January 9, 2025 • 39 mins
From swinger’s clubs to country clubs, Dawn and Wes are living large. But a call from the Dallas FBI upends Dawn’s life. Content Warning: This episode includes descriptions of suicide and suicidal ideation. If you are experiencing feelings of hopelessness or thinking about ending your own life, you are not alone. Help is available. Call or text ‘988’ from anywhere in America to reach the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
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.
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 (00:02):
One day, I'm leaving a doctor appointment and I get
a phone call from the FBI and they just say, hey,
this is so and so with the Dallas FBI. Would
you come in and talk to us about your husband?
And I said, why, what about my husband?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. As a listener, note this episode contains references
to suicide and suicidal ideation. Please take care while listening.
About a year ago, we heard from a fast talking
(00:52):
Southern woman named Dawn.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I'm from East Texas, born and raised.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Donna is a firecracker, speaking your mind. Just in Don's family.
She gets it from her mom. My matter is just
a good little.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Four foot nine Pentecostal woman, but she also doesn't mince words.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Dawn's story of betrayal is a little different. She's the
first to say that her story starts when she committed
a betrayal of her own.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
We did start as a betrayal. There was a lot
of people hurting this and I was not always the
innocent person. I did a lot of hurting.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
In the early two thousands, Don was married with two
young daughters. She described her first husband as a nice guy,
maybe the first guy that had ever really been good
to her, but she wasn't in love. One night, Don
decided to go out with her sister.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I actually left church to meet my sister out on
a Wednesday night at a bar.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
And there this man is.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I saw him, and there was an instant attraction.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
His name was Wes. Wes was an oil man, as
they say in Texas, and he had a smooth talking
persona to match.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
When he walked into a room, he commanded the room.
I'd never seen anything like it. He was just one
of those people and he was paying attention to me,
and I was like, whoa. And I had a little
shirt that came right to the top of my high
waisted jeans, you know, and I've moved and my belly
showed and he reached and kind of like touched my belly,
(02:29):
and I was pulling my shirt down and he's like, oh,
don't pull your shirt down, that's sexy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That night, he focused intensely on her. Wes laughed heart
at her jokes, and the way he looked at her
made her feel beautiful.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
We talked all night. We just stood in the corner
of the club, like where people were dancing and drinking,
just talking.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Dawn told him about her husband and two daughters, but
he didn't bat an eye. Honestly, she was surprised that
he was single.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Tell me he was not married, and then he didn't
have any children, and I didn't believe that. I was like,
that's bullshit. There's absolutely no way in hell that you're
not married and don't have any kids.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Against her better judgment, she gave him her phone number
and then they went their separate ways.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
From then, we just talked every day and we would
meet out once a week.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That went on for about eight months. In the beginning,
it was an emotional affair. There was nothing physical going on,
and he stuck to his story about being single with
no kids.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I just kept telling him, like, I don't believe you,
like you might as well just tell me, like, I'm married,
I have a ring on.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
After a few months, Wes finally came clean. He did
have a wife and a daughter too.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I was like, I knew it, like I knew it,
Like I don't know why you were lying to be
thank you for being honest.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
He confessed that he'd had a few affairs before, but.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
This time with Dawn it was different. They'd been talking
every day for months, seeing each other once a week,
and even though nothing physical had happened between them, Wes
was in deep. This is what he told her.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I fell in love with you, and I just didn't
know what to do with this situation. And I didn't
want to lose you, but I didn't want to disappoint
my family.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Wes was a preacher's son. No one and his family
had ever been divorced, and down understood that pressure. But
after eight months their emotional affair turned physical and there
was no going back.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
After that, I knew what I was doing was wrong.
I knew then that I had to start working towards
dissolving my marriage.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
She was the first to take Philip to leave her marriage.
She wanted to start over with Wes at her side.
Not long after, Wes said he and his wife were
also separating in order for him to be with Don.
In a few months after that.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
We got engaged.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
They made their relationship public, spend time with each other's kids,
and started building a new life together. Don started bringing
Wes around her family and spending time with his young daughter.
His larger family wasn't ready to accept Wes's recent separation. Regardless,
he and Don began envisioning a life together. Don had
(05:21):
stayed home with her kids in the past and loved it.
Wes said he could give that life to her again.
He could afford it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
He told me, I have enough money to take care
of you, so I want you to stay home. And
he bought me a brand new two thousand and four expedition.
It was a forty five thousand dollars vehicle, so I'd
rate my job down.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Agreed to move to a small town outside of Dallas,
where Wes lived. His whole family was there too. He
wanted to stay close to his daughter. Because he and
Don weren't married yet, he decided to live separately. Wes
lived with his mom while Don and her daughters ran
into a small house in town.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
He moved me to.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
This tiny little town of only a few hundred people
with one grocery store.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
There, Wes got a new job in the steel business,
and Don settled into her new life as a stay
at home mom. The couple started making plans to get married.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I wanted a Vegas wedding because it wasn't my first Rodeo.
I wanted Elvis to give me away. He wanted a minister.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
But in the middle of wedding planning, Don's cell phone
got turned off. She assumed that Wes, as busy as
he was, had forgotten to pay their bill. It was
two thousand and four, so she used her landline to
call his office. He had been working at a place
called Chaparral Steel, so.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I called Chaparral Steel. I got to get hold of
him and I'm like, yeah, need to speak to Wes.
And They're like, we don't have anyone who works here.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
By that name.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And I'm like, what are you sure? So Wes was
his middle name, So I tell him like, sure, you
don't I have a you know, like George Wesley Harris Junior.
He's like no, and I said, let me talk to hr.
They put me on the phone like they're like, we
don't have anyone that works here by that name. And
(07:12):
then everything in me just gets this pit right.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
He lied about where he worked. What was going on?
Her gut instinct told her to call his ex wife.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
I looked at the phone and you know, when you're
about to do something, you know, your whole life's about
to go in a different director, like it's going to
change that the course of your life is you know it.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
It's kind of that moment.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I called her and she's like, who is this? And
I said, this is Don this is Wes is fiance.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
There was a long pause on the other end of
the phone. Something wasn't right. Before she could get an
answer about the job, the conversation took a different.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Turn and she said, don't ever haul this house again.
And I said, wait, are y'all still married? And she goes, yes,
we are, and we have been very much married for
the last ten years. Don't call this house again. She
hangs up the phone, and I'm just standing there in
shock because we're supposed to be getting married that month
(08:18):
and he's still married, living with her, telling me he's
little with his mom. So then she calls me right
back and says, well, I know where his heart is
because he just left the house and I'm quite certain
he's probably on his way to your house.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
And she hangs up.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, about five minutes later, he shows up at my door.
She looked like ten minutes from me.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
John had moved her whole life and her kids to
this small town. She thought it was for her and
West to start a new life together. Turns out it
was so he could be closer to his wife, who
he was still living with. He was never separated.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
He moves me to this tiny town with one grocery store.
At any point in time, I could have run into
his wife and daughter at the grocery store, and the
daughter would have run up to me and been like, Don,
she's a toddler.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Within ten minutes, both Wes and his wife were at
Don's house and they were fighting.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I'm like, there's a copy episode up in my house
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
With hindsight, Don can joke about it now. But in
the moment her relationship with Wes was over.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
He told me he was really living with his mom now,
So that came to fruition. He kept telling me like,
no one's ever going divorced in my family. I didn't
know how to end the marriage. I want to be
with you, like we can be together, we could fix this,
but I was done with him. We separated, and then
(09:47):
he had a nervous breakdown. Then he went into his
first seventy two hour hold in a mental institution for
a breakdown.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
She had sympathy for him, especially as he was going
through a mental health crisis.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I just thought, he's just conflicted, he doesn't want to
hurt his family. I can love him through that, and
it's going to be great once we get through this crap.
And I just went to bat for him because I
had given up so much.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
A few weeks after everything came to light, she took
him back. Wes kept saying he was in the process
of divorcing his.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Wife, and finally it was his wife that called me
one day and he was in my living room and
she said, is he with you? And I said yes,
and she said, he told me he hasn't seen you
and hasn't been seeing you. I said, well, you know,
we're still seeing each other. And she said, you could
have him.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I'm done.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
The whole situation was messy, destructive, but Dawn and Wes
could finally be together for real this time. But of
course there was still that issue of his job, or
the job he said he had. When she asked about it,
Wes confessed that he'd been fired from a string of
jobs and he was too ashamed teller. She pitied him.
(11:04):
He put so much pressure on himself to appear perfect,
and it was taking a massive toll on him. So
Don's strategy was to love him through this tumultuous time,
to assure him that they would figure it out together.
And pretty soon he came to her with a new
job prospect.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He said, I have the opportunity to go back in
the oilen gas business.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
He was working in the oil business when they met.
She didn't want him to slide back into the toxic
culture he'd left behind, but she knew she couldn't control him. Plus,
it was a good job offer, so he took the.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Job, and it was that job, saying good being his downfall.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Dawn had forgiven her fiance West for a number of things.
He told her he was separated from his wife, when
in reality he was still very much with her. He
told Don he worked as a salesman at a steel company,
which she found out was also a lie. Finally, with
Wes coming clean, the couple could enter a new era,
(12:20):
a sort of golden era, and it started with a wedding.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
We went to Little Chapel of the West, which is
a historical, beautiful chapel there in Vegas, and Elvis gave
me away. He said, this is your Priscilla and he
kissed me and then he gave me away Wes, and
then we went and did tequila shots in my wedding
dress at Caesar's Palace.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Was awesome.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The new job Westcord, which this time was a real job,
proved to be a natural fit for him. He was
managing investor money at an oil and gas company, and
he was great at it.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
He quickly became their top producer, selling million dollars in
investments some months, and their number one salesman.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
They moved out of the small town where his ex
wife and family lived and settled in a Fort Worth
suburb to be near his job.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But he's like, let's look at houses. And we were
looking at houses and I'm like, well, what's our budget
And he's like, well, no, we can put one hundred
thousand dollars down a house. And I'm like, oh, okay,
that's nice. So we looked at this house on the
golf course. It is beautiful, and we bought that.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
The cherry on top. They joined the country club.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
It was like, if you were anyone, you were at
Walnut Creek Country Club.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
They were officially somebody's And it was around this time
when she entered this life of luxury. That Dawn made
a new friend, we'll call her Sandy.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Her and I became fast friends. And then we got
our hose husbands together, and they became very good friends,
and they would golf together, we'd all travel together.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
As their personal life blossomed, so did Wes's career. The
oil company was growing a lot, and Wes had made
friends with the right people there, people who wanted to
take them all the way to the top of the company.
In fact, they gave him the opportunity to buy the company.
He did, and he took over as CEO.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
All of a sudden, you know, Wes was the president
and owner, and then all of a sudden, I'm the
wife of a man who owns the company. And I
just was like, Okay, here we go.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
This is awesome.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
The sale of the company happened fast and under kind
of weird circumstances, but Wes didn't seem concerned about it,
and the money was good.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
I never really had to what for anything, Like if
I wanted something, I would just say, hey, do you
care if I get this? Or Hey, I want to
go to lunch today with some ladies.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And the couple got to spend a lot of time
doing something they both love, partying.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
We were drinking a lot partying. You know. My kids
were with their dad every other weekend, and we're at
the country club five nights a week.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It was a whirlwind, Great Gatsby style, but set in
the two thousand and six Texas suburbs. Don and West
were still in their thirties and they made it big.
She knew her husband was a charmer, but there were
two sides to that coin. On one side, he was
a natural leader and salesman, but on the other side,
Wes was still the same old lady's man. Early on,
(15:36):
Don found evidence that Wes might be cheating on her.
Instead of confronting him, she decided to take a different approach.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I decided that if he could do it in front
of my face, at least I'd have control over it.
So we started going to swingers clouts.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I had to know a little more about the Dallas
swinger scene.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
They're actual bars and Dallas and they have their own
little language, so you can know if other people go
to these places. You'd just slip in some little language
that only other people know, and then you know who
you're talking to the.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Couple would agree on their boundaries beforehand.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
We can at least just be free. We can dance
with each other and make out and do whatever we
want to do. We don't have to talk to other people.
And I would go and be like, okay, I trust you,
don says.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
She was quote in the lifestyle for about a year
and a half until the party started feeling off to her.
It stopped being fun, but Wes pressured her to keep
going with him. Those nights would always end in drunken
blackouts fights.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I got to where I would wake up in the
morning and be like, I can't do this. I'd be
on my knees in prayer, you know, because we're like
part of a church community too. We had this double life,
and so I would be like, I can't do this.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
They stopped going to swingers clubs together and for a
while everything seemed normal. That was until years later, when
Wes began spending more and more time at work. Dawn
was becoming suspicious about his work travel and the long
hours he was putting in. Plus, he became guarded with
his phone whenever Down tried to confront him. They got
(17:22):
into an argument after one particularly bad fight.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I lied to Wes and told him that I went
and got coffee and was just trying to cool off.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
In reality, she drove to a friend's house to vent
about Wes, and.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
The coffee place I did not know was open at
that hour. So Wes was like, you're lying to me,
and everything just blew up.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
It was a lie that gave him a reason to
leave her, and he took it immediately.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
When he came back home to pack a bag, he said,
this is over. I want a divorce, and I remember
begganing like, please, don't do this. We can figure this out, like,
don't do this.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Don couldn't understand why he was so eager to walk
out on her, so she turned to her friend Sandy,
and Sandy had recently seen.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Wes, and she's like, we took his ring off. I
just want you to know he was not wearing his ring.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Don was devastated and Sandy was there to comfort her.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And I remember my head was in her lap and
I'm crying and she's like, Don, this relationship it's just
too much. It's like a bomb fuse and it was
bound to burn out.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Soon after Wes went on a work trip, Don got
a weird feeling about it. Call it intuition. So she
decided to do a little investigating.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
I found out where he was saying.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
She called the hotel front desk, and she found out
that there were two people staying in Wes's room. The
other person was Sandy Down's friend. She suddenly understood why
Wes had been so quick to walk out of their marriage,
and why Sandy was feeding her information about Wes's infidelity,
(19:14):
even advising her that the relationship was too much.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
She was supposed to be my brand, but she's screwing
my husband.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When Wes came back from that business trip, his affair
with Sandy was out it.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
It was a big scandal. You know, we were all
members of the country club. Her and I were on
the committee at the country club together. So now that's outed.
They're up there hold enhanced the country club, and everybody's talking, talking, talking.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It was humiliating, infuriating, but it was nothing compared to
what came next.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
He comes and tells me that he filed for divorce
and he put a restrained order on me to keep
me out of his company.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
A restraining order. She didn't have anything to do do
with his company.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
I think I walked in the doors of his company
maybe three or four times, like I could kind of
one hand. I didn't have anything to do with it.
So telling me to stay all the company like that
pissed me off.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
So Wes offered to make her a deal to buy
her off.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
He said, I will give you enough money that you
can buy a house cash. I'll give you enough money
for that. And I said, you were nothing when I
met you. You were borrowing money from your mother, living
in my rent house. If you think you're going to
replace me and my two girls with her and her
two boys, and you're going to give me money for
a house and you're operating a multi million dollar company,
you can go fuck yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
I go, that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
When she didn't take the first seal he offered, Wes
tried another one.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
He tried to start calming me down. He's like, we
can work this out together. We'll use my attorney. He's like,
I will sit down with my accountant. I will let
you look at all the books. He goes, if you
just calm down, you don't even have to come to
the hearing. I'll take care of it. The restraining gold
will go away.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
She took that deal and she believed him. She didn't
even know what day the divorce hearing was set for.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Until I was at my second grader's field day in
one of the country club members. A man came up
to me and said, I need you to know. Wes
is going around telling everybody that he got everything and
that you're going to be out on your ass in
a couple of weeks. He's just going to put you
out and he has everything, like you didn't show up
to a trial. What he did was he walked in
(21:33):
there and told the judge, my wife is a raging alcoholic.
She's violent and abusive. She did not even care to
be here today. And the judge gave him everything everything,
and I didn't know it now.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
She was ready to burn it all down.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
I called him and I say, I'm getting an attorney.
I don't trust you anymore.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
She didn't just hire any attorney, hired the mayor of
their town.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I remember Wes going, you hired the mayor of Mansfeld,
and I'm like, you're fucking right. I did.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And that's when Wes let something slip.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
He starts freaking out, and in his panic, he did
say to me, Dawn, don't get an attorney. He goes,
right now, things are in the gray at work, and
I'm trying to pull it up out of.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
The gray area.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
He goes, I could go to prison. I should have
stopped on that and double tapped into that statement.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Dawn discovered her husband, Wes, had been cheating on her
with her close friend, and in the divorce that followed,
he filed a restraining order to keep Dawn out of
his multimillion dollar business. Yes, he crossed her one too
many times, and now she needed to know the extent
of his wrongdoing.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
And then I'm starting to go on the internet looking
at stuff about his company, the things that people are
saying about his company. I'm like, I cannot get over this,
Like this is crazy. They're saying it's a scam and
there's no return.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
She saw a posts from people who'd invested in Wes's
oil company saying they'd been promised returns, but those returns
never came. Dawn was also finding records of properties in
her husband's name, properties she didn't know anything about. That
all led back to Wes.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I have a friend who works for the SEC and
so I called her one day and I said, I
just need to vent about the stuff i'm finding out
about his company. And she said, you're on my government issued.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Phone, so anything you say.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And I said, well, if you're a government oh, Trump's
our friendship, so be it. But I need, I think
I need to tell you this stuff i'm finding out.
What I didn't know is he was already under investigation.
So when she said that to me, that was her
little under the table warning because there was really something
going on.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Her friend couldn't tell her about the investigation, but someone
else was about to.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
I'd gone to your doctor appointment and I was leaving
the doctor's office and I get a phone call and
it was is this Dawn Harris? And I said yes
it is and they said, this is so and so
with the Dallas FBI office. We'd like for you to
come in. And I was like, excuse me, and they said,
we have some questions for you. And I said, what
(24:47):
kind of questions? What's this about? And they said it's
about your husband, Wes Harris. And I said what about
my husband? And they said, well, it's about his company.
And I said what about company? Like, I don't know
what I can tell you about his company. I don't
have anything to do with this company.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
She might not be involved with the company, but she
did know Wes was always up to something and if
she could help expose more of his lies.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
She was in and I called my attorney's office. The
paralegal there answered the phone and I told her the
FBI just called me, and she said, you're probably being tapped.
Don't talk to anyone, come straight here.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
But almost immediately Wes started calling.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So my phone's blowing up. Where are you? Where are you?
So he tells me he's going to come by the house,
and later that evening he came by the house and
he kept doing this really weird thing where he would
talk to me and tell me he wanted to get
back together, and then he'd drop his eyes and he'd
get real close to me, and then he'd snap out
(25:54):
of it and start talking again. And it was making
me very nervous, and so we went from the kitchen
into the living room and we both sat down, and
that's when he looked at me and goes, what did
the FBI call you today? And I went, I don't know,
and he said, what do they want? I said, I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
They said they.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Wanted to talk about you, and he said, well, you're
not going to talk to them. I said, no, I'm
going in to talk to them. And he wanted to
send me with one of his attorneys, and I declined that.
I said absolutely not. I said, I'm not going with
an attorney. I have nothing to hide, I don't need
an attorney. I'm going to go in there and answer
their questions. And he was trying to get me out
(26:32):
to talk to them.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
But don did talk with the Vets and she learned
he had misappropriated two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
That two million dollars was just the beginning. In total,
Wes's company illegally raised thirteen million through what's known as
a boiler room scheme. Salespeople like Wes dooped hundreds of
everyday people to invest their savings in the company's oil
drilling projects. But they were doing it using baked to
falsified information about the company's profits and empty promises about
(27:04):
their expected returns, and a lot of those investor funds
weren't being used to expand the company's profits.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
He was ballsy. He had a stripper on the payroll.
He paid monthly, which I mean, you don't steal millions
of dollars at like thirty five years old, without being
super ballsy.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
And where did all that money go? Well, Wes used
it to fund their famili's lavish lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I would look at things and be like, that was
bot was stolen money, you know, like that's kind of
hard to stomach, and your whole life is bought. Was
stolen money.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Money stolen from regular people who'd invested in Wes's oil
and gas company, who were told they'd see massive returns.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Investors were calling me saying, I know your daughter's names,
where they go to school, I know where you live.
I gave him three quarters of a million dollars and
he ruined my life and I'm going to ruin his.
And then I was so panicked. I'm like, he doesn't
even live here, Like we're separated. So now that they know,
I'm alone.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
She was scared for her own safety, but more so
she was devastated when she heard from the victims of
Wes's fraud.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I had one woman who was really sweet. She called me,
and she goes, we're a mom and pop place in
New Mexico. She goes, we gave him all of our
life savings.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Even though Don wasn't responsible for Wes's crimes, she was
still financially entangled with him.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
His LLC that he was laundering money through. He had
put me as the president, so I was the president
of that until we split up. I had written checks
out of that account, but just because he would tell me, like,
write a check, and then he took me off of it,
thank god.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But of course everything he'd bought for the couple, from
their house to Don's shoes, could now be seized by
the Feds.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I was told that federal marshals were going to show
up at my house and I would be able to
pack a bag for me and my child drink.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Don's life was on pause as she waited for the
financial and legal reckoning.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
We could not have our divorce trial until the sec
was done because what was left over was community property,
what they left me basically, so I had to fight
for that. He made me fight for that.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That's when Don got another unexpected call from, of all people,
a new woman West had started dating. She wanted to
meet Don in person.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
She ended up finding me reaching out to me because
she had suspicions about him. She told me he had
taken her to the seedy little place. Then there was
like other couples that were like rubbing her back, and
she goes and then I'd blacked out and I don't
remember the rest of the night. And she said, and
(29:52):
don I don't drink, not that much. She goes, I
maybe had two drinks. When she goes. I think he
probably drugged me. And I burst in the tears and
I said, you just described the last year and a
half of my life, because that's what I would do.
I wouldn't have that much to drink. But all of
a sudden, I'm coming in and out of consciousness and
(30:13):
I'm seeing all this stuff around me, but you can't move.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
It wasn't until that moment, when someone else described her
same experiences that Dawn realized what was really happening. The
last few times she went to the swingers club with
Wes those nights he blacked out.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
When I was saying that I couldn't do it anymore,
that's when he started dragging me.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
This was more than a betrayal, it was a crime.
He drugged and sexually assaulted her. She was still processing
this while in the middle of an SEC investigation where
the government could be justified and seizing everything she had.
It left her feeling overwhelmingly empty and alone.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
There was times I pulled in my garage and shut
the garage door and the seatback, because I knew that
the government was about to come in and take my
home and take all of my things, and I was
gonna have to tell everyone, and I was gonna have
to uproot my daughters and scare the shit out of them,
right and so I just wanted to die. I'm like,
(31:17):
if I could just go to sleep right now, I
wouldn't have to deal with this. I can remember setting
the garage door and leaning that seatback and sitting there.
But I would see my daughter's little faces they were
like eight and ten, and I would turn the cars.
I'd wipe my face. I'd go in the house and
(31:40):
get it together.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Every day felt excruciatingly long. Don says she got through
it for her daughters, and Wes well, he'd already moved
on to see the least.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
He had met a girl in Sunday school, and he
had convinced all of his family that he was innocent.
If I was guilty, i'd be in by now. I'm
going to sue the government and the sec and all
of them for falsely accusing me. I was told his
mom had like second mortgage your house. I was told
that he had gone through this poor woman's savings or whatever.
(32:14):
These are things, of course I was told. But what
I do know is that was starting to unravel.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
He might have been telling his family that he was innocent,
but that's not what Wes told the government. He agreed
to a plea deal with the FBI. Now he was
awaiting sentencing. Finally they could move forward with their divorce.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Our divorce was a trial because he was trying to
fight me for everything the government left me with. So
I had to get up on stand and testify, and
of course he pleaded the fifth to everything.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Dawn was relieved to keep the modest half of what
the government left her, but Wes still wasn't done with her.
Despite it all, he still kept reaching out to Dawn.
She didn't reply until finally he.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Called me one day. He was really confused and sounded
just really out of it. I'm like, just go serve
your sentence, go do your time, And in one breath
he said, I'm not going to prison. What do you mean,
I'm innocent? And then in the next breath, he'd say,
you know what happens to them might be in prison
on what am I going to do.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
When I come out?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
He couldn't wrap his mind around the reality that he
was going to prison considering what he'd done. Don was
losing patience for him. She knew he was reaching out
for sympathy, maybe for help processing, or maybe because he
just didn't have anyone else left.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
And then he texted me one more thing, which is
what we used to say to each other that meant
to love you. We would always say one more thing.
And he texted me one more thing. And I reached
out to his first wife again, and she said, Don,
he keeps doing this, go to bed, turn your phone off.
(34:00):
The next morning he killed himself. He was supposed to
turn himself in that next day. He had come to
an agreement with the FBI, and he was only going
to serve like, I don't know, five to seven years.
I mean this was twenty twelve. He'd have been way
out of prison by now. I went to the funeral
(34:22):
his grandmother, who I loved, and she loved me. She
came up to me and she asked me about the
house and about me selling the house. I said, you know,
you don't understand. The government took everything. The government took
that house, like I didn't sell any like I have,
I don't have anything. And she kind of looked at
(34:44):
me confused.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
He'd been lying to everyone, including his family. He'd also
been stealing from his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Well, he stole the money out of her account to
buy the gun to kill himself.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
It's been over a decade since the end of their
relationship and since Wes passed away.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
I try to say, I don't have any regrets. I
got a couple, I got a couple hard lessons for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Dawn endured so much in this relationship. We asked what
the hardest part was for her.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
What gets me the most is the betrayal to myself,
like I don't know that woman, and thank god I
don't know her anymore. I look back and how in
the world, for ten years of my life this man
was able to lie and manipulate, and I would lie
(35:46):
and manipulate, you know, because again we started out as
an affair. But the biggest thing is just how I
let myself get so wrapped up in that and the
things that my children had to go through. They were
eighteen months and four when I met him. That's ply
(36:06):
the hardest thing part of.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Don's healing process is being honest, taking accountability for her actions.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Being able to talk to other people and just speak
honest has been very healing. Like I don't hold back
the fact we were an affair. I don't hold back
the people that I've hurt. You know, there was a
lot of people hurting this, and I was not always
the innocent person. I did a lot of hurting.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Dawn found happiness in starting a new career.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I always wanted to be an esthetician, So now on
my own spa, that's what I'm sitting in, my little spa.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
She also fell in love again, this time with a
man who was honest with her and treats her well.
In fact, while we were on our call.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Hi honey, my husband brought me flowers so sweet.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Thank you, babe.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
We end all of our episodes with the same question,
why did you want to tell your story to.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Reach other people and let them know that you know,
there's a whole network of people out here that have
been heard, but that you can go through these horrible
things and it's not over and you can rebuild.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
As many times as it takes.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Just be honest with yourself, Like I like who I
am today, and I think it's because I didn't try
to hide all of those mistakes.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
On the next episode of Betrayal, I just.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Remember it was a profound moment. Who is this cruel?
Who can pull this off? Whose family pulls it off?
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Whose friends pull it off?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
What in the world?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
How do you fabricate the details? 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
(38:18):
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 you to all
of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts,
a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason,
(38:38):
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. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and mixing by
Matt del Vecchio, additional editing support from Nico Aruka and
(38:58):
Tanner Robbins. Trails theme composed by Oliver Bain's music library
provided by mybe of music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts
One day, I'm leaving a doctor appointment and I get
a phone call from the FBI and they just say, hey,
this is so and so with the Dallas FBI. Would
you come in and talk to us about your husband?
And I said, why, what about my husband?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. As a listener, note this episode contains references
to suicide and suicidal ideation. Please take care while listening.
About a year ago, we heard from a fast talking
(00:52):
Southern woman named Dawn.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I'm from East Texas, born and raised.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Donna is a firecracker, speaking your mind. Just in Don's family.
She gets it from her mom. My matter is just
a good little.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Four foot nine Pentecostal woman, but she also doesn't mince words.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Dawn's story of betrayal is a little different. She's the
first to say that her story starts when she committed
a betrayal of her own.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
We did start as a betrayal. There was a lot
of people hurting this and I was not always the
innocent person. I did a lot of hurting.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
In the early two thousands, Don was married with two
young daughters. She described her first husband as a nice guy,
maybe the first guy that had ever really been good
to her, but she wasn't in love. One night, Don
decided to go out with her sister.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I actually left church to meet my sister out on
a Wednesday night at a bar.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
And there this man is.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I saw him, and there was an instant attraction.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
His name was Wes. Wes was an oil man, as
they say in Texas, and he had a smooth talking
persona to match.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
When he walked into a room, he commanded the room.
I'd never seen anything like it. He was just one
of those people and he was paying attention to me,
and I was like, whoa. And I had a little
shirt that came right to the top of my high
waisted jeans, you know, and I've moved and my belly
showed and he reached and kind of like touched my belly,
(02:29):
and I was pulling my shirt down and he's like, oh,
don't pull your shirt down, that's sexy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That night, he focused intensely on her. Wes laughed heart
at her jokes, and the way he looked at her
made her feel beautiful.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
We talked all night. We just stood in the corner
of the club, like where people were dancing and drinking,
just talking.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Dawn told him about her husband and two daughters, but
he didn't bat an eye. Honestly, she was surprised that
he was single.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Tell me he was not married, and then he didn't
have any children, and I didn't believe that. I was like,
that's bullshit. There's absolutely no way in hell that you're
not married and don't have any kids.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Against her better judgment, she gave him her phone number
and then they went their separate ways.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
From then, we just talked every day and we would
meet out once a week.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That went on for about eight months. In the beginning,
it was an emotional affair. There was nothing physical going on,
and he stuck to his story about being single with
no kids.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I just kept telling him, like, I don't believe you,
like you might as well just tell me, like, I'm married,
I have a ring on.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
After a few months, Wes finally came clean. He did
have a wife and a daughter too.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I was like, I knew it, like I knew it,
Like I don't know why you were lying to be
thank you for being honest.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
He confessed that he'd had a few affairs before, but.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
This time with Dawn it was different. They'd been talking
every day for months, seeing each other once a week,
and even though nothing physical had happened between them, Wes
was in deep. This is what he told her.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I fell in love with you, and I just didn't
know what to do with this situation. And I didn't
want to lose you, but I didn't want to disappoint
my family.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Wes was a preacher's son. No one and his family
had ever been divorced, and down understood that pressure. But
after eight months their emotional affair turned physical and there
was no going back.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
After that, I knew what I was doing was wrong.
I knew then that I had to start working towards
dissolving my marriage.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
She was the first to take Philip to leave her marriage.
She wanted to start over with Wes at her side.
Not long after, Wes said he and his wife were
also separating in order for him to be with Don.
In a few months after that.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
We got engaged.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
They made their relationship public, spend time with each other's kids,
and started building a new life together. Don started bringing
Wes around her family and spending time with his young daughter.
His larger family wasn't ready to accept Wes's recent separation. Regardless,
he and Don began envisioning a life together. Don had
(05:21):
stayed home with her kids in the past and loved it.
Wes said he could give that life to her again.
He could afford it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
He told me, I have enough money to take care
of you, so I want you to stay home. And
he bought me a brand new two thousand and four expedition.
It was a forty five thousand dollars vehicle, so I'd
rate my job down.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Agreed to move to a small town outside of Dallas,
where Wes lived. His whole family was there too. He
wanted to stay close to his daughter. Because he and
Don weren't married yet, he decided to live separately. Wes
lived with his mom while Don and her daughters ran
into a small house in town.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
He moved me to.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
This tiny little town of only a few hundred people
with one grocery store.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
There, Wes got a new job in the steel business,
and Don settled into her new life as a stay
at home mom. The couple started making plans to get married.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I wanted a Vegas wedding because it wasn't my first Rodeo.
I wanted Elvis to give me away. He wanted a minister.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
But in the middle of wedding planning, Don's cell phone
got turned off. She assumed that Wes, as busy as
he was, had forgotten to pay their bill. It was
two thousand and four, so she used her landline to
call his office. He had been working at a place
called Chaparral Steel, so.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I called Chaparral Steel. I got to get hold of
him and I'm like, yeah, need to speak to Wes.
And They're like, we don't have anyone who works here.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
By that name.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And I'm like, what are you sure? So Wes was
his middle name, So I tell him like, sure, you
don't I have a you know, like George Wesley Harris Junior.
He's like no, and I said, let me talk to hr.
They put me on the phone like they're like, we
don't have anyone that works here by that name. And
(07:12):
then everything in me just gets this pit right.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
He lied about where he worked. What was going on?
Her gut instinct told her to call his ex wife.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
I looked at the phone and you know, when you're
about to do something, you know, your whole life's about
to go in a different director, like it's going to
change that the course of your life is you know it.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
It's kind of that moment.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I called her and she's like, who is this? And
I said, this is Don this is Wes is fiance.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
There was a long pause on the other end of
the phone. Something wasn't right. Before she could get an
answer about the job, the conversation took a different.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Turn and she said, don't ever haul this house again.
And I said, wait, are y'all still married? And she goes, yes,
we are, and we have been very much married for
the last ten years. Don't call this house again. She
hangs up the phone, and I'm just standing there in
shock because we're supposed to be getting married that month
(08:18):
and he's still married, living with her, telling me he's
little with his mom. So then she calls me right
back and says, well, I know where his heart is
because he just left the house and I'm quite certain
he's probably on his way to your house.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
And she hangs up.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Well, about five minutes later, he shows up at my door.
She looked like ten minutes from me.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
John had moved her whole life and her kids to
this small town. She thought it was for her and
West to start a new life together. Turns out it
was so he could be closer to his wife, who
he was still living with. He was never separated.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
He moves me to this tiny town with one grocery store.
At any point in time, I could have run into
his wife and daughter at the grocery store, and the
daughter would have run up to me and been like, Don,
she's a toddler.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Within ten minutes, both Wes and his wife were at
Don's house and they were fighting.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I'm like, there's a copy episode up in my house
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
With hindsight, Don can joke about it now. But in
the moment her relationship with Wes was over.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
He told me he was really living with his mom now,
So that came to fruition. He kept telling me like,
no one's ever going divorced in my family. I didn't
know how to end the marriage. I want to be
with you, like we can be together, we could fix this,
but I was done with him. We separated, and then
(09:47):
he had a nervous breakdown. Then he went into his
first seventy two hour hold in a mental institution for
a breakdown.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
She had sympathy for him, especially as he was going
through a mental health crisis.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I just thought, he's just conflicted, he doesn't want to
hurt his family. I can love him through that, and
it's going to be great once we get through this crap.
And I just went to bat for him because I
had given up so much.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
A few weeks after everything came to light, she took
him back. Wes kept saying he was in the process
of divorcing his.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Wife, and finally it was his wife that called me
one day and he was in my living room and
she said, is he with you? And I said yes,
and she said, he told me he hasn't seen you
and hasn't been seeing you. I said, well, you know,
we're still seeing each other. And she said, you could
have him.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I'm done.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
The whole situation was messy, destructive, but Dawn and Wes
could finally be together for real this time. But of
course there was still that issue of his job, or
the job he said he had. When she asked about it,
Wes confessed that he'd been fired from a string of
jobs and he was too ashamed teller. She pitied him.
(11:04):
He put so much pressure on himself to appear perfect,
and it was taking a massive toll on him. So
Don's strategy was to love him through this tumultuous time,
to assure him that they would figure it out together.
And pretty soon he came to her with a new
job prospect.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He said, I have the opportunity to go back in
the oilen gas business.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
He was working in the oil business when they met.
She didn't want him to slide back into the toxic
culture he'd left behind, but she knew she couldn't control him. Plus,
it was a good job offer, so he took the.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Job, and it was that job, saying good being his downfall.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Dawn had forgiven her fiance West for a number of things.
He told her he was separated from his wife, when
in reality he was still very much with her. He
told Don he worked as a salesman at a steel company,
which she found out was also a lie. Finally, with
Wes coming clean, the couple could enter a new era,
(12:20):
a sort of golden era, and it started with a wedding.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
We went to Little Chapel of the West, which is
a historical, beautiful chapel there in Vegas, and Elvis gave
me away. He said, this is your Priscilla and he
kissed me and then he gave me away Wes, and
then we went and did tequila shots in my wedding
dress at Caesar's Palace.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Was awesome.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The new job Westcord, which this time was a real job,
proved to be a natural fit for him. He was
managing investor money at an oil and gas company, and
he was great at it.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
He quickly became their top producer, selling million dollars in
investments some months, and their number one salesman.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
They moved out of the small town where his ex
wife and family lived and settled in a Fort Worth
suburb to be near his job.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But he's like, let's look at houses. And we were
looking at houses and I'm like, well, what's our budget
And he's like, well, no, we can put one hundred
thousand dollars down a house. And I'm like, oh, okay,
that's nice. So we looked at this house on the
golf course. It is beautiful, and we bought that.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
The cherry on top. They joined the country club.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
It was like, if you were anyone, you were at
Walnut Creek Country Club.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
They were officially somebody's And it was around this time
when she entered this life of luxury. That Dawn made
a new friend, we'll call her Sandy.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Her and I became fast friends. And then we got
our hose husbands together, and they became very good friends,
and they would golf together, we'd all travel together.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
As their personal life blossomed, so did Wes's career. The
oil company was growing a lot, and Wes had made
friends with the right people there, people who wanted to
take them all the way to the top of the company.
In fact, they gave him the opportunity to buy the company.
He did, and he took over as CEO.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
All of a sudden, you know, Wes was the president
and owner, and then all of a sudden, I'm the
wife of a man who owns the company. And I
just was like, Okay, here we go.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
This is awesome.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
The sale of the company happened fast and under kind
of weird circumstances, but Wes didn't seem concerned about it,
and the money was good.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
I never really had to what for anything, Like if
I wanted something, I would just say, hey, do you
care if I get this? Or Hey, I want to
go to lunch today with some ladies.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And the couple got to spend a lot of time
doing something they both love, partying.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
We were drinking a lot partying. You know. My kids
were with their dad every other weekend, and we're at
the country club five nights a week.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It was a whirlwind, Great Gatsby style, but set in
the two thousand and six Texas suburbs. Don and West
were still in their thirties and they made it big.
She knew her husband was a charmer, but there were
two sides to that coin. On one side, he was
a natural leader and salesman, but on the other side,
Wes was still the same old lady's man. Early on,
(15:36):
Don found evidence that Wes might be cheating on her.
Instead of confronting him, she decided to take a different approach.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I decided that if he could do it in front
of my face, at least I'd have control over it.
So we started going to swingers clouts.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I had to know a little more about the Dallas
swinger scene.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
They're actual bars and Dallas and they have their own
little language, so you can know if other people go
to these places. You'd just slip in some little language
that only other people know, and then you know who
you're talking to the.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Couple would agree on their boundaries beforehand.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
We can at least just be free. We can dance
with each other and make out and do whatever we
want to do. We don't have to talk to other people.
And I would go and be like, okay, I trust you,
don says.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
She was quote in the lifestyle for about a year
and a half until the party started feeling off to her.
It stopped being fun, but Wes pressured her to keep
going with him. Those nights would always end in drunken
blackouts fights.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I got to where I would wake up in the
morning and be like, I can't do this. I'd be
on my knees in prayer, you know, because we're like
part of a church community too. We had this double life,
and so I would be like, I can't do this.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
They stopped going to swingers clubs together and for a
while everything seemed normal. That was until years later, when
Wes began spending more and more time at work. Dawn
was becoming suspicious about his work travel and the long
hours he was putting in. Plus, he became guarded with
his phone whenever Down tried to confront him. They got
(17:22):
into an argument after one particularly bad fight.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
I lied to Wes and told him that I went
and got coffee and was just trying to cool off.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
In reality, she drove to a friend's house to vent
about Wes, and.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
The coffee place I did not know was open at
that hour. So Wes was like, you're lying to me,
and everything just blew up.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
It was a lie that gave him a reason to
leave her, and he took it immediately.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
When he came back home to pack a bag, he said,
this is over. I want a divorce, and I remember
begganing like, please, don't do this. We can figure this out, like,
don't do this.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Don couldn't understand why he was so eager to walk
out on her, so she turned to her friend Sandy,
and Sandy had recently seen.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Wes, and she's like, we took his ring off. I
just want you to know he was not wearing his ring.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Don was devastated and Sandy was there to comfort her.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And I remember my head was in her lap and
I'm crying and she's like, Don, this relationship it's just
too much. It's like a bomb fuse and it was
bound to burn out.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Soon after Wes went on a work trip, Don got
a weird feeling about it. Call it intuition. So she
decided to do a little investigating.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
I found out where he was saying.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
She called the hotel front desk, and she found out
that there were two people staying in Wes's room. The
other person was Sandy Down's friend. She suddenly understood why
Wes had been so quick to walk out of their marriage,
and why Sandy was feeding her information about Wes's infidelity,
(19:14):
even advising her that the relationship was too much.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
She was supposed to be my brand, but she's screwing
my husband.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When Wes came back from that business trip, his affair
with Sandy was out it.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
It was a big scandal. You know, we were all
members of the country club. Her and I were on
the committee at the country club together. So now that's outed.
They're up there hold enhanced the country club, and everybody's talking, talking, talking.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It was humiliating, infuriating, but it was nothing compared to
what came next.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
He comes and tells me that he filed for divorce
and he put a restrained order on me to keep
me out of his company.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
A restraining order. She didn't have anything to do do
with his company.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
I think I walked in the doors of his company
maybe three or four times, like I could kind of
one hand. I didn't have anything to do with it.
So telling me to stay all the company like that
pissed me off.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
So Wes offered to make her a deal to buy
her off.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
He said, I will give you enough money that you
can buy a house cash. I'll give you enough money
for that. And I said, you were nothing when I
met you. You were borrowing money from your mother, living
in my rent house. If you think you're going to
replace me and my two girls with her and her
two boys, and you're going to give me money for
a house and you're operating a multi million dollar company,
you can go fuck yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
I go, that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
When she didn't take the first seal he offered, Wes
tried another one.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
He tried to start calming me down. He's like, we
can work this out together. We'll use my attorney. He's like,
I will sit down with my accountant. I will let
you look at all the books. He goes, if you
just calm down, you don't even have to come to
the hearing. I'll take care of it. The restraining gold
will go away.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
She took that deal and she believed him. She didn't
even know what day the divorce hearing was set for.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Until I was at my second grader's field day in
one of the country club members. A man came up
to me and said, I need you to know. Wes
is going around telling everybody that he got everything and
that you're going to be out on your ass in
a couple of weeks. He's just going to put you
out and he has everything, like you didn't show up
to a trial. What he did was he walked in
(21:33):
there and told the judge, my wife is a raging alcoholic.
She's violent and abusive. She did not even care to
be here today. And the judge gave him everything everything,
and I didn't know it now.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
She was ready to burn it all down.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
I called him and I say, I'm getting an attorney.
I don't trust you anymore.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
She didn't just hire any attorney, hired the mayor of
their town.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I remember Wes going, you hired the mayor of Mansfeld,
and I'm like, you're fucking right. I did.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And that's when Wes let something slip.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
He starts freaking out, and in his panic, he did
say to me, Dawn, don't get an attorney. He goes,
right now, things are in the gray at work, and
I'm trying to pull it up out of.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
The gray area.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
He goes, I could go to prison. I should have
stopped on that and double tapped into that statement.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Dawn discovered her husband, Wes, had been cheating on her
with her close friend, and in the divorce that followed,
he filed a restraining order to keep Dawn out of
his multimillion dollar business. Yes, he crossed her one too
many times, and now she needed to know the extent
of his wrongdoing.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
And then I'm starting to go on the internet looking
at stuff about his company, the things that people are
saying about his company. I'm like, I cannot get over this,
Like this is crazy. They're saying it's a scam and
there's no return.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
She saw a posts from people who'd invested in Wes's
oil company saying they'd been promised returns, but those returns
never came. Dawn was also finding records of properties in
her husband's name, properties she didn't know anything about. That
all led back to Wes.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I have a friend who works for the SEC and
so I called her one day and I said, I
just need to vent about the stuff i'm finding out
about his company. And she said, you're on my government issued.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Phone, so anything you say.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And I said, well, if you're a government oh, Trump's
our friendship, so be it. But I need, I think
I need to tell you this stuff i'm finding out.
What I didn't know is he was already under investigation.
So when she said that to me, that was her
little under the table warning because there was really something
going on.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Her friend couldn't tell her about the investigation, but someone
else was about to.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
I'd gone to your doctor appointment and I was leaving
the doctor's office and I get a phone call and
it was is this Dawn Harris? And I said yes
it is and they said, this is so and so
with the Dallas FBI office. We'd like for you to
come in. And I was like, excuse me, and they said,
we have some questions for you. And I said, what
(24:47):
kind of questions? What's this about? And they said it's
about your husband, Wes Harris. And I said what about
my husband? And they said, well, it's about his company.
And I said what about company? Like, I don't know
what I can tell you about his company. I don't
have anything to do with this company.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
She might not be involved with the company, but she
did know Wes was always up to something and if
she could help expose more of his lies.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
She was in and I called my attorney's office. The
paralegal there answered the phone and I told her the
FBI just called me, and she said, you're probably being tapped.
Don't talk to anyone, come straight here.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
But almost immediately Wes started calling.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So my phone's blowing up. Where are you? Where are you?
So he tells me he's going to come by the house,
and later that evening he came by the house and
he kept doing this really weird thing where he would
talk to me and tell me he wanted to get
back together, and then he'd drop his eyes and he'd
get real close to me, and then he'd snap out
(25:54):
of it and start talking again. And it was making
me very nervous, and so we went from the kitchen
into the living room and we both sat down, and
that's when he looked at me and goes, what did
the FBI call you today? And I went, I don't know,
and he said, what do they want? I said, I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
They said they.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Wanted to talk about you, and he said, well, you're
not going to talk to them. I said, no, I'm
going in to talk to them. And he wanted to
send me with one of his attorneys, and I declined that.
I said absolutely not. I said, I'm not going with
an attorney. I have nothing to hide, I don't need
an attorney. I'm going to go in there and answer
their questions. And he was trying to get me out
(26:32):
to talk to them.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
But don did talk with the Vets and she learned
he had misappropriated two million dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
That two million dollars was just the beginning. In total,
Wes's company illegally raised thirteen million through what's known as
a boiler room scheme. Salespeople like Wes dooped hundreds of
everyday people to invest their savings in the company's oil
drilling projects. But they were doing it using baked to
falsified information about the company's profits and empty promises about
(27:04):
their expected returns, and a lot of those investor funds
weren't being used to expand the company's profits.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
He was ballsy. He had a stripper on the payroll.
He paid monthly, which I mean, you don't steal millions
of dollars at like thirty five years old, without being
super ballsy.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
And where did all that money go? Well, Wes used
it to fund their famili's lavish lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
I would look at things and be like, that was
bot was stolen money, you know, like that's kind of
hard to stomach, and your whole life is bought. Was
stolen money.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Money stolen from regular people who'd invested in Wes's oil
and gas company, who were told they'd see massive returns.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Investors were calling me saying, I know your daughter's names,
where they go to school, I know where you live.
I gave him three quarters of a million dollars and
he ruined my life and I'm going to ruin his.
And then I was so panicked. I'm like, he doesn't
even live here, Like we're separated. So now that they know,
I'm alone.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
She was scared for her own safety, but more so
she was devastated when she heard from the victims of
Wes's fraud.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I had one woman who was really sweet. She called me,
and she goes, we're a mom and pop place in
New Mexico. She goes, we gave him all of our
life savings.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Even though Don wasn't responsible for Wes's crimes, she was
still financially entangled with him.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
His LLC that he was laundering money through. He had
put me as the president, so I was the president
of that until we split up. I had written checks
out of that account, but just because he would tell me, like,
write a check, and then he took me off of it,
thank god.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
But of course everything he'd bought for the couple, from
their house to Don's shoes, could now be seized by
the Feds.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
I was told that federal marshals were going to show
up at my house and I would be able to
pack a bag for me and my child drink.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Don's life was on pause as she waited for the
financial and legal reckoning.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
We could not have our divorce trial until the sec
was done because what was left over was community property,
what they left me basically, so I had to fight
for that. He made me fight for that.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That's when Don got another unexpected call from, of all people,
a new woman West had started dating. She wanted to
meet Don in person.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
She ended up finding me reaching out to me because
she had suspicions about him. She told me he had
taken her to the seedy little place. Then there was
like other couples that were like rubbing her back, and
she goes and then I'd blacked out and I don't
remember the rest of the night. And she said, and
(29:52):
don I don't drink, not that much. She goes, I
maybe had two drinks. When she goes. I think he
probably drugged me. And I burst in the tears and
I said, you just described the last year and a
half of my life, because that's what I would do.
I wouldn't have that much to drink. But all of
a sudden, I'm coming in and out of consciousness and
(30:13):
I'm seeing all this stuff around me, but you can't move.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
It wasn't until that moment, when someone else described her
same experiences that Dawn realized what was really happening. The
last few times she went to the swingers club with
Wes those nights he blacked out.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
When I was saying that I couldn't do it anymore,
that's when he started dragging me.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
This was more than a betrayal, it was a crime.
He drugged and sexually assaulted her. She was still processing
this while in the middle of an SEC investigation where
the government could be justified and seizing everything she had.
It left her feeling overwhelmingly empty and alone.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
There was times I pulled in my garage and shut
the garage door and the seatback, because I knew that
the government was about to come in and take my
home and take all of my things, and I was
gonna have to tell everyone, and I was gonna have
to uproot my daughters and scare the shit out of them,
right and so I just wanted to die. I'm like,
(31:17):
if I could just go to sleep right now, I
wouldn't have to deal with this. I can remember setting
the garage door and leaning that seatback and sitting there.
But I would see my daughter's little faces they were
like eight and ten, and I would turn the cars.
I'd wipe my face. I'd go in the house and
(31:40):
get it together.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Every day felt excruciatingly long. Don says she got through
it for her daughters, and Wes well, he'd already moved
on to see the least.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
He had met a girl in Sunday school, and he
had convinced all of his family that he was innocent.
If I was guilty, i'd be in by now. I'm
going to sue the government and the sec and all
of them for falsely accusing me. I was told his
mom had like second mortgage your house. I was told
that he had gone through this poor woman's savings or whatever.
(32:14):
These are things, of course I was told. But what
I do know is that was starting to unravel.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
He might have been telling his family that he was innocent,
but that's not what Wes told the government. He agreed
to a plea deal with the FBI. Now he was
awaiting sentencing. Finally they could move forward with their divorce.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Our divorce was a trial because he was trying to
fight me for everything the government left me with. So
I had to get up on stand and testify, and
of course he pleaded the fifth to everything.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Dawn was relieved to keep the modest half of what
the government left her, but Wes still wasn't done with her.
Despite it all, he still kept reaching out to Dawn.
She didn't reply until finally he.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Called me one day. He was really confused and sounded
just really out of it. I'm like, just go serve
your sentence, go do your time, And in one breath
he said, I'm not going to prison. What do you mean,
I'm innocent? And then in the next breath, he'd say,
you know what happens to them might be in prison
on what am I going to do.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
When I come out?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
He couldn't wrap his mind around the reality that he
was going to prison considering what he'd done. Don was
losing patience for him. She knew he was reaching out
for sympathy, maybe for help processing, or maybe because he
just didn't have anyone else left.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
And then he texted me one more thing, which is
what we used to say to each other that meant
to love you. We would always say one more thing.
And he texted me one more thing. And I reached
out to his first wife again, and she said, Don,
he keeps doing this, go to bed, turn your phone off.
(34:00):
The next morning he killed himself. He was supposed to
turn himself in that next day. He had come to
an agreement with the FBI, and he was only going
to serve like, I don't know, five to seven years.
I mean this was twenty twelve. He'd have been way
out of prison by now. I went to the funeral
(34:22):
his grandmother, who I loved, and she loved me. She
came up to me and she asked me about the
house and about me selling the house. I said, you know,
you don't understand. The government took everything. The government took
that house, like I didn't sell any like I have,
I don't have anything. And she kind of looked at
(34:44):
me confused.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
He'd been lying to everyone, including his family. He'd also
been stealing from his grandmother.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Well, he stole the money out of her account to
buy the gun to kill himself.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
It's been over a decade since the end of their
relationship and since Wes passed away.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
I try to say, I don't have any regrets. I
got a couple, I got a couple hard lessons for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Dawn endured so much in this relationship. We asked what
the hardest part was for her.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
What gets me the most is the betrayal to myself,
like I don't know that woman, and thank god I
don't know her anymore. I look back and how in
the world, for ten years of my life this man
was able to lie and manipulate, and I would lie
(35:46):
and manipulate, you know, because again we started out as
an affair. But the biggest thing is just how I
let myself get so wrapped up in that and the
things that my children had to go through. They were
eighteen months and four when I met him. That's ply
(36:06):
the hardest thing part of.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Don's healing process is being honest, taking accountability for her actions.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Being able to talk to other people and just speak
honest has been very healing. Like I don't hold back
the fact we were an affair. I don't hold back
the people that I've hurt. You know, there was a
lot of people hurting this, and I was not always
the innocent person. I did a lot of hurting.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Dawn found happiness in starting a new career.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I always wanted to be an esthetician, So now on
my own spa, that's what I'm sitting in, my little spa.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
She also fell in love again, this time with a
man who was honest with her and treats her well.
In fact, while we were on our call.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Hi honey, my husband brought me flowers so sweet.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Thank you, babe.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
We end all of our episodes with the same question,
why did you want to tell your story to.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Reach other people and let them know that you know,
there's a whole network of people out here that have
been heard, but that you can go through these horrible
things and it's not over and you can rebuild.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
As many times as it takes.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Just be honest with yourself, Like I like who I
am today, and I think it's because I didn't try
to hide all of those mistakes.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
On the next episode of Betrayal, I just.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Remember it was a profound moment. Who is this cruel?
Who can pull this off? Whose family pulls it off?
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Whose friends pull it off?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
What in the world?
Speaker 2 (37:57):
How do you fabricate the details? 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
(38:18):
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 you to all
of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts,
a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason,
(38:38):
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. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and mixing by
Matt del Vecchio, additional editing support from Nico Aruka and
(38:58):
Tanner Robbins. Trails theme composed by Oliver Bain's music library
provided by mybe of music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts
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. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!