September 18, 2025 • 38 mins
Jill’s youngest brother was one of her favorite people, until the FBI exposed the dark truth about him.
To find more information about Jill’s work and her podcast, visit https://jillstoddard.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Betrayal fans, I have exciting news to share. Season
three of Betrayal is now a docu series on Hulu.
It's the gripping story of Stacy Tyler and the doctor
who betrayed them. See the voices You've come to know
in Betrayal Under his Eye, streaming now on Hulu.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It was just my daughter and me, the TV and
the laundry, and I just remember being on the ground,
totally hyperventilating, having the only panic attack I've ever had
in my life. If this could be true, and I
could have no idea, how on earth would I ever
(00:41):
know who the monsters were.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. Today, we have a story about family, about
what it means to love someone and to lose them,
not to death, but to something much harder to talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
In some ways, it feels harder to grieve for a
person who isn't dead.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
That's doctor Jill Stoddard. She's a clinical psychologist, a mother,
a woman with a close knit family and what she
always thought was a safe, ordinary childhood.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So I grew up in a suburb of Boston, stereotypical,
middle class, waspy kind of upbringing. Mom was always home
when we got home from school, and even though Dad
worked hard, he was always home by six o'clock for dinner,
so it felt like a very normal, intact family.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Jill was the oldest. Then came her brother John, who
was two years younger, and then when Jill was seven,
her youngest brother was born.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
When my little brother was born, my mom would always say, well,
we can't very well name you Jill, John and Bob.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
It just doesn't sound good.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And so she named him jim And then all of
our you know, holiday cards, everything from that point on,
whenever my parents signed it, it was their first names
and the three jas.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
From the time he was a baby, Jimmy stood out
in the best way.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
We were all very average looking brunettes, brown hair, brown eyes,
and he had this bright orange hair and bright blue
eyes and freckles, and you know, he was so just
stunning looking and adorable.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
I feel like he kind of always had a little
bit of drool on.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
His face for some reason when he was little, and
people would stop us on the street to comment on
his hair and how cute he was.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Jill adored her little brother. He wasn't just a cute baby,
he was a happy baby.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
He was just this like very lovable, goofy, funny little guy.
And one of his favorite things that he would do
on command is we would say happy face, and he
would make this like very big, bright, smiley happy face,
and though we'd say mad face, and then he'd make
this very mad face and it just cracked us up.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
As he got older, Jimmy clearly looked up to Jill
and John. They would lovingly tease him, and he played
along too.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
We would yell the word servant, like servant, and then
you would hear bitter better, bitter better, bitter better, bitter better,
and he would just come running and you'd say, go
make me some chocolate milk, and he would like happily
go run and make chocolate milk.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Because he he was like just happy to be included.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
You know.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
When the family got a camcorder, the kids' film skits
and commercials.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
One of the skits we would do was mister Rogers,
and he would play mister mcpheey and ring the doorbell
and say speedy delivery, speedy delivery, and was just like
always up for anything.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Having Jimmy intew made everything more fun. Besides his red hair,
Jimmy's most defining feature was his laugh. Not only was
he hilarious, but he laughed really easily, and that just
always felt so good that even if you're not a
person that everyone thinks of as being really funny, when
(04:45):
you were with him, you felt really funny. Despite their
seven year age difference, Jill loved his company. I don't
ever remember there being a time where I was like,
you're annoying, get away from me. I think even as
we both got older, he was still my baby brother,
and we were very, very close, and he was always
(05:07):
just sweet and fun and funny. And I'm sure that
there were probably times that, you know, I closed my
door and was like, get away from me, But those
moments aren't the ones she remembers. When Jill thinks back
on her childhood, there's Jimmy in the frame every time,
with his messy red hair and his huge smile. Because
(05:31):
Jimmy was the baby, Jill says, he got away with
a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Our parents were a fair amount more permissive with him,
which I think is pretty typical of their children. Maybe
because you're tired by the time you have a third
child coming along, you're older, kind of like been there,
done that, You're like less worried, less anxious.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
As Jimmy got older, he got in.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Trouble more often than we did. And a lot of
the things he got in trouble for were not things
that my middle brother and I weren't also doing. He
just got caught more frequently than we did. Their mom
had a hypothesis about why Jimmy always seemed to get
in trouble at school. The teacher's writing on the chalkboard
(06:13):
and all the little kids in class are chit chatting,
and she turns around to see who the culprit is,
and you're looking at a sea of brown and blonde heads.
You know, your eyes are naturally drawn to the bright,
orange haired kid.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
There was some sense in it, but it didn't explain
why Jimmy was falling behind in school.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
At some point, my mom told me that she had
all three of us IQ tested. She never told us
the results or the scores, but she did tell us
that Jimmy had the highest IQ, which is not surprising,
like he was very naturally intelligent, but he probably did
the worst in school, which I would guess is probably
because he had untreated ADHD until he was in high school,
(06:59):
and then by then, you know, I think when you
have a history of like kind of always doing the
wrong thing because you have untreated ADHD, you sort of
stopped trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
By high school, Jimmy developed a pattern of making excuses.
It was hard to tell what was just Jimmy being
Jimmy and what was cause for concern. But Jill was
hardly around for those years because she left for college
when Jimmy was eleven. She studied psychology because she wanted
to know how people tick. She called her parents every
(07:35):
week and they would give her updates about Jimmy. She
remembers one story in particular that gave her pause.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
He got in a fight with a classmate in high school.
I don't remember why, and we like smashed a tennis racket.
I think he might have physically assaulted the kid, because
I remember my dad saying that the family was threatening
to sue. So it was more than just angry outburst
that ruined a tennis racket. And so that kind of
(08:04):
thing was like the start of us seeing there's something
going on with him at the time, Jill was focused
on getting her master's degree, and despite being a troublemaker
in high school, Jimmy ended up getting accepted to the
same college as his two older siblings. I think I
thought of it at the time as like, I'm not
(08:26):
his mom, I'm his sister, Like it's not my job
to figure out how to get him in line. When
Jill was accepted into a PhD program, it meant she
would need to move back to Boston, so she packed
up to move across the country. On the way, she
planned to stop at her parents' house for the night.
(08:46):
I had driven cross country with my boyfriend at the time,
and we ended up arriving one day ahead of schedule.
And we arrived at night to my parents' house, and
my parents must have been out of town for some reason,
and Jimmy was having party and I walked into the
kitchen and there was cocaine on the table. You know,
there's a rolled up dollar bill.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
She'd never seen cocaine in real life. Jimmy told her
to relax. He was twenty at the time. It's not
like he was a child. But to me, no matter
how old we got, he was always my baby brother
and so it just felt very shocking. As Jill started
(09:28):
her PhD program, Jimmy was in college.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
This was a time where I was working twelve hours
a day, seven days a week. There was always some
thirty five page paper due. But as busy as she was,
she wouldn't miss Jimmy's college graduation. When the time came,
she bought a plane ticket and traveled a few states north.
(09:52):
I have no time and no money, but this was
a really big deal that he was graduating, and so
my entire family flew out and got up early and
were sitting in the auditorium waiting for him to cross
the stage. They're reading the names alphabetically, and they go
(10:12):
right past where he should have been, and we waited
and were very confused, and he never walked across the stage.
The family got in their rental car and drove to
Jimmy's apartment concerned, so we knocked on the door. He
answered the door, looking very sleepy. All the lights were off,
and he started ranting about his stupid, effing roommate who
(10:35):
must have turned off his alarm. And we were so upset.
We spent all this time and money and effort to
get out to this big event, and like he couldn't
even be responsible enough to show up to the graduation.
You know, it turned into a fight and we decided
to go home early. It just felt like it was
(10:56):
an escalation of irresponsibility and unreliability.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Their family wondered if Jimmy actually graduated at all. Her
parents asked him directly, and he said, no, no, I
definitely graduated, and they had no way of proving it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
They're paying for.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
His school, but they don't have access to his school records,
so there was nothing they could really do to confirm
whether this was the truth. And I think ultimately they
just opted to believe them.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But Jill still had her suspicions about what really happened
that weekend. It was years later and we were having
fun and having drinks and I asked him, I said,
tell me the truth, like what was the real story?
Did you graduate? And he was like, well, don't tell
mom and dad, But no, I didn't graduate. So the
(11:46):
whole thing was actually premeditated, and the lie about the
alarm clock.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And his ire that how dare we leave him when
this wasn't his fault? It was an act all along.
He knew that he wasn't graduating. That conversation made Jilsey
her brother a little differently. Before this moment, she knew
he could be irresponsible, but she didn't know he had
(12:15):
the capacity to lie like this. I had a pretty
complicated emotional reaction to that. I was really angry. It
was sort of like, how dare you? Like, how can
you do.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
This to us? You know?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I think the anger was the thing that was covering
the harder emotion, which was like fear, fear of who
her brother really was and what he was capable of.
So after his fake graduation from college, I remember him
kind of like job jumping a fair amount because he
(12:51):
always had a terrible boss, you know, that kind of thing.
And that was kind of the extent that my middle
brother and I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Became an arborist, a tree expert, and he started his
own landscaping business.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He ended up moving back to New England and lived
in the same town as my middle brother and his family,
and so they started to see more of him and
to see some behaviors that were concerning. He was going
to go out and get his truck washed, and he'd
(13:26):
be gone for hours and then he would come back
and his truck wouldn't be washed, but he would never
explain where he was or what he was doing.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Every year, there'd be one good visit with Jimmy and
one visit where Jimmy was clearly up to something.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Despite the irresponsibility and the frustration, I still adored him
and we were still very cloth like. I was frustrated
by his behavior, but pretty quick to forgive him. And
partly that's because he's my baby brother, and he wasn't
always like that, and that cute, little, sweet and enthusiastic
(14:10):
and happy little boy like he was still that in
so many ways. I even remember, while I was in
graduate school having a conversation with one of my friends
that classic question of like, if you were going to
be stranded on a desert island with five people, who
would be on your island?
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And he was at the top of my list.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Jimmy was there when Jill got married in Vegas. It
was an intimate wedding, a house party, but the next
morning Jimmy was taking someone to the airport and he
disappeared for hours, and when he finally came back, he
was like sweaty and anxious and claimed it was because
he was lost I just remember my brother, my sister
(14:51):
in law, my husband, and I all being like, something
is going on here, no idea what it is, but
it's got to be drugs. Right after years of Jimmy's
(15:20):
strange behavior, Jill and her other brother, John assumed that
he must be secretly using drugs. It was the only
logical explanation. By twenty thirteen, Jill had achieved some big
life milestones.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I was working as a professor in a graduate school
for psychology. My daughter had just turned one, and I
was working on my very first book.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
One day, she was home alone with her infant daughter.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I was in my family room TV on, daughters playing
on the floor, and I was folding laundry, and I
got a text message from John that said he was
on his way to go bail Jimmy out of jail.
And of course we're speculating back and forth, what do
(16:13):
you think this is. It's got to be drugs because
this was on the heels of some of this bizarre,
suspicious behavior. So we thought, okay, this is our confirmation
he's using drugs. I was like, all right, just keep
me posted, and so he started texting me with updates
as he got them. I don't remember what all the
texts said, but I do remember the one that came
(16:35):
through that said, it's a class felony. A felony either
he has like a large amount or he was distributing
or selling.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
But then Jill got the text that changed her life.
The police had confiscated Jimmy's computer and they'd found photos
of underage girls.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
What made it a felony was that the children in
the images were clearly under the age of twelve, they
were pre pubescent. And I remember like falling to the
ground having the only panic attack I've ever had in
my life. My husband wasn't home, and it was just
(17:25):
my daughter and me, the TV and the laundry, and
I just remember being on the ground, totally hyperventilating. Oh
this to this day, so it's been twelve years. I
just remember feeling so panicked that if this could be
true about my brother, and I could have no idea
(17:51):
how on earth was I ever going to keep my
daughter safe, How on earth would I ever know.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Who the monster.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Jimmy insisted that he'd been framed, just.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Like he told us, he graduated and his alarm didn't
go off. We didn't believe anything he was saying. Jill
formed an alliance with her sister in law, John's wife,
and so she and I we would get on the
phone for hours and hours and hours and talk about
all of the sat nauseum because we were on the
same page and we were both new moms. All we
(18:30):
cared about was making sure that our kids were safe.
Nothing else mattered. So my sister in law ended up
actually going to the courthouse to get access to whatever
records were public, and so she was able to see
what the arrest was for. It listed the file names
(18:50):
of the content that they found on his computer.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
It wasn't a lot of information, but it was enough.
These were photos girls as young as six. Jimmy had
photoshopped himself into some of the images. But when it
came to his sentencing.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The consequences were not significant. I think he maybe spent
a couple weeks incarcerated and then he was on the
sex offender registry.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
To Jill, it seemed like a slap on the wrist,
but the inner personal cost was immeasurable.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Because after Jimmy's arrest, our family kind of fell apart.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
A stark divide formed in the family. Jill, her husband
and her sister in law wanted to cut Jimmy out
of their lives, but her parents weren't on the same page,
and I remember them saying things like, well, I mean,
isn't it not as bad because it's only pictures. They
wanted to find a way to explain it, a way
(19:58):
that wasn't as horrib horrific as what the reality was
a lot of just mental gymnastics and denial. And what
resulted from that, I think it was pretty clear to
Jimmy that he could fairly successfully manipulate my parents. He
(20:20):
told them that his addiction to Adderall is what caused
him to do this, and I had several conversations with them,
you know, as a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Saying.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Being high on adderall very likely led him to feel
disinhibited so that he was more likely to engage in
these behaviors, but the drug itself did not cause him
to be attracted to little girls.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Jill and her sister in law drew a firm boundary
that they would not interact with Jimmy. They both had
young daughters to protect, and in response, Jimmy lashed out,
and so he sent me and my sister in law
very nasty messages. He told me I should go kill myself,
(21:09):
cruel lashing out emails the likes of which we had
never seen. We had not seen this side of him.
That year, their parents invited Jimmy to the family reunion
and we were like, what, No, there were going to
be children there.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
He can't be there.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And I remember saying finally, like, I will tell everyone
I am not allowing him to be around children without
the parents knowing. My parents didn't want anyone to know.
They wanted to keep this a secret, so I think
they ultimately just told him he couldn't come. Jill didn't
talk to her little brother for four years. That was
until their mom got sick, when it became clear that
(21:49):
she was near.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
The end of her life.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Of course, my little brother also wanted to say goodbye
to his dying mother, and we were all there together,
and so my dad asked our permission based only to
let him come. Honestly, it was a hard decision, but
it wasn't you know. It was like, of course, he
has the right to see his mom and say goodbye
to his mom, and there were no children present for
(22:13):
any of that, so we let him come.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And this was the first time we saw.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Him, when Jimmy walked in the door, he looked like
his old self. He seemed clear eye and genuine.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
He assured us that he was clean. His behavior was
quite different. He apologized for the mean emails that he
sent to my sister in law and me. He apologized
for the terrible way that he had treated all of us.
He was very sincere, and we believed him. We believed
that even if he still had this sexual proclivity, he
(22:50):
wasn't acting on it.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
After that, Jill and Jimmy were on speaking terms again.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
We agreed to try to.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Repair the rupture in our relationship, but of course with
like gigantic boundaries that he would not be ever unsupervised
around kids or anything like that. And that lasted for
a year. Exactly one year. It was their grandmother's ninety
ninth birthday party. He was there and it became instantly
(23:23):
obvious that something was wrong. He's acting super cagey, he's
being weird. He's sleeping a lot, he's being very aggressive
and hostile. You got in a fight with someone in
a bar. I mean, just kind of back to a
lot of the old stuff. And I remember leaving the weekend,
and my sister in law and I talking and just saying,
(23:44):
like the other shoe's going to drop, We're.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Just waiting for the call. The call's going to come.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
And then sure enough, shortly after that, we got the call.
A few months earlier, the police had received another tip
about Jimmy. They executed a search warrant at his house.
They confiscated his computers. They also found several thumb drives
(24:12):
in various pockets of his clothing.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
He wasn't home during the search. His roommate called to
tell him that the police were looking for him, but
Jimmy was nowhere to be found, so the police tracked
his cell phone to try and make the arrest.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
When they finally found him, he had climbed up a
very high tree. He was a tree guy in arborist,
so he had equipment to climb trees, and the police
all came and he was demanding a letter that he
would not be held responsible for what they found, and
if they didn't give him that letter, that he was
(24:48):
going to jump and kill himself. They ultimately talk him
down out of the tree and they arrest him.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
This time the FBI was involved. Jimmy insisted again that
he had been framed. Jill knew it was a lie,
but she didn't have the FBI report. She didn't know
exactly what he'd done, and she was determined to find out.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
We had a close family friend that was friends with
my middle brother since like third grade, and he's a
private investigator. Actually, this family friend was able to get
access to this very detailed FBI report. He emailed it
to me, and my husband begged me not to read it.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
He begged me what.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Was in this report would determine the future of her family.
The four years that she'd been estranged from Jimmy tore
her family apart. They'd just gone back to speaking terms.
If Jill was going to put her father through that again,
she needed to see it with her own eyes. So
she opened the FBI report.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And I knew I shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I knew, I knew it was the worst idea, and
I couldn't not read it. I mean, we had just
been sitting in so much uncertainty and bewilderment that it
felt intolerable. I was just compelled, like I.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Just had to know. And of course he was right.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
It was the worst thing I could have done.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Jill was in the car with her husband when she
received a copy of the FBI report on Jimmy, and
despite her husband's please, she read it. The report started
by describing not pictures, but videos and objects found in
Jimmy's house.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
It was sickening.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
The detail in this report will be burned on my
brain forever. There were things happening in these videos that
I couldn't have even imagined in my worst nightmare.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Jimmy had clearly escalated.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
He was not.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Only downloading material, he was also uploading material.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
In his home. The police seized a child sized sex
doll and multiple pairs of children's underwear.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
That was really the moment I was like, oh my god,
he's a monster.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Jill spoke to him one last time, and on that
phone call, he wasn't remorseful. He was defiant.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
He said to me, well, at least I'm not part
of a ring or anything. She's often wondered if he
was telling on himself in that moment, and it was
like what a little kid would do. You know, it's
got chocolate all over the face. Did you eat a
cookieat No.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
It's important to note that in crimes like this, her
perpetrators are seeking to consume se sam. There's often a
limit to how much someone can download before they're required
to create and upload their own content.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Knowing the depths of what these perpetrators are capable of
doing really sent me into a spiral as a mom.
A switch flipped in Jill's reality. After the first arrest,
I could still see both sides of him, like he
(28:55):
was still my little baby brother who I always loved
and was very cleo to, who had this sickness, this
horrible proclivity. I even had some compassion for him because
I recognized that he wouldn't want this or wouldn't choose this.
(29:17):
But I think after the second time, my capacity for
compassion largely disappeared. Once I read that report, all I could.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Think about.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Was what happened to those little girls and when he
got caught the second time, the girls in those images
were the exact same age as my daughter, and that's
all I could think about.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
That's all I could think about, was like if he
had had access to.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Her, that was really the point of no return for me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
This time. It wasn't a slap on the wrist for
Jimmy because he'd been trading videos and the FBI got involved.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
He was charged with a federal crime because they have
these federal minimums. The penalty for this is ten years,
so he was ultimately sentenced to ten years in a
federal correctional facility. She'd seen the darkest parts of humanity
in her own brother, and so after this happened, all
(30:28):
of us were just how, why, what possibly could have
caused this? How could the same family, you know, raise
my middle brother and me to be who we are,
but also have this person be a pedophile. It just
(30:50):
did not make any sense.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
She began obsessively researching and studying perpetrators like her brother.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
If I could just understand this enough, then I would
have the tools to protect my children. As an anxiety expert,
what I know about what fuels anxiety is uncertainty, a
lack of perceived control, and a high sense of responsibility.
And those three things were so present for me as.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
A mom when this happened.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
She learned how perpetrators often groomed the parents first and
how they select their targets.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Perpetrators groom children by connecting with little kids over things
that they like. They test them by sharing secret you know,
saying to a kid, telling them or doing something that
their parents wouldn't approve of, and saying this will be
our secret. To then see did the kid tell the
parents it was a secret, and if not, that might
(31:53):
make them a good victim.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
But no matter how much she learned, the anxiety didn't
go away. All the research in the world didn't give
her an answer about how or why her own little
brother became this person. She's had to accept that her
brother's actions have fundamentally changed her.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I think it's made me hard.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And I was not that way before this. Ooh, that
just got me choked up. It was just the most
painful experience of letting yourself love someone so deeply.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
And to have that backfire.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
What hurts the most is thinking back to the happy
little boy she loved so much.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
It feels impossible that those people are the same person.
It just feels impossible that human body is still walking
around on the earth. But I lost my brother that
I knew years years ago.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
There's a word for this kind of experience. It's called
disenfranchised grief.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And so I feel like I have never really been
able to properly grieve any of this because I don't
feel like I'm allowed to feel grief for someone who's
a pedophile.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Jimmy's now out of prison. Jill isn't in touch with
him and doesn't plan to be. Just knowing he's out
there brings all these emotions to the surface once again.
But Jill is committed to finding meaning in the wreckage. Today,
she writes and speaks publicly about her story, including the
darkest parts. Jill co hosts a podcast of her own
(33:50):
psychologists Off the Clock. It's a place where clinicians talk
about real life grief, shame, and what actually helpslogy.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
There's a concept of post traumatic growth.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Some people experience trauma and they kind of rebound back
to baselines. Some never really rebound, and some actually end
up doing better than they were at baseline.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Exactly where I fall on that spectrum, but I do
think there has been sort of examples of growth or
good or purpose through this.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why do you want to share your story?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I think as much as this feels scary and uncomfortable,
we have to be willing to say the hard thing.
Treating this like a dirty little secret, like this is
not my crime, this is not my family's crime, Like
none of us did anything wrong. He Jimmy is the
only one who did anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
And keeping it a secret is just protecting him, and
he doesn't deserve.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Protection, deserve protection, And so I just feel compelled to
start having more of these honest conversations, even if they're
not popular. Like sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I
have to be part of the sunlight.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
On the next episode of Betrayal Weekly, I get.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
A call and it's a detective, he said, Jack oln
We got an anonymous call from a gentleman stating that
you were being scammed and they felt sorry for you.
My head exploded, thinking, oh my god, Oh my god,
(35:46):
Oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Before we end the episode, I have some exciting news.
Betrayal will be doing our first ever live show as
part of the Virgin Voyages True Crime Crew OZ. We'll
be answering listener questions and discussing them live on stage
with Stacy and Tyler from Betrayal season three, as well
as Caroline from season four. So if you have a
(36:10):
question for us, please email us at Betrayalpod at gmail
dot com with the subject line listener question and if
you want to join us on the Caribbean cruise, there
are still spots available. Search virgin voyages dot com slash
true crime. If you would like to reach out to
the Betrayal team or want to tell us your Betrayal story,
(36:33):
email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com, That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com, or follow us on Instagram
at Betrayal Pod. You can also connect with me on
Instagram at It's Andrea Gunning. To access our newsletter, view
additional content, and connect with the Betrayal community, join our
(36:53):
substack at Betrayal dot substack dot com. We're grateful for
your support. One way to show support is by subscribing
to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to
rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way.
A big thank 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
(37:16):
executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and
produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard.
Also produced by Ben Fetterman, Associate producers are Caitlin Golden,
Olivia Hewitt, and Kristin Melcurie. Casting support from Curry Richmond.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio
(37:39):
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio. Additional audio editing by
Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library
provided by mybe Music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts
Hey, Betrayal fans, I have exciting news to share. Season
three of Betrayal is now a docu series on Hulu.
It's the gripping story of Stacy Tyler and the doctor
who betrayed them. See the voices You've come to know
in Betrayal Under his Eye, streaming now on Hulu.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It was just my daughter and me, the TV and
the laundry, and I just remember being on the ground,
totally hyperventilating, having the only panic attack I've ever had
in my life. If this could be true, and I
could have no idea, how on earth would I ever
(00:41):
know who the monsters were.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. Today, we have a story about family, about
what it means to love someone and to lose them,
not to death, but to something much harder to talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
In some ways, it feels harder to grieve for a
person who isn't dead.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
That's doctor Jill Stoddard. She's a clinical psychologist, a mother,
a woman with a close knit family and what she
always thought was a safe, ordinary childhood.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So I grew up in a suburb of Boston, stereotypical,
middle class, waspy kind of upbringing. Mom was always home
when we got home from school, and even though Dad
worked hard, he was always home by six o'clock for dinner,
so it felt like a very normal, intact family.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Jill was the oldest. Then came her brother John, who
was two years younger, and then when Jill was seven,
her youngest brother was born.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
When my little brother was born, my mom would always say, well,
we can't very well name you Jill, John and Bob.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
It just doesn't sound good.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And so she named him jim And then all of
our you know, holiday cards, everything from that point on,
whenever my parents signed it, it was their first names
and the three jas.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
From the time he was a baby, Jimmy stood out
in the best way.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
We were all very average looking brunettes, brown hair, brown eyes,
and he had this bright orange hair and bright blue
eyes and freckles, and you know, he was so just
stunning looking and adorable.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
I feel like he kind of always had a little
bit of drool on.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
His face for some reason when he was little, and
people would stop us on the street to comment on
his hair and how cute he was.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Jill adored her little brother. He wasn't just a cute baby,
he was a happy baby.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
He was just this like very lovable, goofy, funny little guy.
And one of his favorite things that he would do
on command is we would say happy face, and he
would make this like very big, bright, smiley happy face,
and though we'd say mad face, and then he'd make
this very mad face and it just cracked us up.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
As he got older, Jimmy clearly looked up to Jill
and John. They would lovingly tease him, and he played
along too.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
We would yell the word servant, like servant, and then
you would hear bitter better, bitter better, bitter better, bitter better,
and he would just come running and you'd say, go
make me some chocolate milk, and he would like happily
go run and make chocolate milk.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Because he he was like just happy to be included.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
You know.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
When the family got a camcorder, the kids' film skits
and commercials.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
One of the skits we would do was mister Rogers,
and he would play mister mcpheey and ring the doorbell
and say speedy delivery, speedy delivery, and was just like
always up for anything.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Having Jimmy intew made everything more fun. Besides his red hair,
Jimmy's most defining feature was his laugh. Not only was
he hilarious, but he laughed really easily, and that just
always felt so good that even if you're not a
person that everyone thinks of as being really funny, when
(04:45):
you were with him, you felt really funny. Despite their
seven year age difference, Jill loved his company. I don't
ever remember there being a time where I was like,
you're annoying, get away from me. I think even as
we both got older, he was still my baby brother,
and we were very, very close, and he was always
(05:07):
just sweet and fun and funny. And I'm sure that
there were probably times that, you know, I closed my
door and was like, get away from me, But those
moments aren't the ones she remembers. When Jill thinks back
on her childhood, there's Jimmy in the frame every time,
with his messy red hair and his huge smile. Because
(05:31):
Jimmy was the baby, Jill says, he got away with
a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Our parents were a fair amount more permissive with him,
which I think is pretty typical of their children. Maybe
because you're tired by the time you have a third
child coming along, you're older, kind of like been there,
done that, You're like less worried, less anxious.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
As Jimmy got older, he got in.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Trouble more often than we did. And a lot of
the things he got in trouble for were not things
that my middle brother and I weren't also doing. He
just got caught more frequently than we did. Their mom
had a hypothesis about why Jimmy always seemed to get
in trouble at school. The teacher's writing on the chalkboard
(06:13):
and all the little kids in class are chit chatting,
and she turns around to see who the culprit is,
and you're looking at a sea of brown and blonde heads.
You know, your eyes are naturally drawn to the bright,
orange haired kid.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
There was some sense in it, but it didn't explain
why Jimmy was falling behind in school.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
At some point, my mom told me that she had
all three of us IQ tested. She never told us
the results or the scores, but she did tell us
that Jimmy had the highest IQ, which is not surprising,
like he was very naturally intelligent, but he probably did
the worst in school, which I would guess is probably
because he had untreated ADHD until he was in high school,
(06:59):
and then by then, you know, I think when you
have a history of like kind of always doing the
wrong thing because you have untreated ADHD, you sort of
stopped trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
By high school, Jimmy developed a pattern of making excuses.
It was hard to tell what was just Jimmy being
Jimmy and what was cause for concern. But Jill was
hardly around for those years because she left for college
when Jimmy was eleven. She studied psychology because she wanted
to know how people tick. She called her parents every
(07:35):
week and they would give her updates about Jimmy. She
remembers one story in particular that gave her pause.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
He got in a fight with a classmate in high school.
I don't remember why, and we like smashed a tennis racket.
I think he might have physically assaulted the kid, because
I remember my dad saying that the family was threatening
to sue. So it was more than just angry outburst
that ruined a tennis racket. And so that kind of
(08:04):
thing was like the start of us seeing there's something
going on with him at the time, Jill was focused
on getting her master's degree, and despite being a troublemaker
in high school, Jimmy ended up getting accepted to the
same college as his two older siblings. I think I
thought of it at the time as like, I'm not
(08:26):
his mom, I'm his sister, Like it's not my job
to figure out how to get him in line. When
Jill was accepted into a PhD program, it meant she
would need to move back to Boston, so she packed
up to move across the country. On the way, she
planned to stop at her parents' house for the night.
(08:46):
I had driven cross country with my boyfriend at the time,
and we ended up arriving one day ahead of schedule.
And we arrived at night to my parents' house, and
my parents must have been out of town for some reason,
and Jimmy was having party and I walked into the
kitchen and there was cocaine on the table. You know,
there's a rolled up dollar bill.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
She'd never seen cocaine in real life. Jimmy told her
to relax. He was twenty at the time. It's not
like he was a child. But to me, no matter
how old we got, he was always my baby brother
and so it just felt very shocking. As Jill started
(09:28):
her PhD program, Jimmy was in college.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
This was a time where I was working twelve hours
a day, seven days a week. There was always some
thirty five page paper due. But as busy as she was,
she wouldn't miss Jimmy's college graduation. When the time came,
she bought a plane ticket and traveled a few states north.
(09:52):
I have no time and no money, but this was
a really big deal that he was graduating, and so
my entire family flew out and got up early and
were sitting in the auditorium waiting for him to cross
the stage. They're reading the names alphabetically, and they go
(10:12):
right past where he should have been, and we waited
and were very confused, and he never walked across the stage.
The family got in their rental car and drove to
Jimmy's apartment concerned, so we knocked on the door. He
answered the door, looking very sleepy. All the lights were off,
and he started ranting about his stupid, effing roommate who
(10:35):
must have turned off his alarm. And we were so upset.
We spent all this time and money and effort to
get out to this big event, and like he couldn't
even be responsible enough to show up to the graduation.
You know, it turned into a fight and we decided
to go home early. It just felt like it was
(10:56):
an escalation of irresponsibility and unreliability.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Their family wondered if Jimmy actually graduated at all. Her
parents asked him directly, and he said, no, no, I
definitely graduated, and they had no way of proving it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
They're paying for.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
His school, but they don't have access to his school records,
so there was nothing they could really do to confirm
whether this was the truth. And I think ultimately they
just opted to believe them.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But Jill still had her suspicions about what really happened
that weekend. It was years later and we were having
fun and having drinks and I asked him, I said,
tell me the truth, like what was the real story?
Did you graduate? And he was like, well, don't tell
mom and dad, But no, I didn't graduate. So the
(11:46):
whole thing was actually premeditated, and the lie about the
alarm clock.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And his ire that how dare we leave him when
this wasn't his fault? It was an act all along.
He knew that he wasn't graduating. That conversation made Jilsey
her brother a little differently. Before this moment, she knew
he could be irresponsible, but she didn't know he had
(12:15):
the capacity to lie like this. I had a pretty
complicated emotional reaction to that. I was really angry. It
was sort of like, how dare you? Like, how can
you do.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
This to us? You know?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I think the anger was the thing that was covering
the harder emotion, which was like fear, fear of who
her brother really was and what he was capable of.
So after his fake graduation from college, I remember him
kind of like job jumping a fair amount because he
(12:51):
always had a terrible boss, you know, that kind of thing.
And that was kind of the extent that my middle
brother and I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Became an arborist, a tree expert, and he started his
own landscaping business.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He ended up moving back to New England and lived
in the same town as my middle brother and his family,
and so they started to see more of him and
to see some behaviors that were concerning. He was going
to go out and get his truck washed, and he'd
(13:26):
be gone for hours and then he would come back
and his truck wouldn't be washed, but he would never
explain where he was or what he was doing.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Every year, there'd be one good visit with Jimmy and
one visit where Jimmy was clearly up to something.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Despite the irresponsibility and the frustration, I still adored him
and we were still very cloth like. I was frustrated
by his behavior, but pretty quick to forgive him. And
partly that's because he's my baby brother, and he wasn't
always like that, and that cute, little, sweet and enthusiastic
(14:10):
and happy little boy like he was still that in
so many ways. I even remember, while I was in
graduate school having a conversation with one of my friends
that classic question of like, if you were going to
be stranded on a desert island with five people, who
would be on your island?
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And he was at the top of my list.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Jimmy was there when Jill got married in Vegas. It
was an intimate wedding, a house party, but the next
morning Jimmy was taking someone to the airport and he
disappeared for hours, and when he finally came back, he
was like sweaty and anxious and claimed it was because
he was lost I just remember my brother, my sister
(14:51):
in law, my husband, and I all being like, something
is going on here, no idea what it is, but
it's got to be drugs. Right after years of Jimmy's
(15:20):
strange behavior, Jill and her other brother, John assumed that
he must be secretly using drugs. It was the only
logical explanation. By twenty thirteen, Jill had achieved some big
life milestones.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I was working as a professor in a graduate school
for psychology. My daughter had just turned one, and I
was working on my very first book.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
One day, she was home alone with her infant daughter.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I was in my family room TV on, daughters playing
on the floor, and I was folding laundry, and I
got a text message from John that said he was
on his way to go bail Jimmy out of jail.
And of course we're speculating back and forth, what do
(16:13):
you think this is. It's got to be drugs because
this was on the heels of some of this bizarre,
suspicious behavior. So we thought, okay, this is our confirmation
he's using drugs. I was like, all right, just keep
me posted, and so he started texting me with updates
as he got them. I don't remember what all the
texts said, but I do remember the one that came
(16:35):
through that said, it's a class felony. A felony either
he has like a large amount or he was distributing
or selling.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
But then Jill got the text that changed her life.
The police had confiscated Jimmy's computer and they'd found photos
of underage girls.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
What made it a felony was that the children in
the images were clearly under the age of twelve, they
were pre pubescent. And I remember like falling to the
ground having the only panic attack I've ever had in
my life. My husband wasn't home, and it was just
(17:25):
my daughter and me, the TV and the laundry, and
I just remember being on the ground, totally hyperventilating. Oh
this to this day, so it's been twelve years. I
just remember feeling so panicked that if this could be
true about my brother, and I could have no idea
(17:51):
how on earth was I ever going to keep my
daughter safe, How on earth would I ever know.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Who the monster.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Jimmy insisted that he'd been framed, just.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Like he told us, he graduated and his alarm didn't
go off. We didn't believe anything he was saying. Jill
formed an alliance with her sister in law, John's wife,
and so she and I we would get on the
phone for hours and hours and hours and talk about
all of the sat nauseum because we were on the
same page and we were both new moms. All we
(18:30):
cared about was making sure that our kids were safe.
Nothing else mattered. So my sister in law ended up
actually going to the courthouse to get access to whatever
records were public, and so she was able to see
what the arrest was for. It listed the file names
(18:50):
of the content that they found on his computer.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
It wasn't a lot of information, but it was enough.
These were photos girls as young as six. Jimmy had
photoshopped himself into some of the images. But when it
came to his sentencing.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The consequences were not significant. I think he maybe spent
a couple weeks incarcerated and then he was on the
sex offender registry.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
To Jill, it seemed like a slap on the wrist,
but the inner personal cost was immeasurable.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Because after Jimmy's arrest, our family kind of fell apart.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
A stark divide formed in the family. Jill, her husband
and her sister in law wanted to cut Jimmy out
of their lives, but her parents weren't on the same page,
and I remember them saying things like, well, I mean,
isn't it not as bad because it's only pictures. They
wanted to find a way to explain it, a way
(19:58):
that wasn't as horrib horrific as what the reality was
a lot of just mental gymnastics and denial. And what
resulted from that, I think it was pretty clear to
Jimmy that he could fairly successfully manipulate my parents. He
(20:20):
told them that his addiction to Adderall is what caused
him to do this, and I had several conversations with them,
you know, as a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Saying.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Being high on adderall very likely led him to feel
disinhibited so that he was more likely to engage in
these behaviors, but the drug itself did not cause him
to be attracted to little girls.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Jill and her sister in law drew a firm boundary
that they would not interact with Jimmy. They both had
young daughters to protect, and in response, Jimmy lashed out,
and so he sent me and my sister in law
very nasty messages. He told me I should go kill myself,
(21:09):
cruel lashing out emails the likes of which we had
never seen. We had not seen this side of him.
That year, their parents invited Jimmy to the family reunion
and we were like, what, No, there were going to
be children there.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
He can't be there.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And I remember saying finally, like, I will tell everyone
I am not allowing him to be around children without
the parents knowing. My parents didn't want anyone to know.
They wanted to keep this a secret, so I think
they ultimately just told him he couldn't come. Jill didn't
talk to her little brother for four years. That was
until their mom got sick, when it became clear that
(21:49):
she was near.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
The end of her life.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Of course, my little brother also wanted to say goodbye
to his dying mother, and we were all there together,
and so my dad asked our permission based only to
let him come. Honestly, it was a hard decision, but
it wasn't you know. It was like, of course, he
has the right to see his mom and say goodbye
to his mom, and there were no children present for
(22:13):
any of that, so we let him come.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
And this was the first time we saw.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Him, when Jimmy walked in the door, he looked like
his old self. He seemed clear eye and genuine.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
He assured us that he was clean. His behavior was
quite different. He apologized for the mean emails that he
sent to my sister in law and me. He apologized
for the terrible way that he had treated all of us.
He was very sincere, and we believed him. We believed
that even if he still had this sexual proclivity, he
(22:50):
wasn't acting on it.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
After that, Jill and Jimmy were on speaking terms again.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
We agreed to try to.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Repair the rupture in our relationship, but of course with
like gigantic boundaries that he would not be ever unsupervised
around kids or anything like that. And that lasted for
a year. Exactly one year. It was their grandmother's ninety
ninth birthday party. He was there and it became instantly
(23:23):
obvious that something was wrong. He's acting super cagey, he's
being weird. He's sleeping a lot, he's being very aggressive
and hostile. You got in a fight with someone in
a bar. I mean, just kind of back to a
lot of the old stuff. And I remember leaving the weekend,
and my sister in law and I talking and just saying,
(23:44):
like the other shoe's going to drop, We're.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Just waiting for the call. The call's going to come.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
And then sure enough, shortly after that, we got the call.
A few months earlier, the police had received another tip
about Jimmy. They executed a search warrant at his house.
They confiscated his computers. They also found several thumb drives
(24:12):
in various pockets of his clothing.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
He wasn't home during the search. His roommate called to
tell him that the police were looking for him, but
Jimmy was nowhere to be found, so the police tracked
his cell phone to try and make the arrest.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
When they finally found him, he had climbed up a
very high tree. He was a tree guy in arborist,
so he had equipment to climb trees, and the police
all came and he was demanding a letter that he
would not be held responsible for what they found, and
if they didn't give him that letter, that he was
(24:48):
going to jump and kill himself. They ultimately talk him
down out of the tree and they arrest him.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
This time the FBI was involved. Jimmy insisted again that
he had been framed. Jill knew it was a lie,
but she didn't have the FBI report. She didn't know
exactly what he'd done, and she was determined to find out.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
We had a close family friend that was friends with
my middle brother since like third grade, and he's a
private investigator. Actually, this family friend was able to get
access to this very detailed FBI report. He emailed it
to me, and my husband begged me not to read it.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
He begged me what.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Was in this report would determine the future of her family.
The four years that she'd been estranged from Jimmy tore
her family apart. They'd just gone back to speaking terms.
If Jill was going to put her father through that again,
she needed to see it with her own eyes. So
she opened the FBI report.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And I knew I shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I knew, I knew it was the worst idea, and
I couldn't not read it. I mean, we had just
been sitting in so much uncertainty and bewilderment that it
felt intolerable. I was just compelled, like I.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Just had to know. And of course he was right.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
It was the worst thing I could have done.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Jill was in the car with her husband when she
received a copy of the FBI report on Jimmy, and
despite her husband's please, she read it. The report started
by describing not pictures, but videos and objects found in
Jimmy's house.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
It was sickening.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
The detail in this report will be burned on my
brain forever. There were things happening in these videos that
I couldn't have even imagined in my worst nightmare.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Jimmy had clearly escalated.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
He was not.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Only downloading material, he was also uploading material.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
In his home. The police seized a child sized sex
doll and multiple pairs of children's underwear.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
That was really the moment I was like, oh my god,
he's a monster.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Jill spoke to him one last time, and on that
phone call, he wasn't remorseful. He was defiant.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
He said to me, well, at least I'm not part
of a ring or anything. She's often wondered if he
was telling on himself in that moment, and it was
like what a little kid would do. You know, it's
got chocolate all over the face. Did you eat a
cookieat No.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
It's important to note that in crimes like this, her
perpetrators are seeking to consume se sam. There's often a
limit to how much someone can download before they're required
to create and upload their own content.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Knowing the depths of what these perpetrators are capable of
doing really sent me into a spiral as a mom.
A switch flipped in Jill's reality. After the first arrest,
I could still see both sides of him, like he
(28:55):
was still my little baby brother who I always loved
and was very cleo to, who had this sickness, this
horrible proclivity. I even had some compassion for him because
I recognized that he wouldn't want this or wouldn't choose this.
(29:17):
But I think after the second time, my capacity for
compassion largely disappeared. Once I read that report, all I could.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Think about.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Was what happened to those little girls and when he
got caught the second time, the girls in those images
were the exact same age as my daughter, and that's
all I could think about.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
That's all I could think about, was like if he
had had access to.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Her, that was really the point of no return for me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
This time. It wasn't a slap on the wrist for
Jimmy because he'd been trading videos and the FBI got involved.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
He was charged with a federal crime because they have
these federal minimums. The penalty for this is ten years,
so he was ultimately sentenced to ten years in a
federal correctional facility. She'd seen the darkest parts of humanity
in her own brother, and so after this happened, all
(30:28):
of us were just how, why, what possibly could have
caused this? How could the same family, you know, raise
my middle brother and me to be who we are,
but also have this person be a pedophile. It just
(30:50):
did not make any sense.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
She began obsessively researching and studying perpetrators like her brother.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
If I could just understand this enough, then I would
have the tools to protect my children. As an anxiety expert,
what I know about what fuels anxiety is uncertainty, a
lack of perceived control, and a high sense of responsibility.
And those three things were so present for me as.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
A mom when this happened.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
She learned how perpetrators often groomed the parents first and
how they select their targets.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Perpetrators groom children by connecting with little kids over things
that they like. They test them by sharing secret you know,
saying to a kid, telling them or doing something that
their parents wouldn't approve of, and saying this will be
our secret. To then see did the kid tell the
parents it was a secret, and if not, that might
(31:53):
make them a good victim.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
But no matter how much she learned, the anxiety didn't
go away. All the research in the world didn't give
her an answer about how or why her own little
brother became this person. She's had to accept that her
brother's actions have fundamentally changed her.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I think it's made me hard.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And I was not that way before this. Ooh, that
just got me choked up. It was just the most
painful experience of letting yourself love someone so deeply.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
And to have that backfire.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
What hurts the most is thinking back to the happy
little boy she loved so much.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
It feels impossible that those people are the same person.
It just feels impossible that human body is still walking
around on the earth. But I lost my brother that
I knew years years ago.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
There's a word for this kind of experience. It's called
disenfranchised grief.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And so I feel like I have never really been
able to properly grieve any of this because I don't
feel like I'm allowed to feel grief for someone who's
a pedophile.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Jimmy's now out of prison. Jill isn't in touch with
him and doesn't plan to be. Just knowing he's out
there brings all these emotions to the surface once again.
But Jill is committed to finding meaning in the wreckage. Today,
she writes and speaks publicly about her story, including the
darkest parts. Jill co hosts a podcast of her own
(33:50):
psychologists Off the Clock. It's a place where clinicians talk
about real life grief, shame, and what actually helpslogy.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
There's a concept of post traumatic growth.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Some people experience trauma and they kind of rebound back
to baselines. Some never really rebound, and some actually end
up doing better than they were at baseline.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Exactly where I fall on that spectrum, but I do
think there has been sort of examples of growth or
good or purpose through this.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why do you want to share your story?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I think as much as this feels scary and uncomfortable,
we have to be willing to say the hard thing.
Treating this like a dirty little secret, like this is
not my crime, this is not my family's crime, Like
none of us did anything wrong. He Jimmy is the
only one who did anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
And keeping it a secret is just protecting him, and
he doesn't deserve.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Protection, deserve protection, And so I just feel compelled to
start having more of these honest conversations, even if they're
not popular. Like sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I
have to be part of the sunlight.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
On the next episode of Betrayal Weekly, I get.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
A call and it's a detective, he said, Jack oln
We got an anonymous call from a gentleman stating that
you were being scammed and they felt sorry for you.
My head exploded, thinking, oh my god, Oh my god,
(35:46):
Oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Before we end the episode, I have some exciting news.
Betrayal will be doing our first ever live show as
part of the Virgin Voyages True Crime Crew OZ. We'll
be answering listener questions and discussing them live on stage
with Stacy and Tyler from Betrayal season three, as well
as Caroline from season four. So if you have a
(36:10):
question for us, please email us at Betrayalpod at gmail
dot com with the subject line listener question and if
you want to join us on the Caribbean cruise, there
are still spots available. Search virgin voyages dot com slash
true crime. If you would like to reach out to
the Betrayal team or want to tell us your Betrayal story,
(36:33):
email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com, That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com, or follow us on Instagram
at Betrayal Pod. You can also connect with me on
Instagram at It's Andrea Gunning. To access our newsletter, view
additional content, and connect with the Betrayal community, join our
(36:53):
substack at Betrayal dot substack dot com. We're grateful for
your support. One way to show support is by subscribing
to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to
rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way.
A big thank 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
(37:16):
executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and
produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard.
Also produced by Ben Fetterman, Associate producers are Caitlin Golden,
Olivia Hewitt, and Kristin Melcurie. Casting support from Curry Richmond.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio
(37:39):
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio. Additional audio editing by
Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library
provided by mybe Music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
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