September 11, 2025 • 52 mins
A small-town pastor built a loyal group of followers, until an anonymous letter writer threatened to expose his secret life.
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Episode Transcript
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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 (00:20):
The person that sent these letters out was saying, I
have proof. Unless you confess your sins and repent, then
I'm going to release some tapes.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. A few months ago, we got an email
from a listener we're going to call Tracy. She grew
up in the South in the eighties. Her mom was
a free spirit.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
She is a wonderful hippie like woman. We would just
have goats running around. They would jump on the porch.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
But Tracy wasn't like her mom. She was always more
buttoned up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
When I was growing up, my mom would lay on
top of the roof to get some sun and she
would not have her clothes on. And when I was young,
I would be just so horrified by that. And my
mom would always say, Tracy, just loosen up, It's okay,
but I'm always like no.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When Tracy was fourteen, her mom met a new guy
and decided to move with him to Africa. She hadn't
fully worked out where Tracy would stay, but she had
some ideas.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
She said, you can move to New York with your grandma,
or you can move to California with your aunt. Or
you can move to Africa with me, or you can
move in with your dad. Whatever you decide now. I
wasantine at the time, and my dad I applaud this.
He stepped in and said, no, these are children. They
are not deciding which state and whom they live with.
(02:10):
They are coming to live with me.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
So she moved in with her dad and his new wife.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So very happy, wholesome childhood, except that my dad did
drink too much and occasionally that would cause a little problem.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Things at home could feel out of control, and at
times that made her feel really lonely. That was until
her stepmom invited her into a new community, her church.
The first time Tracy went for a Sunday service.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was just so warm and welcoming and something I'd
never experienced before.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
It was a big Southern Baptist church, one that loomed
large in their small town, and after a few Sundays there,
everyone knew her name.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That was something that I had been searching for because
my family is a very small unit and I didn't
grow up with cousins, So that just felt like the
place I wanted to be. I wasn't even related to
these people, but they felt like family just automatically.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
The church quickly became Tracy's second home. She started volunteering
and joined the youth group choir. Her dad didn't understand
the appeal, but Racy did. She saw it as a
way to break a cycle.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Seeing my dad struggle with alcoholism. I definitely felt like,
if I stay in church, I'm going to end up
serving the Lord with someone who doesn't struggle with alcoholism.
It felt very safe.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
By the time she was seventeen, Terracy was taking notes
during Sunday sermons.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I just was one of those teenagers that didn't get
into trouble because everything that was preached.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Baptist, and the person doing the preaching he.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Was funny, he was charismatic, he seemed to care about people.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
His name was Keith, or at least that's what we're
going to call him in this episode, and when she
was sitting in the pew on Sunday, Tracy looked up
to him.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I just remember feeling the energy that came from his
preaching and his dedication to serving the Lord. I really
admired that a.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Lot of other people admired Keith too. He'd built his
church into a huge community.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It wasn't like thirty people in our church. It wasn't
this little church where everybody has behive hair. We had
a thousand people in our church. It was principles, it
was the mayor, it was the police chief, very well
viewed citizens of our town.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
The church was popular, but it also had rules, strict ones,
and Terracy was a rule follower.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I am wearing skirts all the time. I don't even
wear pants. I don't listen to rock music. I don't
listen to any secular music. That's how deeply entrenched I was.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And the strictest rules were around dating.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It was very much praised. If you made it to
the altar and had never kissed, you don't live together,
you don't have premarital sex, you don't go to the
movie theaters.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Tercy's favorite part of the church was the youth group choir.
It was a group of nearly one hundred teenagers who
would travel all around the South to perform.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Our youth group would sing and then Keith would preach.
We would go to churches all around far and wide.
I mean we actually made tapes and like sold them.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
It wasn't a typical teenage experience. Instead of sneaking alcohol
with her friends, she joined the church's campaign against it.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Our county was a dry county and when there was
a vote to bring alcohol in, our church was one
of the biggest adversaries to that and made it very loud,
took out billboards, had preaching on the corners about the
evils of alcohol.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
The message resonated with Tracy. It was personal, but it
also felt like she was part of something bigger.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
For me, being from a small town, it felt like
a movement of positivity.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
After high school, Tracy enrolled in a college about an
hour away. She went for a teaching degree, but she
was still active in Keith's church. She went on weekend
trips to perform with her youth choir. After one of
those weekend.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Trips, when I returned back to my college dorm, it
was about two o'clock in the morning, and my answer
machine is flashing, so I put and it's Keith's voice,
and all he's doing is asking did I get home safely?
And could I please call him at his home to
(07:09):
let him know I got home safely.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Keith, the head passed her was like a celebrity. Even
though she dedicated so much time to his church, she'd
never talked to him directly. To talk to Keith one
on one, he needed an appointment, and now he was
calling her in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I really felt like that was super odd. That had
never happened before. Actually, I didn't even know if he
really even knew me. Of course he saw me, but
we never spoke.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But this was the leader of her church. So she
called him right back.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
I mean, this is now two thirty in the morning,
and gave him a call and he said, I just
really wanted to check on you to make sure you
got there safely, And then the conversation switched to, hey,
I was just wondering if you would ever consider going
out on a date with me.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Tracy felt a rush of emotion.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
When he asked me out. I just started crying. I
felt like it was all that I could ever wish for.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
In Keith's church, asking someone on a date signaled a
very serious intention, a holy intention, with marriage as the
end goal.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I felt immediately very complimented that someone who's serving the
Lord in such a way would even consider asking me out.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
This was someone who not only shared her values, but
preached them.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
He's always going to be serving people and caring for others.
He's never going to hurt people. I could have a
man that's never going to drink too much. He's never
going to cheat on me.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
It made her feel safe, but it was still so surprising.
Tracy had never thought of Keith romantically. He was thirty
five and she had just turned twenty. She didn't really
know much about him.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I didn't pay any attention to him other than being
the pastor that was energetic, charismatic. It never even crossed
my mind to think of him in that way.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
One thing she did know about him was that his
wife had recently walked out of their marriage. He was
open about this journey with his congregation.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
She left suddenly and moved in with a younger man
and left the kids.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Keith had three daughters that he was now parenting on
his own. The youngest was only a year old. It
was hard on him emotionally.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
He really preached a lot about his wife leading him
and how he stays up at night with the baby crying,
and you know, the girls cry for someone to be
in their lives.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
A lot of women in the church felt sorry for him.
He wanted a partner, so when he asked Tracy out
on a date, she knew what it meant. Keith had
chosen her.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I thought, what better opportunity would I have for a
man that could be good in my life? Like this
has got to be it. It's like being offered the best.
What else could there be? That's what it felt like
to me.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
They decided to meet for a picnic. On the date.
She expected Keith to be strict and chased no handholding,
absolutely no kissing. She'd been following those rules for the
last five years. But on the day of their date.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
We met and went to a scenic area that was alone,
and he actually pushed me down and kissed me.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Keith could see that Tracy was taken aback. He tried
to explain, Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
My goodness, I'm so sorry I did this. I was
just overcome because I just really care about you. It
felt like an impulse that couldn't be controlled. I felt elated.
I must be the person who really cares about in
order for him to cross that line, a line that
(11:18):
I so carefully for the past four years never crossed.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
After that, they spent hours sitting in Keith's car just chatting.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Because he had been my pastor for four years, him
talking and me listening was just a natural part of
our relationship, and he just told me how much he
cared for me. It just felt very safe and I
felt very special.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
It was the beginning of a relationship.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
From there, we continued to date in a secretive way
for about a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Tracy knew that if her parents found out about the relationship.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They would have burned the college down to keep me
from being with Keith. My mom and my dad, who
did not go to church with his wife, was very
much against it. In my mind, that would be the
most horrible thing that I could tell them would be
that I was dating a very conservative pastor. And for Keith,
(12:28):
part of the secrecy was because he wasn't ready to
talk to his girls about it yet, even though he
wanted to remain somewhat stable to them looking so that
really played a huge part in me feeling sorry for
him and trying to be what he needed to be.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
They were both willing to do whatever it took to
be together, even if it meant being discreet.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
We'd often drive an hour or two hours to meet,
like at a rest stop, or pick up some food
and eat at a scenic spot. Did that for a
long time.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
They fell hard for one another.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We definitely expressed great love for each other very early on,
and I was deeply, deeply, deeply committed.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
To him, even though it was against church rules. Their
relationship progressed physically.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
We did not cross all the boundaries, but we certainly
did cross a lot of them. He just told me
that the reason that he couldn't control his impulses with
me was because he already felt like I was his wife.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
She felt like she was breaking the rules, but Keith
was the one who made the rules.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
He knows God, and if God is telling him that,
I'm the person who am I to try to figure
that out when I don't know, Like I don't know
what God says, like he runs a church and I
can see God answering prayers for him every week at church.
How could I no better?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Keith had direct communication with God, and that came with
a lot of power.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
He wasn't God, but he was the closest thing in
our church to God. Meaning if he said it, it went,
If he thought it, it happened. If he wanted it,
it was going to be worked through by all the
people in the church to make it happen. There was
no questioning his authority. There was no checks and balances
(14:29):
in our church. We had deacons, but the deacons were
to do good to the widows and they just followed Keith.
If you did question him, you were quickly moved down
the church by others.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Two years into their relationship, Keith said he was ready
to make their commitment public.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That's when he sat down and talked to the deacons
about it.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Of course, the deacons approved that they started going out
together in public. She would join him and his children
for lunch after church on Sundays.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
When we went public, I was proud because it felt
like I was no longer a secret, and it felt
like he was taking a stand on our future together.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
One Saturday, Keith was determined to take Tracy to the
beach for a date.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Shortly after we got to the beach, you know, I
heard the plane and I could see that it was
dragging one of those signs behind it, saying Tracy, will
you marry me? Love Keith, And then he just pulled
out a ring and he said, will you marry me.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
It didn't actually feel like a question. It felt like
the decision had already been made.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
I felt immediately honored that I could be his wife
and we could do this movement together. And at the
same time I felt like, oh, no, is this exactly
what I think it is? But it had gone too far,
and he had already spoken to the deacons and it
(16:06):
was already public in the church. I just felt like,
who am I to question this? If he feels like
this is what has to happen and I love him
very much, then this is what we're going to do.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Before the proposal, Keith hadn't talked to Tracy's dad, so
when word got back to her father.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
My dad was very frustrated and he felt that there
was an imbalance of power and that Keith was taking
advantage of his daughter. So my dad had tried to
talk to him, but he would not.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Since Keith wouldn't meet with him. Tracy's dad decided to
go to Keith, and there was one place he knew
he'd be.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
My dad actually showed up at our church during one
of the services and he walked inside and he said, Keith,
we need to and I mean there's hundreds of people there,
and Keith said, what are you doing. You're interrupting the service.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Tercy's dad confronted Keith in the middle of his sermon
while hundreds of parishioners watched in confusion. It was a spectacle.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Immediately, the deacons surrounded my dad and rushed him out
of the church. Later, my dad told me, he said, Tracy,
I want you to know that that was difficult for me,
but it was the only way that I knew to
try to get his attention and try to let people
know how bad I think this is. He said, I
(17:38):
actually had a gun in my car and I locked
it in my car so I could not run back
and get it, because if I had my way, I
would have used it that day.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Tracy was determined to marry Keith. They set a date
for right after she graduated college, and despite her dad's
public outburst, he showed up for the wedding.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
My dad walked me down the aisle, and that was
one of the hardest things he's ever done, he said,
But in support of his daughter, regardless of who she
was marrying, he wanted to be there for me.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
The wedding was on a Sunday night, with hundreds of
people in attendance, from parishioners to family and friends.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Everything was always done over the top, and of course
our wedding would also be over the top. I mean
this was a big wedding, big, big wedding. I had
like eight bridesmaids, He had like eight groomsmen, and my
little brother was dressed just like Keith, little white tucks
and everything.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
While they were standing at the altar, Keith surprised her
with a personal rendition of a Johnny Mathis song.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Keith got the guitar from behind and surprised me singing
the twelfth of Never. I'll love you till the twelfth
of Never. And they actually cut a hole in the
ceiling of the church and dropped all these balloons down
on top of us when they announced that we were
husband and wife.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
After the honeymoon, Tracy moved into the house, Keith and
his daughters already lived in She got a job teaching
at a Christian school run by Keith's church.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
And by just dove right in. So our life seven
days a week revolved around church, whether it was visitation
or bus ministry or running to this church on a
Friday night so that the youth choir could sing. Everything
revolved around church, and that was our entire life.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
After the wedding, Keith's life didn't change that much. Tracy's
did because now she was the stepmother to Keith's three
young daughters.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I instantly loved the kids because I felt like they
were just being tossed about given the situation with their
mom not living with them. So I was happy to
take that on and I actually thought, I am okay
with not having children of my own. I'm just going
to raise.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
His Tracy also became the first lady of the church,
which had some upsides.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
You are his wife, You drive the best cars, you
live in the big house on the hill, You have
inner workings of what his life is, and you are
privy to all of it, and you should be very
very grateful that you're in it. And for the first
couple of years, that's exactly how it went. I had
a lovely time with his family.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
She even loved the little moments, the everyday tasks of parenting.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I would get the kids up for school and they
would travel with me. I taught at the same school
that they went to. Then after school, I would bring
them home. They would play and do and I would
cook dinner or make something for dinner, and then we'd
get ready for church. So it's just a very busy time.
But I felt like I was exactly where I needed to.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Be plause she was able to continue serving the community.
It felt like she had a larger purpose.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I really thrived in the position as a preacher's wife.
I enjoyed teaching in a Christian school. I enjoyed working
with people where I could go visit them and bring
them groceries and help them figure out how to do
their child care or whatever they needed. I was able
to help people and live for other people. That was
(21:49):
something that I really wanted.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Keith treated her like a prize. He gushed about their
happy marriage in his Sunday sermons.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I felt very much like he was as devoted to
me as I was him, and he would make that
very apparent. He would talk about me in his messages.
He would use humor about our relationship. He would always
brag on me being his wife.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
As time went on, Tercy started noticing some odd behavior
from Keith.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
We would pull up and get gas and somebody would
pump our gas and they would say, hey, what' chulp
and doing all day? And Keith would make up something
that we weren't even doing. Like it just I started
seeing that not telling the truth was something that came
very easily to him, and that surprised me over and over.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And behind the scenes, she was seeing how he ran
the church, and at times it was off putting. At first,
it was little things, the.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Very movies that he would talk against from the pulpit.
We would watch it home and he would say he
was studying it.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
She saw that Keith could be materialistic, so for.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Pastor appreciation Day he would be like, whatever you want,
But behind the scenes he was like, I want this
color car made of this model with this kind of seat,
and I want this kind of trim and it needs
to have XYZ on it. So I was constantly questioning
in my heart, how does this work? Because, as you know,
(23:28):
I wasn't raised in a church environment. He's the only
pastor I've ever had. It just was contradictory to what
I expected life to be with him.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Sometimes, there were other times where his actions really give
her pause.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
When a church member would call and say their child
was in a car wreck. Could he go to the
hospital to visit them and pray with them? He would
say he was busy, and he would hang up the
phone and he would save, Tracy, let's go jump in
the pool. And I would say, Keith, that church member
just asked if you could go see their son who
(24:04):
just was in a terrible car wreck. And he would say, Tracy,
I can't do everything everybody wants. I can't be on
twenty four to seven and here I am fifteen years
younger than him, going that doesn't make sense. But what
do I know?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Every time she had questions about Keith's behavior, this is
what she came back to. He knows more about how
to run the.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Church, and all was good. Until about nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Six, four years into their marriage, Tracy and Keith's life
was well established. They ran a few businesses through the church,
like a summer camp in a bookstore. It was at
that bookstore where Tracy began to notice another strange pattern
in Keith's behavior.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
It was a young lady that worked there who was
in high school. She was very friendly, very sweet, and
I enjoyed her company. However, if I walked in and
Keith was there, they would instantly move apart, like they
would be close together, like a foot apart from each other,
and then they would step away. And I remember that
(25:18):
catching my attention because that's exactly how he and I
did it when we were secretly meeting. So I just
started paying attention.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
She watched for a few weeks, and she saw Keith
behaving strangely every time he was in the same space
as the girl. Eventually, Racy decided to address it with him.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I talked to Keith about it, and I said, Keith,
if you feel an attraction to this girl, I want
you to remember that she is a young girl and
just move on, pray about it, and be done with it.
I was conditioned to believe that men cannot help their impulses,
(26:03):
and I just felt like I need to remind him
to check himself.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Tracy thought that conversation would be the end of it,
but Keith didn't react well.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
He would instantly put me in my place and say
I don't know what you're talking about. You're crazy. It
was a very direct, accusatory flip the script to how
dare you to where you're apologizing to him at the
end of it, like, oh, I'm so sorry, how could
I ever think that?
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And Keith made it clear he didn't take orders from Tracy.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I'm God's man. It's none of your business. God will
keep me in check, that was his answer.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Talking directly with the girl at the bookstore wasn't an
option because Tracy didn't have any proof. She only had
a gut feeling.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I ever said anything to her, of course, you know
it was I would never. I would never say anything
because I wasn't sure right, I was just seeing it.
Maybe I wasn't seeing it. So that's how the next
two years went.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
During that time, Tracy's got feeling grew into a certainty
something was going on.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I knew he had intraction for that young lady. I
could feel it. I could even feel when he dressed
differently because he was going to be around her. So
I would bring those fears or those thoughts to him
as rationally as I could and say, Keith, I know
(27:41):
you're going to see this young lady today, and he'd say,
how you know that? And I'd say, because you're doing
this this, You're wearing this cologne, or you put on
these clothes. I could tell the difference because I knew
him and I just watched him so for four years
before I even dated him. I observed him every week,
(28:01):
many times a week, and I knew his patterns. And then,
most disturbing of all, when we would have intimacy, there
was oftentimes that he would call me her name, and
she's sixteen seventeen and he's forty four.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The first time that happened, Tracy was horrified and embarrassed.
She felt sick to her stomach.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
When I realized that he actually had a true attraction
for someone that was so young, it was devastating to me.
It was such a contradiction between what was being preached
and what I saw happening. I actually considered just walking away,
(28:51):
walking into the woods, and just disappearing because I had
no power, I had no credit card. I thought everyone
would hate me and blame me. Yet I was just
completely powerless, and so the only way to get away
would be to just walk away and just disappear.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Leaving would mean abandoning everything she built, the kids, she'd
helped raise, the congregation she loved. The only way she'd
be able to walk away is if she had concrete
proof of Keith's actions.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
It had been very clear that things had gotten out
of control, but up until that point, no proof had
been put in front of me.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
She knew it would take a lot more than her
word to bring down God's right hand man. Tracy felt
so trapped that she considered taking her own life.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I felt so alone, so ostracized, and I was so
doubting my own understanding of exactly what I was seeing,
and unable to find help.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
To give herself a purpose, she became laser focused on
things she could control, like raising the kids and supporting
the congregation.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I just started throwing myself into what the good was
and trying to just ignore the other stuff. And I
felt literally crazy. And yet I needed to hold the
church together. I needed to not fall apart. I needed
to be acting like I was completely behind Keith and
saw nothing wrong. And that worked until Nathan came into
(30:39):
the picture. One of the deacons came up to me
and told me that he had been receiving letters from
someone who called himself Nathan.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
It was a pseudonym, one that anyone in the church
would recognize, and came from a Bible story about a
prophet named Nathan who was sent by God to confron
King David. King David had committed adultery and he was
using his power to hide it, so God sent Nathan
to confront the king. Whoever wrote this letter was sending
a clear message that even the most powerful leaders are
(31:14):
not above God's law.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
The person that sent these letters out was saying to Keith,
what would you do if someone's committing adultery in your church?
And then it said you are that person, and I
know you are.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I have proof in the Bible story. King David immediately
acknowledged his own actions and repented for his sins.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I feel like Nathan used that parable specifically to give
Keith the chance to correct and not make it public.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
This letter writer also had some leverage.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Then it said, unless you confess your sins and repent,
I'm going to release some tapes.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Letters had been sent to the church deacons and to
Keith himself, but after Keith read the letter, he threw
it away.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Well, Keith did not take that seriously. She didn't believe
that this person that called themselves Nathan really had anything.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Tracey saw her whole life on the brink of collapse.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
No, I'm thinking it's coming down. This is the hammer's falling,
is what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
And she believed Nathan, whoever he was, Nathan meant what
he said when he said, I will make it public
if you don't correct yourself. And so when Keith blew
off Nathan's demands.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Our phone had been tapped and the tapes were released.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Tracy and Keith's life was hanging in the balance when
someone in their church mailed out anonymous letters. The letter
writer called himself Nathan. He said he had evidence of
Keith committing adultery.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
The letter first came to Keith, and then the letters
were sent to the deacons to try to put their
King David in line, and nothing seemed to have been done,
And so then the tapes were released.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Whoever Nathan was, he had tapped Keith and Tracy's home phone.
He'd been recording the line and making tapes of Keith's
private conversations. The David tapes were sent out, Keith was
nowhere to be found.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
It happened all so quickly. At this point, Keith is
now somewhere in the woods praying, like he's gone to
a quiet place to go pray.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
But Racy was in the eye of the storm. She
found out about the tapes when a member of their congregation,
a friend of hers, came speeding into the church parking lot.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And he's like, Tracy, I need to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
His wife, Michelle, was also a friend of theirs and
a member of the congregation.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Michelle was actually around my age. She would hang around.
We all hung around each other. We'd play volleyball after
church all Wednesday nights, and you know, it was just
all fun and games.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Tercy had noticed something funny about her husband, Keith and Michelle.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
He and this woman would back away from each other,
and then I started noticing that they would wear the
same colors, like on Sunday mornings.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Now, Michelle's husband was in front of her with a
cassette tape in his hand. He had received a tape
at his office. It was from Nathan.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He opened it up, you know, he was like, what
is this. Let me you know. There was no markings
on it whatsoever. Nothing, It said nothing, and he just
popped it into the recorder. He's horrified because he's literally
hearing his wife on these tapes and Keith in very
intimate situations, and so he turned it off real quick,
and that is when he came to find me and
(35:23):
he told me what was on the tape.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
The tapes exposed that Keith and Michelle had a secret routine,
one that they kept from their spouses for months.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
It would happen as soon as I would leave to
go to work in the morning. I would take the
girls to school and I would go to my class
to teach, and Keith and Michelle would get on the
phone and that's when they would do. This is when
the kids were in school and the spouses where at work.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
The tapes were recordings of Keith and Michelle having phone sex.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
On this tape was many many weeks of spliced discussions
between Keith and Michelle.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Michelle's husband was horrified at what he'd heard.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
He's crying, he's embarrassed. It's very clear that he's as
shocked about it as I am.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
He wanted to listen to the tapes together with Tracy.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I just refused. I said, I'm not interested in listening
to it. I don't need to hear it, but I
do want to talk to you about what was going
to happen from there.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Before they confronted their spouses, Michelle's husband wanted to investigate
for himself. He needed to know how far this affair went,
and it didn't take long for him to find an answer.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
He personally had seen the ledgers of teeth signature signing
in to hotels.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
This proved Keith's affair went far beyond phone conversations. It
was life altering for Tracy and also from Michelle's husband,
but it had huge implications for the church.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I just could not bear it. I mean, we had
the most beloved congregation of people that I knew this
was gonna absolutely devastate.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
It was time to feace the music. But as word
began spreading through the community Keith was missing.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It became a very real fact to everyone that Keith
was cheating on me and it was someone that was
within the church. It was just full like a firestorm
across our town.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Everyone was shocked to find out that Keith was living
a double life, everyone except Tracy's dad. He still lived
in town for years. He'd been waiting for the other
shoe to drop.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
My dad owns the pool hall across the street from
the church, so he literally has a front row seat
to the chaos that is instill.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Tracy's dad decided to make the most of Keith's public humiliation.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
My dad bought five hundred bumper stickers that he had
printed up that said in bright bold letters, I am
Nathan and proud of it, and he handed him out
to the patrons of his business and his friends.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Tracy's dad wasn't Nathan. He was just thrilled someone was
exposing Keith. But for Tracy, the public humiliation was more
complicated because the night she found out about the tapes, I.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Get a call from the young lady.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
It was the girl who used to work in the bookstore.
She was now in her early twenties, but she was
calling Tracy because she just heard the news about Keith
and Michelle's affair.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
She is as hurt as I am because she thought
she was the only one and now she realizes that
he has done this with another woman.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
This phone call validated Tracy's suspicions from years before. Even
though Keith had vehemently denied it, the truth was coming out.
He had been romantically involved with this girl back when
she was a teenager.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
She read to me the poetry that Keith had written
to her, and she validated everything. She said, Yes, we
did this, we did that. He wrote me this, and
she was telling me because she was so hurt that
he had done this with Michelle, which is so ironic
(39:41):
that I am the wife. They all did it too.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Terracy could finally put together a timeline. After this girl
graduated high school and went off to college, Keith picked
up with Michelle. He spun a complicated web of betrayals,
one that damaged and devastated many people, and he left
Tracy to pick up the pieces.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
She was coming to me from a place of deep hurt,
saying that she should have told me, you know, two
years prior. I really couldn't console her at that point.
I was so shocked that I don't remember what I
said to her, but I did end up throwing the
phone across the room. Since then, I have reached out
to her to tell her that she was a young
(40:26):
lady that was also manipulated, and I've tried to help
her realize that I have no hurt toward her at all.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
After the tapes were set out, the girl told her
parents about how Keith pursued her, and they went to
the police.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
The young ladies parents learned of the affair between her
and Keith, and they brought a lawsuit against him, but
turned out that the age of consent in that state
she had just reached that age, so the lawsuit could
not go any further.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
When Keith came back from his time praying in the woods,
he resumed his position as head of the church.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
The church still let Keith preach every Sunday. And the
reason they did that was because a manipulator, when they're caught,
they don't just come clean. They blame everyone else and
they say that it's been twisted and turned and they
continue to manipulate. And that's exactly what happened. These people
(41:25):
did not want to believe that Keith was doing this,
even though they were faced with it.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Many people in town had the motivation to do what
Nathan did, especially the teenage girl and her parents, but
they weren't behind the Nathan letters. So it left a
question hanging over the whole congregation. Who was Nathan.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
At the time, I had no idea. There was a
lot of speculation of who it could be, and a
lot of blaming, like this person's probably doing it. In fact,
Keith was trying to bring a lawsuit against whoever Nathan
was for tapping his phone lines because it would be
illegal to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Instead of sitting through Keith's first sermon back at the pulpit,
Tracy got a one way ticket to California.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
I felt so much shock and hurt that I didn't
stick around for the fallout of it.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I flew to.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
San Diego and I was on the other side of
the country with my head in the sand, just trying
to breathe.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Back at church, Keith had started preaching a lesson in
forgiveness about how Tracy needed to forgive him.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
During that time, Keith actually announced my phone number from
the pulpit and told everyone to give me a call
and just begged me to come back. It was the
most bizarre and ridiculous thing ever. Hundreds of phone calls,
just over and over, just people saying we love you, Tracy,
We're praying for you. Other people would say, how dare
(43:00):
you do this to God's man? How can you betray him?
You need to get back over there and fight the
good fight. Just on and on and finally the pressure
was so much that I decided, for his kid's sake
and for those people that were hurting, that I could
give him another chance. So after about four months, I
(43:25):
ended up going back to Keith. Not because I felt
like it was necessarily the best thing for me, but
I felt like it was the best thing for the
church and the people, and I was their preacher's wife,
and I felt like I needed to heal all the
hurt that had happened through this.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Keith also promised Tracy's something she really wanted if she
came back.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
If you remember, I had agreed that I would raise
his children and not have any of my own. But
as I grew through the decade, I started wanting children.
But I just kept pushing it back, saying, you know
it's okay, I'll just rap you know. I'll raise his
I love them well. When I left him, that was
one of his buying points is we can have a
(44:13):
child of our own if you come back.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So she went back, but this time Tracy drew a
firm boundary.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
I told Keith, I am back. However, if you ever
do this to me again, you will have zero access
to me and I will not look back.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
And so She went on optimistic that Keith would change,
but six months later.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Some people came up to me and said, Keith is
having another affair. I said, put proof in my hands
and I will leave him and that will be it.
And I ended up getting proof put in my hands
that he was doing marriage counseling with a woman and
her husband. He ended up having an affair with her,
(45:03):
and that night I drove out of town and on
Valentine's Day two thousand, I joined the military. I walked
into her recruitment office and I said, can I take
the ASPAB right now?
Speaker 1 (45:18):
That's the entrance exam for the military.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
They were like, who are you? And yes, yes, come
sit down, and I took it. And because I'd been
a school teacher for middle school math at that point,
I aced it.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
She was sent to basic training.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Straight from being a school teacher and a preacher's wife
to putting my head in the defel bag and low
crawling to go get my food. I joined the military
because that was the only way to break away. It
was the only way that I knew how to get
away from Keith, and to do it in a way
where I was financially independent. Because being a good preacher's wife.
(45:57):
I didn't save a rainy day fund because that means
you're halfway out.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
After basic training, Tracy was offered a position as an officer,
but she wanted something more short term.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Because I was thirty one. I said, you know what,
I don't want to do any of that. I just
want a short term enlistment period because I know that
I want to have a family one day. So I
just joined for three years and I spent my whole
time in Kaiserslater in Germany at Lonstore Regional Medical Center.
It's actually an air ambulance to thirty six Air Ambulance,
(46:36):
and I had a ball and totally restarted my life.
Met a wonderful man there and we have a son together.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Today, Tracy works as a bogue captain in a small
southern town where she lives with her son. It's been
twenty five years since the Nathan tapes were sent out
and Keith's betrayals were exposed. But what remains a mystery
is Nathan's true true identity.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
No one has ever stepped up and said that they
are Nathan. Now, I feel like I have a very
good idea and other people we've talked about it, and
we feel like it could be this person. So I
feel ninety nine percent sure that I know who it was.
At the end of the day, Tracy's never needed to know.
(47:22):
It doesn't matter to her who Nathan really was. She's
just grateful to him for breaking the silence. It wasn't
just me, it's all of these people that went through
this and have never been told the truth. And I
did not stand up and tell the truth for several
reasons because I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't
want to expose things. And I've been I would say, brainwash,
(47:46):
manipulated into thinking that I am partaking in part of
the guilt and the shame if I do speak now,
it's been twenty four years and I can speak.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
After Teresa left for the final time, Keith kept right
on preaching. She got worried about how he addressed it
with the congregation.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
He did not address anything. He did not say what
had happened, He did not explain anything. He didn't say
why I left. All he said was, don't believe everything
you're going to hear. I've heard from other people that
he said directly that, oh, Tracy left because she wanted
a baby, and we couldn't have one.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Keith is still preaching to this day.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
He's built a new building, he has a new congregation,
He's remarried. They know nothing about me or all that
has happened. The lawsuit, the three women finding his name
on a hotel roster, the tapes that were sent out
of him having phone sex. They know nothing about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
And Tracy hasn't been back to church since.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
For me, going into a church and sitting I can
see what could be happening in the background, and that's
really distracting to me. I wish I had that innocence
again of just walking in, but I don't have that anymore.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why do you want to share your story?
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I've actually thought about it for a very long time.
How to ever tell the truth and the story that
I have because I felt like it needed to be told.
I always felt manipulated and guilty to stay quiet. Even
now there's a lot of pressure to do that. But
I understand that the pathway to peace and understanding is
(49:43):
by claiming your experiences and dealing with them. It turned
my life upside down, but you move forward and I've
definitely learned that I'm stronger than I thought I could be,
and I believe the truth sets us free. I decided
to tell.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Us on the next episode of Betrayal Weekly.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
If this could be true about my brother, and I
could have no idea how on earth would I ever
know who the monsters.
Speaker 4 (50:19):
Were before we end the episode. I have some exciting
news Betrayal. We'll be doing our first ever live show
as part of the Virgin Voyages True Crime Cruise. We'll
be answering listener questions and discussing them live on stage
(50:40):
with Stacy and Tyler from Betrayal season three, as well
as Caroline from season four. So if you have a
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.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Dot com slash true crime. 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, or
follow us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod You can also
connect with me on Instagram at It's Andrea Gunning. To
(51:23):
access our newsletter, view additional content, and connect with the
Betrayal community, join our 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
(51:43):
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 Fasin,
hosted and produced by Me Andrea Gunning, written and produced
by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman.
Speaker 5 (52:02):
Associate producers are Caitlin Golden, Olivia Hewitt, and Kristin Melcury.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Casting support from Curry Richmond. Our iHeart team is Ali
Perry and Jessica Krincheck.
Speaker 5 (52:14):
Audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio. Additional audio
editing by Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains.
Music library provided by mybe Music.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
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 (00:20):
The person that sent these letters out was saying, I
have proof. Unless you confess your sins and repent, then
I'm going to release some tapes.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. A few months ago, we got an email
from a listener we're going to call Tracy. She grew
up in the South in the eighties. Her mom was
a free spirit.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
She is a wonderful hippie like woman. We would just
have goats running around. They would jump on the porch.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
But Tracy wasn't like her mom. She was always more
buttoned up.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
When I was growing up, my mom would lay on
top of the roof to get some sun and she
would not have her clothes on. And when I was young,
I would be just so horrified by that. And my
mom would always say, Tracy, just loosen up, It's okay,
but I'm always like no.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When Tracy was fourteen, her mom met a new guy
and decided to move with him to Africa. She hadn't
fully worked out where Tracy would stay, but she had
some ideas.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
She said, you can move to New York with your grandma,
or you can move to California with your aunt. Or
you can move to Africa with me, or you can
move in with your dad. Whatever you decide now. I
wasantine at the time, and my dad I applaud this.
He stepped in and said, no, these are children. They
are not deciding which state and whom they live with.
(02:10):
They are coming to live with me.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
So she moved in with her dad and his new wife.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So very happy, wholesome childhood, except that my dad did
drink too much and occasionally that would cause a little problem.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Things at home could feel out of control, and at
times that made her feel really lonely. That was until
her stepmom invited her into a new community, her church.
The first time Tracy went for a Sunday service.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was just so warm and welcoming and something I'd
never experienced before.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
It was a big Southern Baptist church, one that loomed
large in their small town, and after a few Sundays there,
everyone knew her name.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That was something that I had been searching for because
my family is a very small unit and I didn't
grow up with cousins, So that just felt like the
place I wanted to be. I wasn't even related to
these people, but they felt like family just automatically.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
The church quickly became Tracy's second home. She started volunteering
and joined the youth group choir. Her dad didn't understand
the appeal, but Racy did. She saw it as a
way to break a cycle.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Seeing my dad struggle with alcoholism. I definitely felt like,
if I stay in church, I'm going to end up
serving the Lord with someone who doesn't struggle with alcoholism.
It felt very safe.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
By the time she was seventeen, Terracy was taking notes
during Sunday sermons.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I just was one of those teenagers that didn't get
into trouble because everything that was preached.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Baptist, and the person doing the preaching he.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Was funny, he was charismatic, he seemed to care about people.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
His name was Keith, or at least that's what we're
going to call him in this episode, and when she
was sitting in the pew on Sunday, Tracy looked up
to him.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I just remember feeling the energy that came from his
preaching and his dedication to serving the Lord. I really
admired that a.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Lot of other people admired Keith too. He'd built his
church into a huge community.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It wasn't like thirty people in our church. It wasn't
this little church where everybody has behive hair. We had
a thousand people in our church. It was principles, it
was the mayor, it was the police chief, very well
viewed citizens of our town.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
The church was popular, but it also had rules, strict ones,
and Terracy was a rule follower.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I am wearing skirts all the time. I don't even
wear pants. I don't listen to rock music. I don't
listen to any secular music. That's how deeply entrenched I was.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And the strictest rules were around dating.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
It was very much praised. If you made it to
the altar and had never kissed, you don't live together,
you don't have premarital sex, you don't go to the
movie theaters.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Tercy's favorite part of the church was the youth group choir.
It was a group of nearly one hundred teenagers who
would travel all around the South to perform.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Our youth group would sing and then Keith would preach.
We would go to churches all around far and wide.
I mean we actually made tapes and like sold them.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
It wasn't a typical teenage experience. Instead of sneaking alcohol
with her friends, she joined the church's campaign against it.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Our county was a dry county and when there was
a vote to bring alcohol in, our church was one
of the biggest adversaries to that and made it very loud,
took out billboards, had preaching on the corners about the
evils of alcohol.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
The message resonated with Tracy. It was personal, but it
also felt like she was part of something bigger.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
For me, being from a small town, it felt like
a movement of positivity.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
After high school, Tracy enrolled in a college about an
hour away. She went for a teaching degree, but she
was still active in Keith's church. She went on weekend
trips to perform with her youth choir. After one of
those weekend.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Trips, when I returned back to my college dorm, it
was about two o'clock in the morning, and my answer
machine is flashing, so I put and it's Keith's voice,
and all he's doing is asking did I get home safely?
And could I please call him at his home to
(07:09):
let him know I got home safely.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Keith, the head passed her was like a celebrity. Even
though she dedicated so much time to his church, she'd
never talked to him directly. To talk to Keith one
on one, he needed an appointment, and now he was
calling her in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I really felt like that was super odd. That had
never happened before. Actually, I didn't even know if he
really even knew me. Of course he saw me, but
we never spoke.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But this was the leader of her church. So she
called him right back.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
I mean, this is now two thirty in the morning,
and gave him a call and he said, I just
really wanted to check on you to make sure you
got there safely, And then the conversation switched to, hey,
I was just wondering if you would ever consider going
out on a date with me.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Tracy felt a rush of emotion.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
When he asked me out. I just started crying. I
felt like it was all that I could ever wish for.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
In Keith's church, asking someone on a date signaled a
very serious intention, a holy intention, with marriage as the
end goal.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I felt immediately very complimented that someone who's serving the
Lord in such a way would even consider asking me out.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
This was someone who not only shared her values, but
preached them.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
He's always going to be serving people and caring for others.
He's never going to hurt people. I could have a
man that's never going to drink too much. He's never
going to cheat on me.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
It made her feel safe, but it was still so surprising.
Tracy had never thought of Keith romantically. He was thirty
five and she had just turned twenty. She didn't really
know much about him.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I didn't pay any attention to him other than being
the pastor that was energetic, charismatic. It never even crossed
my mind to think of him in that way.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
One thing she did know about him was that his
wife had recently walked out of their marriage. He was
open about this journey with his congregation.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
She left suddenly and moved in with a younger man
and left the kids.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Keith had three daughters that he was now parenting on
his own. The youngest was only a year old. It
was hard on him emotionally.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
He really preached a lot about his wife leading him
and how he stays up at night with the baby crying,
and you know, the girls cry for someone to be
in their lives.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
A lot of women in the church felt sorry for him.
He wanted a partner, so when he asked Tracy out
on a date, she knew what it meant. Keith had
chosen her.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I thought, what better opportunity would I have for a
man that could be good in my life? Like this
has got to be it. It's like being offered the best.
What else could there be? That's what it felt like
to me.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
They decided to meet for a picnic. On the date.
She expected Keith to be strict and chased no handholding,
absolutely no kissing. She'd been following those rules for the
last five years. But on the day of their date.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
We met and went to a scenic area that was alone,
and he actually pushed me down and kissed me.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Keith could see that Tracy was taken aback. He tried
to explain, Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
My goodness, I'm so sorry I did this. I was
just overcome because I just really care about you. It
felt like an impulse that couldn't be controlled. I felt elated.
I must be the person who really cares about in
order for him to cross that line, a line that
(11:18):
I so carefully for the past four years never crossed.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
After that, they spent hours sitting in Keith's car just chatting.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Because he had been my pastor for four years, him
talking and me listening was just a natural part of
our relationship, and he just told me how much he
cared for me. It just felt very safe and I
felt very special.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
It was the beginning of a relationship.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
From there, we continued to date in a secretive way
for about a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Tracy knew that if her parents found out about the relationship.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
They would have burned the college down to keep me
from being with Keith. My mom and my dad, who
did not go to church with his wife, was very
much against it. In my mind, that would be the
most horrible thing that I could tell them would be
that I was dating a very conservative pastor. And for Keith,
(12:28):
part of the secrecy was because he wasn't ready to
talk to his girls about it yet, even though he
wanted to remain somewhat stable to them looking so that
really played a huge part in me feeling sorry for
him and trying to be what he needed to be.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
They were both willing to do whatever it took to
be together, even if it meant being discreet.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
We'd often drive an hour or two hours to meet,
like at a rest stop, or pick up some food
and eat at a scenic spot. Did that for a
long time.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
They fell hard for one another.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We definitely expressed great love for each other very early on,
and I was deeply, deeply, deeply committed.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
To him, even though it was against church rules. Their
relationship progressed physically.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
We did not cross all the boundaries, but we certainly
did cross a lot of them. He just told me
that the reason that he couldn't control his impulses with
me was because he already felt like I was his wife.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
She felt like she was breaking the rules, but Keith
was the one who made the rules.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
He knows God, and if God is telling him that,
I'm the person who am I to try to figure
that out when I don't know, Like I don't know
what God says, like he runs a church and I
can see God answering prayers for him every week at church.
How could I no better?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Keith had direct communication with God, and that came with
a lot of power.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
He wasn't God, but he was the closest thing in
our church to God. Meaning if he said it, it went,
If he thought it, it happened. If he wanted it,
it was going to be worked through by all the
people in the church to make it happen. There was
no questioning his authority. There was no checks and balances
(14:29):
in our church. We had deacons, but the deacons were
to do good to the widows and they just followed Keith.
If you did question him, you were quickly moved down
the church by others.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Two years into their relationship, Keith said he was ready
to make their commitment public.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
That's when he sat down and talked to the deacons
about it.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Of course, the deacons approved that they started going out
together in public. She would join him and his children
for lunch after church on Sundays.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
When we went public, I was proud because it felt
like I was no longer a secret, and it felt
like he was taking a stand on our future together.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
One Saturday, Keith was determined to take Tracy to the
beach for a date.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Shortly after we got to the beach, you know, I
heard the plane and I could see that it was
dragging one of those signs behind it, saying Tracy, will
you marry me? Love Keith, And then he just pulled
out a ring and he said, will you marry me.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
It didn't actually feel like a question. It felt like
the decision had already been made.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
I felt immediately honored that I could be his wife
and we could do this movement together. And at the
same time I felt like, oh, no, is this exactly
what I think it is? But it had gone too far,
and he had already spoken to the deacons and it
(16:06):
was already public in the church. I just felt like,
who am I to question this? If he feels like
this is what has to happen and I love him
very much, then this is what we're going to do.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Before the proposal, Keith hadn't talked to Tracy's dad, so
when word got back to her father.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
My dad was very frustrated and he felt that there
was an imbalance of power and that Keith was taking
advantage of his daughter. So my dad had tried to
talk to him, but he would not.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Since Keith wouldn't meet with him. Tracy's dad decided to
go to Keith, and there was one place he knew
he'd be.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
My dad actually showed up at our church during one
of the services and he walked inside and he said, Keith,
we need to and I mean there's hundreds of people there,
and Keith said, what are you doing. You're interrupting the service.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Tercy's dad confronted Keith in the middle of his sermon
while hundreds of parishioners watched in confusion. It was a spectacle.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Immediately, the deacons surrounded my dad and rushed him out
of the church. Later, my dad told me, he said, Tracy,
I want you to know that that was difficult for me,
but it was the only way that I knew to
try to get his attention and try to let people
know how bad I think this is. He said, I
(17:38):
actually had a gun in my car and I locked
it in my car so I could not run back
and get it, because if I had my way, I
would have used it that day.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Tracy was determined to marry Keith. They set a date
for right after she graduated college, and despite her dad's
public outburst, he showed up for the wedding.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
My dad walked me down the aisle, and that was
one of the hardest things he's ever done, he said,
But in support of his daughter, regardless of who she
was marrying, he wanted to be there for me.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
The wedding was on a Sunday night, with hundreds of
people in attendance, from parishioners to family and friends.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Everything was always done over the top, and of course
our wedding would also be over the top. I mean
this was a big wedding, big, big wedding. I had
like eight bridesmaids, He had like eight groomsmen, and my
little brother was dressed just like Keith, little white tucks
and everything.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
While they were standing at the altar, Keith surprised her
with a personal rendition of a Johnny Mathis song.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Keith got the guitar from behind and surprised me singing
the twelfth of Never. I'll love you till the twelfth
of Never. And they actually cut a hole in the
ceiling of the church and dropped all these balloons down
on top of us when they announced that we were
husband and wife.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
After the honeymoon, Tracy moved into the house, Keith and
his daughters already lived in She got a job teaching
at a Christian school run by Keith's church.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
And by just dove right in. So our life seven
days a week revolved around church, whether it was visitation
or bus ministry or running to this church on a
Friday night so that the youth choir could sing. Everything
revolved around church, and that was our entire life.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
After the wedding, Keith's life didn't change that much. Tracy's
did because now she was the stepmother to Keith's three
young daughters.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
I instantly loved the kids because I felt like they
were just being tossed about given the situation with their
mom not living with them. So I was happy to
take that on and I actually thought, I am okay
with not having children of my own. I'm just going
to raise.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
His Tracy also became the first lady of the church,
which had some upsides.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
You are his wife, You drive the best cars, you
live in the big house on the hill, You have
inner workings of what his life is, and you are
privy to all of it, and you should be very
very grateful that you're in it. And for the first
couple of years, that's exactly how it went. I had
a lovely time with his family.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
She even loved the little moments, the everyday tasks of parenting.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I would get the kids up for school and they
would travel with me. I taught at the same school
that they went to. Then after school, I would bring
them home. They would play and do and I would
cook dinner or make something for dinner, and then we'd
get ready for church. So it's just a very busy time.
But I felt like I was exactly where I needed to.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Be plause she was able to continue serving the community.
It felt like she had a larger purpose.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I really thrived in the position as a preacher's wife.
I enjoyed teaching in a Christian school. I enjoyed working
with people where I could go visit them and bring
them groceries and help them figure out how to do
their child care or whatever they needed. I was able
to help people and live for other people. That was
(21:49):
something that I really wanted.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Keith treated her like a prize. He gushed about their
happy marriage in his Sunday sermons.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I felt very much like he was as devoted to
me as I was him, and he would make that
very apparent. He would talk about me in his messages.
He would use humor about our relationship. He would always
brag on me being his wife.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
As time went on, Tercy started noticing some odd behavior
from Keith.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
We would pull up and get gas and somebody would
pump our gas and they would say, hey, what' chulp
and doing all day? And Keith would make up something
that we weren't even doing. Like it just I started
seeing that not telling the truth was something that came
very easily to him, and that surprised me over and over.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And behind the scenes, she was seeing how he ran
the church, and at times it was off putting. At first,
it was little things, the.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Very movies that he would talk against from the pulpit.
We would watch it home and he would say he
was studying it.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
She saw that Keith could be materialistic, so for.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Pastor appreciation Day he would be like, whatever you want,
But behind the scenes he was like, I want this
color car made of this model with this kind of seat,
and I want this kind of trim and it needs
to have XYZ on it. So I was constantly questioning
in my heart, how does this work? Because, as you know,
(23:28):
I wasn't raised in a church environment. He's the only
pastor I've ever had. It just was contradictory to what
I expected life to be with him.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Sometimes, there were other times where his actions really give
her pause.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
When a church member would call and say their child
was in a car wreck. Could he go to the
hospital to visit them and pray with them? He would
say he was busy, and he would hang up the
phone and he would save, Tracy, let's go jump in
the pool. And I would say, Keith, that church member
just asked if you could go see their son who
(24:04):
just was in a terrible car wreck. And he would say, Tracy,
I can't do everything everybody wants. I can't be on
twenty four to seven and here I am fifteen years
younger than him, going that doesn't make sense. But what
do I know?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Every time she had questions about Keith's behavior, this is
what she came back to. He knows more about how
to run the.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Church, and all was good. Until about nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Six, four years into their marriage, Tracy and Keith's life
was well established. They ran a few businesses through the church,
like a summer camp in a bookstore. It was at
that bookstore where Tracy began to notice another strange pattern
in Keith's behavior.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
It was a young lady that worked there who was
in high school. She was very friendly, very sweet, and
I enjoyed her company. However, if I walked in and
Keith was there, they would instantly move apart, like they
would be close together, like a foot apart from each other,
and then they would step away. And I remember that
(25:18):
catching my attention because that's exactly how he and I
did it when we were secretly meeting. So I just
started paying attention.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
She watched for a few weeks, and she saw Keith
behaving strangely every time he was in the same space
as the girl. Eventually, Racy decided to address it with him.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I talked to Keith about it, and I said, Keith,
if you feel an attraction to this girl, I want
you to remember that she is a young girl and
just move on, pray about it, and be done with it.
I was conditioned to believe that men cannot help their impulses,
(26:03):
and I just felt like I need to remind him
to check himself.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Tracy thought that conversation would be the end of it,
but Keith didn't react well.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
He would instantly put me in my place and say
I don't know what you're talking about. You're crazy. It
was a very direct, accusatory flip the script to how
dare you to where you're apologizing to him at the
end of it, like, oh, I'm so sorry, how could
I ever think that?
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And Keith made it clear he didn't take orders from Tracy.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I'm God's man. It's none of your business. God will
keep me in check, that was his answer.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Talking directly with the girl at the bookstore wasn't an
option because Tracy didn't have any proof. She only had
a gut feeling.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I ever said anything to her, of course, you know
it was I would never. I would never say anything
because I wasn't sure right, I was just seeing it.
Maybe I wasn't seeing it. So that's how the next
two years went.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
During that time, Tracy's got feeling grew into a certainty
something was going on.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I knew he had intraction for that young lady. I
could feel it. I could even feel when he dressed
differently because he was going to be around her. So
I would bring those fears or those thoughts to him
as rationally as I could and say, Keith, I know
(27:41):
you're going to see this young lady today, and he'd say,
how you know that? And I'd say, because you're doing
this this, You're wearing this cologne, or you put on
these clothes. I could tell the difference because I knew
him and I just watched him so for four years
before I even dated him. I observed him every week,
(28:01):
many times a week, and I knew his patterns. And then,
most disturbing of all, when we would have intimacy, there
was oftentimes that he would call me her name, and
she's sixteen seventeen and he's forty four.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
The first time that happened, Tracy was horrified and embarrassed.
She felt sick to her stomach.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
When I realized that he actually had a true attraction
for someone that was so young, it was devastating to me.
It was such a contradiction between what was being preached
and what I saw happening. I actually considered just walking away,
(28:51):
walking into the woods, and just disappearing because I had
no power, I had no credit card. I thought everyone
would hate me and blame me. Yet I was just
completely powerless, and so the only way to get away
would be to just walk away and just disappear.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Leaving would mean abandoning everything she built, the kids, she'd
helped raise, the congregation she loved. The only way she'd
be able to walk away is if she had concrete
proof of Keith's actions.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
It had been very clear that things had gotten out
of control, but up until that point, no proof had
been put in front of me.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
She knew it would take a lot more than her
word to bring down God's right hand man. Tracy felt
so trapped that she considered taking her own life.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I felt so alone, so ostracized, and I was so
doubting my own understanding of exactly what I was seeing,
and unable to find help.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
To give herself a purpose, she became laser focused on
things she could control, like raising the kids and supporting
the congregation.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I just started throwing myself into what the good was
and trying to just ignore the other stuff. And I
felt literally crazy. And yet I needed to hold the
church together. I needed to not fall apart. I needed
to be acting like I was completely behind Keith and
saw nothing wrong. And that worked until Nathan came into
(30:39):
the picture. One of the deacons came up to me
and told me that he had been receiving letters from
someone who called himself Nathan.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
It was a pseudonym, one that anyone in the church
would recognize, and came from a Bible story about a
prophet named Nathan who was sent by God to confron
King David. King David had committed adultery and he was
using his power to hide it, so God sent Nathan
to confront the king. Whoever wrote this letter was sending
a clear message that even the most powerful leaders are
(31:14):
not above God's law.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
The person that sent these letters out was saying to Keith,
what would you do if someone's committing adultery in your church?
And then it said you are that person, and I
know you are.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I have proof in the Bible story. King David immediately
acknowledged his own actions and repented for his sins.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I feel like Nathan used that parable specifically to give
Keith the chance to correct and not make it public.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
This letter writer also had some leverage.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Then it said, unless you confess your sins and repent,
I'm going to release some tapes.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Letters had been sent to the church deacons and to
Keith himself, but after Keith read the letter, he threw
it away.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Well, Keith did not take that seriously. She didn't believe
that this person that called themselves Nathan really had anything.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Tracey saw her whole life on the brink of collapse.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
No, I'm thinking it's coming down. This is the hammer's falling,
is what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
And she believed Nathan, whoever he was, Nathan meant what
he said when he said, I will make it public
if you don't correct yourself. And so when Keith blew
off Nathan's demands.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Our phone had been tapped and the tapes were released.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Tracy and Keith's life was hanging in the balance when
someone in their church mailed out anonymous letters. The letter
writer called himself Nathan. He said he had evidence of
Keith committing adultery.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
The letter first came to Keith, and then the letters
were sent to the deacons to try to put their
King David in line, and nothing seemed to have been done,
And so then the tapes were released.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Whoever Nathan was, he had tapped Keith and Tracy's home phone.
He'd been recording the line and making tapes of Keith's
private conversations. The David tapes were sent out, Keith was
nowhere to be found.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
It happened all so quickly. At this point, Keith is
now somewhere in the woods praying, like he's gone to
a quiet place to go pray.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
But Racy was in the eye of the storm. She
found out about the tapes when a member of their congregation,
a friend of hers, came speeding into the church parking lot.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
And he's like, Tracy, I need to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
His wife, Michelle, was also a friend of theirs and
a member of the congregation.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Michelle was actually around my age. She would hang around.
We all hung around each other. We'd play volleyball after
church all Wednesday nights, and you know, it was just
all fun and games.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Tercy had noticed something funny about her husband, Keith and Michelle.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
He and this woman would back away from each other,
and then I started noticing that they would wear the
same colors, like on Sunday mornings.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Now, Michelle's husband was in front of her with a
cassette tape in his hand. He had received a tape
at his office. It was from Nathan.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He opened it up, you know, he was like, what
is this. Let me you know. There was no markings
on it whatsoever. Nothing, It said nothing, and he just
popped it into the recorder. He's horrified because he's literally
hearing his wife on these tapes and Keith in very
intimate situations, and so he turned it off real quick,
and that is when he came to find me and
(35:23):
he told me what was on the tape.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
The tapes exposed that Keith and Michelle had a secret routine,
one that they kept from their spouses for months.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
It would happen as soon as I would leave to
go to work in the morning. I would take the
girls to school and I would go to my class
to teach, and Keith and Michelle would get on the
phone and that's when they would do. This is when
the kids were in school and the spouses where at work.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
The tapes were recordings of Keith and Michelle having phone sex.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
On this tape was many many weeks of spliced discussions
between Keith and Michelle.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Michelle's husband was horrified at what he'd heard.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
He's crying, he's embarrassed. It's very clear that he's as
shocked about it as I am.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
He wanted to listen to the tapes together with Tracy.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I just refused. I said, I'm not interested in listening
to it. I don't need to hear it, but I
do want to talk to you about what was going
to happen from there.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Before they confronted their spouses, Michelle's husband wanted to investigate
for himself. He needed to know how far this affair went,
and it didn't take long for him to find an answer.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
He personally had seen the ledgers of teeth signature signing
in to hotels.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
This proved Keith's affair went far beyond phone conversations. It
was life altering for Tracy and also from Michelle's husband,
but it had huge implications for the church.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I just could not bear it. I mean, we had
the most beloved congregation of people that I knew this
was gonna absolutely devastate.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
It was time to feace the music. But as word
began spreading through the community Keith was missing.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It became a very real fact to everyone that Keith
was cheating on me and it was someone that was
within the church. It was just full like a firestorm
across our town.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Everyone was shocked to find out that Keith was living
a double life, everyone except Tracy's dad. He still lived
in town for years. He'd been waiting for the other
shoe to drop.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
My dad owns the pool hall across the street from
the church, so he literally has a front row seat
to the chaos that is instill.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Tracy's dad decided to make the most of Keith's public humiliation.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
My dad bought five hundred bumper stickers that he had
printed up that said in bright bold letters, I am
Nathan and proud of it, and he handed him out
to the patrons of his business and his friends.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Tracy's dad wasn't Nathan. He was just thrilled someone was
exposing Keith. But for Tracy, the public humiliation was more
complicated because the night she found out about the tapes, I.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Get a call from the young lady.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
It was the girl who used to work in the bookstore.
She was now in her early twenties, but she was
calling Tracy because she just heard the news about Keith
and Michelle's affair.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
She is as hurt as I am because she thought
she was the only one and now she realizes that
he has done this with another woman.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
This phone call validated Tracy's suspicions from years before. Even
though Keith had vehemently denied it, the truth was coming out.
He had been romantically involved with this girl back when
she was a teenager.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
She read to me the poetry that Keith had written
to her, and she validated everything. She said, Yes, we
did this, we did that. He wrote me this, and
she was telling me because she was so hurt that
he had done this with Michelle, which is so ironic
(39:41):
that I am the wife. They all did it too.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Terracy could finally put together a timeline. After this girl
graduated high school and went off to college, Keith picked
up with Michelle. He spun a complicated web of betrayals,
one that damaged and devastated many people, and he left
Tracy to pick up the pieces.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
She was coming to me from a place of deep hurt,
saying that she should have told me, you know, two
years prior. I really couldn't console her at that point.
I was so shocked that I don't remember what I
said to her, but I did end up throwing the
phone across the room. Since then, I have reached out
to her to tell her that she was a young
(40:26):
lady that was also manipulated, and I've tried to help
her realize that I have no hurt toward her at all.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
After the tapes were set out, the girl told her
parents about how Keith pursued her, and they went to
the police.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
The young ladies parents learned of the affair between her
and Keith, and they brought a lawsuit against him, but
turned out that the age of consent in that state
she had just reached that age, so the lawsuit could
not go any further.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
When Keith came back from his time praying in the woods,
he resumed his position as head of the church.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
The church still let Keith preach every Sunday. And the
reason they did that was because a manipulator, when they're caught,
they don't just come clean. They blame everyone else and
they say that it's been twisted and turned and they
continue to manipulate. And that's exactly what happened. These people
(41:25):
did not want to believe that Keith was doing this,
even though they were faced with it.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Many people in town had the motivation to do what
Nathan did, especially the teenage girl and her parents, but
they weren't behind the Nathan letters. So it left a
question hanging over the whole congregation. Who was Nathan.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
At the time, I had no idea. There was a
lot of speculation of who it could be, and a
lot of blaming, like this person's probably doing it. In fact,
Keith was trying to bring a lawsuit against whoever Nathan
was for tapping his phone lines because it would be
illegal to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Instead of sitting through Keith's first sermon back at the pulpit,
Tracy got a one way ticket to California.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
I felt so much shock and hurt that I didn't
stick around for the fallout of it.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I flew to.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
San Diego and I was on the other side of
the country with my head in the sand, just trying
to breathe.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Back at church, Keith had started preaching a lesson in
forgiveness about how Tracy needed to forgive him.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
During that time, Keith actually announced my phone number from
the pulpit and told everyone to give me a call
and just begged me to come back. It was the
most bizarre and ridiculous thing ever. Hundreds of phone calls,
just over and over, just people saying we love you, Tracy,
We're praying for you. Other people would say, how dare
(43:00):
you do this to God's man? How can you betray him?
You need to get back over there and fight the
good fight. Just on and on and finally the pressure
was so much that I decided, for his kid's sake
and for those people that were hurting, that I could
give him another chance. So after about four months, I
(43:25):
ended up going back to Keith. Not because I felt
like it was necessarily the best thing for me, but
I felt like it was the best thing for the
church and the people, and I was their preacher's wife,
and I felt like I needed to heal all the
hurt that had happened through this.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Keith also promised Tracy's something she really wanted if she
came back.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
If you remember, I had agreed that I would raise
his children and not have any of my own. But
as I grew through the decade, I started wanting children.
But I just kept pushing it back, saying, you know
it's okay, I'll just rap you know. I'll raise his
I love them well. When I left him, that was
one of his buying points is we can have a
(44:13):
child of our own if you come back.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So she went back, but this time Tracy drew a
firm boundary.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
I told Keith, I am back. However, if you ever
do this to me again, you will have zero access
to me and I will not look back.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
And so She went on optimistic that Keith would change,
but six months later.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Some people came up to me and said, Keith is
having another affair. I said, put proof in my hands
and I will leave him and that will be it.
And I ended up getting proof put in my hands
that he was doing marriage counseling with a woman and
her husband. He ended up having an affair with her,
(45:03):
and that night I drove out of town and on
Valentine's Day two thousand, I joined the military. I walked
into her recruitment office and I said, can I take
the ASPAB right now?
Speaker 1 (45:18):
That's the entrance exam for the military.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
They were like, who are you? And yes, yes, come
sit down, and I took it. And because I'd been
a school teacher for middle school math at that point,
I aced it.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
She was sent to basic training.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Straight from being a school teacher and a preacher's wife
to putting my head in the defel bag and low
crawling to go get my food. I joined the military
because that was the only way to break away. It
was the only way that I knew how to get
away from Keith, and to do it in a way
where I was financially independent. Because being a good preacher's wife.
(45:57):
I didn't save a rainy day fund because that means
you're halfway out.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
After basic training, Tracy was offered a position as an officer,
but she wanted something more short term.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Because I was thirty one. I said, you know what,
I don't want to do any of that. I just
want a short term enlistment period because I know that
I want to have a family one day. So I
just joined for three years and I spent my whole
time in Kaiserslater in Germany at Lonstore Regional Medical Center.
It's actually an air ambulance to thirty six Air Ambulance,
(46:36):
and I had a ball and totally restarted my life.
Met a wonderful man there and we have a son together.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Today, Tracy works as a bogue captain in a small
southern town where she lives with her son. It's been
twenty five years since the Nathan tapes were sent out
and Keith's betrayals were exposed. But what remains a mystery
is Nathan's true true identity.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
No one has ever stepped up and said that they
are Nathan. Now, I feel like I have a very
good idea and other people we've talked about it, and
we feel like it could be this person. So I
feel ninety nine percent sure that I know who it was.
At the end of the day, Tracy's never needed to know.
(47:22):
It doesn't matter to her who Nathan really was. She's
just grateful to him for breaking the silence. It wasn't
just me, it's all of these people that went through
this and have never been told the truth. And I
did not stand up and tell the truth for several
reasons because I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't
want to expose things. And I've been I would say, brainwash,
(47:46):
manipulated into thinking that I am partaking in part of
the guilt and the shame if I do speak now,
it's been twenty four years and I can speak.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
After Teresa left for the final time, Keith kept right
on preaching. She got worried about how he addressed it
with the congregation.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
He did not address anything. He did not say what
had happened, He did not explain anything. He didn't say
why I left. All he said was, don't believe everything
you're going to hear. I've heard from other people that
he said directly that, oh, Tracy left because she wanted
a baby, and we couldn't have one.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Keith is still preaching to this day.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
He's built a new building, he has a new congregation,
He's remarried. They know nothing about me or all that
has happened. The lawsuit, the three women finding his name
on a hotel roster, the tapes that were sent out
of him having phone sex. They know nothing about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
And Tracy hasn't been back to church since.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
For me, going into a church and sitting I can
see what could be happening in the background, and that's
really distracting to me. I wish I had that innocence
again of just walking in, but I don't have that anymore.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why do you want to share your story?
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I've actually thought about it for a very long time.
How to ever tell the truth and the story that
I have because I felt like it needed to be told.
I always felt manipulated and guilty to stay quiet. Even
now there's a lot of pressure to do that. But
I understand that the pathway to peace and understanding is
(49:43):
by claiming your experiences and dealing with them. It turned
my life upside down, but you move forward and I've
definitely learned that I'm stronger than I thought I could be,
and I believe the truth sets us free. I decided
to tell.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Us on the next episode of Betrayal Weekly.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
If this could be true about my brother, and I
could have no idea how on earth would I ever
know who the monsters.
Speaker 4 (50:19):
Were before we end the episode. I have some exciting
news Betrayal. We'll be doing our first ever live show
as part of the Virgin Voyages True Crime Cruise. We'll
be answering listener questions and discussing them live on stage
(50:40):
with Stacy and Tyler from Betrayal season three, as well
as Caroline from season four. So if you have a
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.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Dot com slash true crime. 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, or
follow us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod You can also
connect with me on Instagram at It's Andrea Gunning. To
(51:23):
access our newsletter, view additional content, and connect with the
Betrayal community, join our 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
(51:43):
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 Fasin,
hosted and produced by Me Andrea Gunning, written and produced
by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman.
Speaker 5 (52:02):
Associate producers are Caitlin Golden, Olivia Hewitt, and Kristin Melcury.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Casting support from Curry Richmond. Our iHeart team is Ali
Perry and Jessica Krincheck.
Speaker 5 (52:14):
Audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio. Additional audio
editing by Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains.
Music library provided by mybe Music.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
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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