Broken Harts Trailer

Two white moms. Six adopted black kids. One car found upside down at the bottom of a cliff. What went wrong? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
The cliff is the kind of place Jennifer Hart would
have loved to photograph her kids. Located two hundred miles
north of San Francisco, it has a green edge bluff
right off of California's Highway One, with a gravel path
leading to a dramatic one ft drop into the Pacific.
On other trips, Jan and her wife Sarah might have
pulled to the side of the road and had their

(00:27):
brood line up, as they often did, backs to the camera,
hands raised in peace signs, a technicolor sunset framing their silhouettes.
But this trip wouldn't be like the others the hard
Tribe took to places like Bliss Idaho or Zion National
Park in Utah. Investigators have been desperate to figure out

(00:47):
how that family flew off that cliff in California and
whether it was on purpose. Early the morning of March,
rescue workers were pelled down the cliff, where they lifted
the dead bodies of three children. I'm to the point
where I no longer i'm calling this an accident, I'm
calling it a crime. Together. We've been looking into this

(01:07):
story for the past six months, and what has emerged
is one of the most complex and compelling stories of abuse, neglect, privilege,
and confusion in the digital age, we've ever encountered. Who
are these women and how did they come to adopt
six children, two sets of three black siblings. They are
one of my early role models for what like a

(01:28):
non traditional family you could look like. Over the course
of this cross country journey that leads us from South
Dakota to Minnesota, to Oregon, Washington, and ultimately a cliff
in California, you'll also meet a variety of people who
knew the hearts or thought they did. There's no part
of me and all of my looking back at my

(01:48):
observations of them that's capable of seeing that it was
just a sure And you'll get an exclusive look into
a case that left six people dead to missing and
a nation puzzled over the perfect they never knew because
we would look at our Facebook post. But I guess
she even post perfect on Facebook. We looked up to
her like, Wow, she's the best parent in the world.
Were horrible, We learned now that there was some abuse

(02:11):
charges in Minnesota there fleeing to Oregon. In public and
on Facebook, they looked like the perfect family, fun loving, joyful,
and wacky in the best way. I mean when I
say that Jim was good, she was good and there
was no red flags. But as we've learned, sometimes perfect

(02:31):
is the perfect cover up. I don't out. Yeah, there's
some kids that I feel as being highly abused. The
little girls jumped out of the second story window on
the roof and then down on the ground and ran
to my daughter, And this is like two in the morning,
begging on the help her, to help her, and she
was just frantic and begging, you know that take me

(02:54):
to Seattle. Don't make me go back there. They're racist,
they're abusive. Kind of figure out what's really going on here.
She was eating out at the garbage. That's just kind
of like be a clue right there and there that
this is a person you don't think can operate in
the tad's best interests. I remember vaguely hearing that they

(03:16):
dropped the foster daughter off and like just abandoned her. Absolutely.
I think race is playing a part. You know, when
people were sitting in the areadias thinking that, Okay, well,
why did the judge just rule that like something knocked
right about there that Sens told me about it. I
just can't live with it. I'm very concerned for these
kids kits. Maybe he loves you from glamour and how

(03:48):
stuff works. This is broken hearts