The Knife: Off Record – 112

A listener sends in a tip about an international conman, Chadwick Hauser – who is still on the run. Through an interview with his ex-wife, Hannah tells Patia the story of a man whose scams have ruined lives across the world and whose victim list is still growing. For Chad’s ex-wife, Jordana, the end of their marriage was just the beginning. When the man she thought she loved vanished with her children, she would stop at nothing to get them back. 

Victims of Chadwick Peel Hauser Facebook Page – 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/505870920516958/ 

Associate for the Recovery of Children – 

https://www.recoveryofchildren.org/ 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

(00:21):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Hannah Smith. I'm Patia Eaton.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Today I'm going to tell Patia a story about an
international con man, and then we will have recommendations. Let's
get into it. So I first heard about this story
through someone who emailed me and said that she had
a story about a con man. I remember you telling
me that someone had emailed This was a while ago. Yeah, yeah,

(00:47):
And so as we do, I set up a preliminary
call just to sort of hear more about the story.
So I talked with her on the phone for a bit.
She didn't end up doing an interview, so I'm just
going to use a different name. We'll call her Sarah.
But basically she told me that she was working abroad
in twenty eighteen. She was in Portugal in Poortoo, and

(01:10):
she was working there. She was kind of like going
out and partying. There was an expat scene. How old
was she twenties or thirties Okay, had a job there,
but would go out and was like part of the
expat community through just meeting people. She met this guy
named Chad and they were friends for a year and
a half. She didn't really know him that well. She said,

(01:31):
they kind of just like were in the same social
scene together. The things that she knew about him was
that he seemed to be very wealthy. He had this
penthouse that he was renting, and he would have these
elaborate parties there with like a lot of drugs and partying.
And he also told her he went to Yale fancy
and she was just kind of like, I don't know,

(01:53):
I didn't think much about him. We were friends for
a couple of years, and then she ended up moving
to Hong Kong for a job and then COVID hit
and she was like in a hotel room quarantined for
a couple of months, just by herself. And she said
that at that time Chad ended up becoming kind of

(02:13):
a good friend of hers. They would talk on the phone,
he would check in with her. There was a weird
thing where she had left some of her belongings in Portugal,
and so he offered to ship them to her. He said,
you know, I'll just cover the cost and then you
can reimburse me. And it ended up being like more
money than she would have expected, and looking back now,
she wonders if he maybe got a couple hundred dollars

(02:35):
out of her, and then she had to fly home.
She had to fly back to the States because of
I don't know some visa paperwork, and somehow he said, well,
I have points or I can get you a really
good deal on a flight. So he bought her a
plane ticket, sent her the ticket, and then she reimbursed him.
And when she got to the airport she couldn't get

(02:56):
on the plane. She thought that it was a problem
with the airline. It turns out it was just a
fake ticket. Okay, So he's really wealthy. That's what she
knows about him. He's thrown these elaborate parties at his
penthouse in Portugal, where she initially meets him. They become
long distance friends. When she moves to Hong Kong for
a job, super wealthy guy needs to be reimbursed for

(03:16):
shipping her some of her belongings, but then on the
flip side, will generously get her a plane ticket with points. Yeah, okay,
but she said around that time, a friend of hers
in Portugal reached out to her and said something like,
you know, Chad is not who he says said he
is and apparently she heard through the grapevine that he

(03:39):
had left Portugal sort of fled and left behind this
enormous bill at that place he was renting. It was
like forty five thousand dollars or something. So there's a
story there, but it's like, okay, So she lost maybe
less than one thousand dollars. She lost a couple hundred dollars,
and then she had this really big headache at the airport.
It's not a huge scam, but what she told me

(04:02):
was that she later found out that he had way
more victims and that this was like a small drop
in the pool of what he had done.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
How did you find out about all of his other scams?
I mean, she'd moved away from Portugal by that point.
She googled him and she found this Facebook page that's
dedicated to his victims. When she found it, she said,
there were like two hundred people in this group. But
one of the people that she connected with through Facebook
that she then connected me with is Chad's ex wife, Jordana.

(04:34):
He scammed her too, Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Her story is much more involved and spans multiple years.
And so we did an interview with Jordana, but ultimately
for a couple of reasons, we're not going to use
all of the tape for a full interview. There is
a legal aspect to her story that we actually cannot
talk about legally, so I'll explain that later. But because

(05:00):
of that, we're going to tell the story, but not
with the full interview. We will play clips from the
conversation with Jordana. We'll tell you as much as we can.
We'll tell you as much as we can.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
So Jordana's story starts. She grew up in Hawaii. She
calls herself an island girl. She loves living on an island.
She ended up moving to la in her early adulthood twenties.
She studied acting. She got some jobs, she actually made
some money. She was a stunt woman for a while,
which is such an interesting career, but she said she

(05:33):
didn't really love it. She met and married her first husband, Pete,
and he was living in Bali, Indonesia, and this was
the kind of life that she wanted. She was like,
LA is too busy for me. I want like a
more island life. So she moved there. They got married,
they had a daughter in two thousand and nine, and
here's Jordana.

Speaker 4 (05:55):
Sold everything I owned, and at that time I saved
up a lot of money from the movie business and
put my money in stocks and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
So I had a good chunk of money.

Speaker 4 (06:04):
We opened up the first surf shop ever in Uluwato,
and my business was pretty lucrative. I had five houses
that I owned and things were going pretty well. But
Pete started cheating on me with his second wife or
whatever in Sumbawa. So and that was about when my
daughter was about one found that out, and so things

(06:26):
became pretty rocky at that point.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Five houses, very successful surf shop. Yeah, good for her.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
She's doing well, yeah, you know, but then her marriage
ends and she has a child, but she is sort of,
you know, newly single, and she starts going out and
meeting people and through friends of friends. She's at a
bar one night and she meets this guy, Chad in
Bali and she describes him as very preppy. He really

(06:57):
stood out. She hung out with mostly surfers, and Chad
walks into the bar. He's wearing Ralph Lauren Polo shirts
and is buying everybody around of shots and is loud
and sort of has that kind of frat boy energy
to him, I would say love it, but no, So

(07:20):
she's she's kind of like, who is this guy? But
then she finds out that he's actually living in Singapore
coming to Bali for business and he starts to rent
some of her properties when he's there. So through that
she gets to know him. And she had to come
over to one of the houses to deliver something one point,
and they sat down and hung out and talked four hours,

(07:42):
and she said that her opinion of him really shifted
at that point. He seemed to be a very cultured,
educated person. He said that he grew up in San Francisco,
that he went to Dartmouth, and that he loved to travel,
and he could speak multiple languages. They talked about wine.
He seemed to have like a pretty extensive of knowledge
about wine.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
So in Shordana's story he went to Dartmouth and Sarah's story, yeah,
so yeah, he's been very busy. Yeah spoiler alert this
and I might not be true.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
Right, So she's kind of like, Okay, actually he seems
really cool and they become friends. A few months later,
she tells him she's going to Thailand on a business trip, and.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
I remember telling him that I was going to fly
out to Chang Mai and he said, wow, well I'm
going to be out that way too, I'll meet you well,
we'll do lunch. And I was like, oh, okay, that
sounds cool. So I flew into Chang Mai and he
said that he was going to meet me at the airport.
I thought okay, So I flew into Chang Myi and
he met me at the airport and he tried to

(08:48):
kiss me and I was like, no, this is not
what we're doing. It's like that, and he got really
weird and we ended up going to lunch and he
was just acting really really strange, I guess because I
didn't kiss him and stuff, and I was like, what's
going on and he was like nothing, nothing, nothing, And
then he basically told me that he was in love
with me and he wanted to marry me, and if

(09:09):
I was going to say no, he was never going
to talk to me again. And I kind of at
this point I was like, well, maybe I'll just go
for it. This guy's amazing and he's money, he's smart,
he's intelligent.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
I actually kind of love this from Jordana because it's like,
I think no one in like their most grounded version
of themselves could be drawn in by something like that.
But she had been through so much right now, She
said her first husband, Pete, was cheating on her when
she had a one year old. That ends in divorce.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
You know.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
Now she's flying in somewhere for business and this guy
likes her enough that he wants to meet her at
the airport. Very romantic, very romantic until she says, no,
I don't want to kiss you, and he freaks out.
But then it's like, well, here's this guy who does
really like me, and I'm pushing him away. I mean,
he seems successful. If you have a daughter, I could

(10:04):
see why you would be drawn to someone who maybe
can offer some stability.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, totally. The situation can be read multiple ways. Right
in hindsight, it feels pretty manipulative, but I can I'm
totally with you. I can see how that would feel attractive.
He's this guy who has his life together and is,
you know, very clear about what he wants, which can
be really attractive. Yeah, and sounds super different from her

(10:29):
first husband, who was like surfer bro. Yeah exactly, Yeah,
very different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
So she jumps in.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
They start dating, and according to Jordana. Things move very quickly.
He ends up moving to Bali and they get a
place together. She did say before he made the official move,
she went to visit him where he was living in Singapore,
and this was a bit of a red flag for her.
He was living in this really big house, but there

(10:59):
was hardly anything in it. She was like, they didn't
have forks. He had a roommate. So she questioned him
about it, but you know, he had a way to
explain it away. He was like, well, you know, we're
bachelor's and we're working all the time, and I never
really meant to live here long term, so it's just
been a temporary thing.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
I actually have a close friend who's ultra successful and
in one of his houses, he was like, I don't
need any dishes. I'm just going to postmates everything. I
mean a way that I looked at him in that moment,
I probably looked like I saw a ghost. But this
this predates Postmates. So the excuse is you need forks, right.

(11:40):
I guess he probably was eating out all the time,
but yeah, why not have some forks. It doesn't make
any sense to me. You gotta have at least one fork, Yes,
at least one fork per person who's living in the
house and let this little standard yes, but you know, yeah, okay, cool,
you're a bachelor. Like it's a little bit of a
red flag, but not a big red flag, right. She
also meets his colleagues. He's working for a hedge fund

(12:04):
in Singapore for a person who Jordana described as a billionaire,
very successful. And you know, she meets Chad's coworkers, so
she knows that he does have a job, and his
coworkers seem very similar to him, you know, people with
really good educations and that are wealthy.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
So all of it's checking out. He moves to Bali.
They get a place together, and Chad is paying the bills.
He's paying for rent, all the bills, everything, but he's
pressuring Jordana to escalate their relationship very quickly.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
He really wanted to have a kid. I did not
want any other kids. I wanted just one daughter and
that's about it. And he really wanted a kid of
his own, so he really was pressing that issue. I
ended up getting pregnant and we had this elaborate wedding
at the Astona and it was the nicest place in
Bali at the time. So we flew out all my
friends from La and Hawaii. Stepmom came, my brother, and

(13:02):
we put him up in villas. And I think we
spent almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on this
crazy elaborate wedding. I had a dul chigamana dress. It
was just it was huge.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
I can one hundred percent say my wedding did not
cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Wow. Okay. So
kind of similarly to the way he acted at the airport,
it was like, if we don't have a kid, then
I'm going to blow this up. If we don't have
this big wedding, I'm going to blow this up.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, a lot of pressure to move quickly, but also
throwing her this really elaborate, beautiful wedding of her dreams.

Speaker 4 (13:39):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
She focuses on planning the wedding, but there is another
red flag that happens. So she invites her family. He
invites his family, but he tells her, well, my dad
isn't going to come to the wedding because I borrowed
some money from him and haven't paid it back yet.
Thirty thousand dollars sort of a drop in the bucket

(14:01):
if you're paying one hundred and fifty k for a wedding.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Totally. Like if I'm the dad in that situation, I'm
irritated too. Yeah, Like why did you borrow the thirty
grand if you had that kind of money to throw
it a wedding? Yeah, And he says, I need to
pay him back so he'll come to the wedding. But
my money's all tied up right now, So can I
borrow some money from you? And they're married anyway, so
like why wouldn't she? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And she has the money, right, she has had this
successful business in Bali, and so she agrees and she
gives him thirty thousand dollars to pay to his dad
so that his dad will come to the wedding. You know,
before they got married as well, Chad had convinced her
to sell off a lot of her properties that she

(14:44):
was renting out. And he presented himself as this guy
who really understood finances, and he advised her, you need
to get out of this business, sell them off and
put that money in an investment account so that it
can grow.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
So she did.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
She said she had about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
which was like the extent of everything she'd worked for
in her life, all that work in La that she'd
made money, and then she'd built this business in Bali,
you know, everything that she had still maintained throughout her divorce.
So this was her whole life's work, and so she
put it into an investment account. So they get married.

(15:26):
She said that meeting his family was a little odd.
They were just a little bit tight lipped. They didn't
seem that close to Chad.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
She said. At one point, his mom and sister were
walking around their home, and they had a huge home
with like a security guard and a chef. She said,
even with like the weight of the US dollar, it
doesn't matter, like it was still clearly it's opulent. Yes, yes,
And she said that Chad's mom and sister were sort
of walking around like looking at things, sort of like

(15:55):
they looked shocked or amazed. And this was like a
little confusing to Jordana because she was thinking, well, you
guys are the wealthy ones. This is where the money
is coming from. But okay, cool, Like I don't know,
you have some personal stuff with your son.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
It's fine.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
So they get married and then he says, let's go
to Europe for a honeymoon. And they plan this three
month long European honeymoon and it is lavish.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
And we rented Ferraris. We had two Ferraris. We had
a red Ferrari and a black Ferrari. We stayed at
the Saint Regis Hotels, we stayed in presidential suites. We
went all throughout Rome, Italy, Positano, the Amalfi Coast. I mean,
we just traveled forever and we stayed in the nicest home.
It was an amazing trip. It was just like, oh

(16:45):
my god, this is amazing. Where I'm living the dream.
I'm like driving Ferraris, We're seeing all these fancy places.
We were shopping, I mean it just bought Gucci everything,
and I thought, God, this is I don't have to
work anymore.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
This is this man's amazing.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
And he speaks all these different languages and he did,
like everywhere we went. He could speak a little French,
he could speak a little German, he spoke a little Italian,
spoke Portuguese almost fluently. So that was just like, wow,
amazing where we went. He could speak a little bit
of everything. So it was just a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
It sounds fun, yeah, and he can actually speak these languages. Okay,
But now I'm thinking, like, because we know a little
bit like where this is headed, I don't speak any
of those languages, so someone could easily fool me. And
now I'm curious, does he really speak all those languages?

Speaker 2 (17:36):
It's a very good question, actually, Okay, quick little detour.
It reminds me of this moment whenever we were doing
the cat cult story. So the cat cult story is
like this cult story. This woman, Cheryl Ruth Finn ran
this cult and part of her whole ideology was that
she wanted her followers to adopt a lot of cats

(17:56):
as we get them into Heaven, et cetera. But one
of the things that she did was she would take
her followers on these like sort of missionary trips to Europe.
But really it seemed like she just wanted to travel, right,
because she'd always be like, we have to go to
Italy because there's some spiritual thing happening there. But then
they would just sort of be traveling and looking at
art and eating good food. And someone was telling me

(18:18):
they went to this church with her in Italy, and
she was like really like talking about how there were
demons there she was fighting them, and this person came
up and was speaking to her in Italian, and Cheryl
started speaking back. She does not speak Italian. No, she

(18:38):
was speaking gibberish. And then the person was like speaking
back to her in Italian and she was saying something back,
and then they finally left, and the person I was
interviewing was like, I could tell by the way the
interaction happened that she wasn't speaking Italian and the person
was trying to understand what language she was speaking and
was confused. But the way that she told her followers

(19:00):
like God gave me the gift to speak to this
person and we were battling spiritually or whatever. Oh, this
was a demon she was fighting off. She was, Yeah,
it was like some sort of spiritual battle. I actually, yeah,
I remember this from the tape that was so long ago.
But if you're someone who wasn't really like fully paying
attention and you don't know Italian, you could have seen
that and thought, oh, well, she's she knows Italian, or

(19:23):
you know, you're.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Also in so deep at that point you're in Italy
with her. You have to believe you're believing. Yeah, so
I do wonder now that you bring that up. It's like,
maybe something like this is happening. Is he really speaking German?
I don't know. Maybe he is, maybe he's not, But
she certainly believed that he was right right. And I
also think, I mean, similar to the story you just
told about Cheryl Ruthven in Italy. It's like she's loving

(19:45):
this trip, and I think that we can all relate to, Like,
if you're enjoying your life, you don't want to start
believing that it's not real. You want to just enjoy it.
Oh for sure.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, she has met a man who is wealthy and
committed to her and loves her and threw her this
elaborate wedding and is now taking her to Europe for
three months. Yeah, like that's something she wants to believe in.
I asked her who was paying for this trip, and
she was like, well, it was a mix.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
You know.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Sometimes he would pay in cash for things. Sometimes he
would ask me to put things on my credit card.
She said, the Ferrari rental went on her credit card.
If a Ferrari rental was going on my credit card,
I would say, we can have one ferrari. We don't
need two different colors. Yeah, I'd be like, I don't know.
And by the way, can we just take the bus?

Speaker 4 (20:36):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Public transport. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
I think it's that thing of She was like, he
just has money. Rich people they're sort of like, oh, well,
you cover this and I'll get you back. It seemed
like he gave off this vibe of I'm not really
concerned about it because obviously I pay you back because
I have so much money, And she said that he
would pay her back sometimes he would pay her credit

(20:59):
card statements as well well, so she just sort of
felt like, Okay, I'm going to trust him with all
of this. He's got it under control. Sometimes I might
have to put something on my credit card, but no
big deal.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
They're married. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Then about four months after they get married, so they've
been in Europe for three months, they come back. Her
daughter needs to go back to the US for a
medical procedure. So Jordana goes back to the US with
her daughter she's pregnant, and essentially Chad ends up telling
her like, I think we should just move back to
the US, Like, don't come back to BALI, we need

(21:32):
to move back to the US. I have business there.
Let's just go.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
So she says okay, and ask him how much they
can afford and rent. She's like, I'll start looking for
a place. He says ten thousand dollars a month. So
they find a house in Salceledo and move in and
she said it is a very nice house. They're renting it,
and you know, he outfits the house. They got furniture,

(21:57):
they ship a bunch of stuff from Bali, which is expensive.
They have two cars, a BMW and a range Rover.
And at this point something happens that makes Jordanas start
to question things.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
This is when I started finding out about Chad, when
Hurtz came to take the cars away from our house,
which I thought we owned the cars. So that's when
I started finding out that we didn't own the cars.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
And then I.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
Started questioning him and he said, well, you know, I
got to rent these cars because we don't really have
the money to buy cars right now. We don't know
if we're going to stay here, and I'm running the
cars because I have to look for the piece. Because
he was going to open an investment company in San Francisco,
and he always said that if I don't have a

(22:48):
fancy house and if I don't have fancy cars, then
nobody's going to invest in my company. And I thought, okay, well,
you're spending like three thousand dollars a month for these cars.
I was like, why can't you just buy a car
instead of spending like three to four thousand dollars a
month for these these cars. It doesn't make sense, you know,
like all this stuff doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
I mean, she's right, doesn't make any sense. It's also
like thinking that she was pregnant and already had one
child she was caring for. That means you are just
so busy, Like you can wake up and start thinking
about all these questions that are coming up for you
about your life and your husband's choices. But then you've
got to go take care of your kid, and you're pregnant,

(23:27):
You're going to a bunch of appointments, You're trying to
figure out your living situation. It's like your world is spinning.
You don't have time to just sit down and like
be a sleuth about it.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Absolutely, And you know she's also figuring out custody situation
with her daughter because her daughter's father is still in Bali,
so they're sort of trying to figure that out. She
has so much going on, and she said Chad just
kind of always had again a way to talk about
things and explain things to her. She did say when

(23:58):
Hurts came to get the cars, Chad wasn't home and
Jordana asked them what was going on, and they said, well,
he hasn't paid for over three months on these, So
that was alarming to her, and then you know, she
started to think about what he was spending money on.
He had rented this office space in downtown San Francisco

(24:19):
to get his investment company going. She had visited the
office and she knew it was an expensive part of
town and he had outfitted it with all new computers.
He had hired his friends. She said, he took some
of the people of the company out to a holiday
party at this very expensive restaurant and the bill was
like five thousand dollars. So she was just thinking, why

(24:44):
are you spending all this money when you're just getting
your company going. So the question started to add up.
And you know, she didn't know Chad's family very well,
but she knew that his sister lived in Oakland, so
at this point she decided that she needed to make
contact and trying to get some answers.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
And I just called her one day and I said, Hillary,
I need to talk to you about something.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Can you meet me?

Speaker 4 (25:09):
And I just started telling her all kinds of stuff
about Chad. You know, he went to Darmouth, and she
confirmed that he never went to Darmouth. He went to
Chatsworth in southern California for like a month or something,
never graduated college. And I said, well, he's from San
Francisco and she goes, no, we're from Texas.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
And I was like okay, and just.

Speaker 4 (25:33):
I think there were some other things too, and she
just basically confirmed with me. I remember she said to me,
she just goes, you got to get away from him.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Wow. Everything he told me was a lie. I didn't know.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
I was always kind of scared of Chad too, because
he was just so every time I questioned him about something,
he would get really defensive and then you always had
a good answer, but he was just really get really
angry that I questioned him or asked him anything. He
always kind of kept me down and just made me
just he didn't want to know anything about him. I
couldn't even get in the computers at home. He changed

(26:05):
the passwords constantly to the computers, which I always thought
was weird. I just couldn't know anything about his life.
He was gone constantly. I was at home by myself
like a lot. And then we started having financial problems
with rent. We couldn't make rent.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
That's so strange because she had met his sister at
the wedding. It's like I can remember the first time
I met my now husband's family. You know, you make
small talk.

Speaker 4 (26:34):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
I guess I'm surprised that Moore didn't come up at
the wedding. But if his family was in a situation
where they thought everything was weird, they probably wouldn't talk
to her too much or give her too much information
because you might feel like, well, this is a wedding.
I don't want to like start a problem here. Yeah.

(26:55):
I also wonder if maybe they thought that she was
in on it, hmm, yeah, if he had a history
of doing things like this. She didn't go into detail
about that, but the fact that he owed his dad
thirty thousand dollars, you have to think there was something
going on there. So I wonder if they thought maybe
she's part of this. I don't know, right, because when

(27:16):
you're on the outside of something, it's.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Like, how could you not know? Yeah, exactly. So this
is obviously a horrible situation that Geordana finds herself in. Especially, Yeah,
she's like eight months pregnant at this point and they're married,
and you know, she's worried, but she doesn't know what

(27:40):
to do. She calls her best friend, but her best
friend is kind of like, well, I don't know what
to do. Maybe there's an explanation for this. Another thing
that's happened that you know, is a trend in a
lot of controlling relationships, is that he's kind of isolated
her from her family and from a lot of her

(28:01):
support system. Some of that is because she said some
people in her family really didn't like him, so then
that kind of created some distance she had. When they
first moved back to the States, planned on going out
and getting a job, and he strongly advised her against it,
pretty forcefully, saying that will make me look really bad.

(28:21):
If you start going out and getting a job, it's
going to look like I don't have all this money
to support you. Plus you're pregnant, So she sort of agreed.
So she doesn't have a job, she doesn't you know,
have a support system, and she has no choice but
to just trust him. Right now, she's eight months pregnant.
What's she going to do. Yeah, he's really becoming more

(28:42):
and more controlling, like she said it, with the computer
password and stuff. But you know, she has a safety
net that three hundred and fifty thousand dollars that she
put into an investment account that she's continuing to get
statements on it and it's accruing, you know, money, and
so she has bigger concerns about Chad. But she's thinking,

(29:05):
we need to address the current problems, which is that
we're behind on rent. So let's get out of debt.
So she tells Chad, Okay, look, why don't we dip
into my money and we can pair a back rent
and we'll at least just like get ahead of things.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
But until your company takes off. And that is when
he looks at her and reveals that there is no
more money.

Speaker 4 (29:26):
WHOA, that's so scary finding out basically that I don't
have any money. Well, what I think is is that
he had access to my bank account. I think I
paid for my wedding. I think I paid for the honeymoon,
I paid for my wedding dress, I paid for my ring,
I paid for I paid for everything, and I didn't

(29:48):
know I was paying for everything. So that's kind of
when I realized that he was using all my might
to do everything that we were doing.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
But she was getting statements and he worked at the
hedge fund where he said he had invested her money.
It's a little strange. She put the money in a
bank account in a bank in Bali. He went with
her to set that account up, and she didn't think
that he had access to it. She doesn't know how

(30:19):
he did this. She thinks that maybe he bribed someone
working at the bank. He somehow got involved and was
able to send her fake statements while he actually took
all the money out and was just using it. And
by now she's somewhat isolated from her friends and family

(30:39):
who never really thought highly of Chad, and his own
family is telling her to get away from him, but
she just moved. But she's about to have a baby,
and where's she going to go if she doesn't have
any money. I mean, I think she said exactly that.
It's like she's not going to go sign another lease.
She can't. No, she doesn't have a job, she doesn't come,

(31:02):
she doesn't have any money.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
But where am I going to go? What am I
going to do? There's nowhere for me to go.

Speaker 4 (31:08):
I'm you know, I'm I have no money and now
I feel like I'm really stuck with this man.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
It was horrible, and that's when I really became really really.

Speaker 4 (31:17):
I just remember living with him and just feeling, I
mean the entire time like I was just living in
this bubble in my head and I was just walking
around like I was just a zombie.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
I wasn't even like a real person.

Speaker 4 (31:29):
I was just I remember just being foggy and waking
up and felt like I was living not even in
a movie. I mean movie, you're like even like there's
a clear picture. I was just a foggy mess.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
And what she ends up finding out is that back
when she was living in Bali, Chad had met some
of her mutual friends and through them had found out
that she was recently single from her husband and that
she had all these businesses. And she believes that then
he started intentionally renting her properties in order to get

(32:04):
to know her, and then pursue her romantically for this intention,
So she was like targeted target someone that she thought
was like falling in love with her.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yeah, but she doesn't really have a choice of what
to do right now because she's giving birth to her child.
She goes into the hospital. Chat is nowhere to be seen.
He's out partying with his friends. According to her, she
said he showed up a couple of days later drunk,
and the next months are a blur for her. She

(32:38):
is just trying to survive, you know, with this newborn.
He's again not around. She doesn't know what he's doing.
He's out in San Francisco, hobnobbing with people. And a
few months go by, I think she said, like six
months to where she finally kind of was out of
that like Hayes of having a newborn baby and just thought,

(32:59):
I have to get out out of here. I don't
know what I'm going to do. I'll just go stan
in a friend's couch or something. She packs up. I
think her daughter was with her dad at this point,
and she's leaving and Chad comes home, confronts her and
it's not a good situation.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
He assaults her. He sexually assaults her, and she'll later
learn that she has gotten pregnant again from that. And
this is all taking place still in California.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
H wow.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
Yeah, and she's starting to realize that he's incredibly violent
and dangerous. There's another incident in which he's physically violent
and she does call the police and he's arrested on
domestic violence charges. Ultimately, she decides not to press charges,
you know, which is I think understandable. It's one of

(33:51):
those things that's hard to sort of get from the outside,
but from you know, different people we've talked to in
the context of everything that she's going through mentally and
physically at this time, is just where her head was at.
She was worried that if she pressed charges then you know,
he wouldn't be able to help her out financially. He's
her only lifeline at this point, even though he's abusing her.

(34:13):
You know, it's a complicated, horrible situation that she's in.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, I mean, she needs to get the money back
that he took from her, yeah, to survive. But at
this point, you know, they're still living in this huge
home that's like ten thousand dollars a month, and they're
laid on their payments. The electricity is being turned off
because Chad's not paying the bills, and then she finds

(34:41):
out that he's starting to get sued by people in
the area. So we actually looked into that, and there
are multiple civil lawsuits against him from that period of
time early twenty fifteen, when he was still living in
the Bay Area.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
So the first lawsuit, it looks like it was filed
in twenty fifteen. In May of twenty fifteen, the plaintiff
who's suing chadwick Kauser is I might be pronouncing this wrong,
Rothgar Investments Limited, And it says, you know, breach of
contract and we couldn't find much else about it. But
that's in May of twenty fifteen. And so there's another

(35:23):
lawsuit that comes into play in April of twenty fifteen,
so I guess that predates this last one by a month.
But Chad is alleged of owing more than three hundred
thousand dollars. He's being accused of fraud. Yeah wow. And
it looks like the person who filed this complaint is
saying that he loaned Chad three hundred thousand dollars and

(35:48):
that Chad said he owned a condo in San Francisco,
and he used that to secure the loan, which he
did not and also seems like he just didn't pay
this money back. But you can assume, based on the
information that Jordana gave that he was starting this investment company,
that he was starting to get all of these investments

(36:08):
or loans from people but not paying anyone back. Yeah,
it sounds like it was more Ponzi scheme esque, like, Okay,
I'm going to tell Jordana, my wife that I've invested
her life savings. It's growing since I've invested it, so well,
I'm going to send her fake statements and in the meantime,

(36:29):
I'm going to tell this guy to give me three
hundred thousand dollars is a loan, and that I have
all of these assets. And then he's spending all of
it and runs out, can't find someone else to fraud,
I guess, and then it of course crumbles.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, so all of this is going down, and you know,
his scams are catching up to him, and then they
find out they're getting evicted from their home. And so
this is another point in the story where it's one
of those things that I think Jordana felt like she
didn't have any options, but he basically said, we're moving
back to Bali. She's pregnant again, so she goes they

(37:07):
move back to Bali. She also does have some community
in Bali. Yeah, so at least, you know, she has
friends there and her eldest daughter's father still lives there.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, so they move back. She has her second child
with Chad, who is also a son. But things just
get progressively worse, and essentially Chad confiscates both of their
children's passports and refuses to let Jordana have access to them.
So eventually things get so bad that they do end

(37:36):
up splitting up. But this is after an incident in
which he's tried to run her over with a car
and she ends up in the hospital. I mean, this
is a horrible, violent man, and she doesn't really understand why.
But he finally agrees to sort of let her go,
let her move out and get her own apartment. He
offers to help pay for it, which is in contrast

(37:59):
to previously when she tried to leave him, he had
told her things like You'll never be able to leave me,
So she doesn't really understand why, but she is now
trying to figure out a plan. You know, she is
living in her own apartment, they're sharing custody of the suns,
and she doesn't have access to her children's passports.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
I think it was just a control thing of trying
to control because I ended up finding a place to
live and Chad decided that we were going to split
the kids. So at that point I was at his mercy.
I didn't really know what I was going to do.
I wasn't going to leave my kids in Indonesia. I
wasn't going to leave my kids with him. And I thought, well,

(38:41):
I find get my own place, and Chad said, well,
I'll help you find a place, you know, and I'll
help pay for the rent and all that kind of stuff.
Unbeknownst to me, he had found another girl, a girl
that he wanted to be with. He ended up ripping
her off too, so that was he wanted me out
of the picture so he could go on to his
next victims.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
So that was his thing.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
That has to just be so confusing because you're relieved
that for whatever reason, he's allowing you to live in
your own space, but having to like keep things I
mean peaceful is the wrong word, but like your share
custody of your sons. Yeah, she's not going to leave
her kids in Indonesia. You know she might never see
them again.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Yeah, And you know she's trying to sort of play
this horrible game of you know, not angering him to
both protect herself and her children while also trying to
figure out, like how does she get out of this.
And she's also in a foreign country. She knows people
in Bali, but it's not like the same as being

(39:42):
in the US where she understands sort of you know,
the laws or whatever. There's different there. But she does
hatch a plan. She needs to get passports for her sons.
She ends up sort of figuring out where these passports are,
and the way that she describes going about trying to
get them up to date is a little bit like

(40:03):
she contacts this guy. I don't know how she's met
this guy, right. She calls him a corrupt cop guy,
but he claims he can help her get the passports,
get them updated. She specifically tells him, do not tell
Chad any of this. Keep this between us.

Speaker 4 (40:24):
I went to him and I told him that, you know,
Chad was a con artist, and I'm paying for the
passports you need to give them to me. Please do
not give them to Chad. Give them back to me,
because I had to go to like the embassy in
Chakarto and all that kind of stuff to get them
up to date. So anyways, I remember dropping the boys
off with Chad, and I remember thinking I might not
ever see my kids again. I remember thinking that, just

(40:45):
like I think I'm making the biggest mistake of my
life right now. He had him for the week and
he was supposed to drop him off to me, but
then you know, that next weekend and stuff, and supposed
to be there at my house at like eleven ended
up being like noon, and he's like, oh, there's.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
A lot of traffic, blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 4 (41:00):
And I was like, okay, one o'clock comes, Oh, we
decided to have lunch. Goes on and on and on,
and then it just went on to like three, four, five, six,
and I never heard from him, and I just knew
that he he got the passports and tricked me. In

(41:22):
the next morning, I went up to I got about
like six o'clock in the morning. I took my car
and I drove to the Indonesian the den Batar Airport,
and drove all the way up to the top of
the parking where nobody parks and uh, that's where his
car was parked with the boys is car seats in it,

(41:44):
and he was gone, so he got the passports. He
paid more money for the passports to the guy.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
So the person that Jordana went to for help, like
totally desperate, just turned around and basically added her whole
plan to Chad, who then kidnaps really the boys and
leaves the country without asking their mom. Yeah. I cannot
even comprehend what I would feel like as a mother.

(42:15):
I mean, anyone I think can see how traumatizing that
would be, especially because like she has no means, he's
her source of income, and again she's in a foreign
country and he's left the country, she assumes, but he
could be anywhere in the world. Yeah, it's horrible. She

(42:39):
said that she.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Basically ended up flying back to the States to LA
and staying on a friend's couch. She's, you know, frantically
calling him, trying to get a hold of trying to
get any information. Her kids are two and one at
this point. She said that she heard nothing from him
for three months. For three months, she had no idea.

(43:02):
So she goes back to the US. I mean, who
do you call, Like, do you call the police, do
you call the FBI? I mean, what do you do
in that situation? They're taken from Bali, but they were
born in the US. And she has another daughter whose
dad is in Bali. So she's back and forth. I mean,
that's just like chaos. Yeah, she said she made a

(43:24):
report with LAPD. She was in contact with Inner Poll. Okay,
I mean that seems like the right steps to take,
but then it's sort of like they're like, cool, we'll
take the report. So then she starts just doing whatever
she can. She makes Facebook posts, She's trying to spread
the word. She at one point goes up to the
Bay Area where Chad's parents are, Chad's dad and stepmoma,

(43:48):
and is like posting pictures around everywhere of her kids
and of Chad just to try to get them to
sort of pay attention to her and get involved. Literally,
she said, she's not sleep being she's trying everything that
she can. So this is where we get to the
point of the story where we can't really say a

(44:10):
lot legally, but essentially, you know, she's doing everything that
she can going through all of the channels reporting nothing
is happening.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
She's desperate.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
So her friend says, well, I know this guy through
film and TV, the actor Basil Boz. I'm just looking
at his website, best known for his role at NBC's
The Blacklist.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
I've never seen that he's an actor.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
He's done a lot of things, but yes, he's an actor,
and he is one of the founded members of this
organization called Association for the Recovery of Children. And so
her friend puts Jordana in touch and they end up
taking on Jordana's case. Now, we can't say anything about
that because I was in contact with them, and Jordana

(44:57):
signed an NDA. They're very secretive, I guess about their
organizations told me a little bit about this. So Jordana
tells this story on tape and then we, like just
our normal process, you reach out to this person and say, hey,
can you tell me about this story I heard and

(45:19):
your perspective on it, and then you hear back, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
They did not want to talk. They basically said, don't
use that tape because we are litigious. So I said, okay,
we won't. So we are not going to talk about
any of the details. There's probably a lot that we
don't even know. Jordana didn't tell us all of the details.
But just to be safe, we're not going to go

(45:45):
into any of them. But what I will do is,
you know, on their website they do have some of
their missions listed with photos and Jordana is actually on there.
So because it's on their website, I can read it
because it's public information. It's a picture of Jordana and
her two kids, Howser Boys twenty sixteen, Europe. It says,
according to our intelligence, Chad Hauser and his mother, Peggy Hauser,

(46:10):
blazed a corruptible path through the United States and foreign countries,
stealing money from individuals and institutions. In February of twenty sixteen,
they illegally abducted Harrison, age two, in Pierce, age one,
from their legal custodial garden, mother, Jordana Hauser, in a
joint operation between ARC Association for the Recovery of Children

(46:33):
and the Swiss Police. The children were recovered on June tenth,
twenty sixteen. Peggy Hauser was detained while Chadhuser escaped apprehension.
A warrant for Chad in Peggy Howser's arrest is currently
in effect in the US. Wow. I wonder if it
is it still an effect. I think so.

Speaker 4 (46:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Jordana said that if Chad comes back to the US
at this point, he'll be arrested.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Wow. But it's interesting that he was with his mother,
So his biological mother who was who had been in Texas,
who I think Jordana had never met, but as she
met this step mom, Yes, was with him in Europe
with these kids that he had kidnapped. So it sounds
like his mother was kind of part of this whole scheme. Wow.

(47:19):
That is so scary, especially because like as a mother,
how could you do that? How could you not say, like,
you might not like your ex wife, you might not
get along, but she can't take her kids from her
and leave the country and not say anything and not
tell her if they're okay anything for months. So ARC
is just this organization that is not associated with any

(47:42):
government agency, but they have former CIA FBI people working
for them to help he recover children in the cases
of parental abduction or trafficking. Yeah, so that's what happened.
So she did get her children back.

Speaker 4 (47:58):
I know a lot more than I knew that, and
I pretty much know a lot of what he does.
So I've had probably a good in I mean the
thousands for sure of people that have shared for some reason.
After I recovered my children and kind of went back
to Oregon and all that kind of stuff, I still
would get. I would get tons. We had a website

(48:18):
up about Chad. I never did the website everybody thinks
I did, but there was a website about Chad. So
when he googled Chad, it would come up with all
of his schemes and all that kind of stuff and
ended up going down for some reason. I think Chad
figured out about it or something. But I would get
a lot of emails and Facebook messengers of all these

(48:38):
stories of all these people that Chad had ripped off,
and they wanted to know kind of like or is
this real?

Speaker 3 (48:44):
Or you know, we were friends, why would he do
this to me?

Speaker 4 (48:47):
And you know, we went got skiing together, we went
to Puerto Rico together, and all this stuff, and he
was my friend. And I mean tons, it was almost
like three a day for like years that people would
just say, I'm like, you're never getting your money back.
He's not your friend. This is what he does. You know,
it's just I was a target. Everybody's a target. He's

(49:09):
never had one friend in his entire life. You know,
he's family. It's not that close with anybody. It's funny
because I never knew what a sociopath was before and
what I and to try to understand it. I remember
the LAPD the detective there, he was like, you're never
going to understand it because you're not that. You can
never understand it because you're not like somebody that goes
down the street and is a serial kill alawer and

(49:30):
just goes kills random women just for fun. That's pretty
much what Chad does. He goes and ruins your life
for fun. He doesn't care that you're going to be homeless.
It's just what he does. He doesn't think about what
we think about, you know, like, oh my god, this
is going to be Jordiana and her poor kids. You know, no,
there's nothing. He doesn't give a shit about his kids.
I'm close with his family. I mean we were just

(49:52):
out in San Francisco when I just saw his real
dad and his stepmom, which I'm actually really close with him.
He's known where I'm at. All this he's never reached
out and sent a card. He could, he could send
it to his dad, His dad could send it to
the boys. I mean, he's never ever reached out to
do anything. He does not care about anything. And I
don't know why he took the kids. I think it

(50:14):
was a ploy to and I think he told everybody
that I was dead, you know, and like I think
it was like another.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
Con all these poor kids. You know, I'm dad, But
I don't know. I don't really know.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
I don't even question anymore because I don't give a
crap about that guy anymore at all. He's a horrible
human being. He's ruined a lot of people's lives. He
ruined I'd say he ruined my life more than anybody
because I was not rich and I hadge fun person
or anything. I'm like, worked really hard to have what
I had and that was all I had, and it
took me about I have my own business now, but

(50:45):
took me a good ten years to get back on
my feet.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
I mean, I was literally really dying for a lot
of years.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
That's interesting that she's now close with his father and stepmother.
I mean that for me really like brings into focus
how obvious it is that what he's doing is malicious
if his own father is like, yeah, this guy's no
good and we're on your side here. Yeah, and they

(51:15):
want to be part of their grandson's lives and they are.
And so that's a nice part of the story that
they have been able to connect. And she also said
that she does feel some comfort that, you know, legally
he's not allowed to come back into the US, so
there's some level of safety there. But what a saga

(51:36):
that she had to go through. Yeah, wow. And so
I checked out this Facebook page. Yeah, okay, so tell
me about the Facebook page. So there's a ton of
different people posting that he has defrauded them. One woman,
Montana Burnette, looks like she lives in Toronto and this

(51:56):
is a public Facebook page anyone can access it says
that he claimed to her to own multiple properties I
think in France. She posted a screenshop reaching out to
maybe a realtor or someone that he said he was
associated with, and the person responds never heard about this
person thinks like, oh wow, complete lie. Yeah, and then

(52:18):
another person posts that he went to college with Chad
ran into him in Hong Kong in twenty twelve, and
he was like asking this friend who's posting, do you
know an attorney? My cheating ex took the kids. It's like, well,
she didn't take the kids. Oh, Chad said that. Chad
said that, Wow, she didn't take the kids. Well, And

(52:42):
what's interesting about this post is this person Greg says
I went to college with Chad, ran into him in
Hong Kong around two thousand and seven, remained in contact
for years. Around twenty twelve, he asked for an attorney
something about his cheating ex. So then Jordiana comments Chad
never went to college, roasted good job.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Jordana, Well, twenty twelve is interesting. I wonder if he
was just making up some story because they were together then,
and but she was starting to see the writing on
the wall, like this guy's not who he says he is.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
The money isn't what he said it was in twenty twelve.
Is that wrong?

Speaker 2 (53:24):
I think it was more like twenty fourteen ish. I
think is more like when that's happening. Yeah, I have
no idea that what he would have been talking about.
They moved back to Bali in twenty fifteen.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
But we're doing that thing where we're trying to like
rationalize it. He could have just been doing some sob
story totally, I need money for an attorney.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
My ex she cheated and took the kids. Yeah, like
he basically just wanted money. Probably he was trying to
get money.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
Oh yeah, So many people on this page compare him
to Anna Delvi. Hmmm interesting. Yeah, how many people are
on the Facebook page now? Yeah, it has almost five
hundred members. One hundred and ninety seven members are on
the page. There's people all over the world commenting that
he has defrauded them, and it's the same story. It's like,

(54:08):
presented himself as someone who was super wealthy, very successful,
and then little snappo need to use your credit card
and then just start. In one case, one woman says
that he used it without her authorization many many, many times,
and continued using it after she reported him.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
It's horrible and it's always just too We see with
stories like this that someone is able to get away
with it for so long because they do things like
change locations, fly to a different country. He used slightly
different versions or spellings of his name, so there's those

(54:46):
little tricks like that. But of course, you know, if
this is your life, You've created a life where you're
just always having to run and always having to lie.
What is the endpoint?

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Right? You know, it's never coming back here. He'll be
arrested and he knows that. One of the posts is
he was arrested in Copenhagen in twenty twenty two, but
then let go. And I mean, I don't know anything
about that, but I assume, like, if you're being arrested
in Copenhagen for something you did somewhere else, that's probably
pretty complicated because what do you do bring in all

(55:20):
of those people to try a case or you know,
however it works there, Like, that's probably very expensive and difficult. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
Also, he seems like he is able to get out
of things, like that posting from the ARC website that
his mom was arrested and he was he couldn't be found,
Like what happened? He made his own mom. Yeah, and
then he's like arrested in Copenhagen but then let go.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
So Yeah. One of the members of this group posted
a poll for the other members the options I've lost
money to Chad and he has yet to pay it back.
And then there's bunch of others, the two with the
highest percentage by far forty percent say I've lost money
to Chad and he has yet to pay it back.
Forty four percent I've never met Chad, but have friends

(56:09):
or family affected by losing money to him.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
Well, we really appreciative that Jordana spoke with us, and
good to be aware that Chad is out there. He's
still out there.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Yeah, and I don't think ARC wants to seek with us,
but if they change their mind.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yeah, they really did not, but I would love to
do an interview with them.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
That sounds really here about really cool. Yeah, Okay, so
let's do some quick recommendations. Do you want to before
we wrap up?

Speaker 3 (56:37):
All right?

Speaker 1 (56:38):
So, I'm halfway through a podcast that I'm really liking it.
It's called In Her Defense, and it's about a woman
named Helen Naslund who was convicted of killing her husband
on their Alberta farm. Okay, but she had been suffering
so much abuse for decades and decades by her husband

(57:03):
and the neighbors. The interviews with her son, it really
paints a picture of how difficult her life was and
whether or not she killed him, like she had no
other way to get help. In her mind, that was
reality for her, and so I think the interviews are

(57:26):
really powerful, and it's just one of those podcasts that
makes you think, like you meet someone and you really
have no idea what they're going through, or you are
unsure how to help, so you don't do anything because
you don't want to say the wrong thing. You don't
want to make a problem where there isn't one, or
offend someone. But they understood something was off about the marriage,

(57:50):
but not everyone knew the extent of the abuse. They
had a son in nineteen eighty four. So he does
a lot of the interviews. I actually found the story
because I read about an interview he did and then
saw there was already a podcast. Oh gotcha, what is
his stance? Well, I guess you don't want to give
it away. I don't want to give anything away, but
the interviews are very telling and at least really made

(58:12):
me think, you know, if someone is in a dangerous situation,
I'd rather them be irritated that I called someone and
told someone, then look back later. And that's not to
say these people did anything wrong. I wasn't in their
shoes in that moment, but to hear that a lot
of people had an idea something was happening. Is it's sad.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, it just makes me think I want to learn
more about what qualifies as self defense because you would
think that that would qualify as self defense. And also
makes me think about that that story of that woman
who was being trafficked and she killed her trafficker young.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
She's young. I didn't even know was she's a minor.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
Maybe I think she was a miner, and then she's
being charged for that for his murder.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, I can't recall she's a miner or just a
very young adult. But either way, Yeah, I know what
you're talking about, and it's mind blowing because I can
only imagine what someone's psychological state is in that moment
you're just trying to survive. That sounds like a good podcast.
I will check it out.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Okay, I have a podcast as well. Actually heard about
this from the podcast Queen's Instagram. They do a lot
of recommendations Sea of Lies. Have you heard of this one?

Speaker 1 (59:26):
I have seen it on that charts when to go
look for ours See of Lies from Uncover. It's a
CBC podcast and I think I'm four episodes in out
of seven, and it's really good. I'll just read this
first little descriptor. A body is pulled from the ocean,

(59:46):
and a race against time to capture one of the
world's most wanted criminals begins. What I like about this
podcast is I think they do a really good job
of structuring the show. They keep you interested, and there's
twists and turns, and as you go, the story keeps
unfolding in a way that's really satisfying and interesting. So

(01:00:10):
I would recommend it cool. I'll check it out real
quick because I mentioned it. I just looked it up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Crystal Kaiser was seventeen and twenty eighteen when she shot
Randall Vohler, and he had been abusing her and filming
it for more than a year before she killed him.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Before he was killed, and last year she was sentenced
to eleven years in prison, she accepted a plea deal.
It's like, how could that be?

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
She was a minor, she was being abused. You know,
obviously it's complicated, but like to define self defense, but
I don't know, it's it just doesn't seem just it
seems like she was clearly trying to defend herself from
a very horrible, violent situation.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Yeah, and I mean even thinking about that cat could story,
which is wildly different than this one. It's like, I
imagine in a situation where someone is exercising that level
of control over another person, let alone a child, it's
like you don't know up from down, Like you don't
know what to do to get out of something peacefully,

(01:01:23):
if that's even a realistic option. Yeah, I don't know
a lot about the case, but it sounds very unjust. Well,
that is our episode for today. Thanks for listening. We'll
see you next week. If you have a story for us,
we would love to hear it. Our email is The
Knife at exactly Rightmedia dot com, or you can follow

(01:01:45):
us on Instagram at the Knife Podcast or a Blue
Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
And me Patia Eaton. Our producers are Tom Brievogel and
Alexis Samarosi. This episode was mex by Tom Bryfogel. Our
associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by
Birds in the Airport, artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer,