The Knife: Off Record 136

In 2017, a family friend’s concern over a peculiar coworker led FBI Agent Mark Hastbacka straight into the path of Dana Lawrence — a serial con artist hiding behind the alias “Genna Kaplan.” Patia tells Hannah how Hastbacka pieced together the truth behind Dana’s long con. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:04):
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:11):
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Speaker 1 (00:18):
Smaller diapers, groceries, a puppy. It would all fit in.
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Speaker 2 (00:37):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of
the speaker and do not necessarily represent The Knife or
Exactly Right Media. Welcome to the Knife off Record. I'm

(01:09):
Hannah Smith, I'm patia Eton, and I have no idea
what we're talking about today, but don't worry, because I'm
going to tell you.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Just get to sit back and listen to a story
that you've been researching. It's such a pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, this one was a pretty wild ride, and there's
so much more to this story. It was one of
those things where like I came across the headline, kind
of filed it away, didn't find the right voices, and
then got a call and was like, oh, okay, we
should we should do this.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Okay, can you tell me like the category of crime
that we're talking about today?

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Female con artists?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Oh my favorite? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
So, I mean she has caused a lot of destruction
that we'll get into, but part of my motivation for
talking about the story is that she's still out there.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Really, so this is ongoing.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
This is ongoing, and I'll get get into that more
at the end. But you know, it's like, as I'll
talk about, there's the quirky aspects of a con and
then there's like the real darkness. Yeah, and I'm gonna
play clips from an interview I did with someone who
worked closely on one of her cases, and yeah, let's

(02:19):
get into it.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
So today's story begins in Nashua, New Hampshire. It's the
quintessential New England city. There's a population of about one
hundred thousand people, but it feels much smaller in a
good way. A really charming downtown area, great schools, lots
of parks, really safe place. Yeah, unless you run into
someone named Jenna Kaplan. So actually that's not her name,

(02:44):
but we'll get there. So in twenty seventeen, Marqustbacca was
working as an FBI agent, and he had a long
career in the FBI. This was sort of known to
people in his social circle too, of course, and someone
that his wife actually went to high school with ends
up calling him on a Sunday, or maybe she called
his wife and sort of left message. I'm not really sure,

(03:07):
but you know, Mark wasn't working. It was a Sunday,
but this woman calls and she wants to know if
Mark can look into someone for her, someone that she
works with at the mayor's office that she's become pretty
suspicious of. This woman that she's suspicious of. Her job
was writing grants for the mayor's office. So grants are
you know, most people probably noted this, but it's a

(03:27):
non repayable financial aid awarded by a government body, in
this case, the mayor's office.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Nobody really knew where she came from, and you know,
she claimed to be a Harvard educated attorney, but what
cause concerns for this woman was she was really pressuring
her to get the account numbers from the city bank
accounts for the grants. She said she needed to put
on the paperwork the voting numbers and account numbers and
so forth. And you know that was a normal protocol.

(03:56):
You write the grant, that you pass it on to
the next person a hole fill in those numbers. But
she was very insistent that she get the numbers.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
So the person who calls our FBI agent, what's his
name again, Mark Mark. She also works in the mayor's office.
She also works in the mayor's office, and she'd encountered
this person and Jenna was asking her for the routing
numbers and she was like, that seems weird kind of.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
So Jenna Kaplan is how she knows this woman, this
is her name, that she goes by the mayor's office.
And Jenna Kaplan's role is writing these grants. And as
we hear in Mark's club, you don't need the account
numbers to right their grant, so that someone else's right, okay, job.
But this woman, I don't think that Jenna goes directly
to her to ask about the account numbers. I think

(04:43):
she just sort of hears that Jenna's really pushing for
these account numbers. Yeah, and she's like, this feels off
to me. So she leaves Mark with four pieces of
information to go off of the name Jenna Kaplan. She says,
Jenna has a three year old daughter, she works in
the mayor's office, and she's also has some volunteer role

(05:04):
in a nonprofit called My Brother's Keeper, a local nonprofit.
So Mark takes these few notes and on Monday he
does a little digging. He told me he really wasn't
even thinking much of it. He figured he'd just run
a quick search, you know, tell her as like a
weird coworker, and move on with his life. But pretty
quickly things weren't looking right. So he begins with a

(05:27):
search for the name Jenna Kaplan.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
When I check out the name she was using, there
was only one person by that name in the entire country,
and there was like an elderly woman in Long Island,
New York. I knew I was dealing with somebody who
was in the late thirties. So then it piqued my interest.
Take in the world, is it a possibility of having
a parental kidnapping here because obviously she's using a drop

(05:50):
pham that you can buy at, you know, the convenience
store or CBS or Walgreens, So what are any stores
you pay as you go? And that with the fact
that she had this three year old in tow and
nobody knew anything about her.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
She's using a drop phone.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
So one of the things that comes up in this
search is that she has a lot of different addresses
phone numbers, and currently her phone number is essentially a
burner phone. Interesting, Yeah, like you don't picture someone in
the mayor's office. You're a burner phone. How bizarre?

Speaker 2 (06:25):
How bizarre?

Speaker 1 (06:25):
So okay, now he's like, these are some real red flags.
Now I'm going to find out who this person is.
So the first thing he does is he goes about
finding her current address, which is nearby. So Mark goes
and talks to the landlord and this makes so much sense.
I'm like, should I be an FBI agent? He asks,
you know, did you run a credit check because that

(06:47):
would have a lot of very personal information about this person,
and can I see it? And landlord says he actually
didn't run the credit check. He had her fill at
the application and never ran it. Because he didn't want
to pay the fifty seventy five dollars so it would
have cost him. His rationale was like, well, she works
in the mayor's office, she's got to be trustworthy. Yeah,
good story. And so he didn't end up feeling like

(07:10):
he had to run it. But he did have the
application and he provides that to Mark. And this application
has a social security number on it.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
I had their social screen number. I checked it on
my systems and I found it. It belonged to, you know,
some woman in her late fifties in western Massachusetts. And
I pulled up that driver's license and had a photograph.
So with that photograph, now that social screen number, I
went to the police department where I formally worked.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
So is this an identity theft situation?

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah? And it expands from there. But what Mark is currently?
That's the trail he's following, right, right, identity theft.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Like she might have taken someone's purse or something.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Right, So why is this person who's living under an alias,
using a burner phone and claims to be Harvard educated
working at the mayor's office writing grants but nobody really
can verify anything about her?

Speaker 2 (08:07):
There's a lot of red flags, a lot of red flags.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
And I love that this woman who worked with her
in some capacity trusted her intuition because had she not,
you know, maybe she would have gotten those count numbers.
So Mark had mentioned in an earlier clip, he's questioning,
could this be a parent or kidnapping, because you know,
since those cross state lines, they can fall into the
FBI's jurisdiction or whatever you call it and become their investigation.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
And that's just for anyone who doesn't know, like when
a parent kidnaps their own child, right, so maybe there's
another parent somewhere who doesn't know where this child is. Right.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
It happens with like disputes over custody, you know, and
people not wanting to give their children to their partner
or whatever. So he's questioning if it's that, because why
else would she be living under an alias and.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Have a three year old with her.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
And he has contacts in this community law enforcement because
he former worked in the police department there, and so
he brings this identification that he's found with her photograph
on it, and this information for a woman in Massachusetts
or someplace. He brings it to the police department because
the nonprofit that Jenna Kaplan is a part of. My

(09:18):
brother's keeper meets at the police department once a week,
so they would know her there. So he goes to
the police department and he shows them this picture and
he's like, do you know this person? Never seen her
in my life? And okay, So Mark kind of knew
that was the answer he was going to get. But
great confirmation. So they know she's lying about who she is,

(09:41):
but they don't know why. The chief of police in Nashua,
he says to Mark, I'm going to send a detective
back over to her residence to see what we can
find out, and we'll let you know what we find.
So that detective goes over there and who opens the
door but a criminal defense attorney are Yeah, a guy

(10:01):
named Nick. And the detective says, I'm looking for a
woman named Jenna Kaplan and this three year old girl.
And he says that that's his girlfriend and that's their daughter,
and that Jenna and their daughter are actually on a
bus to New York City. They'd had an argument and
she'd just taken off for the weekend to get some space.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
What is going on?

Speaker 1 (10:22):
What is going on? Because this is an attorney. They're
talking to get a wind of something. Yeah, so the boyfriend,
of course, being an attorney, he knows better. I'm not
going to let you inside. I don't have to let
you inside, and therefore I'm on going there.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
We assume that he's an actual attorney.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yes, okay, yes, And this further peak suspicion's like, why
would she happen to be in New York that weekend?
What's going on? So the detective goes back to the
police chief, who then updates Mark and they decide that, Okay,
Mark's with the FBI.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's scary.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Not that a police detective should be taken lightly, but
I think the FBI. If you're in an attorney, you know,
you don't want to be in trouble with the FBI.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, it's also just like a way to get cases
actually like looked at. And an FBI agent bringing this
to the police department and saying let's look into this
is different from just a random citizen bringing this in.
You know, like there's totally like it's going to get
looked into more. Yeah, you at least know that multiple
people are interested. Yeah, Like it's not going to slip

(11:26):
through the cracks. They're going to keep hunting this information down.
So the boyfriend doesn't let the detective inside. This makes
them more suspicious, and so Mark goes down to the
house and again tries to talk to the boyfriend to
see if he'll tell him anything, because they get the
sense he knows more than he's saying.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
So I went down to Nashville call the detective. He
met me at the house and gave me a brief
friend down and we went over there. In to this point,
the boyfriend the attorney had always met the detective on
the front step of this multi family home, and the
detective never had an opportunity to go inside. So I

(12:07):
think the game kind of changed. Instead of the police
officer being there, there's the FBI knocking on the door,
and this is a criminal defense attorney, and you know,
I just persuaded him that it'll be you know, let's
not talk about your business out here on the porch
with all the neighbors around. Why don't we go inside
and talk privately. Is when we got inside that house

(12:30):
that a lot of alarm bells started going off because
the floor inside this house. Before the floor, the floor
was covered with legos anybody that has kids. Now this
this woman in her kid is sposed have been gone
for four or five days. Anybody has kids knows you're
not going to leave legos around on the floor. You
can step on it.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Painful, painful, and you know, I can speak for everybody,
but the moment my kid is asleep or childcare out
of the house with my husband, I'm cleaning. I love her,
but I don't want to see her stuff. Well, especially
lego is like strewn in the walkway. That's unrealistic, so unrealistic,
like that would make me crazy. So there's legos all
over the floor. But this kid has supposedly gone for

(13:13):
the weekend, which he.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Is aware of.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
You know, when he says they're in New York for
the weekend, that means you know when they're coming back roughly.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Right, because it's like just a train ride away, short
train that I assume.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Right, because they're in New Hampshire. So the boyfriend sticks
to his story at first, and he just says, yeah,
it's kind of messy, it doesn't bother me, but he
eventually consents that Mark and the detective take a look
around inside the house and they go into the primary bedroom,
and there's a pile of papers on the bed, along
with multiple cell phones and computers. Why did he consent

(13:47):
to this? Like, I don't know. Sounds like Mark's pretty persuasive. Yeah,
Mark is pretty persuasive. I did love that, like, we
don't want to have this conversation out here.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, that's pretty good tactic. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
So they go into the bedroom and they notice all
this stuff, and of course Mark asks if he can
look through it all and take it with him and
make copies. And oddly, and I don't know why, but
the boyfriend consents to this. So Mark takes everything with
him and he says, you know, why is all this here?
And the boyfriend's response is that Jenna just threw it

(14:19):
all in the bed before she left. I'm not a
neat freak, but I'm not going to sleep in a
bed that's like caught a bunch of stuff all over
it for a whole weekend. Yeah, but you know, people
do weird things. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
I don't know, but it is. It is strange, right,
and it's strange that he allowed them to take it.
Although maybe since he's an attorney, he's thinking if I
say no, I'll look like I'm hiding something, right, Okay.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
So Mark takes everything with him, and he's pretty happy
with this hall and it's a lot to look through.
But within fifteen minutes of leaving their home, the boyfriend
calls him, and.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
The attorney calls me out and tells me that he'd
been lying to me the whole time. She been hiding
in the basement with a baby behind the boilers. We
never had a reason to go into the basement, right,
it's a multi family home whatnot. But that was probably
the delay in him coming to the front door so
she could get on the back stairwell. But he told

(15:15):
me that she was down on main Street trying to
get her stuff back, her paperwork. So I immediately called
the detective be arranged for a police officer to pick
her up on the street and give her a ride
to the police department. And I turned around on the
highway and went back, and by the time I got there,
she was there. She signed into the police department under
her fate name.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, Mark's all coming together. Yeah, we jump in time
a little bit in this clip. But what Marcus saying is,
so he leaves the house shortly after like within fifteen minutes,
he says, the boyfriend calls him, Hey, I've been lying.
She was at the house with Sho's hiding her daughter.
She was hiding, but now she knows that you took
all her stuff and she wants it back. So she

(15:57):
left and she's trying to get to the police department
and say me.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
My stuff back. So she came upstairs probably and was like,
why is all my stuff gone? So this explains the
toys being out, and also all the stuff in the
bed that he may or may not have known what
it was or why it was there. Maybe she was
in the bedroom with it whenever they arrived, and then
she rushed into the basement. Why wouldn't she grab that stuff?
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, exactly right, exactly right. So of course this is
kind of great for Mark. He's like, here's the person
I've been wanting to talk to, and you're right here
at the police department and you have this little girl
and we don't know who you are. So he asks
if she will speak with him.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
So she comes into the interview rooms to speak to
us and whatnot. And I'm not sure she knew how
much of the stuff of her stuff I had with
me that you know, fiance had given me. So she's
sticking to her story until I started pulling out the
documents and one was like, one that really stood out

(16:58):
was there was an applicate for a certificate out of Denver, Colorado.
And up until this point, you know, the person who
originally called it in the boyfriend and even heard her
and they knew who kept referred to as little girls
is a batt one.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
So I left the name in there because it's actually
not her name, which we'll get into later. But of
course she's you know, a minor, but that's not her name.
So of the birth certificate had a different name on it, essentially, right,
And I'm curious. I don't know if he went into this,
but the name on the birth certificate, the mother's name
and the father's name, did that matchup with her and
the attorney or were you going to get into that later.

(17:38):
I'm definitely going to get into Okay, but these are
great questions. I'm glad you asked.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
I'm just so curious what you finds. Yeah, these papers
and everything, so okay.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, so he knows she's lying and now he has
all these papers, but he didn't have like a bunch
of time between getting all of these documents and realizing, oh,
she's here to even look at what he has, right,
So he's just kind of doing a quick scan of everything. Yeah,
and it's already not checking the boxes. But she agrees
to talk to him, so he confronts her with these discrepancies,

(18:08):
and she tells them, well, I'm running from an abusive
relationship and my real name is Dana Lawrence. And this
is true. This is her name, Dana Lawrence. Okay, but
she's been lying about her identity using someone else's social
Security number. She has multiple big pieces of identification or
pieces of identification that are stolen in not hers and notably,

(18:31):
because we're going to come back to this, Mark has
located this birth certificate for the little girl that they're
referring to is Isabella, and the father is listed as unknown.
So Dana is arrested at this point because they know
she's falsifying her identity and they don't know exactly what
the extent of it is, but she's arrested on this alone,

(18:51):
which for this little girl super sad. She has to
go into state custody at this point because her birth
certificate shows that the father unknown, which means it's not
she's not legally you know, related to this boyfriend either,
even though she's clearly been living with him and under
his care.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, that's rough, really rough.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
So the boyfriend comes down to the police department in
the midst of all this, and he's very upset because
this little girl clearly means a lot to him. So
he tries to tell Mark that he's the little girl's father.
So Mark's like, okay, we'll take a DNA test. Then
his story changes again, and.

Speaker 3 (19:30):
That's when he changed. He changed his story too, well,
I'm not the birth father, I am the adopted father.
And again we hit him up with well, you know,
we'll have agents at the courthouse in Baltimore tomorrow morning
to get the adoption paperwork, and once we get verification
that you have legally adopted her, you can take your
daughter and be on your way. And then yet again

(19:51):
he changes his story to say, well, I don't know
if she, meaning Dana, ever turned the paperwork into the courthouse.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
So it's really sad, and the boyfriend clearly cares for
this little girl, but he and Dana were never married.
He's not related to this child. So now Mark needs
to find out who her father is because you know,
nobody wants her to be in state custody.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
So Mark continues the conversation with the boyfriend, and he
did say the boyfriend was really never that cooperative, but
they did speak on a few occasions where he gave
up a little bit more. Mark is trying to understand
why a criminal defense attorney would get into a relationship
with someone like who we now know is Dana Lawrence
and also continue to lie for her because as an attorney,

(20:43):
there are consequences for that. So apparently, shortly after this
guy and Dana had met, she'd told him she was pregnant,
but shortly after that she'd run off to Texas, and
since he truly believed that she was pregnant with his child,
he hired a private investigator to go and find her.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Okay, this is all so wild. Wait, can you clarify
at what point in their relationship did she say I'm
pregnant and run off to Texas. Basically, at some point
after meeting Nick and beginning to date him on the
East Coast, Dana takes off again with Isabella, who's very little,
so Dana runs off to Texas with Isabella and calls

(21:25):
Nick from Texas and she's like, I'm in Texas. I'm
here with my mom. She has Isabella with her, and
so Nick goes to Texas and he's like, what's going on?
And he talks to Dana's sister, Billy, who tells Nick
her real name is Dana Lawrence. Well, Nick is really
confused at this point because somewhere along the way, Dana

(21:47):
had also told Nick that she might be pregnant with
his biological child.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Okay, so but she's not. But she's not and never was,
got it.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
So Nick then hires a PI firm back in New
Jersey because that's where Dana says she's running from, and
he says, I want you to find out everything you
can about Dana Lawrence and tell me what's going on here. Well,
this PI firm said that Dana had defrauded a family
and a rabbi in New Jersey, both different versions of

(22:22):
a faked pregnancy. So she was on the run because
her whole mo with this fake pregnancy was financial support
and so they had been providing that. Yeah, and interesting,
she was never pregnant. And it also said Yeah, it's
not the first time that she had pretended to be pregnant,
so okay, well that clarifies a lot. Yeah, so the
whole thing was a fraud who was never pregnant that
time around at all.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Gotcha.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
But that is why Nick was so invested, even after
she ran off to Texas, came back, finds out she's
a criminal.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
You know.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
I think I had also mentioned a conversation where he
did tell Mark or tell someone that he had always
wanted a family, and so that was big for him.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
So now he knows. But yet given all that, he
moves her from Texas to Philly and sets her up
in an apartment that's owned by a former client of his.
And he's bouncing back and forth between Philly and Baltimore
because she's wanted nationwide at this point, and he knows
she's wanted nationwide, but he's hiding her out until she

(23:23):
has some problems in Philadelphia neighborhood dispute, neighbors call the
police on her, whatnot. So she's going to get out
of Dodge quick again. So now the attorney has to
move her again, and he complained to the landlord who
he knew because he's represented them in a civil case
that it was like the sixth or seventh time he
had to move her, and then you know, they probably

(23:47):
went up to Maine in Vermont, you know, they wanted
a roundfle of, but they did end up settling in Nashuae.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
So when he says she's wanted nationwide, there's an arrest
warrant out for her essentially for like identity theft or
fraud or something various identity theft and fraud charges. And
they're in multiple states. A lot of them are on
the East Coast, but there's multiple places where she's wanted, gotcha.
So for a while this kind of works and they

(24:16):
fly under the radar. This criminal defense attorney's practice was
in Baltimore, but he would return on the weekends to
this little apartment that they had rented. Now, this chapter
of Mark sort of unraveling things, it's really where we
see how methodical Dana Lawrence is in good a sense
of how many times she must have done this. Because

(24:39):
while her boyfriend is working in Baltimore during the work week,
even though he's rented them an apartment there, she goes
to a women's shelter with her daughter and she says
that I'm running from an abusive relationship and I need
shelter here. So she does this, and she really weaves
herself into this community. And part of the way that

(25:03):
this shelter works is you do volunteer work, because of course,
you know, you're not paying rent to be there.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's for your safety.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
And she really immerses herself in this community of volunteers,
and at first it's on a very part time basis,
and through this volunteer work, Dana cozies up to people
who work in the mayor's office. So, okay, back to
the police station. Dana's arrested, and we know the little
girl's taken and she's sent to live with the foster family.

(25:34):
So Mark's really his first priority is I need to
find out who her dad is and get her out
of this situation. He needs the full story. So he's
got the birth certificate and he's seeing that the child's
father is listed as unknown. So from that birth certificate,
Mark is able to locate a nurse that helped deliver
the baby, and the delivery happened in Colorado, that's where

(25:55):
the baby was born.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
So he calls up this nurse and I got hold
of her in Colorado, and she remembered the birth because
when the baby was born, she had certain things in
her school sample that triggered an alert to child protective Services.
And she also had a conversation with the dad, who

(26:18):
she never got his name, but she knew he was
from originally from Massachusetts. They had that conversation because that
nurse marries her name. She was from Massachusetts, and she
remembered he was either from North or South Carolina. So
I knew he was looking for Matt well as she
was back up. The landlord never met him, but knew

(26:39):
that the boyfriend was named Matt. I was able to
identify two individuals that fit that profile living in that
general vicinity where she was during that three month time frame,
and the very first one I was able to reach
was a guy in South Carolina, and he says, well,
look at I don't know Isabella. My daughter's name is.

(27:01):
My girlfriend left with my daughter, you know, two or
three years ago and never came back and I've been
looking for her ever since. But I don't think that's
my daughter, because you know, we were in Colorado at
the time. They were in South Carolina. Last I knew
she was in Florida.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, but is this him? I mean it sounds like
it could be him. It's him, So we know. Now,
this little girl's name is not Isabella. Obviously I'm not
going to reveal her actual name, but she has a
dad who's been out there looking for her since her birth,
and he had been looking for her by checking arrest

(27:39):
records in every place that he thought Dana might be.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Oh my gosh, and the child aka Isabella not her
real name. She's three years old at this time. At
this time, she's three years old. Oh yeah, it's three
years of him doing this totally. I mean, it's just heartbreaking,
like so much time lost. And so even though he's
checking all of these arrest records in every place that
he thinks there's even a possibility she could have been,
he doesn't know her name is Dana Lawrence. He knows

(28:05):
her by the name Genevieve Morgan, a different name, a
different name. So but interesting that what is her name Jenna?
So first it was Jenna Kaplan, Jenna Kaplan. Now it's
Genevieve Morgan. Yeah, she had a lot of different names.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, So they go ahead, they do a DNA test,
They confirm that he's the father, and so now they
need to get Isabella into her father's custody. So Dana's
in jail, but they have a custody hearing for Isabella
coming up, and so they fly him up there and
they're at this hearing. Dana's trying to talk her way

(28:39):
out of this. She wants her criminal defense attorney boyfriend
to get custody. She's trying to argue that point because
they're in a relationship, the daughter's comfortable with him, supposedly,
But meanwhile, Mark's been in contact with this actual father
of the child and he's flown up to New Hampshire
for this hearing.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Dana assisting she didn't know who the father was until
of a sudden the doors swing open and here comes
the dad, and then she's like, oh, yeah, now I
remember he is the father. Now, mind you. They've been
living together on and off for a couple of years.
So the court eventually gave Matt custody of his daughter,

(29:19):
but from jail, she was calling him, calling Matt, trying
to persuade him not to take Isabella away from her
and her boyfriend, that they could all live on the
one roof the three adults and raise her bananas.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
So when he says they've been living together a couple
of years, he means the boyfriend he is.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Actually referring to the father of this child. It was
not some fling. This was like another relationship that she
had been in. They were living together on multiple years,
off and on. They were in a relationship. She had
the baby, and then what just disappeared. She disappeared. She
listed unknown on the paternity side of the birth certificate

(30:02):
and jetted, Wow, yeah, I think I can speculate a
reason why she does this, but we'll get into that later.
But yeah, So then she has this like wild idea
that okay, father of Isabella first named Matt, just come
in love with us, will be one big happy one. Yeah,
MAT's like wild, absolutely not so. Yeah, that was maybe

(30:24):
one of the crazier little moments in this interview actually,
is that she even thought that was a possibility. But
Matt returns to South Carolina with his daughter, which I'm
sure was a massive adjustment for both of them, and
Dana Lawrence is in jail and they're trying to decide
what to charge her with. They eventually landed on identity fraud,
which is because she was using a social Security number

(30:44):
that wasn't hers on various untal applications and other sort
of forms. So in September of twenty seventeen, Dana was
convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
She got eighteen months federal time for using the social
Security number on that rental application. I credit her daughter,
Kennedy for a lot of that, because Kennedy actually took
the stand against her mother in the sentencing, and she
hit the nail on the head. She told the judge,
if you let her go, she's just going to go
do this to other people. Kenny say, she destroyed my life,

(31:19):
my siblings' lives in every person she touched.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Who is Kennedy. So Dana Lawrence is sentenced to prison,
And part of why she got an eighteen month sentence
is because another daughter of hers actually showed up to
testify against her. And now is where I learned that
Dana Lawrence has six children, oh my gosh, with six
different men, which, of course, like I don't have any
judgments on that as an isolated fact. Yeah, but given

(31:49):
her pattern of deceiving people, I think it's very telling.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
How old is Dana Lawrence.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Dana Lawrence I think now is in her early forties. Okay,
So she got charged. She's charged for all of these
people come out of the woodwork, right and had they
all been looking for her?

Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (32:06):
So as Mark is putting together this like case against
her and helping the prosecutors get everything they need together,
he's unraveling her past, which I'm now going to get into,
and part of that is this daughter, Kennedy. So we
find out Dana has a lot of children with different
fathers and that she uses pregnancy to you know, manipulate

(32:29):
and deceive people and defraud them of money in certain instances.
So pregnancies, real pregnancies and fake pregnancies, right, and she
is always leaving the father as unknown because on every
birth certificate, right, on every birth certificate except for her
first birth certificate of her first daughter, Brittany, who I'm

(32:49):
going to talk about. But we learned that Dana is
from Saint Augustine, Florida. Her first child, a girl, is
placed for adoption, and she's a teenager at the time,
so until recently, no, a teenager at at the time
of her first daughter's birth.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Oh, Dana is a teenager, Okay, Okay.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
So she's placed for adoption and no one really knows
anything about this baby girl or her life. But we'll
come back to that. Then Dana gets married a few
years later to a man who lives in Utah, so
she moves to Utah. She tells him that she's from
a very wealthy family associated with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Not true.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
The marriage ended and Dana went to Illinois and then
to New York. In New York, she met a very
wealthy man and entered into a relationship with him, but
then he broke up with her and she begins stalking him.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, so his family hires an attorney kind of gets
rid of her. She tried to tell him she was
pregnant with his child. She wasn't how much time has passed,
you know, I'm not sure. I think this is over
the course of like less than ten years. Okay, all
of this.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Wow. So she I'm just like trying to track all
the movements. And then she gets to New York. She's
in a relationship with someone and then stalks him, Like
what was going on with that relationship? Yeah, so she
learned that he was very wealthy and she started behaving
in a way that was strange to him, and so
he broke things off, which really upset her. And so
she got pregnant in New York and put no name

(34:13):
on the father side of the birth certificate. So this
is her second daughter. Her first was placed for adoption
when she was a teenager back in Florida. So this
is her second daughter, Kennedy. We're in the late nineties
in New York. Dana is keeping herself afloat with essentially
credit card fraud. She's spending a lot on credit cards

(34:33):
that she has no business being in the possession of.
And she's leaving really generous tips at a local bar,
really getting to know the staff there, and ends up
sleeping with someone who works at the bar. And she
then conceives a second daughter. So Dana and her two

(34:56):
daughters moved to Florida. That's where she meets another man
who is I think a pilot. Oh okay, yeah, And
so with this pilot, they then all move Dana, the pilot,
the two daughters to Indiana. In Indiana, during their relationship,
she has an idea for a small business and he
gives her five thousand dollars as soon as she's got

(35:17):
that five grand, she's gone again. Okay, she's not using
it to start a business, no, okay, she's just taking
the money. Sounds like she's already kind of running, yeah,
fraud like all the time.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
All the time, these like small time scams, scams.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah. So she takes her two daughters to Massachusetts, but eventually,
for whatever reason, calls this pilot back up and says, actually,
I'm pregnant. So he then leaves Indiana and goes to
Massachusetts to be with her. He's now moved from Florida
to Indiana for her and then now to Massachusetts, right

(35:54):
and Dana shortly after that. So this is in the
early two thousands, gives birth to a son. Okay, and
from what I understand, that son is the pilot's son. Gotcha,
so that is his dad, But once again she leaves
his name off of the birth certificate.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Wild yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
And then the whole family, all of them, moved to
Rhode Island in two thousand and three. She tells people
she's Harvard educated, just custody of her nieces. And she
starts telling her daughters to tell people that they are
her nieces. That she has gained custody of them after
a family tragedy.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
And so she also starts telling people that she's going
to inherit millions of dollars and she's just her inheritance
keeps getting held up. So she's running in these wealthy
social circles kind of pretending that she's this wealthy Rhode
Island mom slash aunt with custody of her nieces. I mean,
it's wild. This reminds me of the Peggy Fulford story

(36:57):
we did where she was Dennis Rodman's financial mana and
she was telling people her son was her brother. Yeah,
and I think I remember she said she did that
because she wanted to look younger like she he would,
you know, she didn't want to be like aged by
that she had I'm very young. But she was similarly like,
lying about your kids identity is so strange, And I

(37:19):
can't imagine asking your kid to lie.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah, like horrible.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Like to think that you don't want to identify to
people that you're their mom would be like so sad,
so sad.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
And so she tells her friends in Rhode Island that
she's having a lot of trouble getting her inheritance I'm
not exactly sure what her stories consisted of, but she
steals from her friends. They loan her money, they loan
her credit cards, she takes them for a ride. That's
what she does. And she knows she's going to get
found out in Rhode Island, so she flees to Canada

(37:54):
with her three kids, leaves the pilot. I don't know where.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Pilot's not coming with them.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Pilot's gone, okay, not even the ability to fly a
plane will get him there with her. So while in Canada,
Dana gives birth to another child. Whose child is this
I don't know, okay, and then she comes back to
the United States. But since she's wanted, she has multiple
arrest warrants at this point all over the East Coast.

(38:20):
She stopped at the border with her four kids. With
her four kids, so she puts the son that she
gave birth to in Canada. She places him for adoption
in Canada.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
M hmm, wow.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Yeah, I don't know if he actually would have been
placed for adoption in Canada or the US, but she
gave birth to him in Canada, yeah, and conceived him
I think in the US.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
And so he doesn't come across the border with them.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
I don't know exactly how that comes out, but she
places him for adoption.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, And so she goes to New York and she
faces charges and in the process of that, she loses
custody of the two that she has in tow as
well as the son that belonged to the pilot.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
And what happens to the sun.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
So the son goes to be with his dad, who
you know, is the pilot, and the daughters they have
to go somewhere.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
So the youngest daughter they locate her dad, who was
the person who worked at the bar, and she's now
sent to live with this family as a young kid
she's never met before.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's so wild. And also she's been raised with these
siblings and now they're all being separated.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
That's got to be so hard. Yeah, it was really hard.
Kennedy was interviewed about it at one point and talked
about just how hard it was. And she was actually
sent to live with Dana's sister Billy. Okay, Yeah, Dana
asked even her own children to lie for her. So
sometime around twenty ten, when Kennedy is twelve or thirteen
years old, Dana begins dating another attorney and they're living

(39:50):
with him in Boston and then she tells him, I
need to go to Florida. I'm going to be arrested
if we stay here. He's like okay, and they all
go to Florida.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Wow, because whenever she was initially arrested after coming back
into the US. And then her son gets sent to
live with his father, her daughter goes to live with
her father, and then the other daughter goes to live with
their sister. She's sent to prison, but I'm guessing for
a very short amount of time because it's for fraud
or credit card theft or something, so she's probably out
in like a year or less. And then it sounds

(40:21):
like she gets right back into her old tricks.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, and she regains custody of Kennedy because Kennedy was
with her sister.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
So they go to Florida, Dana twelve or thirteen year
old Kennedy and this new attorney she's dating. And then,
just like always, she then does something in Florida and
has to leave. Well, this time she does something pretty
unimaginable and leaves Kennedy behind.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Hmm, you know when he and Dana left Miami Beach,
she had stolen somebody's identity at her place for employment
and got credit cards in that woman's name. A horrible
that all started unraveling. The police called her in for
an interview. She told her, hey, I can't make it
now today. I'll be in there tomorrow after work at
four o'clock.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
Who would believe that.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
Well, North Miami Beach police gave her that courtesy, and
she went home that night and told Kenny, we're on
the run. We're moving again. Because she used to say
the Boogeyman's coming. She was say the Boogeyman's coming. And
Kenny's a small kid at that time. Was she grew
up with it at at thirteen years old. Now Kenny's like,
I'm done. I have friends here, I'm not going good

(41:30):
for her. Her mother and Jonathan, my boyfriend, gave her
twenty dollars and left her in an apartment by herself.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
In Miami a thirteen year old girl, right, so she said,
but you.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
Know, give that kid credit. She survived for about two weeks,
and she went to school every day because that was
important to her, taking a city bus. And then when
the money ran out, she turned herself. She called the
police and says, hey, can somebody come take care of me?
My mother abandoned me. So the police came put her
in foster care until Billy could come down and only

(42:03):
claimed to her.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah, since the beginning of really her late teenage years,
she's had this pattern of being on the run from
state to state in different relationships and having children and
taking them along with her. So Kennedy goes back into
Billy's care at that point, and you know, we still

(42:27):
don't know how much about this first daughter that Dana
had as a teenager, but all of the other siblings
that can be in touch are in touch, so the
two younger daughters and then the son that she had
with the pilot, and so Mark didn't know anything about
this first daughter. And then when all of this came
out about Dana's arrest and her eighteen month prison sentence

(42:50):
in New Hampshire, Mark was asked to do a TV
interview and he got in the car to go to
the interview and he got a call from a guy
in Maryland.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
I got a call from a guy in Townsend, Maryland,
who the weekend before was at a bar with his wife.
They had just fallen him from out of town, stopped
to get a bite to eat a drink, and who
do they run into but Dana Lawrence in the bar.
She had now finished her sentence, she was done her
parole or probation, i should say, and she had business

(43:26):
cards with her true name at this time, Dana Lawreen's
Social Justice Center or something. But she told them that
she worked for ABC, developing new reality shows and wanted
to know if he and his wife would be interested
in being in this new reality show that ABC was
putting together. And you know, if they were, you know,

(43:48):
could they provide their information to her and she would
get them a casting call. The wife is all excited
by this, was ready to jump on board, but the
husband's like, if it sounds too good to be true,
let's just hold off a little bit. You know.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
As soon as she got out of prison in New Hampshire,
she was right back at.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
It new schame reality TV show. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
And this person who reached out to Mark actually found
him the same way I did, which was at this point,
Dana's case is googleable, and so Mark's name comes up
because he's interviewed about it, and he reached out to
him on LinkedIn. So that's how we got in touch
with Mark, so this is all still happening. And at
this point Mark doesn't know anything about the first daughter

(44:33):
that Dana ever had, and actually just before our interview,
like the weekend before, he heard from her on LinkedIn
and then they got on the phone.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Brittany was the first of Dana's kids. She was born
in like nineteen ninety one, the very beginning of the stuff.
Dana was very very young, and nobody knew what ever
happened to Brittany. Nobody could tell you. You know, her sister
couldn't tell me. The kids couldn't because Brittany was gone
before any of them were born, right according to Billy,

(45:08):
the sister, Yeah, they knew. She went for adoption, but
you know, as luck would have it, Britney's adopted family
gave her a twenty one in me kit and she
took it, submitted it, and she sat on those results
for a while. It never hit the link like who

(45:31):
you might be related to? She got the data back,
but never hit it until very recently and she hit
like who you might be connected to? And it was
through that she was connected to Dana as our birth mother.
So she reached out for Dana not knowing any of
the stuff. It's you know, Dana's tried to suck her
into her same scheme, telling her that, you know that

(45:55):
she's heired to some lumber mill or saw mill fortune,
that she travels down to Dominican Republic every year during
the holidays to give gifts to the underprivilege down there,
that she spends most of her time in Spain. You know,
it's the same type of stuff she told other people
in the past, you know, being connected to the royal
family or to Jack Nicholson. And she was, you know,

(46:19):
sucking Brittany in. Now Brittany is not Brittany anymore. Brittany's
now her adoptive family gear. So something just didn't sit
well recently with her about these conversations with her mom,
and her mom sent her a picture of her when
she was a kid, and you know, she was doing

(46:41):
a research online saw this story. I saw the mugshots
of Dana and noticed that there was a mole on
Dana's mugshot between her eyes, the same mole as on
the picture Dana sent to Brittany from years ago. So
she was starting and you know, she found my name.
I didn't know this is just how this passed. On day,

(47:04):
you know, I get a message on LinkedIn. At first,
I get a request on LinkedIn to be a contact.
So Brittany called me. She's like, you know, this is
a story that I'm being told, and she says, my
parents had dropped me. I've been living in Tennessee. I
obviously never met like birth parents, and I'm an only child.

(47:28):
But putting the pieces together because Danna is back in
I guess Washington, DC area.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Okay, so it's a lot, but Mark is basically saying
that Dennis's first child is reaching out to him, and
she is learning on her own through googling that her
mom is a common woman and that she's been.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Just so horrible. Yeah, I mean, also thinking about like
this child, you haven't talked to you in so long,
reaching out to you, and then she just starts spinning
these lies to her. It's just hard sometimes understand how
someone could be such a pathological liar and just also
be only thinking about how she can use people totally.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
And it's like there's no big build up to a
prison sentence here. She's out. I mean, at least when
I talked to Mark, what two weeks ago, she wasn't
in prison. I think the longest sentence she had was
the New Hampshire one. She's likely still doing this.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Can I have a question at the daughter who's we're
calling Brittany but that's not her name, right, You know,
it's got to be such a disappointing thing. Maybe I
mean to understand that your mother is a sort of
serial scammer, but was she able to connect with any
of her siblings? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (48:41):
So Mark has stayed in touch with definitely the two
girls now young women that he got to know over
the course of her trial and conviction, and he did
put them in touch, and I don't know what that
resulted in, but I know that he was able to
connect them and maybe they'll have a relationship of some kind.
And yeah, it's just got to be so disappointing if

(49:02):
you're someone who is looking for a biological parent and
then you find out that the first thing they do
is lie to you the first thing. Yeah, horrible, horrible.
So Brittany's only interactions with her mom have just been
her lying again. And you know, I was asking Mark, like,
how is it possible that she's not serving more time

(49:22):
for the kind of crime she's committing And I think
it kind of goes back to something we see a
lot of in these sort of small time scams. You
convince someone that you're pregnant, but how do you prove
that you are not pregnant? How does someone else prove
that you were never pregnant?

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Or like you run a bunch of cons but they're
not violent. You know, this is not violent crime. So
you know, she's up in the East Coast, like stealing
from her friends. And then she does get a conviction,
but it's what was it, like eighteen months or something,
and so then she's just out again and a lot
of times also good behavior. Maybe she doesn't even serve

(50:01):
those eighteen months, and you know, so she has a record,
but it's not like she's done anything that legally could
put her behind bars for a very long amount of time, right.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Yeah, totally. It's like all small enough that she can
skip town and not be at the top of someone's list.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
This is like the essential problem with cereal scammers is
that we see all the time, is that you know,
if I'm meeting someone like Dana, like I want to
know because like you know, she's going to probably try
to scam me or whatever she comes into a community,
It's like, they probably want to know, but it's so
difficult to actually stop people like this because they just

(50:41):
continue to move and do the same thing over and
over again. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
Absolutely, And she probably does gain the trust of people
by saying she's a mom and she's a single mom.
And I can see how someone might fall for that, Like,
who would suspect it?

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (50:58):
I wouldn't. All the way back in the beginning when
Mark was contacted about her behavior in the Mayor's office,
you know, he at least intercepted the case before she
got those account numbers.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Yeah, And the fact that he did something about it
and that it actually led to some charges is pretty
amazing because I feel like that's actually kind of rare
when it comes to scams.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Yeah, and some press. So now she's more googleable Yeah, yeah,
which I'm sure Brittany is not the first person to
google her with suspicions and now find out the truth.
So yeah. Dana has also told people that she's the
heir to the Esday Latter fortune, that she works for
George Lucas at a film company. I mean, she has

(51:42):
all kinds of stories. She's conned wealthy businessman, the pilot,
a rabbi, her own family and friends, all manner of
romantic partners, a lot of people who didn't ever know
who she really was. And you know, female con artists.
I think it is like us talked about in how
violating it is. But if you're in a relationship with

(52:05):
someone and they've completely lied to you about everything and
there's intimacy there, it's like, have you consented really to anything?

Speaker 3 (52:12):
No?

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Yeah, that's really horrible. It's really horrible. And so she's
probably out there and still doing this. And you know,
I also wanted to mention that the attorney, the criminal
defense attorney that Mark interacted with, he was actually disbarred.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Wow because of this because of his lies?

Speaker 1 (52:29):
Or yeah, he can no longer practice law there because
he lied.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Yeah wow, Yeah, I mean that makes sense. Can't do that? Yeah,
can't be doing that? What a story. I can't believe
she's still just out there. I mean I can, but
it's just like it is mind blowing.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Yeah, I know that guy is so confusing in the
middle of trying to explain her history, but I think
that's by design, truly.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Like truly trying to figure out if you're a person
who meets her and then trying to like sort through
her history or past, it would be incredibly confusing.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Yeah, like all of these different fathers of different children,
none of them on their birth certificates, different locations, different
identities and careers. Everything about her is like she's a chameleon.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Yeah, and what about her family? Did you ever learn
anything about them?

Speaker 1 (53:18):
I didn't. I heard sort of a rumor from someone
I called that didn't interview that she had a very
difficult upbringing, but I can't verify that. And yeah, wow,
well thanks for telling me that story. Yeah, thanks for
sticking with it. Yeah, lots of twists and turns, so
many twists and turns, so much travel. Yeah, well listen,

(53:39):
I don't have a great true crime recommendation right now,
but you have a medium recommendation.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
I have a recommendation. It's just not it's not true crime.
But I have sort of been love I've been loving it.
I got on the train later. There's three seasons. It's
called The Gilded Age. It's on HBO. So this is
a show. This is a TV show, okay, scripted, not
die documentary. And it's like following families in the late
eighteen hundreds, like eighteen nineties five, like very close to

(54:09):
the turn of the century in Brooklyn, New York, Okay.
And it's just like about like society, and it's like
the new money versus the old money families that are like,
we've been around since the American Revolution and you just
got here and they're like constructing Brownstones and it's sort
of like down Nabby, except it's in New York, and

(54:30):
you know, there's a lot of historical parts, like the
opening of the Brooklyn Bridge happens, and it's just really
fun and sort of an easy entertaining watch. When you
see them building the Brownstones, do you want to reach
for the TV and just buy them all?

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Just buy them all?

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah, someone please invest that I'm related to in the future.
It is fun, like they're living in the Brownstones, but
it's still horse and Buggy love us. So they're like
pulling up to the Brownstone that's in the carriage. So
Ben and I started watching this is just like a
relax at the end of a stressful day. Put on
a couple episodes of this. But there's one storyline and

(55:08):
I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I mean,
there's three seasons out, like they've been out for a while,
but there's a storyline of one of the characters who
meets this woman who like everyone's like, who's her family
and we're not sure, We're not sure, and then she
sort of surreptitiously gets him in on this like investment deal.
And I was like, it's a scam. It's a scam,
and Ben was like, what are you sure. I was like,

(55:30):
one hundred percent. All the red flags are there, this
is a scam. Just you wait, and it was it
all played out, and he was like, wow, you really
spotted that. And I was like, even too much.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
About the show, You're like, I can spot a scam.
I spend too much time or maybe the right amount,
because it's not going to happen to you. You're interviewing
the people who scam you.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Yeah. I'm very on alert for all the red flags,
even in escapist TV.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Better safe than sorry.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Yeah, So there was a little bit of a scam
in there, but not a true crime show.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Well I'll have to check it out.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Well that's our episode for today. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
We'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactlyrightmedia
dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram at
the Knife Podcast or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Paytia Eaton.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
Artwork five Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia Hardstark and Daniell Kramer