Words That Broke the Case: Betrayal and the Unabomber Manhunt

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This program features the individual opinions of the hosts, guests,
and callers, and not necessarily those of the producer, the station,
it's affiliates, or sponsors. This is True Crime Tonight.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to True Crime Tonight on iHeartRadio. We're talking true
crime all the time. I'm Stephanie Leidecker alongside Courtney Armstrong
and Body Move in and we have an exceptional show tonight.
It's Thursday, August fourteenth, and listen, we have the person,
the rock star of crime and forensics. Our first guest

(00:41):
is the retired FBI Profiler in forensics linguist James R.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Fitzgerald.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
He's really the person who has solved so many crimes.
You'll remember him from the Unibomber, also Jean Benet Ramsey,
the DC Sniper, and also the Anthrax attacks. He also
is shown in the Netflix documentary Manhunt the Unibomber. Make
sure you check that out. It's a scripted series, and
also the host of the Cold Red podcast. So listen,

(01:10):
you wear many many hats, but you are the person.
He is the guy who really has taken language and
turned it into the science that has solved so much.
So James, we are so grateful to have you here.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Well body, Steph and Courtney, it's great to be here too.
Thank you for inviting me to true crime tonight. It
is nighttime for me, and it's a good time to
discuss true crime. And that's why I'm here.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
I'm freaking out a little bit. I'm gonna tell you
right now, Fits just said my name, like.

Speaker 5 (01:40):
I'm freaking out just a little bit. I might be
stand girling a little too hard.

Speaker 4 (01:45):
I don't know if if he knows like the instrumental
effect that he's had on my life, and I'm.

Speaker 5 (01:53):
Getting a little bit clemmed. I'm not gonna lie.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
I don't think he understands how important his work in
forensic linguistics.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I'll tell you I learned about this after the Actually
it was Discovery Channel mini series or scripted series. It's
technically not a documentary Manhunt, un obamber. And then of
course I went over to Netflix a few months after
it aired in the late summer and early fall of
twenty seventeen. Seems like so long ago. But yeah, I

(02:25):
don't think I was even on Twitter before that. I
know now it's X but then Twitter and that people
will Discovery, you know, the publicity people. Yeah, yeah, get on,
get on, and the stuff that was coming out afterwards
about every episode I had, someone had to tell me
what the definition of fangirl was. And these people are
going back and forth on Facebook on Twitter. And there's

(02:45):
one woman that every time I would come on she
heard my voice on different podcasts, she'd get out Fits.
Then she said, but she named her dog Fits, and
he'd start barking. So I'm watching these tweets come across,
and I say, boy, is it a good thing or
a bad thing when someone names their dog after you?
So I took it.

Speaker 5 (03:06):
Still, It's an honor.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
Definitely a good thing. So I'm gonna jump right into it.
I'm gonna jump right into it. Forensic linguist and former
FBI agent. We're gonna call him Fits per his request,
but I have severe, massive respect for him. His name
is James Fitzgerald. He played a pivotal pivotal role in
solving the Unibomber case by analyzing the language used in

(03:28):
the Unibomber's manifesto and other writings over a seventeen year period.
Ted Kazinski, also known as the Unibomber, mailed or hand
delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs, killing three people
and injuring at least two dozen more throughout the United States.
Fitz was able to definitively link the domestic terrorist to

(03:50):
the crimes by identifying unique linguistic patterns in the unibomber's
manifesto and personal writings, marking one of the first major
uses of forensic linguistics in a high profile criminal investigation.
And if you know anything about me, you know that
my big motto is the Internet is the new crime scene.

(04:11):
And with a lot of our communication style happening over
Twitter or x and Facebook and you know, tiktoks and
YouTube comments and whatnot. In my work I use basically
his patterns of recognition to figure things out. And he
has been an instrumental role model for me, as you know,

(04:32):
a web sluth, so to speak. And he was very
instrumental in learning how to I used his work to
find Luca Magnata. Of course, Luca Magnata killed jun Lynn
in Montreal of twenty twelve, and James Fitz and I
don't even know if he knows this, but Fits is
a key factor in that. So thank you Fitz for
all of your work. I'm going to give a little

(04:54):
bit of case background on ninabaumer Ted Kaczynski. He was
a Harvard educated mathema at its prodigy and former UC
Berkeley professor who became a reclusive hermit. He lived off
the grid in a cabin in Montreal, where he would
construct his homemade bombs. Kazinsky carried out a nationwide bombing
campaign from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen ninety five, killing

(05:16):
three individuals and injuring twenty three others. He targeted universities, airlines,
and individuals involved with modern technology. Investigators later learned that
the victims were targeted randomly from library research. The FBI
investigation into the crimes was dubbed unibomb derived from University

(05:38):
and Airline Bombing. Due to the early targets and attacks.
In nineteen ninety five, Kazinski demanded that his thirty five
thousand word manifesto, it was called The Industrial Society and
its Future, he published in nationwide newspapers or he would
continue his attacks. And that's where we meet fit, right,

(06:01):
So the manifesto gets published and now and now the
FBI has thirty five thousand words paragraphs, sentences, and history
to learn about the Unibomber, and boy did they learn
about the Unibomber. So we're going to get right into it.
Fitz's linguistic analysis help confirm the match, contributing to a

(06:25):
search warrant that led to the arrest of Ted Kazinski
on April third, nineteen ninety six. So, Fitz, thank you
so much for joining us. We're so lucky to have you.
The Unibomber is one of the most famous examples of
language cracking, and in a case, what made Ted Kazinski's
manifesto stand out linguistically?

Speaker 3 (06:44):
Well, first of all, yeah, this all brings back memories
because it was thirty years ago this month that I
showed up at Unibomb, actually July of nineteen ninety five.
So but the memories are all there. I wrote a
Journey to the Center of the Mind, my now four
parts memoir series. In book three, I spent two hundred
pages discussing my role in the Unibomb case. And yeah,

(07:07):
I was a police officer for eleven years in suburban Philadelphia,
an FBI agent in New York City, working bank robbers, extortions, kidnappings,
and I used all kinds of evidence to put bad
guys in jail, and you know fingerprints, and of course
you know tire tread marks and the early days of
DNA starting in the nineties, you know, you could use

(07:27):
that type of analysis. But what we're finding with the
unibomber and got what I found when I was assigned
to the unibomb Task Force in July of ninety five,
was that they had no evidence at all on his
documents and as well as on any of the devices,
any of the improvised explosive devices aka bombs. And I

(07:49):
then realized, and this guy's been getting away with us
for seventeen years, I said to myself and others in
the room with me when I first showed up, I said,
we have to start, you know, deep diving into this
thirty five thousand word, fifty six page, single space document
has never been associated with any case before, or nothing

(08:09):
like this with any case. Of course, other kidnappings have
had a note here, a note there, and the investigators
do their best and put something together. But now we
have this treasure trove of information of all these words
and all these pages, and it's so idiosyncratically written. It's
laid out like a nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties thesis or
dissertation with even a corrections page up front, you know

(08:32):
in nineteen thirty or a typewriter. So the author was
being consistent the unibomber with his anti technology, you know,
screed there in terms of no computers, no copies, used
carbon copies, and your younger viewers won't even know what
carbon paper is. You guys probably don't know what car
idea is, but you underneath other pieces of paper and

(08:54):
it makes copies when you type over it. So anyway,
you know, that's how he sent his various copies out.
So but you've got just a little bit ahead there.
I showed up in early July of ninety five, and
the big debate was do we accede to the demands
of this terrist? Do we publish this thing? And if
any of you or your audience has seen the movie

(09:15):
Twelve Angry Men in the Jewelry Room, and you know,
everyone thinks the guy's guilty except one guy. And you
know Henry Fond of the original movie critic, a critical thinker,
And that's kind of how it was with about eight
of us when the unibomb Task Force, when we went
in the room that first day with his demand, and
everyone's saying no, no, no, we can't print this thing.

(09:35):
And you know, we're every other nutcase out there will
want to do it. And I said, guys, I think
we're rushing to a decision here, I said, there, I've
had a few days just now to just go over.
There's such much there's I won't say unique, but there's
such highly distinctive and idiosyncratic writing here worded she's using
and I don't even pick up the linguistic smoking gun yet.

(09:56):
But you can't eat your cake and have it too.
So but I'm still looking through it, said we got
to get this published. Someone out there, a former professor,
a former student, an editor somewhere, you know, maybe a
family member that was in there. And one by one
over the next week and a half, people in the
Unibomb task for if it's you may be onto something
there again. I was just part of a team. Other

(10:18):
people in the in the UTF for short were doing
their jobs too, because I found something highly distinctive on
the flight out to Unibomb that in the second letter
the Unibomber ever wrote in nineteen eighty five to Professor
McConnell at the University of Michigan. It was a trick
letter to get the people to open up the device,

(10:39):
which in fact then would explode and hopefully kill someone. Well,
I look down the left hand column and found the
words dad it is. I.

Speaker 5 (10:47):
I remember.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
That's an It's called an acrostic in literary terms. I
didn't even know that term back then, but I.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
Used to do that with a friends letter of the
of these each paragraph okay, and then the line dad
it is. I.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
I took that to the boss Jim Freeman was his
name of the UNIBOMB Task Force, and I said, hey,
I just said, casually, Yeah, what do you guys think
of this data design? What are you talking about? Well,
this nineteen eighty five, ten year old letter, what do
you guys? You know, think no one's ever seen that before?
Come in here, Fitzgerkook and he put me on a
speakerphone with the Attorney General's office. I'm talking to her people,

(11:26):
Jennet realmless people. And after that call was ended, said fits,
you're in charge of all the documents on this case. Wow.
And I don't think I've ever even used the word
linguist in my life. I had a master's in psychology,
you know, I had advanced degrees whatever, but but really
nothing formally with language analysis. But all of a sudden
I was put in charge of it. And that's when
I said earlier. No other evidence in this case except

(11:49):
the composite sketch of course, with the aviator glasses and
the hoodie, and that was the only evidence the UNIBOMB
Task Force had. I said, guys, there's something in here.
I'm going to mind this, and Eric fitz it's yours.
You run with it. And I started coming up, you know,
every few days with something a little bit here, a
little bit there, a spelling, a phraseology, and I you know.

(12:10):
And at the same time, when I got there in
the summer of ninety five, there were twenty five hundred suspects,
some named, some unnamed, and I'm and the ones that
are named, and they can get you know, they do
background checks on them, They put FBI surveillance teams on them.
No one's rights are being violated, but we're certainly watching
what they're doing in public, all this stuff. And they
would get some writings of these people and send them

(12:32):
to me. In my early days of doing you know,
forensic linguistic analysis. I would just look at the manifesto.
I'd look at these writings of these suspects. No, no, no,
and anyway. Finally, September nineteenth, just not too long from
the time we're doing our chat year and True Crime Tonight,
thirty years ago, is when it finally was published in
the Washington Post. And then we got all these new

(12:54):
leads coming in. I can't tell you how many neighbors
were suspected, how many ex husbands were suspected.

Speaker 5 (13:00):
Thought we're going to cut the break.

Speaker 4 (13:01):
When we come back, fitz is going to continue diving
into the unibomber case and maybe some other suspects.

Speaker 5 (13:06):
Keep it right here. True Crime Tonight. We're talking true
crime all.

Speaker 6 (13:09):
The time, and we have the greatest guest right now,
James Fitzgerald. He's one of the people who actually solved
the unibomber case, as well as many many more. Sorry, fitz,

(13:30):
we didn't mean to cut you off, but continue with
what you were saying.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
I had one person called the eight hundred number that
was set up for the unibomb Task Force, and we're
getting dozens of calls a day, and they finally the guy,
the operator calls me and says, fitz you want to
talk to this one. Oh well, okay, hello, Agent Fitzgerald.
And the first thing she said was hello, I slept
with the unibomber and I'm here to help you. What wow.

(13:58):
And he's one of those where you get pull the
phone away from your face, look at it, you know,
the old landlines, and I see, all right, I don't
need those deep nails. But how do you know this guy?
And here, twenty plus years ago she was in college,
this wacky guy and all these you know, ideology, philosophy
regarding you know, in the evils of the technological society,
and she thought it was him. She didn't remember his name. Unfortunately,

(14:22):
she had a book that the guy gave her and
she kept all these years. And she never saw him again,
never saw his car, no tag, she described them, looks
a little bit like the composite sketch. Anyway, we took
the book off her, got fingerprints from it. Nothing matched up.
It was not the unibomber. So she called me later
that she was kind of disappointed she never slept with

(14:43):
the unibomber. But I said, well, I'm sorry to disappoint
you too. In that regard. Yeah, yeah, so anyway, but
other leads came in and then it was published and you,
your audience probably knows the rest. A guy in upstate
New York, his wife was a college professor. She read
it online the first time the FBI ever used the

(15:03):
internet to help solve a crime, because they published a
manifesto on it, and we currently encouraged that at the
task Force. And the guy named David Kazinski saw it
and he didn't want to believe it was his brother,
but he couldn't help, but finally come to the conclusion
it probably was. They got a lawyer, they had someone
look at a few documents. They started sending us documents

(15:26):
they kept over the year David and his mother one
hundred and seventy eight ted Kaczinski daughter, letters, poet, name,
short stories, essays, all these things that he wrote and
sent to David, his brother and his mother, And luckily
they were pack rats. Sometimes that's a bad thing, but
for us trying to catch the unibomber, it was a
good thing. And it turns out they had over one

(15:47):
hundred and seventy five or so documents, all written by
their son slash brother Teddy, and they were all coming
my way, and I started doing the analysis with my
five person team and it finally started coming together.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
And so you're you're reading this manifesto and you mentioned
you were from Philadelphia, you were a cop in Philadelphia,
and you're looking at this manifesto. It's thirty five thousand words,
and you know, people from Philadelphia have a unique way
of speaking. I love the Philadelphian accent, by the way,
the same here here's phil Yeah, here's to Philly, Philadelphia freedom,
let's do it.

Speaker 5 (16:22):
So you're looking for.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
Something that is going to when you're looking at this manifesto,
you're looking for kind of an accent, not really, I mean,
not a speaking accent, but you're looking for something.

Speaker 5 (16:34):
Unique to tell you about who this person is.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
And in manhunt, we learned that this was water because
people in Philadelphia say water instead of water.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
Right.

Speaker 4 (16:47):
So you're looking for something unique, anything unique, in this manifesto,
and you found one. What did you find?

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Well, it wasn't so much a regionalism. First of all,
it wasn't regional contact. Right. That's fine, But I understand exactly.
In linguistics we call it ideo elect. It's a term
other people have coined before me, and it's really a
personal dialect and it manifests both spoken language and in
written language. And the people are listening to me right now,

(17:15):
they could probably you know, pick up some of my
Philadelphia regionalisms which are all incorporated within my ideo elect
go go Philadelphia iggles, as they would say whenever I
crossed the bridge and the water to get to the stadium.
So yeah, all those things come together. And I did
meet a professor who just retired from Georgetown University's linguistics department,

(17:37):
and I did talk to him before I went out there.
He was given an advanced copy of the manifesto and
he pointed out a few things that maybe this person
grew up in Chicago and you know, approximate age and
you know, white male. But he didn't even rule out
it could be a black mail and I said, all right,
well thanks. I thought, hey, it's very interesting with this
guy who's spent a career studying and teaching linguistics, you

(18:00):
know what he can pick up from these thirty five
thousand words. Let me see if I can borrow from that.
And you know, even in not formally educated in the
world of linguistics, still let me put something out there
that I could help my fellow investigators. So I'm reading
this thing day in and day out. Sometimes I would
come in the morning and purposely start in the middle
of the manifesto, so I'm fresh. But I'm looking at

(18:22):
some of the keywords, some of the archaic terms. He
would use words like negro to represent you know, black people,
chicks and broads to describe women, none, you know, very nicer.
But this is the mindset this guy had. And he's
never talking about family or kids. So we're thinking, all right,
maybe this guy is not married and doesn't have kids.

(18:45):
I mean they would He would talk about young children,
how they're educated, things, but nothing that he would like
personalize it. So we're starting to build this profile. And
there's one letter I read that he not only bombed
a Yale professor named David Glertner and tore off part
of his hand, but then he about a month or
two later, he sent him rubbing salt in the wound,

(19:05):
a snarky letter criticizing him for his vomit with the
computer science etc. Etc.

Speaker 5 (19:12):
This is true.

Speaker 4 (19:12):
Current tonight on iHeartRadio, I'm Boddy Move and I'm here
with Courtney Armstrong and Stephanie Leidecker and the wonderful Jeames
fitz Fitzgerald, and we want to hear from you. Hit
us up on the talkbacks on the iHeartRadio app.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
He wrote, in the beginning of this letter, I guess
you think people without advanced degrees don't count. And then
about the next paragraph down in almost the same language, Oh,
I guess people without college degrees aren't important. I'm paraphrasing,
but the words are in my book, the third book.
I said, wait a minute, this unibomber guy is working

(19:44):
so hard not to be identified. Why would he give
us even a little clue that Number one, he's not
a college graduate. Number two, he doesn't have an advanced degree.
And that's when it hit me. No, he's flipping the
coin on us. He's the the antithesis of that, not
exactly opposite. But this guy has an advanced degree. People

(20:05):
were saying before he was, and that it was a
countermeasure on his part, a forensic countermeasure using language. And
that's when we first said, you know what, when I said,
this guy, let's bring his education level up. He is
not only a college graduate, he most likely has at
least one advanced degree. Maybe he's ABD, which is all
but dissertation. But you know, he wants to get published.

(20:28):
And this guy is a lot smarter than we think.
He also wrote in another letter to the New York
Times that he's tired of going into the Sierra Nevadas.
You know at nights and on weekend weekend is to
practice is bomb making, which we know serial bombers do,
that they have to practice their bomb somewhere. But we said, no, no, no,
he's not going to this yer in Nevada's and he's

(20:49):
making it sound like he has a full time job
where he only has nights and weekends free. No, this
guy doesn't have a job, and we narrowed it down
in that regard. Again no name and address. But the while,
I was slowly being altered and changed, certainly when I
got out to the unibomb task for all these factors.
But I know what your original question was in a
paragraph one five as I'm reading through it of the manifesto. Yes,

(21:13):
he numbered every paragraph in the manifesto up to two
hundred and twelve. Then there are a bunch of notes
after that that he numbered twenty six separate notes. I
think at the end of the manifesto. So it went
on and on and there at the end of paragraph five,
gotta the environment, this evils up technology that But then

(21:33):
it ends with but you can't eat your cake and
have it too?

Speaker 5 (21:37):
And why was that important?

Speaker 3 (21:38):
Well, the first time I read through it, it wasn't important.
Good question, But then you know, the next morning I
came in started halfway through a paragraph, you know, one
twenty five or something, and I get to that. So
wait a minute, you can't eat your That's not how
it said.

Speaker 5 (21:51):
It's not how it's right.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Right. We all grew up saying you can't have your
cake and eat it too. And there was no internet
searches back then, or at least none that I knew about.
I certainly went to I had our FBI library people
do some research. I found an old four season song
where they say you can't have your cake and eat
it too. Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay. He uses those
exact words, you can't have your cake and need it too.

(22:14):
But for some reason, the unibomber transposes the two verbs
and he writes it you can't eat your cake and
have it too. And I went to someone in the
task force. Hey, did you guys see Oh yeah, we
saw that. No big deal. Well no, it is kind
of a big deal. Well it did. It gave me
a feeling, you know, based on my brief meeting with

(22:35):
the linguistics professor before. I said, this is something I
don't know what the word word to be, but I
don't like to use the word you need because that
literally means one of a kind. But this is highly idiosyncratic.
And all the books, all the searching I could do
back then, no one found an example of you can't
eat your cake and have it too, only the Unibomber's manifesto.
And I was so proud of myself because this guy

(22:58):
was a wordsmith. He made no mistakes. Now, he would
x out some words because it was a manual typewriter
and he can't go and delete and paste and all
the things everyone does today. But other than that, he
was he wrote his sentences perfectly, grammatically aligned and independent clauses,
independent complex sentences. But here I said, no, what he

(23:20):
screwed up? He put the verb in the wrong place.
But guess what, he had it right, going back to
fifteenth century early modern English. And it was actually that's
how that expression was first used by some anonymous unknown
but we weren't even there yet. That wasn't even important
to us yet. So all these suspects writings are coming in.

(23:41):
We didn't know. This guy named David Kaczinsky in upstate
New York is fretting over this thing with his brother
who lives in a cabin in Montana. But you know,
he claims his brother wouldn't hurt a fly, but he
eventually does contact the police. Writings start coming in of
Tedcazski and I'm the first one to look at a

(24:03):
twenty three page facsimile. And the younger people here ask
your parents what a fax machine is. But they would
print out documents and people could send from one location
to another. I'm looking at it, you can say that,
But a phone call came in first. Fits for faxing
you a twenty three page document. Because now I'm back

(24:23):
in Quantico. Remember I'm a brand new profiler in Quantico,
and I go for a twelve week training block in
the spring of ninety five. John Douglas, a mindhunter fame,
is just retiring and he gives a two hour presentation
on the unibomb case. Of course I'm listening but I
have no idea what's next for me. I go on
a two week vacation to hang out with my family.

(24:46):
Get a phone call from Quantica. Hey, Fits, do you
want to go to San Francisco for thirty days work
to help with UNIBOM. I said, I don't really know
anything about the case. That's all right. They want a profiler.
No one else is available. You're new, okay, sure, never
been to San France before, and lo and off.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Hould that thought seconds minds, Well, you're going to come
right back. This is true crime tonight and stick with us.

Speaker 5 (25:17):
So Fitz, continue with what you were saying.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
And all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of
this case, experienced investigator, brand new profile, but with twelve
weeks of intensive training, but never having done anything before linguistically.
But now this is what I'm being passed with. So
again I go back to Quantico. My bosses are just
going to get to know me. There. Oh, here's a
serial case from here. There's a serial rape case from here.

(25:42):
Fitz start working these, but my buddies in San France
started sending me stuff, a few of them. I said, no,
that's not the writer. Keep going though, Fits, here's something else,
twenty three pages. What do you think? And I looked
over it. I got my marking pens out, had my
dog eared cop of the manifesto I brought with me,

(26:03):
going for like three and a half hours, turning page
after page, and I realized this was this matched up
as closely as anything I've seen before in terms of
any of the suspects we've already had in the unibomb case.
So I called the boss back in San Francisco and said,
it's one of two things. This is an elaborate plagiarism.

(26:23):
Someone got the manifesto, which was published on September nineteenth,
and the Washington Post and they sit down with an
old typewriter and just you know, like outlined it or
you've got your man and they said, fits, we know
it's not a plagiarism. You're coming back to San Francisco.
So I was on a flight a few days later,
and I was working six days a week before that.

(26:45):
Now I'm working seven days a week, fifteen hours a
day towards the end. But it was my job, with
my five person team to finally put together the probable cause.
Affi David and we did six hundred examples of unibomb sentences, clauses, phrases,
and the same number of Ted Kazinski writings. Column guy, yeah,

(27:09):
two columns on each page, fifty pages long. Sent that
off to a judge in Montana. He reviewed it, thought
about it. We heard later, and said, well, I've never
used language before to approve a search warrant. But actually,
I'll let me back up. I want to ahead up
myself here. The prosecutor assigned the case liked what I
was doing, but he said, Fitz, we need that smoking gun.
I said, all right, I'm looking for we need something,

(27:31):
if not unique, certainly highly distinctive or idiosyncratic. Finally, and
I'll never forget we were. I was the one first
one seeing the Ted documents. These are the documents I
referenced drawer from his mother and his brother. We're up
to t one thirty seven. There's only been already been
one hundred and thirty six Ted Kaczinski documents that we reviewed,
and we mined for every bit of information in there.

(27:54):
And here comes a letter to the editor. So I
think it was Saturday Evening magazine from the early nineteen seventies,
long defunct. You know, monthly periodical whatever, and YadA YadA,
the environment, the evils of technology, pollution. And then at
the very end, but you can't eat your cake and
have it too, Signed Theodore J. Kazinski in Chicago, Illinois.

(28:18):
I actually fell out of my chair. I fell out
of my chair. I had witnessed. I said, guys, what
paragraph was that? I actually memorized some of the paragraph numbers.
Dig it out there, and I had to hold it
up in front of me. Can't eat your cake, you
can't eat your cake. Then there it is twice. Then
this letter from Ted Kaczinski, and I went to the prosecutor.
We got the bosses together. I said, guys, you wanted

(28:40):
the linguistic smoking gun. This is it. The other stuff
is really good. This is uh, this is this is
the best. And that was, of course one of the
major parts in there. And in the mini series. You know,
that was like a last minute thing that the Fits
character found, you know, hours before the judge is going
to go home and and whatever. It was actually a

(29:01):
few days before that that, or maybe a week I
should say before that, that we were ready to put
that together. Then of course Dan Rather from CBS News
stuck his head in and said, we've got a source.
We know you're looking at the guy in Lincoln, Montana
with a Polis last name, and we're going to run
with it. And so Louis Free was a director, give
us three days. So we had to rush everything up

(29:22):
and we were going to make the arrest in May
when the weather was nicer. Well, we had to go
on April third, and we eventually did. I stayed back
in San frank because I was finishing up the Affidavid
till midnight that night.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
This is true cruent tonight on iHeartRadio. I'm Boddy Movin
and I'm here with Courtney Armstrong and Stephanie Leidecker and
the wonderful James fitz Fitzgerald. We've been talking all things linguistics,
from manifestos to ransom notes, and we want to hear
from you. Hit us up on the talkbacks on the
iHeartRadio app.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
A team went in, got him, He tried to run,
he tried to get him back in his cabin Kazinski
that is, but they tackled and put him on the
ground and they had to send robot into his cabin
to look for potential booby traps. Bombs that could go
off trip wires, and we were thinking all along how
much he must have hated the fact, mister anti technology
robots going through his own cabin. But they cleared the

(30:14):
cabin within a few days. I was in there, found
all the documents, one thousand cabin documents. Found a handwritten
on yellow legal pad version of the manifesto with crossouts
like he used to write in college when I was there,
before you had a word processor. So we had such
great evidence, and my report stood up. A few attempts

(30:35):
to get it thrown out, of course by the defense team,
whatever their own experts, but it stood in there. And
they knew if the evidence in the cabin was going
to be admitted into his trial, he was going to
be convicted readily. So they had finally convinced him to
plead guilty. He did plead guilty to two consecutive life sentences,

(30:55):
and he was never to see the light of day again.
And of course he died about two years ago, in
June twenty twenty three. They say, of suicide. I don't know.
I wasn't there. But the unibomber campaign ended in April
of nineteen ninety five, and his life ended whatever that
was twenty eight and were you.

Speaker 4 (31:12):
Were instrumental in that, and you you know, be very
very very proud of you and your team for putting
all that together. Do you think that if the manifesto
was never published, would he have been caught without the
like y'reling theistic's work plus the you know, being published
in the Washington Post and his you know brother and
you know sister law seeing it in the paper.

Speaker 5 (31:32):
Great question.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
Yeah, it is a great question. And I've always said,
and I was already manifesto was published September nineteenth of
ninety five, and we were hoping maybe to get a
break within the next week or two. Nothing until February
of the following year, I say nothing. Leeds came in.
I told you about phone calls and ex husbands, whatever,
but but nothing that matched up. Nothing for me, nothing

(31:57):
substantial at all until that facts came in and mid
February to me back at Quantico, and I started putting
together a plan. And it wouldn't have been easy because
this is the Internet was around, but there was you know,
se search engines where we're at a minimum, there's so
little you can do. But I said, guys, let's pick
out about a dozen statements in all of the unibomber's writings.

(32:22):
You can't eat your cake and have a do being
another one maybe even you know, negroes and chicks whatever.
And there's some other sentences in there of the six hundred,
and let's start going through letters to the editor to
various newspapers magazines. It's going to be labor intensive. We
have to have agents go into newspapers, maybe serve subpoenas.

(32:43):
We need your archives, all microfish machines, and you can
picture them and how they used to operate, like the
up using the base of a library, whatever, and just
get and just look for these types of bizarre or
i should say, highly distinctive phraseology words, whatever, and look
for some kind of letter. If we would have gotten
lucky somehow, you know, the Saturday Evening magazine archives would

(33:07):
have been looked at and we would have found you
can't eat your cake and have it too Theodore Jay
Kazinski and guided that it would have been labor intensive,
no guarantees had quite frankly, it could still be going
on to this day, but it would be a lot
easier now, of course, with the Internet and virtually everything online,
you know, going back you know, one hundred.

Speaker 4 (33:26):
Years, including dictations and thesises and things like that.

Speaker 5 (33:29):
Those are all online now. Yeah, and still.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Think of writing features would have come up somewhere.

Speaker 7 (33:33):
Still, Fitz, I can't believe that the inception point of
your story and how basically there was no other There
wasn't the DNA, there wasn't the traditional evidence. Do you
feel like this was almost a case of necessity is
the mother of invention? Do you did you know you
had such a wild proclivity for linguistics before this?

Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, I did a ted X talk about five and
a half years ago at Miami Modern pen State, and
I wanted to talk to some younger people, and while
putting this talk together, it really hit me that all
my life and I put this in my books too,
in my memoir series A Journey to the Center of
the Mind. But I've always had a kinship with language.
Only English language took you know, a few years of

(34:17):
Spanish in high school and a semester in college, but
not too much there. But I just the intricacies, the
mechanisms of language, and how people from different parts of
the country pronounce words differently, regionalisms, how older people may
use certain My mother, my grandmother, used to were going
or we're taking the machine to visit Aunt so and so.

(34:38):
To her, that was automobile. My parents sometimes would slip
and call the refrigerator an ice box. They were, you
know so, and these are terms that I knew that. Boy,
it's funny how language ships and you being a different
part of the world. My really one big vacation with
my parents was in nineteen sixty three. We drove from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and boy, what a lifeanguage transition

(35:01):
that was for me. And I met her. After three
weeks there, my dad was taken the Hotbeds where his
band back. And I'm living in this hotel with my
mom and I'm reading other kids there and I'm playing
with them. It was a cool little town, Hot Springs,
going to the movies, and I'm actually picking up some
of their regionalisms. I think I wound up saying y'all
or all y'all to my parents, like by the second

(35:22):
or third week, and they said, you're talking like a
Southerner now, And I said, oh, was that good or bad? Mom?
But the point is I learned at an early age
how important that was. And I also the first adult
oriented book I ever read was called Kidnap, and not
the Robert Lewis Stevenson kidnap, but it's strictly called Kidnap.
Was written in the early sixties, all about the Lindberg

(35:44):
kidnapping case. And my parents were young adults when that
happened in nineteen thirty two, was right across the river
from Philadelphia where they lived on Hopewell, New Jersey, and
that was the crime of the century, certainly through most
of their life. And they said, why don't you read
this book someday? And it was the first book I
went to the build up your library of the local
branch and got this thick book out was I was

(36:05):
done with doctor Seuss and some of you know that
type of reading. And this book just fascinated me, and
from all different elements of forensics, but certainly the letters
and how handwriting experts could look at them, and the
language features of eventually Bruno Hopman that the German language
features found in the letters, certainly his accents when they met.

(36:26):
And here I am put on the unibomb case. All
these things that interested me. No formal education yet I
bestually went back to school the Georgetown University and got
a second master's degree, this one in linguistics. But I
was really it was trial by fire for me. I
was just in many things. I read the beginning of
a dictionary. If you ever look at a dictionary in
the early days, and I did as a kid, I

(36:46):
would read it. It's just interesting how language it gives,
like the history of English, you know, Indo European, and
the different branches that go off, and then of course
different dialect regions in the US and all these factors.
As a kid, I was always playing scra with my
mother that I continued playing as an adult, crossword puzzles.
Language always intrigued me, and hear a perfect environment, perfect

(37:08):
storm for Kazinski. Perhaps all came together with me by chance,
being you know, getting promoted due profiler the manifesto in
April of ninety five. Manifesto comes out in June of
ninety five. I get sent to in July of ninety
five to the task force, and I found his dad
at the zig thing. The acrostic is it fits You're

(37:29):
in charge of language and the rest is history. So
fate karma kismet in a positive way for me, negative
way for Kazinsky, and it just it just all came
together and I got back and I went back to school.
I couldn't believe it in my forties and I'm getting
another master's degree. But the FBI gave me a scholarship,
so to speak, so it was worthwhile and going on

(37:52):
campus that was before remote classes, so that I could
really find the science behind it. And once I got
my degree, I did consider myself a linguist, a forensic
linguist and a profiler. I think I'm the only one
in the world that wears both those hats. Wow, I
do use both when I assess cases and from all
around the world. Actually, I'm still doing some work even
in Australia a few years ago. Helped save a stalking

(38:15):
case for them there. So yeah, it's interesting where life
took me an a hobby and interested as a young
kid and do adult years. And then the biggest case
probably in the history of the US. Really nine to
eleven was a bigger crime, but there was really little
investigation because the pilots were all dead and other things
like that. But as far as the biggest longitudinal investigation,

(38:38):
seventeen years long when I joined it nine months later.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
We find do emojis and like short paragraphs, like tweets
carry the same forensic linguistics that paragraphs do, like modern
or historical writing. Do they carry the same weight with you?

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Do you think yes? Because people who are writing to
threat or in conjunction with committing a crime, we're covering
up a crime if they're going to write it all.
Not every criminal does. They can't stop themselves. Right.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
I could talk to you for another seven hours easily
and just listen because I'm just fascinated by everything you
have to say. I'm a huge fan personally. There are
two people I really wanted to have on the show,
you and John Douglas, and you've made my dream come true.
I really appreciate it. Fitz, thank you so much for
joining us. This has been an absolute dream come true
for me and I know we all learned so much

(39:30):
for anyone else who's interested in Fitz's work. He's the
author of the Journey to the Center of the Mind
series and his new book Just Dropped. Book purchasing information
is on his website at www dot James R. Fitzgerald
dot com. There you can also access bonus chapters. Fitz
also hosts the Cold Red podcast, where he and his

(39:53):
co host cover cold cases, innocent projects, and some of
their own most high profile cases. Thank you so much again, Fits,
I'm literally gonna cry for real. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (40:03):
I'm so really in honor for all of us.

Speaker 7 (40:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
Coming up, we've got more true crime to dig into,
and later, Betrayal host Andrea Gunning joins us to talk
about the jaw dropping truth behind one of the most
talked about true crime stories of the decade. Keep it
right here on True Crime Tonight if you're just tuning in.

(40:31):
We just got done talking to one of my personal heroes,
James fitz Fitzgerald we call him Fits, retired FBI linguist
who was instrumental in capturing one of America's most notorious killers,
Ted Gizginski, the Unibommer. But right now we're gonna shift gears.
We have another special guest, Andrea Gunning. She is the
co host of the hit iHeart podcast Betrayal and Betrayal Weekly.

(40:54):
Andrea is the head of podcast development at Class Entertainment Group,
and she's here to unpack Betrayal, which is jaw dropping
tales of deception, resilience, and healing, all while guiding listeners
through some of the most personal accounts Betrayal you'll ever hear. Courtney,
you want to get us started, Yeah, So, Andrea, do
you want to start and give us just a little
bit of background of before you started Betrayal?

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Sure? Well.

Speaker 8 (41:19):
My name is Andrea Gunning. I'm the host of Betrayal
Weekly as well as the limited run series with iHeart.
Before I got into Betrayal, I had I was running
the business affairs department. I was the executive in charge
of production with Glass Entertainment Groups, so I handled all
of the boring stuff about TV, which is the budgets,

(41:43):
the schedules, the money. Glass Entertainment Group is a larger
production company and we do everything from true crime, home renovation,
historical documentaries, and so you were seeing a lot of
great shows getting passed up in the TV pipeline and
development because there wasn't a why.

Speaker 4 (42:03):
Now.

Speaker 8 (42:04):
We had one show in particular that was really great,
had really great access, and it was with Kim Goldman,
the sister of Ron Goldman who was murdered by O. J. Simpson,
and networks were kind of passing up the access because
in order to sell it to TV, we needed to
guarantee OJ Simpson's appearance, and so we couldn't sell it.

(42:28):
And I thought, I mean, like my colleague Ben and
I talked to our boss, Nancy Glass, who's an Emmy
Award winning journalist. She's done. She was like Jeffrey Dahmer's confidant,
like she had is incredible, and she saw a vision
and we were like, let's let's pitch this, and we
pitched it to Wondering and we produced Confronting O J. Simpson.

(42:49):
It was my very first podcast that I had ever created.
I remember when the O. J. Simpson trial happened because
my mom was out of work at the time. Her
name was Kim. My mom's name is Kim. She was
extremely just drawn and connected to Kim Goldman because at
the time of the trial, my mom was taking care
of her brother who was dying of cancer. So she
felt like this kinship, like she felt this connection to

(43:11):
Kim Goldman. And I think a lot of people were
obviously captivated by the trial, but I remember my mom
feeling so connected to Kim, and I just saw such
value in her point of view. So he created this
banner series it is true crime, but it's basically about
people who live through an American tragedy. And so I

(43:33):
produced Confronting O. J. Simpson and then we did a
follow up to Confronting O J. Simpson that was Confronting Columbine.
So that was my first time producing it. And then
around the same time, Jennifer Fason, who was the subject
of season one of Betrayal, heard confronting OJ Simpson. I
had worked with her agent before because we've done a

(43:53):
lot of deals with executive producers and producers, and he
knew me and my colleague and so he connected us.
And I was just coming out of a relationship that
was difficult, not similar to Jen's, but like I could
understand that I had gone through a relationship with deception,
and so I had felt this connection of like this

(44:16):
understood of just feeling shame and feeling like what was
I missing and all of these things. So when she
was sharing and I just kind of I just understood
and I knew there was something here, and that was
how Betrayal started interesting.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
And Jennifer, Jennifer is the one who her husband was Spencer.

Speaker 8 (44:34):
Yeah, so the story of season one is about Jennifer
Fason and her husband, Spencer Heron. He was two time
Teacher of the Year and she comes home from work
finds him sitting on the couch. There was a arrest
warrant in his hand, and he said, you know, everything's over,
It's all over. He was being arrested because he's sexually

(44:55):
assaulted a student of his And then through that whole
process she found evidence of dozens and dozens and dozens
of affairs.

Speaker 5 (45:04):
And that's kind of like her journey through that right.

Speaker 8 (45:07):
Like right exactly unpacking the man she really trying to
see and fine, like just trying to discover the man
she married, really because there was a version of who
she believed him to be. And then she sat down
with other women that had a relationship with him and
tried to understand the mask he presented to them to

(45:30):
really try to get a full picture of who this
person really was.

Speaker 7 (45:34):
It was so compelling from the jump, I have to say,
and yeah, I think part of what I loved and
got sucked into is obviously going in. You know the title,
it's betrayal. You know something's doing you've heard what you
know the trailer is. But the way you guys laid

(45:56):
out episode one and Jennifer like, just staying so in
the present of Spencer was wonderful. He was dreamy, I
was excited, Like I'm I think from a storytelling perspective,
what made you guys do that? Because it was really
effective and I could see not making that choice.

Speaker 8 (46:16):
Yeah, I think it's a great question whenever we talk
about what stories work for work for betrayal, you know,
there obviously is the deception element to it, but the
more important aspect is really the love story. Because without
really understanding what these two people mean to each other
before everything falls apart, there aren't a six So it

(46:38):
was really important for us to really establish where jen
was at her in her life and who Spencer was,
and you know, he she I remember meeting with her
and her saying there were no red flags and there
were none. People who do this are really good at
hiding this other side. So it was important for the

(47:02):
audience to really hear that relationship and how good it was,
to really understand how devastating everything was when it.

Speaker 4 (47:10):
Fell apart, right, because it's just a shock because they
presented so well this mask of who they pretended to be,
and yeah, that's devastating. And I think people that they
put the why didn't I see it? Why didn't I?
You know, so this is actually the therapy too for
women who have gone through things similar.

Speaker 8 (47:31):
That's right, and so I think part of our mission
as a brand is to really educate people, because I mean,
we get all the time, and it's totally understandable that,
you know, people are going to say, oh, there are
red flags. You know, they're either are no red flags
because the perpetrator is just that good and they're that
skilled at deceiving and lying, or there's a whole other

(47:54):
phenomenon called betrayal blindness. It's a real psychological issue where
an experience that you go through where you're able to
your brain is kind of overwriting information as a survival mechanism.
I mean, this is a really very real thing, and
so it's really just an exploration because you're right, women
are really hard and people are really hard on themselves,

(48:15):
and there's a lot of self shame and guilt that
people live in when they deal with something like this
because you realize so quickly that you have very little
control and so that's such a scary feeling, and so
you really are hard on yourself. Like, what's in a
nice say see so that you can protect yourself in
the future. The reality is is that you often don't
see anything for those reasons I just mentioned before.

Speaker 7 (48:37):
Right, I forget who was speaking about Jennifer, maybe her sister,
but saying when she would leave Jennifer, she would just
break down into tears because she saw Jennifer in that
moment of he cheated on me, and now I'm worthless
and worthless and then your brain spins and now I'm ugly,
and now I'm this, And Jennifer was none of those things.

(49:00):
But I think all of us can relate to being
in a position that has made us feel that way.

Speaker 8 (49:07):
That was what was the most relatable to me when
I first met jen were those feelings of unworthiness and
just the idea because I had again come out of
a relationship and discovered, you know that the person that
I was dating and living with was like, you know,
taking our dinners to a woman at the gym, like

(49:29):
our leftovers, and then there was another woman that he
would make care packages for. And I just remember thinking like,
why am I not What's wrong with me? Why am
I not good enough? I was so destructive to my
self worth and it took a long time to repair that,
and so just knowing that she had gone through that,
it was just again not to the same magnitude, but

(49:52):
just that thought. Those feelings that you go through are
just so lonely that if we could reach someone that
was going through through that, that was the whole point,
to make them feel less alone.

Speaker 4 (50:04):
Do you think that's why Betrayal has struck such a
nerve with its listeners and continues to gain popularity is
because it's relatable and it you know, people and particularly
women you know, relate to the storytelling and feel like
they're not alone.

Speaker 8 (50:21):
I think so. I think that that's at the core
of the show and every season, in every story we tell,
we try to look for the emotional access like where
am I meeting another person that's listening? And what are
the threads that like kind of bind us together?

Speaker 3 (50:38):
Right?

Speaker 8 (50:38):
So you may not have a husband that did this
to you, but are these the emotions that you've dealt
with at some point in time in your life? And
we try to write into that a lot, because I've
gone through my fair share of ups and downs and
I know what I needed in those times, and so
there's definitely pieces of it, and I hope that that's

(50:59):
what is keeping people around.

Speaker 5 (51:02):
Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure it has a lot to
do with it.

Speaker 4 (51:05):
What are what are some of the common messages you
get from listeners.

Speaker 8 (51:09):
Man, it's it's we have an email in box Betrayal
potat gmail dot com and people will will write in
their one or two sentences or a whole diary entry
of what they've experienced. Every season of the limited run
has come from someone that's written in. So season two

(51:30):
is Ashley's story. She literally wrote to us in the
middle of the night listening to season one. Season three
is Stacy and Tyler story. Same thing. Listen to Ashley's
story compelled her to write in. Same with Caroline, which
was just season four, and now I'm about to go
in the field for season five. It's a story out
of Maryland. All of them have been listeners that have

(51:51):
written into us, and it either is like a small
little message of like, hi, thank you, like I went
through something similar. This made me feel y and Cee,
I don't feel as alone. We get a lot of feedback,
a lot of feedback, you know, of decisions people made
in the moments of the wake of their life falling apart,

(52:12):
and so those are always really interesting. It's a mixture
of like positive listenership and a lot of feedback, which
we take seriously. It's really it's really interesting to us
what people, you know, try to dissect and discuss because
a lot of people each season comes up. There's one
thing that the audience really harps on.

Speaker 5 (52:32):
Interesting and different for each season and.

Speaker 8 (52:34):
Different season absolutely.

Speaker 7 (52:37):
Yeah, will you tell us a little bit and about
back to season one for just a hot second. Sure,
But how was it working with Jennifer in season one
with her being a producer and that was kind of
a lot of her story and how her and her
husband Spencer met Jennifer also a producer.

Speaker 8 (52:57):
Yeah, that's how we met because she is an agent.
But you know, she obviously understands story, but she's a
talented writer, so getting her feedback on anything that we
were writing and crafting this story as was helpful. You know,
we obviously needed to maintain a sense of objectivity. That's

(53:17):
why I sept in i was producing it. That's why
I sept in his narrator because I wanted to be
that person that could ask the questions that the audience
were asking and be that had that separation from what
she went through and provide context where she couldn't. You know,
she obviously went through something really difficult, but even had
the perspective of like, this is a really interesting story

(53:38):
to tell.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
Wow.

Speaker 7 (53:39):
And that's remarkable because I would imagine it would be
almost harder rather than easier with someone who kind of
knows all the components that goes in.

Speaker 5 (53:48):
But again, you did a beautiful job.

Speaker 4 (53:50):
Right Courtney. I agree, it's so well done. Andrea, you
were giving us some insight into what goes in, like
behind the scenes. Can you go ahead and continue those thoughts?

Speaker 8 (53:59):
I was just going to say, I think in terms
of the way that TV is written, there's a lot
of outlines. There's very clear beach sheets, like it's very
you know, there's a lot of preparation, and you know,
when we went into season one, Carrie, who's my producing
partner on the series, we're like, we're not doing anything,

(54:19):
like we're going we're getting interviews and then we're going
to see where the story takes us, which was a
very different approach for Jen because she's used to something
a little bit more structured, and so it allowed us
to have more freedom, you know, because obviously if you
have a background of like everything being very produced and written,
you can kind of get very narrow and where you

(54:42):
want something to go. But we really wanted to see
where the story was taking us as we did interviews,
and that's kind.

Speaker 4 (54:48):
Of telling is so good because you're not forcing a narrative.
You're letting the story just develop one and tell itself.
That's important, That's really important because it's more natural anyway. Yeah,
can you talk this through Ashley's story in season two?

Speaker 5 (55:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (55:05):
So Ashley Linton, she's a mother of three in Riverton, Utah,
and one day she was trying to set up a
business venmo account for her husband. He was an electrician
is an electrician. I don't know if he's still doing
that anymore, but he was about to take over a
book of business and it was a really exciting time
in their life because you know he was going to start,

(55:29):
you know, he was working under somebody and then he
was going to take on their book and it was
going to be a whole new level for them as
a family financially. And through the process of setting up
the business venmo account, she sees hidden folder and then
something in her gut, like we've all had this right
where it's like, look, it compels you. There's something there,

(55:49):
open it, and so she sees it, she thinks about it,
and then she clicks into it and sees things she'll
never unsee. And what was in the hidden older were
images of Sea Sam which is child's central abused material,
and some were like strangers people she didn't recognize, the

(56:11):
children she didn't recognize, and then there were videos of
her own daughter. So she had two kids with another
like her high school sweetheart. They ended up separating, and
then when he came into the picture, he was like
the perfect father. He took her two kids under a swing,

(56:32):
basically raised them. They basically called him dad, and he
was taking videos of her oldest daughter. So it's really
about that season. It's difficult. You know, she sits down
with her daughter, Avea, who's an incredibly beautiful and strong individual,

(56:53):
and we really unpack like what happens when you see
something like that again and then the dominoes fall and
what those twenty four hours and forty eight hours look
like because she had to call the police on her husband,
even though her husband's brother was a police officer. So
when she sees it, she's like, I don't know what
I'm seeing, right, Like, am I being dramatic? I don't

(57:16):
know what this is. She takes some pictures of it
so she can have evidence of it, and then she
calls her brother in law and not much is done,
and so she kind of has to take matters into
her own hands. He gets arrested, and then we cover
his trial and the fallout and the sentencing, and then
we kind of that's a very specific part of the story,

(57:38):
and then we kind of zoom out and really show
what is going on with the Internet and technology and
how pervasive this issue is and how these things are prosecuted.
So you would be surprised. I thought that someone who
is caught with se sam gets the book thrown at them.

(58:00):
There's always what I thought, I like you, right, but
that is not the case because we have task force
in our state called IKAK, and they're triaging, so you
you know, for every tip they may only be able
to handle a handful.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
In processing the Internet crimes against children? Right, Yes, that's
that spell out what that is, Okay.

Speaker 8 (58:24):
Internet Crimes against Children's Task Force.

Speaker 5 (58:25):
Every state house has a different right that's right.

Speaker 8 (58:29):
And so depending on depending on how bigger state is,
you can have someone you can have a larger task
force than others. But you know, Utah's got a pretty
significant task force, and they are they're just triaging the
tips that are coming in and even the ones that
they get to sentence and prosecute, they're not enough jail cells,

(58:52):
unfortunately for people that are consuming this material. So it
was an education for me. Definitely an education for me.

Speaker 4 (59:02):
This is true crimes and I on iHeartRadio we talk
true crime all the time. I'm buddy, move in and
I'm here with Stephanie Leidecker and Courtney Armstrong and we
are lucky to be joined by Andrea Gunning. She's the
co host of the iHeart podcast Betrayal and Betrayal Weekly. Courtney,
you were going to add something else. I'm sorry, go ahead, No.

Speaker 5 (59:18):
It's wild.

Speaker 7 (59:19):
The proliferation of all of these internet child rhymes is
you know, it makes because we've been talking about it
in a couple of different capacities. I don't even remember
what started us.

Speaker 4 (59:31):
I was begging on the topic posting pictures of their
children online.

Speaker 7 (59:36):
Right, And we actually went to a commercial break and
I was crying anyway, it's so horrible. Yeah, but you know,
I wonder if the Internet is it because this material,
these images are more accessible. Like it just makes me
wonder societally or has this dark and disturbing has it

(59:57):
always been going on?

Speaker 5 (59:59):
I think, yeah, going on societally it must have been.

Speaker 8 (01:00:02):
Yeah, I would I would agree, but with the Internet
and the ability to manipulate and distribute, And you have
to remember, I mean, once that video has taken, that
is a crime has already been committed, right, And so
a huge part of these online communities you can get
access and consume, but ultimately at the end of the day,

(01:00:25):
you then have to start contributing. So then you have
to be able to provide videos and the.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Ones that they haven't seen already, right, So they trade,
It's like it's like a trade, and it's some trade.
You have to contribute. So now you have to read,
you have to victimize someone, and then the person receiving
is also getting revictimized at this point now because their
pictures are being sent to new people.

Speaker 7 (01:00:52):
Yeah, it's really important issues that you guys tackle, and
you know, just the way in of one person story
of Ashley's story to tell it, I think is always
almost always the most powerful way to get across a
larger message.

Speaker 8 (01:01:10):
It's a really heavy topic, but what I found really interesting,
and we do feature a few other stories that are
similar to Ashley's in that season, but what was really
important to me to cover in season two was after
he got out of jail, she went back to him
for a little while. And we're sitting here, probably you

(01:01:34):
guys may be thinking, how could you do that? He
was violating her own daughter because he was pretending to
go stargazing and he would stand outside of his stepdaughter's
bedroom and videotape her and take pictures of her. You know,
it's easy for the audience to say, like, I cannot
believe that she would go back to him, Like that's horrifying.

(01:01:57):
She hadn't seen the full discovery that the police had
in the lawsuit, and she immediately went back into wifey mode.
There was this like maternal this need to like keep
her family together even though he had done something so horrible,
and she just was grasping at straws for the life

(01:02:21):
before she saw what she saw. And we're not here
to like judge those decisions, right, We're just trying to
like show that those decisions are made every day, and
a huge part of what I do is show the
complexity of the human experience. It's, you know, an easy
story to tell to say this happened, she left him.

(01:02:41):
It is what it is. But the more interesting story
to me is what are those days, in those weeks
and the months in the aftermath where she's like trying
to figure out, you know, leaving her husband and she
finally sees everything like descriptions of the photos, the things
that of her daughter, and is like, I can't, I

(01:03:03):
can't do this. And there are parts of her story
in her marriage where you know, he would be alone
in his bedroom drawing for hours on end, like he
was isolating himself, and she would take care of him,
and she would leave him dinner at their bedroom door.
And so much of her season is her exploring her
own self worth and like how she was parentified at

(01:03:24):
an early age and so it was just easy for
her to just take care of everybody and not really
focus and lean in on, you know, what was really
going on. She was just trying to keep everything together
all the time. That's another example of like you know,
we talk about this crime that was committed. The aftermath
and you know, her own exploration and to why she

(01:03:46):
did what she did and forgiving herself for it, and
then ultimately sitting down with her daughter and talking about
those months where she was with him and her daughter
forgiving her for that, which was like very powerful, really powerful.

Speaker 7 (01:04:00):
Yeah, no situations, I mean it's amazing. You never know
how any of us will react in any situation. You
just don't, Like you said, it is real easy to
have a knee jerk judging reaction to lots of it,
but very different when you're in it. Can you also

(01:04:21):
catch people up on season three just what they should
know going in.

Speaker 8 (01:04:26):
Yeah, absolutely, And we're currently in production. It's a three
part docu series for ABC. Season three is about a
family from Reading, Pennsylvania. Swoman Stacy was dating and ultimately
married this man named Justin Rutherford, and he was a

(01:04:48):
doctor as a physician, she had already gone through one marriage,
had two kids and Tyler and Mikaela, and then you know,
later in life, found justice and she had gone through
a lot in her first marriage, there was betrayal, so
back to those feelings of feeling like unworthy. She never

(01:05:08):
thought she was going to find love and she is
an incredible mom, Like those kids love her. So when
she found Justin, like these kids were so excited for
their mom, and you know he was basically they have
a good relationship with their biological father, but he became
like their dad, they called him dad. And he turns

(01:05:32):
out that he had been abusing her son, Tyler, since
he was very young. And so Season three is basically
two people's story. It's Stacy's and Tyler's. And for Stacy
it's really understanding, similar to Jen reconciling the man that
she thought she had married and the monster that he

(01:05:56):
really was and really integrating those two things. And Tyler's
story is really the power of breaking his the stigma
of male sexual abuse and overcoming that and like finding
power in his voice.

Speaker 5 (01:06:14):
Hold that thought.

Speaker 4 (01:06:14):
We're going to continue our conversation with Andrea Gunning, the
co host of the hit iHeart podcast Betrayal and Betrayaled
Weekly Drew Crime tonight. So, Andrea, you were getting ready
to tell us about how all this happened.

Speaker 8 (01:06:35):
How everything went down, was there was a hitting camera
in one of their bathrooms in their home, so their
house was they were this family was so proud of
this home. Stacy never thought she had been spending so
much time like making ends meet. She finally was like,
we have made it. We have a five bedroom house,

(01:06:56):
a pool in the backyard. My kids are happy, they
love being home. She had two other kids. She calls
in the littles with Justin like life was good. And
then one day CPS basically filed a complain. There was
an investigation done because there was a hitting camera that
was in the bathroom and it was Tyler's bathroom. One

(01:07:18):
of his friends thought it was like a phone charger
and they're like, this is a little fishy.

Speaker 5 (01:07:23):
What is this?

Speaker 8 (01:07:24):
Took it home, investigated it was it was a camera.
Through investigation, they determined that it was Justin had placed
it there, and there was a lot of things that
were confusing for Stacy. She made that decision like once
it was confirmed that he had placed the hitting camera there,
she was done, like she was divorcing him, like it's over.

(01:07:45):
And through the process of that coming out, Tyler disclosed
to his aunt that there had been abuse, and abuse
had been going on for a long time, and ultimately
he disclosed to law enforcement. He really he was so

(01:08:07):
afraid that if he didn't say he was going to
take everything to his grave. But he didn't want what
happened to him to happen to his little brother, so
he spoke up. Justin goes on the run and then
ultimately comes back to the United States, is arrested, and
then tries very hard to get Tyler to recant his testimony,

(01:08:27):
and through the process of that, tries to hire a
hitman and have Tyler killed. So it's really about and
it's a crazy story. There's a lot of twist and turns,
and it's really about again, like this family of this
is a man that they loved him so much. Tyler

(01:08:50):
loved his stepdad so much even till this day. They
can say good things about the person that he was
and the values, and so it's really, you know, the
work that Stacy was doing is really trying to understand
like who was this monster? Because I only ever saw

(01:09:10):
this incredible husband to me and did he just use
me for access to my son? And what does that mean?
And so it's a really complicated unpacking. The best part
about the this family is they're so they're like the
funniest people and so they like even through it all,

(01:09:36):
they have such a great sense of humor. We had
access to the sentencing hearing. We got to hear Justin's
elocution and you know, interesting allocated. Yeah, and it's pretty
wild what he says in court, and so it kind

(01:09:57):
of just really goes to show the kind of person
that he was and how he perceived his relationship with
Tyler was very you know, was inappropriate and violent. So
that's season three.

Speaker 5 (01:10:10):
It was so mind blowing.

Speaker 7 (01:10:11):
First of all, congratulations on the series deal and.

Speaker 5 (01:10:15):
But that's amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:10:16):
Congratulations on all your success. This is Your Crime tonight
on iHeartRadio. We talk true crime all the time. I'm
body movin and I'm here with my co host, Stephanie
Leidaker and Courtney Armstrong and we are joined by Andrea Gunning.
She's the co host of the iHeart podcast Betrayal and
Betrayal Weekly. Courtney, go ahead and continue. We're going to
finish your thought.

Speaker 7 (01:10:33):
I have to tell you, the first thing I listened
to in all of Betrayal with the bonus, and you
guys have done so many episodes was don't quote me.
I think it was. I think it was season four,
the first bonus episode, but it was Stacy.

Speaker 8 (01:10:49):
Yes, we did like a recap because he's appealing his sentence,
so you got sixty years and then I think whatever
the probation was, it was like it was a very
hefty sentence, and I definitely believe his allocution is one
of the reasons why the judge went heavy on the sentencing.

Speaker 5 (01:11:08):
Really got it.

Speaker 4 (01:11:09):
I have to go listen to this. I'm dying to
now what he said, don't tell me, so I go listen.

Speaker 8 (01:11:13):
Okay, I want to tell you. But yeah, So he's
working through the appeal and I think Christmas time was
really hard when we recorded that bonus, it was during
the winter, and she was having a hard time because
she's still trying to make ends meet. I mean, she
she had never thought of herself as someone that was
going to get remarried, meet the man of her dreams.
Like she was, she had two kids, she was back

(01:11:34):
on it, like after her first marriage. She had found
her footing, She had her two kids, she was fine,
and then she meets this guy, she falls in love.
She has two more kids because he wanted to be
a dad, and because she always kept saying like I
don't want to be another single mom again. I don't
want to be another single mom again, So you know,
Christmas is hard and to know that he has money
to have a criminal defense attorney to spend the money

(01:11:57):
on the appeal where she's barely making ends meet to
you know, get gas groceries and Christmas presents like that
was that was a hard time. And I think that's
probably the bonus that you heard when we were talking
about it.

Speaker 7 (01:12:08):
Yes, yes, yes, no, it was and I was equal
parts engaged and enraged and it was kind of every
emotion in one and it then kicked off into season
four at the end of that episode. But my question was,
with all of these the relationships that you I imagine

(01:12:31):
you build with these women over time, do those extend
past the production or what is that like?

Speaker 8 (01:12:37):
Since we've done so after season one came out, it
was then picked up as a three part docku series
with Hulu, and so we've done the Hulu series for
season one. In season two, so I work with these
individuals for like a year a year and a half,
and then the show comes out and then there's a

(01:12:58):
little bit of all old but then we go back
into production for the documentary and so we're around each
other for like two three years, and so we get
to know each other on a very deep level because
I'm with them, I'm with their families. We do so
many interviews with people around them. With law enforcement.

Speaker 5 (01:13:16):
Being the subject.

Speaker 4 (01:13:18):
Of a documentary, I mean, I know because I was
in a really popular documentary. It's invasive to your life.
And you do become because you have to trust your
the producers as the subject, you do become close with
the production team.

Speaker 5 (01:13:33):
I still talk to Mark Lewis right.

Speaker 8 (01:13:36):
It's when someone dedicates themselves to your story, like there's
a there's a bond there, and you know, we do
go through really intense legal reviews and vetting, legal vetting
for these for these stories, and so that being able
to tell your story from start to finish again one

(01:13:57):
I'm not saying like one sitting, but like from the
beginning to end is so healing and to just be
able to just kind of go through that cause you're
kind of you're meeting your that information that you're giving
your producer at a very specific time in your life,
and so you're relating to it differently, and so you're
unpacking things that you need in the current moment, and
so it's very healing for for people I've heard, and.

Speaker 5 (01:14:22):
It is to know that they.

Speaker 8 (01:14:24):
Are vetted, like everything that there's there's there's sources, there's one, two,
three sources, there's public information out there to you know,
just validate what they're saying. You know, we're going through
everything in the case file or whatever it is, and
so to just know because people doubt themselves, They're like.

Speaker 3 (01:14:44):
Did I f through this?

Speaker 8 (01:14:46):
What did I what I did I go through something
that was really as bad as I think it was?
Or am I being dramatic? And just to have this
ability to tell your story, share, have it validated, have
it supported, and like corroborate really supports people who have
gone through betrayal trauma because you have this other person

(01:15:06):
that doesn't really know you, but is checking and saying, yes,
this did happen to you. I'm seeing it, I'm validating it,
and we couldn't put it out there if we didn't
have that support. So yeah, you become really connected in
that way.

Speaker 7 (01:15:21):
I relate to what you're saying so much. We actually
have very similar because Stephanie Leidecker, who heads up KAT Studios,
she and I have made a lot of TV together.
But the validation and telling people. As you said, with
the legalities, it's like, listen, you can't say something wrong.

(01:15:41):
You're not going to say something wrong. We won't allow it.
We're not going to let you look stupid. And it's
just you know, there are so many well it holds right.

Speaker 4 (01:15:54):
And also like when you're telling your friends or like
your family or story, you hold things back because the
so your loved ones, right, But when you're talking, at
least for me, when I would tell my story, like
people would just like their eyes would glaze over and
they would kind of back away, and I would be
conscious of that. But when you're telling the producers or
your director whoever is doing the documentary or podcast in

(01:16:16):
this case, it's much different because you can you can
do it from start to finish without any holdbacks, and
it's so therapeutic. So I think, like, to your credit,
you are absolutely providing some kind of therapy to these women,
and I think it is going to I think it
is empowering them to continue on with their life in
a meaningful way.

Speaker 8 (01:16:37):
So really, thanks, I mean to your point, that's that's
something that Tyler really experienced because when you are sharing
with your family and friends, you don't want to do harm, right,
or you don't want judgment, like you know where you're
going to be getting from those people. And I know
for Tyler, I feel like I can speak speak for
him in this way where he was afraid to share

(01:17:00):
with his mom exactly what happened because he didn't want
to hurt her, right, Yeah, he never wanted his Protestant.
He was protecting her. He was going to take this
to his grave because he knew what this family and
what this world meant her. And I think through this
experience of working with us, he's been slowly able, like

(01:17:23):
she's been able to like create room to like digest it.
And she was always game, but like it wasn't a
matter of her being willing to hear it, it was
whether or not he could feel comfortable sharing.

Speaker 5 (01:17:36):
Powerful. So yeah, yeah, it's next. What's next for Betrayal.

Speaker 8 (01:17:42):
Going out in the field in August to cover a
story out of Maryland and.

Speaker 5 (01:17:50):
Is going to be season five.

Speaker 8 (01:17:52):
That's going to be season five, which errors in mid January,
and so in between now and January, we'll have our Weekly,
which is a new story every week, and then in
January we'll bring back the limited run where it's we
are in one story for eight to ten episodes, and
season five is this Woman in Maryland and it's about

(01:18:16):
intimate partner violence and it is a theme that to
your question earlier, like what kind of emails do you
get from listeners, we kept seeing this theme of women
writing in who were either drugged and raped by their
husbands and they were videotaped and then put online.

Speaker 5 (01:18:36):
I'm kind of like speechless. I didn't know that that
was happening.

Speaker 4 (01:18:39):
So now we're in season four, right, and was there
any particular challenges that you experience working on season four
because the subject, well, the husband was a police officer.
Is there any Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:18:50):
I think the biggest thing for season four was that
Joel Kerrn, who's Caroline's husband, he didn't commit a crime.
And so when we were looking we were actually going
to do this story for the Weekly, Caroline wrote into
us and so we were like, oh, this is really interesting.
We did a pre interview and we were going to
do her story for the weekly series. But then when

(01:19:11):
we did our team meeting, I said, you know, this
is an interesting story, but there isn't crime. Like, we
need a lot of sources, we need documentation to what happened,
and so we kind of went off and did There
are cor requests Colorado Records Act where if you can
look up a police officer and see if they've been
terminated or suspended to get details and if they've had

(01:19:32):
an IA investigation internal affairs investigation, you can get access
to those records if it is of public interest. So
we made a request and we were like, this seems
like of public interest. He had been terminated, we'd been
recommended for termination. He ultimately retired, but he had an
investigation because he was sleeping with people in his cop

(01:19:54):
car out in public, and so we wanted to get
access to what was actually going on. We had, i
understood the tip of the iceberg, but then when we
received the investigation from Colorado Springs Police Department, we had
then understood what was underneath the water or the like,
the full iceberg. And so that was the biggest thing.
It was like, Okay, this is a bigger than just

(01:20:14):
one weekly story. This is a whole season. And then
getting an understanding of the culture at CSPD that kind
of allows and you know, accepts this behavior to even happen,
getting people to go on the record that was really
really tough.

Speaker 4 (01:20:34):
Well, it's that thin blue line, right that you often
hear about that police officers don't cross. That's my understanding
of the terminology, that they don't cross to betray other
police officers.

Speaker 8 (01:20:46):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (01:20:47):
What do you hope listeners take away from Betrayal?

Speaker 8 (01:20:50):
I want people to walk away with realizing these people
go through something really real and that's a really powerful
thing to not feel alone. Because when Caroline was listening
in the car, she was listening to Jen talk to
therapists and was like, this is a real thing. There's
a word for what I'm going through. Somehow that made
it a little bit lighter.

Speaker 4 (01:21:09):
As is often the case, at somebody else, as is
often the case, somebody else has.

Speaker 5 (01:21:14):
Gone through what I have.

Speaker 4 (01:21:15):
I'm not alone. There's actual a word for this. I'm
not crazy. It's probably healing just to even know other
people have been through this and there's an actual word
for it. Listen, where should people go Andrea to find you?
To find betrayal? Any anything listeners should know?

Speaker 8 (01:21:32):
Yeah, I mean wherever you get your podcasts, so you
can get episodes one week early in ad free on
Apple True Crime Plus, which if you like to binge
or get things early.

Speaker 5 (01:21:43):
I'm a binger.

Speaker 8 (01:21:44):
Great access, so anywhere you get your podcasts.

Speaker 5 (01:21:47):
And the series they can watch on Hulu currently.

Speaker 8 (01:21:50):
Yeah, so season one and season two are on Hulu
right now and TBD on season coming come the fall. Yeah,
season three.

Speaker 4 (01:22:00):
We will definitely definitely keep our eyes out. Thank you
so much for your time. Betrayal of the podcast is Betrayal,
also the name of the docuseries.

Speaker 8 (01:22:10):
Yeah, since Betrayal the Perfect Husband, Betrayal the Perfect Father,
it's usually that's our We.

Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
Will definitely definitely be keeping our eyes out for those
on Hulu and maybe something upcoming somewhere else. So thank
you so much, Andrew, thank you so much.

Speaker 7 (01:22:24):
Yeah, thank you for having me do a beautiful job.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
I can't believe the show is already coming to a close.
It's been an amazing night. Thank you to our incredible guests.
Now listen, Josephcott Morgan is going to be joining us
on Sunday, so be sure to tune in. We are
having another scientific Sunday discussing all kinds of forensics. We're
not here tomorrow or the next day, so you guys
have a great few days and we'll be back next week.

Speaker 5 (01:22:48):
This is True Crime Tonight

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