Part 6: Save The Cat
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I'm Barbara Schroeder, and now, episode six of Bad Bad Thing. Sometime after five o'clock yesterday, Chapman walked into her Lowry's Lane home. Police say she was walking into a trap. Chapman's alleged lover's wife had broken into the home and was waiting inside with a gun. There were emails and text messages indicating... For the next seven hours, he thought I was the suspect. Apparently, the neighbor thought I was the suspect. He thought maybe I had done this. They...

Took me to the police station, and I was held there for close to seven hours until around midnight when they removed their bodies from the house and they found the gun underneath Jannier. The whole mood changed in the interrogation room. I was no longer a suspect, but I was still there for a couple hours. Now that Radnor Township Police had cleared Mark as a suspect, he was allowed to make some phone calls. The first was to Jannier's parents.

No doubt it was impossible for the family to comprehend what Mark was struggling to say, that their daughter had killed a woman he'd been seeing, and then she killed herself. Mark's second call was to his lifelong friend, Mike. When I first found out I was actually living on a sailboat, I typically turned off my phone or would not answer my phone. But for some odd reason that night, I hadn't turned off the ringer. It was Mark calling from the police station, and...

I'm freaking out. Trying to explain that Jenner had shot and killed Meredith and was dead and he was being questioned. It was mind-blowing. Beyond comprehension. It's in your dead asleep and all of a sudden it's like a bad movie. But he said, I need your help. I said, okay, I'll be there. I got on the plane the next morning as soon as I could.

Around 2 a.m., Mark was allowed to return home. When he walked into the apartment, Huck, the dog, was sleeping. Gypsy came up to Mark and he lifted her up and hugged her. Mark noticed that Janir's computer and all of her electronics were missing. Police had searched the apartment earlier and taken everything for their investigation.

Mark looked around. He was struck by how sparkling clean Jeneer had left the place. The bed was perfectly made. Nothing was out on the kitchen counters. He checked the refrigerator and saw a batch of homemade dog food Jeneer had made just that morning. The silence in the apartment was so unsettling. Mark could barely sleep, waiting for Mike to arrive. By the time I left Key West Airport at like 10 in the morning and landed in Philly at 6, just watching the internet kind of blow up.

He picked me up from the airport. I don't know how he did it. He looked like a skeleton. Driving, it didn't even seem like he could drive. And then we spent the next week trying to deal with that event and what are the next steps and how to get him on with life. But his apartment had been surrounded by the media. And so we ultimately managed to get in his apartment to get some paperwork and start dealing with those things.

This is Max, Mark's former employee. And I saw the, you know, it was some title like...

Love Triangle ends in murder-suicide. And honestly, I knew. I knew when I realized who it was coming from and the title. I knew what I was going to see when I clicked it, and it was awful. I just couldn't believe. For as unstable as I felt like she probably was at certain times, I just wouldn't have thought that it would go to that extreme.

The fact that she didn't kill him, what do you make of that? On some level, I think she blamed him for so many of her problems. I think in the end, she just wanted to stick it to him. And I think for her to do it that way and to leave him alive was going to be so much more painful for him than to just shoot him. I think she wanted him to suffer.

Mike ended up staying with Mark for about a week, taking care of things like closing out Janair's bank accounts and ending her car lease. And we get down to the car, and I'm like, Mark, what if she's done something to the car? Because all this stuff, you know, I'd known over the previous couple months about the wire taps and the buggings, and here's someone who's technologically capable, certainly savvy at creating, you know, could do that. I mean, certainly had figured out how to do all these things

technical things, why couldn't she have created a bomb for a car? And so we're standing at the car, you know, it's so unlikely we're in the suburbs of, of Wilmington, Delaware, and honestly afraid to open the doors of the car. And I'm like, screw it, Mark, let's go. If you go, I go, we open the door and get in. We both honestly were afraid of, we were afraid. We were truly afraid of this, this human being and what she had done. What's the best thing you can say about Janair? That's a hard question. Um,

That's a really hard question. I don't know. It's hard to say. I can't say anything. When I found out how it happened, I, well, I stayed home and cried all day. Here's Nylan Ely again, Jenner's old work acquaintance. When you heard and read that she had purchased a gun, that must have shocked you. It was surprising. Yes, yes, absolutely. I felt like

Well, she just expertly lied to me. You know, I felt like, gosh, what did I miss? Like, did I tell, was she just, what an actress, right? She worked at deceit and lying to people who cared about her. You know, I'm sure she lied to her therapist. She lied to me. So she did all this so that, so that she could do this really awful thing. Like, why? Sorry.

Sorry. Tell me what you're feeling right now. Just empathy. Wow. Sorry about this. Usually I only reserve this for my therapist. Look, you're talking about this for the first time. This is very... And I appreciate your candidness. I just... What I'm thinking is I imagine the pain, the utter pain that Mark lives with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, yeah, he did a stupid thing. But he didn't make this happen.

You also teared up a little earlier about Janair because you sound like a very empathetic person. You could see or understand that she was in turmoil too. Absolutely. Definitely. I mean, look, I've lived with depression my entire life. You know, as somebody who may consider herself intelligent and otherwise capable of life, when depression comes to visit, it robs you of all those things. Yeah. Yeah.

She was given lots of opportunity to go a new way, make a new path. But why not take one of those opportunities instead of doing the ultimate thing in not only taking her own life, but someone else who just totally, I don't know, who is not a bad person. I don't know. I didn't know Meredith. I don't know her family or anything like that. But she can't have been a horrible human being.

Not that bad. Like, nobody deserves that. Meredith Sullivan's family, her ex-husband, most of her friends, have never talked publicly about Meredith or the tragedy. But Meredith's sister, Jessica, has shared some things publicly, writing about her family's deep, unending sorrow. She's a good writer. This is an actor reading some of what Jessica wrote. None of us feel even slightly better.

Try going 30 years with a cheerleader by your side, just a phone call away, who had the answers to anything and then having her ripped away without warning. Meredith loved me wholly and completely, in a way no one else ever has. I tell my little brother all of the time that he should be thankful I love him the way she loved me. She taught me how to do it. I'd give anything to have that perfect, unwavering love again. She was spectacular. Every single day we wake up now marks the longest any of us have gone without seeing or talking to Meredith.

We are all doing what we have to do, but none of us are doing well. We all watch the world around us with the same despair resting heavily on our hearts. Because many of Meredith Sullivan's social media accounts are still available online, you can see videos of her. This is one she uploaded to YouTube in 2013.

She was at a conference in Washington, D.C. It's pouring rain. Meredith and two friends grab umbrellas and go outside. She captioned the video, While the crowds ran inside, we ran for the umbrellas and the chance to be dancing in the rain. Meredith looks so happy, twirling with her friends, dancing. A carefree moment. A lovely young woman. All is well.

Here's Eric Qualman again, who worked with Meredith. Yeah.

She's a positive influence on her students and on the world. Now, obviously, none of us, including myself, are perfect. And so there's certain things that we have that we're not perfect by any means. But net, net, she's a positive influence. She's a spitfire. She's just a dynamic person. She's a light. If you have to put it in one word, it's like Meredith Chapman is a light for other people. And that's why we're sitting here talking, right?

Eric and Meredith had worked together on one of his book projects. It involved a concept he calls digital stamps. And everybody who uses the internet has one. I noticed that you're using the present tense. Yeah, I mean, it's like, I mean, when you say the word shock, it's just, it's still, but in my mind, I'm using present tense and it's part of

This is why it's always ironic to me is that when we talk about when Meredith and I partnered on digital stamps, so digital stamps, your digital footprint, that's anything you upload, upload about yourself digitally. And the shadow is anything that people post about you or say about you online. And so what we're dealing with right now is her shadow. And so even after your death, you still have your digital stamp and it can still evolve.

And so that's why when you're a person that has a light like Meredith, over time, your reputation continues to increase well after you're gone from this planet. You still have that impact. You still have that impact five seconds from now, five years, 50 years, 500 years from today. So that's why you'll often hear me talking almost in the present because of these digital stamps and Meredith Chapman's digital stamp in particular.

What would you want people to remember about her and to take away from the memory of her? I think all of us, at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we produce more smiles than we take away. That we're net positive on the amount of smiles and the lives that we impact. But at the granular level, how do we make people smile? The one thing that I always remember about her, whether it was in person or whether it was remote, she was always smiling.

And that smile was infectious, and it caused me to smile as well. And I could see it through the eyes of her students. I could see it through the eyes of her peers when I'd meet them as well. And so it wasn't just me one-on-one. It was actually through the collective of all the people that she touched. On a calendar that Mark and Meredith shared, Meredith had placed a green heart emoji on a day in early May. She and Mark had plans to go to the jewelry store to pick up the promise ring Mark had ordered.

They would both have been legally single by then and could have gone on Meredith's dream date, the one where she would be in Mark's arms dancing to her favorite song, Perfect. Instead, on May 14th, a public memorial was held for Meredith. This event, as the invitation read, was for friends, colleagues, and the community to remember social media pioneer and community leader Meredith Sullivan Chapman. Mark Gerardo was not welcome. He was also not invited to Janair's funeral.

Her cremated remains were returned to her family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and placed in a family plot. After a short break, Mark Girardo's road to recovery is not going to be easy. We'll talk with the very first therapist Mark went to see when we come back after this.

Bad, Bad Thing is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. And here's a question for you. Now that we're seeing light at the end of the COVID tunnel, maybe you're experiencing these feelings. You're not really depressed, but something seems off. Maybe you're sad, kind of down, or your relationships are suffering, and you don't really know why. This is a good time to get BetterHelp Online Professional Therapy that you can access privately and securely.

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Our listeners get 10% off their first month with BetterHelp. Just log on to betterhelp.com slash bad thing to do a good thing for yourself. That's betterhelp.com slash bad thing. Mark was now on his own, truly alone for the first time in his life.

He'd gone back to work, but it was so awkward. He felt like a pariah, everyone staring at him, not talking about the elephant in the room. He had panic attacks, and he began drinking heavily at night. Mark would eventually go to AA meetings, church services, and therapists to deal with the drinking, his grief, and remorse. My name is Dr. Sam Romerowski. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice for the past 40 years.

Dr. Romerowski is the first psychologist that Mark Gerardo sought out after the murder-suicide. I asked Mark for permission to talk to him about what those first sessions were like. And then Mark has given me his consent. Let me ask you, when Mark first came to you, how did he present? What kind of shape was Mark in when you first saw him? At the time that I saw him, which was first in April of 2018,

I think he was numb. That's the best way that I think I can describe his affect. His presentation was anesthetized. It was numb. It was rather lacking in emotion. I think he was so overwhelmed and conflicted with myriad emotions, guilt, feeling responsible. He was also having rather severe sleep impairment.

And while it had always been his practice as an adult to typically have maybe a glass or two of wine in the evening, he was now drinking a bottle of wine and that was four or five glasses. And that was concerning because I was concerned about that leading to bad judgment or that leading to addiction. I had spoken to him about possibly seeing a psychiatrist, maybe getting on some medication, not using drugs.

Dr. Ramarowski wanted Mark to talk more and open up more about what he was feeling, but the therapy sessions weren't working. So he came up with another idea. The concept of writing is a very important thing.

was something that occurred to me that would be helpful to him because he really was not able to do it very well verbally. So I thought, well, let's try to pick a different modality. If he were four or five years old, I would have said, let's draw pictures. You know, let's do art. Let's do something that taps into what you're feeling because you come across as being sort of like a stone.

Mark liked Dr. Amorowski's idea and started writing in a journal. And around this time, he stumbled upon something unexpected. He was trying to close out one of Janir's bank accounts, but couldn't. An auto-pay transaction was pending. And that's when he discovered Janir's cloud account, which had backups of everything that had been on her computer. And he was able to use it to

Mark clicked on the drive, and there it was, Janair's secret life. Twelve different alias email accounts, the selfie videos, the audio recordings, her last letter. She was hiding the fact that she was making videotapes, that she was writing a letter all along, and planning, and plotting, and scoping out Meredith's house. I didn't know she was doing any of that. Mark told me he felt so dumb and naive when he saw all that Janair had done and planned. If I had seen Janair,

Anything that tipped her hand that she was going to do something even close to what she ended up doing, I would have stopped her. I would have instantly gotten her help. And if she was unwilling to get help, then she would have had to have been restrained in some way. If I had known that she had that vitriol in her heart.

Now that Mark discovered all that Janair had left behind, he started an investigation of his own into how he could have missed so much and why Janair's reality had become so twisted. Here's Sheila Brennan, Janair's divorce coach. So Mark reached out to me a couple of months after the incident and he said, would you meet me? And I said, no. When I did respond, I said, no, I won't meet you, but I'll talk to you.

And his email was really nice and just said, I'm sure I'm the last person that you would expect to hear from. But I'm just trying to put pieces of the puzzle together. And I think you might have some answers that I am looking for. So we spoke on the phone. And at the onset, I said to him, I just have to tell you that I don't really like marketing guys because they seem to put their own spin on stories very well. So he was like, OK.

All right, well, you know, can I ask you a few questions? So by the end, I did, I mean, I answered his questions and then I said to him, I feel terrible. I mean, I feel terrible. I felt terribly for him as well as for Jenn Air's family and friends and Meredith's family and friends.

For the next several months, Mark kept uncovering more clues about Janair's private life. He found an email Janair had written to the GPS tracking company asking for help to track her teenage son. Mark then found another email Janair wrote to a psychic asking for a reading to tell her what to do about her troubled marriage. And then Mark found the receipt for the gun and the practice sessions at the shooting range. Janair was his anti-gun, if not more so than I was.

She was the last person that would own a gun in my mind. So when I found out later from the police and then eventually saw the receipt, it was still unbelievable that she actually would walk into a gun store and buy a gun, let alone use it. She talked about animals to me. She absolutely loved her dog and a cat that she loved. And the cat especially loved her. I can't imagine someone who loves animals like that, that deeply, that deeply.

really, really strongly could shoot another human being point blank in the face. How can you do that? Half an hour earlier texting me, thanks. Meredith didn't, Meredith's life didn't need to end the way it did, which was just absolutely plucked off the earth in such a violent way. When it's all said and done, was Jenner a monster? Was she evil? Jenner's final action was monstrous.

because it stole two lives and permanently impacted many others. So if we look at it through that pure lens,

Obviously, the responsibility would then squarely sit on the shoulders of Jen-Air, but it's far more complex than that. Mark did not have a clear vision of what to do about Jen-Air. If it was simple as, I need to end this marriage, then he could have assertively gone into couples therapy and say, I know this is painful. I've met someone else. I've fallen in love with her. And this marriage has to end.

But where it got complicated was Mark drew this out longer and longer, likely feeding Jenner's rumination about it, upping the probability that this kind of tragic end of some kind would have happened. I'm not saying this story would have ended differently, given Jenner's personality organization. There was a certain inevitability to this, but you might have dropped the odds if there had been more rapid decisiveness so that it wasn't getting drawn out into this ruminative sort

sort of space. Is it fair to tag her with PTSD or borderline personality disorder? Is it fair to do that to Jenner? There were many other things that came out in Jenner's story that would raise concerns about mental health issues. Having not met Jenner, I don't know. I wouldn't be able to definitively obviously diagnose her.

You know, when we see a person who has a highly dysregulated personality, that what we might even consider is does this fall in the realm of something more in the personality pathology realm? And the issue with a personality disorder or personality pathology or dysfunctional personality of any kind, because it's so chronic,

It doesn't shift with time and it's actually not amenable to treatment. It can really shape behavior, often very extreme behavior, because it's not something you can sort of treat away. There's no magic pill. So in Janair's case, the culmination of a lifetime of personality issues, antagonism and dysregulation against almost one of the worst possible insults and triggers she could face that

that were really not managed well by Mark, culminated in a horrific tragedy. If you could go back in time, what would you... - Jenner needed to feel safe. That's what I would have done with Jenner. I would have wanted to give her a sense of safety.

so that she would get the chance to practice regulating those seemingly impossible feelings. I think that in many ways, and this is to me the heartbreaking, despairing part of this story. Anyone hearing this story, it's very easy to paint Jenner linearly as this horrible, evil person. Jenner was hurting, does not rationalize the crime in no way, shape or form. Jenner was hurting though.

And in this lashing out in this acting out of removing Meredith, yes, that was a piece of it. But in herself, you wonder she was so destroyed herself by what has happened that

that taking herself out was just the final extension of that. Now, a cynical person might say, no, she didn't want to deal with facing justice for her crimes and the absolute, you know, misery of spending the rest of one's life in a prison setting. But I really think Jenn Air was already destroyed. And this was just sort of the final, the final blow. In a way,

Everyone in this story was a victim and everyone in the story was a perpetrator. And that's what's so telling about this, obviously, to differing degrees. And ultimately, the ultimate perpetration happened from Janair. She's the one who pulled the trigger. She's the one who ended a life. And that's completely unacceptable. We'll take a break here. And when we get back, what Mark Gerardo did on the one year anniversary of losing both Meredith and Janair, that's on the other side of this break.

Mark had been writing in his journal for months now, and he shared what he had written with his therapist, who was amazed to read all about the emotions Mark had never been able to talk about. Is it fair to say that you encouraged him to turn it into a book? Yes. Tell me how that conversation went. Was he, he was just writing for therapeutic purposes, and you said what? You know, I said, this is a sensational story. It's not what we hear about in the evening news.

You know, you've already been labeled a complete manipulative jerk, callous, indifferent, selfish, narcissistic. All of those are attributes that people are pinning on you. Wouldn't it be nice if you could also, assuming that any of those descriptors are accurate, wouldn't it be nice if you were also that guy that shared something

from which you got no benefit. I mean, you write a book and you agree with whatever publisher agrees to publish this thing, should that happen, that you don't make a penny. That it's clear from the beginning that this is a therapeutic project that may help somebody as well. And that you're not going to benefit from it except from knowing that maybe you help somebody.

Mark liked the idea of a book, and for the next several months, he began turning his journal into a manuscript. It gave him purpose while he was navigating his new world order. A year had passed, and I dreaded whatever weight the anniversary carried with it. I flew out to Indiana and brought Janair sunflowers, her favorite, and laid them on her grave and...

Asked her for forgiveness and sat and cried and talked to her for an hour or so. I jumped on a plane back to Philadelphia and I drove to Meredith's grave and I brought her flowers and sat on her grave and asked her for forgiveness and told her I was so very sorry that her life ended so soon. Meredith had such joy and love of life. Her favorite song would come on and every song was her favorite song it seemed and she would...

be sitting in the car in the passenger seat or the driver's seat for that matter, and she would just be dancing and singing along. She didn't have the greatest singing voice. She sang a little off-key, and I loved every minute of it. I never told her because I didn't want her to stop singing. That's my memory of her. What do you think would have happened if Janir didn't do this? I wish Meredith and I had at least had the opportunity to explore. I had high hopes for us. I was...

Mark Girardo finished his book with the help of a writing coach.

And then he contacted a suicide prevention group and told them he wanted to donate proceeds from book sales to them. But they said no. They didn't want anything to do with him or this story. More rejection was headed Mark's way. He sent the manuscript out to several traditional book publishers. Nobody wanted to work with him.

So in March of 2020, about two years after the tragedy, Mark self-published his book on Amazon. It's called Irreparable. And at the time of this writing, it has over 400 reviews and a four out of five star rating. But he still gets a lot of hate in the comments section.

Like this remark, read by an actor. This pathetic attempt at prose reads as the weak, rambling defense of a coward who abused his mentally ill wife until she snapped. He and Meredith killed Jenn Air.

Mark has, though, also started getting some of the feedback he'd hoped for, like this comment written by a woman involved in an intense affair. "But a pit has been forming in my stomach. His wife is suspicious and has become threatening. After seeing Mark's story, something shifted. I stopped the affair out of complete fear. Mark's story may very well have saved my life or at the very least my reputation.

So thank you, Mark Gerardo. And please pray for my recovery. So as Mark tells his story about this, is Mark admirable? I mean, Mark's telling a story, but I think he's a storyteller and he's telling a painful story. He's sharing a cautionary tale. He is rendering himself vulnerable. He's rendering himself as a target. For people who say Mark is the reason both women are dead. You know, Mark is an easy fall guy in this one. He was out of his game.

It's not the job of a partner to be a psychodiagnostician and to understand fully the mental health of their partner. It is the job of a partner, though, to keep their sort of psychological house in order, work on being self-reflective, open, honest. And I'm a big believer that when you are in a loving relationship, the most important thing you can do, you protect the vulnerabilities of the person you love. That's love.

And Mark didn't seem to get that. You will have to face a lifelong, painful, difficult legacy of being self-reflective on what could have been done differently. What would the impact of transparency have been once Jenea started suspecting what was going on? What would the impact have been of stepping away from the relationship when it was very clear that it was not a healthy space? You know, what would those choices have looked like? That's his sentence to bear.

I asked Mark if he still intended to donate any money he made from book sales, and he told me he'd chosen a golden retriever rescue organization and had made a donation. I called them to check. They confirmed Mark had in fact sent them money. They even told me how much. So I asked Mark to show me his current sales report. A modest number of books have sold, and the money he's made matched his donation to the penny. If people don't listen well enough to his story, they're going to

Quickly judge. One of my favorite quotes from Rush, quick to judge, slow to understand. That's happening a lot already with him and his story. People are quick to judge. He had an affair. He deserves it. Meredith deserves it. That's awful. No one deserves that. Most of us try to hide our secrets. Most of us try to hide the things that we've done wrong, the things that people will judge us for. He's thrown it all out there. It's exemplary. It's courageous. His goal with this, his goal with the book is

is to tell the story, help affect people in a way that prevents heartache and pain and suffering. Do you think Janair was successful in her I hope you never find happiness, Mark, missive? I hope not. I don't think so. And I'm going to work like...

as mad, as hard as I can to help her not be successful, help him. I'm going to do whatever I can. That's why I'm sitting here. She cannot be successful. She failed. The minute she pulled the trigger, she failed. Come here, Gypsy. I know. It's okay. Come here. It's a little hard to hear, but that's a cat meowing in the background during one of Mark's interviews. It's okay. Don't be afraid. The cat is Gypsy, Janair's cat.

After Jenner died, her family wanted to take Gypsy, but Mark wouldn't let her go. He didn't want anyone to maybe follow through on Jenner's last wishes to kill the cat. So Mark took Gypsy with him when he moved across country from Delaware to Southern California, where he now lives, rebuilding his life. A few months after my interviews with Mark, he called to say that Gypsy had died. He didn't know for sure exactly what caused her death, but Gypsy had lived for 15 years. Mark had her cremated.

Then he sent the ashes to Fort Wayne, to Janair's childhood friend, Shelley, who was planning something special. And on a sunny summer afternoon, with the birds chirping and serenading her, Shelley knelt down by her friend Janair's headstone. Hi, friend. I just wanted to come out and bring you somebody. Mark sent me Gypsy. He wanted me to read a letter to you.

And it says,

Go to the Rainbow Bridge, Gypsy. Mommy is waiting for you. Love and eternal peace, Mark. I also wanted to tell you that I am so sorry that you felt the pain that you felt, the hurt that you felt, and everything you endured. I wish that you could have reached out. I could have reached out. I feel some sort of guilt because I could have been a friend. I could have been a better friend.

But I wish we would have had the relationship we did when we were kids to be able to talk about everything, cry, laugh. You will always forever, forever be a part of me. So I'm going to leave Gypsy here with you and you two can be together again. I love and I miss you very much. Lessons to be learned from all of this. What do we say? You know, anytime somebody looks at a story like Mark and Janair's, they watch it with morbid fascination.

But then once that goes away, you wonder, what did I just learn? You know, it depends on what seat you're sitting in. For most people, they're sitting in it as a person who's in a relationship or may have even contemplated or had an infidelity. I think that it really comes down to that it's about...

Knowing your demons before you go into a relationship sometimes, understanding what the triggers are about, doing your due diligence when you select partners. But the fact is nobody gets trained in that. I mean, if I lived in the world I wanted to live in, we would actually spend less time on algebra and more time on how to choose a healthy life partner because I think you're going to get more payout from that.

Is this a cautionary tale about infidelity? Maybe it's much more a cautionary tale about dishonesty. Maybe it's a cautionary tale about transparency. One of Mark Gerardo's favorite memories of his marriage is when he and Jenner saw the musician Sting in concert at the Red Rock Amphitheater in Colorado back in 2013.

Someone posted a fan video online, the part where Sting is performing the song Fragile. After the show, they bought Sting's book of lyrics. Mark still has it. It's painful to recall that they sang these words together. Nothing comes from violence, nothing ever could, for all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are.

There was definitely something in J'Nair that caused her to do really awful things. You hear it lots of different places in literature and movies and whatnot, this idea that we're not all good or all evil, that we're both of these things.

And there's a spectrum of them. And sometimes, sometimes some people just get taken over by one end of the spectrum and they, they get, they go farther and farther toward evil until they can't or bad or dark or whatever you want to call it until they're unable to go back. I think she got there.

I think that whenever we look at these stories, we try to figure out where could we have stopped this. I think that it's like that fatalistic, you know, kind of parable that no matter how the stars aligned, the end of the story was always going to be the end of the story. But also it is a wake up call on the despair in the world. How do we be with it? How do we address it? And how do we create some form of acceptance with it? And how do we bring that into our own lives?

Meredith Sullivan's sister Jessica wrote this online, that a friend helped her label what she was feeling. They said that when Meredith was killed, Jessica, and anyone who loved Meredith, had their world forcefully and violently reordered. Jessica said that those words, in that exact order, were jarringly poignant. And then she shared a moment, read here by an actor, when the memory of Meredith came to her. I had black mascara tears streaming down my cheeks.

I ran off to the side of the trail by the water and sat on a graffitied rock listening to the words my sister would have told me had she been running next to me. One foot in front of the other, babe. People don't love you because you're perfect. They love you because you're perfectly flawed. And so it's warts and all. Here I am. And again, net positive. And whenever you enter a room, like with Meredith, whenever you enter a room...

You're either going to give energy or you're going to take energy. In every interaction I've had with her, she gave the energy. She didn't suck energy out of that room. She gave that positive energy. And again, I'm going to say this a hundred times, is that basically be a positive force for good. Don't worry about your flaws. Embrace them. I could go on for days about Meredith's unique ability to see a path where one didn't exist.

She lived by an unspoken creed to just keep pushing forward. I think the best way to honor my sister is to share with other people, people who may be hurting from different types of pain than mine, to keep looking forward. Whatever your journey is, whatever your struggle is right now, just keep moving, one foot in front of the other. Have a good night, everybody. Thank you.

Bad, Bad Thing is produced in partnership with Podcast One and LiveXLive, edited by Jeff DeRay, our music composed by Gage Buzan and Gary Lionelli. And special thanks to Amber Robertson-Buzan, Suzanne Rico, Natasha Belmont-Rose, and to John and Amy Ruskin of the Ruskin Theater in Santa Monica.

And finally, if any part of this story resonates for you or for someone you know who needs help dealing with thoughts of suicide, there are a lot of great resources to get help, including the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. 1-800-273-TALK.