Revisiting Season One: What's in the Water in Tarrant County?
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Hello, it's Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me. Today we are re-airing the third episode of our show, and we have something really special that we are including as a follow-up. We're going to be checking in with good friend of the show, Detective Mike Weber, about what is going on in Tarrant County and what's been going on in Tarrant County since we recorded this episode.

Mike has been such a fantastic contributor to this show, and really hearing him talk about his cases at a conference was one of the huge impetuses for me in...

conceiving of this as a true crime show. And he's been really an amazing collaborator all the way through. Also, a fun piece of news is that Mike and I just finished writing a book together, and that will be coming out next year from St. Martin's. We are going to be talking about the Hopiabara case, which we talked about this season, among several others. So stay tuned for a release date for that.

In the meantime, if you want even more, you can subscribe on Patreon and on Apple, and we've got lots of exclusive bonus content there. You also get episodes early and ad-free, so do check that out. And as always, if monetary support is not an option, rating and reviewing the show helps, and sharing about it wherever you talk to your friends is also a huge help. So without further ado, here is the episode.

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Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. People believe their eyes. That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

If you questioned everything that everyone told you, you couldn't make it through your day. I had developed a really good relationship with the Pucher family at this point. But I just really wanted to hear from Hope. I really wanted to sit down with her and hear what her experience was.

about what her experience of this had been like because that was still the biggest mystery. So I got her number from her father, Paul, and I sent her a text message asking her if she'd be willing to talk to me, and she told me she would think about it.

When I came across Hope Ybarra's case, it really stuck out to me and resonated with me because of some of those similarities that we've been talking about with my own family story. But it was far from the only case in Tarrant County, Texas that was in the media at the time. The cases of people like Cecilia Ransbottom, Kristen Shreve, and Elizabeth Honeycutt were also making headlines at that time. And I started to wonder, what's going on here?

The cases are out there. I'm not trying to say that they're common, but they're out there. But so many of them just go undetected and unreported. I'm Deanna Boyd, a former investigative reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. What I found out about Tarrant County, but I don't think this happens in a lot of counties or a lot of states, it's all about the investigation.

Tarrant County seems to do it right. They don't do it alone. They get CPS involved. They get Cook Children's Medical Center involved. There is a team of people who were involved in this investigation and going through medical records and going through social media records. And these are long, drawn-out investigations. From my research, it was most law enforcements aren't going to dedicate the time. Most law enforcement officers and CPS don't even have the training in these kind of investigations.

Here again is Detective Mike Weber. He echoes Deanna Boyd's thoughts on why there are so many cases in Tarrant County.

How can we have so many? That's easy. The criminal part is me, right? Because no one else can do that. But we have a system set up to catch these offenders. Our pediatricians at Cook's Children's feel comfortable reporting this abuse. I mean, that's a real issue for physicians. There are physicians that have been followed home. There are physicians that have been harassed. There are physicians that have been sued by these offenders. For physicians to feel comfortable reporting, knowing that something is going to be done is important.

For them to be educated on what this is, is important. Me and Dr. Kaufman have done two grand rounds at Cook's Children's Hospitals to make sure that the physicians there have an understanding of this and know and will feel comfortable reporting this abuse. And it also goes to the hospital legal staff. Are they going to be more concerned about self-protection? Because it'd be real easy to ignore this and never have to deal with a headache and just let the child suffer.

Or are they going to do the right thing and be supportive of their doctors whenever they do report this abuse, which Cook's Children's has been? And I can tell you 100% that all children's hospitals have not been. The more I got into these cases, the more I realized what a huge lift this was for hospitals and doctors to investigate these cases. And I wondered how Cook's seemed to be accomplishing this.

For hospitals, between HIPAA and their various liabilities and their, you know, bills to pay and whatever else their staff has to do, you know, it's just a lot of work to try and get everything that you need together to move forward with one of these investigations.

I got a chance to meet with Dr. Jamie Kaufman. She's the child abuse pediatrician at Cook Children's Hospital, and she frequently does trainings with Detective Mike Weber. Dr. Kaufman told me about their care team at the hospital, which she is the head of. So the care team is actually our child abuse program for our medical system. So we have an outpatient clinic,

And we have a pretty big staff that's full-time, which we're very fortunate for that. We don't have to do any general pediatrics or any other types of clinics. So there's myself. I'm a board-certified child abuse pediatrician. We also have advanced practice providers, nurse practitioners in our case, as well as sexual assault nurse examiners. And so we all work full-time in this clinic, along with social workers as well. We see children with concerns of any type of abuse.

So it can be sexual abuse, severe neglect, physical abuse, medical child abuse, whatever the issue is. But we also do inpatient consults in the hospital. We have a lot of experience with dealing with the different types of abuse, but also dealing with the system. So whether it's the criminal system or the civil court system. Does every children's hospital have some version of this?

They all look very different. There's a huge variety on staffing. And in a lot of children's hospitals, the child abuse pediatrician may have to do other types of pediatric work as well and not just child abuse pediatrics. So they may be doing some general pediatrics. They may be doing some emergency medicine. So it varies.

What occurs to me listening to Dr. Kaufman talk about these discrepancies in care at various children's hospital is just that I can't imagine that you could ever catch one of these cases without dedicated staff.

Because the number of pages of medical records that you have to review in order to detect this abuse, you know, that's what it comes down to. It comes down to the records. The hallmark of these cases is abuse.

The parent is taking their child to the hospital all the time, to different hospitals, in different counties, with different systems. And they're creating this immense paper trail that could completely overwhelm the staff of any hospital. And so it's hard to imagine that...

without some kind of really direct focus, you know, of the staff to be able to do that medical record review. I mean, that's what it comes down to in these cases. Dr. Kaufman talked to me about the importance of everyone involved in these cases talking to each other and how much trust plays a huge role.

Our system really fosters a collegiality amongst staff because we have relationships. And I think that's what everything basically comes down to is relationship between providers, between departments. I've worked at a lot of different places. And I have to say, I have the cell phone numbers for a lot of people.

that I can call for different specialists or investigators or whatever, that if I want an opinion or I need help, they're a phone call away. They're an email away. They're an instant message away. And they respond.

It's not like I'm going to send an email to an orthopedic surgeon with a question about an x-ray and he's not going to get back to me or she's not going to get back to me. They get back very quickly. And so we have that relationship and expectations that's fostered by everybody.

I've become really familiar with Dr. Kaufman's work via Mike Weber. I came to find out that she wasn't the only one who has been working really hard to make this system work to protect kids. Here's Dr. Karen Schultz. She is a pediatric pulmonologist at Cook Children's. Cook is a unique place. Our main focus is taking care of patients, not education for students and residents. So if I have a concern about my patient,

I pick up the phone and I call directly to the attending physician and we don't have layers of students and residents that everything gets filtered through. There's a lot more direct communication. So despite all of the strong working relationships amongst the various colleagues at Cook Children's Hospital, investigating these cases of medical child abuse is still anything but easy, even with a dedicated child abuse detection team.

At the same time, it really seemed to me like Cooks is doing something right here. And I wondered if we just couldn't replicate this model all around the country. Well, it is a complicated issue. It's complicated for medical professionals, much less laypeople. Even when you're well-informed, these are such entangled, complicated issues.

medical kinds of situations that I think even for medical professionals, it's oftentimes hard to disentangle fact and fiction, right? Because

The perpetrators are so manipulative and have enough knowledge base that they're really good at putting enough truth with the fiction that it gets very difficult to differentiate sometimes. When there is a suspicion of medical child abuse specifically, what does the record review process for that look like?

You can't make a diagnosis of medical child abuse without reviewing all medical records. And that's not just from your own institution, because many of these perpetrators doctor shop and hospital shop. And we've had children that not only use different physicians within our town, but also traveled among different cities and among different states.

to get that medical care that they're trying to seek. So it's important to review all those records because that's where you find the discrepancies between what the caregiver is saying versus what is actually documented in the record.

And so when you start seeing those discrepancies where they're saying, oh, this child had a brain bleed, for example, and then you review the records and they're saying the brain bleed was found on this hospitalization, you review that and you're finding, oh, there was a normal head CT scan. There was no brain bleed. So there you find that's a falsified report of a medical condition that isn't true. And so you're looking for those kind of discrepancies in the record. And then once you start looking for that,

then you let the medical providers know this is a discrepancy, that this isn't really the truth. Because these diagnoses get perpetuated in the medical record. So if a mom says that or a father or whoever the perpetrator is, it gets put down as one of their diagnoses. And then that just gets repeated throughout the medical record, and it's not true to begin with.

And there's difficulties in reviewing medical records outside of your own institution because unless a legal guardian gives you consent, you can't see those records. And so, number one, they have to be truthful to tell you they went somewhere else, which if they don't tell you, you don't know to look. And two, they have to give you permission to look.

So if you don't have those two things, you're not going to even know the care that's done elsewhere. And to review these records is usually thousands of pages of medical records because you can't just review the doctor's notes, right? There is so much within the nursing notes.

telephone calls. All those things have to be reviewed. It's every single notation. And it can take well over 100 hours to do all that. And of course, insurance doesn't reimburse for any of that time. So how do you do it, right? How do you have time to do it? How do you...

something to where people can review those records and then find out, is this just an anxious parent who comes to medical care for every sniffle, right? Which that happens, especially new moms and things. You don't know what's normal and what's not normal.

And obviously, there are anxious parents out there. There are children with truly complex medical problems that are getting appropriate care. And then there are situations where a caregiver is lying or inducing illness and suffering.

In all that quagmire of information, you have to figure that out. Do you think that it's as rare as most people believe? No. When I first started in this role 21 years ago, we looked at maybe one or two cases a year as being Munchausen by proxy or medical child abuse.

And over the years, when we've really kind of developed better system for looking and not being siloed, right? That's one of the problems is siloed medical care. So once we started looking at getting out of those silos and really looking and having a system for other medical providers to speak out and notify that there may be an issue, we started looking at 30 or 40 cases a year.

And out of those cases, there are some that aren't, that are truly a true medical condition or an anxious parent. But out of those, you know, we'd have 20 that CPS validated. Now, where they got removed was a whole other thing. But that CPS did validate and substantiate as being abuse. Technology also plays an increasingly important role in these cases.

How many of those were abused and didn't get validated, that is another thing that we can't really know for sure. And I think the number's growing as we have a computer in our pocket to Google everything and to look for symptoms that you can falsify. So I think it's going to get worse, not better. And also as our society is all about social media and how many likes you have and how

how many people watched whatever, you know, I think that kind of feeds into it as well, that attention seeking. And so I think it's going to get worse, not better.

I really want to make sure that this moment in Dr. Kaufman's interview lands because I think this is really genuinely a terrifying thought. We know that this abuse is underreported to begin with. It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to investigate. And the way that this collides with the attention economy of social media, it means that it's primed to get worse.

And this is the access to the drug that people who have this disorder are looking for has increased so many times over as social media has permeated our society. And so I think looking at this intersection and really absorbing what Dr. Kaufman's saying here is really important. The reality is...

modern tools make this crime much easier to commit. After all, we know that this is a crime of opportunity. Here's Dr. Mark Feldman, a psychiatrist and one of the world's leading authorities on Munchausen by proxy.

Years ago, before the advent of social media, people who wanted to falsify illness had to trudge to medical libraries, find medical textbooks, decide what ailment they were going to depict, bring their child to the emergency room or doctor's office or hospital, or go there themselves and do a fair amount of acting to convince the doctors that there really was a severe problem when in fact there was none at all. That's time intensive and laborious.

But now you can become an expert in a medical illness or a mental illness in about 20 minutes by reading Wikipedia. And you don't need to go to the medical libraries. Similarly, you can just click to a support group devoted to illnesses of various types.

And they exist to be unquestionably supportive. And perpetrators count on that. So they'll go online and say either that they're sickly or that the child has cystic fibrosis or asthma or some other dread condition. And there's no verifying it, really. That makes it hard, obviously, to dispute it, on the other hand. And they get all sorts of

attention and feel a sense of control over other people by having manufactured all of this online. What would you say to people who say this isn't a real thing? Fortunately, it's getting a little bit more common for people to acknowledge that it exists, but we get into conflict over how common it is. One of the biggest myths is that Munchausen by proxy is extremely rare.

And I counter that it's not rare. It's just we're failing to recognize it.

that if doctors and health professionals and the public were better informed about Munchausen by proxy, we might see an explosion of cases, not because people are suddenly abusing their children, but because we're now recognizing the risk factors for cases. So again, it's not true that it's very rare. It's also not true that

People who engage in munchausen by proxy abuse, the perpetrators, are, quote, crazy. If they were, if they were flagrantly psychotic, we would be able to tell right away that they're not credibly reporting on the child's symptoms. The fact is that even in court, they present as utterly normal people, loving parents for whom this kind of behavior would be totally alien.

So we can't tell from just chatting with an alleged perpetrator whether or not she is, in fact, a perpetrator based on the apparent normality of her responses to questions. I think also another myth is that Munchausen by proxy is about financial gain.

So that if somebody is not getting disability support or opioid medications as a result of what they're doing to their children, it can't really be Munchausen by proxy. That's a complete misunderstanding. We call that malingering by proxy or just plain malingering. The aim there is to acquire attention, sympathy, and concern.

They want intangible satisfaction and they get very deceptive in order to obtain it. That's what Munch has on my proxy is all about. I really like that point you made about them not seeming crazy because I think that that is one of the things that has persisted a bit in some of the media around it. And I'm thinking actually more of the dramatizations where people

in some ways those perpetrators come across as so obviously creepy that it does run the risk of making it seem like this is something that anybody would be able to spot. And that, you know, these women are so odd and so sort of either have, you know, this really heavy sort of Southern Gothic creepiness or seem sort of deranged or

when in fact that's not usually the case and that's actually what enables them to pull this off. That's precisely the case. That's exactly what I'm talking about. And Munchausen by proxy is an inherently

dramatic phenomenon. And I don't think programs need to go and sensationalize it further. When you find out the facts of a case, your jaw drops. So why elaborate all sorts of turns and spins to something that's so disquieting to begin with? But it's done for dramatic effect.

in many of the programs that have recently appeared in which Munch has them by proxy as either the central plot or a subplot. You know, it's a word that comes up all the time when you're reading about these cases in the news or, you know, reading about sort of the coverage of it in the media in any way is the word monster. And even in one of Hope Ybarra's newsreels,

interviews that she did from prison, she described herself as a monster. And I understand that because the behavior is monstrous. I think that it's something that as a behavior, it's the worst thing that most people can possibly imagine is a mother who would torture her child in this way for the purposes of attention. And yet I think that people have a desire to distance themselves from it.

by saying that person's a monster, that person's crazy. And in that way, it allows them to push it away and say, this would never happen in my family. If it did happen in my family, I would be the person who knew right away. I would not be the person who got conned for 10 years. I don't think that that reflects reality at all. Actually, people who are good and loving get pulled into these

These stories, and I think that in many ways to characterize these women as somehow this really scary other is a disservice because in reality, I think it is the mom next door. It is your sister, your auntie, your friend. It could be in your family. It could be in any family. Against all odds, Tarrant County is still catching and prosecuting more of these cases than anywhere else in the country. Again, here's Detective Mike Webber.

After the first case that I worked on, I went to my chief prosecutor, Atlanta Minton. And I told her, I'm like, you know, I'd seen what it took to work these cases, the volume of the amount of work. And I told Atlanta, you know, a detective with 30 cases on his caseload is going to have a hard time working these. Why don't you just give any more of these that come in to me? Ybarra came in two months later, and that was in April of 2009 when we got the Ybarra case. And from that point until 2015,

I investigated 16 reports of this abuse and we filed six criminal cases. We got five guilty pleas to child abuse crimes and one guilty plea to Medicaid fraud.

So Mike has a really impressive track record, and he's considered the top expert in the country on law enforcement in medical child abuse cases. But the road in Mike's career has not always been easy for him. I went to the sheriff's office in 2018. And how many more have you worked on since that time? Since 2018.

January of 2019, I've investigated, gosh, 12 more of these cases and we filed criminal charges on six. That's a lot of cases for something that's just exceptionally rare, allegedly. So is there something in the water in Tarrant County? We're investigating crimes. The issue with this is police aren't trained on what this is. They don't know what it is. They tend to dismiss it as a CPS issue.

and the child continues to be unprotected. We have learned in Tarrant County, we have a quasi system. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

But we have a system in place that allows us to address these offenses, and we're working to make that system better every day. So what you're saying is you've got kind of a working ecosystem in Tarrant County around this. So what does that look like? You know, the first thing in a good ecosystem is having education.

And that starts with the doctors at Cook's Children's. And, you know, this can be very dicey for doctors if they report it and nothing is done. These offenders are extremely litigious. They can—I know doctors who have lost professional privileges because of accusations made by these offenders. You know, there's a very big case in Boston, the Pelletier case.

where they sued the hospital for falsely accusing the mom. Our doctors at Cook's Children's know that this is going to be addressed properly. Anyone, right, with anything, when they know that the right thing is going to be done, they're more likely to report things.

which is what we found at Cook's Children's. And, you know, doctors are humans. That's another big fallacy here that people don't understand. There are cases where reports are made that aren't true, but we have a system that shows that they're not true. Police investigations do not just convict the guilty. They also clear the innocent.

And without that police investigation, there are certain things we can do that CPS cannot do. And without that police investigation, you do not get a full picture of the behavior of the alleged offender. There is a pretty visceral fear as a parent of having some run-in with the system where you—

are falsely suspected of abusing your child. So I think it's good to point out that actually the behavior of a loving parent, of a parent who's taking good care of their kid, does not look like the behavior of a parent who's being medically abusive. You know, a lot of the perpetrators that we know about, where we know back into their history as teenagers, they started these behaviors in teenagers. You know, Hope's family told us about

She suddenly fell out of bed and was in a wheelchair in her marching band, and the marching band was pushing her out in a wheelchair. You know, there's things in my own family's history that go back to being a teenager that we look back now and are just, oh, my God, I can't believe we didn't realize this was going on. You know, we were talking about early, like catching these things early being a preventative measure. Ideally, catching the person when they're doing it to themselves and getting them psychiatric help is,

When they're not victimizing anyone else, that's the ideal time to catch the behavior, right? So this is like really important on a couple of levels. Right. It's what parents worry about. So if you have police involvement early, it can stop that. You okay? Oh, man. It just sneaks up on me sometimes.

I think it's because my sister was around the same age when she started doing some really obvious, you know, falsifying. And yeah, there was this incident when she was, I think, 16 or 17 when she told everyone at school that she was losing her hair and she had a bald patch. And my mom took her to the dermatologist and the dermatologist pulled my mom aside and said, your daughter's shaving her head.

I'm just like, why didn't this dermatologist say she needs psychiatric help? And I think my mom tried to get her to go to counseling, but once you have a 17-year-old and you're not in a situation where it's as serious as you have a police officer there and they can send you to the psych ward—

It's so hard to look back at that situation and think, oh my God, if we had known. And I know that that's just something that like so stuck with my parents. I know it's not that they didn't do the right thing. I just think that it's like nobody said this could be Munchausen, this could be infectious disorder, this could be the psychiatric condition where this is the reason she's doing it. It just seemed like a baffling teenage thing that no one could make sense of.

And then it escalated and escalated, and here we are now, you know? It's just... I mean, something that you need to understand, and your parents especially need to understand, is even if you had sought psychiatric help, and you know this, there's every chance that it would have been ineffective. I mean, whoever you would have sought it from probably wouldn't have known how to apply the proper psychiatric help. My name is Karen Schultz, and I am a physician at Cook Children's Medical Center. Starting out, it just... All of these are just normal kind of cases that...

patient comes to you with a problem, you try to help the problem. But as you dive into them and you start having second doubts of yourself, is this really right? Am I really doing what's in the best interest of the child? Because that's my job is to do what's in the best interest for the child, not for the parent, for the child. It really makes you

doubt where you're going, and makes you not sleep at night. If you could talk a little bit about how you get to a diagnosis, like whether that's mostly tests that you can sort of see on the screen, or is it mostly based off of patient history as a specialist? So it kind of depends on the age of the patient and the problem, depending on where you can come from. There tends to be less...

you can do on smaller children a lot of the time than you can on some of our older children. And for our younger children, you really depend on the history from the parent or the caregiver because they can't tell you, my head hurts, my stomach hurts, whatever.

whatever else hurts. You depend on the parent to tell you the truth about what is happening to their child so you can make the best decisions on, is there a test I can do? Is there a medicine I can give? Is there something else that I need to do? And what sorts of things would make you suspicious that a parent wasn't being honest?

It's usually when things don't quite add up. They tell you about symptoms and you're like, oh, that is clearly looks like this and your treatment plan doesn't work whatsoever. And you try a different treatment plan that again should work and it doesn't work at all. And you just know that there's something there that isn't quite right.

I mean, you just don't feel that it's right. Are there any patterns that you've seen emerging that have helped you develop a way of looking out for red flags?

I think the biggest one that I pay attention to right off the bat is whether they've doctor shopped. So if they don't get their answer at one physician, then they go somewhere else and then they end up at me because there's something they're looking for. A lot of people, if they had the feeling that something was wrong with their child, they

and felt like the doctor they took them to wasn't being responsive to their concerns, it would be pretty natural to go and seek a second opinion. So how do you differentiate this kind of doctor shopping that you're talking about from a parent's more natural inclination to follow their instincts about their child's health? I mean, as a parent, if I had any doubt about what the physician was telling me and what

I would go find someone else to ask the same question to. I think the big part is they've had multiple normal tests or multiple appropriate therapies that families report don't help. And then they're switching and wanting all of the same evaluation repeated. Obviously, some things are medically complex. Like what sort of

distinguishes that? Like, what does that look like? So we can kind of contrast it with what you just described. You can verbally review the test results with the family and say, okay, these are all the things that I know are normal. And the families who are really looking for a second opinion will go, okay, so what do we do now? And a lot of my

medical child abuse families will say, yeah, but I don't really believe that. They are clearly looking for a yes, rather than we've ruled out X, Y, and Z, so now what comes after that? The assumption would be that someone would go to something that was really rare and sort of hard to test for, et cetera. But you're saying that some of these things that parents are bringing their kids in where it does turn out to be an abusive situation are pretty common things. It's just that they're

The child response is not what you would expect? Yes. Ones that are easy for families to tell you about and hard for doctors to prove they're lying. One of the most common, just in general, for medical child abuse is failure to thrive. The family...

comes in and you go through a whole plan of how you're going to feed this child, how you're going to get the child to gain weight, what you're going to do. You can bring them into the hospital. You can document them gaining weight in the hospital and they go home and they lose weight again. And you bring them back into the hospital and they gain weight and they go home and they lose weight again. And so that's really documenting that I can make this child gain weight when it

They're there. I am trusting that the family is doing the same thing at home, but clearly they are not, is the conclusion you come to eventually.

Our training is a patient comes to you, you figure out the problem, you treat them, everybody moves on. I mean, there's some chronic illnesses that have lifelong implications, but for the most part, that's your goal is to get the patient better. And then when they're not getting better, and then you're doubting yourself, is there some medical diagnosis I'm truly missing?

And then to make the leap of, is this caregiver not being truthful and that's why they're not getting better versus I missed something from a medical standpoint. And when you get to the point where you're thinking, is this really more on the medical child abuse side, then you keep going back saying, oh, but if I miss something, then I'm going to feel even worse because I missed something rather than

Thinking that a parent is not being truthful to me. That sounds like a scary place to be as a professional. I mean, this is a lot of responsibility that we give to pediatric medical professionals in particular. To put someone in that position where none of the outcomes are good, right? You're worried you missed something or this parent is doing this to their child on purpose. Do you think that...

Some physicians are just not even able to make that leap to the possibility of child abuse. It's a hard leap to make, especially that first time or two when you haven't been exposed to it as much. And I think it's why a lot of these cases, the children undergo multiple procedures is because the physician's going, oh, but what if I did miss something? And so you're really then just playing into the possibility

caregivers wants and desires to have the focus put back onto the child and the caregiver. Once you suspect that this may be a case of medical child abuse as a doctor, what happens next? Generally, I try to

document well that the steps that we have gone through to get to that point, then I generally call CPS. And they're my first line to get more investigation done.

It's become really clear to me how, in order to protect children from this form of abuse, every part of the system needs to be working well and working in concert, from the doctors to CPS to law enforcement to family court and criminal court. And in some ways,

This makes me feel a little hopeless because the idea that all of those systems would work together in this seamless way almost seems like an impossible bar to reach. And yet the fact that these systems are working, this ecosystem clearly is developing in this one place in Tarrant County, Texas, where...

They're developing something of a model for what a successful system that does protect children from this abuse and that does catch these perpetrators when they're hurting their kids, what that looks like. I think the really chilling thing that settled in to me as I dug deeper into what is working at Tarrant County is just that there's no reason to believe that there's something extraordinary about Tarrant County in that they just have a higher rate of Munchausen by proxy than other places.

Right now, the way that this issue of Munchausen by proxy is presented in the culture when it's talked about at all is as being an extremely rare thing. None of the experts that I've spoken to throughout the course of this project have told me that they think it's rare. They don't think it's common, but it's not rare. It's likely as prevalent as any other form of child abuse. Just something that's interwoven into our communities.

We know that right now the various systems and mechanisms that are meant to catch child abuse are not working. If we were catching it, unfortunately, I think every county would look like Tarrant County.

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Hello, Detective Mike Weber. Hello, Andrea. How are you? I am doing great. I'm happy to be on with you. You are a frequent guest. You are a friend of the show. And you are also my co-author on a book that we have coming out sometime in 2025. We will keep you guys updated when we have our exact on-sale date. But I'm very excited about it.

I am too. It has been a very interesting process for a non-book person, to say the least. Yeah. So we'll keep you guys posted with that. But.

But today we are having a look back at the first season of Nobody Should Believe Me and episode three, which is What's in the Water in Tarrant County, where we talked to you and a number of other folks in Tarrant County, including Dr. Jamie Kaufman, about why you have a system there that is working better, at least than anywhere else in the country. So...

I'm very curious to hear from you. What was it like for you listening back to this episode? Because we did this interview actually several years ago now. Yeah, it was just really interesting going back through and hearing the different perspectives from people and just knowing what has happened since then and just what we have seen just since that time period. This abuse is not going away anytime soon. And it's not just Tarrant County that it's happening in.

Yeah, absolutely. And it really struck me listening back to this episode because I almost feel like the entire ethos of the show was actually developed as this episode was being put together because this is really where we...

get into the revelation that exactly as you said, there's nothing specific about Tarrant County that makes rates of abuse higher there. It's just that this is the only place that has any kind of system, really. And I know you guys have your own problems there, but this is the only kind of place where there's any real systematic effort to detect this abuse and where you have this sort of dedicated team of people. And

it really is a microcosm into how common this abuse is. And that was not just said by you. You know, in that episode, we also heard that from Dr. Jamie Kaufman, and we also heard that from Dr. Mark Feldman. And I sort of think this is almost like the big aha moment of the first season. Yeah, and it's in meetings we have with politicians, politicians,

and everything. I try to convey to them that the only reason we're saying the number we are is because we're actually addressing it. This is happening in other counties. What's the secret to replicating this, really? Awareness. Awareness and people that are willing to

do something about it. I'm not going to say Tarrant County is perfect. We don't have complete buy-in from all of the people who should be bought into this. We don't. It's very important to have that buy-in at every level. I'm hoping someday at Tarrant County, we will get there. But

If you have buy-in at least at most of the levels, you can do really good work on this. Yeah, and you know, something that you said to me, there are some real systemic issues with this abuse, with holding people accountable for it in these overlapping spheres, which are some of the most fraught areas.

institutions in America, right? I mean, you have these interlocking systems of the healthcare system, which has all kinds of problems, and then the criminal justice system and the child protection system. And I mean, these are some of the most troubled, fraught, in many cases, underfunded systems in America and things that people have extremely strong feelings about. And something that you've said to me that I think we have seen play out and that

is a beacon of hope in all this is that systems are made up of people. And that can go both ways, right? I think it's important to know, like you see as things play out on the criminal justice side or in family court, like...

Those judges are human beings that bring all their biases to the bench. And then at the same time, one person becoming really aware of this abuse and becoming invested in combating it can become in a positive way a sort of contagion for wherever they're working. And so I think we've seen that with you, where you are, and the various other folks like Dr. Jamie Kaufman and Sheriff Weyburn, you know, in Tarrant County.

Someone getting interested in it really can begin to move a system. And it's not, it's certainly not like, you know, you do need other people to buy in, as you said. But I think that we shouldn't underestimate the fact that one person can start a change in the right direction. And you sort of have to get to one person at a time almost. You do. And...

You're exactly correct about systems. They are made up of people and people, the people inside those systems make decisions. And, you know, whenever I hear, you know, those cases are really hard. I hear someone saying, I just don't want to do the work.

Whenever I hear, you know, well, you know, the system isn't made for that type of abuse. I hear this is hard and we don't want to do it. Yeah. And, you know, I can walk you through, if you'd like, where the system is fraud in each step. Like for doctors, for pediatricians in my state, they get an hour of training every year on human trafficking. They get nothing on medical child abuse. So there's no training at the pediatrician level to even spot this abuse.

The CPS in my state have no policies on this abuse and provide no training to their investigator, mandated training to their investigators on it. So you may get a 24-year-old CPS investigator who has no idea what to do on one of these cases if she even knows what this type of abuse is. They have no finding for it. It may come in as a medical neglect case.

Then you have police who, you know, seasoned detectives have a hard time wrapping their head around this abuse. And they also receive no training on it. And the same for your family court and the same for your prosecutor. So,

Education is so important on this abuse. And we've made some inroads in my county with that education. I did a presentation, myself and Dr. Kaufman, to the family court bar in Tarrant County. And there were several family court judges in attendance. And it was filmed so all the judges could see it. I hope all the judges watched it. We recently did another

A luncheon, educational luncheon for politicians, which include judges who are in the election cycle and sitting bench judges, both family and criminal. And we had several judges show up on the criminal side, which was really helpful to get across the point to them that, you know, this is this. There is no exception, mental health exception for this abuse or there shouldn't be. Right. Not in the criminal criminal side of the system.

So that was nice. And again, to educate the politicians, we're still working on the bill. We're still trying to get a law passed on this and maybe get, you know, maybe get education for doctors on this, maybe get CPS policies passed also. Yeah. So it's just and I say it all the time, you know, we're at this abuse where we were in the 60s with COVID.

child sexual abuse in the 90s with human trafficking. We're at the very, very beginning of the educational level and recognizing this for what it is. It's not Uncle Bill has a problem like we thought sexual abuse was. It is, no, Uncle Bill's a pedophile. And this abuse is not, oh, mom has a mental health issue. It's no, mom's abusing her child. Right.

Right. And this is something that we talk a lot about on the committee and talk a lot about sort of the way to help the public understand this because, you know, and this is something that we heard from Dr. Mark Feldman on in this third episode of the first season, that yes, there's an underlying psychopathology, but that should not distract from criminal culpability. And that's just could not be more important for people to understand that.

And we certainly see this a lot in the way these cases are covered. And I was looking up

And, you know, for a reference point, the Olivia Gantt case, which is a Colorado case where a six-year-old child was killed by her mother. And the Garnett Spears case, which I can't remember off the top of my head what state that was in. That was, I believe, New York. A seven-year-old boy who was killed via salt poisoning by his mother. And I really noticed the language around those deaths.

was not put into the context of being a murder. And I'm not sure if that's because of the way the criminal charge was written or the way the medical examiner's report was written, but...

You really think like there seems to be a lot of deliberate avoiding of putting it in that context. And I think that that's because of the confusion around the mental health aspects of like, oh, did she really understand? Did she really mean to kill her child? Was that really intentional? Did she think her child was sick? And I think that's why it matters that we make that really, really clear. It's not because we don't have any interest in addressing the mental health of perpetrators.

I know that we both try and kind of leave space for that. But at the same time, if you don't recognize what perpetrators of this abuse are capable of and where this could end up—

then you're not going to take it seriously. And I think that is by and large what we see with regards to how these perpetrators are seen. I mean, do you see that as well? Yeah, I think the mental health aspect of it confuses the media. And, you know, it's also a human nature thing. We don't want to believe in our society that a mother could do this. It's just...

It's a huge human nature thing. And we've talked before, you know, even in other forms of abuse, if it's a mother committing the abuse against her child, be it sexual abuse, which is not real common with women, but abusive head trauma, even with those cases, you know, mothers get far, far lighter sentences than fathers do in those cases. And it's just that societal perception of motherhood that we just...

really, really, we don't want that disturbed in our own consciousness. So we want to give mom an excuse so we don't have to accept the cold, hard fact that some mothers are not good.

Right. And I think like you can't really live in the world and not accept that men are violent, especially if you are a woman, because you just I mean, you couldn't. It's inconceivable. Like, you know, that from speaking from the perspective of the woman, like, you know, that from the time you're conscious of really anything. I don't remember a time when I didn't sort of understand that men could be a threat. And I think that's.

We just are not there with accepting that women also can be. And I think that that's, yeah, I just think you see that everywhere. You see it permeate everything. It's not like, oh, this one political party has a problem with it or this one specific, you know, profession has a problem with seeing it that way. It's just so pervasive. Yeah, it's throughout society. I think that's why it makes it so hard to sort of uproot because it just is that deep.

And, you know, something that really struck me as I was listening back to this episode is Dr. Jamie Kaufman, who is the child abuse pediatrician at Cook Children's and an incredible thinker on this subject, incredible speaker on this subject, incredible sort of explaining it in a very relatable way. I found, and I know you work with Dr. Kaufman a lot, you know, she talked about how important it is for physicians to feel comfortable with

reporting this abuse when they see it, right? Because in every state in the country, physicians are mandated reporters, which means that it is a federal crime for them to not report a reasonable suspicion of abuse. That particular comment just really struck me because of what's just happened with the Maya Kowalski case.

where we saw the physicians who reported her and the child abuse pediatrician, Dr. Sally Smith, who ultimately made the diagnosis that it was medical child abuse, absolutely get villainized and excoriated and harassed for taking those measures that we depend on doctors to take to protect children.

And how that's left sort of the mood of the entire community in terms of how badly that bargain has been damaged. That bargain between the state and that doctors are supposed to be protected from liability if they are reporting in good faith. And I think what we have seen with the Kowalski case is that that's not true anymore. And I wonder...

If you can just talk about that and sort of, you know, I think a lot of people don't see how scary it is that this has happened and sort of how the sort of the chilling effect that this could have.

especially with this type of abuse because it is so much more complicated and the evidence may not be as straightforward as something like an abusive head trauma case. Right. And, you know, you also have the lack of understanding with CPS and police where doctors may feel if they do report, and especially child abuse pediatricians may feel that if they do report and nothing's done, that they're going to be in serious, have some serious consequences coming their way.

How could they not think that after what just happened? That said, I mean, it was a horrible trial, in my opinion, was conducted horribly. There's no way in any legal courtroom that the attorneys for the family should have been allowed to say that this wasn't Munchausen by proxy. And then the hospital not to be able to talk about medical child abuse. That would be in a criminal courtroom.

Like having a defense attorney stand up for someone accused of pedophilia and put an expert on the stand to say he's not a pedophile and then not let the state introduce evidence of sexual assault of a child. That's what that would be like. It is the most insane judicial mood that I have seen in quite some time. But

Again, we talked about lack of education. I think that comes from a lack of it. I think the judge saw my child's by proxy as mom's issue and medical child abuse as a totally separate issue and didn't understand how they collide and didn't understand that the treatment plan for that child was completely dependent on the medical child abuse diagnosis.

And how you can talk about how the child was treated without talking about that diagnosis makes no sense. And it was a terrible, terrible decision. And you have to wonder how much of an effect the TV movie had on him.

and how much of an effect the pending election had on his decisions and the decisions he made. You know, he didn't render the verdict, but he made decisions that made the verdict go a certain way. Yeah, I think no doubt at that point. And, you know, we are going to do a follow-up episode with Ethan to talk about kind of the appeals process and also just everything that's come out about that trial since it ended. I mean, I have not been able to even keep up with how much more has come out. I mean, that situation, and again, we'll get to it, but like it's so much more

It's so much even more bizarre than what it seemed like while I was watching the trial. I mean, that trial brings up a lot of interesting things in terms of like, how do we deal with a high profile trial in the age of social media and where everyone is so online? And like, you know, that entire trial was broadcast nationally. And so I don't think any trial, again, should ever be televised ever. Well, the judge, let's look at the trials we've had televised and how the judges have conducted them.

they have not gone well. Yeah. And they're not going professionally from the bench, in my opinion. Yeah. So I just wish they'd keep cameras out of the court. Yeah, I guess, I mean, there's an argument for transparency. I guess if the transcripts were public, obviously, I think it was helpful to be able to watch that whole trial. It was very surreal to watch the whole trial. But yeah, I think...

You know, in the case of that judge, I mean, I think you're right. Part of it, I do think, was ignorance. I think that's really likely, just not understanding this form of abuse. I mean, at one point, he said, I think we can all agree that Beata Kowalski wanted the best for her daughter. And I was like, I don't actually think that we are in any world on the same page about that as an underlying assumption.

Which has told me that he really misunderstood what was happening. And I think he, it's my opinion, you know, I think that he got a whiff of what was going to be popular with his constituents in terms of an outcome. And I think that he...

stepped on the scale. And I'm not a terribly cynical, I'm not probably half as cynical as I ought to be given my life experience. But like, you know, I never, you never want to just assume like everyone's in it, you know, but it was watching it. It's sort of like those decisions and that big one being the one you mentioned where they were barred from sharing evidence about medical child abuse. To be clear, they had a ton of extremely compelling evidence that medical child abuse had happened. They just weren't permitted to share it.

And that was wild. I mean, I watched it happen in real time and I was like, surely he can't mean that they're not going to be allowed to talk about medical child abuse. And that is exactly what he meant. So, yeah, that was crazy to watch play out. And I think we will see. And then at the same time, I know we're all experiencing this.

a lot of whiplash from watching that trial play out. And then immediately, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison in December. And the conversation about her has been the opposite in many ways. Now, there's been a lot of different conversations about Gypsy Rose Blanchard. And my hope is that she can go and sort of live her life maybe out of the spotlight for a while. And certainly, I know we all wish her well. But there's sort of this...

conversation happening where you have people that are sort of cheering on the Kowalski verdict and seeing that as a, quote, medical kidnapping case, that the doctors just snatched this child for no reason. This is a conspiracy theory that is unfortunately becoming more and more mainstream. And those same people are looking at the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case and saying, why didn't someone report that mother? Why didn't someone intervene? And

I mean, how do you, having been in this profession for a long time and having been specifically in the area of Munchausen by proxy cases for a while, I mean, how, what's your read on this cultural moment? Like, where is this the messy beginnings of us moving towards some kind of revelation about this abuse and some kind of collective understanding of it? Or is it just messy or we don't know yet? What's your, take the temperature for us.

I just think this society these days is, I mean, wait 15 minutes and things will change, right? You know, we've gone from everyone thinking that doctors are stealing kids to now, you know, people are because Gypsy's out. Oh, Gypsy, she was abused. And it's sometimes the same people who have these two opinions that they don't even realize are incongruent. They don't understand that one case is like the other. Right. And it's just...

People follow the pack these days. It's whatever's on social media. It's whatever they're told, whatever gets them likes. Not our listeners, obviously, because our listeners are fabulous critical thinkers. No, I mean, no, it's...

Well, no, you know, we we you make some really good points. And I think there are a lot of very real things that are underlying that, you know, the sort of complete gutting of local journalism. I mean, there's there's a lot of things that are kind of contributing to that media climate. And I think you're right about that media climate. And I do think that more people have some passing knowledge of Munchausen by proxy than they probably did a year ago. And I think that there is a positive aspect to that, how that will play out.

is a question mark. So the book that we're working on together, we talk about three of your cases, a couple of which we've mentioned on this show. And the interesting thing in looking back at these cases and looking at, you know, the Hopiobara case, which is the first one that we ever covered on the show and that we covered in season one,

is that the internet and social media play a relatively small role. And that's because of when these cases happened, which is almost 12 or 13 years ago in the Hope You Bar case, right? So, you know, it's amazing how much more prolific social media use has been and how much more sort of just interwoven into everything, into our daily lives it's become in that time.

And it's also really had an effect on both the sort of modus operandi of perpetrators and also possibly perpetrators

how much it's happening, period. And that's something that Dr. Jamie Kaufman said in this episode is because of those tools. And, you know, Dr. Feldman also sort of echoed that is that because these tools are available, because all this information is available and because this infinite well of attention is now available via social media,

That these things are not only making the abuse look different, that they very well may be making it worse and actually exacerbating the abuse because those driving factors are, you know, attention and sympathy. And what have you seen in the cases that you've worked on between what are some of those differences in the cases that you're investigating, you know, right now and the cases that you were investigating 12 years ago?

Well, social media, right, is the huge one. You know, the different social media platforms. Now, TikTok is a big thing. TikTok wasn't in existence 12 years ago. It used to be when I first had social media on these cases, you know, it's always Facebook. The offenders are always using Facebook. Now, the older ones still do that, but...

The younger ones are much more TikTok, much more Instagram based. But social media nowadays, attention is just right at their fingertips. It's seconds away. Whereas, you know,

Before social media, that attention had to come from doctors or family. And, you know, some of that's still in this process, but it's so much easier. You know, we talk about Brittany Phillips, her entire friendship base was social media. She didn't have any real friends in real life. And she got all of her attention seeking fulfilled through social media. In her case, it was Facebook. But yeah, TikTok has become a huge player. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and it's funny because, you know, you say that and I feel like the norms around having relationships online, whatever kind of relationship they may be, whether it's a professional one or a friendship or a romantic relationship, like the social norms around that.

those relationships starting and completely existing online have changed so much. Like it used to be, you know, oh, like if you met your partner online, like you must be some kind of desperate person that never leaves your house. Now it's like, who doesn't meet their partner online? Like how else do you even meet a person? Like how do you date a person? I don't know how anyone else meets a

And certainly, like, this has become really, among other things, that was exacerbated by the pandemic. And so, like, now you say that, and that doesn't even sound strange. It was a little bit more unusual then to sort of have this sort of your entire social ecosystem online. But that is true for a lot of people now that, like, that is primarily where they spend their time. And so that, you know, all of those indicators that you might get from someone that things are not adding up, that that person doesn't,

is not really sick or is not sick the way they say they're sick or maybe they don't have a child at all, like all of those real-life indicators that you would get if it was someone that you met through school or work or through, you know, some community thing, you don't get, right? And even a lot of medicine has moved online and certainly during the pandemic, a lot of it was solely online. And so I think, like, it makes attention infinitely accessible and it makes deception infinitely easier, right? And so those two things coming together, I think, just make

It's very scary. Sure. And the Internet to do this abuse is so easy, right? It's a five-minute Google search to get the symptoms you need to present to the doctor. Right. It's not hard to do. It's not a mastermind situation. It is not. Even though, you know, certainly a number of the perpetrators we've looked at, including Copiabar, were sort of mastermind types and very smart people.

But yeah, I think it's very scary and I think people should take that seriously, that there are things that are exacerbating this behavior and sort of it does, you know, it's interesting to me too, reading, which I know you have read as well, like when you read some of the older literature from some of our academic colleagues, you know, this used to be believed to be really scary.

to specifically getting attention from the medical system, right? Like that it was something about the attention from doctors specifically that was appealing to these perpetrators. And I feel like that's less true now because...

That was probably who was accessible before. Like, now you sort of see, like, they might not care. Like, Brittany Phillips didn't necessarily seem to care about getting attention from the doctors specifically. It was using the medical crises to get attention from, you know, other places. And I think we see that much more now where it's like, oh, it's not just about fooling the doctors. It's about fooling everyone. Yeah.

Right. Brittany didn't care about that. It was very clear she didn't care. She was a bulldozer with them. She just yelled and screamed when she didn't get what she wanted. Right. Didn't want them to like her, didn't want them to be on her side, like just wanted to get what she wanted to get. Just give me what I want. Give me it now. Yeah. And so since we first recorded together, how many and you can give me a rough estimate, but like how many cases have you worked on?

Well, let's just say from when I came to the sheriff's office since March of 2019, over 30. Wow. We've made arrests on 10 offenders. We have seven convictions. We just had one plead guilty. We're still can't talk a lot about the case because we're still pending punishment hearing. But I can say she pled guilty to poisoning her child with Benadryl to present symptoms of epilepsy and then high, high, high levels of Benadryl in a four year old.

So, it was a substantial risk of death situation. So, that's a first-degree felony. She has done what we call pleading open to the judge. And that means she pleads guilty and lets the judge decide her sentence. So, they're doing a pre-sentence investigation after which they'll have a sentencing hearing and then the judge will pronounce sentence. And he has...

you know, five years to 99 years and he can even probate her if he'd like. So you try to educate your prosecutors and you try, you know, to tell them who to contact and what experts they need to call and hope that they listen. Yeah. Okay.

Can you tell us, like, within those cases since 2019, you know, the last five years, like, are there any other than the social media element that we've talked about? You know, are there any other trends that you're seeing or ways that this abuse is sort of changing or just any observations that you have in terms of, like, being a person who's looked at more than one case, which is rare, as we know?

Well, and as you know, probably just from looking at some of the cases you've looked at is, you know, they all it all tends to be the same things that they claim. And, well, yeah, I used to joke that there was a playbook out there for these offenders.

It's not really, it's not that I've come to understand. It's that they do the research and they find the elements that are very hard to medically test for. It's why we see so many feeding tubes. They pick all of the elements that are very hard to test for. We see the same patterns, the same presentations all the time. That pattern becomes a red flag. Now you have to do the work, right? And you have to develop probable cause and then prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they're doing this. But

But the way those cases come into us, they come with those red flags that we see, especially when we start getting the medical records and seeing all the claims, you know, seizures, apnea, food allergies, gastric issues, just all the standard stuff, early attempts at getting diagnosed for autism or ADHD, just all of those very common things. And we see that pattern just consistently throughout all these cases.

We had an insulin poisoning case. And you know, the disappointing thing about that case is this was a nurse who poisoned her child with insulin. Now the child was separated and her rights were terminated, so that's the good thing. But she admitted to me poisoning her child five times with insulin. Well, my county shipped it off. There were two counties who had jurisdiction and the smaller county in East Texas was the one that took over prosecution. Now all of their witnesses are 150 miles away and

And they are working on a small budget. There were numerous out-of-state witnesses. They pled her to a deferred and she can have other children. Well, I say that I don't know that she can't have other children. Can you explain to us what that means? Yes, I'm sorry. Sorry, legal terminology. They pled her to deferred adjudication, eight years of deferred adjudication. What deferred adjudication is, it's a form of probation where if you complete it without any issues, you can then have it erased from your record.

And I have no doubt that she will complete that without any issues. I also have no doubt that she will offend in some way in that county because there was tons of extraneous evidence of bad behavior against her. Tons of fraudulent things that she had done in her past that maybe weren't crimes, but could have been introduced to punishment. But again, that would have been dependent on calling a ton of out-of-state witnesses, flying them in, paying for their hotels.

which is a small county in that part of Texas, probably doesn't have the budget to do. Yeah, I think a lens that I've brought to this since having spent so much time talking to you and just looking into all these various cases is that when you're an outside observer, it's easy to sort of ignore all those realities about like,

And like, you know, like what is realistic in terms of a trial where it's happening, who the jury is, who the judge is. I mean, just like all of those. There's so many factors that go into this that like, you know, something that B. Yorker, our wonderful colleague who is a professor emerita of criminal justice, points out is that like, you know, our legal system is purposefully designed to protect.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We are designed to err on the side of letting people out who've done things rather than punishing people who haven't done things. Now, whether it always plays out like that in every community, in every situation is another question, but we do have high standards for that, right? Not every country in the world is that way. Right.

Well, the overall goal of the criminal justice system, I believe, is reform, right? To reform the criminal. Whether or not we accomplish that is another question. That's the stated goal, right? And whether or not that can be accomplished is also another question, right? Not only can't, I mean, we can try as hard as we can. Some people are just unreformable. Right. And I mean, I think that is a huge open question with these offenders and with these cases is like,

You know, and I think this is something actually that my feelings since beginning this process of making the show and really getting deep into all this, my thinking on this has really shifted. I think my sort of feelings about it, you know, in the large scheme of things in terms of like lock them up, throw away the key, like I'm not someone that necessarily, you know, believes in like huge punitive measures for every kind of crime. And like, you know, I have a lot of like complicated feelings about people going to prison. And with that said...

You know, in these cases, what we almost always see is a sentence that to me feels not at all commensurate with the crime that's been committed, which is, you know, torture of a child and or in some cases, even the cases where the child dies, sometimes their sentences are like, you're like, if anything in all the world warrants a life sentence, it seems like killing your own child would be

number one. And, you know, you don't see that. And so I, that's a constant sort of piece of it for me that I kind of can't decide how I feel about of sort of like, but I think what I've come down to is this. It seems to me like prison until that person definitely cannot have any more children is

is a really good idea because it makes me very nervous when one of these women could potentially have more children because of situations I've known of where people have been held criminally accountable and then have another child and then sure enough perpetrate on that child. And so it's like, I think the question of sort of recidivism is like that person will not stop that behavior. Like they are going to hurt someone. Right.

And, you know, the reason I say someone is like if they have another child, they'll hurt that person. But also we see a lot of other people get hurt by these offenders. You know, we saw the Hopi Abara poisoned her coworkers. Insofar as prison is a mechanism to keep people who are dangerous to other people away from the general community, it seems like no one belongs in prison more. Yeah.

than these offenders because I believe they are extremely dangerous. Like there's probably other people that get way stiffer sentences that are nowhere near as dangerous to their community and have nowhere near the likelihood of recidivism that these offenders have. I mean, how, just like in terms of, and I know you're not the person that hands out sentences, but in terms of like just your view on that, I mean, how should we, how

How should we look at these offenders? How are we looking at these offenders wrong if we are? And how do you think we should sort of shift our thinking? Well, I mean, I think we're looking at them wrongly as mothers first. Right. And I think that we also don't understand how women offend. Beatrice Yorker talks a lot about this and female violence is.

is a lot different than male violence. Not a psych expert, but especially toward children a lot of times. Now, it can be the same, right? Abusive head trauma, women have absolutely committed that crime. But a lot of times, especially when it takes this form of abuse, it's a lot more subtle.

It's a lot more hidden and it's a lot more manipulative. Poisoning is a big thing, especially with loved ones of female offenders, things of that nature. And until we recognize that as a society and we recognize this is just as bad as a husband beating his wife to death or a wife poisoning her husband to death, then we're not going to see it the same. And you still have that societal bias.

tug of motherhood and society not wanting to believe that mothers can act this way, that you're always going to face. And as far as sentences on these cases, let me be careful how I phrase this with the sentencing trial upcoming, what I feel they should get and what is realistic may not be the same. So while I feel someone should get 30 years in prison for what they've done,

Realistically, I'm happy for Ken. I had a suffocation case. We had her on video suffocating the child. It was not great video. And she suffocated the child against her breasts. She pulled the child in and smushed the child's face against her breast to suffocate the child. So it's clear that was that's what was happening. And she was given 12 years.

Under the circumstances, I was happy with that. The child in the suffocation case did not die. She had a previous child that had died under what the prosecutor said in open court were highly suspicious circumstances. And I mean, this is that would be far from the only time that we've heard about

perpetrating on a second child after a death. I mean, the Olivia Gantt case, Olivia Gantt's death was not investigated until she brought another child in for, I believe it was cancer treatment that they did not need. And then they reinvestigated the death. So I think again, to the question of like, how dangerous are they to other people in their life and especially other children? I think that's

That's how I mean, are you shocked in some ways that you hope you are ended up with a 10 year prison sentence considering? At the time, I thought it was light. You know, we've talked about this before. At the time, I was like, man, that's light for what she did. But having the experience now and now looking back on the case and seeing the way we had it indicted and the hoops we would have to jump through to get that had some great admissions from her.

But they were admissions. She never confessed to bleeding her child to cause anemia, which I absolutely believe she did. And that's what we had her charged with. And the admissions would have killed her in court. But knowing the risks involved in going to trial and having her willing to take that 10-year sentence, I think that's appropriate for that case. And I'm happy on any of these cases to get prison time at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, again, that is not my belief on what should occur. Right. I want to be very clear about that. Right. And it's all dependent on the facts of the case. Maybe probation. If we have someone who's only offended at a low level, a bodily injury case, say an NG tube,

And they make a full confession, which I had a case like that. Maybe probation is the proper point at that point in time. But and I want to commend the prosecutor on that case. He did a very good job on that case. She did plea. She pled to a deferred adjudication, but she gave up rights to all of her children as a part of that plea.

And I think that is appropriate justice for that case. I mean, I think that's the piece, and I know you and I are really aligned on this, is like, to me, it's not so important about the punishment piece. It's about the safety piece. And if the kids are safe, if the kids are alive, then...

As long as the kids are protected, then. Well, I mean, it depends on the facts of the case as far as the punishment. For sure. I mean, I guess like as a sort of blanket statement, as a sort of numbering our priorities, I guess. Like the safety of the kids has to be number one. And that's where people should focus their efforts. And that's why, to me, the mental health of the perpetrator comes second. I don't think either of us take that.

The idea of separating a child from their parents lightly, like all of those things are real and the children have to be safe first and foremost. Right. And, you know, the collision in my state all the time, you know, with CPS attorneys is CPS has a mandate for family reunification. And this abuse, as you know, Andrea, a lot of times that these offenders are not admitting their entire course of conduct.

Literature says that you move determination of parental rights and you get what should happen versus what the system says is going to happen. Right. And the people in the system are going to make that happen every time. Yeah. And it's a tough thing. So that's, I think, why we always just children deserve to be safe in their homes. Correct.

Okay, Mike, well, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else that you want to tell us before the next time that you're on this podcast, which will surely be soon? Just that we've been able to do some trainings. We've been able to educate some people that have been pushed back in a couple of those trainings from people who don't want to be educated and maybe people who have agendas. And I hope the powers that be over those people

do the right thing when the time comes. That's all I can do. The sheriff has been great in his support, but the sheriff is but a man. Even as powerful as he is in this county, he is but a man. And he'll be the first to tell you that. And he doesn't have power over some of those people. So all I can do is do my job, work these cases as best as I can, and hope that the rest of the people involved in this system do what they should do for these children.

So the upshot is systems are made of people, but people can work together to change those systems. Again, yes. Okay, Mike. Well, thank you so much. And we will talk to you again soon. Keep up the good work down there in Tarrant County.

In the next episode, I'm going to talk to three dads who have been through really similar cases, and we are going to delve deeper into what it's like to be the non-offending partner in one of these cases. If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at munchausensupport.com. We have resources there from some of the top experts in the country, and we can connect you with professionals who can help.

If you are curious about this show and the topic of Munchausen by proxy, follow me on Instagram at Andrea Dunlop. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash nobody should believe me. And if monetary support is not an option for you right now, you can also rate and review the podcast on Apple and share on your social media. Word of mouth is so important for podcasts and we really appreciate it.

Our lead producer is Tina Knoll. The show was edited by Lisa Gray with help from Wendy Nardi. Jeff Gall is our sound engineer. Additional scoring and music by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Shupak. Also special thanks to Maria Paliologos, Joelle Knoll, and Katie Klein for project coordination. I'm your host and executive producer, Andrea Dunlop.

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