Broken Harts, Episode 6: Full Transcript

Liz Egan: One quick thing: A week ago, on Tuesday, January 8, 2019, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office received word from the Department of Justice that the foot discovered near the crash site in May was positively identified as belonging to Hannah Hart. It is now believed by officials that she died in the crash with her family. The notice reads, "Devonte Hart is still listed as a missing person with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office…. The case remains open and active." Stay tuned for the latest installment of Broken Harts.

Justine Harman: Before we begin today's episode, Liz and I feel compelled to address something we think is vitally important to the story. We're white. Liz is of Irish Catholic descent. She has freckles and eyes she thinks are green, but I'd say are blue with a swirl of cinnamon. I am of Jewish descent. I have blond hair and hazel eyes. We were both raised on the East Coast. We both attended private colleges in the Northeast. We are both mothers to white children. For many reasons, we are not the ideal people to delve into the tricky and very problematic race issues that this case presents. We'd also be remiss not to talk about these issues, as they're crucial to the larger sociocultural context of the story. In this episode you'll hear from Nathaniel Davis who helped raise three of the Hart kids before they were adopted, and April Dinwoodie, who is a transracial adoption expert here in New York. And more from Shonda Jones, the lawyer who fought to keep Jeremiah, Devonte, and Sierra with their biological aunt. Each of these people has a different perspective on how race and bias may have played a role in the deaths of Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah, and Sierra Hart. From Glamour and HowStuffWorks, this is Broken Harts. I'm Justin Harman.

Liz Egan: And I'm Liz Egan. Before Jen and Sarah Hart adopted their second set of siblings in 2009, Devonte, Jeremiah and Sierra had been Devonta, D-E-V-O-N-T-A, Jermiah, J-E-R-M-I-A-H, and Ciera, C-I-E-R-A, Davis. They had lived in Houston, Texas, with their older brother, Dantay, their mother, Sherry Hurd, and her boyfriend Nathaniel Davis, whose last name the children had taken even before Sherry and Nathaniel got married in 2010. Here's Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Davis: All of them called me dad. I was the only dad that they had. And they took them from me and sent them to my brother, and they removed them from there to [inaudible].

Justine Harman: The audio quality here isn't great, but Nathaniel is saying that he was the only dad those kids ever had, and that CPS removed the siblings from his and Sherry's care when Ciera was born in 2005. The children lived briefly with his brother. He says, before for all three entered the Texas foster care system. Nathaniel remembers the three younger siblings' personalities well, even though he hasn't seen them in over a decade.

Nathaniel Davis: Devonta, he was gonna be very smart. Sierra, she just loud all the time so…. Devonta always tried to protect Jermiah.

Liz Egan: Remember, Nathaniel wasn't the only family these kids had. Before Jen and Sarah Hart adopted Devonta, Jermiah and Ciera in 2009, their aunt Priscilla fought hard to get them out of foster care. Priscilla hired Houston attorney Shonda Jones to help her plead her case and was successful in having them returned to her care. She even moved to a new house to accommodate the children, but a decision to let their mom, Sherry, watch the kids while Priscilla went to work resulted in the kids being removed from the home. Sherry had a well-documented substance abuse problem. According to court records, she was a crack cocaine abuser and was forbidden contact with the kids, and CPS exercised a no-tolerance policy. The children had only lived with their aunt for five and a half months. Priscilla's decision to let the kids' mom babysit was a bad judgment call, yes. But Shonda says the tenor of the court proceedings stands out in her 22 years as an attorney.

Shonda Jones: The father's rights had been terminated because I think he had alcohol problems, and the mother had drug problems. And so that's why their rights were terminated, which I don't take issue with that. I think, in that instance that was the prudent thing to do. I always have taken issue within this case is the harsh manner in the way that they dealt with Miss Celestine.

Justine Harman: The presiding judge for that court was Patrick Shelton, who is now retired. In response to questions about how the Harts were allowed to adopt Devonte, Jeremiah, and Sierra after an allegation of child abuse had already been made against them,he pointed to the lack of criminal charges in the state of Minnesota. Shelton told criminal justice site The Appeal, "Unless there's a criminal charge, what can you do? Believe it or not, kids get bruises that do not get beat." Shelton also denies reports that he or his associate judge favored nonrelative adoptions over placement with family members.

Liz Egan: The agency that facilitated Jen and Sarah's adoption of Davis siblings closed in 2011. It was called the Permanent Family Resource Center. The offices were located on a commercial grade of land in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which is about a 15-minute drive from Alexandria, where the women lived until 2013. An archived version of the now defunct website says it was started in 2000 by three families who had adopted eight children out of the child welfare system.

Justine Harman: According to a 28-page report filed by the Minnesota Department of Human Services in September 2009, only months after Jen and Sarah officially adopted their second set of siblings through the agency, the Permanent Family Resource Center was placed on conditional status after accruing 17 licensing violations. The violations ranged from failing to submit paperwork to failure to complete proper background checks on families. In the past 10 years, the Minnesota DHS has only issued three conditional licenses for child placement agencies.

Liz Egan: Back when the Harts were clients, the Permanent Family Resource Center ran the Waiting Children Program, a service that provided families in Minnesota and North Dakota with access to foster kids living in Texas, Washington, Ohio, Idaho, Oregon, California, and Florida. The website reads, children in this program are living in foster homes or residential facilities, and the termination of parental rights has occurred. They are legally available for adoption. The average wait for a child after approval of the home assessment is between six months and three years. It took Jen and Sarah Hart less than a year to legally adopt Devonte, Jeremiah and Sierra.

Justine Harman: Our field reporter Lauren Smiley, reached out to three former Permanent Family Resource Center employees about how these children were matched with the Harts. As we record this episode, those emails have not yet been returned. Devonta, Jermiah and Ciera's stepdad Nathaniel Davis still has a hard time understanding why Jen and Sarah were able to adopt the children while also being under investigation on allegations of child abuse.

Nathaniel Davis: They was wrong, wrong, wrong, moving them kids out of the state of Texas.

Justine Harman: He goes on to say, "I'm going to tell you why. They figured we were poor, didn't have nothing to fight them with. They should have given other people an opportunity to adopt them kids."

Liz Egan: After Devonta, Jermiah and Ciera were removed from Priscilla Celestine's care, Shonda says she barely had a chance to say goodbye to the children she had cared for for the past several months.

Shonda Jones: I think Miss Celestine maybe saw them one last time.

Liz Egan: Both Nathaniel and Shonda believe the institutionalized bias may have informed the court's decision.

Shonda Jones: You just have the complete feeling that they already had made up their mind, almost like, "You're just wasting their time, you're in the way." And it's like, this is supposed to be a judicial system where you weigh evidence. Why would you be so emotional and so angry over somebody doing their job, because this lady wanted to make sure that she kept her niece and nephews and not allow them to go off and she never see them again in life.

Liz Egan: Despite trying to find out more details regarding the siblings' adoption, Shonda said she was never given more information about their placement family.

Shonda Jones: I saw some communication with Brian Fischer, who was the children's attorney, and he said he would have to fly to Minneapolis, so they sent the kids out of state and that didn't even make sense anyway 'cause, as huge as Texas is, you mean to tell me that there is no one? Why is there this effort to hurry up and get these kids out of Texas?

Justine Harman: When Lauren reached Brian Fischer over the phone in August to ask about the case, he said only, "No, ma'am, no, ma'am, no, ma'am. Adoptions are sealed in Texas. Goodbye." It wasn't until March of this year, when Shonda saw reports of the crash on TV, that she realized what had happened to Devonta, Jermiah, and Ciera, and who got custody of them so many years ago.

Shonda Jones: I was sitting here in my office, and I was looking at the news and I heard them say Minneapolis, and then they said that's Devonte. And then that's when I said, "Oh my God, those are the kids."

Justine Harman: Shonda called Priscilla to break the news.

Shonda Jones: When I finally made the connection, I was just horrified, and I hate to admit it because she is somebody who can't listen to a lot of bad things that happened. I called her around like a 11:00 at night, I asked her, have you heard about the case where those kids are driven off a cliff? And she said no. So she says she couldn't hear what I was about to tell her. So I called her back the next day, and that's when I revealed to her they were driven off the cliff. And she said she just can't, she didn't want to accept that. She always thought that the kids were in a better place, but she was devastated. She was devastated.

Liz Egan: Like so many people who learned the fate of Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah, and Sierra Hart, Shonda takes issue with the disconnect between the facts that emerged on paper and the fiction Jen Hart presented on Facebook. She recalls reading about a particular post in which Jen called out the racism her children experienced on a regular basis.

Shonda Jones: These kids were being used as a prop. I read this article where I think one of the adoptive mom had said she was in a store. She was checking out and then an older white gentleman and this cashier who was also Caucasian were having this discussion about Devonte asking him something about whether he was going to play sports. And I don't believe for one moment that that conversation took place. That never happened.

Justine Harman: We scoured Jen Hart's Facebook feed, and sure enough, a post from November 2014 refers to this interaction. The post reads: "We were standing in the grocery checkout line. An elderly man was standing at the end of the bagging area, conversing with the woman checking us out. He spots our son, looks him up and down. Man: 'I can tell you we're going to be a baseball player when you grow up.' Son, pauses, tilts his head and gives a closed-mouth grin: 'Actually no, baseball isn't really my thing.'" The post goes on like this a little bit with the woman bagging groceries in what Jen describes as a "befuddled, nearly astonished voice," saying, "WHAT!?!? I have NEVER met a kid that looks like you that doesn't play sports." And the man agreeing with a chuckle, right? Never. They all do." Jen laments having to watch her child be subjected to "ongoing racial stereotyping” but doesn't step in. Instead, she says, her son responds, “Well, of course you'd never met a kid like me. I'm one of a kind. I'm going to be myself, no matter how much people try to make me something I am not.” She adds at the end, “I think this kid will be all right, no matter what is tossed at him.”

Liz Egan: This kind of storytelling from Jen may seem benign at first, but when it factors into an ongoing pattern of isolation and chronic abuse, the narrative takes on a sinister undertone. Jen and Sarah Hart had taken six black kids from Houston, one of the most diverse cities in America, and moved them from one rural town to the next. For context, a 2017 census report found that Woodland, Washington, the last place the Harts lived, is at least 92 percent white. Only 0.3 percent of Woodland's population is black.

Justine Harman: Friends of the Harts often recount the stories Jen and Sarah told about how unwelcoming their neighbors were, how much abuse this unconventional family faced, and how unsafe it was for them at times. Bill Groener lived next door to them in West Linn, Oregon, where the population is 89 percent white. Bill believes that maintaining a sense of fear might have helped Jen and Sarah keep the ongoing abuse under wraps. He spent the past four years playing keyboard at Mount Olivet Baptist Church in North Portland. The website for Mount Olivet claims the church was built in 1907 from lumber provided by the Ku Klux Klan to keep the African American organization on what they deemed the proper side of town. For the record, Bill is white.

Bill Groener: I've always played music in church. I play at an African American church, so I'm aware about racism. It may be covert rather than overt. Even if it's almost subliminal, I could see parents wanting to protect their kids. Maybe that's part of why they told the kids to not be overly conversational or friendly with neighbors, because people could secretly harbor prejudice against you, but when you read more about what actually happened, I don't think they want the kids to tell what was going on. I think that's really part of the deal, because all it would've taken is one kid to come over and say, "I'm hungry. Could I have some food?" for me to call children services.

Liz Egan: Groener isn't the only one who noted the way the Hart women, especially Jen, would cut their family off from outsiders, but their festival friend Ian Sperling only came to that realization after they died.

Ian Sperling: It's like, OK, so we have some dates set up; they canceled. Like, "Hey, let's plan a play date at the park this Tuesday." "Oh yeah, that'd be great." Then the day comes. "Hey, we're not going to be around." A few little things here and there that we never thought anything more about. Now, looking back, it's like she was shielding them from being close to people. I felt like we were really close with them, but at the same time, are they like our family that just stops by all the time? No, not at all. Now, looking back, there were some duh moments there. In particular, Markis and Jeremiah, they were very reserved and almost stoic in nature and then when you talked to them, boom, snap into a smile, snap into some personality, and then boom right when you stop talking, go right back to a stoic face.

Liz Egan: And Ian got closer than most. Back in June 2018, our field reporter Lauren talked to Ken Nwadike, an activist who started the Free Hugs Project. Ken first reached out to the family when he saw that viral image of Devonte hugging a police officer at the Black Lives Matter rally. He thought perhaps he could mentor the boy. Here's Lauren.

Lauren Smiley: Ken Nwadike first held a Free Hugs sign at the Boston Marathon in 2014. He soon extended his campaign for peace and racial understanding to Black Lives Matter rallies in college campuses across the country. When Devonte's photo went viral six months later, Ken's social media lit up. Ken read about how Devonte had white moms. He also noticed the boy's curious outfit, fedora hat, leather peacoat, and wise-looking face, the age of which was hard to peg. He sent a direct message to Jen's account on Facebook.

Ken Nwadike: When his photo of him holding that Free Hugs sign and crying in front of the officer, when that went viral, my social media went crazy, because it was the second time an African American was shown like that in regards to law enforcement. That's what my work at the Free Hugs Project really began as. Shortly after Devonte Hart's photo comes out with him holding a Free Hugs sign in front of a police officer, I'm getting all of these emails from people saying, "Ken, your work is spreading. Look at the impact that you're having even on young people." Right away I felt like I need to meet this kid, and so I started searching online and then made contact with their family via Facebook.

Justine Harman: Ken thought Devonte might benefit from having a black male figure in his life. In fact, it was something he, himself, had craved growing up.

Ken Nwadike: I was raised by a single mother. I appreciate my mother and all of the strength that she had to raise four boys and my sister, but my entire life I longed for a father.

Justine Harman: Originally, Ken thought he was messaging with Devonte, but then it became clear he was chatting with an adult—Jen. Over Facebook she said she preferred her children live what she called a "private lifestyle." Understandable, really. How many parents out there willingly connect their young children with strangers over the Internet? After the amount of attention that photo solicited, all the more reason to be protective. Still, the two remained friends on Facebook, a choice Ken now believes was intentional on Jen's part.

Ken Nwadike: She intercepted that potential friendship or connection we could've had. It wasn't until after that I was like, Oh, now it all makes sense. You wanted them to live a private lifestyle because if he would've started sharing with me that food was being withheld…. She kept a very close circle of people that she can play this role with, that everything is OK, and so then the truth wouldn't get out or they wouldn't believe it.

Liz Egan: Back when we started looking into this story, we wanted to better understand what it takes to make a blended family like the Harts work in the real world. Lauren spoke with April Dinwoodie, a transracial adoption expert and the former executive director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute.

Lauren Smiley: April Dinwoodie's expertise in transracial adoption starts close to home. She was adopted out of foster care as a toddler by a white family in Rhode Island. The way her family dealt with their racial differences was to not talk about race at all. As an adult, hungry to connect with black culture, April moved to Harlem. She became CEO of the Donaldson Adoption Institute and mentors kids of color who are adopted by white families. She used to host a workshop called "What My White Parents Didn't Know, and Why I Turned Out OK Anyway." April's vocal about the flaws in the adoption system. More often than not, professionals are underpaid. Black children are overrepresented. Not enough attention is paid to bias training. Sometimes adoptions are rushed.

April Dinwoodie: If you look at what tends to happen when it comes to data, states can have a sense of not leaving young people in foster care for a long time, so things get rushed. Sometimes a termination of parental rights happens too quickly. Sometimes an adoption happens too quickly.

Lauren Smiley: She also believes that the American perception of adoption is binary. Adoptive parents are good. Parents who can't take care of their children, bad. She says not enough attention is paid to the gray areas that exist.

April Dinwoodie: What kind of words come up when you think of parents who had their rights terminated? Poor, drug abusers, addicts, all these really loaded terms. Then you say what comes up for you with parents who adopt? Family, love, safety. Then, even when you look at families and parents who relinquish voluntarily, there's a much warmer feeling about that versus parents who had their rights terminated. It's just something that we have embedded in our perceptions.

Justine Harman: Like Shonda Jones, April believes that the system may have favored the Harts.

April Dinwoodie: In a family like the Harts, I could see how they would be very appealing within the foster care system, very appealing.

Justine Harman: She says there is no way to discuss this case without taking a hard look at what she calls the deep layers of racism within the child welfare system.

April Dinwoodie: There's so many issues of just racism and race and class differences. It's just hard not to have that just be so front and center. You know, you have an aunt who's ready, willing, and able; and you've got family that are struggling for whatever reason and doing what they can to rehabilitate, and they're people of color; then you've got white family resources available, and you can see it coming so clearly. You know that this is how this would play out. Institutional racism within child welfare is just there. There's no question.

Justine Harman: As a woman of color who was taken in by white parents, April's uniquely aware of the challenges of transracial adoption, how important questions about identity can get glossed over, or how a child may grow to feel ambivalent toward their birth culture, or as if they're stuck between two worlds.

April Dinwoodie: First and foremost, they should be living in diverse areas with examples and teachers and community members and friends, close friends of the family, that are people of color. You just can't raise a brown or black kid in a situation where they're one of a few people of color. It's just not safe anymore. It's not emotionally safe. It's not physically safe. I think first and foremost, they should be living in diverse areas. Parents need to be uncomfortable. White parents need to make it their business to go and be in places where they're in a minority so they can get a little bit of a sense of what their kid feels.

Justine Harman: Ultimately, she believes that Jen's multiple pleas for racial understanding and tolerance on Facebook, not to mention the family's presence at protests, was self-congratulatory.

April Dinwoodie: I just remember looking at Devonte's Facebook back in, I think, 2014. It just struck me. I had no idea, honestly, I had no idea that he was a young person that was involved in the foster care system, but something didn't sit right, and it's just so much pain in that. It just felt like, it felt uncomfortable to me, honestly. It just did. Then to find out his backstory and this tragic end to his life, it just reinforces this idea that some parents do operate this way, which is, "Look what we did. We're symbols of racial harmony. Our kids are evidence of that." It's just really, really uncomfortable and exploitive. It's sort of heartbreaking. It's really calculated, right?

Liz Egan: Was it calculated or was it ignorant? If you read Jen's heartfelt words on the topic of systemic racism, you might find yourself impressed by her conviction. On July 7, 2016, she took to Facebook to air her frustrations. "My beautiful black boys," she wrote alongside a picture of Jeremiah and Devonte smiling in hoodies and beanies, "We talk endlessly about the realities of this world. So much beauty, so much pain and suffering. These boys live and lead with love, but I will never deny them their human right to be frustrated, sad, and angry about the perpetual violence and murder of people of color. My feed is filled with people, white and POC, that want to help make a difference but are completely at a loss of what to do. Opening up and breaking the silence is a start because white silence is black death. If that statement makes you uncomfortable, I'm not sorry. Black pain matters. Black anger matters. Black lives matter."

Justine Harman: Back in 2007, after Jen and Sarah adopted Markis, Hannah, and Abigail, a caseworker visited the women's home in Minnesota. Her findings were positive. She recommended that Jen and Sarah be allowed to adopt a sibling group of up to five more children. Her report, filed on July 11, 2007, read, "The Harts are open to any race and gender, although they would prefer to have at least one boy in the sibling group. Jen and Sarah have adopted biracial children, and they have the tools and knowledge to adopt more children from the African American heritage. They are prepared to advocate for their children and to secure the necessary services to support their family."

Liz Egan: Over the course of our reporting, Lauren has reviewed over 800 pages of material from the Clark County Sheriff's Office in Washington. Among the documents are official caseworker reports and personal emails from the Hart women. And it appears they did try, at least at first, to create a nurturing and culturally aware home for their children.

Lauren Smiley: Before they even received the first set of kids, Jen wrote an email in January 2006 to her adoption agency caseworker, talking about having set up an appointment with a child psychologist, who she calls simply the best of the best. Jen wrote, "We registered him ASAP because there's a waiting list about three or four months out." They talked about enrolling Markis in special education. Jen calls the school the most diverse in the district. A caseworker wrote up a conversation she had with Jen reflecting on the transracial adoption homework Jen had completed about places and people African American kids could identify with. It said that Jen had identified the black student union at a local university. The caseworker writes about Jen, "Just purchased a couple more children's books about African American heritage. One book is called Martin's Big Words, about Martin Luther King." In pictures that were released of the inside of the Hart's home in Washington, their home library showed what looked like African masks hung on the wall. The book collection included books like Mandela and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Another thing that really stood out was back in a March 2009 email to some friends. This is after the adoption of the second set of kids. Jen says how well the kids are doing and mentions the maternal aunt trying to get the kids back. Jen wrote, "The kids are all doing swell. I don't know why they insist on growing up on me. Sierra will be four next month. Abby and Jeremiah are five now. Devonte, six, Hannah, seven, and Markis, 10. Devonte, Jeremiah, and Sierra are doing incredibly well. You wouldn't know they are the same kids that came to our home nine months ago. I'm so proud of them for all they have accomplished in such a short time. We finalized their adoption last month, thank goodness. I have been a ball of anxiety just waiting for that day to come. Until a couple months ago, a maternal aunt was still trying to get them back. Long story. Happy ending, or beginning."

Justine Harman: A 2015 evaluation of data on 600 children adopted in Minnesota examined whether being raised by someone of a different race is inherently damaging. And the conclusion was no. Emma Hamilton, the lead author and a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, put it this way. “Being raised by someone of a different race is not inherently damaging to the development of the adoptees. But much depends on how white parents talk about race with their children of color and help them identify with people of their own race.” This mirrors what April Dinwoodie has found in her person and professional life.

April Dinwoodie: You almost have to become an activist, and I think a true activist, one that goes into the school and says, "Black and brown kids are disciplined at higher rates." And you've got to make yourself known to say, "Hey. Not my kid." You've really got to become a champion of your child's safety, physically and emotionally. I think the Harts tried to sort of put that idea out there of racial coming together. But it was very, very superficial and uncomfortable, quite frankly, in how they sort of paraded the children around. That's not what that looks like. What it really looks like when you embrace bringing a child of color into your family, into your white family, there better be people that look like your kid in that community. And it better really be authentic. And the way it becomes authentic is learning about birth family. There are a lot of ethnicities and cultures within black and white people and brown people, so it's kind of like you've got to have some information so that you actually know what your kid may have been experiencing in their birth family.

Liz Egan: In so many ways, the mythologies Jen and Sarah Hart told about their children had their intended effect. They told people the kids were crack babies, a 1980s term now widely debunked. People believed them. For April Dinwoodie, these stories are evidence of white saviorism, the idea that white people can swoop in and fix nonwhite people.

April Dinwoodie: It's one of the things that really just makes me so angry because, at the end of the day, it may well be true that these young people come with those traumatic experiences that manifest in behavior and health issues. That just means that family needs more support, and those parents who are going to parent those children need not use that as any form of excuse, or even be talking about private things about their children, unless it's with a licensed therapist. That draws so much suspicion and so much just emotion around the fact that that would be utilized as a way to mask some of the abuse and neglect that was happening within the home. It's just disturbing.

Liz Egan: Ian Sperling now sees how the use of loaded terms like "crack babies" may have helped reinforce a certain narrative.

Ian Sperling: Everyone was very envious of them because of how they could pull this off, how they can raise these six "developmentally delayed children." "Good for you. Nice work. You saved them." That was the narrative always. We talked extensively about it, so it was just like she had a very detailed story about how they were adopted and what they went through prior. There's a lot of white saviorism symbolic in this story now that I never understood or knew about, trying to build this portrait of an idealistic situation where these white ladies came in and saved these six black children, which just…Oh, man. It's tough. We loved those kids so much. Sorry. OK.

Justine Harman: Jen and Sarah's artfully spun stories were alarmingly effective. They neatly explained away some of the kids' strange behavior while also reinforcing a cocoon of silence around what happened behind closed doors. They kept the kids from being able to connect with people who had similar backgrounds. They kept the neighbors from interfering. These stories even prevented the children from being in touch with their own flesh and blood. And most importantly, these stories ensured that the voices of the Hart children were never, ever heard.

Justine Harman: If you suspect a child is being abused, call 1-800-4-A-CHILD. That's 1-800, numeral four, A-C-H-I-L-D. Or visit childhelp.org to find out how to report your concerns.

Justine Harman: Next time on Broken Harts.

Speaker 3: When I realized that she was a homeschool mom, I'm like, "There's no way in hell those kids are learning." I mean, really.

Speaker 4: The search parties came here and scoured the bluffs with fancy helicopters and airplanes and boats. I can't even imagine how many miles he walked on those beaches and bluffs and drove around and sat on that cliff with his binoculars day, after day, after day, after day.

Speaker 5: I remember making this comment like, "You're like an abused wife." And she just kind of gave me this look like, "No kidding."

Liz Egan: For access to exclusive photos and videos and documents about the case, visit glamour.com/brokenharts. Have questions for us about this podcast? Reach us on Twitter @GlamourMag, or @BrokenHartsPod. If you like what you heard, leave us a review. Broken Harts is a joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Harts is cohosted and cowritten by Justine Harman and Elizabeth Egan and edited by Wendy Naugle. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha Berry is Glamour's editor in chief. Julie Shen and Deanna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pendola, Pat Singer, and Luke Zaleski are our research team. Jason Hoch is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers Julian Weller, Ben Kuebrich, and Josh Thane. Special thanks to Jenn Lance.

Top photo by Zippy Lomax.

To view a transcript of episode five, click here.