EP 7 - Heather

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Speaker 5 My dad was like, I want to talk to you about something. Let's go talk for a second outside.

Speaker 5 He started this whole preamble of like, you have taught me the importance of honesty. You have been such a positive influence on my life.
Like, you are an inspiration.

Speaker 5 And he was looking me in the eye and being really emotional about it. And he said, because of that, I want to be honest with you.
You're going to have a little bit of trouble coming up.

Speaker 1 I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything.

Speaker 1 At Betrayal, we hear lots of stories about romantic betrayals, marriages and relationships blown apart by deception.

Speaker 1 But sometimes we encounter another kind of betrayal, one that's not a violation of vows, but instead the violation of a more inherent trust, the trust a child puts in their parents.

Speaker 1 That's how we found Heather Summerlad.

Speaker 5 As

Speaker 5 a really young child,

Speaker 5 I had no idea that there was anything bizarre about my family.

Speaker 1 Heather grew up in El Paso, Texas, in the 80s and 90s. She was the youngest child in a blended family.
We're not going to use her parents' names here. We'll just call them mom and dad.

Speaker 1 Her earliest memories of her parents are fond ones.

Speaker 5 My parents were everything.

Speaker 5 They were really silly. They were really fun.
My dad, he used to play this game with me where he'd put me on his shoulders, played a piggyback ride,

Speaker 5 but he used to call it a camel ride for some reason. I don't know why, but he said that he was my camel.
So I never called him dad. I only called him camel.

Speaker 5 I thought he was the funniest, best father in the world.

Speaker 1 Heather's mom was also playful and charming.

Speaker 5 My mom wasn't strict at all. There was this kind of running joke in my family.

Speaker 5 Anytime I quote-unquote acted up or threw a tantrum, she'd make me sit in this little pink plastic chair, probably from the dollar store or whatever. And it was called the attitude change chair

Speaker 5 until my attitude changed. But then she would feel so bad about making me sit there that every single time she made me a chocolate malt.
She would would joke about it.

Speaker 5 She'd give me the malt and be like, oh, I'm Ehai, you're going to act up just so you can get this chocolate malt.

Speaker 1 Her mom was part of a tight-knit Mexican-American family.

Speaker 5 I always like to joke that my mom didn't teach me Spanish so that she could talk about me in Spanish to other people and then I wouldn't understand.

Speaker 1 Heather says her mom treated her more like a confidant or a friend and not so much like her child.

Speaker 5 I never had a bedtime and I remember asking my mom for a bedtime because all my friends, they had bedtimes, but it was a free-for-all. Like we could do whatever we wanted.

Speaker 1 When Heather was in second grade, she was confronted for the first time with something that would become a major theme in her life. Money.
Or more specifically, debt.

Speaker 5 I have a pretty specific memory of being

Speaker 5 in line at school for lunch and I had my little tray and I walked up and the lunch lady just looked at me, and she was like, Your parents owe us a lot of money. You can't keep taking trays.

Speaker 5 And the shame, you know, that washed over me. And also, the anxiety of just like, wait, what do you mean they owe money?

Speaker 1 At home, mealtimes were always a crisis.

Speaker 5 Dinner would roll around, and we'd be like, We're hungry. And then my dad would act surprised that we were hungry and that it was dinner time.

Speaker 5 When we didn't have money, my dad would have to go like basically forage for for food or money.

Speaker 5 He would leave for like a few hours and we wouldn't know when he was coming back and we didn't know where he was. And then he'd come back with, sometimes it was a full-blown takeout.

Speaker 5 And my mom would ask, how did you get that? Other times he would come home with like tortillas. And this was like a daily occurrence until payday.

Speaker 1 Heather's childhood revolved around her parents' payday.

Speaker 5 That was such a big day in our house. Everything was centered around when was the next paycheck? When are we getting paid again?

Speaker 5 And so we would get the paycheck and, you know, it was like celebration.

Speaker 5 That first day we'd go out to eat or we'd go to the movies or my mom would go shopping and we'd live it up. We'd have all this stuff.

Speaker 5 But the money seemed to always be gone. a few days after payday.
And then a few days later, we didn't have anything.

Speaker 1 Between paydays Heather and her dad would usually take a trip to the pawn shop.

Speaker 5 I used to go with my father to pawn things as early as first grade. We would drive around to all the different pawn shops.

Speaker 5 I mean to me as a kid it wasn't bizarre. It was like oh yay like we're going to the pawn shop.
We're going to Applebee's tonight.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing that still doesn't make sense to Heather about her childhood.

Speaker 5 We weren't poor, or at least their salaries suggest that we shouldn't have been poor.

Speaker 1 Both of her parents worked full-time as teachers. In fact, when she was growing up, her father was an assistant principal at a high school.

Speaker 5 We should have been, I think, pretty clearly middle class, especially the cost of living where we were from wasn't really that high.

Speaker 5 So it was bizarre that we never had money.

Speaker 1 They lived above their means. When the paychecks came in, they bought things including jewelry and expensive electronics.

Speaker 1 They spent so quickly that between paychecks, they would run out of money and wouldn't have enough to eat, so they pawned whatever they had just bought.

Speaker 1 She began realizing this was strange, especially when she made friends at school.

Speaker 5 My friends, a lot of their parents were teachers, and seeing how they lived in comparison with how we lived was

Speaker 5 eye-opening.

Speaker 1 When she was in fourth grade, Heather was finally allowed to go over to a friend's house for the first time.

Speaker 5 One of the craziest things is they would offer me food.

Speaker 5 Like they were like, oh, do you want dinner? And the idea that somebody would be offering me food willingly and that I was welcome to it, like, it just didn't feel real.

Speaker 5 So that, I think, is what I started to realize. Like, this is really not normal.

Speaker 1 And there was another thing Heather noticed.

Speaker 5 She had her own room. That was really eye-opening.
Because I never, I got my own room maybe like four times in my childhood out of like the 17 houses we lived in.

Speaker 1 The 17 houses they lived in.

Speaker 1 Her family moved every single year of her childhood. And Heather shared a room with her half brothers or slept on the couch.

Speaker 5 We always knew it was because we were getting evicted. There was no cover story.
We heard all the fights, we knew everything.

Speaker 1 After every move, Heather watched her mom become increasingly defeated, exasperated, and angrier with her dad.

Speaker 5 Because I was the girl, I think my mom relied on me emotionally. Oh, your father, he did this and he's done that.
It started to become really clear that the things he was doing were really shady.

Speaker 1 Heather quickly learned that her mom didn't approve of her dad's behavior, and it rubbed off on her.

Speaker 5 I started to see my father as the quote-unquote problem.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 my mom,

Speaker 5 I always thought of myself as her protector.

Speaker 1 Heather's mom would even confide in her about wanting to leave her dad.

Speaker 5 She was always talking about leaving him. She never would leave him, though, because, like, oh, I don't want to be a burden to my kids, or I'm saving as much money as I can.

Speaker 1 Right before Heather started high school, her dad just walked out.

Speaker 5 He just said he couldn't take it anymore. So he left.

Speaker 5 And that was great. I was helping my mom budget.
Family and friends came to help. My aunt paid some bills.
People brought us groceries. It was just great.

Speaker 5 And I remember going with my mom to a divorce lawyer too, and just like really like trying to support her in actually going through with a divorce.

Speaker 1 But within a month or two, he started coming back around.

Speaker 5 My dad would start to come over in this period when they were separated. He would come over because my mom needed him to fix a light bulb or something.

Speaker 5 And then he'd come over and the next day it was just like a little bit longer.

Speaker 5 Oh, let me fix the light bulb and also do your laundry. And then he like lived there again.

Speaker 1 He promised that this time things were going to be different. He started taking steps towards financial stability.

Speaker 5 And so my dad started seeing the pastor and was supposedly getting all this help with budgeting.

Speaker 1 Heather didn't believe him at first. She was angry with him and angry at her mom for letting him back into their lives.
It was a lot of pressure on a child. Too much pressure.

Speaker 5 I have memories of sobbing in front of my parents. And then just kind of like going about and eating breakfast while I'm there, just sobbing about getting evicted again.

Speaker 5 My mom just like eating her grapefruit and kind of like ice cold and giving no comfort. My dad just kind of like catering to her needs.

Speaker 1 Heather retreated into herself emotionally. When she started high school, she fixated on the one thing she could control.

Speaker 5 I was in the gifted program at school and part of how I connected to other adults was trying to excel at whatever I did. So trying to excel at school, making good grades, not being rebellious.

Speaker 5 And I played the violin, which my mom wanted me to do.

Speaker 1 Even though it wasn't her passion, Heather was a gifted violinist, and she started dreaming about a future, one that was far away from her parents.

Speaker 5 I wanted to be a writer. That was like a big part of my childhood.
And there was this writing contest, and as I was looking up the writing contest, I discovered Bennington College.

Speaker 1 Bennington College College is a small liberal arts school in Vermont. It's known for creative, student-led coursework.
It promised the one thing Heather craved the most:

Speaker 1 freedom.

Speaker 5 Everything about it just seemed like paradise, and it was like 2,000 miles away.

Speaker 5 So I just got it in my head that I really wanted to go there.

Speaker 1 From that moment on, Bennington became her goal.

Speaker 1 Her only goal.

Speaker 5 I just had that determination. I just knew I needed to get the fuck out.
My body just couldn't take it anymore.

Speaker 1 One day during her senior year of high school, Heather got a letter in the mail. The letter she'd been waiting for.

Speaker 5 It was just a normal day, and my mom got the mail, and there was an envelope for me. She handed it to me.
It was from Bennington.

Speaker 5 I remember opening the envelope, and I was like, Mom, I got in.

Speaker 5 And her face just dropped. Like it went ice cold

Speaker 5 and she started walking away. And I was like, oh, maybe she's getting me a present or something?

Speaker 1 But she wasn't getting her daughter a present. Instead, Heather's mom felt abandoned by her decision to go to college so far away.
To Heather's surprise, it was her dad who swooped in.

Speaker 1 And it was him who said the things she desperately needed to hear.

Speaker 5 Like, oh, I'm so proud of you. This is great.
Congratulations. I will talk to your mom for you.

Speaker 5 Like, let me smooth this over for you because I really want you to be able to go to this school.

Speaker 1 Her dad worked hard to earn her trust back. He acknowledged his mistakes and promised that he was going to be there to make her dreams come true.

Speaker 5 My dad really made me believe that he was on my side.

Speaker 5 He would say things like, after everything that's happened, I want you to go to school. I want to help you do this.
Like, I will figure this out for you.

Speaker 1 For the first time since she was a child, Heather trusted her dad.

Speaker 5 I wanted that camel relationship that we had had because after a while, I stopped calling him anything. Like, I didn't call him camel.
I didn't call him dad.

Speaker 5 Like, I think for a while, I was referring to him as my biological father. So to have him put this olive branch out of like, yes, you know what? I know I did wrong.

Speaker 5 I'm learning from my mistakes and I want to help you. You're an 18-year-old kid.
You're going to eat that up, which I did.

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Speaker 1 Heather had been accepted to her dream college, Bennington, 2,000 miles away from El Paso, Texas, and the chaos she'd grown up with.

Speaker 1 There was still one big obstacle between Heather and Bennington, money.

Speaker 1 But her dad was there to help.

Speaker 5 When it came time to filling out the paperwork for financial aid, you know, he was the one helping me. He was like brainstorming and then he was like, I've worked it out with Bennington.

Speaker 5 We've got this payment plan.

Speaker 1 Heather was skeptical at first. Just a few years ago, they didn't have enough money for food.
Even with financial aid, how could they afford regular college tuition payments?

Speaker 1 But her dad reassured her.

Speaker 5 We're budgeting and we have more money now and like I know how to do this and I want to do this.

Speaker 1 So Heather enrolled at Bennington. She finally felt like her life was starting.
There was one upfront cost that financial aid didn't cover.

Speaker 1 A few thousand dollars she needed for travel to Vermont, a laptop and textbooks. The family put their heads together to come up with the money.

Speaker 5 I remember one day he came and was like, I've got a co-signer for you for a loan. Because my parents were never going to be co-signers.

Speaker 5 They They didn't have the credit for that, and I didn't have any credit.

Speaker 5 It was a small loan for, I think, $3,000.

Speaker 5 And that was the loan that was going to get me to school. It was going to buy me a computer.
It was going to get me my textbooks. He came home and he was like, I've got it.
I've got you a co-signer.

Speaker 5 She's already agreed. It's my friend.
She's already signed the paperwork. Like, all you have to do is sign right here.
And this is it.

Speaker 1 When August came, the whole whole family took a trip to Vermont to move her into college. As they began the drive, Heather was overcome with anxiety.

Speaker 5 I kept expecting there would be some sort of issue. And the whole drive up to Vermont, I was like, I'm going to die.
We're going to get into a car crash.

Speaker 5 My dad is going to have a heart attack and die. Just the most awful situations just kept replaying in my head because I didn't think that I was actually going to make it there.

Speaker 1 Behind her catastrophic anxieties was a much more realistic one.

Speaker 5 I'm going to show up and they're going to tell me that I'm like denied or something or like the payment plan didn't work out. When they finally got to campus, I go and I asked for my ID.

Speaker 5 They took my picture and everything.

Speaker 5 Like here.

Speaker 5 And I was like, okay, this is real.

Speaker 1 It was a huge relief. Her parents took her shopping for dorm supplies and helped her move in.
It all felt shockingly normal.

Speaker 1 When it came time to say their goodbyes, Heather expected her mom to be upset, clingy, or even angry, but she wasn't.

Speaker 5 She was kind of like, okay, Miha, you know, just to have fun. And I was kind of like, what is happening? This is very bizarre.
And I said, goodbye.

Speaker 5 And I was on my own.

Speaker 5 As far as I knew, I was leaving my childhood behind and entering into a new life with my parents as supporters.

Speaker 1 Bennington was everything she expected it to be. She finally felt free.

Speaker 5 Oh my god. I loved it.
When the leaves started to change, oh my gosh, my friends took me in her car and we just like drove around and it was just like the best freaking day ever.

Speaker 1 She thrived at Bennington. Even though she wanted to be a writer, she ended up pursuing a degree in music.

Speaker 1 But in the back of her mind, she always felt a nagging guilt that her parents were breaking the bank to send her to college.

Speaker 1 And Heather felt especially guilty that she had left her mom alone with her dad. So she was surprised when her parents called to tell her that they were moving to Boston.

Speaker 5 It was a shock that it actually happened and they just kind of up and moved.

Speaker 1 Her mom loved Boston and always talked about moving there. So maybe Heather's dream was allowing her mom to live hers as well.

Speaker 1 For the remainder of her time in college, Heather's parents were just a few hours away in their new Boston apartment.

Speaker 5 They moved to this really nice, cute little apartment, three bedrooms, two stories, a tree-lined street, and they were there for a couple of years.

Speaker 5 For my family, like that was huge. Like staying anywhere for more than a year.
meant things were great. They're not only paying for my education, they've also got this amazing apartment in Boston.

Speaker 5 And so when I would go back home to visit, I have this nice place to be.

Speaker 1 Even though her parents were doing better than ever, the cost of Heather's tuition was still a strain. She had financial aid, and then that small loan she'd co-signed before she started college.

Speaker 1 Everything else totaled about $5,000 a semester, and her parents were covering it out of pocket.

Speaker 5 Pretty much every semester, I would get a late notice of payment in my box, like you're pass due with your tuition.

Speaker 5 And I'd always call my dad and I'd be like, listen, I know you're working really hard. Do you know when you're going to be able to make the payments?

Speaker 1 Every time she had to make a call like this, it racked her with guilt.

Speaker 5 My parents would be really stressed, like, your mom's been working so hard after school doing tutoring to get some extra money and I'm doing this, that, and the other. We've almost got it.

Speaker 5 We've almost got it.

Speaker 1 The day before her senior year started, she was staying at her parents' house. Before she left, her dad wanted to talk.
He sounded concerned.

Speaker 5 It was like a really beautiful day. My dad took me out to the back deck and he was like, oh, let's go talk for a second outside.
I want to talk to you about something.

Speaker 5 So he started with this whole preamble of like, you have taught me the importance of honesty. Like, you have been such a positive influence on my life.
Like, you are an inspiration.

Speaker 5 And he was like looking me in the eye and like being really emotional about it.

Speaker 5 And he said, because of that, I want to be honest with you. You're going to get a note in your box this semester.

Speaker 1 He asked Heather if she knew how loans worked.

Speaker 5 I was like, you said that we didn't have to take out loans for this year. Like you said everything was all set.
And he was like,

Speaker 5 No, actually, we did have to take out a loan and everything is all set, but you're going to get this paper and just give them this.

Speaker 5 And he started fishing something out of his back pocket and it was just like this piece of paper. It was a promissory note.
And he was like, you just give them this and everything should be good.

Speaker 1 The next day when Heather got to school to start her senior year,

Speaker 5 there was a note in my box. I went to the business office and they told me that I had to leave and that I couldn't be on campus unless I came back to school with a bank certified check for $20,000.

Speaker 1 The number didn't even make sense. As far as she knew, her parents only paid about $5,000 out of pocket every semester.
How could they possibly be this far behind on payments?

Speaker 5 I called my dad and I kept on being like, hey, like, they said $20,000. How do we owe $20,000? And he was like, oh, those guys, they're real jerks over there at the business office.

Speaker 5 I couldn't get anybody to tell me what was going on. My father didn't know anything.
My mom didn't know anything. I just knew that I couldn't be at school until this money was paid.

Speaker 1 Without any real answers, Heather spent a few days at her parents' house, unsure if she'd be able to continue her education. Furious and exasperated, she stopped asking for answers from her dad.

Speaker 1 She just wanted to go back to school. And somehow, it got cleared up.

Speaker 5 I can't even say I know how.

Speaker 5 I was just like, I don't want to know anything about this. I just want to go back to school.
I just know that at the last possible second, I was able to graduate.

Speaker 5 That's when I started to realize, like, okay, something fishy is going on here. But I just wanted to graduate.
I didn't want to think about it.

Speaker 1 And she did graduate with a music degree. She planned to move to New York City to work as a musician.
She felt her dad had done something fishy to mysteriously settle the bill at Bennington.

Speaker 1 That made her more concerned than ever about her dad's behavior and what it meant for her mom.

Speaker 5 I remember telling my mom, look what happened with Bennington. He's going back to his old patterns.
You have to leave him. Like, I was so upset.

Speaker 5 And my mom kept being like, yes, I'm going to leave him. I'm going to leave him.
And, you know, I told her, like, mom, you're in an abusive relationship.

Speaker 5 And she was just like, oh, I know, I know, I know.

Speaker 1 That summer, Heather worked gigs and odd jobs off of Craigslist to get enough money to move herself to New New York. Even though she was in survival mode, Heather was still worried about her mom.

Speaker 5 It got to the point where I even asked my roommates if my mom could come live with us for a little bit, which didn't go over very well with the roommates. They were like, no.

Speaker 5 That's how desperate I was to get my mom out of this situation.

Speaker 1 One day that summer, Heather got a message out of the blue.

Speaker 5 And as soon as I saw that it was like an 888 number, I was like, oh, I knew what those kind of numbers meant. They're looking for my parents.

Speaker 5 Because, you know, we were always getting debt collector calls and stuff.

Speaker 5 So I called them back and I gave them my name and the guy on the other end was like,

Speaker 5 you're past due for your student loans.

Speaker 5 And I was like, what are you talking about? What student loans?

Speaker 1 As far as she knew, she didn't have any student loans. Just that initial $3,000 loan she signed for before starting starting school.

Speaker 5 He said I had 12 student loans that were in collection and that it was a really, really serious matter. I asked him how much and he said it was $124,000 that I owed.

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Speaker 1 Shortly after she graduated college, Heather Summerlad received a call from a debt collector. She was overdue on her student loans.
12 student loans, totaling $124,000.

Speaker 1 Student loans with her name on them that she never knew existed.

Speaker 5 It was like feeling the chain getting clipped to my collar. I was like, wow.

Speaker 5 I still feel it in my body. I feel that anger in my chest and my chest constricting.

Speaker 1 In addition to the overdue loans, there was something else Heather would be on the hook for. A fraud charge.

Speaker 1 Turns out there there was a co-signer on some of the loans and their signature had been forged.

Speaker 5 So of course I have visions of going to jail and being framed for something that I didn't do.

Speaker 1 Heather knew immediately that her dad was behind this crisis. She tried desperately to explain it to the debt collector.

Speaker 5 I was like trying to tell the story. My dad, you know, I was like, no, you don't understand.
My dad, he's the one who did this.

Speaker 1 Heather hung up and immediately dialed her parents' house. Her mom picked up.

Speaker 5 I told her what happened, and she was like, hold on.

Speaker 5 There was no, he did what? I was like, oh my God, she knew.

Speaker 5 So she handed the phone to my dad. He was just like trying to flip it back to me.
He kept talking about how I was too expensive. Your violin costs holds me.
And your education costs this much money.

Speaker 5 And we did this, that, and the other for you. And you're not letting me talk.
I remember him saying that, you're not letting me talk. You don't let people talk.
And he gave the phone back to my mom.

Speaker 5 And I was like, you knew about it, mom. You knew.

Speaker 5 And my mom was crying. And she was like, yes, I've been nagging him to pay this back.
He said he was going to take care of it.

Speaker 1 He promised.

Speaker 1 Her dad had taken out $124,000 in loans in Heather's name and forged her signature. He'd also forged the signature of a co-signer, someone who was a family friend.

Speaker 1 Her dad wouldn't admit to it directly, but Heather saw the documents with her name signed in her father's handwriting.

Speaker 1 Realizing the extent of his deception, she immediately feared for her mom's safety.

Speaker 5 I always saw her as a victim of my father's abuse. I wrote this to her in an email too.
I was like, I don't understand why you're still with him.

Speaker 5 I don't know if he's threatened to kill you, if he's threatened to kill us, like if there's violence involved.

Speaker 1 She'd never seen her dad be violent, but there had to be a reason why her mom never spoke up.

Speaker 1 Her dad said he would fix this, that he would be responsible for making the payments.

Speaker 5 But of course, my dad never made the payments.

Speaker 1 Heather was done with her father. She told her mom that she wanted no contact with him.
And if she came home, he couldn't be there.

Speaker 5 And so we started on that dynamic where it's like, my mom and I, as long as we didn't talk about the loans or my father, we were cool. And my mom was happy to respect that.

Speaker 1 Now, with her father out of her life, Heather got another call about overdue payments. This time, she was ready.

Speaker 5 I immediately was like, give me the fraud department. And so through that process, they told me to file a police report.
And so I did. I went to the police and I filed a report.

Speaker 5 Who wants to file a police report against their father? You know, I didn't want to put my dad in jail. Like, I really didn't.
Like, I didn't want to be the kind of person who did that.

Speaker 1 We've seen these police reports and filing them wasn't easy for Heather.

Speaker 5 As soon as I said it was my dad, they were like, well, how else were you supposed to get an education? I had to provide copies of my signature.

Speaker 5 That was actually really hard because I had to go through old, old, old paperwork. They needed signed and dated from within the time that the fraud occurred.

Speaker 1 Through the process of filing a police report, Heather learned more about the fraudulent loans. She discovered that her actual signature was on one of the loans she didn't know about.

Speaker 1 When she saw the date of the signature, it jogged her memory.

Speaker 5 It was something that my father had said was a gift from my grandfather. A check that was made out to me.

Speaker 5 That turned out to be one of these loans.

Speaker 5 He didn't present me with a loan. He presented me with a check and was like, this is a gift.
You just have to endorse it, which I did.

Speaker 1 She was held responsible for that one. After the police report, the debt collectors stopped calling and sending mail about the loans.

Speaker 5 Months later, I got the letter back saying that the loans had been written off except for three,

Speaker 5 and those can remain on my credit report forever.

Speaker 5 I can't imagine being being out of debt anytime soon.

Speaker 1 Her dad was never arrested or charged for the fraud. She's still left wondering how he was able to get away with it.

Speaker 5 There were five states involved, and my dad is also really smart. And I'm guessing he probably knew this, and maybe that's why they ended up moving to Massachusetts so suddenly.

Speaker 5 I think that he had an overarching plan for how this was going to occur and how he was going to get out of it.

Speaker 1 The fraudulent loans had a lasting impact on Heather's finances. It impacted her ability to buy a car, rent an apartment, or take out a credit card.

Speaker 1 Today, nearly 20 years later, she's still working towards financial stability.

Speaker 5 The repercussions of this financial devastation are huge. They're going to reverberate forever.
Once you are in a hole, it's really hard to get out. It's like being buried alive.

Speaker 1 But this isn't the end of Heather's story of betrayal. For a decade after she ended her relationship with her dad, she remained close with her mother and life moved on.

Speaker 1 She met the love of her life and got married. Her mom was even at her wedding.
But one day, just a few years ago, all of that changed.

Speaker 5 My wife and I decided to move back to Vermont.

Speaker 5 As we were moving into our apartment, I had all my identity theft paperwork and I was looking through it and I opened the envelope where all the forged disbursement checks were and I hadn't really looked through them.

Speaker 5 I had like seen like the first one and I saw my dad's handwriting like forging my name and I started looking like kind of laughing about it like wow, what an asshole.

Speaker 5 And I go through and on like the third or fourth page, I saw a different handwriting and I recognized it immediately.

Speaker 5 That was my mom's handwriting. It's my mom forging my name.

Speaker 5 As soon as I saw that,

Speaker 5 my whole reality changed.

Speaker 5 My whole soul just shattered. I was broken into a thousand pieces because it just changed the narrative for me.

Speaker 5 Like, my mom wasn't this victim,

Speaker 5 she was

Speaker 5 his accomplice.

Speaker 1 She thought her dad was the one behind the fraud.

Speaker 1 For her entire life, Heather had been manipulated into seeing her mom as a victim.

Speaker 1 She'd spent decades feeling protective over her mother, supporting her, and hoping that she would finally find the strength to leave her dad.

Speaker 5 And it shifted my perspective on all those times that my dad got away with stuff

Speaker 5 and she wouldn't leave. And I started to think, like, was he getting away with it? Or was my mom like helping him?

Speaker 1 Out of the $124,000, her parents would have only spent $40,000 on her education.

Speaker 1 So what did they do with the rest of the money?

Speaker 5 They were definitely living on it. When I think about the nice place they lived in in Boston, I feel like, oh, maybe I was funding that.

Speaker 5 You know, any help they might have given me, like, it was actually me maybe paying for it.

Speaker 1 Her mom finally achieved her own dream of living in Boston. And she did it by nearly destroying Heather's life.
That's why she wasn't so upset when Heather went to college.

Speaker 1 She and her husband were taking out fraudulent loans in Heather's name and using them to fund their new Boston apartment. And it left Heather on the hook for a hefty six-figure sum.

Speaker 1 If she had known that her parents couldn't make the tuition payments, she could have applied for scholarships. But her parents wanted the money, not to pay tuition, but to live off of

Speaker 1 and live the life they really wanted to.

Speaker 1 Heather thought about calling her mom to confront her, but when she played out the conversation in her head, they knew that

Speaker 5 if I were to confront her,

Speaker 5 Nobody was going to tell me the truth. She was willing to go this far for this long, and she knew she was an accomplice.
There was nothing more to be said.

Speaker 5 She knew how devastating this had been, so I just stopped responding to her. She would text and like call, and I just never texted or called back.

Speaker 5 After a while, she just stopped trying to contact me, and I never contacted her, and that was it.

Speaker 1 In 2023, she learned that her mother had passed away. She says it's a complicated grieving process, especially when she tries to explain her story to new people.

Speaker 5 A lot of times people are like, oh, were they desperate? Like, maybe they were like really desperate for something. And it's like, I actually think they just enjoyed it.

Speaker 5 The thrill, the adrenaline rush of having to run all the time or having to avoid debt collectors or just the thrill of seeing whether or not I'll find out or what I'll do when I find out.

Speaker 5 It was like psychological warfare, so I wouldn't put it past them that it was more like an experiment or something.

Speaker 1 Heather has been in therapy for years, unpacking the trauma her parents put her through.

Speaker 5 When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. He is a criminal.

Speaker 1 She's also learning to find the words for what she experienced. Words like familial fraud and abuse.

Speaker 1 Heather is leaning on her chosen family, starting with her wife. Today, she's a music teacher and musician in Vermont.
She and her wife are in the process of building their own house.

Speaker 1 She's also found healing through writing. She's working on a book about her story.

Speaker 5 The idea of writing the truth for me as a kid was really daunting because it's like I wasn't allowed to tell the truth. Shame around telling the truth stuck with me for a long time.

Speaker 5 But the process of writing, it started out as a catharsis

Speaker 5 and has since become more of an artistic process where I am learning to make meaning from that pain.

Speaker 5 So yeah, if anybody wants to publish it,

Speaker 5 that would be awesome.

Speaker 1 We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question.

Speaker 1 Why did you want to tell your story?

Speaker 5 I think that people need permission to remove themselves from family systems that aren't safe and to understand anger as a healthy and appropriate emotion when people do this kind of stuff to you.

Speaker 5 I mean, we talk about forgiveness and I think it's because society doesn't want to grapple with the uncomfortable truth that there are some things that are just unforgivable and the emotional repercussions from those things are very real.

Speaker 5 Everything in my life was a lie, but telling the truth about the story and then maybe other people seeing their reflection in my story, and that sense of connection, I feel like it helps with that feeling of isolation.

Speaker 5 Telling the story allows me to be my most authentic self.

Speaker 5 On the next episode of Betrayal, he had bamboozled a physician,

Speaker 5 and if he tricked her, what else had he come up with?

Speaker 1 If you would like to reach out to the betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com. That's betrayal, p-od at gmail.com.
We're grateful for your support.

Speaker 1 One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.
Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners.

Speaker 1 Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison.

Speaker 1 Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde.
Also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristen Mel Curie and Caitlin Golden.

Speaker 1 Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreinchek. Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio.
Additional editing support from Nico Aruka.

Speaker 1 Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIBE Music.
And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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