Deception

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Speaker 10 It was like being in a nightmare.

Speaker 10 Mom was never late.

Speaker 10 Mom didn't miss appointments.

Speaker 10 She didn't just disappear.

Speaker 11 A mother of two disappears.

Speaker 12 She waved a quick goodbye, walked down the stairs and out the door.

Speaker 11 But she wasn't the first to vanish. This was a town that appeared to be haunted by a serial killer.

Speaker 15 It became sickening to hear that another girl had gone missing.

Speaker 11 Was Wendy another victim? Or could she have been targeted by neighbors she tangled with?

Speaker 12 She made an enemy. She made an enemy for sure.

Speaker 11 Or maybe the enemy lurked within. Some said Wendy had a history of emotional troubles.

Speaker 17 She began screaming obscenities and shouting.

Speaker 11 Could this beloved teacher have had multiple personalities?

Speaker 18 He said that's not Wendy. When she does that, she's shunned.

Speaker 11 Was this a woman broken or a woman taken? To find out what really happened, an elite group of detectives would launch an elaborate undercover mission.

Speaker 19 They're described as right out of Hollywood. The staged kidnappings, the fake blood is truly phenomenal.

Speaker 20 All leading up to a sit-down with a man they call Mr.

Speaker 11 Big.

Speaker 21 You want me to get you know short.

Speaker 11 A high-stakes gamble to reveal the truth on tape with the children left behind.

Speaker 23 Who's going to like to hear that?

Speaker 24 Shattering.

Speaker 11 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 25 Here's Keith Morrison with Deception.

Speaker 29 The story you're about to hear is all too real, though it may seem perhaps implausible like a play or a movie, with at its dark heart something quite unspeakable.

Speaker 33 The actors are the family, divided across a thin line separating truth and deception.

Speaker 35 There's the gambler's last desperate hand.

Speaker 37 The the voice, the presence, summoned from the beyond,

Speaker 32 and the audacious undercover caper,

Speaker 43 all to solve an 11-year-old mystery and put under the light of intense personal scrutiny a most unlikely villain who, depending on whom you choose to believe, may not be a villain at all.

Speaker 46 But in the beginning, In the beginning, there was wilderness, vast and lovely, and a happy little family, a brother and sister who loved each other and loved their mom and dad.

Speaker 10 I always thought of our family as a perfect little family. Didn't matter where we lived, as long as we were together, that was home.

Speaker 9 This is Anna Siepert, who at the time was Anna Rotte,

Speaker 48 and home was a country cabin surrounded by the trees and mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

Speaker 25 And this is her little brother, Gabriel.

Speaker 12 And I always thought of my family and my parents as being perfect.

Speaker 22 Really. Especially when you saw the dysfunction in families around you.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and like parents get divorced. Like it just didn't make sense to me.
Yeah. Like how would you deal with that?

Speaker 36 And their parents?

Speaker 4 And a story as unlikely and romantic as Anna and Gabriel had ever heard.

Speaker 26 This shy, rustic French-Canadian laborer named Denis Ratte, who fancied himself a gambler.

Speaker 13 And Wendy, the sweet, wild girl who'd strayed so far from her middle-class roots in the Connecticut suburbs.

Speaker 6 They met at a hotel in Reno, Nevada, of all places.

Speaker 10 And he hardly knew a word of English, and she hardly knew a word of French.

Speaker 12 And yeah, they hit it off

Speaker 12 when it came time for him to leave. She said, take me with you.

Speaker 54 And so he did, all the way back to Canada, to northern Saskatchewan.

Speaker 26 And against all odds, said Denise Sister Dionne.

Speaker 53 The marriage of this wayward teacher's daughter and a virtually illiterate dropout worked.

Speaker 18 What I really liked about them is that they seemed to be more friends than lovers. The way they talked to each other, the way they behave, you know,

Speaker 18 it almost didn't feel like husband and wife.

Speaker 58 And the kids?

Speaker 59 Anybody could see how close they were.

Speaker 60 It wasn't just, oh, how's Anna and what's Gab doing now? It was always Anna and Gab.

Speaker 57 And as their friend Lois Cook could plainly see, Denis was fiercely protective of all of them.

Speaker 60 I would trust him to do the right thing and keep me safe.

Speaker 63 He was going to protect his family and he was going to protect his kids.

Speaker 30 Were you daddy's girl?

Speaker 64 Yeah,

Speaker 10 I was.

Speaker 10 He was the rock that I had. He was calm.
He was patient. I always considered him

Speaker 10 about as close as a hero as a girl could get.

Speaker 66 A strong, silent hero who preferred long, solitary walks in the woods to social gatherings.

Speaker 58 Except for poker.

Speaker 39 There was usually a game in town.

Speaker 67 The family could certainly use the cash, and Denis figured he was pretty good.

Speaker 18 He prided himself on being able to read people and

Speaker 18 know

Speaker 18 when to hold them, when to fold them. And I guess

Speaker 18 he sort of could because he was winning quite a bit.

Speaker 37 Wendy, an art teacher by trade, taught her kids to help others, to speak up and be heard.

Speaker 46 She organized a peace project that taught students, including her own son, about conflict resolution and respect.

Speaker 12 And that's just the ideal of what she tried to do in her everyday life.

Speaker 26 You were close to your mother, right? Oh, very. Very tight relationship.

Speaker 12 Well, she was incredibly nurturing, and I think what she succeeded in doing is that she raised a good son, a good man, to live in this world as a sane person.

Speaker 69 Wendy wanted her children to have the emotional stability she couldn't seem to manage, even in her solid middle-class upbringing.

Speaker 5 She was open about it, too.

Speaker 56 How she was constantly seeking something missing.

Speaker 26 How as a teenager she ran away from home, experimented with drugs.

Speaker 57 How her parents sent her to a psychiatric hospital back in Connecticut.

Speaker 34 She wanted to have a peaceful part of her.

Speaker 63 She wanted to be centered, would be the word.

Speaker 18 But isn't that life?

Speaker 60 Isn't that something common to all of us?

Speaker 36 Nor did her quest seem to be over.

Speaker 53 She was drawn to spirituality.

Speaker 4 And for a time, to a little-known religious group that called itself the Emissaries of Divine Light.

Speaker 10 I remember her saying that she felt she felt at home there. She did that, though.

Speaker 73 She

Speaker 10 religion bounced, searching for somewhere to belong.

Speaker 47 And then finally, she and the family seemed to find it.

Speaker 59 A place to belong.

Speaker 50 At the edge of the wilderness, far from her Connecticut past.

Speaker 75 A small house a few miles outside of Prince George, British Columbia.

Speaker 76 Denis took a job at a local lumber mill.

Speaker 78 Wendy found work off and on as a substitute teacher at the local high school.

Speaker 36 And that might have been the whole story, really.

Speaker 16 Except, well,

Speaker 79 every drama needs a catalyst, right?

Speaker 61 One day in 1995, Denis returned from work at the sawmill and told his family how a log hit his shoulder, knocked him out cold.

Speaker 36 And when he tried to return to work, tough as he was,

Speaker 52 He just couldn't.

Speaker 12 It turned out he had a lot of nerve damage down the right side of his body, so he was left high high and dry without being able to work anymore.

Speaker 43 Denis could no longer be the family's strong, stable protector.

Speaker 12 Once he lost his job, I think that it was up to her to figure out, okay, girls,

Speaker 12 how do we make everything work?

Speaker 75 And then it was a hot morning in August 1997 when everything stopped working.

Speaker 45 Gabriel was in the kitchen, and he was more or less paying attention when his mom and dad told him they were off to run some errands.

Speaker 12 She waved a quick goodbye at the door, walked down the stairs and out the door.

Speaker 46 The first inkling of something wrong, something off, was when the phone rang just after lunch.

Speaker 10 Had a phone call from dad asking if we'd seen mom because

Speaker 10 she hadn't shown up where they were supposed to meet.

Speaker 39 And his dad told her her mom had dropped him off downtown so he could run errands while she drove on in the family van to tutor a student, then meet a friend, then pick him up again at a hardware store.

Speaker 68 But she hadn't returned.

Speaker 41 And as each hour crawled by that afternoon, Anna's worry grew.

Speaker 75 By nightfall, there was still no sign of Wendy.

Speaker 10 But when I called the police to say, I don't know where she is. Can you help?

Speaker 10 Their only question was, has it been 24 hours?

Speaker 10 And it hadn't been, so I couldn't make a report yet.

Speaker 30 So, dark now. Anna and her father took the family's old truck and drove to Prince George to look for her.

Speaker 76 They stopped by a coffee shop, one of Denis and Wendy's favorite meeting places.

Speaker 70 No Wendy.

Speaker 30 But as Anna looked around, her eye caught something familiar.

Speaker 10 And there was the van, sitting under a street lamp in a grocery store parking lot.

Speaker 10 I was so excited, because the grocery store, I think, was just closing up, and I thought, well, maybe she's on her way out of the grocery store.

Speaker 10 So I went and knocked on the door, and they said, no, there's nobody here.

Speaker 52 The van, a white Plymouth Voyager, had picked up a dent, neither one of them remembered, on the driver's side door.

Speaker 2 Weird.

Speaker 39 The van was locked, but Denis had an extra key.

Speaker 42 Inside, everything looked normal.

Speaker 29 So Anna drove the van home.

Speaker 10 That night and the next morning, I just kept making phone calls. I called every friend of mine, every friend of hers.
I called every number in the directory that she had.

Speaker 10 And no one had seen her. No one knew what I was talking about.

Speaker 45 What did all of that feel like?

Speaker 10 It was like being in a nightmare. Because mom was never late.

Speaker 10 Mom didn't miss appointments.

Speaker 10 She didn't just disappear.

Speaker 41 The next day, Denis and the kids filed a report with the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Speaker 42 They created a missing persons poster.

Speaker 32 A photo of Wendy, smiling, happy, her hazel eyes magnified by supersized glasses.

Speaker 84 They plastered it around town.

Speaker 57 A day went by, then two,

Speaker 2 then a week.

Speaker 12 I just kept waiting for her to walk back through that door.

Speaker 23 You expected that to happen?

Speaker 12 I didn't know what else to do. For me, it was just, well, she's going to come back, right?

Speaker 12 I'm 15 years old and just expecting everything to come and be normal.

Speaker 12 One of my really vivid memories is we went to see a movie together because we felt like, Let's have a little distraction from this trauma.

Speaker 12 So I remember standing in line to go to the cinema, just feeling awful, feeling the weight of what's happening and having it feel so odd that we're doing that. Like, why aren't we looking for her?

Speaker 53 And Denis,

Speaker 53 Anna remembered her father going for long walks in the woods alone.

Speaker 6 Seemed devastated, lost in denial.

Speaker 10 He broke down for the first time.

Speaker 10 I'd never seen

Speaker 10 real emotion come from him before.

Speaker 45 By then, Wendy's disappearance became news all over Prince George.

Speaker 15 I came into contact with the case as a news reporter covering the disappearance itself.

Speaker 32 Frank Peebles of the Prince George Citizen.

Speaker 15 It was quite a shock that somebody who was apparently normal everyday, almost a stereotype in that sense, could disappear without a trace. She was everybody's mom and she just disappeared.

Speaker 46 A disturbing echo of other stories Peebles knew all too well.

Speaker 15 This town is used to disappearances and when Wendy Ratte disappeared, there was a hint,

Speaker 15 you know, I would say even a strong whiff of suspicion that this was another Highway of Tears case.

Speaker 46 Highway of Tears?

Speaker 21 Now, what would that be?

Speaker 11 Coming up, was Wendy just the latest on a long list of women who disappeared or been found dead along this stretch of road?

Speaker 15 It became sickening to hear that another girl had gone missing.

Speaker 8 A terrifying specter haunted the lonely highway that passed through Prince George on its way into the wilderness.

Speaker 57 The highway of tears,

Speaker 66 837 miles of exquisite natural beauty winding its way past dramatic snow-capped mountains and breathtaking vistas of lush forests and clear lakes reflecting the blue skies above

Speaker 66 and also past the sites of unsolved mysteries

Speaker 30 say there are six active investigations cbc news prince johnite more missing women on the highway of tear body by the time wendy rete vanished at least 15 women had either gone missing or been found dead somewhere along this highway

Speaker 15 word was a serial killer was on the loose for me me as a reporter, it became sickening after a while to hear the police issue another release that another girl had gone missing.

Speaker 35 Had Wendy become highway victim number 16?

Speaker 57 Her abandon van wasn't far from the highway.

Speaker 15 You couldn't not look at it as a possibility. It's another woman gone missing in unsubstantiated ways.
And for some, that's all that's needed. And in many ways, it's perfectly valid.

Speaker 8 But as reporter Frank Peebles dug into the story, he found another, so far unsubstantiated theory making the rounds around town.

Speaker 15 I know that the police spend a lot of time thinking about and investigating the Jones theory.

Speaker 83 The Jones family, once neighbors of the Rutte's, not exactly friends.

Speaker 42 In fact, just four months before she disappeared, Wendy complained very publicly about the Joneses, appearing with Didi in the newspaper, accusing the family of mistreating their animals and using their land as a garbage dump.

Speaker 10 She was able to get a fairly big news story happening, which made the city react and get them kicked off the property and the animals taken away.

Speaker 39 It was not only damaging for the Joneses, it was humiliating. Not the sort of thing they were inclined to take lying down.

Speaker 15 Allegedly, there were threats made from the Joneses to the Rattes.

Speaker 57 Yes, in fact, the Jones family matriarch sent a scathing letter to the Prince George citizen, bad-mouthing Wendy and her family, intentionally misspelling the family name, exchanging the rattes for the rats.

Speaker 15 I never met the Joneses, but the stories I heard about them were that indeed people would not have been surprised if they had acted out some of the threats that they were alleged to have made.

Speaker 9 Oh, and there was no question, said Gabriel.

Speaker 13 His mom did feel threatened by the Joneses.

Speaker 9 They did not make their anger any secret.

Speaker 12 They would hoot and holler at her as they were passing. That's one of the examples of her community activism.

Speaker 12 Having a bad neighbor like that,

Speaker 12 who

Speaker 3 fearlessly, apparently, because she must have known that they would not like this, obviously.

Speaker 73 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 9 And they might have

Speaker 12 that she made an enemy for sure.

Speaker 32 That was just four months before she vanished, leaving nothing but her van in the local parking lot.

Speaker 57 A van with a dent in the door that nobody could remember seeing before.

Speaker 12 It was a pretty sizable dent.

Speaker 12 So, what was it? Could it it have maybe been

Speaker 12 some kind of sign of a struggle? If my mom was accosted and she was thrown into the van, something forceful must have caused this dent. And

Speaker 30 you know how people are.

Speaker 90 They talk.

Speaker 66 And the longer Wendy stayed missing, the more they talked about the Joneses.

Speaker 15 So even in the newsroom, that was a leading theory. That's one of your clear first steps in any disappearance or murder case is what's the motive? And the Joneses could have a motive.

Speaker 91 There was a grudge, certainly there was some differences. And it certainly was in the media, and we looked at that angle.

Speaker 46 Prince George detective Judy Thomas was leading the police inquiry into Wendy's disappearance.

Speaker 84 And this early in the investigation, any lead was welcome.

Speaker 22 What became your focus?

Speaker 91 This is the difficulty with missing person files. You don't...
There's no real starting point. You don't have a scene.
You don't have remains. And it makes it difficult.

Speaker 34 Thomas decided to focus her investigation closer to home.

Speaker 90 She discovered that none of Wendy's clothes or personal things were missing from the house, except for her passport.

Speaker 36 So, the obvious question.

Speaker 34 Did you have the feeling that this is a woman who might have just up and left?

Speaker 91 We had to look at all possibilities. You have to keep an open mind when you start on these investigations, because we had, at that point, very limited information on who Wendy was.

Speaker 57 Where do you start?

Speaker 38 Maybe a phone call to Wendy's family back in the States.

Speaker 17 And I hear this story and I think, oh, for crying out loud. You know, she's done it again.

Speaker 92 Coming up.

Speaker 11 A missing person's case like no other because who actually disappeared? Wendy or a second personality some say lurked inside.

Speaker 18 We asked him, we said, what is going on? He said, that's not Wendy.

Speaker 88 That's That's Shauna.

Speaker 18 When she does that, she's Shauna.

Speaker 11 Gwen Dateline continues.

Speaker 16 Wendy Ratte,

Speaker 53 the sweet free spirit of Prince George, British Columbia, had vanished from her life as slick as a magic act, her passport nowhere to be found.

Speaker 4 And as unlikely as it seemed, police had to seriously consider, could,

Speaker 42 would a dedicated wife and mother of two simply skip town, run away from her own family?

Speaker 25 Which brings us to the Greyhound bus station, a few blocks from the place Wendy's van was found, abandoned.

Speaker 26 Gabriel was putting up a missing person's poster there.

Speaker 49 And...

Speaker 12 I asked the lady who was there

Speaker 12 at the cash register, do you recognize this lady on the poster?

Speaker 12 She did say that she recognized my mom. And we were just taken aback.
You do? And she said, yes, very certainly.

Speaker 91 We asked her repeatedly, and she said, I saw her.

Speaker 12 She was sitting at that table over there.

Speaker 6 What does it do inside when you hear that?

Speaker 12 It's hope, you know?

Speaker 78 Then, shortly after Wendy disappeared, Anna was looking through her mom's papers in search of clues and found an application for a teacher's job in California.

Speaker 10 We thought, well, maybe

Speaker 10 she's there.

Speaker 10 I know

Speaker 10 she'd spent some time in New Mexico when she was getting her teaching degree, and she loved it. So, Well maybe she went there.

Speaker 27 And then there was that religious group she'd been so into years earlier, the emissaries of divine light.

Speaker 38 Could she have up and joined them?

Speaker 91 They feel they have transcended the conflict and tension of their former lives.

Speaker 38 A Canadian news magazine show profiled the group and found it had several branches in the U.S.

Speaker 10 I had helped the police

Speaker 10 look into that and give them every information I could and

Speaker 10 would often ask, how much did you look into this? Because I knew there was an American sect.

Speaker 9 But still,

Speaker 53 why would her own kids think it possible she abandoned her family without so much as goodbye?

Speaker 16 The reason for that was history.

Speaker 48 She had done it before.

Speaker 30 Just

Speaker 17 disappeared from her life.

Speaker 5 This is Karen Kreider, Wendy's sister.

Speaker 53 who told how Wendy vanished the first time when she was 17 years old. The family finally found her living in a tent in New New Hampshire.

Speaker 17 Just at our very approach, she began screaming obscenities and shouting and just behaving in a menacing, hateful way.

Speaker 17 And she was not a person I'd ever met and we knew she was not well and needed care

Speaker 17 and forcibly took her. and put her in the hospital.

Speaker 13 Doctors thought Wendy suffered from drug-induced manic depression, but Karen said they didn't have time to make an official diagnosis.

Speaker 32 That's because Wendy Wendy turned 18, checked herself out, and disappeared again, this time for almost two years.

Speaker 17 When Wendy disappeared, all traces of her were gone. She did not call anybody.
We couldn't find her. We couldn't track her.

Speaker 26 She showed up suddenly, apparently seeking refuge from an abusive relationship she was in at the time, and then was gone again.

Speaker 91 There was a clear

Speaker 17 disengagement from reality. She didn't understand that

Speaker 17 her disappearances

Speaker 17 were hurtful to her family members. Didn't get that at all.

Speaker 35 So it went on and on until one day she turned up and announced she was getting married to Denis.

Speaker 55 The family was overjoyed.

Speaker 17 Our family thought that he was a very good influence on her and the fact that he chose to take a chance and take her away

Speaker 63 was nothing short of amazing.

Speaker 55 Wendy became a dedicated wife, teacher, artist, mother.

Speaker 70 But there were always issues, mood swings for one thing.

Speaker 10 Some days she would be so happy and other days the world would just weigh down on her.

Speaker 18 But today's sister Dionne said that what she observed back in Saskatchewan when Anna and Gabriel were still young weren't just mood swings, but something far more complicated than than that the first time that i really noticed it was with the kids she was always so gentle with them um soft-spoken

Speaker 18 and all of a sudden she was very cold and very abrupt with them and i started noticing deny when this would happen deny would take her away and they'd say oh we're going for a walk now and when they got back

Speaker 18 She was back to normal. And then finally we asked him, we said, you know, what is going on? Finally, he said, he said, you know, that's Shauna.

Speaker 9 That's not Wendy.

Speaker 18 He says, when she does that, she's Shauna.

Speaker 77 Wait, did Wendy suffer from multiple personality disorder?

Speaker 26 That was never diagnosed.

Speaker 2 The stories were all anecdotal.

Speaker 30 But...

Speaker 17 I met Shauna. Wendy and I met in a parking lot somewhere just to say hi.
She was driving a very fast,

Speaker 17 very expensive car. She was bragging about how much money she made.

Speaker 91 She was

Speaker 17 uninterested in anybody else besides herself. And she said, I'm not Wendy anymore.

Speaker 30 Shauna seemed to have been around off and on for quite a while.

Speaker 32 She even called herself that in a letter she wrote her parents when she was just 23.

Speaker 43 Shauna has magic, she wrote.

Speaker 30 So, two Wendy's?

Speaker 18 Wendy was the good mother, conservative, hard worker,

Speaker 18 wanted to save the world. While Shauna was the wild child.
She didn't want to be tied down. She wanted to have a good time.
She felt restrained by the bonds of marriage and family.

Speaker 39 Maybe it was Shauna who got on that bus.

Speaker 36 Or perhaps O'Shaughnessy?

Speaker 2 Yes, three Wendy's.

Speaker 43 O'Shana came to life at seances Wendy led, sometimes with Anna and Gabriel.

Speaker 10 I don't know if they were real or if they weren't real. They seemed real at the time.

Speaker 22 She was speaking in voices and things.

Speaker 10 She was very in touch with a spirit, an ancient spirit named Oshana. She found some peace in that.

Speaker 10 And one day she said, let's hold hands and speak with Oshana.

Speaker 12 I just remember her transforming into this character,

Speaker 12 this different self. And it was a surprise to me.
I didn't know she did this. She was a completely different person.
She wasn't responding in the way that my mother usually does.

Speaker 59 So everybody was looking for Wendy, said Gabriel.

Speaker 52 When, really, maybe they should have been looking for one of the Shaunas.

Speaker 12 I think that she had the capacity to pick up and go. She might have reached that breaking point where she just thought.
Or she didn't think. It just snapped and she just left.

Speaker 46 Then one day, after a month of rumors and unsubstantiated theories followed one after the other, there was a break.

Speaker 54 Wendy had been getting unemployment insurance, and two of her checks had been cashed at an ATM in full view of the bank's surveillance camera.

Speaker 11 Coming up, another potential clue is about to surface from Wendy's past. A crucial moment when a high-stakes gamble went very wrong.

Speaker 10 She was so angry, she just vibrated.

Speaker 11 What that told investigators.

Speaker 51 A month into the investigation, police thought they were a big step closer to solving the mystery surrounding Wendy's disappearance.

Speaker 26 Someone cashed in her unemployment checks at an ATM.

Speaker 75 Was it Wendy?

Speaker 47 Was it someone who had done her harm?

Speaker 56 RCMP investigator Judy Thomas checked the bank surveillance cameras.

Speaker 13 And there he was.

Speaker 76 Denis Ratte, Wendy's husband.

Speaker 31 So you asked him about it?

Speaker 91 And he admitted it.

Speaker 84 Straight out. Didn't try to lie.

Speaker 91 I don't think he could lie about it when you have a picture of him cashing the check at an ATM.

Speaker 22 Did he have an explanation that made any sense?

Speaker 91 Yeah, he explained the fact that his wife had disappeared.

Speaker 91 There was no money coming in, and he needed to pay the bills. It made me wonder about his character.

Speaker 89 Denis suddenly became suspect number one.

Speaker 76 Though it was hardly a surprise police would look at the husband.

Speaker 26 In fact, in the very first week of the investigation, Thomas had questioned him three times.

Speaker 91 I introduced myself as a police officer coming to talk to him. And I said, how are you doing? His comment was better.
Better. It struck me odd right at the beginning.

Speaker 25 Did he seem nervous?

Speaker 16 Upset?

Speaker 75 He didn't strike me as overly concerned, not distraught by any means frustrated is what he was denis told his sister dion i said you don't get used to it you're the husband they're gonna look at you um because 99 of the time the husband did it

Speaker 91 didn't help that from one interview to the next denis appeared to change vital information about the day his wife went missing he said she'd left with no money but then in the following statement he claims that he gave her money More than $2,000 in fact, money he'd gotten in advance for an odd job which he asked Wendy to return when he couldn't complete it.

Speaker 91 It struck me there I was going

Speaker 6 why didn't you tell me that the first time?

Speaker 91 Yes, because it was specifically asked did you did Wendy have money on her?

Speaker 25 You wouldn't think he'd forget about $2,000.

Speaker 91 $2,000 exactly.

Speaker 32 And in the fall of 1997, As investigators interviewed more and more people who knew the Ratte family, they discovered that ever since Denis had the mill accident and lost his job two years earlier, the perfect little family had not been quite so perfect after all.

Speaker 12 Well, that was really hard for him. As you could imagine,

Speaker 12 he liked being the man of the house.

Speaker 73 Sure.

Speaker 83 And if both your physicality and

Speaker 4 your ability to provide for your family are taken away from you, that's got to be hard on the ego.

Speaker 73 Very hard.

Speaker 12 It was very hard.

Speaker 33 And especially hard on the family's finances.

Speaker 8 Their visa card was almost maxed out.

Speaker 32 The only income came from Wendy's work as a substitute teacher.

Speaker 36 Not exactly a lucrative profession.

Speaker 45 So Denis did what he always did when times were rough.

Speaker 73 He played poker.

Speaker 18 He got a little desperate and started gambling more and more to try to get money for the family. And gambled too much and started losing money and money they didn't have.

Speaker 26 And it was on one of those smoke-filled nights, sometime around February 1997, about six months before Wendy disappeared, when, hunched around a poker table in the company of high rollers, Denis found himself staring at a hand that spelled salvation,

Speaker 6 with $25,000 in chips sitting on the table.

Speaker 12 Maybe it's every gambler's excuse.

Speaker 23 My hand was so good that no one was going to beat it.

Speaker 26 So he threw everything into the pot.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he bet the highest he could.

Speaker 12 And yeah, he lost it. So I think that went on to the visa as well.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 it was terrible.

Speaker 10 Mom was very vocal.

Speaker 10 I remember her yelling.

Speaker 10 She was so angry. She just vibrated.

Speaker 2 Vibrated.

Speaker 10 Mom was emotional. You've never seen her yell at him like that before.
She talked about how much she loved dad, but was so angry with him and wasn't sure if she could forgive him.

Speaker 10 That it was a betrayal. And that you put years of devotion into someone

Speaker 30 to be cut down like that.

Speaker 35 Your father's addiction is ruining us, Wendy told Anna.

Speaker 29 And as was Wendy's way, told everyone else who cared to listen, too.

Speaker 36 16-year-old Anna, daddy's girl, began to see the tarnish in her father's halo.

Speaker 10 When I heard that mom had to change bank accounts into her name, she had to protect the family's income. That was the first

Speaker 10 waiver I had with my father's character.

Speaker 25 A month before she disappeared, Wendy decided she needed some distance from Denis.

Speaker 78 She took the kids and went to visit her old friend, Lois.

Speaker 60 I feel that the decision Wendy was making was whether she was going to end the marriage with Denis or not.

Speaker 63 But she knew how much Denis loved his children and how much the children loved Denis.

Speaker 53 So she decided to give Denis one last chance.

Speaker 23 She went back to Prince George, had a heart-to-heart with him, and then called Lois.

Speaker 63 When she phoned, she said, I've talked with Denis.

Speaker 60 I've decided we're going to give it another try.

Speaker 24 That phone call

Speaker 60 was happiness with a lot of relief in it.

Speaker 63 But my sense was, if Denis betrayed her trust again, it was over.

Speaker 17 She was finished.

Speaker 79 Denis told Wendy he'd do whatever it took to save the marriage.

Speaker 58 But Anna could clearly see that Wendy's very public complaints about his failings had been bothering him a lot.

Speaker 10 He was a proud man

Speaker 10 who didn't like his dirty laundry aired

Speaker 10 and she just had to everyone they knew.

Speaker 3 His failings had been put on display.

Speaker 10 And they had never been before.

Speaker 10 What it took for her to forgive him

Speaker 10 hurt him deeply.

Speaker 32 But Denis told police again and again his marriage was back on track.

Speaker 50 He had absolutely no reason, he said, to hurt Wendy or have anything to do with her disappearance.

Speaker 30 Police said, prove it.

Speaker 18 We were talking on the phone and he says they want me to take a lie detector test. I said, Denis, you're the husband.
They're going to suspect you, but don't take a lie detector test.

Speaker 18 They scare me, don't do it.

Speaker 36 Denis did not listen to his little sister.

Speaker 59 Four months after Wendy disappeared, he volunteered to take the test.

Speaker 23 How How did he seem going in?

Speaker 91 A lot of people are nervous when they come in. They're unsure of the procedure.

Speaker 32 It'd be pretty scary, I would think.

Speaker 91 Yeah, if I could categorize him, he was that way, wondering, you know,

Speaker 91 what was going to happen, what's going to take place.

Speaker 82 It was a polygraph question that had to be asked.

Speaker 35 Last August, did you murder Wendy?

Speaker 46 Deni Ratte answered with conviction, No, I did not.

Speaker 45 And waited to see what the machine would say.

Speaker 92 Coming up,

Speaker 11 the investigation is transformed when detectives run up against a fresh and frustrating piece of evidence.

Speaker 84 Did it seem to you at the time, hey, this is...

Speaker 91 this can't be I remember having a thought of it's not what I would expect it when dateline continues

Speaker 54 four months into the investigation of Wendy Ratte's disappearance, no sign of Wendy anywhere.

Speaker 57 Police radar was squarely pointed at her husband, Denis,

Speaker 26 which was no surprise to seasoned Prince George reporter Frank Peeples.

Speaker 15 It was just the natural assumption that someone of that style, that demographic, wouldn't go missing unless it was to someone that she knew closely.

Speaker 45 Denis, of course, had proclaimed his innocence, took a lie detector test to prove it.

Speaker 30 There was no shortage of other theories in the case, though theories like rumors are easy.

Speaker 38 Separating rumor from fact is another matter altogether, as Detective Judy Thomas discovered as she chased down the leads.

Speaker 83 First, the highway of tears.

Speaker 41 For years, women had been going missing out here, a body occasionally turning up beside the road, a horrifying surprise for passers-by.

Speaker 72 But Thomas had investigated those cases and expected no such surprise in Wendy's case, was sure of it, in fact.

Speaker 30 Wendy just didn't fit the profile.

Speaker 91 Some of the victims that we see are hitchhikers also involved in drugs and organized crime, or some of the folks that are sex trade workers.

Speaker 22 So you were able to dispense with that one pretty quickly.

Speaker 91 There was nothing to indicate that she was in any way connected to any of the missing or murdered women along Highway 16.

Speaker 36 So, said Judy Thomas, no highway of tears.

Speaker 90 But Wendy could still have left Prince George of her own accord.

Speaker 2 There was, after all, that sighting at the Greyhound bus station.

Speaker 85 But no, said Thomas, false alarm.

Speaker 91 With various files, you get a lot of people saying, oh, I saw this person. They're quite adamant.
But when I spoke to the woman, she actually said no. I wouldn't be able to say that at all.

Speaker 91 We flagged bank accounts, credit cards, social insurance numbers. We put Wendy on a Canada-wide database.
We checked the airlines, the border crossings. There was just nothing.

Speaker 35 What about the religious group, the Emissaries of Divine Light, that Wendy had been drawn to years before?

Speaker 91 We checked into that and had met with dead ends. They said they had never heard of her.

Speaker 71 Reports that Wendy was mentally ill?

Speaker 30 That it wasn't her, but her alter ego that may have left town?

Speaker 4 Thomas interviewed Wendy's mother.

Speaker 51 about her daughter's troubled youth.

Speaker 91 We spoke at length. She told me all about Wendy and her background and growing up.

Speaker 22 Did she bring up the idea that Wendy may have had some sort of mental breakdown?

Speaker 91 There was talk of some issues that Wendy had. We looked into medical records and there was nothing recent.
There was a time in her life when she did,

Speaker 91 I don't know if you want to call it disappear, but she lost contact with her family. But that's

Speaker 91 in a person's youth, which is much different than when you're married with children.

Speaker 34 And Thomas interviewed several of Wendy's Wendy's closest friends.

Speaker 43 All told her the same thing.

Speaker 35 Wendy was first and foremost a mother.

Speaker 22 You get a sense that you know these people when you're looking for what happened to them?

Speaker 91 You certainly develop an idea of who that person could be.

Speaker 22 And what idea did you develop about Wendy?

Speaker 91 For Wendy, a very caring, loving mother. When I was talking with Anna and Gabriel, the love that they had for their mother,

Speaker 91 I knew that it had to be reciprocated. That obviously Wendy loved her children very much, and I kept hearing that over and over, that she would not leave her children.

Speaker 73 Right, that was a central fact in your mind. Definitely.

Speaker 57 So, run away, Wendy?

Speaker 14 Investigator Thomas decided no.

Speaker 35 So, what about the Jones family, the neighbors who Wendy helped evict from their property?

Speaker 39 They would have had the motive to hurt her.

Speaker 91 You look at the full circumstances of it. That family had moved four months, I believe, prior.
The main person that they alluded to wasn't even in the area, and there was nothing else to support that.

Speaker 84 The Joneses ruled out as suspect in the disappearance of Wendy Ratte.

Speaker 45 Which left Wendy's husband, Denis.

Speaker 45 He'd created the suspicion himself, of course, when he illegally cashed Wendy's unemployment insurance checks, and his gambling habit almost bankrupted the family, led to those terrible fights just months before Wendy disappeared.

Speaker 45 But Denis remember agreed to take a lie detector test and now the results were in

Speaker 91 the polygraph operator came back and told Dennis that he found him to be truthful.

Speaker 16 You heard right.

Speaker 37 Truthful.

Speaker 25 Letting him go as a suspect had to have been difficult.

Speaker 84 Did it seem to you at the time, hey, this is this can't be?

Speaker 13 Or?

Speaker 91 I remember having a thought of, hmm, it's not what I would expected.

Speaker 29 Dionne, who had warned Denis not to take the lie detector test, got a call from her vastly relieved brother.

Speaker 18 Did the lie detector test, and I passed it. He said, C, told me not to do it, and I did it, and it paid off, because now, you know, they know I didn't do it, and they're leaving me alone.

Speaker 18 See, I was right. I said, okay, you were right.
You win.

Speaker 34 The case of the disappearance of Wendy Ratte

Speaker 80 was at a dead end.

Speaker 10 Judy told me, we don't understand.

Speaker 10 For other cases, there's usually at least bogus information coming in. There was nothing coming in.

Speaker 66 Was her mom alive?

Speaker 80 Was she dead?

Speaker 35 Could she have abandoned the children who loved her so much?

Speaker 35 Unsolved cases often carry with them an intolerable uncertainty.

Speaker 59 Or maybe, as Anna was about to discover, an unbearable truth.

Speaker 11 Coming up, Anna gets word there might be witnesses who know what really happened to Wendy.

Speaker 10 Who are these people? Have they told the police?

Speaker 11 Returning to our story, Wendy Rette left the house for a morning of errands and never came home. Police have pursued all kinds of leads and come up empty.

Speaker 11 Now, the investigation is about to take an unthinkable turn, and Wendy's two children will learn that in this case, the only thing worse than not knowing what happened to their mother may be knowing.

Speaker 7 Again, Keith Morrison.

Speaker 47 It's a very personal thing, the way humans react to trauma.

Speaker 51 For three years after his mother disappeared, Gabriel's way was to forget, force it out of his head.

Speaker 30 He went to Vancouver, registered for college, tried to go on with life.

Speaker 12 I didn't give it a lot of thought. To the point where I tried to remember her face and I couldn't.

Speaker 86 I would have dreams though.

Speaker 12 Dreams of her coming back up those stairs in the same way that she walked out.

Speaker 5 Anguish like that couldn't stay hidden for long.

Speaker 50 It happened in a drama class.

Speaker 53 Gabriel was reciting a scene from a play that dealt with abandonment, anger, desperation.

Speaker 53 The very feelings he'd been trying to suppress.

Speaker 12 I broke down. I was bawling.
In the performance? In the classroom. They couldn't console me.

Speaker 12 I was on the ground. I was heaving.
I didn't know. I mean, this is like three years build-up of just holding it in.
I just quit school because I felt like this is too much right now.

Speaker 21 My brother was lost.

Speaker 10 I say I always felt that I connected with my father more.

Speaker 10 I'd always felt that my brother connected with her more. I feel a lot of guilt for not being able to

Speaker 10 have been able to replace her.

Speaker 30 Why should you replace her?

Speaker 94 Because then maybe

Speaker 94 he would have been okay

Speaker 10 but we were both so lost

Speaker 88 that we couldn't

Speaker 10 we couldn't be there for each other anymore

Speaker 26 well gabriel tried to forget anna became obsessed with remembering now 20 and living with a boyfriend hundreds of miles from prince george She was determined to keep the search for her mother alive.

Speaker 10 Everything else I did was just mechanical motion.

Speaker 10 My emotion went in to finding her.

Speaker 72 And she began to believe she was quite alone, that the RCMP had let the case go cold.

Speaker 10 They always promised me it wasn't. They promised they were still looking, but that

Speaker 10 nobody would be working on it. And finally, I was tired of this file shuffle and went to the media.
to say, don't forget, this was a person in your community, don't forget.

Speaker 15 She came in in carrying this folder of news clippings and possible leads that were connected to her mother. I had talked to many families of many disappeared people over the years.

Speaker 15 And I could see the light in her eyes that way, that this was one of those people who was not going to let this go.

Speaker 47 But Anna's father, Denis, it seemed, had given up, not only on ever finding his wife again,

Speaker 9 but on himself.

Speaker 10 He was changing over the years in front of my eyes. This calm, patient,

Speaker 10 sturdy, steady person

Speaker 10 was emotional,

Speaker 10 angry, and he was a mess. I saw him at the food banks.
I saw him with girlfriends that you had to pay for. I saw his demeanor change from a proud working man

Speaker 10 to a

Speaker 10 street thug.

Speaker 26 Denis was in a downward spiral. Desperate for money, he turned to small-time crime, tried a bit of drug dealing, got caught.

Speaker 34 He was lucky.

Speaker 26 It was his first offense, so he only got probation.

Speaker 18 He told me that, you know, he did this drug deal because he needed the money to keep her home, Wendy's home. As he said, if I keep the house, he says she'll have a home to come home to.

Speaker 85 Denis lost the house.

Speaker 26 Six years after Wendy disappeared, he was living in an apartment in the seediest part of town, collecting bottles to make ends meet.

Speaker 18 It was a blow that he'd gone that low. But when I tried to question him about it, he just, you know, he says, hey, he said, my kids are gone, my wife's gone.

Speaker 18 Don't have much left.

Speaker 26 But Anna had a sense, she said, a nagging feeling, that it wasn't just grief that kept Denis from being the strong, dedicated father she had known.

Speaker 52 Was it possible, she wondered, that it was guilt?

Speaker 29 I thought.

Speaker 10 I thought he was hiding something.

Speaker 4 What would he know?

Speaker 10 I don't know. He said, I have gone through my story.
If you need to hear it, go see the police. Ask them to tell you the story.

Speaker 37 So he was fed up. He was over.

Speaker 10 He said, I'm done. I'm not talking about it anymore.
Now, I understand about being fed up. I couldn't imagine how it would feel to be the one investigated.
But I also believe in truth.

Speaker 10 And if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to hide.

Speaker 42 But when Anna kept pushing, her dad snapped back that he was conducting his own investigation, His target, suspects police had already eliminated the Jones family.

Speaker 10 He said that day that she disappeared, friends of his saw the family from down the street that she had had kicked out.

Speaker 10 She saw them following her. I said, where is this coming from?

Speaker 10 Who are these people? Have they told the police? And he said, these people don't want to go to the police.

Speaker 10 They're afraid of this family. And I couldn't understand that he would be okay with not telling the police.

Speaker 79 If her father didn't want to go to police, Anna decided, then she would.

Speaker 10 I asked, could I have my father's storyline? And the police said,

Speaker 10 we don't have a clear picture of what happened that day because every time he tells us a story, there are big holes.

Speaker 18 What did you think when you heard that?

Speaker 10 Just at a loss. It felt like there was a...
It's like he was putting a barrier in front of the investigation.

Speaker 4 But there was something Anna didn't know.

Speaker 38 The case of her mother's disappearance wasn't cold at all.

Speaker 54 In fact, police were actively investigating her father.

Speaker 45 Four years after Denis passed his live detector test, the RCMP reviewed it.

Speaker 48 Standard practice in unsolved cases.

Speaker 82 But this time, with a quite unexpected outcome.

Speaker 91 The polygraph operator rereads his charts.

Speaker 91 And then we find that he was actually deceptive.

Speaker 25 Deceptive.

Speaker 78 Meaning, according to the police polepher, that Denis Ratte lied when he claimed he had nothing to do with Wendy's disappearance.

Speaker 45 Investigator Thomas wanted to be sure.

Speaker 91 We had five polygraph operators read those charts. Every one of them read them to be deceptive.

Speaker 45 But a failed lie detector test was certainly not enough evidence to arrest Denis, let alone charge him with a crime.

Speaker 91 It was hard for me not to tell Anna. I couldn't because you have to balance the integrity of this investigation.
You don't want it jeopardized.

Speaker 51 So all Thomas could do was file the results away and try to find more evidence against Denis.

Speaker 85 But as the years slowly ticked by one by one, nothing.

Speaker 54 Finally, in 2007, a decade now since Wendy vanished, Thomas decided that if she wanted to get closer to Denis to find out what he knew once and for all, she would need some help.

Speaker 91 That's when we looked at passing it off to the Unsolved Homicide Unit.

Speaker 26 Vancouver's E-Division, to be exact.

Speaker 76 The premier cold case unit in British Columbia.

Speaker 53 Get ready for an undercover mission,

Speaker 13 unlike any you have ever seen.

Speaker 92 Coming up,

Speaker 11 a sting by investigators worthy of the big screen.

Speaker 19 They're described as right out of Hollywood. The staged kidnapping and the fake blood is truly phenomenal.

Speaker 11 Meet the man they call Mr. Big when Dateline continues.

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Speaker 25 It was a sweet wedding, happy and a little sad to wistful, when Anna the Bride danced with her father.

Speaker 53 It was 2003, six years since her mother vanished from her life.

Speaker 71 Her father insisted he had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 39 And tender moments like these, Anna said, reminded her how much she yearned for the bond they once had.

Speaker 10 I had to believe him.

Speaker 10 He was still my

Speaker 10 hero, childhood hero, was still there.

Speaker 98 But she was sliding, sliding into a darker understanding of her father.

Speaker 56 Until the day in late 2007, when Anna met reporter Frank Peoples at a downtown cafe.

Speaker 15 There was no one else in the room at the time, and we were talking quietly. And after about an hour of conversation, she finally just shook her head and said, I'm very sure that it was dad.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 the wrench in her eyes when that came out was something I don't think I can ever forget.

Speaker 53 By then, the RCMP's lead investigator, Robert Barrett of the Unsolved Homicide Unit in Vancouver, was in charge of the case. One of 800 unsolved cases on the unit's books.

Speaker 101 Upon our review, we came to the same conclusion as Judy did here that Denis Roté was the suspect in his wife's disappearance.

Speaker 34 But there wasn't quite enough to charge him, is that right?

Speaker 101 That's correct, yes. And one of the things we decided was that an undercover operation may be the best to try to move this file forward.

Speaker 23 An undercover operation.

Speaker 101 Yes.

Speaker 53 The undercover operation the Unsolved Homicide Squad came up with was so elaborate and ambitious, it might seem frankly unbelievable.

Speaker 42 They created from scratch a fake criminal organization complete with detectives posing as crooks.

Speaker 76 The goal to lure Denirate into their midst and gain his trust, so as to find out what he really knew about his wife's disappearance.

Speaker 19 The RCMP have conducted over 350 of these investigations.

Speaker 89 Curry Keenan, a policy analyst for the Canadian government, has studied these operations and written a book about them.

Speaker 19 They have creatively fashioned a backdrop that simulates a real-world criminal environment, so much so that fiction is often difficult to differentiate from reality.

Speaker 47 The RCMP would not discuss the specifics of the undercover operation that targeted Denis Ratte,

Speaker 47 but Dayline NBC reviewed an RCMP summary of the mission.

Speaker 26 June 2008, an undercover officer approached Denis and Prince George.

Speaker 47 He was looking for someone, he told Denis, but didn't know his way around town.

Speaker 14 Denis agreed to help.

Speaker 47 About a week later, another question.

Speaker 98 Would Denis like to make some money on the side, delivering bags mostly, their contents unknown?

Speaker 90 No problem, said Denis.

Speaker 14 And bit by bit, as days went by, Denis became fully involved in what he clearly believed was a criminal gang.

Speaker 35 After a couple of months, by August, he was helping them smuggle illegal cigarettes and alcohol, to exchange stolen diamonds, and even to transport guns.

Speaker 72 Or so he thought.

Speaker 19 Over time, the target is led to believe that he is an up-and-comer in the criminal organization.

Speaker 8 Then it got more serious.

Speaker 57 Denis was asked to threaten a man.

Speaker 26 He did, though he said he didn't like it.

Speaker 25 And he guarded a hotel room door as an undercover officer savagely beat a woman.

Speaker 68 Denis never suspecting it was all an act.

Speaker 19 These undercover officers, they're they're amazing actors, and they're described as right out of Hollywood.

Speaker 19 The types of scenarios that they do, the beatings, the staged kidnappings, the fake blood packs is truly phenomenal.

Speaker 57 Denis bonded with his crime buddies over meals in fancy restaurants and evenings in strip clubs.

Speaker 51 The pay was good, too.

Speaker 57 About 12 grand in a little more than three months.

Speaker 75 More than he'd earned in years, he told his sister Dionne, without divulging too much.

Speaker 18 He says, I'm earning some money. He says, I'm not eating at the soup kitchen anymore.

Speaker 18 And, you know, I just thought, you know, great, he got a job and he's got people he's working with that he really likes and they really like him.

Speaker 34 During one of his delivery trips to Vancouver, Denis stopped to see his son Gabriel, now 26 and a college student once more. Gabriel noticed that the old self-assured Denis was back.

Speaker 12 I saw that glint in his eye where he felt proud of himself again. And he hadn't felt that since

Speaker 12 he'd been injured.

Speaker 53 Then, three months into the operation, the sting was primed. The real police showed up again in Denis's life, told him the investigation had been reopened.
He was the prime suspect.

Speaker 79 And, oh, by the way, he failed that lie detector test all those years ago.

Speaker 26 Now, suddenly worried, Denis, just as planned, had no one else to turn to except his new friends.

Speaker 3 The undercover detectives had him just where they they wanted him.

Speaker 5 Time for Mr.

Speaker 25 Bigg.

Speaker 19 Mr. Bigg is the commanding, all-powerful boss of the criminal organization.
He's the one who calls the shots. If he likes you and wants to bring you in, he can make your criminal problems go away.

Speaker 13 And Denis, his crime buddies assured him, had all it took to be a made guy.

Speaker 56 All because he'd been what the organization valued the most, honest and loyal.

Speaker 52 That's a common safeguard of the Mr.

Speaker 57 Big technique, said Keenan, to ensure as much as possible that the suspect doesn't lie to gain respect.

Speaker 19 Just be honest. If you're honest, things will be great.
You'll thrive. If you lie, there could be very devastating consequences.
Mr. Big will only accept the truth.

Speaker 58 The truth?

Speaker 83 So far, whenever undercover officers had asked Denis about his missing wife, about a dozen times or so, he didn't waver from the story he'd stuck to for more than a decade.

Speaker 98 He had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 26 September 27th, 2008, a hotel room in Winnipeg marketplace.

Speaker 57 Lead investigator Rob Barrett monitoring the video in a nearby room.

Speaker 25 So, you've got this elaborate setup.

Speaker 84 What are you trying to get?

Speaker 101 I've been involved in investigations where we've actually been able to clear a person of any wrongdoing. So it's not just there to try to find a person guilty.
It's there to seek the truth.

Speaker 36 The moment had come, time for Denis to come clean.

Speaker 97 You'll be within the top right, meant to be

Speaker 97 meant to be for sure.

Speaker 11 Coming up, his back against the wall, what would Denis say to Mr. Big?

Speaker 102 I'm gonna tell you honestly what happened.

Speaker 102 I want you to take this as a job in touch.

Speaker 97 Okay? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 97 We're gonna put everything on the table. Sure.
Okay?

Speaker 56 Denis Raute had come to the moment of truth.

Speaker 55 He was meeting Mr.

Speaker 47 Big, the man he believed to be an all-powerful crime boss.

Speaker 57 His audition, he believed, for membership, for trust, for help from Mr.

Speaker 51 Bigg.

Speaker 80 Royal Canadian Mounted Police disguised the identity and voices of the undercover agents.

Speaker 97 Right now, I have to decide if I'm going to help you or I'm not going to help you.

Speaker 66 Okay?

Speaker 97 Right now I'm going to see who are you as a person.

Speaker 62 So first Mr.

Speaker 52 Bigg told Denis he'd have to come clean about his past, especially about the mystery of his wife's disappearance.

Speaker 36 That is, of course, if he knew anything about it.

Speaker 50 The undercover Canadian investigator, posing as the crime boss, wanted Denis to feel comfortable.

Speaker 58 So he spoke French, Denis's mother tongue.

Speaker 26 We have translated and dubbed over their conversation in English.

Speaker 103 There are three things I want.

Speaker 89 Loyalty.

Speaker 95 Truth.

Speaker 103 Honesty.

Speaker 102 The last one, I didn't...

Speaker 103 Honesty.

Speaker 102 Being honest. Ah, honest.
Honesty. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 30 Then, a knock on the door.

Speaker 26 It was one of the crime boss's alleged cronies with an internal police memorandum.

Speaker 31 Read it, said Mr. B,

Speaker 55 as Denise sat and listened.

Speaker 97 Our good primary suspect and only suspect husband, Dennis Florian, are at the

Speaker 97 just about finished their investigation.

Speaker 97 And they're waiting for satellite results from the U.S.

Speaker 97 Satellite results?

Speaker 30 That was a lie, of course.

Speaker 74 There had been no satellite watching Denis on that August day back in 1997.

Speaker 97 And they're 100% sure he's the one who did it.

Speaker 26 For the last 11 years, Denis had insisted he had nothing to do with his wife's disappearance.

Speaker 55 Now, suddenly, for a man he believed to be a crime boss, he changed his story.

Speaker 103 Okay, man. What do you have to say?

Speaker 102 I'm going to tell you.

Speaker 102 I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you honestly what happened.
The honest truth. I never told it in my life.
I ain't happy about it,

Speaker 102 but I did it.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Okay?

Speaker 102 Not happy I did it, but I still did it.

Speaker 65 Everything worked perfect.

Speaker 71 With a rifle,

Speaker 102 one shot, you know,

Speaker 102 nice and easy.

Speaker 103 You shot her where?

Speaker 102 In the head.

Speaker 103 Where in the head?

Speaker 102 Well, in back of the head, there, you know. I didn't really check when

Speaker 102 I hit her. I was pretty nervous.

Speaker 102 I guess. I guess around here.

Speaker 43 He shot Wendy, Denis told Mr.

Speaker 47 Big, that morning at their house in Prince George.

Speaker 51 She was feeding the ducks, her back to him, when he took aim with a.22-caliber rifle.

Speaker 103 Right or left side?

Speaker 102 I got to put myself back there.

Speaker 30 Eerie.

Speaker 9 Seeing a husband trying to relive the moment when he said he murdered his wife.

Speaker 40 Okay,

Speaker 102 you move over there like that, yeah.

Speaker 102 Yeah, because I remember turning.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 102 And that's your left side, right?

Speaker 103 That's my left side.

Speaker 74 Denis said it was just one shot.

Speaker 4 Not a lot of blood.

Speaker 76 After Wendy fell to the ground, he said, he quickly wrapped her body in a black tarp.

Speaker 29 And that's when he noticed she was still moving.

Speaker 102 I took a bumper jack, right? It's those old jacks you used to put under a vehicle.

Speaker 95 Oh, yeah, okay, okay, okay. There was a big thing

Speaker 102 with the cover on. I didn't want to leave a mark, right? So it's...
Okay. I finished her off with that.

Speaker 21 Where?

Speaker 102 In the face.

Speaker 42 Then, did he continue?

Speaker 14 He put the body in Wendy's White Plymouth Voyager, made a left turn on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, and drove to an abandoned logger's road about one and a half hours away.

Speaker 68 There was a swamp there.

Speaker 102 I made sure, you know, the body.

Speaker 103 What did you put on it? What did you put on top?

Speaker 102 There was mud, right? And there was a stick.

Speaker 61 Okay.

Speaker 102 You know, I started around

Speaker 85 and it slipped.

Speaker 97 Oops.

Speaker 96 Did he told Mr. Pig that he drove back to Prince George, got rid of the gun and his wife's ID along the way, and left the van in a grocery store parking lot.

Speaker 50 He wandered around for a bit before he called Anna to report her mom was missing.

Speaker 83 And later that night, he came back with Anna to the coffee shop so that she would discover the van.

Speaker 18 that curve there, the house is right there, you know.

Speaker 57 The day after his meeting with Mr. Pig, Denis took two other undercover officers to the scene of the crime.

Speaker 36 Of course, he believed he was talking to fellow gang members.

Speaker 49 So after you shot her, what happened then?

Speaker 84 I brought her

Speaker 18 more behind the garage.

Speaker 49 So you just shot the once, right?

Speaker 18 Once. I don't believe him twice.

Speaker 57 Then Denis' criminal friends asked him to take them to where he dunked Wendy's body.

Speaker 56 They told him they needed to make sure there was no evidence left.

Speaker 36 It took a while to find the place.

Speaker 56 He hadn't been back in 11 years.

Speaker 29 But finally, he was sure.

Speaker 18 So if I work there, the wires are there, you know?

Speaker 18 So everything makes sense.

Speaker 34 And as they continued searching the area.

Speaker 18 Oh my gosh!

Speaker 18 I'm putting in my gloves.

Speaker 18 The ips that's black at the other side, that's the tarp.

Speaker 18 That's a piece of a tarp.

Speaker 30 A couple of days later, Anna got a call.

Speaker 50 It was the police asking her to come come downtown.

Speaker 73 And

Speaker 10 they sat me down

Speaker 10 and said, we've just arrested your father for the murder of your mother.

Speaker 24 Shattering.

Speaker 10 I broke down, but at the same time,

Speaker 10 it's like I knew. I just didn't want to believe it.
The signs were all there.

Speaker 10 It changed so much.

Speaker 10 And just hearing it

Speaker 10 made it kind of official that

Speaker 10 the person I held so dear wasn't there anymore.

Speaker 56 Not a big surprise, really.

Speaker 57 Anna had doubts about her father all along.

Speaker 30 But her brother, Gabriel?

Speaker 36 Well,

Speaker 51 that was a different story altogether.

Speaker 12 I can't imagine how anyone would say it's 100% certain that my dad did it.

Speaker 21 And Gabriel isn't the only one with doubts.

Speaker 11 A confession is one thing, but did police have anything else on Denise?

Speaker 18 I'm going, wait a minute. They found absolutely nothing to corroborate his story.

Speaker 11 When dateline continues.

Speaker 36 Gabriel was at work when the call came.

Speaker 47 The police, they said they needed to see him right away.

Speaker 12 Oh, it was a big mystery until they brought me in. And they put me in a room with a camera.
And that's when they broke it to me. They told me that they know that my father did it.

Speaker 12 And they are 100% certain of it.

Speaker 22 And your very first reaction was what?

Speaker 12 It felt like my world came unhinged. Like

Speaker 12 it was a dream.

Speaker 12 Like reality had ceased to be.

Speaker 35 And right then and there, the police asked Gabriel to record a message to his father.

Speaker 29 And so, of course, he did.

Speaker 12 I spoke to him in French about how I loved him first of all. And I told him, you know, if this happened, I just want to know more.

Speaker 12 So please be honest. Please know that I'm here for you.

Speaker 55 Then with a heavy heart, Gabriel called Wendy's family in the States.

Speaker 58 But instead of anger, he was surprised to encounter skepticism.

Speaker 30 I didn't believe it.

Speaker 17 All of us, I think, saw him as someone who would

Speaker 17 die to protect his family.

Speaker 17 That was who he was.

Speaker 17 That was his source of pride.

Speaker 17 And at that point, it was the only source of pride he had left.

Speaker 26 The only way Gabriel thought he could make sense of it all was to confront his father in jail.

Speaker 12 And I just told him right away, I want the truth, whatever it is, I want you to tell me the truth. And he told me, no, no, no, it's just, there's no way I didn't do it.

Speaker 38 So Gabriel wondered, what hard evidence had police found that proved his father was guilty of murder?

Speaker 4 It turned out, they hadn't found anything.

Speaker 18 Oh my gosh, that's a piece of a tarp.

Speaker 4 A day after Denis led undercover detectives to the scene of his alleged crime, they returned to pick up that piece of tarp and sent it to the lab for analysis.

Speaker 90 But the results were inconclusive.

Speaker 31 They also searched the area for a body, of course, but found nothing at all.

Speaker 9 Not so much as a bone.

Speaker 101 It's not unusual for us to, over that kind of timeframe, because of animal activity and things of that nature, not to find either any remains or very few remains.

Speaker 22 But their gun barrel, the

Speaker 22 bits and pieces of things, the stash places, the driver's license, and so on.

Speaker 95 None of that showed up.

Speaker 101 Because it had been over 10 years,

Speaker 101 I think it's

Speaker 101 reasonable to expect that a lot of those items would have just disappeared.

Speaker 22 You didn't have the physical evidence that would back up his confession in the undercover operation.

Speaker 101 There wasn't physical evidence, correct, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And I'm going, wait a minute. They found absolutely nothing to corroborate his story.

Speaker 80 It was painful for Deanne to watch the video of her brother's confession at pretrial hearing.

Speaker 52 But she was shocked to learn that the confession was the only thing the cops had to convict her brother of killing his wife.

Speaker 77 And that's when she became convinced.

Speaker 26 Denis lied to Mr. Bakes.

Speaker 44 His confession was false.

Speaker 97 Whoops.

Speaker 16 The proof?

Speaker 9 First, she says, the chilling details of his alleged cold-blooded murder, they just didn't make any sense.

Speaker 18 I cannot see him, the way he loved her, doing it.

Speaker 18 And not, especially not with his kids in the house. There's no way he would have taken that kind of a chance.
So I asked Abraham, you know, do you hear gunshots all the time?

Speaker 18 And he said, no, and especially not first thing in the morning outside my window. There was no gunshot.

Speaker 12 He said he did it between the house and the garage.

Speaker 85 You would have heard that, surely.

Speaker 12 I definitely would have heard it.

Speaker 55 Then there were the clothes Denise said Wendy wore.

Speaker 3 A little sweater and jogging pants.

Speaker 12 Couldn't be true because of my recollection of the morning. He said that she was wearing totally different clothes than I saw her leave with.

Speaker 72 And something else bothered him.

Speaker 80 Something Denis told his crime buddies when they asked him whether he was capable of murder.

Speaker 12 Earlier on in the Mr. Biggs thing, he confessed to killing a man with rat poison.

Speaker 12 And it turned out that he died of natural causes.

Speaker 29 So it was. It never happened.

Speaker 54 It was a fake confession.

Speaker 44 It was.

Speaker 30 Why lie?

Speaker 57 Gabriel said DeLee was desperate to be accepted by his new tough guy friend.

Speaker 97 Was that the best way for you to talk to him?

Speaker 72 And if he lied about one murder, why not lie about killing Wendy, too? Especially when what was at stake was his acceptance in the gang and his new job, which he loved as Mr.

Speaker 29 Big's loyal foot soldier.

Speaker 12 All I remember is the glint in his eye when he told me he was working again and how proud he looked. Perhaps a regular crime organization wouldn't have even brought him in.

Speaker 30 Do you know?

Speaker 12 They might not have looked at him twice.

Speaker 21 Probably.

Speaker 12 But this crime organization was designed for him.

Speaker 18 He made a lot of money, first of all. He had more money than he'd made in a long time.

Speaker 18 He had found a newfound family

Speaker 18 that respected him, that thought he was intelligent.

Speaker 18 He didn't want to lose that.

Speaker 35 But perhaps the most convincing argument Dion heard was from Denis himself when she went to see him in jail. For all those years, he told her, the police just wouldn't leave him alone.

Speaker 80 And his meeting with the crime boss, he said, was a chance to finally make the investigation stop.

Speaker 103 We're going to talk to each other and we're going to work out these problems. We're going to fix them, okay?

Speaker 103 That's what we're going to do. We're going to fix them.

Speaker 18 He says, I couldn't just tell them I did nothing.

Speaker 18 Well, then they can't help me.

Speaker 18 And so he says, I made up a story and, you know, that, you know, I thought they would find me some kind of an alibi or something. He says, I'll fix it so that

Speaker 18 these cops would get off my case. You know, like, he had such a miserable, lonely life

Speaker 18 that I believe he would have, at that point, would have said almost anything.

Speaker 67 Relatives of suspects nabbed by Mr. Bates Sting have every right to cry a foul, said criminologist Corey Keenan.

Speaker 19 The technique's ingenuity is also its Achilles' heel. While it's capable of exposing the guilty, it can also induce innocent suspects to falsely confess to a crime they didn't commit.

Speaker 19 So the litmus test, to me, is corroboration. Without it, there's no way to tell whether the suspect is telling the truth or is lying.

Speaker 70 But Anna watched the tapes too, and she said she could tell.

Speaker 10 I know my father. I know my father's mannerisms.
I know when he's hiding something, when he's not being truthful about something.

Speaker 53 And unlike Deanne and Gabriel, unlike her mom's family in the States, Anna was convinced her father was guilty as charged.

Speaker 10 I knew when he was talking about mom's murder that

Speaker 10 it was true. That's what he had done.

Speaker 97 They've just about finished their investigation.

Speaker 97 And they're waiting for satellite results from the U.S.

Speaker 97 Satellite results?

Speaker 10 That's when he folded.

Speaker 10 And I saw the look in his eye.

Speaker 10 I'm caught. I saw the I'm caught look in his eye.

Speaker 78 The gunshot, the tarp, the carjack.

Speaker 80 Her brother Gabriel said it was all a lie.

Speaker 30 But Anna had another word for it.

Speaker 88 That's cold.

Speaker 10 That's cold to talk about, let alone cold to do.

Speaker 10 How do you talk about the woman you were married to? I mean, if you didn't do it, could you really, could you really tell that story?

Speaker 16 Or could he?

Speaker 23 Would he

Speaker 84 tell it again?

Speaker 11 Coming up, whatever Denis was or was not about to say, did it really make sense that he would hurt Wendy?

Speaker 18 She was the breadwinner. She was the brains of the operation.

Speaker 45 Why would he kill her?

Speaker 49 Hey, weirdos!

Speaker 104 I'm Elena, and I'm Ash, and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 94 Each week, we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 104 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 94 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

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Speaker 37 Denis Ratte, caught by an elaborate undercover sting, a confessor to murder, sat in jail while outside his two children, Anna and Gabriel battled over whether he belonged there.

Speaker 33 Anna thought the confession finally proved it.

Speaker 79 Her father was guilty.

Speaker 77 But she stood alone.

Speaker 68 Most of her family sided with Gabriel.

Speaker 8 There was no evidence, said Denise's sister Deanne, and no motive.

Speaker 18 She was the breadwinner. She was the brains of the operation.
She was his everything. He lost the house.
He lost his kids. He lost his whole life.

Speaker 45 Why would he kill her?

Speaker 8 In his confessions, Denis said he had a reason.

Speaker 42 Though it seemed so twisted, neither police nor anyone else believed it.

Speaker 34 Wendy, remember, was said to have had a split personality.

Speaker 8 And Denis claimed that on the day he killed her, he knew Wendy's alter ego, Shauna, was going to sexually assault Anna.

Speaker 50 And of course, he couldn't let that happen.

Speaker 102 I had no choice. Save the little girl.
Save my little girl.

Speaker 50 What did you think when you heard that?

Speaker 10 I was disgusted.

Speaker 10 Of all the lies you could have said for why,

Speaker 10 you had to involve me again.

Speaker 36 It was all too much for Anna.

Speaker 2 The lies, the betrayals, and now her dear brother refusing to share her outrage.

Speaker 16 He

Speaker 22 wants very much to think that your father is not guilty.

Speaker 10 I know, and I can't blame him.

Speaker 23 You think he's living in Lala Land?

Speaker 10 I think he didn't see what I saw. He wasn't there.
I was up to my neck in investigation trying to find mom.

Speaker 10 And I can absolutely understand wanting to be blind to

Speaker 10 to the to the truth, because I was there too.

Speaker 12 You know, I don't wanna

Speaker 12 speak badly about my sister. I really don't.
But she, because of her

Speaker 12 activism in trying to find my mother for so many years, it was a lot easier for her, I think, to to put everything aside and create an easy solution. Me, I'm happy to live with a question mark.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to pretend it's anything else.

Speaker 22 Why don't you want to see something, some kind of evidence to back up what you've seen on tape?

Speaker 10 The look in his eye on that tape wasn't.

Speaker 24 That's all I needed?

Speaker 10 That's what I needed.

Speaker 22 Or is it that you cannot stand living in this kind of doubt any longer?

Speaker 74 You had to make a decision, and that was the decision you made.

Speaker 10 I saw the truth on his face in that tape.

Speaker 42 The man who ran the undercover sting, lead investigator Robert Barrett, insisted his team took all precautions to make sure Denis did not lie when he met with Mr.

Speaker 47 Bigg.

Speaker 101 We're always mindful of false confessions and...

Speaker 47 Allegations are made all the time, I suppose.

Speaker 101 Correct. You know, I think no loved one really wants to believe that, you know,

Speaker 101 someone they know and care about could be responsible for somebody's murder.

Speaker 78 In fact, the Mr.

Speaker 48 Big undercover technique has been repeatedly upheld by Canada's Supreme Court.

Speaker 46 And although the RCMP did not find any physical evidence to corroborate Denis's confession to Mr. Big and his gang, it turned out they did have evidence that was perhaps much more compelling.

Speaker 78 And they got it after Denis Ratte was arrested.

Speaker 101 By that point in time, Denis Ratte has read all his rights

Speaker 101 that he's provided under the Canadian law. He had access to...

Speaker 20 So he could have said,

Speaker 84 I thought I was talking to a crime boss and I was just lying to him.

Speaker 23 Absolutely.

Speaker 21 And he didn't?

Speaker 46 No, he didn't.

Speaker 53 When Denis was arrested, he had no idea he'd been caught in a sting and that his confession to Mr.

Speaker 26 Big was on tape.

Speaker 25 But then police showed him the video.

Speaker 87 Does this come back to you? Is it coming back to you, Denis?

Speaker 85 At first, for almost an hour, Denis seemed to be in denial.

Speaker 102 I have never said that, that I killed her, first of all.

Speaker 65 Yeah, but Denis, we know that you killed her.

Speaker 102 Well, I've never said it, though, huh?

Speaker 65 No, you said it. No.
You said it there, Denis.

Speaker 102 I said it there? Yes.

Speaker 68 And that's when the interrogator decided to show Denis another tape.

Speaker 82 The one police made of Gabriel the day they told him they'd arrested his father.

Speaker 87 So, essentially, Denis, your son is asking you to tell the truth.

Speaker 84 And then, a couple of minutes later, a silent nod from Denis, and he began to confess.

Speaker 21 Again, the same details: the gunshot, the tarp, the car jack.

Speaker 68 She didn't suffer.

Speaker 23 She didn't suffer. No.

Speaker 44 It was fast?

Speaker 102 It still hurts.

Speaker 84 It had been a heavy burden to carry that with him all those years, said Denise.

Speaker 102 You know, it's hard. You know, someone who looks at you and

Speaker 102 I've always loved my wife.

Speaker 19 I still love her even.

Speaker 48 We were friends, okay?

Speaker 10 You have killed your friend?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 102 It took everything for me to do it.

Speaker 84 I even cried when I did it.

Speaker 21 There.

Speaker 85 He admitted it.

Speaker 69 And this time...

Speaker 7 Check the tapes, it's all true.

Speaker 87 It's all true what you told them.

Speaker 23 It was all true.

Speaker 87 You didn't tell any lies at all?

Speaker 22 A confession is the strongest evidence anybody ever gets. And, you know, it generally does the deed.

Speaker 22 And that was a pretty detailed confession, not just once, but twice.

Speaker 12 And that's the one I don't understand more than anything. I've asked him more than once, why did you confess when you knew you were in front of a police officer?

Speaker 12 Why wouldn't you say, oh, well, of course I didn't do it. You know, I was just trying to get in with this organization.
And, you know, he didn't have much of an answer.

Speaker 12 So if there's an ounce of me not believing him, it's there. This is the biggest weakness in the story.

Speaker 82 But given the continued absence of any physical evidence,

Speaker 29 that second confession still wasn't enough to convince Gabriel his father killed his mother.

Speaker 22 Is it possible, though, that you're living in denial?

Speaker 49 No.

Speaker 12 You're not the first person to ask me. I bet.
I've definitely thought about it, right? But I think I'm very balanced about it.

Speaker 12 I can be swayed by the evidence, whether it is going to be for or against my dad. So show me the evidence.

Speaker 53 Were Denise's two confessions evidence enough?

Speaker 57 As a jury was about to decide, a brother and sister were prepared to fight for what they believed was right, even if that meant losing each other.

Speaker 47 December 2010, 13 years after Wendy Rette disappeared.

Speaker 71 In a Prince George courtroom, the battle lines were drawn. But this case wasn't only the Crown versus Denis Rette.

Speaker 70 It was brother against sister on the witness stand.

Speaker 19 What was it like to testify at the trial?

Speaker 73 It was hard.

Speaker 29 You looked out there and you saw everybody else in the family who

Speaker 55 disagreed with you.

Speaker 10 They're still my family.

Speaker 73 It was tough for all of them.

Speaker 10 They all felt I should have been with him more, siding with him more.

Speaker 10 But I had to make it clear that someone has to defend mom.

Speaker 85 Deni Rette pleaded not guilty and recanted the confessions he made both to Mr.

Speaker 57 Bigg and to the police after his arrest.

Speaker 77 His son Gabriel was one of just two witnesses the defense presented to the court.

Speaker 12 I kind of hold my breath and go through it and

Speaker 12 hope that whatever I say is going to work for my dad.

Speaker 12 And I'm utterly aware that I'm the only person there who is speaking in favor of my dad.

Speaker 95 Denis' defense lawyer hammered undercover detectives about the lack of physical evidence and pointed out lies Denis had told Mr.

Speaker 52 Bay and his gang.

Speaker 38 Proof, he told the jury, that Denis' confession should not be believed. And after four weeks, The end to the 13-year-old mystery was finally at hand.

Speaker 77 It took the jury just two hours to find Denise Ratte guilty of second-degree murder.

Speaker 10 So much of my life had been devoted to finding the truth, and now I had the truth.

Speaker 10 It's not the truth I wanted.

Speaker 10 But nonetheless, that's what I had. I'm happy I have it.

Speaker 6 Interesting that getting the truth isolates you from the people you love.

Speaker 10 That's true.

Speaker 10 But isn't the truth more more important? It doesn't matter that my family

Speaker 10 might be angry with me for the results of where this trial led. The truth is all that matters.
And that's how mom led her life.

Speaker 26 Anna knows all too well the truth will never replace her mother's soothing voice.

Speaker 4 It's what she yearns for most these days.

Speaker 98 If only she could speak to the spirits the way her mom once did.

Speaker 10 Because I think maybe then I could hear her. Maybe then she could speak to me.

Speaker 10 If I open up enough, she'll come talk to me.

Speaker 73 But

Speaker 30 not today.

Speaker 30 And there was one last moment of melodrama.

Speaker 78 Right after Denise was sentenced to 15 years to life, he suddenly turned.

Speaker 30 to Anna.

Speaker 18 As she was leaving, he said to her, keep looking for your mother.

Speaker 47 Gabriel was not there for the guilty verdict.

Speaker 57 He had to leave right after his testimony. Back to Vancouver to his college graduation that very same day.

Speaker 12 It was such a whirlwind. And I was just in the lineup late to get in my gown, get ready to go into the ceremony, and just think, oh my god, you know, what is this life?

Speaker 12 Where are my parents to watch this?

Speaker 2 His father was in prison, and his mom, well,

Speaker 30 his mom.

Speaker 22 do you really believe in your heart that there is a possibility that your mother is still

Speaker 22 out there somewhere that she

Speaker 12 that she's still alive that's the part of me that is the

Speaker 12 the the dreamy hopeful

Speaker 12 optimistic side you hear the odd story once in a while of someone returning after 25 years of absence you do hear it it does happen

Speaker 12 so man whenever i do hear one of those I just...

Speaker 12 My heart fills with optimism.

Speaker 22 There hasn't been a happy ending for anybody, except...

Speaker 73 No.

Speaker 22 Your sister Anna thinks it's the right ending.

Speaker 12 It's hard being on the other side of this with her. It's impossible to get around.

Speaker 28 It's been almost 15 years since his dad was arrested for killing his mom.

Speaker 31 Gabriel is a father himself now to three children.

Speaker 26 His father in prison has met two of of them.

Speaker 96 Anna has two a couple of years ago at their grandparents' place in Cape Cod.

Speaker 57 They've tried to reconnect since then and chat once in a while, though never about their father, who was up for parole this August.

Speaker 10 We love each other very much.

Speaker 10 We have a bond as brother and sister that was very strong as children, and it will always be there.

Speaker 10 This is a really difficult situation for both of us,

Speaker 10 And we'll get through it.

Speaker 86 It's all that's left of our perfect family is the two of us.

Speaker 73 We can't let that go.

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