S06 E03: “Open, Reliable, and Trustworthy”

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Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners.

If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to munchhousandsupport.com to connect with professionals who can help.

Just something that

I wanted to touch on after sitting down with my aunt and everything

was the fact that even as I was sitting across from her and not able to like remember some of the things, some of the events that she was talking about, it just like really stuck out to me

how much crap my mom talked about them.

And like

growing up, I was just convinced that I guess that's just what families did is like sit and talk crap about the rest of their families.

Like I just remember my mom telling me

literally every mistake my aunts had ever made and not just my aunts, but anybody in my family.

Just all the negativity and all of like the things and like she would call my family liars and like they would make stuff up.

And so over the years, I just feel like

that just kind of seeped into me in ways that I didn't really realize.

Like my first instinct

is to just assume people are lying to me sometimes.

And like, especially when it comes to my own family.

And I think that really directly came from her.

And then when I really started to like examine that, I kind of realized that there was this voice in my head that sounded like my mom

that was telling me, oh, like she's clearly just lying about this because you don't remember it.

And like, it's just such a bizarre thing.

It just becomes this web that you have to untangle of who you can trust and who you can't trust and who's telling the truth and who's not.

Our children depend on us as parents to tell them what is real and what isn't, which fears are valid and worthy of attention, running into busy streets, for example, and which they can safely put to rest.

Zombies are a big one in my household right now, as is the fear of accidentally becoming an astronaut.

Perhaps most importantly, parents teach us how to determine for ourselves who we can trust, who is a safe adult, and who is not.

And this is what really throws Munchausen by proxy survivors into the upside down.

The person they should be able to trust the most, their parent, is the biggest threat to them.

And anyone who attempts to protect them, whether it's family members, social workers, or doctors, is immediately cast as the enemy.

The gaslighting and manipulation Michelle experienced from her parents was relentless, and getting to the truth would be the work of a lifetime.

People believe their eyes.

That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

If we didn't, you could never make it through your day.

I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

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Thanks for listening.

Many of you know that I have a new book out this year called The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, which I co-authored with friend of the show, Detective Mike Weber.

Did you know that it's also an audiobook that I narrated?

All true.

You can find the Mother Next Door, Ears Edition, anywhere you find audiobooks.

Now, here's a sample.

Unlike with Hope, there was no carefully crafted facade of a loving mother doing her best.

Brittany's abuse was in plain sight, observable by all who interacted with her.

But no one knew what to do.

It seemed impossible to prove that Alyssa didn't have these medical issues.

And after all, why weren't the doctors doing something?

But even if people in Brittany's life suspected she was mistreating Alyssa, they had no idea what she was truly capable of.

And the darkness in Brittany would shock them all.

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After Michelle's mother, Lisa, was caught abusing Angelin on video in December of 1998, Michelle was placed with her grandparents.

She remembers learning that her life was about to change.

My mom and dad came to my grandparents' house and they sat down with me and they were like, we have some things that we want to tell you and you're going to have to listen and you're not going to like them.

And I'm like, okay.

And like at this point, I think I'm like seven.

And

I just remember my mom saying, hey, I did some really bad things to your sister that I regret.

And it's because I had like a mental breakdown, but I'm dealing with it and I'm going to go to therapy for it and we're going to get through it.

But in the meantime,

you may not be able to go back home for a while.

So that was really the first, I guess, moment I realized like

things weren't going to be normal for a very long time.

And I just remember being really hurt and really confused.

And I remember the really prominent moment I remember out of that conversation was

them like making me repeat it back to them so that they could understand that I understood.

I remember being really upset and being like, I don't understand like why we have to do this.

Why do I have to say this?

Like I feel like if I say these things it means I hate you.

The McDaniel case made its way through the juvenile court and in February of 1999, a judge found in favor of deprivation, placing Angelyn in the custody of the state.

This order summarizes the steady improvement in Angelyn's health after being removed.

Heartbreakingly, Angelyn was able to go outside for the first time in eight months while she was still with her medical foster family.

Michelle and Angelyn's father, Carrie, was permitted to visit Angelyn at her medical foster home.

Lisa, however, was not.

Meanwhile, the police investigation carried on gathering records for Angelyn and interviewing those involved, including Lisa and Carrie.

As part of their investigation, Lisa was ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation and counseling.

People use the medical system to harm their children for different reasons, and it's important to understand those reasons as the courts look to treatment of a perpetrator and the possibility of reunification, as B.

Yorker explains.

It's very difficult to treat this, okay?

For a malingering mother, a mother who's doing it for benefits, that's much easier to treat.

A mother who's poisoning their child because they believe the child is the devil incarnate and their minister told them that you've got to purge them by making them drink Clorox.

We saw those kinds of cases, okay?

That mother is easier to treat.

We would not terminate parental rights on a mother who got on anti-psychotic medications and did the work so that they really truly were remorseful for and understanding that they were delusional.

The reason we started talking about Munchausen by proxy after Roy Meadows article and in those you know early 80s working up to the 90s in Georgia is because

the typical court judge police

think oh this mom made a mistake she accidentally poisoned the child oh she didn't mean to over medicate the child oh this poor mother she sounds like she really loves the child.

Of course we can reunify.

And so at that point, there was a lot of literature and a lot of data out there that this is a compulsive behavior.

This is more like substance abuse.

This is more like anorexia.

This is something that you can't just treat with psychotherapy, get some insight, and you're cured.

It's an ongoing battle to be in recovery.

to

struggle with your demons and your compulsions every day that you wake up.

We don't have a cure cure for it.

If it's genuine, factitious disorder and the motivation is to make a child sick or to get that attention for a sick child or a dead child, if that's the compulsion, it's as difficult to cure as anorexia.

We don't really have a cure for anorexia.

We have treatment and it's a recovery model.

In Lisa's case, when I read the interview with the police, this is where I got her minimization, her justification, and her admissions.

She admitted.

She admitted she had taken syringe from an unauthorized, an unauthorized syringe and injected saline repeatedly into Angeline's trach.

And every time that happened, the baby basically suffocated, struggled, turned blue,

choked, and then it would need to be suctioned.

And she admitted that that had been wrong.

However,

continuing with the alligator tears and the very little empathy of how this has affected your family, your behavior tore your family apart.

And from then on out, the narrative that Lisa told everybody was that B.

Yorker had torn the family apart.

And one of the things that we wait for for even contemplating reunification

is when the mother fully admits to what they did and says

i am responsible my behavior is responsible for tearing this family apart my behavior is what caused the girls to have to be in custody my behavior

is what caused our family to have to go to therapy, da da da, instead of continuing to say, be Yorker caused all the problems in our family.

This case took place over 20 years ago, and I was curious to understand where the field was at this time.

Brenda Bursch and I wrote a paper in 2002.

I know this the first evaluation was done in the 90s, but there was still information out there.

I was certainly doing evaluations during that time.

And the approach is to get the medical records and to analyze the records, looking for either evidence or lack of evidence of falsification or possibly induced illness.

This is Dr.

Mary Sanders, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a longtime member of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children's Munchausen by Proxy Committee.

In this case, it's very blatant because we have videotape of

induction of illness numerous times.

And so it's not even a question.

I mean, the records, I would have gotten the records anyway,

but basically, yes, this is a case of Munchausen by proxy.

We have it on video.

To add to that, as far as doing a psychological evaluation,

I don't know that I would have felt the need to assess the possibility of a delusional system because this parent is volitionally abusing the child.

From my point,

when I'm doing a psychological evaluation, I'm looking for

is there anything that's contributing to maybe the parent is an anxious parent.

Maybe this is a parent that has a delusional system and believes a child is ill.

But certainly in this case, it doesn't appear that that's the situation.

The court saw things this way as well.

The deprivation order is plain spoken in recounting the horrors that Angelin was subjected to, stating, quote, her life was placed in jeopardy because of Lisa McDaniel's callous, intentional acts.

A more egregious form of child abuse cannot be imagined.

Dr.

Albert Davis, the psychiatrist who evaluated Lisa and then saw both her and Carrie for treatment for about a year, had a much different take, as B.

Yorker remembers.

She got therapists to evaluate her and say she didn't have Munchausen by proxy.

And as we know now, that's not how you diagnose munchausen by proxy.

You diagnose it through the separation test.

If upon separation from the perpetrator, does the child start to thrive and their medical issues improve?

And the second is from looking for lies.

And both of those were amply evident.

In addition, we had the video surveillance.

So doing a psych eval eval on Lisa or on any mother is not how you determine a factitious disorder.

There is no psych test for factitious disorder.

Yeah.

It's a constellation of looking at circumstantial behaviors.

A year of counseling for something like Munchausen by proxy is not, in any world, a solution.

However, Dr.

Davis was never convinced this was Munchausen by proxy to begin with, as he states in his June 1999 evaluation, where he instead diagnoses Lisa with major depression and anxiety.

Lisa also gets a referral this same month from Christian Concepts of Living, where she and Carrie were attending counseling.

This letter recommends allowing Lisa a visitation with Angelin and placing Michelle back in the home.

They do not elaborate on why they would make such a recommendation for someone who'd been caught poisoning and suffocating her infant daughter a mere six months after this happened.

This leads me to believe that these practitioners either have no understanding of Munchausen by proxy or simply don't believe it exists.

Not the people for the job.

So I asked someone who is qualified, Dr.

Sanders, how she would have approached this.

So what would your goals have been in evaluating this parent?

Yeah, well, I would still want the records.

And since there was another child, I'd want those records because I would be looking for evidence of, you know, potential falsification of illness in the other child as well.

And

if possible, I would like to have the parents' medical records because frequently the parent has engaged in falsified illness.

And so having all that information actually helps with trying to determine, is this a case or not?

Certainly in this situation, we know that it is, but also speaks to treatment.

So I would want to then be able to ask this mom about these incidents and what was going on in her life.

You know, how does this, you know, how did we get to this place where you are abusing your child?

You know, where does that come from?

And that speaks more for the possibility of treatment.

As far as we can tell, the investigation did not look into Michelle's medical history.

But you can't look at Lisa's actions as an isolated incident.

Munchausen by proxy is a pattern.

And when a perpetrator has repeatedly put their child's life at risk, they've proven themselves to be a threat to children.

Period.

I have to wonder if Dr.

Davis looked at any of the records in this case, as he appears to have taken Lisa at her word about both what she did and why she did it.

He describes Lisa in one letter as, quote, open, reliable, and trustworthy.

In Dr.

Davis's report, he calls Lisa, quote, excruciatingly remorseful about her actions, which he describes as Lisa injecting water into her daughter's trach.

And again, this is Lisa's preferred version of the story, not what really happened.

He blames these actions on the overwhelm that Lisa experienced having such a sick child.

His overall take on Lisa is just wild.

It leads me to believe that Dr.

Davis, willfully or otherwise, has absolutely no idea what or who he's dealing with, because you can't just take a perpetrator's story at face value, as Mary Sanders explains.

When I do these evaluations, I look for what I call checkoutables.

And so, for example, if a parent tells me, well, you know, the doctor saw the seizure, then I'm like, okay, who is that?

So I can, you know, I can access that doctor, I can check it out, or the teacher saw this happen, or what have you.

I don't necessarily believe everything I'm being told by the alleged perpetrator, and I want to be able to kind of check that out outside of what I've been told.

B also agrees.

So when people say to me,

shouldn't you meet with the mother and interview them before you decide if they have munch housing by proxy?

No, it obfuscates the whole picture.

I do much better if I just look at the records and see, did they lie?

Or if we do a separation.

I have been snookered every time,

every time I do an interview.

Dr.

Davis Davis does detail Angeline's litany of health issues, her surgeries for her GI and breathing issues, her many emergency admissions, and brushes with death.

But his framing of these events are as, quote, catastrophic stressors on Lisa, not as something she herself caused.

The dissonance, especially given the video evidence, is staggering.

He mentions that Lisa and her husband reported that she'd been struggling with depression, having panic attacks, and that she'd experienced a number of other traumatic events, including an alleged sexual assault, and that these issues had led to her behavior.

However, these events were not, to use Mary's parlance, checkoutables.

We certainly see a high percentage of perpetrators

report trauma.

And as you're saying, sometimes it's hard to check out whether it actually happened or not.

And, you know, when it comes down to it, I mean, as you said, unfortunately, sexual assault is not uncommon.

However, that's not an explanation for abusing a child.

Dr.

Davis clearly bought Lisa's justification that she'd harmed Angeline because she was so afraid of bringing her home.

He says in one letter that, quote, her inappropriate actions were clearly a cry for help to delay the impending discharge by demonstrating just how fragile was Angelyn's condition.

PICU nurse Judy does not find this argument compelling.

I don't buy that one.

I really

And she not saying that she didn't have scary things at home.

You know, she had a trach and she had oxygen and she had to be suctioned.

But they would not send someone home unless they felt that they were demonstrating in terms of all of the things that they had to learn and do, CPR, like all of that, until you're ready.

Dr.

Mary Sanders was equally incredulous.

I see it as a rationalization.

I work in a hospital, and I would say

almost 100% of the time my parents tell me they're worried about taking their children home and I understand that.

However, if a parent is then making their child ill to remain in the hospital, that's child abuse.

And

that's certainly what's happened in this situation.

It's hard to admit that you're purposely harming your child and putting them close to death.

I think it's an easier,

it's easier to swallow to say, oh, well, I was scared to take her home, you know, rather than, you know, admitting that I put my child at risk of ending their life.

This is a kind of case that you don't reunify.

This is a case where there's serious risk of death, there's poisoning,

there's smothering.

This is not a reunification case.

I'm actually amazed from what you're telling me that this child lived through this.

And Bea, who was evaluating this case for the court, agreed.

I wrote a report that said that it was very similar to the report that I had written in previous

injecting microbials and suffocating, which is that this is

the most dangerous form of child abuse.

It is the most lethal, and that I recommended termination of parental rights.

We didn't have the exact accepts model at that point, but at this point, Lisa was blaming me for everything that had happened rather than saying it was her behavior.

And so without that acknowledgement,

I said I recommended termination of parental rights.

I recommended that the children remain placed with their grandparents because it looked like a loving and stable environment for them.

I think it's valuable to consider why perpetrators do what they do.

The clearer picture we can have of the motivations and psychological picture of offenders, the more attuned we will be to the warning signs.

And someday, perhaps, this could even lead us to strategies that could curtail this behavior before it crosses the kind of line where someone can never be safe around children again.

But understanding behavior is not the same thing as excusing it.

And from Dr.

Davis's notes, he appears to be in full-on denial about what Lisa has proven herself to be capable of.

He writes, throughout her treatment with me, she has consistently maintained her belief that although wrong, her actions were never to intentionally harm her child.

He goes on to say, that she represents the recovering picture of a young mother once overwhelmed by fear and desperate for help who is genuinely struggling to find peace and forgiveness.

This Mobius strip of an argument is like a snake eating its own tail.

If Lisa found her daughter's health crises so very stressful, she could have just stopped causing them.

In their original case plan, DFACS gave the objective of Lisa being, quote, free from Munchausen by proxy in six months, which as Bea explains, isn't even remotely possible.

Mark Feldman's book on factitious disorders in post-on self

has got some glimmering and some inspirational stories from people who've compulsively made themselves sick for attention, who get into recovery,

who actually do.

So I figure if you can recover from making yourself sick compulsively for the attention, because it's it's your default way to get your needs met

then

if you if you have a sponsor, if you have daily check-ins, and this is what the accepts model says, is, you know, every day you wake up and you say, okay, what might trigger me today

to need to go back to the hospital or to need to have a dying child or to need to have the funeral or the hospice or

what might trigger me to resort to my old bad behaviors?

And then build your day around avoiding those triggers.

Build your day to reach out as soon as you feel yourself slipping.

So kind of what you talked about, it's not a treatment that you sort of go to for six months.

It's like you are in recovery for the rest of your life.

For the rest of your life.

Yes, and that's what the 12-step model is based on.

Being in recovery for Munchausen by proxy, regardless of reunification with one's children, must begin with a full acknowledgement of one's actions.

Dr.

Davis seems convinced that Lisa has reached this milestone, describing her in a January 2000 letter as being being remorseful and ashamed and as understanding the harm she's caused.

But outside of Dr.

Davis' office, Lisa was insisting she'd done nothing wrong.

In the spring of 1999, in the midst of her police investigation, Lisa begins posting on an internet forum called Mama, or Mothers Against Munchhausen Allegations.

This forum and its creator, Julie Patrick, are also the subject of a documentary by the same name.

And this is simply too big of a rabbit hole to dive all the way into here.

But this forum was created by Patrick after she was suspected of abusing her infant son and is well known to those of us in the field.

It was, to my knowledge, one of the first internet forums dedicated to, as the site describes it, exposing the Munchausen by proxy agenda.

The webpage for mama remains, but it appears to be abandoned these days.

Lisa's posts, however, are preserved in the police record.

These posts show Lisa looking for information about how to combat the allegations against her and and requesting information such as the quote, CPS Bible.

And according to Lisa, this whole thing is the fault of one person in particular.

On Angelin's second birthday, she writes, Help, my baby is two years old today and I haven't seen her in five months.

This week, DFAX put in a new case plan that I couldn't see her for the next six months.

Thanks to B.

Yorker.

This early social networking in Munchausen denier communities is, I believe, important to how the story of Lisa McDaniel progresses.

And it gives us insights into not only Lisa's lack of accountability, but how Bjorker became a scapegoat in the McDaniel household, a place she appears to hold to this day.

Munchausen by proxy is something that even Bjorker says you cannot recover from.

And she doesn't even agree with that anymore, Mama.

She doesn't even agree with that anymore.

You're wrong.

Lisa asks the Mama community for information on B to use in court, and a fellow forum member named Kathleen Coutre obliges, sending Lisa detailed instructions on a password-protected website containing information about B.

Kathy emails Lisa this information because, as she explains in her message, Kathy is currently under a court order not to post on Mama.

She ends her email saying, quote, I sincerely hope you find what you're looking for so you can nail the bastard.

This kind of scapegoating, the idea that it came down to one doctor or one expert, is ubiquitous in these cases, but it's particularly preposterous in this case.

Though B's testimony and expertise was no doubt invaluable to the court, Even someone with no understanding of Munchausen by proxy could likely grasp that a parent who repeatedly poisons and suffocates their own child is a danger to them.

Unless they're Dr.

Davis, apparently.

On June 11th, Lisa posts on Mama that the courts have decided to terminate their rights, saying, didn't mean a hill of beans what our doctors and therapists said, just what B.

Yorker had to say.

It does seem that DFACs in the courts were aligned that Lisa should not be permitted to parent her children after what she'd done.

Judge John W.

Beam Jr.

is quoted in one document as saying that reunification should not happen under any circumstances.

You may assume, as I once did, that a parent who goes to prison for child abuse would automatically lose their parental rights.

But criminal court and juvenile court are separate, if intertwined systems.

In the Alyssa Wayburn case, which we covered in season two, the Wayburns, Alyssa's adopted parents, ended up having to pay exorbitant legal fees to terminate her biological mother's rights despite her criminal conviction, just as Derek Jones, a case we've also covered, had to do to terminate the rights of his ex-wife even after she was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

In the end, despite the judge's warnings, the state did not terminate the McDaniels rights, a move that set the stage for everything to come.

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In September of 2000, Lisa McDaniel was charged with two counts of aggravated assault and one count of cruelty to children.

She pled guilty to the lesser charge of cruelty to children and was sentenced to 10 years probation and to serve six to nine months in a women's detention facility.

Throughout this time, Michelle and Angelin lived with their maternal grandparents.

And while the girls were safe, it was a rough transition for Michelle.

Me and my Nana, that's what we called her, we would argue about my parents a lot.

She was very

not a fan of my dad.

She did not like my dad at all.

And she was very angry at my mom, and like, understandably so.

But my nana had some pretty hefty, like kind of untreated mental illness herself i could not put any blame on my i mean i was like what seven or eight years old like i could not put any blame on my mom whatsoever like this was all like cps's fault and these people these awful lawyers and these awful judges and they've torn my family apart and i could not wrap my head around would not admit like this is my mom's doing and so i think that really frustrated her And she could not handle it.

And so it caused a lot of conflict between her and I because I was just very like angry and she was like no like this is your mom like your mom's doing this and your dad is not here protecting you and so it caused a lot of grief because I was like you're just crazy you know you're that's not true and you just hate my mom for no reason is how and of course that's I'm sure you know understandably why that would drive her up the wall Angeline, who is five years younger, didn't have much of a bond with her parents and she became especially close with their grandparents.

And then I think my sister got really really close to both of them

and so I think that was a direct comparison.

Like I was the oldest just like my mom was the oldest and you know I was always at war with her the same way my mom was always at war with her and so I think for my Nana there was a lot of like parallels there that made the whole thing worse.

My sister started calling them mom and dad and for me that was like really awful because I heard like my mom found out about it and my mom like I would go visit my parents on the weekends before my sister was able to have visitation with them and so I would go by myself and then my sister would stay with my grandparents and so that really kind of like I think drove a wedge between all of us because I was going over there and then my mom and dad would question me the whole time of like

um

what was said or how's Angelin doing or did y'all talk about this this week or y'all I mean it was just all these like questions just being kind of used as that, that pawn, I guess, of like the back and forth.

Lisa served the minimum sentence of six months in a women's detention facility.

And after she was released, due to the fact that her rights had not been terminated, she was still allowed visitation with Michelle, supervised only by her husband, Carrie.

Michelle even spent nights back at her parents' house until yet another dramatic turn of events.

I just remember that particular night, her asking me over and over and over to sleep in my room.

and she just went on and on and on about it and she was never pushy about it.

And I remember getting woken up in the middle of the night and they're like the house is on fire.

The house is on fire and they my mom like wraps a blanket around me and just kind of runs me outside and my bedroom

like the wall outside of my bedroom and the window like was all on fire and like no other part of the house was on fire like nothing else it was just isolated and it was very intentional right because there's no like wiring that it could have been right there there was no like somebody very clearly said just that piece on fire it didn't spread like it was literally right there and i remember like

um

like we were going to church at the time with like some firefighter friends and like they came out and i just remember like sitting um in the truck of like one of our church friends and like there and then my nan and papa took me home they were like you're coming home with us and i was very upset by that and they wouldn't let me go back that weekend and i that is the

one of two occasions i've ever seen seen my papa cry and this was like to describe my papa he was like really tall big burly just like you know beard just very like strong presence like did not cry very rarely showed emotion just like and that is like one of two instances I remember him crying and I had walked in the bedroom because I was dead set on I'm going back to my mama's like

and I walked in And he's sitting on the bed and he's crying.

And that was so jarring for me because I had never seen this man cry.

And I am just like,

I don't understand what's going on.

And they sat me down and they were like, you can't go back to your mom's right now.

And I just remember being like angry about it and being like mad about it.

And them just being like, I don't think they ever,

I don't, they, I don't think they ever said like, your mom did it, but it was very like, I think they probably handled it in the most like.

child friendly way of like they were just very like

we don't think you're safe there right now We can't be certain that Lisa was responsible for this incident, but the connection between arson and Munchausen by proxy has been studied, with an entire chapter of Catherine Ardingstahl's book, Munchausen by Proxy and Other Factitious Abuse, devoted to it.

Ardingstahl even advises detectives to prepare for the potential to need to investigate this.

The theory is that being a victim of arson or other crimes such as vandalism or burglary, which the book also notes in case studies, fulfills a similar psychological need as as Munchausen by proxy, namely gaining attention and sympathy from the person's spouse, family, and community, and of course, playing the victim role.

Fire can also serve as a potential way for them to harm their children and further the medical abuse itself.

All of this drama was exhausting for Lisa and Sabrina's father.

So much at that point had happened.

And to be honest, he was really just sick of Lisa because it was just after everything because everything that about Angelin had come out at this point and mom and daddy had had had custody of Angelin and Michelle and daddy was just so tired of dealing with Lisa's drama and then when he saw that I think in his mind he was just thinking you know it could have killed her it could have killed Michelle and I think it's just so many emotions ran through him and like my daddy was not an emotional person he would look he would hug you he would love you he would tell you he loved you and everything but as far as him really being an emotional person, he was not.

Even amidst all this chaos and every sign in the world that Lisa and Carrie were not able to provide a safe home, Michelle just didn't feel much of a bond or much stability with her grandparents.

In this vacuum, Michelle's child mind created a fantasy that her life could return to normal if only she could be back with her parents.

I was very ready to go home.

Like in my mind, like that were my parents.

That's where I belonged.

I was still very angry at everybody else.

Like I was ready to go home.

And so my grandparents knew that and they saw that for years.

And so I remember sitting down with them one day and my grandmother being like,

okay, like if you're sure we're not going to keep you here, if you're ready to go, like we have kind of the attorneys have kind of talked and

we're ready to sign the paperwork for you to go back.

My dad still had

access, he had like legal, legal custody still, or like joint legal custody or something, because he was still able to like talk to my teachers and like be involved in my school and stuff.

Even if Michelle didn't understand at seven the gravity of what had happened, she understood that her father was supposed to step up and she quickly learned that he was never going to do so.

Me and my Nana had been arguing and

I would get in the car and like he would come in and then I think him and my Nana tied up multiple times too, like during all this.

And anyway, I got in the car and I was just like boo-hooing.

Like I was just very upset.

I don't even remember what the argument was about.

I just remember like had arguing with her and then it always upset me more to see the adults in my life argue.

Like that just, I couldn't handle it.

And so I vaguely remember them like tying up and my dad being really mad.

And I was like just...

mess just very upset and we were in the car and we were backing out of the driveway and going down my Nana's little road road and he was like I'm so sorry if

I knew things would have turned out this way I would have made different choices when I was given the option to and I'm like what does that mean and he was like oh don't worry about it and I'm just like well you can't say something like that and then just not tell me like even you know and he was like well I just mean when

everything came out about your mom

They gave me the option to divorce your mom and take custody of you and your sister.

And he was like, I just, sometimes I wish I had done things differently if I had known this was how it was going to be.

And yeah, like that stuck with me, I think, my whole life.

And then

years and years and years later as an adult, I had another conversation with him in which I brought all that back up and I was like, is that true?

And he admitted to me then it was true.

And like.

One of the most heartbreaking things about about children in abusive households is the love and attachment they still feel towards parents who haven't demonstrated any ability to return that love.

This is why even abused children so often defend their parents or even lie for them.

And when separated, they often long for and even idealize their missing parents.

But as any parent knows, children aren't always capable of deciding what's best for them.

And that's why they need loving, protective adults in their lives.

And this family dynamic was about to get a lot more complicated.

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Following Lisa's brief stint at a detention center and in the midst of the ongoing custody battles over Michelle and Angelin, there was another big change afoot for the McDaniel family.

I remember some like whispers and like talk.

I knew something was going on like I was that kid that like I was always trying to eavesdrop because I wanted answers to my own life and so I would get like bits and pieces that I probably shouldn't have.

And so I remember just like hearing some things about like

CPS coming in about my brother and being really scared.

On July 25th, 2002, Lisa gave birth to her third child, Colin.

He was also born slightly early at 35 weeks, unlike his sister who'd been born months before her due date.

He reportedly had some breathing issues initially, but was otherwise healthy.

My mom had come in to

pick me up for the weekend and my nana had kind of met her at the door and they were being being really friendly to each other which was bizarre because they weren't very friendly to each other um and my nana was just like

you know how did everything go and and my mom was just being like it's okay like everything's okay and like I remember her saying something about ask like if I knew or like how I was or something and my nana was like well she doesn't know but she's asking or something like that and so that was like when my mom like sat me down and was like

um

cps came in and they tried to remove Colin too.

Like they tried to take Colin from us, but they did rule that there was no need to because he's not sick.

And so we're going to get to like keep him and stuff.

The DFAX reports from this initial visit are telling.

By way of explaining her past, Lisa repeats the story of her being so overwhelmed that she interfered with Angelyn's trach to keep her in the hospital.

Lisa tearfully recounts that she had no support from family and friends, and that though she'd been diagnosed with munchausen by proxy, her psychiatrist disagreed.

PICU nurse Judy, who'd been there for Angelin's abuse, had followed the case and remembers hearing when Colin was born.

So she went from medical foster care to her maternal grandparents, I believe.

And so she was with them.

And then Lisa had another baby boy.

And so I'm pretty sure that must have been the first time that I went to court.

And there were several other nurses that worked in the PICU that were subpoenaed.

And it had something to do with foster care for the little boy, not for Angelin.

Within a month of Colin's birth, a complaint to Defax was filed, resulting in an emergency petition of protective custody.

The court ultimately ruled that Lisa could maintain custody, but that she could not be left alone with the baby, though how this would have been enforced is unclear.

In March of 2003, when Colin was still under a year old, Defax entered a deprivation petition for him, requesting that he be removed from Lisa's custody because of the abuse she'd subjected Angelin to.

The court cites the severity of Angelyn's abuse and the expert testimony that this was a Munchausen by proxy case, which they describe as not being treatable and having an extremely high recidivism rate.

In the midst of all this legal back and forth, Lisa continues to minimize her actions, blaming the stress and a hospital staff that was forcing her to go home.

When asked how many times she'd injected a substance into her daughter, Lisa says around seven.

The video evidence, however, captured dozens of incidents.

And furthermore, because the pattern had been ongoing since Angelyn's birth, the hospital concluded that there had been many more times other than those that were captured.

During all of this, Carrie remains fully in step with his wife.

He continues his dubious claim that while he was in the room while she was hurting Angelyn, he couldn't actually see what she was doing.

And in his testimony during the custody case, he also shares a chilling detail about the two of them shopping for a dress for baby Angelyn to be buried in.

They both present Lisa as contrite and reformed, but the nurses who'd seen what Lisa had done did not agree.

I was pretty horrified at the end of the court hearing when the judge gave full custody back to them, because I remember I stood up and I told him, I thought, I'm going to get arrested.

I said, I hope you don't sleep.

When you go home tonight, you have no idea what you've done and you should be ashamed of yourself.

On September 10th, 2004, the court denied the deprivation petition and the case was closed.

Colin could remain with Lisa and Carrie.

And in November of that year, Carrie and Lisa regained full custody of Michelle.

Walking into the house for the first time after

like everything was finalized and after I was like coming home and being really disappointed because my parents told me that like what a wonderful homecoming party we were going to have when I got to go back to live with them.

And so I had like thought about that for years.

Like, and so I remember coming home and being disappointed.

And then my dad had like made like a screensaver on our family computer that just said, welcome home, Michelle.

And just like almost crying because I expected like this really big thing.

And then I remember feeling really guilty about it because my dad was like, I'm sorry.

Like we, everything happened last minute and we didn't know it was going to be today, but like we're, we're going to do something, you know.

Michelle had been dreaming of this homecoming.

But even though it wasn't the moment she'd been promised, she was still hopeful about the family's future.

I just remember he was really little and still in his car seat and I would always sit in the back.

I was obsessed with my little brother.

Like he was just amazing to me.

And so I always wanted to be around him and be like a part of like whatever was going on with him.

Like that's where I wanted to be.

And so I would sit in the back with him

and like my mom would be back there too.

And I would like choose to sit in the back beside him.

And I remember his car seat being in the middle and me being on one side and her being on the other.

And I remember her looking at me and looking down at him and saying, he's going to be what puts our family back together.

In a letter from the state, the agency wishes the family well and writes that they hope they never find themselves in need of their services again, which was quite a pivot as B Yorker remembers.

I see that

in 2002

Child Protective Services in Georgia said Ms.

McDaniel now has another infant child, Colin McDaniel.

This agency feels that this child is subject to harm by Ms.

McDaniel due to the severity of her past history and the fact that she has not received any professional counseling, nor has she had custody of her previous two children since this incident.

So

Child Protective Services was on it when Colin was born.

I don't know what happened after that.

I mean, I've heard from the girls that the parents were able

to

work through the legal system, get lawyers, move to another state and another jurisdiction, and that they were able to keep Colin and they were able to get the girls back.

But I look at this report and I'm like, okay, people did not follow what Child Protective Services had recommended when Colin was an infant.

In the two years after Colin is born, everything goes to pieces in terms of protecting these children.

Between unresponsive judges and delayed hearings, the case is eventually closed, and DeFax asks to be relieved of any responsibility for continuing to monitor this family.

From reading these documents, it appears that on this round, the court fully bought Lisa's minimizations and claims of rehabilitation.

The description in these documents of Lisa's previous crimes mirror her story.

The seven incidents, the refuted MBP diagnosis, rather than the truth of what was captured on video and how it was contextualized by experts.

Eventually, though the paperwork for this piece has been lost to time, the McDaniels got Angeline returned to their care as well.

So off the McDaniels went, now with all three of their babies back under their roof.

While there had been eyes on Colin McDaniel, he'd remained healthy.

But that, sadly, wouldn't last.

I walked into the unit one day and he was in the PICU, PICU number four, and I saw the name on the board and I had to leave the unit because I thought I was going to be sick.

And so I said to the charge nurse, I said, I can't take care of that patient.

I told all my coworkers, you know, who he was because most of them had no idea.

And I did let the physician group that was taking care of him, you know, know my concerns.

I couldn't even look at her after everything that she's done.

And then I was off after that.

And by the time I came back to work, he wasn't there anymore.

That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me.

Nobody Should Believe Me is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dunlop.

Our supervising producer is Mariah Gossett.

Our senior producer is Taj Easton.

Assistant Editor and Associate Producer is Greta Stromquist.

Research and Fact-Checking by Erin Ajayi.

Engineering and Mixing by Robin Edgar, and Administrative Producing by Nola Karmouche.

Music provided by Blue Dot Sessions, SoundSnap, and Slipstream Media.

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