S06 E02: “How Could Someone Do That to a Child?”

Speaker 1 True Story Media

Speaker 1 Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So, I am currently on my way to tell my mom and dad

Speaker 2 about the podcast

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that I'm going to sit down and do it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I feel like my fight or flight has kicked in. I feel like I'm going to throw up.

Speaker 2 And I don't know. I've been putting it off for a while.
I have made dates that I planned on doing it.

Speaker 2 And then I changed it for one reason or another.

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 I'm just I'm just tired of feeling like I'm hiding it

Speaker 2 and something my therapist and I have talked about and I've tried to really work on something she said that just like stuck with me was

Speaker 2 I have put so much

Speaker 2 thought and process and energy into worrying about how this whole thing was going to impact my mom and how it was gonna

Speaker 2 impact her life and what it could potentially do or not do or how she was gonna handle it or not handle it.

Speaker 2 And my therapist was just like,

Speaker 2 do you think she honestly stopped to think about the

Speaker 2 with the same amount of care the number of podcasts that she's been on to tell your brother's story

Speaker 2 and to be able to tell her side of things Not that she's publicly spoken about anything to do with my sister or anything to do with like my children about broths and things.

Speaker 1 Lisa McDaniel has done plenty of interviews about her work at the Guthy Jackson Foundation, but no one's exactly asking her tough questions. The media coverage of Lisa, in fact, paints her as heroic.

Speaker 4 As a caregiver, I feel like you have lost part of the life you knew beforehand, before your loved one got sick, because your life changes. So that grief is really real.

Speaker 4 A caregiver mourns their whole way of living and I think that grief is very, very real.

Speaker 2 That's such a great point.

Speaker 2 It's just so selfless the work that you do. You put yourself in the situation to see other people doing well and that's just a tremendous selfless act every day.

Speaker 4 Well, you know, I appreciate you saying that, Corey, but as you know, I don't like to be patted on the back for those things. I love what I do.
I love working with the people that I work with.

Speaker 4 I love being able to help patients. That's who I am at heart as a helper.

Speaker 4 And again, I find that more selfish than anything because I think I get just as much out of this as what the people that I'm able to help do.

Speaker 1 That's Lisa McDaniel on a podcast called The Power of Rare, chatting about her work with a colleague. A helper, a caregiver, selfless.

Speaker 1 That's the brand that Lisa has cultivated in her 12-year career as the director of patient advocacy at the Guthy Jackson Foundation.

Speaker 1 To Michelle's point, Lisa rarely mentions the existence of her other children, let alone her conviction for abusing one of them.

Speaker 1 And the folks who hired Lisa to do this advocacy work with NMO patients and their families, turns out they don't exactly have the full story.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

Speaker 1 Hello, I have exciting news. I am officially taking this show on the road next year.
I'm going to be doing a series of Nobody Should Believe Me live shows next March.

Speaker 1 I will be in Los Angeles on March 7th at the Regent Theater. I'll be in my hometown, Seattle, at the Triple Door on March 18th.
Then I'm headed to New York City for a show at Sony Hall on March 25th.

Speaker 1 And I'll be wrapping up in Chicago on March 26th at The Den. Tickets for all shows are on sale now.
You can find a link in the show notes or on our website.

Speaker 1 We're going to have special guests, meet and greets, and more at these shows. We're going to have a great time.
So go get your tickets now. Hope to see you out there.
Hey, it's Andrea.

Speaker 1 It's come to my attention that some of you have been served programmatic ads for ICE on my show.

Speaker 1 Now, podcasters don't get a lot of control over which individual ads play and for whom on our shows, but please know that we are trying everything we can to get rid of these by tightening our filters.

Speaker 1 And if you do continue to hear them, please do let us know. In the meantime, I want it to be known that I do not support ICE.
I am the daughter of an immigrant. I stand with immigrants.

Speaker 1 Immigrants make this country great. Many of you know that I was an author before I was a podcaster, and those worlds collide with my new audiobook.

Speaker 1 The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, which I co-authored with Detective Mike Weber, and which I narrate.

Speaker 1 If you want to dive into these three fascinating cases, you can listen wherever you get your audiobooks. Here's a sample.

Speaker 1 You busy? Alana said, leaning against the doorway of Mike's office. We got another Munchausen by proxy case.
This one is ours. You interested?

Speaker 1 Of course, Mike told her, somewhat taken aback. Wasn't this abuse vanishingly rare?

Speaker 1 Alana deposited the voluminous CPS report about Hope Yobara on his desk. Mike had worked dozens of child abuse cases by this point in his life.
He'd seen children subjected to unimaginable horror.

Speaker 1 He thought he had seen the absolute worst of humanity already, but nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to discover about Hope.

Speaker 2 Where would you like to begin?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Where do you begin?

Speaker 1 Geez.

Speaker 2 I mean, I guess we can just begin with my sister, right? So she was born, and I just remember being told that she was really sick. Um,

Speaker 2 and I

Speaker 2 was staying with my other set of grandparents, my dad's parents, for a little while because they were in the hospital. And so my mom kind of left me there and was in the hospital with my sister.

Speaker 2 And pretty much, from what I, what I remember, just pretty much lived there. Like, she was there.
My sister was born at like 27 weeks.

Speaker 2 She was born pretty early, especially this was like 97, and we were in Savannah, Georgia. And so that was pretty early, you know.

Speaker 2 And so she just pretty much lived there with her.

Speaker 1 In the last episode, we heard from Lisa's younger sister, Sabrina, about her bizarre and difficult history with her sister and Lisa's odd behavior during her pregnancy with her second child, Angeline.

Speaker 1 And it's these events that lead up to this story taking a very dark turn.

Speaker 1 In a setup that is, unfortunately, all too familiar from these cases, Lisa McDaniel gave birth to Angelyn terrifyingly early on May 30th, 1997, when the baby was months from her due date.

Speaker 1 This early labor seems likely to be related to the fact that, as Sabrina witnessed and recounted in the last episode, Lisa kept falling down the stairs.

Speaker 1 A detail that parallels many other stories, including the Hope Yobara case that we covered in season one.

Speaker 2 When she was first born, I don't remember how many, I want to say 28 weeks gestation.

Speaker 2 We were led to believe that it would be very touch and go for a long time because she was a pound 12 ounces and we couldn't touch her because like literally her skin was so frail she would rip, like her skin would rip.

Speaker 1 A baby born as early and as small as Angeline is certain to have complications. And her life began with a lengthy stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Speaker 2 You would go in and you would see her and she would do really good and then she may not do so well.

Speaker 2 But if we could get, you know, her lungs developed, because you could not hear her cry.

Speaker 2 Like her lungs were so weak and stuff that her mouth would open like she was crying, but you physically could not hear it.

Speaker 1 Michelle had been looking forward to having a baby sister, but the reality of Angeline being born so fragile was harrowing.

Speaker 2 I had been been waiting all day to go back and see her in the ICU. I finally, I got to go back and see her for like just a minute.
It was literally like just a minute. And I don't remember all of it.

Speaker 2 I hate that, but I remember seeing a lot of the pictures. And so I imagine for me that young, that was probably a super scary like place to see her because she was hooked up to every cord imaginable.

Speaker 2 And IVs and a trach and a feeding tube and like all these things. That's really my first core memory, I think, is like

Speaker 2 her.

Speaker 1 After three months, Angelyn was discharged in August of 1997 with a lengthy list of complications, including breathing and feeding issues that were due to her premature birth.

Speaker 1 Between trips to the hospital and Michelle being passed off to grandparents, Michelle got the message. Her care and her needs were low on the priority list.

Speaker 2 Sometimes my dad would come pick me up and we would go back to Savannah and I would stay for like a weekend or something.

Speaker 2 So I remember them really, really pressing of how medically fragile my sister was to the point where they were like, you have to wash your hands and you have to be very careful and you can't have germs and yada yada.

Speaker 2 And so there was an instance where I literally was washing my hands so often like I had huge like rashes on my hands because I had just washed my hands like till they were raw because I was like, I'm just taking care of my sister.

Speaker 2 That was the core of most of my life.

Speaker 2 It was how my sister was doing, how my mom was doing when they were coming home.

Speaker 2 It's like this overwhelming sense of keeping an eye on everybody and everything and like just making sure that they were okay.

Speaker 1 Even after Angelin's initial discharge from the hospital, she was never out for long. And the first 21 months of her life were a series of repeated hospitalizations.

Speaker 2 An emotional roll toaster. You're emotional already,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 you would get a call.

Speaker 2 Oh, they're talking about letting Angelin come home if she keeps doing well.

Speaker 2 And then two days later, you would get a call, Angelin's so sick, if you want to see her, they say she may not make it through the night. If you want to see her, come.

Speaker 2 I believed and was told like she was fighting for her life and that weight, just walking around with it all the time. My life revolved around that.

Speaker 2 And there was like a pond that my grandparents had that, you know, me and my granny would walk down sometimes and spend some time at the pond and like listening to the birds.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if you can hear in the background, there's so many like birds and stuff out because I'm talking about all this in my grandparents house. You could constantly hear birds chirping.

Speaker 2 My days revolved around

Speaker 2 the phone call.

Speaker 2 It was, you know, it was waiting for that phone call

Speaker 2 of how my sister was today.

Speaker 2 And I remember I would like, I remember asking Granny like, have they called today? What's going on? And

Speaker 2 this was a lonely time for Michelle, who at six should have been taking her first big strides into the wider world as a kindergartner except the mcdaniels had decided not to send her so like my dad would come back and forth and visit like on weekends and stuff um me because i was staying at my grandparents house while my mom stayed and then occasionally they would both like come and i don't remember how often it was or anything i just remember sometimes they would both come and see me at my grandparents house while my sister was in the hospital and they would come and like try and do some like brief weird like homeschooling things but it was also like we're doing this once every however often very much not like a daily you know thing because they were kind of opposed it feels like to me going to public school for a while do you have any sense of what their beef was with sending you um it I feel like

Speaker 2 From best I can gather, it was very religious-based because we were, I was very religious growing up and my dad was like a Baptist preacher growing up.

Speaker 2 And so it felt very like my homeschooling curriculum was very like religious based and I can't remember the actual thing they use now like um I guess I had like questions of like why like I couldn't be over there like if I'm here you know why can't I be with my parents or why can't I stay there or whatever and like she was an ICU so there was no like feasible way for me to be in there like I wasn't even supposed to be in there with her at all um

Speaker 2 But I would go sometimes like over weekends and stuff like I would go either with one set of grandparents or the other sometimes my dad would come pick me up and we would go back to Savannah and I would stay for like a weekend or something

Speaker 2 so I remember that I remember a lot of back and forth

Speaker 1 and every time Angeline's health started to improve it would take another nosedive

Speaker 2 as she grew and got bigger got stronger

Speaker 2 It was almost worse than when she was first born because you're thinking, okay, you're on the road to get to come home.

Speaker 2 they started making out a plan okay this needs to happen this needs to happen these things need to happen if she can do so many days on these feeds and not you know have any issues and her heart rate stay up and her her breathing and everything stay intact and this is the plan of action to go home that's when it was

Speaker 2 okay Angelin may not make it through the night. If you want to see her come on.

Speaker 1 So she would be improving and kind of in this preparation for discharge and then suddenly take a turn towards, as you understood it, like imminent death.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's how I understood it.

Speaker 2 Like when you get that call, the doctor says she may not make it through the night and you're still thinking, okay, at this time, you have to understand, we didn't have a clue.

Speaker 2 We bought into everything that we were told.

Speaker 1 As a parent, there's nothing more frightening than the idea of something happening to your baby. Both of my babies, luckily, were born full term and with no complications.

Speaker 1 And even so, those early days are really hard.

Speaker 1 I remember not being able to sleep some nights because I would stir awake at every little peep they made.

Speaker 1 I struggled with breastfeeding with my first and I remember just torturing myself to make it work.

Speaker 1 It's hard to overstate how, especially in those first few months when your baby is just so helpless and your hormones are raging, every cell in your body turns itself over to keeping this tiny, precious thing alive.

Speaker 1 And again, that's without complications.

Speaker 1 Angelin spent the first 21 months of her life critically ill, so it's easy to see why the family rallied around Lisa and Carrie.

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Speaker 1 How did you first come to meet the McDaniel family?

Speaker 3 Just as a patient in the PICU. So she was an ex-premie.
I honestly don't remember the very first time I met them, but it wasn't unusual.

Speaker 1 This is Judy, which is the pseudonym we'll be using to protect her identity. She was a nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, or the PICU, in Savannah at the time Angelyn was being treated there.

Speaker 1 Angelyn was born very premature. Was it pretty typical that you would see babies babies born on the more extreme end of being born premature, that they would have a lot of visits to the PICU?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it wasn't surprising back then to see them visiting a lot. If they got sick, they would not get sick the way your children or my children would get sick.

Speaker 3 They could become very violently ill and even in danger of death if they got sick with, let's say, sepsis or they had a very bad pneumonia.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a lot of things that would make them, the physicians be very concerned about their outcome And that's why they would need to be with us so we could watch them very carefully.

Speaker 1 Something I've become well acquainted with making this show over the past few years is what strong stuff PICU and pediatric emergency room staff are made of.

Speaker 1 This is work that requires an extraordinary amount of empathy, calm, and emotional endurance. And listening to parents about what's going on with their child is a huge part of this work.

Speaker 1 I would imagine there's almost no instance where you're not meeting someone on one of the worst days of their life, right?

Speaker 1 If your child is in the pickup, that is just an incredibly stressful and upsetting situation.

Speaker 3 Yes, it's terror-inducing for pretty much everybody. It's very stressful for all of them.
Everybody has a story. Everybody believes that their story is the most important.

Speaker 3 And so I always tried to be very cognizant of that when I was talking with them about what was going on with their children.

Speaker 3 And so I always believed I would have probably about five minutes to make that. I called it the click, because I would just go in the room, start doing stuff.

Speaker 3 And the minute I felt that little click, I was like, yep, I'm good. I've connected with this family.
Now I can just go in and do my job. But I want to put them at ease.

Speaker 3 I want to see their shoulders come down.

Speaker 3 You know, I want them to be able to talk with me and not just have that awful deer in the headlights look. So it was really important for me to make that connection.

Speaker 1 Lisa, who was still in her 20s at the time, was reportedly charming and popular with the number of hospital staff who she'd often go to lunch with.

Speaker 1 Judy, however, had a different reaction as she explained to me and my producer Taj, who is the other voice you'll hear in this clip.

Speaker 2 Did you have a moment, like a click with Lisa?

Speaker 3 I did not have that with her. What I had with her,

Speaker 3 I had the other reaction where the hackle stood up on the back of my neck is about the only way. And I thought, this is somebody that is best for me not to be around.

Speaker 3 And then some of the things that happened while Angeline was in the unit, like when she would, they used to have a phone outside the door. So she would ring to come in and visit.

Speaker 3 And there was one time we heard all this banging and we opened the door and she was like lying on the ground outside the door looking like she was convulsing. It only lasted a brief period of time.

Speaker 3 And then one time she said that somebody had tried to attack her outside of Ronald McDonald's house. And the nurses, you know, we were all friends.

Speaker 3 They would tell me some of the things that she had confided in them about.

Speaker 3 And I was just, the more I was exposed to all of that, it wasn't so much what was happening clinically with Angelin at that particular time. It was just the other stuff, just

Speaker 1 yeah. So you just had a bad vibe, basically, from her, it sounds like.
And I mean, it also sounds like the take on Lisa at the hospital was that she was quite capable of taking care of her child.

Speaker 1 This was not a situation where

Speaker 1 because of course these situations do happen right where a parent is having such severe mental health concerns that they're not able to take care of their child adequately.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't sound like that was anybody's read on Lisa.

Speaker 3 No, not at all.

Speaker 1 Though there were only brief periods during this time when Angeline was able to leave the the hospital, Michelle has vivid memories of one homecoming in particular.

Speaker 2 She had like her own room in the crib and then there were still like tubes and like attached to her and like feeding tubes and like her breathing tubes and like all attached to her trach and all this.

Speaker 2 And I remember waking up in the middle of the night to her alarms just like blaring because I was like, I think I was like across the hall from her in my own bedroom.

Speaker 2 And I go in there and she's not breathing and she's like blue, like dark blue.

Speaker 2 And I remember like screaming for my parents and my parents coming running in there.

Speaker 2 And I remember my mom making just like this big deal out of me the next like two or three days that was like, you saved her life.

Speaker 2 Like you're the only reason why she's alive and like all this and really internalizing like, okay, well, that's just another sign. Like I got to protect her.
Like this is my job now.

Speaker 1 And this traumatic event solidified Michelle's understanding of her place in the household, not as a child with needs of her own, but as a caretaker, as a rescuer, a heavy weight for tiny shoulders.

Speaker 1 To my adult ears, the logistics of this story seemed odd. If you have a baby this fragile, why is she not in the room with the parents?

Speaker 1 Lots of babies sleep in the parents' room when they're little anyway. And when my babies had so much as a bad cold, I'd want them near me throughout the night.
This detail also stuck out to Sabrina.

Speaker 2 I can remember asking my husband,

Speaker 2 why did they put her in that room so far away? Like so far away where you, and at this point, she still, when she cries, you still can't, like you can hear her if you're close to her, but you can't,

Speaker 2 even if you're the next room over, you still can't hear. I mean, so she still like, you know, was very quiet.
I was like, why would you, because that's a lot. for a little kid to come in and find.

Speaker 2 It never made sense to me why she was on so many machines and all this stuff and you had her where you couldn't even hear her.

Speaker 1 The medical team had been tracking Angelin's troublesome pattern of declining each time she was on the precipice of going home from the hospital.

Speaker 1 And they began to suspect that they weren't getting all of the information from Lisa.

Speaker 1 So they were in and out of the hospital, sounds like in the hospital more, you know, for quite a long period of time.

Speaker 1 How did this all take a turn?

Speaker 3 I believe, if I remember correctly, that the physicians were concerned enough to send her for a second opinion in Atlanta.

Speaker 3 And while they did that, they installed the surveillance cameras in the room that she often stayed in.

Speaker 3 And they were getting to the point where she was having these infections that didn't make a lot of sense with organisms that weren't normally found in those particular areas of the body, which is why they sent her up to Atlanta and then came back.

Speaker 1 As Sabrina explains, the doctors weren't the only ones who'd begun to suspect something was very wrong.

Speaker 2 And then my husband said, like, and I was, but I'm like, when I say this, I was really mad at my husband at the time that he said this. He's like,

Speaker 2 it's just weird to me that she is so well she can come home. And then in less than a day, she's so sick she's going to die.

Speaker 2 He said,

Speaker 2 Do you think your sister's doing something to her? I thought I would beat him to death. I'm not kidding.
Because it just,

Speaker 2 how could you dare say that, you know?

Speaker 2 And I'm like, don't ever say that again. And he's like, I'm just asking.

Speaker 1 As this dramatic cycle continued, things got increasingly tense for the whole family.

Speaker 2 One time my mom had called from the hospital. And so I'm outside like playing with my friends or whatever.

Speaker 2 And my granny comes outside and she was just like, hey, your mom's on the phone with an update about your sister. And I was just like, I just really want to to finish this game.

Speaker 2 Like, can I call her back? And I remember them all getting really upset with me. And like,

Speaker 2 I made the wrong choice of like, I wouldn't go, like, talk on the phone at that moment. You know what I mean? To like hear about it.
And like, I remember that being like the first true like

Speaker 2 guilt that I felt of like, oh, okay, obviously, like, I'm supposed to go.

Speaker 2 take care and listen to me even if I couldn't do anything right that was like a phone call you're so you're six at this point ish five or six ish yeah probably maybe closer to seven, like the ish.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, small.

Speaker 2 And just being like, yeah, like that was a really, I think, moment for me to realize, like, that's not my place here. Like, my place is like, when mom calls, you come.
Like, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 And as Angelin continued to fight for her life, Sabrina's own suspicions began to emerge.

Speaker 2 I mean, it just got to the point where it was basically, y'all just don't come, which I like.

Speaker 2 that's weird because we've been all this time back and forth killing ourselves to go. And now all of a sudden you don't want anybody to go.

Speaker 2 I'm like, that's weird. And so then my husband said again,

Speaker 2 something to your sister, there's something going on there.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, don't say that. But in my mind, I'm like,

Speaker 2 Could he be right?

Speaker 2 I mean, could he be right? And it was actually several months after they went back to Savannah that we actually found out anything that they had had the video or anything like that.

Speaker 1 In December of 1998, Angelin, then just a little over 18 months old, was once again hospitalized with polymicrobial sepsis.

Speaker 1 But this time, because Lisa had been placed under video surveillance, there was no mystery about what had caused it. PICU nurse Judy remembers what happened next.

Speaker 3 The incidents happened. I came in the next morning and she had already been removed from the hospital.

Speaker 3 And then every day that I worked, I took care of Angelina until she was discharged into foster care. So I was quite comfortable, you know, talking with them and dialoguing with them.

Speaker 3 I said, I'm gonna call the supervisor in the county. And I did.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of how the whole ball got rolling of them investigating, you know, what was going on at home and how that all was going to play out.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting. So the hospital had already reported because of the videotape.

Speaker 1 And then you also made an additional report to DFAX.

Speaker 3 100%. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Did you ever see the video of Angelin?

Speaker 3 I remember watching it, but I was watching it because

Speaker 3 The DA at the time had asked me to come to a meeting of child fatality review. And it was like a staffing, they call it a staffing meeting.

Speaker 3 And he wanted me to interpret the medical parts to it, to the people that were at the meeting. So I don't remember like watching it intently, but I would point out, you know, that's a tracheostomy.

Speaker 3 That's, you know, what goes in the neck in an ambu bag where, you know, people deliver oxygen, central line. So it was more of a medical.

Speaker 3 thing than it was for me to like watch it intently and go, oh, that's happening, that's happening.

Speaker 1 What these videos captured would change the course of this family's life forever. Video evidence is somewhat rare in these cases, and it's not always a slam dunk.

Speaker 1 My sister Megan was captured on video dumping a syringe of anticoagulant medication meant for her daughter into her bed sheets.

Speaker 1 My then five-year-old niece subsequently ended up in the PICU with a life-threatening blood clot, which would not, as hospital staff reported to the police, have been possible if she'd received the full dose of that dumped medication.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, my sister's lawyer managed to successfully argue that this wasn't what it looked like because the syringe the hospital was using wasn't, according to him, the syringe the hospital said it was using.

Speaker 1 Maddening. To this day, Lisa appears to have mostly stuck to her version of what the video surveillance captured.

Speaker 1 According to Lisa, she had been attempting to flush her daughter's trach out with water because she was concerned about a buildup of mucus.

Speaker 1 This story isn't so much a minimization of Lisa's behavior as it is an outright fiction. Here is her sister, Sabrina, remembering what she saw on these videos.

Speaker 1 And just a warning that the following is extremely disturbing and graphic.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 when you're sitting there, watching videos like that

Speaker 2 and I couldn't watch them all. And yeah, there's, I mean, to this day I don't ever want to see them again as long as I live but

Speaker 2 when you're sitting there with your dad

Speaker 2 and keeping in mind this is a man that I look up to I'm my daddy's kid okay

Speaker 2 and it brings him to his knee where he just

Speaker 2 he couldn't say nothing he couldn't he couldn't even move

Speaker 2 I got nauseated to the point I had like I pure had to go vomit it made me so sick

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 to sit there and see her taking

Speaker 2 feces

Speaker 2 out of a diaper

Speaker 2 kit

Speaker 2 and putting it down her trach.

Speaker 2 And like I say, Angelin's still not to the point that she can cry out like a normal kid. She had the ability to cry, but it still wasn't very loud at that point.

Speaker 2 And then you're thinking,

Speaker 2 I don't know. This is not a person I know.
This is not somebody I know.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 you know, because Lisa's still maintaining she hadn't done anything. She hadn't done anything.
There's so much video. There was so much video of it.
Over the two or three week period, there was.

Speaker 2 Incidents every day.

Speaker 2 Multiple times a day. I know there were at least 50 incidents

Speaker 2 and it was always of like feces being put in her trache or the saline

Speaker 2 getting put down her trach to try to drown her. Like she would put like whole syringes of

Speaker 2 the saline water or whatever down her trache and wouldn't suction her back out because you know when you're sticking something like the nurses would put like a drop or two to help you know kind of loosen up her secretions or whatever and would suction it right back out.

Speaker 2 And so when you're sticking a 10 millimeter syringe down worth of fluid down a trach and letting it sit there, yeah, you're drowning somebody.

Speaker 1 We really try not to spend too much time on the gruesome details on this show, but this can be a difficult balance because we also can't shy away from the seriousness of what's happened.

Speaker 1 Hearing Sabrina tell this part of the story was incredibly heavy, especially given that Michelle was also with us.

Speaker 1 This is the kind of memory that you can never erase, no matter how you try. It's these details that follow you into your nightmares.

Speaker 1 It's a horrible thing to reckon with, that someone in your family would do this to a baby. And it's remarkable that Angelin even survived.

Speaker 1 Can you give us just

Speaker 1 from a medical perspective, just a sense of like how risky these behaviors are?

Speaker 3 All of them very high-risk behaviors that could lead to someone becoming violently ill or die.

Speaker 3 particularly the part about the tracheostomy, which is basically someone's lifeline because it, you know, bypasses your nose and your mouth.

Speaker 3 And so, if you cover that, you're essentially suffocating somebody.

Speaker 1 There is always the question of how family members will react to the information that their loved one has committed abuse.

Speaker 1 All too often, spouses and parents choose denial and defend the perpetrators, even in the face of very strong evidence. But for Lisa's father, no shred of doubt could survive what he'd seen

Speaker 2 When my daddy saw the videos,

Speaker 2 he never

Speaker 2 had a relationship with my sister after that, after that day. He never, it just ruined his whole perspective, it ruined everything.

Speaker 2 He just, because for him, and I mean, for me, but my dad, it was just, you did the unimaginable. You did something that was absolutely in my dad's mind, unforgivable.

Speaker 1 Listening to Sabrina talk about her and Lisa's dad is gutting, especially after watching my own father grapple with something similar. Nobody wants to see the best in us more than our parents.

Speaker 1 Nobody wants to believe more in our innate goodness. And dads, they do anything to protect their little girls, right?

Speaker 2 And Carrie is, Carrie has said, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on.
I didn't see it. I didn't see it.
And then to see him be sitting in the same room with a newspaper,

Speaker 2 pull it up to his face like you're reading a newspaper.

Speaker 2 Like on the video, yes, on the video. She's Lisa's at Angelin's crib doing this.
And Carrie is sitting in a chair. You know, you're in a hospital room, so the rooms are not very big.

Speaker 2 Across from the crib with a paper up like this to make it look like he's reading, and then you see him fold that paper down. He's watching her.
He knew exactly what she was doing.

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Speaker 1 Fathers play a crucial role in these cases in protecting the children. They are the only other person who has legal rights to the child absent a court order.

Speaker 1 The child's fate often rests on their decisions. So what's going on with Michelle and Angelin's father, Carrie?

Speaker 3 Carrie was very detached, passive. Lisa was definitely the alpha female in the house, for sure.

Speaker 1 Sabrina has an even more pointed take.

Speaker 2 He knew. He knew exactly what she was doing.

Speaker 2 And that, I mean, to me, that even made it worse. Yeah.
Because it's like,

Speaker 2 okay.

Speaker 2 But it even,

Speaker 2 like I say, in watching the, and like, there's so much video. There was so much video in it.

Speaker 2 But literally.

Speaker 2 this was like over two weeks I think this is not one incident this was it was either a two or a three week period

Speaker 2 but over the two or three week period there was

Speaker 2 incidents every day

Speaker 2 every multiple times a day

Speaker 2 I know there were at least 50 incidents

Speaker 2 But after a while, you just quit reading it.

Speaker 1 Because of the video evidence and the severity of what Lisa had done, this wasn't the kind of complicated investigation that we often dig into in these cases.

Speaker 1 But even with evidence as straightforward and shocking as this, the police, child protective services, and the courts still had to do their jobs, and there was still plenty of room for error.

Speaker 1 The detective who took this case appeared to have a shaky grasp of this abuse. He explains to Lisa at one point that this syndrome was discovered by a man named Munchausen.

Speaker 1 He does interestingly note that they get a couple of cases a year and that it's not terribly uncommon.

Speaker 1 On December 31st, 1998, Detective Bill Sharpley from the Savannah Police Department interviewed both Carrie and Lisa McDaniels separately and then together.

Speaker 1 Jeff Baker from the Department of Family and Children's Services, or DFACS, also said in. Unfortunately, we don't have any tape of it, but we do have transcripts.

Speaker 1 Kerry goes up first, and the cop explains to him that because of the video surveillance, they suspect Angelyn's blood infection was caused by Lisa.

Speaker 1 They also mention that they have additional concerns about him, given the fact that he was also in the room.

Speaker 6 Carrie immediately starts defending his wife and says that they were both tired of seeing Angelyn suffer through all of the tests and the 19 surgeries she had endured.

Speaker 1 And right away, Carrie says something extremely revealing. He tells the police, We both said this.

Speaker 6 And like I said at first, was that, you know, if this is going to be her life, I'd rather,

Speaker 6 and we're Christian people, that I'd rather God go ahead and take her onto heaven instead of having her suffer.

Speaker 1 One of the many things I think this investigation overlooked in terms of the actual threat that Lisa and Carrie posed to their children was this piece, the intent that a statement like this telegraphs.

Speaker 1 Sabrina, however, saw it more clearly.

Speaker 2 I don't really think she ever meant to leave the hospital with Angelyn at any point. I don't think it was,

Speaker 2 I don't think she ever meant for that child to live.

Speaker 1 Detective Sharpley walks Carrie through the tapes, but it doesn't seem to make a dent.

Speaker 1 He offers them the same explanation that Lisa will go on to offer, that she was just trying to suction Angelin's trach, which of course doesn't explain even a fraction fraction of what the video captures.

Speaker 1 When pressed, Carrie says that he just quote, can't really see what she's doing.

Speaker 1 They continue to walk him through additional videos, even bringing a nurse in to help explain, and Carrie refuses to give an inch.

Speaker 1 At one point, he says he's not even 100% sure that this is his child, though he does concede that the woman in the video is his wife.

Speaker 1 Given Sabrina's description of this video, which is corroborated by transcripts and and court documents, it's impossible to see Carrie as anything other than entirely complicit.

Speaker 6 At one point in the interview, he asks the detective, is there any chance that I can protect my wife from this?

Speaker 1 When Lisa is questioned by the police, she reiterates the story about trying to suction the trake and admits that she knew she wasn't supposed to do it.

Speaker 1 When this explanation clearly doesn't suffice, she deflects, blaming her stress and her fear about taking the child home given the level of her needs. Reading through these interviews is frustrating.

Speaker 1 It's impossible for me to know, of course, how much of this is tactical on the part of the detective.

Speaker 1 But throughout these interviews, there's an emphasis on what a loving mother they all know Lisa is and how she just really needs some help.

Speaker 1 The baby, who had nearly died because of Lisa's actions, is an afterthought.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, the courts did remove custody from both parents, as Sabrina recalls to Michelle.

Speaker 2 So you were placed first and then Angeline came.

Speaker 2 Mom and daddy had to get medical training to know what to do to take care of her once they got her and they had to make sure that they were comfortable and then I was like their me and my little sister were like the backup to you know if something happened mama couldn't be there

Speaker 1 Even though they all now knew that Lisa had been the cause for many of her issues, Angelyn was medically complex, which made her placement more complicated, as our nurse Judy explains.

Speaker 3 I knew her foster parents because her foster mother and foster father, her foster mom was a nurse in my unit in the PRN pool.

Speaker 3 So I still got to see her. In fact, I babysat one night for her because she was on a ventilator, you know, so it's not like you can just call the babysitter to come watch.

Speaker 3 And they're also picky about who's babysitting your kid, you know, kid that's in foster care. So I babysat for them, but I have a picture of all of us.

Speaker 3 We all went to one of the parks and had like a cookout. And, you know, there's a picture of me holding her and stuff.

Speaker 3 So I still got to see her after she got discharged while she was with her foster parents. It was after she went back to the grandparents that I never really got to see her again.

Speaker 1 As the court was evaluating next steps for the McDaniel family, they called in one of the country's top experts on munchausen by proxy, B.

Speaker 2 Yorker.

Speaker 2 Yes, so DFAX or the state of Georgia became the parents of Angel and of Michelle. So they took custody of both girls.

Speaker 2 First, Angel was placed in a foster placement that cared for medically fragile kids because she did have a trach and had been a preemie in the NICU and she needed to stabilize.

Speaker 2 Then, when Angel was stabilized, she joined her older sister at Lisa's parents' home, which was

Speaker 2 a drive. I can't remember if it was an hour, 30 minutes, whatever.
It was a distance away from Lisa and Carrie. So I made at least one home visit to see

Speaker 2 six-year-old Michelle.

Speaker 2 and 18-month-old or two-year-old, yeah, she was probably two, two-year-old Angel at their grandparents' home.

Speaker 2 I vividly remember spending a few hours in the living room, looking around the home,

Speaker 2 seeing how the family interacted, and spending time watching the grandparents interact with the girls, particularly with Angel. Angel had long red ringlets.
She was using a little

Speaker 2 two-year-old walker to help her walk. She had to put her finger over her trach hole for her to talk, and she was babbling, and she was talking a little bit.

Speaker 2 She had glasses because there were some visual corrections that were needing to be done.

Speaker 2 She was a beautiful,

Speaker 2 lovely little girl who seemed to be well on her way to thriving and recovery. The biggest question that I had for those those grandparents is I said,

Speaker 2 are you because we are very doubtful and it's a high bar to place victims of lethal Munchhausen by proxy with relatives

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 of the influence and the ability of perpetrators to get back into the family system. So I said to them, are you able to protect these girls from your daughter?

Speaker 2 And I remember specifically the grandfather looking me in the eyes and saying, Oh yeah,

Speaker 2 oh yeah, we are on to her. She has lied to us.

Speaker 2 They went on to describe several crises situations that had happened when Lisa was in high school. They were telling me

Speaker 2 that they

Speaker 2 understood

Speaker 2 that there to be no unsupervised contact and they even said they doubted that there would be very much even interaction

Speaker 2 with Lisa and Carrie as long as they had the girls in their care.

Speaker 1 Just a disclaimer here.

Speaker 1 Because she was never a treatment professional for any of the McDaniel family and was not involved until after the girls were placed, Bea is able to speak to us about her experiences in this case, where she served as an expert consultant for DFACs.

Speaker 1 Her role was to explain this type of abuse to the court and explain how to keep the girls safe.

Speaker 1 She is speaking from her knowledge of what happened to the girls since they reached out as adults and from reviewing records and materials provided to her by Michelle.

Speaker 1 In Lisa's absence, Angelyn thrived and both sisters were safe. But unfortunately, the safety would not be long-lived.

Speaker 1 As we said in the first episode, what Lisa did to Angelyn is only the beginning of this story.

Speaker 2 So my parents wanted to take my grandparents back to court for custody of me and my sister again. I was very ready to go home.
Like in my mind, like that were my parents. That's where I belonged.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so I remember sitting down with them one day and my grandmother being like,

Speaker 2 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 um,

Speaker 2 we're ready to sign the paperwork for you to go back home. And in the meantime, my mom had had another whole child.
Um,

Speaker 2 so it was after my brother was born.

Speaker 1 That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Assistant Editor and Associate Producer is Greta Stromquist. Research and Fact-Checking by Aaron Ajayi.
Engineering and Mixing by Robin Edgar, and Administrative Producing by Nola Carmouche.

Speaker 1 Music provided by Blue Dot Sessions, SoundSnap, and Slipstream Media.