Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber

Speaker 1 True Story Media.

Speaker 1 Hello, it's Andrea. First of all, thank you so much for all of the incredible feedback on season five.

Speaker 1 I've gotten so many comments and emails about this season, and especially about my interview with Chalice Howard that aired last week as our unexpected episode 9.

Speaker 1 So I wanted to tell you I have been sharing all of these nice messages with Chalice and she said that you are such a lovely group of people and I could not agree more.

Speaker 1 She also wanted me to tell you that she is so grateful for how this episode landed and peace and blessings to you all.

Speaker 1 Today we've got a bonus episode with friend of the show and of course my co-author on my new book, The Mother Next Door, Detective Mike Weber, breaking down some elements of the Sophie Hartman case that we didn't get to in our episode with the other Detective Mike, Michael Lee, because some of that documentation came in later in the game.

Speaker 1 And that is Adventures in FOIA Requests for You. A reminder that we've got our season five mailbag episode coming up, so get your comments and questions in now.

Speaker 1 You can email us or send us a voice memo at hello at nobodyshouldbelieveme.com. Again, that's hello at nobody shouldbelieveme.com.

Speaker 1 Or if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a question in the comments and we will grab it. We are hard at work right now on our season six, which is is set to air later this spring.

Speaker 1 And I know I always say this, but we have really never done anything like this one on Nobody Should Believe Me. So all I can say is buckle up.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, we've got a whole new batch of case files episodes for you. We are going to be covering a couple of cases that are in the headlines right now.

Speaker 1 We'll be doing some follow-up on previous seasons, and I'll also be doing some fun crossover episodes with other podcasters I love. So stay tuned for all of that.

Speaker 1 As always, if you would like to support the show, you can subscribe on Patreon or Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 You'll get ad-free listening as well as some great bonus content from this season and my twice monthly subscriber show, Nobody Should Believe Me After Hours with Dr. Becks.

Speaker 1 This month, Becks and I are going to be covering The Anatomy of Lies, which is the documentary about the Elizabeth Finch case. So you won't want to miss that.

Speaker 1 And if you are a subscriber, you will get every episode of season six on the day that it launches.

Speaker 1 If monetary support is not an option, we have a free tier of Patreon where you can listen to some select episodes.

Speaker 1 And of course, rating and reviewing on Apple and leaving comments on Spotify, as well as telling others about the show are great ways to help.

Speaker 1 Your support is how I keep making this show as an independent podcaster, and I am deeply grateful to all of you. Now, on with the show.

Speaker 1 Many of you know that I was an author before I was a podcaster, and those worlds collide with my new audiobook, 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 Ybara 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 1 Hey, it's Andrea. 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 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.

Speaker 1 Hey, Mike.

Speaker 2 Hey, Andrew, how are you?

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm hanging in there. How are you doing?

Speaker 2 I am good. I am in the great white north and just enjoying a little vacation on my

Speaker 2 time away from work.

Speaker 3 Is your time away from work? Is permanently time away from work? Is it not now? You are officially retired.

Speaker 2 I am officially retired, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to work. It's just kind of shifting to another aspect and another part of the career.
I don't see myself ever not working ever.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you probably, you'd probably be kind of a menace if you weren't working. Like, I don't know where all that Mike Weber energy goes.
You're not working.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a fact.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So, Mike,

Speaker 3 we will have you back on to do your Mike Weber tells all or tells some

Speaker 3 post-retirement special. But today, you're here to talk to us about the Sophie Hartman case, which we just covered in season five of the podcast.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 yeah, you have reviewed a whole bunch of documentation in this case. You've listened to the season.

Speaker 3 We spoke to another one of our AppSec colleagues, also a detective mike a detective michael lee um about this case as well but um yeah we're we're excited to have you on to just kind of do a little bit of a debrief on this case and and get your thoughts on it because this was one of the more extensive and thorough police investigations I've really ever seen on one of these cases.

Speaker 3 And yeah, we're just curious, curious to know your thoughts on this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you know, I read through the entire police report. Um,

Speaker 2 and really, the only thing that I see missing in this is, and there could be many, many reasons for this.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, the detective actually preserved the social media records when the case first started. I didn't see anywhere where they were, they were obtained by warrant.
Um, but that could be.

Speaker 3 Well, actually, though, Mike, I do, I do have an answer to that. Oh, okay.
Um, yeah. So, they, I believe, because

Speaker 3 I was in the communications of the public record department.

Speaker 3 There is,

Speaker 3 I think, so much evidence from the social media that that has just not yet been, they have not yet had the ability to like redact that and

Speaker 2 reduce it. So I think that exists somewhere.

Speaker 3 I think she did get that. I just think that's not available yet.
This records request is still open.

Speaker 3 And there was also quite a lot of video evidence, which I think is, I would imagine, extremely time-intensive to redact.

Speaker 2 And yeah, that's, I mean, it kind of struck me odd that I didn't see that in her report.

Speaker 2 But again, we may not, I was just about to say, we may not have everything, and we certainly don't know everything. Everything else was done just what she should have done.

Speaker 2 She got her devices, she found her actual

Speaker 2 journals.

Speaker 2 Something I noticed was in Detective O'Rourke's interview with the

Speaker 2 gym teacher, the gymnastics, to be very clear, teacher, in her supplement was the gymnastic teacher that said that the victim had told her, when she approached the victim about joining the gymnastics program, the victim had told her, no, I'm no good.

Speaker 2 I'll never be good enough. And that is...
I mean, you see the same thing in Sophie writing about herself. And, you know, you just wonder how much of this abuse, you know, is multi-generational.

Speaker 2 I'm not a psychologist, but I just found it very striking that Sophie's writing that she's not good enough. And now her daughter is now writing that her daughter is not good enough.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And so you're talking about her older daughter, M's gymnastics coach, was interviewed by the police, and we did not really get into this during the show.

Speaker 3 And that gymnastics coach had a number of interesting observations.

Speaker 3 One of the interesting observations in there was that for some periods of time, I think this was during COVID, while this was happening,

Speaker 3 during, you know, whatever phase of COVID where we were sort of,

Speaker 3 you could get, you could, you would be somewhat in person, but it was still somewhat limited. That she would, that Sophie would sometimes leave both of her daughters at the gym for periods of time.

Speaker 3 And that both this coach and some of the parents at the gym had noticed that there was a huge discrepancy in her younger daughter C's actual physical abilities versus what Sophie was saying they were.

Speaker 3 Right. That is striking.
And it's really sad because I think that really gets to, you know, as we talk about, obviously, the criminal investigations are very focused on usually acts of physical harm.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 But then that really speaks to the psychological damage that this abuse does of telling someone that they can't do something, that they'll never be able to do it.

Speaker 3 And sort of having this doom and gloom

Speaker 3 picture of that person's future.

Speaker 2 Yeah. When we talk about the evidence in this case,

Speaker 2 it's really, really strong. It's circumstantial, but

Speaker 2 when you deal with falsification cases, they're all going to be circumstantial. And you have to put every piece of the puzzle together.

Speaker 2 Her statements that would be admissible at trial, and I'm going to clair, let me put an asterisk by this, in the state of Texas, I'm going by Texas law.

Speaker 2 Sophie's statements in her journals about pinching and hitting her children and how she's a bad person for doing that would absolutely be admissible because that goes to show the relationship between

Speaker 2 the suspect and the offender.

Speaker 2 I say absolutely admissible by law. You know, that depends on what judge you get.
depends on the judge's relationship with the defense attorney.

Speaker 2 Is the judge going to go by the law or is the judge going to try to even out the trial and make things fair for, you know, make it a 50-50 proposition for each side.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 and I've seen both of those things happen. Um,

Speaker 3 go ahead, and back to this question about the journalists, because I was really interested to talk to you about this.

Speaker 3 And actually, when we had Detective Michael Lee on, we had not yet received this part of the public records request, so regretfully, we did not get to talk to him about this piece of it.

Speaker 3 But these journal entries, I mean, for me, I'd never seen anything like this in case files where we had so much that was

Speaker 1 in a

Speaker 3 presumably unguarded kind of moment of a really direct line into the thoughts of a perpetrator. You know, we often have plenty in their narrative, right? But it's like a public narrative.

Speaker 3 So you sort of assume anything that's on their social media or that they're doing in the meeting in the actual media, which we have plenty of that, Sophie, too, right?

Speaker 3 She's on the local news, she's on social media a lot, but you sort of assume that that's like a performance, right? And then this to have this sort of interior view

Speaker 3 was very different. And I wonder, like, yeah, what did you think of this collection of Sophie's musings and what stuck out to you about those?

Speaker 2 You know, of course, you know, the major thing that stuck out is how she calls herself. I can't remember if she said pathological or what word she used, but a pathological liar, basically.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that's something I've gotten in interviews with several offenders. And it's really the one true thing

Speaker 2 I think that I get out of interviews. I mean, I get a lot of minimization, right? I get a lot of

Speaker 2 admissions, but never a whole true confession. Out of those writings, that's the thing that really struck out to me.

Speaker 2 She calls herself an habitual liar, I believe, which interestingly enough, Jessica Jones is.

Speaker 3 Oh, I think it's compulsive.

Speaker 2 I think compulsive?

Speaker 3 But yes. Yeah.
Yeah. So anyway, same idea.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that really struck out to me. And obviously, all of her admissions about her illness, her own illness falsifications, which show just a pattern of behavior.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm not an attorney. I'd be interested to see what an attorney had to say about those being admissible,

Speaker 2 specifically an attorney from the state of Washington. I think you may have problems getting them in in the guilt-innocence portion of trial, but they would absolutely come in

Speaker 2 in punishment phase.

Speaker 3 Right. Interesting.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 i i i was going to ask you actually if you thought like how you thought these would have played at trial the main thing they would have done is there was no way her defense attorney would let her take the stand because she she makes one statement that she's an honest person she makes one statement that i don't lie about anyone's health or i don't lie about health she makes that statement on the stand uh under cross-examination that comes in right all those statements from her from her journal come in.

Speaker 2 So, and people mess up whenever they're under cross-examination all the time

Speaker 2 because they don't know. They don't know the legal system.
No matter how much you coach them as a defense attorney, when they get up there, you never know what they're going to say.

Speaker 2 And it would have kept her absolutely from testifying

Speaker 2 at the minimum. But one of the things she says in the journal is, you know, we need a feeding tube.
I need to push for this.

Speaker 2 So she can't, those journals, again, eliminate the defense of just saying, well, you know, I'm just following what the doctors tell me to do.

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Speaker 3 So, her chronicles of C's actual sort of health journey, those would have likely been admissible in court, you think?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I mean, those are the most striking to me because, yeah, they do really show evidence of the planning. Um,

Speaker 3 and this sort of, you know, I think between that and the internet search history that they found, you do really, it really does paint this picture of someone making and executing a plan.

Speaker 3 And she expresses frustration with the doctors that don't want to go forward. And she talks about, you know,

Speaker 3 help the doctors be brave enough to see the truth about C's health beyond the facade of how cute she is.

Speaker 3 And it's like, it's very striking that she's pushing this narrative of her daughter being so much sicker than anyone else thinks she is. And

Speaker 3 then there's all of the stuff about death.

Speaker 3 And that to me

Speaker 3 is just so striking, given that we know she's writing this in the context of not having been told by a medical professional that her child is going to die.

Speaker 3 And she's talking about having these conversations with God where God says, Give C to me and talking, recounting conversations that she's having with her daughter about her going to heaven and etc.

Speaker 3 And that to me, I feel like even if you're sort of giving this the most generous read of whatever sort of explanation you could come up with of, oh, this is an anxious parent.

Speaker 3 This is a parent who really thinks she's doing the best for her child. I just don't see how you explain that away.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 I don't either.

Speaker 2 And it's funny the way she, depending on who she's talking to, the way she tries to kind of couch that, right? I mean, she'll, some people she'll say outright terminal.

Speaker 2 Some people she'll say, well, we, we just never know how long she's going to live. And then in her journal, she's wanting to give this child to God.

Speaker 2 And she's just all over the place, which is what you see in these cases.

Speaker 2 It really strikes a chord with me from what I've seen in past cases.

Speaker 3 It certainly seems to me looking at this case, and that this is one of, again, an extremely thorough investigation that Detective Orwark did.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 kind of like no notes on that, right? I mean, really did, like, it seems like really she went above and beyond.

Speaker 2 Well, she did it.

Speaker 2 Now that I know that she has a Facebook record, she did everything right.

Speaker 2 I can tell you where this case really went wrong, and it's where we see cases go wrong all the time. You know, they separated the child when the child was inpatient at Seattle Children's.

Speaker 2 Child was recovered, was healthy, had no episodes, was doing great.

Speaker 2 And then family court places her with family members who

Speaker 2 do not believe that the offender is guilty. And this, you cannot do this in these cases.
And look, that's not fair to Sophie's sister and Sophie's mother either, right? Because it is their daughter.

Speaker 2 They're going to be biased. They're going to have that internal bias to believe their daughter has not done this.

Speaker 2 And they may think they see things that are simply not there, even if they're trying to be as honest as they possibly can, because Sophie is in their ear. You know, Sophie can't

Speaker 2 have contact with the victim.

Speaker 2 She can have contact with her mom and her sister all day long, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they're going to be looking for any little thing in this child in order to justify what Sophie has done.

Speaker 2 So that is that, again, and we see it all the time, family court is terrible at understanding what this is and what to do about it. And you cannot make that placement

Speaker 2 with a family member that does not believe this is occurring.

Speaker 2 You will have failure every single time.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And two questions about that, or one observation, one question.

Speaker 3 I am curious, you know, because something that's come up in another case that we're working on is that there was eventually a family placement, but before that, for a period of time,

Speaker 3 they were placed with a medical foster parent.

Speaker 3 Because one of the, you know, things, if you have a child that is, has a really severe medical condition, is that it is not safe to place them with someone who doesn't, you know, isn't, isn't a very experienced caretaker.

Speaker 3 So obviously they would have given Sam and Sophie's mother Ann some guidance on what came up with the medical, but it was interesting kind of reading between the lines of some of the

Speaker 3 some of these reports that were in the

Speaker 3 second investigative summary about them reporting medical issues with C.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it strikes me that, you know, what we know from

Speaker 3 when C was discharged after the first, you know, period of, shorter period of separation from Sophie while she was in the hospital is that she was physically doing really well, right?

Speaker 3 That she was not, if she had been extremely medically fragile, presumably they would not. They either wouldn't have discharged her or they would have discharged her to a medical foster family.

Speaker 3 Is that right?

Speaker 2 If she's ready for discharge, she would not necessarily go to a medical foster family. That's the court's decision on where the child goes once she's ready for discharge.

Speaker 2 But I mean, this child did not have any symptoms while in the hospital and

Speaker 2 no symptoms. The one thing, I hate to see this, but I know why they do it, but they left the feeding tube in, even though she had shown she could eat with no issues.

Speaker 2 And when you do that and you release back out, now you're leaving access to an offender, right? And CPS is not sitting on the doorstep making sure that Sophie is not coming over to the house, right?

Speaker 3 She was visiting. She did have visitation that was only supervised by like some private.
company that they hired and then also her mom and sister.

Speaker 3 And even I was reading in the investigative summary that, you know, on one of these instances, she brought food with her. And I've just, that just made me want to bang my head against the wall.

Speaker 2 And again, it just goes to show how lost family court is on this. You don't, you don't allow them to bring anything.
I mean, Sophie could have poisoned food to cause symptoms.

Speaker 2 She could have been medicating the food. And the thing is about dystonia, which is

Speaker 2 one of the main complaints by Sophie,

Speaker 2 you can also get dystonia through massive medications that you don't need. And

Speaker 2 I've recently had that in a case. So all of that, I mean, it just, the family court handling of this was just butchered beyond belief.
And I don't blame a CPS investigator for that.

Speaker 2 Who I blame for that is family court judges or CPS attorneys who did not bring the proper evidence to

Speaker 2 family court judges to make a decision. And, you know, we see it all the time.
You know, I yelled and screamed at the top of my lungs about it.

Speaker 2 And CPS in my state doesn't seem to care. So I really don't know what to do about it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think to your point about putting the mom and the sister in a really difficult position, because I think we both understand why kinship placements are preferred in a lot of situations, right?

Speaker 3 You're absolutely traumatizing a kid, even if it needs to be done. It is traumatic for a kid to be taken away from their parents, and that is a hugely stressful and difficult situation and very sad.

Speaker 3 And if you can have them with people that they know and love rather than people who are strangers, obviously that's preferable, but it creates so many issues in these cases.

Speaker 3 And in particular, then it puts, you know, the people who are doing that supervision in an impossible situation because that's going to cause a lot of conflict with the parent if they are not sort of being the maximally,

Speaker 3 you know, sort of

Speaker 2 deferring to that parent.

Speaker 3 And you can see in this report

Speaker 3 how it read to me that Sam and Ann seemed very anxious about C's health. You know, there was like an instance of them calling an ambulance for what turned out to be a behavioral episode and,

Speaker 3 you know, just this kind of like, well, we need a specific contact at the hospital and just making these kind of like somewhat outrageous seeming requests.

Speaker 3 And I sort of assume that that was coming from Sophie.

Speaker 3 They may not be necessarily actively lying to the police, but they are not seeing things clearly. And in fact, that was pointed out by Dr.

Speaker 3 Makati when he said, if this child is placed with the maternal grandmother, if she's not able to clearly evaluate what's happening, that's going to be a huge problem.

Speaker 2 Right. And, you know, it may not even be anything intentional.

Speaker 2 And another thing, another issue you brought up, you know, we don't have the medical records, but I didn't see anything noted in Detectives

Speaker 2 O'Rourke's report about the days that the victim was in the hospital after separation. There was no defiance issues.
There was no issues like that at all. So

Speaker 2 why is she now having defiance issues

Speaker 2 when she's in her placement home? Could it be that a six-year-old has no other way? to act out when she knows that things are happening that should not be happening to her.

Speaker 2 And, you know, again, is Sophie telling him to her give her medication? What is going on? It's very easy for Sophie to direct care.

Speaker 2 Very easy for Munchhausen by proxy, by proxy to happen in these cases when you place with a family member that believes that their daughter could never do this. And that seems to be kind of where

Speaker 2 Sophie's mom kind of ends up on this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it certainly sounded that way from her interview.

Speaker 3 And, you know, again, this is a really direct parallel, not surprisingly, since they had the same attorney, since my sister was working on this case, you know, this is a direct parallel to the placement decision that happened in my niece's case where she was placed with my sister's in-laws who, you know, they were making no secret of the fact that they did not find these accusations credible and told the police that they felt like it was a witch hunt.

Speaker 2 That should eliminate them from placement right there. Right.

Speaker 3 And then, and they admitted that they were letting my sister be there for 11 hours a day or something like that. And that's just not, you know, there's no way that that's safe.

Speaker 3 And we don't know, you know, what all was happening

Speaker 3 in this case, but certainly Anne has did not then and none of her family members have ever given any indication that they think that this was anything other than a false accusation.

Speaker 3 So I think that that inability to protect the girls, even if their intentions were good,

Speaker 3 is really notable.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if you have a family member that you know is protective, yeah, sure, that is a proper placement, right?

Speaker 2 Derek Jones is a good example. That was a proper placement.
He was protective of his children. He did not let her around them.

Speaker 2 But the health and safety of the child has to come first. And I don't know what we have to do to drive that through family court's head on these cases.

Speaker 2 We have made some progress in my county with family court, but it's very dependent on who the judge is

Speaker 2 still to this day.

Speaker 2 And across the country, we are not making that progress. And that is something that I don't know how you change it.
You know, the

Speaker 2 say all the time, the last two articles in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal on this abuse were in 1990. And so they are just lost.
And I wish they would seek education on this.

Speaker 2 I've gone down that road and just hit dead ends every time I try.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, I do think that there is a possible role for,

Speaker 3 you know, prosecutors in these cases to be themselves better educated and able to educate judges when it comes to that sure

Speaker 3 and in this case you know we have this sort of interesting chain of events right where uh sophie is charged um and

Speaker 2 and the detective consulted with the da before that charge right so they they said yes we are going to take this case go ahead and get the warrant Got it.

Speaker 3 So does that not always happen?

Speaker 2 It does not. It's very dependent on from agency to agency on whether that occurs.

Speaker 3 Interesting. So that is kind of all systems go if the DA says, so like you, you take this step, you get this warrant, we're going to do something about it, basically.

Speaker 2 If you take the case,

Speaker 2 you shouldn't just then

Speaker 2 throw your detective in the grease.

Speaker 2 And when things get hard, say, oh, well, well, no, you know, family court didn't do the right thing, so we're not going to go forward with prosecution.

Speaker 2 But that's what appears to have happened in this case. So they absolutely had the criminal laws available to them to hold her accountable.
They just chose not to.

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Speaker 3 You know, something I was speaking to a former prosecutor from this area, and we were talking about why these, all the sort of complicated constellation of reasons that these cases are so challenging.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that he brought up, brought up, was cost. Yeah, absolutely.
You know, these are expensive cases at court. I think there is this

Speaker 3 completely divorced from reality assumption that

Speaker 3 the state has endless funds with which to pursue child abuse charges.

Speaker 3 And that is not the case. I understand where these are costly to try.
And that makes sense. And I think a certain amount of

Speaker 3 realism in living in the world that we wish that

Speaker 3 that didn't come into play. And of course it does.
But I think that there's sort of a piece we're not looking at

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 what is the cost, like what is the actual financial cost of letting them go? Because number one, they turn around and wage these lawsuits.

Speaker 3 And it has really struck me covering so many of these cases over the years,

Speaker 3 what

Speaker 3 an absolute resource black hole these perpetrators are because they are taking up money and resources that are meant for legitimately sick children. And they're taking up space.

Speaker 3 You know, there are, there are, we know how imperfect these systems are. And there are parents who should, you know, get their children back.
And it's like those things get shoved down on the docket.

Speaker 3 And it's, they take up judges' time. They take up, you know, I mean, they take up an unspeakable amount of resources.
And

Speaker 3 so letting them carry on with that. And in fact, I think in many instances, adding fuel to the fire of, oh, now you can go on and say you were falsely accused of abuse and become the victim there.

Speaker 3 And you have a new lawsuit and you have a whole new project. It really unleashes this,

Speaker 3 you know, this absolute sort of,

Speaker 3 you know, just like vector of resources

Speaker 3 that is kind of unmatched. And I think like you see it in this case, you know, with Sophie and the fundraising and you see this in some element of this in all cases.

Speaker 3 And I think like there's just an element where these people are really grifters at the end of the day.

Speaker 2 Oh, I say all the time that they're at their core, they're con artists. It's just a different type of con.

Speaker 2 You talk about the resource suck of what the offender is taking up for other children, you know, the cost to the child.

Speaker 2 This is a child that's going to be abused the rest of their childhood. If this is occurring, that's going to happen.

Speaker 2 And then probably about 80 to 90% of my cases are Medicaid cases. So this is also a cost to the public.
And it can, I mean, it is an extreme cost to the public.

Speaker 2 You know, these cases can get over a million dollars,

Speaker 2 easily over a million dollars in Medicaid costs to the to the taxpayers. And so you have all of that.
So when you make that decision as a prosecutor,

Speaker 2 you're basically protecting yourself. over all of those other things.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I've thought a lot about in this case in particular.

Speaker 3 So you have, you know, which is a pretty common pattern that, you know, you have a child that has one in a million rare neurological disorder and they're seeking treatment from.

Speaker 3 And so basically,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 by saying, and

Speaker 3 it's a false setup of does the child have the disease or not, that will determine whether abuse is happening, right?

Speaker 3 Because the child could have, she could have AHC, does not negate the possibility of abuse. After reading Dr.

Speaker 3 Wainwright from Children's that C does not have AHC, I feel pretty comfortable saying that in all likelihood, she does not have AHC.

Speaker 3 But having gone through this case and having it dismissed, that appears to have reinforced Sophie's narrative. And she has an accomplice in this, unfortunately.

Speaker 3 So, Mike, you and I talk a lot about how there is a lot of misunderstanding about what the culpability of doctors in these cases is.

Speaker 3 Because you can get into this situation where, you know, people have asked you, well, what do you want me to do? Charge the doctors.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, you explained how this law, the law of parties works, where you are convincing someone else. So then it can be quite complicated.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of times the doctors are victims as well, right?

Speaker 3 They have been used and it's horrible for them. They experience a lot of betrayal trauma.
They end up being sued and dragged through the mud of the media.

Speaker 3 So the doctors in these cases can really go through a lot.

Speaker 3 And the good doctors, unfortunately, the ones who get it the worst are the ones who reported, the ones who really stood up to the parent, become the focus of that ire.

Speaker 3 And then there are doctors, unfortunately, who are a problem. And I fear we have one in this case because there's the question of this doctor, Dr.
Makoti from Duke.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he...

Speaker 3 you know, had only seen the child a few times, but he was the one who gave this diagnosis of AHC.

Speaker 3 And then he spoke to the police on a number of occasions and said,

Speaker 3 you know, I would, I did not spend that much time with this child. I know Dr.
Wainwright from Children's the Neurologist. I would defer to him.
He's an excellent doctor.

Speaker 3 I had hoped to work with him someday. He trained at Duke.
I would defer to him on the differential of whether this is an AHC case and whether this is munchousing by proxy. So he said all of that.
And

Speaker 3 now somehow C is back being treated at his clinic, which we know because Sophie posted a picture of Dr. Mercati with his arm around her daughter on social media in his clinic.

Speaker 3 And that is very distressing how a doctor would have those conversations with the police and then continue to treat this child for a condition that he,

Speaker 3 I can't find any plausible reason why he would not understand that this child doesn't have this disease.

Speaker 3 So I did send him a letter and sent him just to make sure that he was aware of that sworn affidavit and that give him a little refresher on his conversations conversations with the police.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, what do we, how are we to think about the doctors that do end up playing a role in these cases such as this?

Speaker 2 Well, and what is his understanding of what happened, right? Is he being told,

Speaker 2 because, you know,

Speaker 2 the detective, once she gets a lawsuit filed, she's not going to talk to anybody. So is he being told, well, she was found innocent, you know, they messed up.
What is he being told?

Speaker 2 What is his mental culpability? And, you know, I have, I would have no problem ever filing a criminal charge on a doctor. I do not care what your status is, and I never have,

Speaker 2 that is actually mentally culpable for the abuse of a child. I would have zero problem doing that.
But you have to determine

Speaker 2 what's the culpability. And then also what we don't know is, okay, she's being seen at his clinic, but have they now backed off doing anything invasive with her?

Speaker 2 Are they continuing to do invasive procedures

Speaker 3 well as far as i know she still lives here and he is in north carolina so this is like a you know we know this from talking to her friend chalice um that this was like the sort of pilgrimage they made every year right to go do a day at the clinic and and do whatever they do there i don't know that it involved at least from what we saw their previous visits that it involved any invasive procedures So I had sort of, you know, as I was thinking about why, why this doctor would still be treating this child.

Speaker 3 And I mean, so for one thing, you're right. He might not have known.
He might have gotten one story from the parents.

Speaker 3 And now, if I were a doctor in that situation and I knew the treating neurologist at Seattle Children's, I would probably pick up the phone.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 if the lawsuit's filed, is that treating neurologist is his legal team going to allow him to talk to that other doctor now?

Speaker 3 That's a very good point.

Speaker 2 And I am not defending a doctor. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 These are good questions.

Speaker 2 I actually, I don't, the point of this is not to uh this the point of this is not to be an attack on dr makati um i am trying to sort through sort of what could possibly be going on with this doctor um and it was very he was very clear that his entire diagnosis was made based on the history provided by sophie because she did not have the gene mutation you know that that he said i believe he said like it's an 80 of the kids and then 20 of the kids don't have it um she did not have i have fears about that 20%.

Speaker 3 No, sure.

Speaker 2 Those are certainly

Speaker 2 our equal thoughts there.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's an easy diagnosis for offenders to run to because, you know, there is no hard and fast diagnosis and all of it relies so much on history.

Speaker 3 Right. And that she was talking about her having these episodes and you don't necessarily catch that, much like epilepsy or something like that, where you don't necessarily catch the episodes.

Speaker 3 So yes, he did confirm that this was a clinical diagnosis, yes, when you talked to the police.

Speaker 2 And going back to Sophie's writings, you know, she says in her writings, one of the notes that really struck me is the note about the gene mutation and the fact the child didn't have that gene mutation and how she could lead, you know, she could be this special child that God can help the medical professionals determine, you know, all these new things.

Speaker 3 It's going to lead to a scientific breakthrough.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Lead to a scientific breakthrough. And

Speaker 2 I mean, that's obviously, to me, that just shows that pattern of her continually pushing for things. And I thought that was a pretty striking entry also.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it really also is this sort of grandiose story about,

Speaker 3 because I think like, you know, we understand that these perpetrators know what they're doing and that they are culpable and that they are, you know, aware of their actions.

Speaker 3 And at the same time, I think something that Sophie's journal entries really give us insight into is that they are telling themselves a story about what they are doing and why, right?

Speaker 3 And so there was a lot of sort of religious framing of she's going to bring souls to God and the harvest and that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 And then also with the, you know, she's going to bring so much insight to the doctors and

Speaker 3 lead to scientific breakthroughs and that kind of thing. So you can sort of see her finding this very odd way to justify her behavior.
But if we could go back to Dr. Mohatti for a moment,

Speaker 3 you know, this is sort of a new insight for me because I have in general been

Speaker 3 defensive mostly of the doctors, right? Because I think we see the doctors getting so

Speaker 3 beat up and we see the doctors getting so pilloried. And so I think I sort of have this like natural defensive position of, oh, it's not the doctor's fault, right?

Speaker 3 But then I really am increasingly seeing that doctors really can be part of the problem. Yeah.
So there's the possibility that Dr.

Speaker 3 Makati just didn't know the outcome of this and that he was told by Sophie that it was all a mistake and whatever, and he just went with that and that's fine.

Speaker 3 So, you know, now I have emailed him and sent him that sworn affidavit. So now he knows.
So now he has the information, right?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 But I think it just strained credulity to me that someone would have all those conversations with the police because he talked to the detective multiple times. Right.

Speaker 3 And that they would have those conversations with the police and then not sort of see the red flags after that. Right.

Speaker 3 And then I think to the question of like, you know, then it was the question of like, well, maybe they are sort of aware that there might be a problem here and they are sort of continuing to see the child to monitor them, right?

Speaker 3 So that is one possibility. However, in this case, because

Speaker 3 he sees her once a year at a clinic that's specifically for a thing that she doesn't have, that sort of doesn't make sense. And so what I worry about, and what I said to Dr.
Mercati in this letter

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 even if you are not doing invasive procedures, you are co-signing that parent's story about what is going on with their child's health.

Speaker 3 You're doing it in front of their child and you're also doing it publicly because she is posting a picture of you standing in your clinic.

Speaker 3 You, a doctor who is best known for treating this specific disorder. You are posting a picture of you and her child online.
That is telling the child, that is telling other people who may question

Speaker 3 that diagnosis, that

Speaker 3 that's real. You know, I'm also very concerned about the people who provided funding for Sophie to take these visits, right?

Speaker 3 So you're, you're telegraphing to all of these people, I approve this message. So that is continuing harm.

Speaker 2 Right, right, yeah. And

Speaker 2 the psychological harm to the child of going to the doctor just all the time and being continued to be told that that she has something that she doesn't have.

Speaker 2 The only grace I can give him is if he's trying to control it. And if I was in his shoes, I would discontinue care.
I would fire her

Speaker 2 as a patient and

Speaker 2 not have her come back to the clinic. But what education does he have on this? Right.
Because pediatricians aren't required to learn anything about medical child abuse anywhere that I'm aware of.

Speaker 2 In Texas, they don't have to take any CLEs on this abuse.

Speaker 2 They probably don't get it in medical school unless they take a child abuse class. So people who listen to this podcast will know more about this abuse than a pediatrician who doesn't.

Speaker 2 And that's just a sad state of where we're at educationally here.

Speaker 2 What would really concern me is if the hospital, if Duke Children's is now advertising her or using her in promotions or anything like that, because then you get into a whole other ethical situation.

Speaker 2 You know, we can go back to the Olivia Gant case in Colorado children's and

Speaker 2 kind of that mess that they got into with that. And, you know, human nature is human nature.
If you think that doesn't affect things, well, it does.

Speaker 2 It shouldn't, but it does.

Speaker 3 Well, and I also worry about, I think, and I think this is a dynamic that we're aware of and that is a concern regardless.

Speaker 3 But I think, you know, doctors are human beings and they are susceptible to the rest of the human things that

Speaker 3 are the human condition that we are. And it is threatening, I think, for any doctor to entertain the possibility that they have been used to abuse a child.
That's a horrible thing.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 3 And I think that that may cause in some certain physicians some, you know, a certain amount of denial, even if they are faced with compelling evidence. And I wonder if this is specifically

Speaker 3 perhaps a bit potent for someone who studies something that is so rare that they have a very small population because if you, you know, of people that they're treating for this disorder overall, right?

Speaker 3 Because if it's, you know, thousands of patients out of your sort of sample size or hundred thousands of patients, right?

Speaker 3 Well, that doesn't necessarily interfere with your work or your research.

Speaker 3 And I worry that like, if you have the sample size of 10 and one of them turns out to be an abuse case, that that could be just sort of psychologically threatening in a way that it might not be for like a general pediatrician.

Speaker 3 It's again, this is just, this is just full-on a theory.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I worry about doctors that study rare diseases being targeted by these perpetrators.

Speaker 2 Absolutely they are. Yeah, absolutely they are.

Speaker 3 And I worry about them being susceptible because of some of these other factors.

Speaker 2 I mean, is that a concern? Those are two very valid concerns. And I think if you talk to some other members of the committee, they will back those concerns up.

Speaker 2 They want their child to not only be medically fragile, but also to be very specially medically fragile in a lot of cases.

Speaker 2 And what's better than that than an extremely rare disease that hardly any children have, right? It's always the worst of the worst, right?

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, these doctors are highly susceptible to this. And again, they don't have any training on medical child abuse.

Speaker 2 And it goes back to the old medical adage: you know, when you hear hoof prints, you know, think a horse, not a zebra.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately, a lot of the very specialist doctors who deal with these very rare conditions often think they found the zebra when, you know, it's just a big old horse with medical child abuse on its side riding their way.

Speaker 3 There's an image. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, Mike, any other kind of final thoughts on this case and what we can can learn from it?

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 I just wish prosecutors' offices would seek education on this and learn how to address these cases so they're not intimidated by everything when it comes to them.

Speaker 2 And God, please, family court judges, I don't know that we have any listen to this show, but

Speaker 2 talk to your organizations. Get a training on this abuse.

Speaker 2 It certainly doesn't have to be me. There are plenty of other people with the impressive letters behind their name that your organization may want to bring in that can train on this.

Speaker 2 Any member of the committee, for sure.

Speaker 3 We got PhDs for

Speaker 3 these guys.

Speaker 2 We can deploy them. Get training on what you should do on these cases because, to be very blunt, you're doing a terrible job by these children, family court judges.
To be very blunt.

Speaker 2 Again, I'm talking nationwide.

Speaker 2 We've gotten better in Tarrant County. We're far from great.
We're far from good, but we're better with some of our judges. So I want to give them that grace.
But overall,

Speaker 2 as a nation, family court judges are doing terrible on this abuse.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 3 Well, Mike, we're going to talk to you again about a bunch of other things coming up on the show. And thank you so much for being with us and congratulations on your new life as a published author.

Speaker 2 And thank you for kind of helping me along to that

Speaker 2 published author status.

Speaker 1 You got it.

Speaker 3 All right. Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 1 Nobody Should Believe Me case files is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett.
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