Scary Terri | 6. “I need some money, honey.”

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Speaker 5 You're listening to the season finale of Scary Terry. But if you want more heart-pounding true crime stories, there's tons waiting for you on the binge channel.

Speaker 5 And as a subscriber, you can binge them all ad-free right now.

Speaker 5 It had been over 15 years of Terry Hoffman being in the spotlight.

Speaker 6 Glenn Cooley overdosed on drugs. In 1979, Devereux Cleaver drowned.
Sandy Cleaver's car went over a cliff in 1981.

Speaker 5 Wrongful death suits. Wills contested.

Speaker 6 Robin Lynn Otstadt, Mary Levinson, and Richard Hoffman committed suicide. Jill Bounds was murdered.

Speaker 5 Smoke was filling up the room so thick, you can't find the handle of the door.

Speaker 5 But where was the fire?

Speaker 5 Ever since Gail and Chuck contacted Cecil Emerson, the assistant DA, he'd been looking into Terry.

Speaker 5 At this point, Cecil had known about Terry for a decade, since Devereux's death.

Speaker 6 Can these cults be deadly?

Speaker 7 Oh, they're very deadly.

Speaker 5 But he hadn't brought criminal charges yet.

Speaker 5 Then, new evidence came to light.

Speaker 5 Cecil found out that Terry Hoffman might be pushing pills on her acolytes and even injecting them with God knows what.

Speaker 5 In fact, Cecil had some evidence that Terry was throwing out needles, syringes, countless pill bottles. Her trash even had a suspicious letter postmarked from San Diego.
It read,

Speaker 5 Here's your bulk order plus the samples. Number one is a new formula that's slightly more complex and will cost 35 cents more per capsule.

Speaker 5 It should contain more amphetamine along with a balancer to mitigate side effects.

Speaker 5 Number two is the basic E formula without the final purification step to remove all amphetamines.

Speaker 3 E here,

Speaker 5 I think is safe to say, is ecstasy. The white pills?

Speaker 5 The drug that was found in Don's system?

Speaker 5 Terry was no doctor.

Speaker 5 Why was she buying amphetamines?

Speaker 5 If she was giving her followers drugs, then maybe Cecil could go after her for a new charge. A local TV station interviewed him in February of 1990.

Speaker 5 This is nearly a year and a half after Don Hoffman overdosed and left behind that harrowing video. And three months after the Goodmans took their lives and were found decomposing.

Speaker 6 Cecil Emerson heads up the DA's investigation of Hoffman, says he believes she is practicing medicine without a license, and that can be dangerous.

Speaker 7 Would you want

Speaker 7 a tree surgeon doing open-heart surgery on you? Is the way I look at it.

Speaker 5 So Cecil's investigation pivoted to trying to get Terry for giving pills.

Speaker 5 This is when the DA finally admitted on record that they were pursuing a criminal investigation.

Speaker 5 But then, multiple people told me, just before the grand jury hearing was to be held, Terry's case was pulled from the docket.

Speaker 5 The criminal case against Terry seemed to be a lost cause.

Speaker 5 It was deeply disappointing for victims' families, who had in some cases been waiting 15 years for justice.

Speaker 5 Some even questioned whether Terry had influential followers within the Justice Department or politics who might have been able to summarily quash any trial. But Terry wasn't out of the water yet.

Speaker 5 After she filed for bankruptcy, the IRS and FBI launched an investigation into her.

Speaker 5 This would be the final showdown.

Speaker 2 These shark eyes, those cold, dark eyes.

Speaker 5 The most sophisticated sociopath I've ever observed.

Speaker 10 Her love of money just was so evil.

Speaker 2 She wasn't accustomed to anyone saying no to her.

Speaker 11 I kind of pulled on a thread and the sweater came undone.

Speaker 9 They're saying that I wanted her to die and I hypnotized her and got her to die and all this bullshit stuff.

Speaker 5 Why do you think it was so difficult to tie Terry to these deaths?

Speaker 8 Because there's no smoking gun.

Speaker 5 From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scary Terry. I'm Jonathan Hirsch.

Speaker 5 Chapter 6.

Speaker 5 I need some money, honey.

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Speaker 5 When Terry filed for bankruptcy, she did so amid a snowball of legal issues that went went back several years.

Speaker 5 Don Hoffman died in September 1988. A wrongful death suit was filed.
The Goodmans died in 89, another wrongful death.

Speaker 5 And two years later, by October of 1991, Terry had filed for bankruptcy.

Speaker 5 This was not a normal bankruptcy case. And these were not normal creditors.
Because it wasn't just MasterCard or a mortgage company that wanted their money back. It was the victims' families.

Speaker 5 How many items have been sold?

Speaker 5 I have sold

Speaker 5 to Audubon. Audubon Prince.

Speaker 5 And what

Speaker 5 amount did you derive from those shipments?

Speaker 5 $65,000.

Speaker 5 This is Jim Barklow, the lawyer who helped Sandra's brother contest her will at one of these creditor meetings.

Speaker 5 Jim Barklow asked who she sold the Audubons to.

Speaker 5 The sale happened on the last day of 1990, just months before she filed for bankruptcy.

Speaker 14 To a gentleman named Roger Simon.

Speaker 5 A gentleman. named Roger Simon.

Speaker 15 That Roger Simon had stayed with you on Christmas holidays this year.

Speaker 5 You mean the guy you spent Christmas with this year?

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 15 What type of business is Mr. Simon in?

Speaker 14 Nutritional sales.

Speaker 5 Nutritional sales?

Speaker 15 Pharmaceuticals?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 14 Nutrition like vitamins.

Speaker 3 Herbs.

Speaker 3 Ah, herbs.

Speaker 5 Quite a lucrative business, I gotta say, these herbs. Enough to buy a couple of pieces of land in Colorado? and a bunch of very expensive artwork?

Speaker 5 It seems too convenient that her boyfriend had that kind of money lying around.

Speaker 5 It does seem like another, simpler answer is possible. Maybe Terry wasn't that bright when it came to money.
She collected things, people, and cash the way she collected junk in her house.

Speaker 5 Cravenly and indiscriminately.

Speaker 5 As the meeting progressed, you can hear Terry becoming increasingly agitated.

Speaker 15 So are you familiar with that account? It's in your name.

Speaker 5 Uh, yes.

Speaker 15 That account is not listed in your schedules.

Speaker 5 The account he's talking about was opened in 1988, the year before the Goodmans died. The same couple who donated more than $100K to Terry before they died.

Speaker 5 The checks were written to cash and had been addressed to David and Glenda Goodman. Jim Barklow wanted an explanation.

Speaker 14 I had David and Glenda Goodman put this in an account for me.

Speaker 14 I wrote the checks to David and Glenda Goodman.

Speaker 14 They cashed them and they gave me the cash and I gave it to my husband.

Speaker 5 Why not just make a withdrawal from your own account? Unless the plan was to hide the flow of money for some reason.

Speaker 15 This will show and demonstrate the debtor's ability and knowledge of how to manipulate bank accounts and transactions through bank accounts without showing the money being directed to the source that it was supposed to have been directed.

Speaker 5 You can hear Terry scoff on tape when Jim said this.

Speaker 5 He believed she knew how to hide assets, that she was capable of it, despite the way she made it seem.

Speaker 14 Maybe

Speaker 14 my mind is too too monotonous.

Speaker 15 Ms. Hoffman, why

Speaker 15 did you write the checks to the Goodmans if the cash was supposed to go to Don Hoffman?

Speaker 14 Because

Speaker 14 I borrowed the money from David and Glenda Goodman,

Speaker 14 and my husband later came to me and said, quote,

Speaker 14 I need some money, honey.

Speaker 5 Don had asked for the money in cash, and the Goodmans had offered to cash the check. Easy, right?

Speaker 15 Can you not go to the bank and ask for a cashier's check or cash?

Speaker 14 Yes, I could.

Speaker 15 Would you tell me why you did it?

Speaker 14 Because David and Glinda offered to do it, and I did it.

Speaker 15 All right, let me ask you why.

Speaker 14 And I'll just say the rest of it. I think later, this is exactly the money that my husband gave his children that they won't admit to.

Speaker 15 Let me ask you why those amounts. You'll notice the amounts are in

Speaker 15 less than 10,000.

Speaker 14 I wish Don Hoffman was here to answer that question.

Speaker 15 I'm sure they join you in that, Mrs. Hoffman.

Speaker 5 Terry seemed to be accusing Don Hoffman of grifting her.

Speaker 5 If anything, these creditor meetings were a red flag. Another indicator that Terry Hoffman needed to be stopped.

Speaker 5 That's how an FBI field agent by the name of Jerry Milton got a visit to his office in Dallas.

Speaker 2 This middle-aged couple walks in and it's Chuck and Gail Cleaver.

Speaker 5 They'd never given up hope in finding justice for their daughter, Devereux.

Speaker 2 And they start telling me this story about this Terry Lee Hoffman.

Speaker 2 And I'm listening to it and I'm going, well, this is interesting.

Speaker 2 She wanted to avoid those lawsuits. and so allegedly she filed bankruptcy to do that.

Speaker 2 So I look at that and I go, all right, well, she's getting a lot of insurance policies and been left a lot of stuff in wills. She's probably got a lot of cash or other things or jewelry and so on.

Speaker 2 What happened to all those assets?

Speaker 5 Some of the ways an FBI agent might investigate a case like this weren't exactly possible in Terry's situation. Her exes, at least the ones involved in the group, two of them were dead.

Speaker 5 And the people close to her, they didn't want to talk to the FBI.

Speaker 5 The cult-like nature of the group sort of prohibited that kind of shoe leather investigation.

Speaker 5 And so, Jerry had to resort to what's known as trash covers.

Speaker 2 That's an old tried-and-true method.

Speaker 2 It is legal for law enforcement to dig through your trash if you've left it out by the side of the road and because it's considered abandoned property by the courts but in terry's case this also became an issue the story was white hot in the press and terry's close circle knew it victims families had also come looking for clues in terry's trash they had already picked up on the fact that the families of the people who had died were already looking through her trash.

Speaker 2 So I think what they were probably doing is should burn it or have a follower take it off somewhere.

Speaker 5 And to get a warrant, either to raid safety deposit boxes or her home, they would need probable cause.

Speaker 5 The FBI can't just storm your house because they believe you're buying jewelry in cash and hiding it to protect your wealth.

Speaker 4 They need proof.

Speaker 2 One of the issues is, and I think this probably happened.

Speaker 2 I would definitely think somebody in this situation would do this. They'd take a lot of that and

Speaker 2 they would hawk a lot of it, sell it just for cash, convert it, and then literally maybe even give a shoebox of money to a follower and say, keep this in your closet kind of thing.

Speaker 2 There's a saying we have, and it probably applies in a lot of areas, in the South and Midwest, it's called poor mouthing. People always talk about how bad they got it.

Speaker 2 You know, they don't want to seem ostentatious or whatever. And Hoffman seemed to poor mouth a lot when this was going on.

Speaker 5 This is part of what made the financial crimes part of this so puzzling. In public, Terry came across as a bit of a bumpkin.

Speaker 5 Oversized clothes, a thick, almost turn-of-the-century twang to her voice, she'd roll into court like a Texas tumbleweed.

Speaker 5 It became part of the defense.

Speaker 2 Like I said, she had a very vigorous defense.

Speaker 5 Terry's defense would have the public believe this was a witch hunt. Authorities had torches in their hand, Shirley Bacchus Labelle, Terry's counsel, told the Dallas Morning News.

Speaker 5 And they were leading the townspeople up the hill to burn Frankenstein.

Speaker 5 The point was to downplay Terry's ability to manipulate anyone, though Frankenstein is a metaphor for your client is an interesting choice.

Speaker 5 Anyway, at the time, Jerry wondered how the supposedly destitute Terry was even paying for her lawyer.

Speaker 2 Her followers would write her checks gladly to pay for her defense. So it could have come from there, but a lot of it had to come from somewhere else.

Speaker 2 I saw these people who had died and there were life insurance policies and wills and so on, but they were spread out over enough time that she would have had the opportunity to hide that money, to convert it into cash or gold or whatever you wanted to.

Speaker 2 You try to convert it into something, and that's what I believe probably happened.

Speaker 5 So, in short, Terry either bought assets, jewelry, property, et cetera, through her followers in a way that would never be traced back to her, or she bought a bunch of stuff and sold it for cash and stuffed it away in a mattress like my Hungarian grandma used to do.

Speaker 2 And there were a lot of dead ends. Because one of the things that happened,

Speaker 2 as I recall,

Speaker 2 she kept going back and amending her bankruptcy schedules. Because normally

Speaker 2 once you file, you file, and that's it. The bankruptcy moves forward.

Speaker 5 Things just kept popping up, property, assets that she forgot to mention, little bits and pieces of things that she'd have to share in.

Speaker 5 Jerry said they were in a hurry to pin her with an indictment, though. He thinks, as a result, they didn't have enough time to build an airtight case.

Speaker 2 And the problem is when you try to rush into cases, there's only so much you can do.

Speaker 2 I was actually set to, I had it approved and everything.

Speaker 2 I was going to travel to the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. Hoffman had a,

Speaker 2 it was her boyfriend or fiancé at the time or something like that that was in med school down there.

Speaker 5 Roger Simon.

Speaker 5 Terry had started dating him after Don Hoffman's death. He was from the Chicago area originally and had been involved in CDBMS for some time before that.

Speaker 5 He'd gone to medical school in the West Indies.

Speaker 2 We believed that she had transferred a lot of the stuff to him,

Speaker 2 a lot of the property.

Speaker 2 So I wanted to go interview him and we were going to subpoena him to the grand jury because loyalty does go a long way, but when you're sitting in front of a grand jury or in court and

Speaker 2 that willingness to lie for someone suddenly starts dissipating pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 And so I was literally going to fly to Miami, fly from there to Antigua and take a boat to Montserrat and interview the guy.

Speaker 5 Before he left for med school, Roger had given a power of attorney over to Terry. This allowed her to access his bank accounts.

Speaker 5 The argument was that Roger needed help paying his bills, his mortgage, while overseas. And so he gave that ability to Terry.

Speaker 5 But it could have also been an easy way to launder money for her. Whatever cash she'd held on to could be used by him, and no one would be the wiser.

Speaker 5 Jerry planned to subpoena Roger Simon and to escort him back to Dallas, but the grand jury date approached too quickly. They wouldn't have enough time.

Speaker 5 Throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, there was this uneasy tension between the laws Terry actually ran afoul of and the larger manipulation that families wished to hold her accountable for.

Speaker 16 Do you swear that the testimony you're about to give should be the truth, the truth, and the thing of the truth? Yes.

Speaker 16 This is in cause number 39138177 SAF-13,

Speaker 16 a chapter 13 bankruptcy. Are you Terry Lee Hoffman the debtor in this matter?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 5 In late summer of 1992, Terry was deposed. She's sobbing at the beginning as her counsel explained that Terry was on medication.

Speaker 5 that the stress of this case might have pushed her over the edge. Quite the irony there.

Speaker 5 She invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Speaker 16 Do the teachings of conscious development, Body, Mind, and Soul Inc. include teachings that are known as the Magic Circle? I invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Speaker 16 The Magic Circle documentation indicates that it was copyrighted in 1970 by Terry Cooley.

Speaker 16 Is Terry Cooley are you Terry Cooley Hoffman? I invoke the Fifth Amendment. This object here, can you tell me how that's used in your teaching? I invoke the Fifth Amendment.
Is this a shield?

Speaker 16 I invoke the Fifth Amendment. Is that included in the teachings of the Magic Circle? I invoke the Fifth Amendment.
I invoke the Fifth Amendment. Are those your teachings? I invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Speaker 16 I invoke the Fifth Amendment. I invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Speaker 5 This lasted for 45 minutes.

Speaker 5 In the winter of 1993, Terry Lee Hoffman was indicted on bankruptcy fraud charges.

Speaker 2 So I drive over there and then eventually we got it and that's it. And so arrest warrant is issued, but she actually surrendered herself.

Speaker 5 It was one of the most bizarre bankruptcy fraud cases anyone I talked to had ever heard of. But it was also a case of ones and zeros.

Speaker 5 Did she have cash stored away here? Did she not claim property there?

Speaker 5 This would be the victim's family's last hope at finding justice. Their last chance to stop the manipulation, the grift, the senseless deaths needed to end.

Speaker 4 Nicole Ernest Pate was 21 years old when a predator assaulted her in her own home.

Speaker 5 He is kind kind of the boogeyman in the night that you are truly afraid of.

Speaker 4 She went straight to the cops.

Speaker 8 She said, this sounds like some sort of movie plot.

Speaker 4 No one believed her until one day, the man who helped put the Golden State killer behind bars helped figure out the serial predator's pattern.

Speaker 5 This is a serious offender.

Speaker 4 He'd been hiding in plain sight. But even when the attacker was unmasked, Nicole still had questions.

Speaker 1 The why, the what, the why means.

Speaker 4 She wanted to meet him.

Speaker 4 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Hunting the Boogeyman. Available now on the binge.
Search for Hunting the Boogeyman wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today.

Speaker 5 Bob Webster was a prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office when the bankruptcy fraud indictments came down against Terry.

Speaker 11 I think I first learned of it in the newspaper, and then I came to learn that we had an open investigation on Terry Hoffman involving some shenanigans in the bankruptcy court.

Speaker 5 A bankruptcy investigation, no doubt, thrust into the view of the federal government by the Cleavers.

Speaker 11 You know, the Cleavers were very, very active. They took a very aggressive role to

Speaker 11 try and seek justice.

Speaker 5 Bob was brought on after the indictment to support the lead prosecutor in the case, Larry Jarrett.

Speaker 11 I, of course, knew that there was a lot of smoke. There was background.

Speaker 11 There was noise associated with

Speaker 11 the defendant that undoubtedly was motivating the government.

Speaker 5 The smoke Bob's talking about is that same smoke the reporters had been seeing. The drama of Terry's dark opera wasn't lost on them.

Speaker 11 You know, we were not prosecuting a cult. We were not prosecuting evil.
We were prosecuting somebody that we believe defrauded the bankruptcy court.

Speaker 5 And so the bankruptcy case against Terry Hoffman raises the same fundamental questions about all of the financial crimes allegations against her.

Speaker 5 Was she a criminal mastermind or a profoundly incompetent person?

Speaker 3 Or both?

Speaker 11 I can't tell you which end of the spectrum that is. I think it,

Speaker 11 you know, I drove by her house every day that I drove home, and, you know, it looked like it had needed a new roof for the last 10 years.

Speaker 11 Lawnscaping was ill-kempt. I struggled with exactly that kind of attempt to get an understanding of what sort of defendant she was or would be.

Speaker 11 It's not unusual, in my experience, for FBI agents and government prosecutors to give more credit to defendants than they deserve, you know, in being masterminds, in being evil.

Speaker 11 You know, quite often they are just sad figures.

Speaker 5 Terry had certainly hired some of the best-in-class attorneys to represent her in the many cases levied against her. Her bankruptcy attorney, Jim Palmer, was quite well known around town at the time.

Speaker 5 In fact, he himself had been in the federal government's crosshairs for, get this, bankruptcy fraud. He was ultimately acquitted.
It was going to be a tough road to conviction.

Speaker 5 In fact, a couple of weeks before the trial, the prosecutors had to adjust their indictments against Terry because they no longer had enough evidence. Not a great sign.

Speaker 11 There were essentially three indictments in the case. You know, I think an expert in federal criminal prosecutions would say that that's

Speaker 11 a red flag.

Speaker 5 The trial took place over six days in November of 1993.

Speaker 11 We didn't even try hard to even go down the road of having the noise, the Mumbo Jumbo admitted at trial. She didn't take the stand, so we couldn't even inquire.

Speaker 5 Despite the narrow terms of the indictment, the court decided that Terry Lee Hoffman

Speaker 5 was guilty.

Speaker 5 Terry G

Speaker 5 was going to Terry jail.

Speaker 5 She appealed the case, requested bond while on appeal, which was denied. Terry would wait the results of her appeal from behind bars.

Speaker 5 It took about a year for the appeal to make its way to the Fifth Circuit.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, Terry was finally out of the hair of the families that had fought so long to see her pay. It wasn't everything, but it was something.
And something, as they say, is better than nothing.

Speaker 5 That is, as long as it stands. Which, sadly for the families, wasn't very long.

Speaker 11 You know, it's a singular event,

Speaker 11 almost a singular event, to have a criminal case thrown out by the Court of Appeals in the Fifth Circuit.

Speaker 11 You remember every one of those that you ever had to suffer. And honestly, it's the only

Speaker 11 case that I was ever in that resulted in a complete dismissal of the case for, you know, essentially the government not stating a crime.

Speaker 5 The very last effort at bringing Terry to justice.

Speaker 5 Twelve inexplicable deaths, a messy pile of lawsuits, and tomes of breadcrumbs in a fragmented case against the clever enigma of Terry Hoffman, Hoffman, conscious development yielded nothing.

Speaker 5 Deborah Cleaver, the bright and beautiful girl with a whole life ahead of her.

Speaker 5 The troubled lives of Sandra Cleaver, Glenn Cooley, Don Hoffman, Mary Levinson, Robin Ottston, Glenda and David Goodman, place markers in a path of scorched and deadly earth.

Speaker 5 Terry Hoffman was released from prison in 1995. She changed her name to Terry Lillia Keenley.
She never made news after that.

Speaker 5 She started a website where she sold photographs, quite dreadful ones, if you ask me. They look more like accidents than art.

Speaker 5 She remarried and lived out the rest of her life in relative obscurity in that house on Dunhaven Road.

Speaker 5 And then, on October 31st,

Speaker 5 2015, Terry Hoffman died.

Speaker 5 Halloween night. You can't make this stuff up.

Speaker 5 And her passing didn't do anything to resolve the many questions that remained unanswered.

Speaker 5 No, I don't, sort of.

Speaker 3 I feel that my spirit never thought.

Speaker 5 Was this really the end of the road?

Speaker 5 This story, for me, begins and ends with Gail.

Speaker 5 She's why I did it in the first place. Her love for her stepdaughter and her now-deceased husband, she carried the torch all these years.
And she deserved to have her family story told.

Speaker 5 Hi, Gail.

Speaker 8 Nice to meet you. So nice to meet you, Terry.

Speaker 5 Yeah, after all of our conversations.

Speaker 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 Wow, thank you.

Speaker 5 We drive around the neighborhood in North Dallas where she still lives, not far from Sandra Cleaver's old house and Terry's.

Speaker 5 But first, we've got an important visit to make.

Speaker 5 We're here at the Sparkman Hillcrest Cemetery in Dallas, which is the place where

Speaker 5 Devereux and Chuck are laid to rest

Speaker 5 in a mausoleum here at the cemetery. So

Speaker 5 Gail and I are going to walk over there

Speaker 5 and take a look and talk.

Speaker 5 What would you hope for the telling of

Speaker 5 the story of

Speaker 5 your kids,

Speaker 8 any child's life, any person's life

Speaker 8 from spiritual deception? And that's what it was. It was spiritual deception and plain evil.

Speaker 8 Plain evil and greed.

Speaker 8 Telling this story will be closure for me.

Speaker 8 Because if it impacts and saves anybody from that kind of evil,

Speaker 8 it'll be good enough for me. me.

Speaker 5 We walk through the empty halls of the mausoleum at Sparkman Hillcrest, looking for the cabinet on a high shelf where Devereaux and her daddy were interred together.

Speaker 5 I've come to believe there's really only one Black Lord in this cautionary tale, a remorseless grifter turned body snatcher.

Speaker 5 Even in death, they seek respite from her influence.

Speaker 5 Chuck told Gail he wanted his and Dev's ashes resting on the highest rung of the mausoleum so nobody could get to them. So nobody could take Deb's ashes like some kind of sick trophy.

Speaker 5 We're approaching Sandra Cleaver's home.

Speaker 5 My god, these houses, these are like estates.

Speaker 5 This is it.

Speaker 5 And when you see this house, what what emotions does this house evoke for you?

Speaker 1 I wish it were gone.

Speaker 5 Does it make you sad or

Speaker 5 angry, maybe? Angry. Oh, Terry wanted this house.

Speaker 5 We keep driving.

Speaker 5 So we're sitting in front of the house.

Speaker 5 And unlike all the houses that surround it, the lawn is overgrown. It's messy.

Speaker 5 There's a bunch of of old outdoor

Speaker 5 ceramic pots and artwork,

Speaker 5 there's

Speaker 5 broken rattan furniture in the front yard.

Speaker 5 There's a part of me that really wants to go inside,

Speaker 5 but of course

Speaker 5 this is an open carry state. I'm not about to go door-stepping somebody

Speaker 5 and risk my life.

Speaker 5 But I will say that in an area of immense wealth and resource,

Speaker 5 this house sticks out like a sore thumb.

Speaker 5 Anything you feel when you come here?

Speaker 8 I'm disgusted.

Speaker 5 It looks like an abandoned house.

Speaker 5 Like, I don't even know if anybody lives there.

Speaker 5 Want to drive down the arm?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 5 Which way way do I go?

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 And this, of course, is the alley where maybe 30 some odd years ago, y'all would have been scoping out

Speaker 5 the house,

Speaker 5 trying to see what was going on inside, yeah? Pretty much.

Speaker 5 As we bounced down the dirt road behind the house, gazing through the cracks in the fence, I saw broken chairs and a shed in the backyard.

Speaker 5 And I saw us,

Speaker 5 gazing through the dark looking glass of Terry's deeds. It's been nearly half a century since Devro died.
And what is different?

Speaker 5 Quite a bit, actually.

Speaker 5 Terry's origin story, we've proved, is about as factually accurate as the mythical biographies of the spiritual teachers she venerated.

Speaker 5 She preyed upon vulnerable, marginal people. She seduced them with a carefully designed nurturance.

Speaker 5 And when they were no longer useful to her, all she needed to do was gently encourage them to cross over that invisible line separating life and death, a line she'd primed them to unsee.

Speaker 5 And we know now that Terry was painting Devereux as a troubled soul possessed by the Black Lords.

Speaker 5 In fact, she was the target of one of the infamous Black Lord battles, the ones that happened in the living room of her mom, Sandra Cleaver.

Speaker 5 And multiple sources confirmed that the plan was for Devereux and Sandra to die that day, out on the rocks of the Wailupe Peninsula.

Speaker 5 Terry may have guarded against criminal prosecution, but we know the truth. She didn't pull the the trigger, but she did pull the strings.

Speaker 5 A horrific and unforgivable series of crimes that she deserves to go down in infamy for.

Speaker 5 There is one last piece we should discuss. The money.

Speaker 5 And the possibility that someone a man had been helping Terry stash away money for years.

Speaker 5 There's been no evidence proven in a court of law that Terry's bankruptcy was a long con to get out of the two wrongful death suits she no doubt stood to lose everything in.

Speaker 5 But there is something that came up when I started looking into this. A name I heard time and time again.

Speaker 5 Roger Simon. Roger Simon.
Roger Simon.

Speaker 16 Roger Simon. Roger Simon.

Speaker 5 Roger Simon.

Speaker 5 Was he the man behind the woman?

Speaker 5 We first hear about Roger Simon in the 80s, when Terry expanded her reach to a small community of CDBMS followers in the Chicago-Evanston area.

Speaker 5 He had a house there, and according to followers at the time, was an herbalist. On December 31st, 1990, Roger Simon makes a major payment to Terry.
He buys up $65K in Audubon prints from her.

Speaker 5 Prints she'd gotten in the settlement over Sandra Cleaver's estate. This was, mind you, two years after Don Hoffman's death.

Speaker 5 And in each relationship we know of with Terry, she began seeing somebody almost simultaneous to the deaths of her spouses. Then in the early 90s, Roger decided to go to medical school.

Speaker 5 in Montserrat in the West Indies. And before he did, he gave over power of attorney of his accounts to Terry Hoffman to pay his bills while he was out of town.

Speaker 5 That was all fine until she started writing checks out of his accounts. The body count rose and the wrongful death suits poured in.

Speaker 5 She filed for bankruptcy. October 91, she filed the paperwork.
Roger also, according to Jim Barklow during the creditors' hearings, threw down 20 grand to purchase land Terry owned in Colorado.

Speaker 5 The power of attorney issue underpinned one of the charges against Terry by the federal government. She had not disclosed that she controlled that account.

Speaker 5 Ultimately, the government determined in the reversal of her conviction that she hadn't intended to withhold information from creditors about her access to Simon's accounts.

Speaker 5 She just didn't put two and two together.

Speaker 5 As far as most people are concerned, this is where the matter of Roger Simon and Terry Hoffman petered out. Terry was released from prison in 1995.

Speaker 5 This is where most left off and where we picked up.

Speaker 5 It's unclear from the records we have whether Roger ever completed medical school, though he lists himself as having a medical degree.

Speaker 5 We do know, however, that he returned returned to the States, to Texas, in fact,

Speaker 3 Dallas.

Speaker 5 And this is where things start to get a little weird. In 2002, long after the dust settled on the bankruptcy fraud case, Roger Simon decided to change his name to Roger Keenley.

Speaker 5 Six months after that, Roger Keenley gets married. The address on the marriage paperwork,

Speaker 5 The house on Dunhaven.

Speaker 5 Terry's house. And his bride?

Speaker 5 Terry Lee Hoffman.

Speaker 5 Or, I should say, Terry Lillia Keenley.

Speaker 5 So now, the man who bought up her assets to the equivalent of nearly $200,000 today, whom Terry was accused of unlawfully using his accounts by not disclosing that information to creditors,

Speaker 5 he was married to her under a different name.

Speaker 5 His property was now hers too.

Speaker 5 And of course, should anyone come knocking, you needn't worry about testifying against your spouse.

Speaker 5 I wrote Roger.

Speaker 3 I called.

Speaker 5 asking for comment. He never responded.

Speaker 5 So I can't say for certain as to why he changed his name, whether he'd been holding property and funds that Terry wished to shield from her creditors and detractors.

Speaker 5 But multiple experts on financial crimes, including Bob Webster, told me that if the goal had been to park Terry's cash and assets, marrying someone in possession of those assets, cash, property, et cetera, would be an easy way to do it.

Speaker 5 And of course, changing one's name further obscures the chain of events.

Speaker 11 I don't recall the specific circumstances of Roger Simon's participation in the case, but if she was parking assets, knowing that if they cleared bankruptcy and she was going to be able to get to him on the rebound after the bankruptcy, he would be complicit, of course, in a bankruptcy fraud.

Speaker 11 I don't think we ever explored that possibility.

Speaker 5 When I told the former investigator in the case about Roger's name change, they instantly instantly raised the same question I had.

Speaker 5 Was Mr. Simon the straw man after all?

Speaker 5 I had one last stop in Dallas before my flight home. A bar near where Janine Snyder first met Terry in the early 70s called Louise Tavern.

Speaker 5 It used to be a haunt for Secret Service and FBI guys, back when the Dallas headquarters were located downtown. The Oklahoma City bombing changed all that.

Speaker 5 I'm here to meet Jerry Melton, the FBI field agent who first investigated Terry for financial crimes. He shows me these portrait sketches made by a regular on the walls.

Speaker 5 Many of them legendary figures in Dallas law enforcement. He brought along a buddy with him, an old colleague from the FBI.
He's a private investigator now.

Speaker 5 The bar is known for its pizza and martinis.

Speaker 5 He points to the booth where the FBI guys used to sit back in the day.

Speaker 5 I lay out my case for them.

Speaker 5 The questions I could spend the next decade trying to answer with certainty. And they mostly wave it off.

Speaker 5 You just got to tell the story you know, they said.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 let it go.

Speaker 5 It was getting late. I said good night and good luck to Jerry and his friend.

Speaker 5 Then exited the bar

Speaker 5 into the hot Texas night.

Speaker 5 Scary Terry is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. It was hosted and reported by me, Jonathan Hirsch.
Cooper Moll is our lead producer and co-reported the series with me. Catherine St.

Speaker 5 Louis is our story editor. I'm our executive producer.
Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. We use music from Epidemic Sound and APM.
Our associate producer is Zoe Culkin.

Speaker 5 Our fact-checker is Tracy Lee. Our production managers are Tamika Balance Kalazny and Sammy Allison.
Our lawyers are Rachel Goldberg, Allison Sherry, and Lauren Pagoni.

Speaker 5 Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, Jamie Myers, Liz Taylor, Daniel Ralston, Alex Pennebaker, George Rodriguez, and Peter Elkin, whose reporting for the Texas Monthly is an essential piece of the story of Terry Hoffman.