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Hello, it's Andrea, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.
We are working hard on season four right now. We are going to have that coming to your ears in early May. And we have some really big things in store for 2024. We're going to be bringing you two full seasons, and we're going to be bringing you new content every week in the feed. So we are officially an always-on podcast, which I am really excited about. And we are starting with a look back at
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We'll be right back.
So, in the meantime, between now and season four, we're also going to be bringing you new episodes on what's happening in Lehigh, Pennsylvania. We're going to be bringing you an update on the Kowalski case and some other stuff as well. If you want even more from us in the meantime, you can subscribe on Patreon or on Apple, and we've got...
Lots of exclusive bonus content there, including full coverage of the Kowalski trial, recaps of the Gypsy Rose Blanchard Lifetime series, and coming up, I'm going to be doing a deep dive with Dr. Bex, who is my frequent contributor there, on the Justina Pelletier case, which is something that a lot of you have asked about. So in the meantime, please enjoy the very first episode of Nobody Should Believe Me.
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Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. People believe their eyes. That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this is that
We do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If you questioned everything that everyone told you, you couldn't make it through your day. My older sister has been investigated over suspicions of abuse brought by the doctors who were treating her children. I'm Andrea Dunlop. This is Nobody Should Believe Me. I am a mom. Is that a tickle meal?
I am a novelist. I am the author of three books, including most recently We Came Here to Forget, which is inspired by my family's story.
My sister has been investigated for Munchausen by proxy child abuse on two occasions that I'm aware of, though I want to be clear that she has never been charged with a crime. I'll get into a little bit more detail about my family's involvement in the first investigation in a future episode. The second investigation concerned her younger child, whom neither I nor anyone in my extended family has ever met, because we've been estranged from her for over a decade.
The extent of my involvement in the second investigation was to share truthful background information with a detective who reached out to my family and several other relevant authorities. Everything that has happened with my sister has had a huge impact on my life, and this podcast is really about me looking for answers.
The stories I'm going to be sharing about my sister in this podcast concern my lived experience with her and mostly happened prior to her having children. I'm not a medical professional, and any opinions that I share in this podcast are just that, my opinions, informed by research and my own experience. We're going to be getting into all of the nuances of this in future episodes, but I wanted to start you off with a working definition of Munchausen by proxy because there is so much confusion around this term.
We used the term Munchausen by proxy a lot in this podcast because it is the most well-known of the terms used for this. But Munchausen by proxy actually encompasses two different things. One is the act of medical child abuse, which involves a parent or caregiver fabricating, exaggerating, or inducing illness in their child.
The second is factitious disorder imposed on another, which is the DSM term for individuals who commit medical child abuse in order to obtain emotional gratification.
So even though this is a mental illness, it is rarely diagnosed, and it's never diagnosed in the absence of a conviction for medical child abuse. Even in the most famous case of our era, the Dede Blanchard case, she was never officially diagnosed with infectious disorder imposed on another or Munchausen by proxy. She was also never charged with a crime. When I started writing my third novel, We Came Here to Forget...
I really quickly realized that it was going to be about sisters. And then I started getting into the topic of Munchausen by proxy more directly and realized that it just felt very urgent for me to write about. And I think that a huge part of that was because I was working through my own feelings about that while I was getting ready to become a mom. When I first came across Hope Ybarra's case, it was in Deanna Boyd's reporting for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
There were just these uncanny similarities about really Hope's life and the story of her family that struck me right away as being so similar to my sister and my family's story. When I was pregnant with my first child, the specter of these investigations into my sister just hung really heavily on me. And in addition to that,
You know, her absence from my life during this time was really palpable. She'd been out of my life for many years by the time my daughter was born. And after some of the things that she'd done, which I'll get to, I felt really strongly that she needed help. Because of that, she cut me and my entire family off.
After the second time she was investigated, I set out to learn everything I could about Munchausen by proxy in an attempt to come to grips with what had happened in my family. As most people would, I went online and I found the website of Dr. Mark Feldman, who is a professor at the University of Alabama and one of the foremost experts in the world on Munchausen by proxy and other factitious disorders. And I reached out to him.
The American Psychiatric Association, since 1980, has recognized factitious disorder as an ailment when the person induces or feigns illness in themselves. And that's called either factitious disorder imposed on self or more commonly Munchausen syndrome. When the person is feigning, exaggerating, or inducing illness in another person,
That's still a factitious disorder, but we refer to it often as munchausen by proxy.
And then malingering is when a person does it not for emotional gratification, but more to acquire tangible goals like money, disability payments, or other rewards like evasion of criminal prosecution or evasion of military service. So there are subtle differences, but they're important because in some sense,
Munchausen by proxy is paramount because it's a form of child abuse. The others are not. Until you understand the psychology behind it a little bit, in that, you know, folks that have Munchausen, that psychopathology, they get a dopamine rush from the attention that they get
for having a medical issue. So it can be seen like an addiction. So when you understand it in those terms, it's a lot easier to understand the why. It's a maladaptive coping mechanism that people use to get attention that they feel they need and can't get otherwise. Why a particular person develops it, that is...
more of a mystery than what it actually is or like how it functions. So all I knew was that my big sister had lied to me about something really serious and that is a very hard thing to wrap your head around. I've spent the last decade of my life trying to make sense of my history with my sister and it is complicated and it's complicated to talk about.
The truth is, there is so much about our shared history that I will never know. And I find myself still trying to make sense of memories that don't make any sense. There are some incidents where I do know definitively that she lied. And those are the memories that I can share with you. Many others, I can't.
So I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Munchausen by proxy at the time. I was doing interviews on the topic. I was talking to a lot of experts. And throughout all of that, you know, I found that this story of Hope Ybarra and her family just really stuck with me.
I just had this very strong feeling that I could get to the bottom of something that I needed answered for myself by talking to Hope and her family. I started trying to get in touch with Hope's family members. I knew she had three siblings.
I reached out to Robin Putscher and she just happened to be living at the time about an hour and a half south of me. So she was actually the first person that I sat down to talk to face to face. You ready? My producer Tina and I, who both live in Seattle, drove south to the Tacoma area where Robin was living at the time.
So what was hope like growing up?
She was like the perfect sister. You know, she was the perfect student. She was the oldest and she had all the responsibility in the house. And she never let that bother her. You know, like parents put a lot of weight on their kids, especially a mom of four. Dinners and getting us in the shower and the laundry. And that was all Hope's kind of responsibility. And she just carried it. It wasn't like at the end of the day, she goes, I shouldn't have to do this or why do I have to make dinner? She just did it.
As I was talking to Robin, that feeling that I'd started out with of Hope's life and family being a parallel to my own was just deepening in this really extraordinary way. I really wanted to talk to the rest of her family and just fill this picture out. And so I was able to get in touch with her father, Paul Putscher, and her younger brother, Nick Putscher, who both live in Fort Worth, Texas. My name is Paul Putscher.
I'm the father of Hope Ibarra. We didn't really notice anything, any issues whatsoever before anything started happening. And it was, everything was cool. Hope's younger brother, Nick, really looked up to her during their childhood. So Hope was the oldest of the four of us. We were really, really close, especially as I got into high school. And that's really where my relationship with Hope had grown a lot.
She was the first person in my family that had gone to college. Mom and dad were always really proud. She did really well. She was doing well in her life, and it was kind of an inspiration for me. I could talk to her about what she had gone through, how she got to where she's at, and lean on her for kind of a resource because I wanted to go to school. I wanted to eventually be able to help take care of mom and dad and do all of that stuff. Again, Robin, Hope's younger sister.
You know, she participated in all of our stuff. My brother and my sports events, and she would take us. She would be our taxi, our chauffeur, and she still had such an exuberant social life. You know, she had friends, and she was in clubs, and she was in marching band. In jazz band, she played the saxophone, and then she played the clarinet in marching band, you know, and she could play the piano, and her and my mom shared that commonality. I could never learn, you know. She just was very outgoing. ♪
I'm just sitting here smiling because I think talking about this part, it reminds me so much. You know, my sister was...
She had this incredibly lighthearted personality. She was magnetic. She was smart. She always had a ton of friends. She had this really close circle of friends from band. She played the French horn. I looked up to her in terms of, you know, just in the way that little sisters look up to big sisters. She just seemed to have things, you know, more figured out. She always had boyfriends. She's incredibly warm and kind.
Very smart and so funny. So silly. People loved her. Pretty green eyes. Really all-American girl next door. Sounds like hopeless. Really similar. So striking to me. That's scary. Yeah, it's almost like it's a little eerie. There was certainly a definitive moment where I lost my sister. You know, 10 years ago, I remember really vividly having
what may turn out to be the final conversation that I have with her in my life. But at the same time, I also felt like I lost her little by little. In my memory, there's a person who is this funny, vibrant person with all of these interests. Someone who's a swimmer, loves horses, and who was the partner in crime to all my childhood adventures.
Someone who was this loving, warm person. And she just disappeared little by little over the years. And her strange behaviors just escalated. Here's Hope Ybarra's father, Paul Putscher, who told me about an incident that happened to Hope in high school.
So, you know, really wasn't until about 16 when she fell out of bed on a... We just tiled her floor and she fell on the tile floor and hurt her back, supposedly. Like, she couldn't walk and she was, you know... She was in a wheelchair for a couple months and thinking back, this was probably the first sign of something's amuck, but...
being young parents ourselves, we just kind of blew right through it and rolled her around in the wheelchair. She was in the band. And so we went to Texas Stadium. The football team was playing in playoffs and the band was out on the field and we rolled her out in her uniform out onto the field. And my boss got to roll her back and we're doing wheelies and everything. And it was a good six months, eight months of
Heavy caregiving, heavy, you know, heavy, heavy love and for all of us. And finally she got better, but there was no rhyme or reason. Two or three doctors said there's nothing wrong with her. There's no reason she shouldn't be walking. My sister had the same thing at the same age, not from falling out of bed, but she had when she was 16 and
She was really active, had always been healthy. She was a swimmer. And she had this mysterious back injury, and it wouldn't go away. And she was wearing this big plastic brace. She convinced doctors to do surgery on her. I want to clarify here that I didn't know then, and I still don't know,
how many of my sister's ailments that she had in high school and beyond were real and how many were fabricated. She had a series of surgeries on her back and knee that look different to me and my family now looking back, knowing what we know. There is one incident that stuck with me because we did have evidence.
When she was in high school, she started losing her hair. Obviously, that is like the sort of nightmarish thing for a teenage girl. My mom took her to the dermatologist to have a look at it, and the dermatologist pulled my mother aside and said, she's not losing it, she's shaving it. That was a very definitive, like, oh, we know that she was faking that.
I think my parents tried to get her to go speak to a therapist at the time and she just sort of blew them off. You know, she was always able to explain these things away. She always had an uncanny ability to just sort of like move forward. My parents have gone through all that same thing of like in the light of what happened after. But, you know, so much of what doctors base everything off of is what the patient's reporting their pain to be, right? Again, Robin.
So seizures in high school and then the paraplegia that came along with that and then her miraculous recovery came about her senior year. So her goal was to be able to walk across the stage. So she managed to be able to regain her ability to walk just in time to be able to walk across the stage and graduate. And then she was walking and then she went to college.
Yeah, it was really similar with my sister, actually. It was, there are things that I think for my parents, they can look back even further. For me, definitely high school is where, yeah, she started having all these problems with her knee, with her back. She had a couple of surgeries. And even then, it's just, you know, the doctors were basing what they were doing off of what she was saying. ♪
That summer, they packed her up and they brought her to school over in El Paso, Texas, and it was this
very typical taking your child to the university. My mom and dad went and helped her pack into her dorm and she was doing great, you know, very typical things. She was participating in band, obviously. She also picked up jujitsu and was taking classes at night to be able to, you know, defend herself. And she was all of a sudden just thriving again in school. And then my mom came
Got a call that Hope had had a seizure at school. They had found her in her dorm on the ground. And so my mom, of course, rushed down there and mortified that her daughter is so far away and needing her. And so she got her back on her feet, got her back into school, made sure everything was fine. Then when she was in college, she'd met her husband-to-be, Fabian Ybarra, and they had actually had their first child while Hope was still in school.
She managed to have this baby and she supposedly had complications, broke her tailbone. So my mom was there nursing her back to health, you know, with this new dad and this new mom and the new dad didn't know how to take care of a child. And they shared funny stories. He peed on them, the first diaper change. And still at this point, she was a couple years into her schooling. She was going to become a veterinarian.
She decided now as a new mom that she couldn't do that because she had to take care of the family. And so she changed her program and got her degree in chemistry. And so then they got married, a great, beautiful wedding, and had another child after that. Very typical family. She was working, is a chemist. He was a school teacher. They were raising their now two children. They had a home.
Just, I could say the all-American dream. Even at this point, everything we have been through, nothing said something wasn't right. It really seemed like Hope had everything someone could want, including a happy marriage and beautiful family. When we spoke to Fabian Ybarra in Fort Worth, he had a somewhat different take on things. I don't think we were in love. I think we were just trying to make it work. After, like, the second year...
My son, I think that's when it started. Something clicked. I believe when my first daughter, the middle child, when she was born, that's when you saw everything changed. And they had a two-story house, and seven months along, Hope fell down the stairs and went into preterm labor.
And so here this baby was born, 28 weeks. She was a pound and a half or, you know, some ridiculously small weight. And she spent months in the NICU. And so here we are now, a family dedicated to taking care of Hope and her family and her kids. And she's power-throwing everything and still being a devout mom and wife and husband.
Managing it all so well, that's whenever you could start to see that things were changing a little bit with Hope. I can't even say that she lost her light at that point, but that's whenever things, that's what sets the rest of things into motion. After Hope had her second child with Fabian, she later told her family that she was pregnant with twins.
This detail of the pregnancy with twin girls really stuck with me because we'd had an identical situation in my family where my sister told us that she was pregnant with twins. So when I was in my 20s, she was with a partner and she got pregnant. You know, they were engaged, so it was a really exciting thing. It was like a really happy piece of news.
And she told us that she was having twins and they were twin girls. And I was living in New York at the time. I saw her when I was home for Thanksgiving and I was so excited. I knew their names. We bought gifts.
My parents and I, we're all out of town. I think we were out of town together. We were in Las Vegas. And my sister called us. She was about six months pregnant at the time, so pretty far along. She called us and she said that she was going into labor early and she was going to the hospital. And my parents scrambled to get a flight home.
She was calling and giving us updates, and I was having these long conversations with her, and she was saying, they've got me in the hospital, they're holding me upside down so the babies stay in, kind of like a little bit gallows humor about it. And then she lost the babies and was so sad. I was so sad for her. I...
I was so excited to be an auntie, and I really felt that grief of losing those two little girls. And then things started to unravel really quickly. I think it was my dad who called me and said, you know, there's something about all of this that's not adding up. And I spoke to the friend who my sister had told me took her to the hospital when she was losing the babies.
That friend told me she had the understanding that my sister's fiancé had been the one to take her to the hospital and that they'd been there together when she lost the babies. That was impossible because he was living in Tennessee at the time and, unbeknownst to me at that moment, was no longer her fiancé. When I got his version of events many years later...
He told me that he'd had doubts throughout the pregnancy and eventually surmised that she had probably never been pregnant at all, which is the conclusion that we'd all eventually come to. I did confront her on this once.
during my final conversation with her that I had, which was during the first investigation into her. And I asked her how she expected me to believe her when she'd lied about something as serious as an entire pregnancy. She didn't deny it, but said indignantly, I don't know why you're bringing that up now.
This fact of the fake twin pregnancy is the most striking similarity between my sister and Hope. And I asked Robin about it. Do you remember finding out that the pregnancy hadn't been real? So I remember her losing the twins and us coming and mourning with her. My sister's belly was very real. I saw the ultrasounds. I held them. My sister was pregnant in that moment in my mind. So when my sister was pregnant,
purportedly with twins, I put my hand on her belly and felt the baby kick. And I now know that that wasn't real, but my experience was real, and I don't even know what to do with that. The twins that she lost were Alexandria and Alexia, so my son's name is Alexander after the twins, that come to find out they never existed. It took us probably a couple months to realize that the baby's more true. We've mourned
these babies. The final deciding factor is my mom found the urn and she opened up the urn and it was empty. That, to my mom, was enough closure to realize that my sister was not telling the truth about anything. For me, the thing that I could never do and that I do not foresee having an opportunity to do in my life is to sit down with my sister
and say, I can help you. But that's true that I could help her. Like one of the things I've really wrestled with in this podcast that I didn't really even realize I was holding on to is this hope that I'll do this and that she'll hear it and say, I'm exhausted. I want to come home. Help me come home.
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Welcome to another round of Drawing Board or Miro Board. Today we discuss technical diagramming with systems architect Maya. Let's go. First question. You've spent 10 hours slogging over a sequence diagram that should have taken five. Drawing Board or Miro Board? Drawing Board.
And if I'm being honest, Miro would probably cut that time down by half. You know, with its AI tools and ready-to-go templates. Next, your diagrams become so bulky, it's more complex than the solar system. But all it takes is a few clicks and... It's Miro. I've used those technical shape packs way too many times. Now, the final question. Everyone's brought in, but you have to make all these tasks
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It is intense listening back to that last moment of the first episode. And that scene was captured in a moment of brilliance by my producer, Tina, who had the tape running while we were in the car on our way to do the very last interview of the season. And I was like,
And it is very strange to listen back to that now for a whole bunch of reasons. I think, number one, just listening to this whole first episode, my voice sounds so different than it sounds now. And I listen to my voice a lot, which can be...
kind of a strange experience for anybody else who's done it. And it sounds so different in more recent episodes than it does in these episodes. And I don't know what combination of that is, partly just because I was completely new to podcasting. I'd never done anything like that. I'd done some media for my book stuff, but never anything like this with this much audio. And so probably it was just me getting used to talking into a mic. But also I think just that I was at a really different place
With regards to this story that I talk about from my own life, this history with my sister than I am now. And so I think I can hear that. I can sort of hear the difference. And, you know, one of the things that Tina, who fortunately came into this project with so much experience and was such a, you know, was such a mentor for me.
Making this first season of the show in particular, you know, said that that's really something that you sort of have to be in a different spot to get your voice more in your body. And so I think part of that's that I learned that, but part of it is I can also just hear so much more emotional and my voice is kind of in my throat a lot. So yeah, it's strange to listen back to that. And I think I also feel like a little bit sad for myself thinking about making the first season of this show and...
And remembering that I really did have a little bit of hope. I mean, I don't think it was a huge amount. I think there was some part of me that was realistic about it. But it's amazing to me that I had any hope that making this project was going to be
You know, something that could bring about some kind of resolution with the situation with my sister or that she would interpret me doing this as me sort of reaching out. And I did want to do that, I suppose. I really made this show because I was getting involved in the professional sphere in Munchausen by proxy. I'd
joined this committee that's part of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children by then. It was really meeting those experts that was the impetus for making this show. And I think, you know, what's always been driving me in that direction is this relationship with my sister. So it makes sense, but I think it's almost strange to think that I even thought that was a possibility, especially given what...
actually happened as a result of this show coming out between my sister and I, which I will get into a little bit more in my postscript to the second episode. So do stay tuned for that. Lots more to come. Yeah, and the other thing that I really, you know, sort of made me nostalgic, just thinking about doing my first interview for this show. In this episode, I'm talking to Robin Putcher, who is the younger sister of Hope Ybarra. And that was the very first thing that we recorded for the show, which
We found out when I was, you know, when I set out to make the show, I did not know who would be willing to talk from the case. You know, Mike Weber, who was a detective on the case and who I knew, hadn't really stayed in touch with anybody from the family. And he wasn't sure if that was going to be
the right way to get a hold of anybody. He wasn't sure sort of how they felt about him when he was, you know, when we were talking about it. And so I ended up just reaching out to Fabian Ybarra on Facebook and that's how I got in touch with everyone. And, you know, several of them were willing to be interviewed, obviously. And so Robin was the first person that we talked to and we found out that she lived just south of Seattle. So Tina and I drove down there. We spent about a half a day with her. She lived on this really cute little farm with all of these goats. And
We just, we really had a lovely time. You know, we sat at our kitchen table and talked, and it was this really surreal experience for me because it was the very first time I had ever talked to someone who'd
had a case in their family. And obviously the Hope Ybarra case played out very differently than my sister's, but there were so many similarities, you know, that I talk about in this episode. And Robin and I, you know, just down to these details of like them both being in the band and sort of even looking alike. And
It was just very, it was very, very strange and really wonderful. I mean, it was really healing. That was the first time Robin had ever talked to anyone outside of her family who'd had that shared experience. And so that was just really profound and very emotional. You know, I think it was going into this project, I originally had the idea that I would just talk about it in this more removed way of kind of just being
in a sort of journalist seat. And I really, like, as we got to making it, and I think that my producer and our editor on the project at the time, Lisa Gray, kind of always maybe knew that it was going to eventually include my personal story. And I was very resistant to that at the time for a whole bunch of reasons. You know, I had talked a little bit about my personal experience in the media up until then and had gotten pretty strong pushback from my sister. And
her lawyer. So that stuff that had happened around the novel coming out, you know, that was not a pleasant experience. And also just, you know, I didn't really, I'd never talked about anything really personal in public. That's just not an experience I'd really had before. And that felt very vulnerable. I was concerned about, you know, my parents are very private people. Like there's just a lot of things I was concerned about. But I think as soon as I started really making the show, as soon as I started having the conversations, it just became really clear that it was not going to be possible for me to sort of
wall that piece off and also that it was just going to make a much better, more authentic, more moving project if I did disclose my connection to it. And that also, you know, it wasn't
genuine for me to pretend that I was experiencing this as a remove. And sometimes people will, as a criticism of me reporting on this topic, talk about how much bias I have. And that's true. I have a tremendous amount of bias. I have all of the baggage in the world that I bring to this topic, and that's why I'm here. And so I think it's always even felt sort of more ethical and more honest to disclose that.
So obviously that sort of came up right away in the conversation with Robin, and that was a very emotional experience. It was really wonderful. She's just a lovely, sweet person, and, you know, was very warm and very easy to talk to. And, you know, but I left that recording, you know, my producer and I went and had lunch, and I think we just were both sort of like sitting in how—I think this project kind of felt big right away. Like it felt like, oh my gosh, we're sort of doing something that—
hasn't been done before on this topic. And I think that there was sort of like a gravity, I felt like, that settled in on me as I was recording these first few sessions. And I called my therapist on the way home from that conversation, and I was feeling really overwhelmed. I think I am the kind of person that will take things on and get excited about them and not necessarily think about...
the consequences. And I felt like I was really feeling like I'm not sure I can do this. Like, this is really overwhelming. I'm not totally sure that I'm ready to just excavate all of this stuff. And this might not be the best decision for my mental health. You know, my daughter was still really young at the time. It was very much, you know, it was right after, well, not right after, it was smack in the middle of the pandemic. It was right after the vaccines, you
came out and we all got them. And it was right in that period where we all thought that was going to be the end of everything. And like, hooray, the pandemic's over. And then, of course, that's not totally how it played out. But it was sort of in that first period of hopefulness, which is a strange time all around. And I remember talking to my longtime therapist who's known me through this whole thing about it. And then just like waking up the next morning and feeling really good about the conversation and feeling like, you know, actually, no, I think I can do this. And I think this is going to be a really worthwhile project. And I
You know, I was not thinking about this as, oh, I'm pivoting my career to becoming a podcaster. I just really wanted to make this project and pull these stories together and sort of go on this journey. And it was quite the journey. And I will share a little bit more about that.
the rocky road of getting this show out into the world after the next episode. So thank you for listening and please stay tuned for episode two and an update from me afterwards. In the next episode, we'll do a deep dive into Hopiapara's case and talk to her family about what it was like to try to unravel all of her lies.
If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at MunchausenSupport.com. We have resources there from some of the top experts in the country, and we can connect you with professionals who can help.
If you are curious about this show and the topic of Munchausen by proxy, follow me on Instagram at Andrea Dunlop. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash nobody should believe me. And if monetary support is not an option for you right now, you can also rate and review the podcast on Apple and share on your social media. Word of mouth is so important for podcasts and we really appreciate it.
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