EP 22 - Angelique Pt. 2
30:53 Share

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beckley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there.

Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

He took the police report and he gave it to me. And he said, "One day when you're ready, you should read this. There's some stuff in here that I don't think you know." It's actually diabolical. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. When Angelique Robledo was 17, she found out she was pregnant. She decided that this baby would be her second chance.

She got clean from drugs and made a new friend, another pregnant teenager named Cassandra. But one day, a casual hangout with Cassandra took a sinister turn. Angelique had a gut feeling that something was wrong, but she didn't know what it was. After a fire started, Cassandra was taken away by paramedics, and Angelique was left to explain the situation to her parents and law enforcement.

She suspected that Cassandra started the fire and that the proof was in her friend's bag. I take the diaper bag and I keep explaining to them, "She said she had this present for me." Like, the explanation is in this bag. And as I'm doing that, I put the bag on the counter, I reach my hand in the bag, and I feel these two metal objects. And when I lift them and pull them out, they're two large butcher knives. And I drop them on the counter, and I just start screaming.

She backed away from the bag, trembling. The cops stepped in. And they come and pull out more. They found like scissors, disinfectant, alcohol. The items painted a dark picture of what Cassandra might have been planning that night. And Angelique realized the gifts she'd been given weren't for her at all.

Everything that she gave me was one of everything to take my son, to make sure my son had a newborn diaper, to make sure my son had a baby onesie, a receiving blanket to wrap him in, a blanket so he didn't get cold, a carrier to carry my baby out with. She had one of everything to take my child and to leave that house. It all finally clicked for Angelique. Cassandra had been planning to stab her and run away with her baby.

I just remember sitting on the couch, staring at a wall, and I just kept repeating the same thing over and over and over again. It was like a trance. I told you she was going to kill me. I told you she was going to kill me. I told you she was going to kill me. My mom said that I sat there for hours. The rest of that night was a blur. She was in shock. She remembers the cops taping off the scene. They had blocked both of my streets off so that nobody can get in, nobody can get out.

what had been a potential arson, was now... In an attempted murder investigation. Later that night, a police investigator came to speak with Angelique. When the detective comes in, me and her very much know each other because of my past. I've been arrested by her at least once. It's a small town, but she knew me by name. Hi, Angelique, you know. She was surprised by how the cops spoke to her.

They hadn't been smoking weed.

Angelique knew what happened. She just couldn't prove it to the cops. They had me write it down, and then that was it for the night. They just did their investigation and they left. So the next morning comes, I call them, and they don't have any news. They know that she left the hospital and she's not there anymore. They know that for sure. And I'm like, okay, well, what are you guys going to do?

Well, we're trying to find her. She was afraid Cassandra might come back and follow through with the plan. This lady literally came to my house with butcher knives and tried to kill me. But the cops weren't necessarily convinced. Well, we can't prove that. We can't say that that's what happened. We don't know if that's what happened. She didn't feel like they were taking her seriously. And now Cassandra was out of the hospital roaming free. Angelique decided to take matters into her own hands.

I think when people think of survivors and they think of people that are victims, they think that we go into this weird moment of poor me or like I'm scared. It's not like that. It's quite the opposite. We go into this moment that we need to figure out what happened. I was ready to investigate. I was very much, I watched way too much SVU. I know what to do. That's how I felt. She got to work online. So I started Googling my little heart out and found things about her.

I found this news article on her and I found out that they stated that she was a danger to herself and society. So that was like a little clue. And then she found a surprising connection. Her cousin is somebody that I knew from middle school and I called the cousin. Cassandra's cousin had a lot to say. Found out from the cousin, she said, "My cousin's crazy. My cousin is very dangerous." That's when everything started to click.

After the fire, Cassandra was brought to the hospital because she was having contractions. Angelique had a friend who worked at that hospital at the time, a friend who was willing to break the rules to help Angelique get some answers. And what her friend saw in Cassandra's medical record was a bombshell. She actually saw the test that she took at the hospital and they were able to confirm that she was not pregnant. Up until that moment, Angelique fully believed her friend was pregnant

In fact, that had been the basis of their entire relationship. But now she had confirmation that it was all a lie. She felt like this information was important to her case. I gave it to the cops and they were like, "Oh, how did you find this?" And I'm like, "Are you serious right now?" It felt like they were not taking my case seriously and it was extremely frustrating. For the cops to move forward, Angelique would need to get Cassandra on the record contradicting her original statement to police.

Because her story was that we were in the room, we were smoking marijuana, we ashed out my pipe and it set my closet on fire. So they asked Angelique to do a recorded phone call.

My goal was to get her to admit that she was in the room alone before the fire started. So I had to call her and ask her, how are you doing? How did everything go at the hospital? I had to pretend like I had no idea what was happening because she didn't know what was happening. She has no idea that I found the butcher knives. So she admits it. Yes. Yeah. I remember when I was in the room. Yeah. You were in there by yourself. Yeah. I was in there by myself. And that was the goal to get her to say all of those words again.

Then, Cassandra started to catch on. I could tell that she wasn't alone. There was somebody in that house with her because we all heard a man say, hang up the phone and then click. Angelique got what she needed, but it was anticlimactic. The police basically thanked her and sent her on her way. But almost immediately... From that moment, I had went into labor. She went straight to the hospital. Because Cassandra still hadn't been arrested...

The hospital took precautions to keep Angelique safe. They have police outside my room. They have me down as Jane Doe. You have to have a code to get inside my room. She spent four days in labor. I probably should have had a C-section, but I think they were trying to be mindful of the whole situation that I had just gone through.

After all, someone had wanted to steal her baby and brought a butcher knife to do it. So she was adamant about not having a C-section. As much as I wanted my son to be born, I felt like the only safe place was inside of me. But at the same time, I was feeling like, okay, well, inside of me isn't safe because someone just tried to kill me. So I was going through all of these emotions. The stress had led to high blood pressure, and now Angelique had preeclampsia. It was a high-risk birth.

Finally, my water broke and it was just an intense birth. His heart rate had dropped at some point. It was it was honestly it was scary. Finally, her son was born. He was healthy and in her arms. I went through such a traumatic event that seeing him alive was just a blessing. I could not imagine him being with anybody else.

She hoped that after he was born, she'd find some relief. And finally, once everything is OK, I still can't sleep because, A, I'm freaking out on nurses, making them show me their badges. Two, I think I'm destined to die and I just want to spend whatever moments I can with my son. And that's all I remember actually being in the hospital is I was worried about someone coming to steal him or me dying.

While she was in the hospital, her family worked to renovate her bedroom, to repaint it and make it livable again. But after she was discharged, she struggled to relax at home. Coming home is such a blur. I didn't go back in my room. I refused to go in my room. So I slept on the couch. Josh, her son's father, stepped up to help. He wanted to be a safe place for Angelique. So every night, he stayed with her on the couch next to their new baby.

he helped me feel safe when nobody else made me feel that way. But even with him by her side, she couldn't let her guard down. I just wasn't myself. There was nothing that was right or okay about me. When Josh or her family tried to talk to her about how she was doing, Angelique shut down. I pushed everybody away. Josh would say something and I would be like, I'm fine. But really, I'm dying inside.

She wanted Cassandra arrested, but the cops weren't sharing any information about the case. I felt like I was completely in the dark when it came to my investigation. Anytime I would try to talk to somebody, nobody could give me answers. And it was just super discouraging because I had gotten out of the hospital and I expected to feel safe, and I didn't feel safe. I expected for her to be caught. She wasn't caught. She didn't even feel safe taking a walk around her neighborhood.

One night, about a month after her son was born, It was the lead detective on her case. Cassandra had been arrested.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beverly is guilty.

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you would have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet. And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, is

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's...

After weeks of waiting, Angelique was losing faith that Cassandra would ever be held responsible. But then she got the call.

Law enforcement was finally able to make an arrest. Cassandra was facing multiple charges. She is being charged with attempted first-degree murder, which means that it was plotted, it was planned out. So attempted first-degree murder, arson, burglary. She said she's going to go away for a very, very long time. Cassandra had made a full confession. And I started crying and I said, she admitted it? And they said, yeah, she admitted it.

She admitted that she'd planned to murder Angelique in order to steal her baby. Cassandra was now behind bars, and she would stay there until there was a trial. And I just remember crying and being so happy. That was the first night that I actually slept. The news brought a lot of relief.

Anjali could breathe a little easier, but the arrest didn't take away the trauma. As a mom, you imagine you're going to be this happy family. You're going to teach him how to say mama. You're going to teach them how to walk. You're going to teach him, you know, figure out if his first food is going to be peaches or carrots. All of these things are things that I thought about. I don't remember any of them. It's like it was all stolen from me.

She recently saw a video that was taken when her son was one. He was learning how to walk for the first time. And I say, oh my gosh, it's his first steps. I can't, I don't remember that video. I don't remember where that video was taken, what time, like I, and I was standing right there talking in the video. In the wake of everything, she wasn't living. She was surviving.

My family, my friends, they distracted me. I can't tell you how because I don't remember, but I know that I survived. When everything went down, Angelique had to fight for her case to be taken seriously by the cops. And after Cassandra was arrested, she didn't hear anything from law enforcement or prosecutors for 12 months. I just remember thinking, like, when is this going to happen? Like, what's going to happen? Maybe I should just be thankful that she's in jail, but nobody has communicated anything with me.

That was until she got a call from the district attorney's office. They tell me, we're going to be completely honest with you. We don't think this should go to trial. And I was completely thrown back. Like, what do you mean this shouldn't go to trial? They said, well, through our investigation and through everything that we've done, the cops did not read her Miranda rights at the time of the confession. And I was like, wait, what? Like, what do you mean that they didn't read her Miranda rights?

The full confession police got out of Cassandra wouldn't be admissible in court. If we go to trial, her whole confession is thrown out and we can lose this case because it's not illegal to carry butcher knives around the city. Technically, it's not against the law and we cannot pinpoint everything in here without her confession. But Angelique knew there was physical evidence from the fire.

And I was like, "Well, what about her fingertips on the candle?" And they said, "Yes." They said, "We want to try to do a plea bargain." The DA's office informed Angelique of Cassandra's defense strategy. She was going to plead insanity. The picture that they painted for me was that she was there to take my child because she was mentally ill and believed that my baby was her baby, that she was pregnant and this was her child.

And in that moment, Angelique almost felt bad for her. The prosecutor said that Angelique could decide. Do you think she should go to prison or do you think she should go to a mental hospital? And I asked if they can give me some time to think about that. She slept on it and realized that without the confession, the prosecution's hands were tied.

The state offered eight years in a psychiatric hospital. At the sentencing hearing, Angelique was able to read a victim impact statement. I wrote this long letter to her. I said...

I don't want to live my life hating you. I don't want to have hate in my heart. I don't think I can live my life that way. And so I'm going to tell you that I forgive you because you're mentally ill. I ended it that way just for my conscience, for me. The judge told her, Cassandra, is there anything that you would like to say to this woman? She stood up, put her hands together. She looked at me and said, no, your honor, and sat back down. No remorse.

Almost immediately, it became a media circus.

Everyone wanted to run with the story. Angelique became reduced to a headline. It felt like something was being taken from her, and not on her terms. If I could take back some of the shows that I did, like doing the Dr. Phil show, I would have not done that. Absolutely, he used me for my trauma to get views. A few years after sentencing, a local journalist came over to interview Angelique about the story.

And he was the first one to ask her. Have you ever read the police report? And I was like, no. At the end of our interview, he took the police report and he gave it to me. And he said, there's some stuff in here that I don't think you know. You should read this. But at the time, Angelique wasn't ready to hear it. So you want to know what I did? I shredded it. I shredded it all. I shredded everything. That is what trauma does.

It wasn't until eight years later when Cassandra was released from the psychiatric hospital that Angelique finally revisited the case.

And that intrigued me to open everything back up because I felt like I was in a better state of mind. I was older. I feel like I'm ready to start digging. So I went deep. I went deep down this rabbit hole. I went to the police station. I pulled all the police reports. I pulled the tapes. I pulled anything that they would give me. And I sat in my car for hours listening to these CDs, listening to my, like me talk, listening to the all, listening to everything. It took like four to five hours.

She started with Cassandra's taped confession. And on it, she learned Cassandra's story. What Cassandra was really doing the night the fire started. The fire was never meant to happen. It was an accident. Her plan was to kill Angelique with a butcher knife and steal her baby. That's what she was preparing to do when she sat Angelique on her bed in the dark and counted to three.

She said that she felt a moment of weakness when she was going to stab me. When she had me bent over, she had her hand on my shoulder. She had the knife physically to my back and she was ready to push the knife inside of me. But then Cassandra got cold feet. When she started counting, she started to feel guilt. And she says, I started to second guess it, if I could actually do it. When Angelique stood up, the initial plan fell apart. So Cassandra moved on to plan B.

She said the fire was supposed to be a distraction, and she was hoping that I would be overcome with smoke and I would pass out. Then she'd be able to perform the C-section with me being passed out on the ground. Cassandra thought it would be easier to kill Angelique if she were unconscious. The whole thing was like a horror movie. It's actually diabolical. It's almost unbelievable, though, that an 18-year-old can come up with this. It turns out the plan wasn't entirely hers.

Or at least that's what Cassandra stated in her confession. At the very end, before they cut the tape, she talks about how she was a part of a gang. And in this gang, Cassandra confessed that she worked for one man in particular.

Cassandra claimed that she was part of a gang operation. And her boss had a plan to sell Angelique's baby. She says he has done this before, that they sold babies in Mexico and that they were going to get a certain cut.

She talked about how much they would get for the baby and that they were going to stay and live in Mexico. This was all news to Angelique. These tapes suggested an alternate motivation for why Cassandra did what she did. And it didn't match up with what Angelique heard from prosecutors back when they offered a plea deal. At the time, her understanding was that Cassandra was mentally ill and thought the baby was hers.

But in the confession... Not once did I ever hear her say that she wanted the baby for herself. And there was something else in Cassandra's confession. Another thing Angelique heard that didn't square with what the prosecutors told her. I heard them read her her Miranda rights. To have a murderer as gruesome as Jade Beasley's

It doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beth Lee is guilty.

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet. And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That?

The opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Prosecutors had told Angelique that Cassandra's confession wasn't admissible in court because no one had read Cassandra, her Miranda rights.

While reviewing the case file years later, Angelique discovered that wasn't true. They had read her her Miranda rights. I even have it circled where it says they read her rights and then it goes on to her telling her confession. This supposed procedural error was the reason why Angelique was okay with the plea deal. So why did the prosecutors tell her this story? Well, Angelique has a theory.

If Cassandra was telling the truth, maybe she could help law enforcement catch higher-ups in her gang.

Angelique thought back to all the phone calls Cassandra had taken, the ones in Spanish, and she'd taken a call in the middle of the attempted murder. Angelique had believed she was talking with Edwin, her husband. So was Edwin the mastermind? The gang leader? The cops met with Edwin, and they were very surprised to hear...

So this guy, Edwin, who she told all of this was her husband, was not actually her husband. Edwin was a real guy that Cassandra had dated, but he hadn't talked to her in years. So who was actually on the other end of the phone? In her confession, Cassandra does name someone besides Edwin, but the cops couldn't find a record of this other guy. And that's where the police file ends. For Angelique, it felt like... They gave up.

She's had to make peace with the fact that she might never know who Cassandra was working with. She might never get the full story. I think about it a lot. I contemplate all the time if I want to know the truth, and I always go back and forth with yes, no, yes, no. The thing is, it's not going to do anything except for maybe piss me off. So I just stopped looking for answers. She's come to accept that the police report may just be another version of the story.

And can she even trust Cassandra's taped confession? After all, Cassandra was clearly unwell. By the time Angelique heard the tapes, Cassandra had served her entire sentence. Angelique felt like reopening the case against Cassandra would be a dead end. I found out way too late. We're talking about nine years now. I can't go back and bring them all this.

I just thought every person there was doing their job for me. I thought this was a big case. I thought this was abnormal. I've never heard of fetal abduction. Like, I just figured that everyone was in my best interest. For her, reopening the case would only bring back bad memories. The damage was already done. She stole my first few years between me and my son, and I'm never going to get those back. There's no money in the world that could pay for that. She stole that away from me.

Her healing process wasn't linear. There were moments in my life where I remember being like, I'm healed. I feel so much better. I'm going to be just fine. And then like five weeks would go by and I would be like, I'm so triggered right now. And it's just been a cycle. It's been a vicious cycle. And that's what healing is. It's been almost 14 years since my trauma. And I feel like I just had an epiphany just a couple weeks ago.

She recently drove past the house where the crime happened for the first time in years. And instead of feeling overwhelmed and triggered, she felt a powerful calm. I realized it's just a house. That's all it is. It's just a house that something bad happened to me in. But I'm here. I'm alive. I'm okay. And I have my son. You can't push or rush healing. Josh, her son's father, has been a constant in her life and in her healing. If you were to ask me where my safe place is, it's with him.

They dated throughout their first few years as parents.

And come 2020, we decided why not. So we actually got engaged in 2020 and we got married. She and Josh had two more children together. We live a happy life all together. We're a very big sport family. We do football, softball, soccer, ride quads, go hiking, go to the lake. The son she nearly lost is now 13.

Angelique's also become an advocate for preventing fetal abduction. I didn't know that because it was never talked about.

Fetal abduction is incredibly rare. There have been less than 20 documented cases in the US in the last decade.

And of those cases, very few of the victims survived. My motivation is not just to get my story out so that other mothers can understand that this is something that happens. I feel like it's an opportunity for me to be a voice for not myself and my son, but also for the mothers that are not here that didn't get to survive this crime. She's also done something astounding. She wanted to help others grow their own families.

So she became a surrogate. Carrying a baby who wasn't mine and allowing that baby to leave my body and go to somebody else was a huge step for me and absolutely healed me in ways that I didn't know that I needed to be healed in. We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question. Why are you telling your story? I think about how that one second that it took

For me to turn around is literally what saved my life. I would not be here if I did not listen to that gut feeling. It's okay to be naive. It's natural. It's who we are. We're only human. Just listen to yourself. Trust yourself a little bit more. Sit there and start to learn what that intuition feeling is and listen to it. Maybe it'll help save somebody's life. On the next episode of Betrayal...

I get a phone call and it was, is this Don Harris? And I said, yes, it is. And they said, this is so-and-so with the Dallas FBI office. We'd like for you to come in. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at BetrayalPod at gmail.com. That's BetrayalPod at gmail.com. We're grateful for your support.

One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison. Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Also produced by Ben Fetterman.

Associate producers are Kristen Malkuri and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt DelVecchio. Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by Mibe Music. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beasley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there.

Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.