S1: E7 - Recovery
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I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Swine off.

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and activist Darren Seals was found murdered. That's what they gonna learn. On for death, on for nothing. Every day Darren would tell her, all right, ma, be prepared.

They are going to try to kill me. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising, The Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From iHeart Podcasts comes Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay?,

9-1-1, what's your emergency? Mastavati is dead! Featuring the star-studded talents of Michael Urie, Jonathan Freeman, Frankie Grande, Cheyenne Jackson, Robin de Jesus, and Kate McKinnon as Angela Lansfairie. Lick them, lick those toesies. Listen to Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay? as part of the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi Betrayal listeners. This week, we just wanted to quickly drop a note to our listeners and say thank you. We've been taking the time to read through all of your emails that you submitted at BetrayalPod at gmail.com. Because so many of you have reached out with your own stories, questions, and feedback, we plan to release bonus content with updates and resources. So stay tuned. But first, here's episode seven. This podcast discusses sexual assault. Please take care while listening.

I was packing up to go and was in my office and she surprised me. I think she said something like, what are you doing? Going home, I said. That's too bad, she responded. I was in shock and surprised by her closeness. Then I remember a kiss. It was so very consensual. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal. Episode 7, Recovery.

In the first year after Spencer's arrest, Jennifer fought hard to move forward and heal. All the while, Spencer was sending letters from jail telling her how sorry he was. I want to restore our marriage, and I'll do whatever it takes for you to believe me about that. I promised myself to be real with you about my true feelings, and that promise also makes me say that I 100% believe we can get through this.

Jennifer understood she was experiencing trauma.

She sought help from wise, empathetic voices that helped her find her footing. My name is Kim Gould. I am a betrayal trauma specialist and coach. It is my deepest passion to help people heal from trauma and reclaim their lives. I do this profound work at the Center for Relational Healing in Los Angeles, and then in my own intimacy coaching practice, I help people take that healing to the next level.

Kim, I get so emotional when I think about you and the part that you've played on this journey with me. And I'm just really, really grateful. You know, when all this happened, I didn't know betrayal trauma was a thing. And it's a thing. Certainly, yes. It is what we commonly refer to as the shattered worldview.

Betrayal trauma basically takes away everything that you thought you knew to be true or safe or just in the world. So you're literally like a little baby trying to learn to walk and talk and make sense of things in a nonsensical world.

and what feels like a very dangerous world. In the beginning especially, I walked around feeling like there was an elephant standing on my chest.

Yeah, it certainly is physiological, emotional, spiritual, cognitive, and mental. The child trauma feels like, and it does, hijack the person going through it, and it did that to you at the beginning as well. Physiologically, a large part of that is because your nervous system has been shut.

There's no place to find safety and your nervous system will send you into a hypervigilant state and the body and the brain are sending you into fight, flight or freeze. So many behaviors come from seeking safety.

Being a detective and checking emails and texts all night long for hours and hours and not able to sleep. This would look like, oh, the betrayed partner or the woman is going crazy. And there are unfortunately times where women have been misdiagnosed.

As an example of this, many women have been labeled as having a personality disorder when they are really just adapting to this earth-shattering trauma and did not even have these symptoms before the event. And every single thing we see a betrayed partner doing is safety-seeking behavior. I relate to that so much, and I think that's why I'm so consumed by needing to know who it was that I married.

Because I didn't know him. I didn't know a whole side to him. And that's so scary. Honestly, my biggest fear coming out of this and sharing this story with everyone is I know people are going to ask, how could she not know? How did you not see any signs? And I just didn't. Probably at least 50% of the betrayed partners I work with say it's like being with Jekyll and Hyde.

These are not people who, for the most part, were mean or uncaring to their partners. The majority of the women that I've worked with, similar to you, Jen, were astounded and surprised. And they were very smart women and very intelligent, intuitive women. These are not women who've had their blinders on.

What we're talking about is the acting out partners being so unbelievably skilled at gaslighting and manipulation and such severe compartmentalization in the brain.

To be able to go out during the day and do certain things that are terrible and totally against the value system of your marriage, and then to come home and act like he loves you and things are fine. I trust that Spence was really, really practiced and successful at that because you are a very intelligent woman and you're not naive and you didn't see it. And most betrayed partners don't.

You listened to my conversation with the student. I did. It was very touching. Talking with her and the other two women, that's what this whole journey has been about. It's really helped me understand the other side of this person that I thought I really knew. As the police were leading Spence out the front door of our house, handcuffed, I yelled out to them,

He's a good person. Even after finding out that he just committed this awful, awful crime against a young person, I still needed them to know he was a good person. Because in my head, he was somebody completely different. My reality was shattered and it had not registered yet.

And I'm still struggling to understand the way he was with me and the way that I know he behaved and treated many, many, many other women. You know, I haven't been able to do any kind of assessment or diagnosis or anything like that clinically. But I would guess that there are other things going on besides addiction. Like what? It feels to me like there were splinters of his personality.

He learned, you know, how he was supposed to be a good, healthy husband. And maybe there was this other part of him that he didn't know how to express. In the beginning, all Jen had to make sense of her life and all the lies were long confessional letters and apologies from Spencer. She wasn't falling for it. But that didn't stop him from attempting to manipulate her from his jail cell.

That first Thanksgiving, he sent her a three-page letter on all the things he was thankful for. "I'm thankful for getting to marry my dream girl. I'm thankful that you said yes. I'm thankful that one day there's a chance that you might forgive me. I'm thankful that at some point I might get a shot at life again. I'm so very thankful for second chances.

There wasn't going to be reconciliation. The apologies were hollow. She didn't trust him. How could she? Her eyes were wide open, and she wanted to see who he really was once and for all.

Maybe then she could understand what he did and why this happened to her. Knowing what I do about Spencer's behavior now, I feel like there was this compulsion that he just couldn't control. In another letter sent from jail, Spencer theorized that it must have been his need for attention that caused his problems long before he and Jennifer reconnected after college.

I remember once getting a message from a woman saying she was thinking of me. It was such a rush. I had never had that. That became my search. This is all backstory. It's what I've discovered with so much thinking, meditation, and of course prayer. You asked me when the cops were coming to get me if I was a sex addict. My answer is still absolutely no.

My problem was at a much more intimate level: attention seeking, approval seeking.

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I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him going to sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, the hunt, family annihilation today, and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

New from Double Asterisk and iHeart Podcasts, a 10-part true crime podcast series. Emergency 911. This is fire in my fucking life. This car is on fire. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me.

A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. I'm a podcast journalist. And I'm a former state senator, Maria Chappelle Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren, and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Novoshevsky investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something, that's a dangerous game to play. The FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months. That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now.

Listen to After the Uprising Season 2, The Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can look at sex addiction just like you would with any other addiction. Gambling, food, heroin, alcohol. Somewhere along the line, they learned that if I have this thing, I'm going to have relief from pain.

Or it could be the opposite. I'm actually going to feel alive for a little while. So it's whether someone feels too much, feels too little, and basically doesn't know how to have healthy coping mechanisms in life.

But really what makes something an addiction or a compulsive disorder is that the person keeps doing it again and again and again. And it is bringing a lot of harm and dysfunction into their lives and into others. And they keep doing it and they're not able to stop.

Do you think people with these kind of addictions or compulsions look for a certain type of person to prey on? You know, there's a big piece of this, which in my opinion is so deeply connected to our patriarchal society that teaches us that women are of the most value when they are beautiful and getting attention from men. And they are trained that way from childhood.

And here's, you know, a charismatic man who is giving them attention and this feeds their own need for validation, making them so vulnerable to grooming and the way they are going about trying to find worth in this world. Hearing Kim say this made me think of Hope and Jennifer's friend. They said almost the same thing. I got this text message. Well, you're beautiful. Here's an attractive guy telling me I'm pretty.

But he says that he never sought after any of this. He says...

It was always the women that were giving him the eye or letting him know that it was okay. When in fact, I have so much communication that proves otherwise. Here is exactly what he wrote about Jennifer's friend, the one Spencer had sex with at the wine bar. To my memory, she was staring at me a lot at the bar.

It was important to Jennifer. And it seemed Spencer had amnesia when it came to how the affair started. But the women, they remembered specific details. I went into the bathroom...

And when I came out, he was there and mentioned like, you know that we have this thing together, you know, you're feeling this too, right? And then he came in for a kiss, then held my hand and touched his crotch with my hand on the outside of his pants. What is, is how it continued. I guess she had to be a willing participant. There were times when you or her husband were out of town or when she might just linger at the bar.

I can't give you details because I can't remember them. When it was over with her, you can't imagine my relief. That problem in my life was over. I was so happy. I think one of the biggest blessings of this situation was that Spence was arrested and has remained locked up. I haven't had to face him or deal with it except for in letters.

It's truly a blessing because I can't imagine if that person was around to be able to lie about the situation, essentially. I absolutely agree. His absence and removal from your space and from your life, while so painful, allowed you to heal more quickly. And the extreme of his behaviors...

made things really definitive and clear for you. Jennifer took note of how often he used the word love with other women. It stung. She pressed Spencer about that, especially with his colleague in the Air Force. I really thought that he loved me. He had me convinced that he did. I mean, he told me. Hope, I know you were really wondering how I used the word love with her,

In that same letter, Spencer goes on to say, Or anything like that.

Allowing these things to happen was just that, allowing. Hope and I never had a thing that anyone could see or detect. It was that cheap and meaningless. I imagine it happened just as with the other one. Dumb looks that were accepted as attention and some kind of thing I wanted. After each time I was unfaithful, I felt disgusting and hurtful to all involved. Allowing these things to happen almost sounds like his participation was passive.

However, each woman who has spoken has consistently shared that Spencer was clear about his intentions. And what's sad to me is that in his letters that he writes, he really minimalizes the situations. With the victim, it was consensual. She was looking at me. She made eyes at me.

He wrote to Jen about the sexual assault victim. As a warning, it is disturbing.

I had never ever looked at her in any inappropriate way. Not at all. I tell you this so that you know how it all started. In fact, probably for the last 10 to 15 years, I have not looked at any teen girl as anything but that, a teen girl. I'd gotten older. There were no fantasies. That is 100% true. In May, I can remember the students starting to stare at me. Longer looks. More often.

She was being very obvious and it started coming out of nowhere. She also started coming by at the end of school asking random questions for no reason. She then started lingering at the end of the club. I started to sense something. I was packing up to go and was in my office and she surprised me. I think she said something like, "What are you doing?" "I'm going home," I said. "That's too bad," she responded.

His account certainly differs from the sexual assault victim's account on how they first became involved. He had texted me that he had feelings for me. I remember feeling, I don't know, I guess shocked. It's an understatement.

Spencer continued his account of the story in his letter. She was very aggressive most of the time. I was sure it was something she was super familiar with. In other words, I was never taking some leading role, if that makes sense.

I know it was all my fault, no matter how she was. What I remember feeling most was really confused. It didn't feel right. You know, I expressed to him that I was a virgin and I don't know if I was ready for anything. I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Oh my God.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, the hunt, family annihilation today, and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

New from Double Asterisk and iHeart Podcasts, a 10-part true crime podcast series. Emergency 911. This is fire in my apartment life. This car is on fire. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me.

A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. I'm a podcast journalist. And I'm a former state senator, Maria Chappelle Nadal. I was in the movement with Darren, and I've spent two years with co-host Ray Novoshevsky investigating his death. Even if I did want to tell you something, that's a dangerous game to play. The FBI did this to myself. They've been following him for months. That's enough proof right there. All episodes available now.

Listen to After the Uprising Season 2, The Murder of Darren Seals, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Andrea Gunning. The Trail is now releasing episodes every single week. We're bringing you new stories about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Every week, we'll share firsthand accounts of broken trust. I was sitting there thinking, what?

Who did I marry? Shocking deceptions. I said, I can't believe what I'm listening to. And the trail of destruction they leave behind. To me now, a rom-com is a horror movie. I couldn't watch that if you paid me. Now you can get access to Betrayal Weekly 100% ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love, like There and Gone South Street, Creating a Con, The Story of BitCon, Paper Ghosts, Unrestorable, The Girlfriends, and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeartTrue Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Spencer pushed for his court-appointed attorney to argue his account of the victim's complicity in the case.

But his attorney wisely reminded Spencer that remorse was his best legal strategy. While reviewing all of the raw materials for the series, her team made a shocking discovery. In 2015, the same year that he started sending text messages to the sexual assault victim, Spencer made a hard play for at least one other student at Kell High School. And yes, she was a teenager. Was she also the pursuer? Another girl making eyes at him?

Here are some of the messages he sent to that student. As a warning, these messages may be hard to hear. "You are so out of my league. Busy tonight? Come by the bar. You're the focus of all my erotica. What about hanging after school one day? We'd get away from this place."

Well, since we both trust each other, I'm not worried. I think it'd be fun and totally cool. No issues, stress, or drama. And when he didn't get the result he wanted, he tried a different tactic. Her adulthood. You're incredibly pretty and mature. You are a woman, are you not? And this. Do you ever think about me in the flesh? No.

The texts Spencer sent the other student were wildly inappropriate and upsetting. And while we did not see evidence that a sexual assault occurred in these text exchanges, we did share this information with law enforcement. Everybody gets these kinds of dopamine hits if they're on Facebook or Instagram and they get a heart or a like.

These things start to train the nervous system. Like, oh, I like that. We want more of those pleasure hormones running through our bodies. So every time he was texting, every time Spence was emailing and getting a response from these young women, it was releasing those endorphins and the dopamine and keeping him in the addiction cycle.

Another detail that caught our attention was the way he described a fantasy to the student, what their first kiss would be like. I keep seeing this image of you and I hanging out wherever, doesn't matter. But then at some point you lean into me as I'm talking, simply kiss me.

almost like you couldn't wait any longer and couldn't wait for me to move towards you. It sounded eerily similar to the way he described the sexual assault victim in his letter to Jennifer. I was packing up to go and was in my office and she surprised me. I think she said something like, "What are you doing?" "Going home," I said. "That's too bad," she responded. I was in shock and surprised by her closeness. Then I remember a kiss.

It was so very consensual. His fantasy with the other student, the one he attempted to seduce, was the same as his account to Jennifer of what happened with the sexual assault victim. A young girl simply found him irresistible. But the reality was quite different. The victim did not initiate the relationship. There was one last issue in the case with which Spencer took great umbrage.

Here he argues that with the number of partners

the availability of women he had, what reason would he have to be forceful? The victim must be lying. Then I thought about the words we heard earlier from Hope. Looking back, I remember a couple of times where, you know, he would kind of put his hands around my throat and push down. That kind of caught me off guard. Hearing that story from her, it's heart-wrenching.

She talks about how he was forceful with her at times. But then in a letter, he says to me, I would never. I just feel like in his brain, he really doesn't see the truth.

Again, I haven't been able to do any kind of assessment or diagnosis, but I would say that having that control and being able to manipulate and coerce was part of what fed him. None of it is about love or kindness or connection or even the beauty of sex.

It's about wounds and control and manipulation and trauma to everyone involved and avoidance of anything that feels like intimacy. It's been about two and a half years since I spoke with Spence.

And I really am curious about whether or not he still feels the same way in those letters that he wrote to me. If that is all still the case, then that means very little healing has happened because those are the beginning stages of what someone needs to face in order to heal. And those things are all things that also allow the addiction cycle to continue.

We work with those cognitive distortions in therapy and coaching when we're trying to help sex addicts heal. All those things, rationalizing, minimizing, they help the person not have to look at themselves and take full accountability for what they've done.

He has been manipulating himself and believing all of his own lies for so many years that he really can't see the difference probably between reality and things that he's making up.

There's also this other part of him that feels like he needs to hold on to. That part that you needed to hold on to, Jen, when the police took him away. He needs to hold on to some part of that within himself. And even though he's done all of these things, the part that he's holding on to so he doesn't disintegrate or totally fall apart is...

They were okay with it. It wasn't assault. Do you think there's any way that Spence has healed himself? From my vast clinical experience, it takes a lot of hard recovery work. Coaching and therapy groups, going through the 12 steps, making amends. It's a long journey.

But one of the first steps is being in some kind of recovery group where it will start to break down the lies and the identity that you've been telling yourself all along. I do believe greatly in the power of healing.

And no, people cannot heal from this level of addiction and other compulsive behaviors without significant therapeutic help from specialists. True recovery and healing involves so much accountability, empathy, and compassion that

If Spence was deeply remorseful, maybe he would come to you and say, you know, I'd like to pay you back for the tens of thousands of dollars that you needed for your coaching and your therapy. It's called making living a mess. I mean, you wouldn't accept it and that would be a drop in the bucket, but I'm just saying that.

When someone is truly healing and in recovery, there is a very big part of them that deeply cares about the pain and the impact that they brought into other people's lives. And they do what they can to try their best to clean that up. I can only work on myself, which is what I have been doing now for the last few years. You've gone through one of the most difficult

traumatizing things I've ever heard of. And you did that deep work of learning how to heal yourself every day so that you can come out to the world and say, this happened.

This is my story. It affected me. It affected other women, too. I'm helping to heal those other women by doing this. And it's been such an honor to support you and be a part of your healing. On the next episode of Betrayal...

Jennifer confronts Spencer. In one of the letters that you wrote me, you said that you never saw after it. Do you still feel that way? Well, yes. It's just an opportunity would present itself. And then before I knew it, I was pursuing it. I wasn't lucky to get away with it. I was unlucky that I was getting away with it. It would have been better for it to all gone to shit the first time. That's the truth.

If you'd like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at BetrayalPod at gmail.com. That's Betrayal, P-O-D, at gmail.com. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show was executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison, hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Carrie Hartman, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreinchick,

Special thanks to voice actor Todd Gans, sound editing and mixing done by Matt DeVecchio. Betrayal's theme was composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MyMusic. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Why not?

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and activist Darren Seals was found murdered. That's what they're going to learn. On for death, on for nothing. Every day, Darren would tell her, all right, ma, be prepared.

They are going to try to kill me. All episodes available now. Listen to After the Uprising, The Murder of Darren Seals on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From iHeart Podcasts comes Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay?,

9-1-1, what's your emergency? Pastor Vandy is dead! Featuring the star-studded talents of Michael Urie, Jonathan Freeman, Frankie Grande, Cheyenne Jackson, Robin de Jesus, and Kate McKinnon as Angela Lansferry. Lick them, lick those toesies. Listen to Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay? as part of the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.