178: What if you couldn't tell him what really happened?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It was like I had crash-landed back to Earth and now I'm supposed to be a person again. Will I ever be able to be one of them ever again? Or am I just like an alien now? Nothing was ever really the same. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 178. What if you couldn't tell him what really happened?

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I was born in Texas and my parents were together until I was four or five years old, at which point my mother moved my little brother and I from Texas to Maryland and cut off all contact with my father. We tore off in the night when she left my father. We packed up just barely anything and took off. She said that he...

had many other families, not only just other wives, but other children. And other than that, she left it very vague. I always had a lot of questions. My questions were met with a lot of anger. It would be, oh, if you love him so much, why don't you go live with him? Why don't you go marry him if you love him so much?

In fact, she told us that he didn't want anything to do with us. He was my best friend when I was a kid and we spent a lot of time together. So I think that was the first heartbreak I ever really experienced. Their marriage fell apart when my mother got addicted to drugs. When I was really young, before she got into methamphetamine, my mother was a really, really good mom.

She was a very young mother. She met my father when he was in his mid-50s, and she was about 19. For all my early childhood memories, she's there, and she's a whole person. And as time went on and the drug use went on, I could actively see, even as a child, her going from a whole person to just losing these massive pieces of herself.

She wasn't funny anymore. And then she wasn't insightful anymore. She wasn't any of the things that I, as a really small child, had loved about my mother.

And what was left was someone whose only personality trait was anger and frustration. And to some extent, there was a lot of resentment to my little brother and I. So much so that, you know, she would leave us all the time for days at a time, sometimes a week. And I'm, you know, five, six, seven at this point. And my little brother is two years younger than me.

She used to climb around in the attic looking for wires because she thought my dad was recording her. She did this fairly often.

I can recall one time being at a hotel on vacation and a family was recording in the pool, just like a home movie. And my mother began absolutely freaking out at this family. And she said that she knew that they were recording her because she insisted that my dad was having her followed.

She insisted that I was trying to steal her identity. And at this point, I'm just a child. But this stayed the case kind of through my early adolescence, where it was just constant paranoia, constant questioning if I was wearing a wire. You know, we couldn't really drive anywhere because if any car got too close to her, she would have a meltdown.

Because of my mother's actions, I was an extremely defiant child and an even more defiant teenager. Anything that she told me to do, I would do the opposite. I got into some light, like, drug experimentation. Even though I had seen the effects that drugs had on my mother, I didn't do well in school because I didn't try.

I would do almost anything to make her upset because I wanted her to hurt in the same way that she hurt me. At this point, my mother's paranoia had gotten extremely out of control. She thought I was trying to date the men she was dating. She thought I was running wire fraud on her bank account.

She thought that I was a curse from the devil sent to punish her. Nothing about my relationship with her was happy, and I had no love for her, and she had even less for me. Socializing for me was incredibly difficult compared to my peers, and later in my life, in my, you know, my teens, I would be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

So that explained kind of the difficulties I had relating to other people in my life.

I couldn't really stand speaking in class without full-on having a breakdown. I couldn't look at people in their eyes. I didn't really understand why anyone would ever want to make eye contact with anyone. And once you got me talking, especially about something I was interested in, I would take no social cues you gave me on when to stop talking.

If anything of mine was out of order or I was asked to try something out of my comfort zone, it was like the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I would lose all control of my emotions.

Some people believe that autism spectrum disorder looks one certain way and they typically characterize a lack of self-awareness with that. But in young women, you are extremely self-aware. I am aware of every inch of my body and where it's placed and everything in a room and how I might appear to other people all the time.

For me, my main issues were a lack of an ability to relate to others. Everyone kind of seemed like a space alien to me. I didn't really understand why people did the things they did. I didn't understand why you would want to talk to someone you didn't know. I didn't understand how to keep myself organized. I was a mess all

My classmates discovered that I didn't really understand tone well, and I was fairly gullible and was bullied fairly severely through elementary and middle school. As I got towards high school, it got a little bit better.

I found a couple of friends who I was incredibly close to. And once I entered treatment, not that you can treat autism, but you can learn ways to manage the symptoms. I began to understand people a lot better and I became a lot better about letting people in and ways to handle my emotions that were at that point incredibly out of control.

My mother didn't really accept my diagnosis. She didn't believe mental illness was a valid thing. She didn't believe that things like autism were real. She said it was because I had a poor diet.

I was extremely conflicted between the adults in my life who were trying to help me and my mother who would tell me that she was going to get a CAT scan of my brain to prove that there was no mental illness in it. She thought that I was the way I was just to humiliate her.

For years and years, I thought of my father. I never stopped thinking about him. And I would fantasize about getting to meet him and know him because in my head, he was still very flawless. Him and I were so close when I was a child. About annually, I would bring up my father and every time it would be met with the same anger.

especially when I reached my teen years and became a lot more defiant against her. We'd fight about it all the time. At this point in my life, you know, I'm 16 and I told my best friend at the time about my father and my friend says, well, we should just look him up. So we did.

It took us maybe 10 minutes to find his profile. And we knew it was him because his picture was a picture of him and I.

I had this narrative in my head that this person wanted out of my life. And here they are on a public platform with a photo of the two of us. And immediately at this point, my mother's story began to fall apart. I decided to message him and I kept it super, super brief.

I just told him I was his daughter and that I wanted to talk to him. It took him about 15 minutes to message me back, and he enclosed his phone number in the message.

I felt more nervous than anything else, and I still at this point feared that he might reject me. But I ended up giving him a call, and we talked for hours. It ends up that my mother knew where he was all along, and he'd even been paying child support.

So all the times that my mother didn't feed us, didn't clothe us properly, said no to school events because she couldn't pay for it, all of that was her own doing. And she blamed my father and kept me away from someone who really loved me for 11 years.

It took a couple of phone conversations, but we decided that I would go down to West Texas and spend the summer with him. He was going to wire me some money and I was going to go drive down and be with him. We definitely couldn't tell my mother that I was going down to see him. That was not something we could do.

Luckily, his brother lived in Fort Worth and I was extremely close to my uncle. I called him and I told him that I wanted to do this and if he could help me by lying to my mom and saying I was going to see him. And reluctantly, he agreed. He said he'd only be hours away from me and if it didn't work out, my dad was an asshole and I hated him, he could rescue me in a day.

but just to keep in contact with him. School ended about two weeks after that. School let out at about 11 a.m. By noon, I was on my way to Texas.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I drove up and he was already waiting on the porch for me. And the sun was just beating down. It had to have been 100 degrees outside.

And I got out of the car and I got my first really good look at him. My father's older. He was in his mid-70s at this point. He had long gray hair that he kept in a braided ponytail. And we hugged and cried. I had never felt so happy. The way he decorated his house, the way he

always chewed gum. He was so much like me, and suddenly I went from being someone who felt so misunderstood to someone who felt like I had just met a missing piece of myself. That first night, we stayed up all night just talking about everything. My life back home, his life, his time in the

At this point, I had been there about two weeks, and my father and I were outside eating dinner, and we decided that we should make the move more permanent. At this point, my mother doesn't even know I'm with him, so we didn't really know how to approach me staying. My dad brought up his friend, who was a police officer.

He lived fairly close and he said that we could pick his brain about how to go about me moving there permanently. So we set up a day for him to come help my dad set up a large above ground pool that he had bought. And we picked his brain a little bit about my dad getting in any trouble for me staying with him and how we could go about that.

And he was really nice. He seemed very interested in helping us out as much as he could with any expertise that he had. He was extremely nice to me. And I had never had anyone ask me that many questions about myself.

I was extremely interested in math, and he asked me what about math I enjoyed, and when I answered that it was the language of the universe, he smiled and was extremely interested in everything I was saying to him. He complimented me all the time. He said my skin was the same color as honey.

in front of my dad, he would tell my dad that he better be ready to beat the boys away with a baseball bat. So not only was I forging this relationship with my dad that was going amazing, here was this other adult who was very respected in his community, who was also showing me a lot of interest, a lot of attention.

My dad delivered payroll for a living around the larger town near where we lived. He worked every day except Sunday, and he worked for really long hours. He'd leave at about five. Sometimes he'd be home about four o'clock in the afternoon. Sometimes he'd be home at about ten.

So I spent a lot of time alone. I also spent a lot of time in and hanging out by the pool. So I would listen to my iPod and tan. Frank started coming around the house to check up on me. He said my father had asked him to, which made perfect sense to me.

So when I'd be in the backyard tanning, he'd drive up and come up to the chain link fence and strike up a conversation with me. At first it was fine, but it became a lot to handle. It seemed like the shorter I was with him, the more he tried to pull out of me.

One day, I was so fed up with the small talk and the staying around for way too long and looking at me weird that I left my headphones in and I pretended like I couldn't hear him. At which point he opened the gate, came up to me and yanked my headphones out. And then he took my cigarette out of my hand and

and took a couple of drags off of it before returning it to me. At this point, I covered myself up with a towel because I was extremely uncomfortable, even in a bathing suit, because the way he looked at me felt like he was looking right through me.

And in my head, I thought, this guy is like in his mid-40s and he has a wife and he has children. There's absolutely no way he's got some kind of ulterior motive. Maybe he's just a really, really intense person. So I was doing backflips in my head to justify what was happening.

One afternoon, my dad was working and then there was a knock at the door and I could see Frank's truck. And I thought, are you serious? Why is he knocking on my door? I went to the door after a minute or two and I said hello through the door and Frank laughed and he said, open the door.

I asked him what was up, but why did he come knock on my door in the middle of the day? And he said that my dad had asked him to fix a leak in our kitchen sink. He had a small toolkit with him and I let him in. I walked him over to the kitchen sink and I went back to the sofa and I continued watching TV. At some point, he got up from working on the sink and

and came over and sat down on the sofa with me. And he asked me if I would get him a beer and to get myself one as well. So I did. And once I came back and sat down with him, the conversation took a really, really sharp turn. He asked me how old I was, even though he already knew how old I was.

And he said that by his standards, I was old enough to have some fun with him. I didn't really process it. And he took my hand and put it on the crotch of his pants. And at that point, I ripped my hand away from him. And I told him it was time for him to get out. It was time for him to go home. And I went back into the kitchen to get my cell phone.

And he pursued me into the kitchen, cornering me between himself and the end of the counter. And I started to cry and I said, you have to stop or I'm going to call the police. At this point, he took a knife out of his belt and began brandishing it at me. And he said, we're so far out from anyone who can get to you.

It would take anyone 30 minutes to get here. And in that time, I can slit your throat. I can have sex with your body while it's still warm and I can be gone. I could not believe what he was saying. I was just bawling and asking him to stop and asking him if he was kidding.

He started taking a much kinder tone with me at this point and said if I followed any directions he gave me, he wouldn't hurt me and he told me to give him my phone, so I did. And then he told me to turn around, put my hands behind my head, and get down on my knees. He handcuffed my hands behind my back and

and sat me down and drug me across the linoleum to the living room floor. And the whole time I'm just screaming and crying and asking him what he wants. And he got right up on my face and asked me if I was stupid. And he asked me what about my situation wasn't extremely clear to me.

He started telling me he knew what I had been doing to him, how I would tease him by wearing next to nothing. And I just started apologizing. I felt like my chest was going to explode. I could barely breathe. I was hyperventilating. And he told me to stop moving. And he asked me if I would rather...

have sex with his knife or if I would rather have sex with him. And he made me say that I would rather have sex with him. I was incredibly convinced that he wasn't gonna let me go, that he wasn't gonna let me live. So really, all that could go through my mind was how much I really didn't want this to be how my life ended.

I felt really embarrassed, humiliated. I felt really stupid. I wasn't really present with my own body. I was somewhere else. My mind was completely elsewhere. After the assault took place,

He tried to help me get up, but I couldn't stand. Like my legs were just, I just couldn't use them. They just weren't working. They felt like jelly. And then I just threw up all over the carpet. He picked me up in his arms and he took me to the shower. He turned it on and put me in it. He said to clean myself up.

He sat down on the toilet next to the shower. He put his head in his hands and he started to cry. He told me to come to him and gestured for me. I got out of the shower and I sort of just stood in front of him and he hugged me and he put his head on my chest and told me that he was sorry.

And he said that there was just something in him that made him do this, and that he wanted me to forgive him. This person who had just brutalized me and attacked me was now asking me to make him feel better about having had done that to me. And for some reason, I complied with him completely, and I told him that it was okay.

Obviously, it was not okay. I was absolutely horrified. And really, the most important thing to me was to get out of the situation intact and alive. So really, I probably would have told him anything that he wanted to hear. We sat in the bathroom for a while, just quietly. Eventually, he said he had to go home.

So I walked him to the door and he asked me if we were okay, if we were still friends. And I said, yeah, we're still friends. He gave me a kiss and he left. I put my back on the front door and just sank down. I felt really gross and really guilty.

I felt like I had let myself become a victim for him and hadn't sufficiently tried to defend myself. In the following week, Frank sent me a couple of text messages asking if I was alright, and I didn't respond. About a week after the assault, he showed back up at my dad's house while my dad was gone to work, and he came up to the window in the living room

He had fast food bags with him, and through the window, he told me to let him in. And I told him to fuck off. He said, open the door, or I'm just going to open the door. So I let him in. He offered me lunch, and I said no. He asked me if I had said anything to my dad, and I said no, and I hadn't.

He asked me if I had been thinking about him because he couldn't get me out of his head. And I said no, that I hadn't thought of him at all. Which wasn't true, but I wanted to give him the wrong answer. He called me an ungrateful bitch and he told me that he knew I had had an orgasm when he assaulted me.

He also expressed extreme disappointment at my having not been a virgin. In an instant, before I could really realize what was going on, he put his hands around my neck and assaulted me again. And this time he just left, extremely angry with me.

Throughout all of this, he snapped so easily between someone who was abusing me violently and someone who wanted my acceptance and my affection. In his mind, we were definitely in some kind of relationship. He came over really frequently after this, almost every day, and I just kept letting him in, just kept going with it.

I don't know why I didn't say anything. I really wanted to, but he was undoubtedly the scariest person that I've ever met or ever will meet. My father and I's relationship really started to fall apart. I was lashing out at him. I would tell him that I hated him. And for him, this really just came out of nowhere. Everything was just falling apart.

I just wouldn't stop lashing out and I kept taking this out on my dad. Everything that was happening to me, I really felt like I just couldn't tell him. There was also just a lot of shame and how I felt like I kept letting it happen.

Frank would hold me on his lap and tell me about his life for hours, about how he had been abused as a child, about how he was unhappy in his marriage. He bought me really expensive gifts, a diamond necklace, things that I had never really had before in my life, and he would tell me how much he loved me.

He told me after every time he assaulted me that he hoped I'd get pregnant. After several times that I didn't become pregnant, he demanded that I give him my birth control pills. Sometimes he'd be so nice, so kind to me. Sometimes he almost had me fooled. Sometimes I almost liked him back.

I at least felt really bad for him. He told me he wanted to run away with me, that I was the best thing that ever happened to him. I can't imagine that on some level he didn't know that he was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It wasn't just the physical abuse or the sexual abuse. It was getting inside of my head.

It was so much easier to take when he was being nice, so I would tell him everything he wanted to hear. I would tell him that I loved him. I would tell him that I wanted to be there for him. I didn't mean it, but some part of me even wanted to mean it. I'd rehearse in my head how to act and

for our next visit, and I'd practice smiling in the mirror so I could be convincing enough so he would be easier on me. I definitely felt outside of my body and completely dehumanized. I felt like everything I was didn't really matter, and I was just a puppet who came to life to entertain Frank

and then went back to being inanimate afterward. I was really just a body for him to put all these feelings onto, all his hate onto me, and all his love, or what he thought was love.

I rarely ever said a word when we would be together. He told me how much he didn't like his wife, how much he wanted to start over, how much he didn't like being a police officer. He'd ask me why I wasn't happy with him. He'd ask me what he could do to make me happy.

Anyone who I was before this happened to me did not exist anymore. I was a hollowed out version of myself. I felt like I didn't remember anything that I liked about being alive. I was seeing the world through like a sheet, just something clouding all of my vision and making it all look so gray. Toward the end of August, I was

I realized that I missed my period. And at that point, I guess I'd finally had enough. I also knew I couldn't have an abortion in Texas. So I knew I had to get back to Maryland and have an abortion. I called my uncle and I told him that he had to come get me. And he asked why and what happened. And I couldn't tell him.

I couldn't tell anyone what was happening to me. I just didn't really know how. I told my dad that I was leaving and he begged me to stay. It just made him extremely sad and he said that he failed me when I was a child and he was doomed to fail me again and that he was sorry.

And I was just in my head, like screaming at myself to just tell him what was going on. But I couldn't and I just kept taking it out on him.

I was never sure how dangerous of a person Frank was. Clearly very, but I didn't know the extent of it. And he had threatened my life numerous times and my father's life as well. And I felt like if my father knew and then Frank knew my father knew, I didn't think anything good happened.

could ever come of that. About a week before I left, there was a knock at the door and it was Frank's wife and she asked me to stay away from her husband. I was fuming and I told her to keep her husband the hell away from me and where she had been upset before, I could see her shrink and

And she told me to go home. And she told me to be safe. It almost seemed like she had dealt with this before. Here was this adult who could and maybe even should have helped me. And she just told me to leave and never come back.

My aunt and uncle came to get me, and when they pulled up, my aunt flew out of the car and stormed up to my dad, and she slapped him across the face. And she said, what did you do? And she told him to never, ever speak to me again. When we got back to their house in Fort Worth after I left my dad's,

I was laying on my uncle's bed and he just kept asking me, what happened to you? What happened? And I threw up all over his lap. And my friend back home had to be flown down to Dallas so he could drive my car back to Maryland because I couldn't do anything. At this time, I was not telling anyone anything.

I didn't even tell my best friend, and I hadn't talked to my friend at all since the first time that I was assaulted. I didn't talk to anyone. When they picked him up and brought him back to my uncle's house, I hugged him. I felt all these emotions come back because I knew he could tell that something really, really bad had happened.

And we didn't talk much. And we were in the car just driving. And he said, you still don't have to tell me, but can you tell me if you're okay? And I told him I was pregnant. And I told him that I had been assaulted, but I didn't say by who. And I left out most of the context. And he started to cry again.

I felt some amount of weight come off of me just telling someone even just a little bit about what had happened, even if I really didn't have it in me to tell him the whole truth, because I was afraid that he'd reject me, because I felt as though I had been a bad victim and I had allowed things to happen that I should have never allowed.

I told him that I couldn't tell my mom that I was pregnant, so we told my friend's father, who took me to the clinic to have an abortion about a week after we arrived home.

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to Maryland and I got back to being a high school student, I would look at the other students, my peers, the girls on the cheer squad, and I would think, how am I ever supposed to relate to any of these people? It was like I had crash-landed back to Earth and now I'm supposed to be a person again.

Will I ever be able to be one of them ever again? Or am I just like an alien now? Nothing was ever really the same. I was an emotional wreck. I was completely emotionally devastated all the time. I really wanted to kill myself. I stopped eating. I lost a ton of weight very quickly. Everything was too much and too painful.

I would throw up a lot. My body felt like it was too tight and I didn't want to be in it anymore. I never told my mother and I never told my father and I never told my uncle and I never fully told my friend. It was always this thing that I carried around with me, so burdened by and so responsible for.

I really didn't want to share things with anyone. I didn't trust anyone. If I had a disdain for authority prior to this, this made it so, so much worse. I went back to having outbursts at school. My grades were pretty bad. I was a joyless person.

It was very much me versus the rest of the world, and I became extremely selfish. I broke up with the boyfriend I had had at the time, and I became fairly promiscuous, but I never wanted to enter a relationship or make any kind of emotional commitment to anyone. I didn't really know how.

As soon as I graduated, I moved out of my mother's house into a program that's intended for children who were in foster care to get on their feet. But as soon as I moved out of her house, I never looked back. And once I entered this program, I was able to seek therapy and really learn to just forgive myself.

and realize that I made the choices that I made because at the time they really felt like the only ones I had to make.

It took me so long to warm back up to people and I still have issues trusting people and making friends. And if I get pulled over by a police officer, I still have a hard time navigating that situation. I'm still traumatized by handcuffs. It took about six months for me to get back in contact with my father again.

But finally, I called him and he immediately opened his heart back up to me, even though I had not been a very good person to him. And him forgiving me for how cruel I became to him was like the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. And it wasn't even a question for him. You know, he just did it. He just forgave me.

My father would often bring Frank up. He would often say like, "Oh, you know, he's coming over to watch the game." And I would just grit my teeth. I tried not to be angry at my father because he didn't know. And I had to constantly remind myself that my father didn't know.

But my father would always try to get me to come see him. Always. And he'd beg me to come down and see him even for a little while. And because I knew Frank was still his friend and still living so close, I could never do it. We had been able to reforge a wonderful relationship, but it was long distance and I never did see him again.

in person. I noticed at the end of 2015 that my dad hadn't posted anything in a while and he was constantly posting things on Facebook and he was constantly, you know, we were constantly talking and I had missed a call from him about a week prior to this and he left me a really long voicemail

Just about how much he loved me and how he was so happy that I was out on my own and in college and how proud he was that I made it out of my mom's and that I was doing a lot of things for myself. He just wouldn't pick up the phone no matter how many times I called him. One night I called him 20 times. He was dead in his house for a week before anyone found him.

My dad committed suicide. My uncle called me and told me, and I could just hear ringing in my ears, and I felt like I couldn't breathe. I had no inkling that my dad was going to do this, and he didn't leave a letter.

My dad always lived on his own terms. He was very much a person who did his own thing and marched to the beat of his own drummer. So on some level, I understand that if he had gotten sick, he wouldn't really want to go out that way. And he'd want to do it on his own terms. And that is how I cope with this.

I assume that he got sick and it was terminal and this is how he wanted to go. But there's a hole in my heart that will never be complete again. It's still hard for me to accept.

And it's hard for me to accept that my mom kept us away from each other for so long and there were all those wasted years. And then when I finally found him again, it got fucked up and the rest of the time we had together was spent not together like it should have been.

It felt like all the old wounds that I had been working to stitch together were suddenly reopened, especially because Frank showed up at my father's funeral, and it was an extremely small group of people at this funeral. My father remained very close with this man until his passing. In fact, Frank was the person who found his body. I gave my speech

and I tried not to look at him. And when he gave his, every time he'd look at me, I'd mouth, I hate you, so much that my uncle elbowed me and told me to stop. So I went to the bathroom to calm myself down, and when I came out, there Frank was.

And he said that I grew up really beautiful and I spit on his face. It looked like I had broken his heart when I did that. Like in his mind, on whatever planet it is that he's currently living on, I would be happy to see him. I should have been able to make peace with my father and say goodbye to

But instead, I had to deal with this absolute creature continuing after years to torture me. Occasionally, he would send me a letter. I never read one of them, but every time he did it, I could just feel him just jabbing me, just like he wanted to remind me, like he won't ever let me forget. It's not like I really could anyway.

As I grew up and entered different relationships, I always seemed to pick guys who were just not nice to me. And I entered a number of abusive relationships as a young woman. I think because of what happened to me, it's cyclical. It

just keeps going. You just keep picking these people who will treat you not like you deserve to be treated, but the only way you really know how to be treated. It wasn't until I met my husband that I really felt fully loved in the way that I deserve to be loved.

It's still hard for me to make friends. And there's still lots of feelings of guilt and shame. And it's so hard in a world where people publicly discount things that happen to victims and publicly say, oh, you know, she's definitely lying or she was complicit because I feel like that's how the world will think of me.

You just carry it around and you keep carrying it around and you just shove it down in there, down into you. And it's like holding a ball underwater. It just keeps coming back up, even in small ways, like the way I still don't love to be cuddled.

The way I couldn't wear a bathing suit for years. The way I can't emotionally handle being around police in any capacity. The way I shut people out and put up a wall. The way I had to relearn how to date people my own age. And since I was so young when this happened, I lost what little trust I had for authority figures as a whole.

Frank used his power against me, and he certainly targeted me from the first time he saw me. Is it that easy for someone to just target you? How could you ever really feel safe again when someone could so easily just take you over? I feel...

Like, any sense of normalcy I have is really insecure. Like, it's on just a hair trigger. But I also feel like now I know that I can make it through pretty much anything. I've learned to appreciate myself and my body that carries myself in it in a way that I never was able to before. I appreciate...

my life in a very different way. And I just try to remind myself that what happened to me doesn't say anything about anyone else. And I try to let people into my life. But there's always that feeling that everything I hold dear to me is really fragile.

I think the most difficult thing for me now is that fragility of everything that's going on that's so normal, just the day-to-day can just, in the snap of a fingers, when someone wills it to be so, can completely change. Nothing really feels like home and nothing really feels safe. And I don't think I'll ever shake that feeling.

I don't think I'll ever be a super happy person. I'm always going to have oddities and issues that will follow me. But being able to come out of what happened to me makes me proud of myself on some level. Maybe it even makes me feel special that I was able to survive it.

In the months after my dad's passing, I'd still find myself calling him and I would leave him voicemails and I would listen to his voicemail. Sometimes I'd wake up and I'd forget that he was really gone. If I could say anything to my father, I would tell him what happened and why I acted the way I did, but I know it would have absolutely destroyed him.

And I would tell him that I wished I could stay. I really, really wished I could stay. To this day, my dad is still my very best friend. And I miss him so much. And I'm so sorry that I could never be honest with him. Because I think if anyone would have understood, it would have been him. But I never gave him the opportunity. I also would want him to know that I'm okay now. That I'm married and happy.

And that I hope he found peace unlike anything he was ever able to find here on earth.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, or at Actually Happening on Instagram. And as always, you can support the show by going to patreon.com slash happening, or by visiting the shop at actuallyhappeningstore.com. Wanderer.

She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reid was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.