216: What if you opened Pandora's Box?
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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. Time stopped, you know, while my brain was trying to catch up and I was horrified, I was confused, I was bewildered, I was panicked. I mean, just a wave of all of that came over me. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 216. What if you opened Pandora's box?

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I always describe myself as normal. I was blessed. I had a lot of great friends. I loved going to school. I grew up going to camp in the summer. I loved summer camp. Just loved being outdoors. You know, I grew up with friends that went to church. So church youth group Wednesdays and Sundays. I grew up with friends that went to church.

I was very happy. In fact, I don't have a lot of sad, upset, hard memories as a child. I adored my parents. I had a good relationship with my parents. I had a good relationship with my brother. I just assumed my life would be a lot like my parents. I assumed at some point I'd meet someone that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I'd get married once. I'd have children. I'd be a stay-at-home mom if I was financially able to do that.

I thought about going into child psychology in college, but I went into education and just loved it from day one. Once I graduated college, my first job I was offered was back in Omaha. So that was an easy move from Kansas back to Omaha.

As I got into education, it just was an easy fit. And I remember thinking it was fun going to work every day. And I remember thinking, I don't think everyone feels this way. But each day I was excited to get to school. I owned a home. I had a couple of roommates who were paying me rent. I really got a strong start to life.

I met my husband in my mid-20s, and he was about the same age, a little bit older than me. And we just clicked right away. And I think it was exactly a year from the time we met to when we got married. We were married about a year, I believe, before I got pregnant. And then once I had my first child, I knew I really wanted to stay at home to be a stay-at-home mom, similar to my mom.

So when I stayed at home that next year, I just felt like that's where I was meant to be. But it was very tight financially. And I think that's what put a lot of strain on our marriage.

I have a daughter. She was born two and a half years after Ben. And that was amazing to have both a boy and a girl. I was staying at home with them. I loved staying at home. It definitely was not easy at all. I feel like it was easier when I went back to work.

It's just crazy. You think like, oh, how delightful it sounds to be a stay-at-home mom. Well, it is so much work. And I think it was hard for my husband to understand when he got home from work, why? If I was home all day, why wasn't the house clean? Why wasn't there a meal ready? In his eyes, I was kind of failing. So that was a big issue between the two of us.

So I started subbing as much as I could. My mom would help out to supplement our income. But again, it just, it was getting more difficult between my husband and I. We did seek counseling. We went to a marriage counselor, but our marriage most definitely was unraveling.

I felt very hopeless. I felt like I had tried counseling and I just started to kind of hate who I was becoming. I realized that I wanted to seek divorce. And one of the first things I did was just start to apply for jobs because I knew if I was going to be a divorced mother, I was going to need income.

I was offered a job where my kids went to school. So by this time, Ben was in first grade. Rebecca still was going to have one more year of preschool. It was very hard. And I think like most people who get divorced felt like a failure.

The way I moved past that was just because I knew being a mom was like my new top priority. I kind of failed at being a wife, but I was okay with that or willing to accept it because I was going to be a really good mom. I think every divorced mother can relate to your work is never done.

It's exhausting, as every working mom knows, but I loved everything I was doing. I loved being a mom. I loved being a teacher. So for the first time, I could relax in my own house and I didn't answer to anyone. I was happy, to be honest.

I wasn't too interested in dating. I knew I would like to eventually meet some, but I wasn't sure how or who it would be or how that works when you have young children. And I ended up meeting Michael right there at school where I was working.

He was a teacher assistant or paraeducator about my age, and he was going back to college to get a teaching degree. He was also recently divorced. He dresses beautifully. He's handsome. I knew he was involved in theater. So just everything was interesting to me about him. He'd talk about his girls. He had two girls from his first marriage.

Eventually, we met each other's kids. Now, Michael knew my kids because he worked at the school where they went to school. So my kids knew him as Mr. Riley, and they knew that we were friends, and they knew we were spending more time together. My son was leery of that. He wasn't sure if he wanted me spending time with someone other than his dad or him.

Eventually, we got all four kids together and they got along great. They'd put on plays and shows and they'd have scripts that they'd write. We dated for about three years before we got engaged and married in 2016.

I just thought this was great. Like, oh my goodness, I'm going to have a second chance to have a husband. I'm going to have a second chance of having a family. And I am older and I'm wiser. And I just adore this man. I love spending time with him. I'm going to have a second chance to get this right. We knew it would kind of make our kids sad if we left them for a honeymoon. So we did a family moon. Had a great time. It was so much fun.

When we returned from our honeymoon, just started up life as a blended family. By this time, Michael had gotten a teaching job, so he was working full-time as a teacher. So things went great from May to December, and I'd felt a lump. That was the year I turned 40, so I had a mammogram in August, and it was clear.

And in December was when I felt the lump. And, you know, once the doctor feels something, things usually go pretty quickly. And then December 19th, I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in my left breast. You find yourself sitting in that chair and looking at an oncologist and hearing the words, you have cancer.

And time stops. It really does. You can't wrap your brain around it at first. And, you know, I'm 40. I have young children. I have a job I need to go to tomorrow. I don't have time for this. I don't. How do I do this? It's overwhelming. Michael was with me at the appointment when the doctor told me that I had cancer and

My oncologist was recommending that I go through chemotherapy first and then have a bilateral mastectomy second, and then they would determine if I needed radiation. I had a chemotherapy that's nicknamed the Red Devil. You can only have six doses of it in your entire life.

Someone told me once that chemotherapy is kind of like walking you up to death's door, but not pushing you in. And that's exactly what it did. It walked me up to death's door. The feeling is unreal watching chemotherapy go into your body. One reason is because the nurse that administers chemotherapy is basically wearing a hazmat suit.

I felt like someone took like a cast iron pan and hit me on the back of the head. That was the pain that I felt in my head after that first round of chemotherapy. It was a horrible two to three weeks, very hard to eat. It was hard to sleep, just miserable pain that would come and go.

It's on your mind constantly. Like, is this treatment plan going to work? Am I going to be healed? Because we're all aware that some people recover from cancer and some people don't. But I didn't have a lot of time or maybe I didn't choose to spend a lot of time contemplating death at this point just because I, in my head, I had a lot of work to do to fight cancer.

They told me, you know, you're going to lose your hair about day 14 after your first chemotherapy treatment. So my husband took me to get my head shaved and held my hand through that whole thing and shaved his head as well. And they had a place in the hospital where they would fit you for a wig. And I got fitted for a wig. I bought beautiful scarves. And, you know, everyone was okay with that. I don't know what I would have done without him.

I was miserable a lot of nights by the time I got home from work because I worked so hard during the day to be the best teacher as I could for my third graders that I was just absolutely exhausted by the time I got home. It was just a very unfortunate way to spend your first year of marriage. And my husband was doing everything he could for me. Everything he could.

I had a total of 16 rounds of chemotherapy. And then I finished with chemotherapy in May of

I had the mastectomy on June 23rd. The mastectomy was definitely difficult, but I couldn't imagine a better support system. My mom and Michael and two of my friends stayed at the hospital while I had my mastectomy, and both breasts were removed. And in August, I started radiation treatment. So this is a new school year now.

So every day for 28 days, I drove to the hospital and got radiation after school. That took me into September. So by the about middle of September, I was completely done with cancer treatment and they found zero trace of cancer in me.

I was exhausted. I had this different body. In my head, I was kind of malformed now. So I did get reconstruction and I had implants put in. And you still don't feel like yourself though. So that part was sad just because still I'm newly married. And he always made me feel like I was beautiful and he just wanted me healthy. But it's a lot to...

your identity is different after going through cancer. You know, life kind of went back to as normal as it could be. There were lots of good times mixed in with hard times, you know, like every marriage. After I got through my cancer treatment, my mom gave the kids and I a really gracious gift of taking us to Hawaii.

That kind of started us on kind of a pattern of when we had spring break in March that my mom and I would take the kids somewhere. And that was kind of hard for Michael because I think he felt left out and not included. And so the four of us would be packing up to go on a trip and he would be kind of left at home.

My mom wanted to take the kids and I to Washington, D.C. that spring break. And again, Michael was going to be at home, and I knew he wasn't happy about that. We went to D.C. and did all the sightseeing and things like that. And I had come back, and I remember I'd been home for one or two nights, and I remember being awake and hearing his phone vibrate in the night like it was ringing, and

He was asleep. I don't think he even heard it. And I glanced at his phone and it was his coworker. And I thought, that's not right.

You know, why would your teaching partner be calling you in the middle of the night unless there was an emergency? And I just kind of let it sit in my brain for a while before I brought it up to him. But eventually I said that I had seen that she had called in the middle of the night and I wanted him to explain that to me. And instantly from his reaction, I knew something wasn't right because he kind of squirmed.

And he tried to put my mind at ease. You know, this is, I'm just friends with this woman and she's much younger than me. And, you know, she's kind of new to town. She doesn't have any friends and I'm just doing her a favor by talking with her. And we came across this show that we were both watching and that's, that's all we were communicating about was this show we had in common. And again, women's intuition, I don't know, call it what you want, but it just didn't sit right with me.

It came to a head at the end of that school year. I remember his end of the school year and I had gone with him to his end of the school year party. His teaching partner was there and she avoided me like the plague. His phone was ringing as we were leaving and I grabbed it and I could see the message from her said, I miss you already. And when I read that, I just knew that

And my heart sunk just because this was my husband and I was in love with him. And this is who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And I couldn't believe after everything we'd been through, he was going to mess it up with a coworker.

It was ugly when I confronted him. It was a lot of denying and accusing me of reading more into it than it was and just denial after denial after denial. And I've got to take matters into my own hands. He's obviously not going to be honest with me. So that's when I knew I had to come up with a plan to find out the truth.

I knew there's probably something on that phone. And I needed to find out what it was because he wasn't going to be honest and tell me. So his phone was password protected. But I knew my husband well enough. And I figured out the code to his phone. It still sounds crazy to me, but I figured it out. And I got into his phone. And in such a weird place, I found it in the Notes app.

I looked in the notes app and there was a link that,

When I clicked on the link, it had a roll of photographs of his coworker and she was nude. And so once I had found those photos, he came clean and he said it was an inappropriate friendship and that he had lied to me, but he told me the relationship had never been physical. He said he had never cheated on me. He hadn't kissed her. He hadn't hugged her and they had not had sex.

And so as devastating as it was to me, he was repentant and he was sorry. And, you know, because I was like, do you want our marriage to be done? You know, like, I don't want to be in a marriage with someone who doesn't want to be married to me. But I was still, I still loved him at this point. And I was willing to try if he was willing to try. And he told me he was willing to try. And we got counseling and everything.

worked on our marriage, and I felt we were on the way up. We hit this big road bump. It's not a road bump that is unfamiliar to many couples. I can handle this. I do not want to get divorced again. If he wants to work on things, then I'm willing to work on things.

We were doing okay. We went to church on Sunday together. One of my favorite things would be going to church and him reaching over and taking my hand. It's just like each week, you get a chance to renew yourself and just start fresh and put the past behind you and let's keep moving forward.

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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. So it's winter break, another time that's like teachers, it's such a blessing for teachers. You'd have like two weeks off over Christmas and it'd been a nice winter break and we'd spent time with the kids and my son's birthday is January 2nd.

That was the date. My son had turned 15 and we were having my parents over for dinner that night and my brother and his wife to celebrate my son's 15th birthday. It was just a nice night. We were going to bed and I remembered I had asked him about a couple bills that I'd asked him if he had paid. And he had told me that he had not paid them. And he told me that not only had he not paid them, but he hadn't paid them for two months. And I just was like, oh gosh, what?

I was stressed and it was late at night though. And Michael went to sleep and I laid down and tried to go to sleep. Something just wasn't sitting right with me. Like something's off and I couldn't go to sleep. And why can't my mind rest? I just want to go to sleep. It's been a long day. And I'm like, I'm just going to take a sleeping pill and go to sleep. Took a sleeping pill and I was wide awake. Could not sleep. I just laid in bed and I was like, what could be bothering me? Like what's going on?

I just felt like something was off with Michael. And I didn't know if it was like maybe he's talking to this coworker again or if it's related to the finances. Just, you know, something inside me was telling me something's wrong and you need to pay attention. I mean, it's after midnight. And, you know, I feel like, you know what, maybe if I go through his phone again and there's nothing there, that'll put my mind at ease.

So I remember getting up and opening his phone up and looking through every app I could think of, looking through his messages, looking through his emails. I didn't even know where to look. I just, I couldn't see anything off. I didn't see any signs of him communicating with this woman again.

after looking through everything I could think of, I remember setting it down. I'm sitting in the closet and I just prayed. And I just said, God, if there's something on this phone that you want me to see, you're going to have to show me where to look. Cause I don't, I don't know where else to look. And as soon as I finished that prayer, I opened up his photos and I scrolled down to the file called recently deleted. And I tapped on that and,

And it was like opening Pandora's box. It was my daughter, my 12-year-old daughter. And she was naked. And the photos and videos were taken in my husband and my bathroom. I couldn't figure out.

How is there a picture of my daughter without her clothes on in the shower on my husband's phone? I couldn't. I mean, time stopped while my brain was trying to catch up. And I was horrified. I was confused. I was bewildered. I was panicked. I mean, just a wave of all of that came over me.

fight or flight, I would definitely say came over me. I started to make sense of what it was. And the horror turned into just action. Like I had to take care of this immediately.

I could see that there were a number of videos and I could kind of tell that he had tried this out because at first there was a video where he kind of set his phone up in the closet where he could videotape the mirror reflecting the shower area. And then he must have gotten bolder because then he would set it up his phone and

right at the sink, which was directly across from the shower. So it was just a clear shot of the shower. So there were multiple videos of my unsuspecting daughter going into the bathroom thinking she was alone. And then from those videos, he had gone on to make still shots of

I was instantly horrified. I was shocked. I was also terrified at the same time because I knew I had to keep this evidence away from him to keep him from hiding it.

My first thought was, I'm going to forward it to my phone so I have a record of it. So I started forwarding the videos to my phone, but it was taking too long. You know, my heart is just pounding a million times a minute.

So my plan B was, okay, I'm going to lock his phone in my car. So I went and locked his phone in my car. And then I hid my car keys in my son's room. Now, mind you, my son's asleep in bed. My daughter's asleep in bed. And I didn't want to wake them up. I just wanted to handle this, you know, like I always had handled it and not disturb the children. And then that's when I woke Michael up.

I had told him that I found the video footage that he had taken of my daughter and that he needed to get out of the house. He was shocked and horrified. He didn't say much, actually. He didn't say much at all. I think he was shaking. He went in the closet to start to kind of put a bag together, and I said, "No, I didn't tell you to make a bag. I just said you need to leave immediately."

I don't know if I didn't trust myself. I don't know. I just knew he had to get out of the house. He left and I don't know what he took with him. He knew I had his phone and I think he knew there was no way I was going to give it to him. I never even contemplated him hurting me until months and months later when I was processing this with my counselor.

The thing I was thankful for was that I didn't hurt him, you know, because I mean, I am a mother and mothers who fear or know their children are in danger can do unbelievable things. And I could have hurt him, but I didn't. And it didn't even enter my mind that he might hurt me.

I think I knew I had it within me. Whatever I needed to do that night, I was going to do it. It didn't matter what it was. My daughter had been violated and I didn't know the extent of it yet, but I knew I was now in control and I was going to do whatever I needed to do to protect my children. The first person I called was Michael's mother,

I called her because I knew Michael had nowhere to go and I had his phone. And so I figured he would go to their house at some point. So I just wanted to warn them. And I told her what I had found and she was speechless. She didn't know what to say. I called the police next. I didn't even know how to report this. I didn't know what kind of crime it was. I didn't know any specifics at all.

The police came into my house and sat at the kitchen table with me, and I went through everything I'd found on his phone, and I surrendered his phone to the police, and then they started to go through all the electric data files on his phone. The police sat with me, and it was around that time I started to get text messages from Michael,

He had his laptop in the car and so was remotely texting me, which I didn't even know you could do that. But he had texted me to ask, he said, if I can't have my phone back, can I please come back and get my wallet? Because he must have left so quickly that he didn't even grab his wallet. And I told him no and that if he needed a place to go, he should go to his parents' house, that that would be a safe place to go.

His reply was, my life is over. I have nowhere to go. Goodbye. The police interpreted that, that maybe he was suicidal. So the police sat with me and he said, we need to keep your safety and your children's safety the priority. And so we would like you to go to the courthouse and file a restraining order against him.

A patrolman stayed in my driveway, and I tried to rest for a few hours. I remember getting up so I could be at the courthouse when it opened at 8. That afternoon, I was granted a restraining order, and the police also told me, you're going to need to take your children to be questioned. And they told me they needed to find out if anything else had happened.

That was another wave of horror that came over me, that there could be more that had happened that I wasn't aware of. Once it was done, they came and told me that there was no evidence that there had been any abuse and the kids had no knowledge of what Michael was doing. So that was a huge relief to me.

They brought the kids in and I had a woman detective who was there and a social worker and a counselor, I believe. I went through the events of the night with the kids and told them what I had found. I was crying and my daughter was crying and my son just had his head down.

I'm thinking about how he never wanted me to get remarried, how he just wanted it to be the three of us. And now I felt like he was the wise one. Like I, he was right. It should have just been the three of us. And I'm looking at Rebecca and I'm thinking about this is her privacy that's been invaded. And I,

She's at this age of 12 when you feel awkward about your body to begin with. And now she's been violated and not just violated, but by a man who supposedly loved her and was her father figure to her. So it just was heart shattering as a mother. And to think about like, I'm the one who opened the door for this man to come into their lives.

That was the worst part of all because I felt like I allowed this to happen. From there, I think we went back to my parents' house and we have to tell my parents and that's horrifying as well. And you know, there's no one who loves my children more on this earth besides me other than their grandparents. And so it's heartbreaking for them.

That afternoon, I got a phone call from him and he told me he was at a psychiatric hospital.

To this day, I still don't know what happened to him in that time to where he got to the psychiatric hospital. But I didn't believe him at first. I needed to know for sure where he was at. And so I said, why don't you give me the number and I'll call you back. Then I'll know you're really there. And so he gave me the phone number and I called it back and it was a psychiatric hospital, like he said. And yeah,

I hung up just because I didn't want to talk to him. I just wanted to know exactly where he was so I could tell the police because at this point, the police had a warrant for his arrest and they were trying to locate him.

Winter break was over, so I went to school that Monday to teach. And I told my principal, obviously, before the school started, just because the police had told me that there's a chance this is going to hit the media and it's going to be a big deal because my husband was a schoolteacher. And not only was he a schoolteacher, but he taught 12-year-olds, and it was the same age as my daughter.

The school district where he taught in was a pretty prestigious school district. Parents would not take this news lightly, as expected. So I taught Monday, didn't hear anything. Tuesday, the school secretary came and got me out of my classroom and said there was a phone call that I needed to take.

It was the detective and she said, I wanted to make sure that you know that we just arrested him. They had booked him into the county jail and that the next steps were to be to set bond and they gave me the dates for when that would happen and...

I was in a communication a little bit with his mother through this, and she had told me that they decided that they were not going to post his bail. They thought it might be the safest place for him to be right now. He could not have contact with any children, including his own children. So once he got arrested, that's when it started to be publicized in the media that

Since Rebecca was a minor, they couldn't use her name in the news. They had a picture of his face. They had his mugshot on the news. They had his full name. They had what school district he was employed at.

The police were in touch with the school district and I believe told them it was a stepdaughter. So the district could reassure parents that it wasn't a student in his class or from the district.

I slowly start to get messages. I knew people wanted to express support and kindness and love. And it's really hard to know what to say in a situation like this. But I felt like a community kind of rallying around me.

I wanted to keep my life as normal as possible for my kids' sake. I just wanted to keep our routine. And I knew the kids would probably need some counseling. And they started seeing a counselor right away. But we talked about it whenever they needed to talk about it. And the kids knew it was on the media. So they knew it was going to be kind of a long road.

My daughter, you know, had her grandparents. My daughter also picked just a couple of her closest friends to tell what had happened. And I talked with their parents to make sure that was okay with them first because they're just too young. 12 is too young to have to think about things like this.

She had her favorite teacher that she trusted a lot, and she confided in her. And that way, it helped me to know that there was a teacher at school kind of checking in with her. Michael was accused of nine different felonies. And really, there was three different felonies, but three counts of each. So that's how you get to the number nine.

unlawful intrusion, recording when you're recording someone unlawfully. And then the strongest felony was the possession of child pornography. And so his lawyer worked really hard to get that last count possession of child pornography dropped. The attorney that we were assigned, she was excellent and she really fought

He pleaded guilty to three of the nine felonies and one count of child pornography. So then he was sentenced for those three felonies in July.

The sentencing, because of COVID, was done all on Zoom. Rebecca also watched the sentencing, but she had her screen turned off. And Rebecca wrote a victim impact statement to the judge, but she did not want to read hers at the sentencing. I chose to read my letter at the sentencing. And Michael was actually given an opportunity to speak first.

I read my letter and then the judge pronounced her sentence. So this is part of the letter that I read at the sentencing that the judge allowed me to read before she gave her sentencing for his crimes.

I would like it to be known that Michael had everything needed to live an exceptional life. The man has earned two college degrees, was employed arguably by the best school district in the city, had parents that have loved him unconditionally his entire life. He has two exquisite daughters who are intelligent, musically gifted, grew up adoring him, and he has his health. At least I thought that he had his health until January.

Michael made the comment to me on more than one occasion that his brain was not right. That comment did not slip by me, and I asked him to explain what it meant. He would then go on to tell me that he was able to remember trivial facts and dates, and yet the important facts and dates he could not remember.

But that was obviously not the whole truth. Not only did Michael have all of the gifts that I mentioned above, but he also had access to help and to health care. And yet instead of getting help, he chose to violate his 12-year-old stepdaughter. I understand that Michael is pleading guilty to three of the nine felonies that he was charged with. The truth is that he is guilty of all nine felonies.

The fact that he has refused to accept responsibility for each of these nine felonies proves to me that he is still most concerned with only himself. Michael is not concerned about the people that he has hurt the most. Rebecca, once his stepdaughter, and myself, once his wife whom he proclaimed to love.

Michael is guilty of nine felonies against an innocent and unsuspecting 12-year-old girl. Michael knows this. I know this. God knows this. And it is Michael that will have to take this to the grave one day with him. I went on just to say that I trust the judge to sentence Michael accordingly.

And I said, before you do this, I want you to know that Rebecca and I will move on from this day victoriously. I want you to know that Rebecca and I are not destroyed. We are strong and determined to overcome the chaos, the confusion and heartache that Michael orchestrated in our lives. We know the truth about Michael has been revealed.

I want the court to know who my daughter is too. Rebecca completed her sixth grade year with a 4.0 GPA. She was on the superior honor roll for the entire school year. She received a kindness award from the middle school principal for how she treated a student who was struggling to speak in front of the class on a day when he was to present a report. She stood alongside of him and helped him make his presentation.

She also plays shortstop better than anyone I have ever seen play the position in the sport of softball. Rebecca and I are stronger because of the difficulties and heartaches we have overcome. We believe that God has a future for us that is full of hope, goodness, and love. Michael will be a part of our past that unfortunately we cannot change, but this did not overcome us. Thank you for allowing me to speak truth in your court today. And that's how I ended the letter.

He was sentenced to a maximum of 19 years in prison with a minimum of eight years for the three felonies. However, in Nebraska, they're eligible to be paroled after half of their sentencing. And so Michael will actually be up for parole in January of 2024.

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He didn't try to really make any excuses for what he did other than he said that he struggled with depression and he said he struggled with an alcohol addiction. He did say that he failed at being a husband. He failed at being a stepfather. I want to believe that he was remorseful. I definitely think he can't explain it or understand it himself.

So I actually went to the jail one time to see him just because my brain still couldn't put this together. And I needed to look at his face and have him explain to me like what happened? Like what, who are you? I couldn't, I couldn't make sense of it. Just visiting someone in jail is, that was foreign. I mean, I'd never done that.

You don't even see the real person. You sit in front of a screen and all of a sudden, there his face just pops up on the screen and he's wearing a neon green jumpsuit. There's my husband now behind bars. It's just...

It's unreal. And so basically it was a really awkward 20 minute conversation because he like hemmed and hawed and talked about how he wished he could answer my questions. But, you know, there's this restraining order I've put in place and he can't communicate with me without breaking the law. And so I thought, you know,

I don't care. Like, even if he has to sit and look at my face for 20 minutes, he can sit and look at my face because I just I wanted him to know I'm still dealing with this. I'm out raising kids and working and dealing with this. Like, in a way, you're locked behind bars and you don't have to deal with the media and going to work and family and phone calls and you don't have to deal with any of it. But I do.

We just both sat and stared at each other until the timer got to zero and the screen went black. That's the last time I've seen him. We have exchanged a few letters because like I said, my ex-husband now is, he's an introvert and I knew, I thought letters would be a good way to communicate because he'd have time to like think and process and weigh his words.

But he just, he can't, he can't give me, and he's told me that. He's like, I can't give you the answers that you're looking for. I can't give you the answers. And what he has told me is that, like, he's battled demons for a long time. You know, like he had this demon. Yeah.

I wasn't satisfied with that because I don't know what that means. I know that people struggle with addictions. I know people struggle with temptations, but I don't know what that meant to him, that demon. And he either doesn't know either, or he wasn't willing to tell me. He said that he struggled with certain things that he thought he could take care of on his own, but he was wrong.

He should have gotten help, but he didn't. It's just, and it's very unsatisfying. My brain couldn't put all the pieces together yet. And in some ways, my brain still has not put all the pieces together yet.

For all of our marriage, I felt like he's loved me as his wife. He's been attracted to me. And he's referenced an addiction to alcohol and he's referenced an addiction to pornography, which again, I saw no sign of an addiction to pornography. And I am not a naive wife. I have a wife who was like going through his phone constantly.

So if he had an addiction to pornography, he hit it pretty darn well because I never saw it. I don't know. An addiction to pornography does not equate looking at children. An addiction to liquor does not equate to looking at children. So through this all, I feel like my faith in my parents, my kids, those are the things that haven't changed at all.

I do believe there's like a battle going on all the time between good and evil with everyone to some degree. I do believe that.

And I know there might be some mental illness, possibly. That's another thing Michael's dealt with is he's, I know he's struggled with depression and some anxiety. He's been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD. But again, I feel like that's a big percentage of the population. I have students every year who have ADHD in my class that grow up to be adults with ADHD. And that doesn't really give me any insight.

I can't make sense of this crime. I still haven't been able to. I've thought many times about how unexpected this occurrence is in my life.

a lot of people could say those same things. Like even though they haven't gone through exactly what I went through, there's a lot of people who would say, this is not how I planned for my life to turn out. So, you know, in that regard, I've made peace with my life didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. My life didn't turn out the way my parents' life turned out.

But I'm so glad that this came to the light. It needed to come to the light. I'm horrified and I don't let my mind go. Like if I would have overlooked this or if it would have continued, like where it would have gone, because that's horrifying to think about. And it makes me sick to my stomach to think about. There could have been a lot more heartache.

My faith has remained solid. The night that I found this, I don't think I could have found it without the Lord leading me to that spot to look because I'd never looked there before. So I do feel like God saved my daughter. God saved me from any more. There could have been a lot more heartache.

It's still hard for me to see people who grow old together because that's what I thought I always wanted. You know, I wanted a person to grow old with, a companion, and I thought I had found that in Michael.

He actually gave me a bracelet that said, you're my person, you know, and that was maybe the most special thing he'd ever given to me other than the engagement ring he bought for me. Like I loved being his person. I loved that he was my person. I never envisioned my person violating my one and only daughter. Like those two things shouldn't go together, right?

And I still try every day trying to figure it out. For a long time, I, you know, grappled with that word pedophile. Like, does this make Michael a pedophile? It seems like it does. How long has he known he's a pedophile? You know, like, was this something that just awoken him? That doesn't seem logical. Yeah.

Was he originally attracted to me because I had a young daughter? Was this in the works? And that's one thing he told me. This wasn't a cooked up plan. Okay. If it wasn't a cooked up plan, then when did it become a plan? I don't know. And, you know, my counselor said, do you really want the answer to those questions? And, you know, some days I do like as horrifying as the truth is, it is the truth. And, you know, to know the truth is kind of relief, right?

but there's not an answer key. You know, when you're a teacher, there's this really cool part of the book called the answer key. You can just flip to if you're not for sure, but it just doesn't exist in life. And you just have to do the best you can with what you have. The most challenging part is knowing what to keep freshest in my memory about Michael, because it's kind of like he died and,

Because my husband's gone, I don't see him. I don't talk to him anymore. But he didn't die. He's alive and he's actually living in Omaha. He's just living in a prison. And it's really hard for me to know what to do with the good memories. Because I have a lot of good memories of us traveling and with our kids and just the two of us. And I remember him being alongside of me in my cancer treatments and when I had my mastectomy. And he was good to me.

It's really hard to know on what note to leave it with Michael. Because if I leave it with remembering the worst of him, then it leaves in my soul just anger and bitterness and hurt and sorrow. But I don't know what to do with the good memories because when I remember the good memories and I remember the good qualities of Michael, I shortly thereafter feel really guilty.

Everyone has good parts and bad parts about them, right? The person you love the most has annoying qualities at times. And you can rectify those two things. But with Michael, that's what I can't rectify. Like, I can't rectify this horrifying thing that he did with the good parts of him. Those two things shouldn't be housed in the same person. They're too far apart. That's why I'm left spinning. Like, and I don't know what to do.

After all this happened, the kids and I put the house for sale just because it was too hard to stay there. We sold the house and bought a smaller house since it was just the three of us now. And I love that it's the three of us. I love that our house is smaller. There's just room for the three of us. You know, COVID hit after all of this happened for us. And it was almost like a little bit of a blessing that we all had to hunker down. The three of us had to hunker down in our house, mostly alone, the three of us.

And that's where we knew we were safe. So in a way, it was kind of good. I think what lingers with me is mainly heartache. Like I said, there's times I start to miss him, but it's not even missing him. It's heartache for just everything that happened and mostly that this is part of my daughter's story now. I don't want it to be part of her story. It shouldn't be a part of her story. It's part of my son's story, unfortunately. Yeah.

I miss his parents. I mean, they're wonderful people. I miss a lot of people in his family that I have no contact with anymore. And I miss his daughters. Those were my stepdaughters. And I have no idea how they are. And, you know, sometimes I wonder, like, who has it worse? Do Rebecca and I have it worse or do they have it worse? Because I can't imagine if this was my biological father. I can't imagine how they make sense of it. So that adds to my heartache, too.

I try to imagine myself just like wrapping it up in a box and putting it on a shelf. And I have a box for Michael and I have a shelf that I put him on for now. And maybe one day I'll take the box back out and try to make sense of it again. It's nice to think about maybe one day everything will make sense. But right now it doesn't. And for now, I'm just putting it on the shelf.

You just don't get to pick your journey in life, unfortunately, but maybe sometimes fortunately.

It's okay that life didn't turn out how I'd hoped it to be. And it's okay. It's okay. Like you can't redo it. Unfortunately, you are where you are. And when things are bad, you have to hope that it's going to get better. And there's still good people to meet and there's still good work to do. There's going to be new kids that come to fifth grade every year. So, you know, that I can count on.

So I'm just, I'm thankful for those things. And I try to linger on that and not, there's no point in lingering on what I can't make sense of. Today's episode featured Kate Solberg. You can find out more about Kate on Instagram at ka.solberg03.

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