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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. Did I actually give birth? Where's my baby? Did I kill my baby? Where's my husband? Where are they? You don't know any of these people or what's going on. You must be in hell. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.
Episode 293 What if you believed your son was possessed?
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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. My dad grew up in Pennsylvania. He came over to the Pacific Northwest as a young man where he met my mom.
They both came from kind of difficult backgrounds. My mom was raised with a very unstable, quite tragic upbringing. Her parents got divorced when she was maybe 10 or 11, and her older sister ran away.
And my grandma just left my mom to fend for herself and had kind of a revolving door of men. And, you know, it was the early 70s because of her sister leaving and the abuse from her own mother who became an alcoholic. My mom never really grew up and even to this day is very much childlike. My dad...
Hard worker. He built our home from the ground up. And my brother and I were raised on 25 acres. I was a wild child. I never wore shoes. I spent all day, every day in the woods with my dogs and reading in the orchard.
Most of the time, the home was pretty volatile. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom really lived each day kind of haunted by her past. And my brother and I just rode the waves of our father's rage and our mom's constant shifting moods.
When I was eight, we had a rabbit and I took the rabbit out in a little carrier to play outside and I wasn't going to let her out of her cage. I just wanted to take her outside. And so I took her outside in the carrier. I went back inside to get something. When I came back out, our dog had broken open the crate and killed the rabbit.
I went to find my dad who took care of it and he wasn't mad at me. He just took care of it. And then we waited for my mom to get home from work. And I will never forget the screams that came from my mom when my dad told her, I think I was hiding upstairs. And then she went into her room without a word to me. And she did not come out for four days.
And when she came out, she was out in the yard with a sledgehammer, smashing the rabbit carrier. We were never allowed to say the rabbit's name. We weren't allowed to talk about rabbits. We were never allowed to get another rabbit.
That was one of my most difficult memories because it was my fault. I felt so much guilt and shame, like my mom didn't love me over something that was an accident. The rabbit was my mom's rabbit, and I should never have taken her out of the house. That was not a good idea, but I was just a child.
And I never meant any harm. And I was left to process all of that by myself. My mother was just shutting me out and everyone out. She wouldn't even feed us. She wouldn't even feed herself or her own children. I was used to being isolated by my mother growing up. She would not talk about things. She would hide from all the problems. And that was...
Pretty typical for her would be respond in a childlike way, right? Screaming, breaking things, and then hiding and shutting everyone out. So between having a dad who was constantly berating and belittling us, and then a mother who would run and hide, my brother and I were on our own in a way to grow up in this unsteady home.
God was not something that was discussed. It wasn't as if my family was anti-religion. We were just agnostic. But I always had kind of a hunger for that. I started going to church, and I accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was 11.
That was very special. And so from that moment on, I was definitely an outsider within my own family. And I had this desire and this hunger for God. And He was an outlet for me, a source of comfort and strength. And I knew that I was not walking alone through what I was walking through. When I was 13, my mom and my dad were
on the verge of a divorce and my mom did not want to get a divorce. She saw my dad asking for a divorce as the end for her, the end of everything that she desired for her life. And she wanted a way out. And so she made a suicide attempt when I was 13.
She drove out into the woods to a campground and she had this old tent that she had had from childhood. She took our big roasting pan and filled it up with charcoal and was going to kill herself with carbon monoxide poisoning inside the tent.
So she got really, really drunk and she started calling our house, told us what was going on and wanted to say goodbye. And my dad and my brother were trying to convince her not to go through with it. And at some point she hung up.
The next thing I remember is that she was at the hospital and she had third degree burns on her upper arm and lower leg because she passed out because she was so drunk and the tent actually caught on fire and burned her. And once that happened, she was in so much pain. So she called the police and they came and they saved her.
She had to get skin grafts, and we never really talked about it after that. To this day, she won't acknowledge that there was mental illness. I think that she just sees it as she was doing what she could, but she wasn't receiving any help.
Because she wasn't willing to take responsibility for what had happened at that time. My dad pointed the finger at her for everything, even though meanwhile he was a raging alcoholic and extremely verbally abusive to my brother and I. And I believe even physically abusive to my brother. But she was made out to be the villain. My dad still went through with the divorce.
My dad moved out and we were able to keep the property and my mom and dad never spoke again. My dad ended up building a house just down the street so I could come and go as I wanted to. Meanwhile, he was in the throes of alcoholism and my mom was spiraling.
I started getting depressed as a preteen into teen years and I've been fighting it my whole life. I was so depressed and so moody. I was cutting and burning myself. I also attempted suicide when I was 15. I hated myself and all I wanted to do was sleep and I just wanted to go to sleep forever.
Because the only time I felt good was when I was asleep. I was homeschooled and I hated it because I was such a social butterfly. I was very much into dance. I danced ballet. And that is where I met my husband. His sister was in the class. And one time he came along to a class begrudgingly.
We just locked eyes and it was immediate attraction. I was about 14 and he was 16. Skater boy, hood up, headphones, long swoopy hair across his face, so tall. He went to the high school in the town over and at the time I was still homeschooled, but we would spend every moment we could together. He would ride the bus to see me and I would ride the bus to see him.
He came from a pretty unstable home as well, so we really found solace in each other. And we really grew up together. Instead of growing apart, as oftentimes couples do in high school, we really grew closer and together and stronger. We have been together now for 16 years. I went to beauty school and got my cosmetology license.
He always dreamed of joining the military, and he eventually joined the Air Force at 21, and we got married shortly thereafter. Our first duty station was Alaska, where we spent the first years married, just enjoying each other in the wilderness. I started working at a salon, and he was working all the time.
We always had people over. We were always throwing parties and celebrating and just always having so much fun. So we got orders to Okinawa, Japan as our second assignment after being in Alaska for three years. We traveled to Korea and Thailand, partied hard on the weekends, and spent most of our spare time just really taking in the culture.
We didn't want kids at the time. It just didn't seem like a priority. We were really enjoying being married and doing all the things we wanted to do and having all these adventures. We didn't think we would ever have a family, and we were okay with that. We just were really enjoying life just being together.
When I look back on those first years married, I have so many fond memories of my husband and I being on the mountaintops in Alaska and the sandy shores in Okinawa. And we had time and money and so much fun. But after a couple years overseas, I had a sudden change of heart and then I got a primal urge to have a baby.
I went from loving my freedom and not thinking I ever wanted to have children and going to bed one night with that thought in my head and waking up the next morning and saying, "Oh my God, I want a baby." And it felt so unreal to utter those words out loud. And then everything became baby this, baby that. It was a fixation. Month after month, you think it's going to happen in the first few months and then it doesn't happen in the first few months.
Six months go by, nine months go by, and then you start thinking, okay, we need to do testing. I need to get tested. He needs to get tested to see what's going on. Why aren't we having a baby? Why am I not getting pregnant? About a year after we started trying, it was Mother's Day. I tested out of habit at the end of every cycle, never expecting a positive. And this time it was positive.
We were excited. We were scared. We knew it wasn't going to be easy starting a family overseas. My pregnancy started out pretty normal. I did not have any morning sickness. I worked waitressing, so I was on my feet all day, every day.
It was really rough. I did not particularly enjoy being pregnant. As I got further along, I started having migraines and I actually had to go to the hospital because they got so bad. It was just a very uncomfortable experience. I know women who say, I wish I could be pregnant all the time. And that was just not me.
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It was January 2020. I was 41 weeks and 6 days old.
And I had spent three days in labor and I was not progressing. The doctor told me I could either keep going, start an induction or have a C-section. I wanted to have a home birth, natural, intervention free, catch my baby. And as I agreed to have a cesarean, I just watched that dream just drift away.
but even though it looked different than I had imagined, when they pulled our baby out and put him on my chest, it felt like coming home. It was the most warm, joyful, beautiful experience. Just perfect. After our son was born, I started having issues nursing right away, and my hormones were all over the place.
My mom flew in after he was born and we were living in a tiny house on base. She drank a lot during her visit and her natural moodiness with my hormones did not mix well. So much stress. It became apparent very early that our son was not an easygoing baby. He was not chill. He did not sleep well. He did not eat well. And this is even as a newborn.
My mom stayed over a month after she left and my husband went back to work. The wheels really started to fall off. I didn't have an extra set of hands to help me with this baby that seemed nearly impossible to soothe.
I would make sticky notes and I had probably 10 different journals all over the house where I was constantly scribbling notes about this baby tip and that baby tip and this and that and I was obsessed with sticky notes. And in the pictures from that time, you can see all my journals and notes all over the place.
I stopped being able to sleep, and then the severe mood swings started. One moment I was on top of the world, riding the high of new motherhood and tackling every task on my list. And next I was paralyzed and couldn't even change my son's diaper. I literally had to call my husband to come and change him because I was frozen in place, not knowing what to do. All I knew was how to nurse him.
And I knew at this point that this can't be right. Something was off. It got to the point where I lived on plain white rice and scrambled eggs because I thought maybe a food allergy was the source of our son's fussiness. So on top of not being able to sleep, I was barely eating. I would lie awake researching obsessively every little thing I could find to try to make him stop crying.
During these states of depression, I would feel so guilty and like I was a horrible mother, and I would just go into the depths of despair. I finally went to the doctor and explained what was happening. They prescribed Zoloft, but I still couldn't sleep, and I started having even more intense episodes of mania and depression. Everyone knows that postpartum, your hormones are all over the place, but how do you know
what's normal and what's not when it's inside of your head. No one can see inside of your head. So I didn't know if what I was feeling was to be expected after having a baby. So I sought medical help again, this time at the mental health clinic. And after I told him everything that was going on, he told me to breathe, take a bath, and take a walk.
That was so invalidating to hear from a mental health professional that he was giving me the same spiel he gave every single postpartum mom. I felt utterly dismissed and alone. Depression was nothing new to me, and I expected this postpartum, but I could not explain where these surges of energy were coming from.
I knew that there was something wrong with me, and no matter who I reached out to, all my family, all my friends, doctors, no one could tell me what was wrong. I knew that there was something wrong, that this wasn't just normal postpartum depression baby blues. I knew there was something more going on.
So around this time that I was struggling with these severe swings, we FaceTimed my husband's family and explained to them what was going on. And they immediately jumped to this idea that there were demons. They believed that there were demons in our house, and that's why our son wouldn't settle down and I couldn't sleep.
That there were things in our home that were not of God and that needed to be removed from the home. I love my husband's family. And I'm also a Christian, but they were saying some really intense things. And I was really impressionable and not in a good headspace. So my sleep-deprived brain just took it and ran with it.
I believed that they knew what they were talking about and that they were right. And that night I woke up, I woke my husband up and I brought my Bible into our bed and I was so scared. I thought there were demons in the house and they were coming to get me. I felt like my brain was hijacked, but I remember having thoughts that like kind of creep into my brain about possession.
like a whisper almost of a thought that there could be something else at play here other than just a colicky baby. And I felt that there were demons in the house. I didn't know if that was from my son, if it was from me, or if it was from some sort of an item within my home. I even thought maybe from my mom's visit, she had brought something with her.
I wasn't sure where it was coming from, but I knew that it was different and I knew that it had never happened before in my life. And when I think of it, I just see dark shadows. When I think back on that time, I see dark shadows in the house. Just tall, tall dark shadows with points at the top. It was terrifying. I felt like I couldn't leave the bed, like I wasn't safe, like our son wasn't safe.
so we brought him into bed with us and with the bible and i can only imagine what my husband is thinking at this point the next day he took me back to that same man at the clinic and he gave me breathing exercises again i was completely blown off at this point i had lost touch with reality completely even there in that clinic and no one
picked up on it enough to do anything to help me. When we were in the clinic, I was paranoid that everybody was watching and they were going to take my son away. Every person here in this clinic is out to get me. So I wasn't in touch with reality at that point. My husband had to take me home like that with our son. And that afternoon I got down on my knees and went into a total trance.
Everything I was hearing, it was almost like you turned a TV on, an old school TV, and
And you're flipping through all the channels. And it's all these different sounds of things. Like horses or waves crashing. Gunfire. Different things that you would see on TV flipping through channels. Is what it was like in the background noise. As I'm on my knees reading the Bible. My face is practically pressed up against the pages. I'm looking at it so closely. My son is crying.
And I don't know how long I was there. I was completely sucked in. My husband was frantically calling our friends. They come over to try to convince me to go to the hospital. First, our friend, his wife came in and talked to me and I was telling her, no, I was refusing to go. And then her husband came in.
And at that point, I was freaked out because I thought that Satan just walked into my house. I was rebuking him. I was trying to get away from him. I was absolutely terrified. This is a friend we'd had for years, and I thought my friend was Satan. I end up going out in the front yard to get away from him, and he's following me, trying to talk to me, trying to convince me, like, no, Olivia, this is me. It's me. It's okay. Okay.
And I'm saying, it's a trick. You're lying. Get out of here in the name of Jesus. At some point, they are able to get me in the car. My husband and my friend's wife and I, and of course our baby, are all in the car and are driving to the hospital. And they're walking me in. And I have my Bible open. And I'm reading loudly and proudly as I'm walking through the ER room.
And they take me back right away and they're trying to figure out what's going on with me. And I'm completely out of it. They are trying to get an IV in me and I'm ripping the IV out of me and refusing to stay in the hospital because in my mind, staying at the hospital meant going to hell. My mind told me that the hospital was hell and I tried to run away.
I got down on my hands and knees and was crawling on the floor, under the curtains, into other people's rooms. And then there's our friend, who I thought was a demon. And I know that these are his feet in front of me as I'm on the floor, and I'm absolutely terrified as he's standing over me trying to help me. They get me back on the bed and try to talk to me.
I had a thought at some point that maybe why all this was happening was that my son was actually possessed because of how much he cried. I keep reading from the Bible, and somehow I got to Genesis where Abraham is going to sacrifice Isaac. I had read that story in Genesis in the midst of my psychosis and fixated on that.
One of the things that is taboo surrounding parenthood and motherhood is the thought that we would ever have this urge to harm our children. And it's a really hard thing to talk about. And after what happened to me, there are things that are fuzzy and I don't really know for sure if I did have a desire to hurt my son.
I truly cannot remember that, but I know I can understand why some moms do. I was not in control of my own brain. I didn't know what day it was. I didn't even know that at the time there was a global pandemic. That is the level that I was on, out of this world level.
And I'm not condoning, I am not sympathizing with mothers who hurt their children. But I can understand where that feeling comes from. When you have a postpartum woman with a newborn talking about a Bible story where she sacrifices her son, alarm bells really start going off for people. So they put me in a wheelchair. They start wheeling me out.
And I start fighting because something changes where I don't want to leave. Then my brain tells me going home means hell. It's a trick. So I start fighting with everything I can to stay in that hospital. They have orderlies. Four strong men have to get me into the car. I was in the car and I was about to break the windows out with my feet to get out of that car. And I fought our friend.
When they saw me attack him, that was when they admitted me. They immediately sedated me. And I wake up in the morning in this white room all by myself. I don't know where I am. I don't know where my family is. I don't know if I'm dead.
And I get up and start walking around and there's people in uniform and there's other people there in these light blue pajama pants and shirt and grippy socks. And at the time, I'm still wearing what I showed up in.
And the next thing I remember, I was taken into a shower, told to take off all my clothes so that they could check my body for marks. Then they watched me while I took a shower. My breasts are exploding and leaking and extremely painful.
And I looked to make sure I had my C-section scar because I wasn't sure if I had actually given birth or if it had all been a dream and I had a psychotic break and I was waking up in a mental hospital. Did I actually give birth? Where's my baby? Did I kill my baby? Where's my husband? Where are they? You don't know any of these people or what's going on.
You must be in hell. I felt that I was in hell. Not that I had died, but somehow I was there. Walking around, not knowing anyone or what happened. And I'm trying to escape. I'm looking for a way out, out a window, out a door. But I'm trapped without my family. So the first night they had me there, I was in isolation and I was on suicide watch.
I was allowed to call my husband, but still, I'm not understanding what's going on, thinking that I'm in hell and that all of this is just a big test. I'm not making much sense to anyone. My husband came to visit me that afternoon. Our son was not allowed to come.
I was telling him, like, yeah, you got to get me out of here. Like, all these people are crazy and they're trying to make me look crazy. And he's just nodding and smiling and being supportive. He doesn't know what to say. And he thinks that he's lost his wife forever. When I was in the hospital, I had a real fear of men. I did not want to be alone with any men.
The chaplain came in and sat on my bed and I was so freaked out and I told him how uncomfortable I was. So he went and sat in a chair. For some reason, my mind was telling me I couldn't be around any men that I was betraying my husband. I was very freaked out to have anybody draw my blood. They wanted to do a lot of testing on me and that really freaked me out.
I also had to pump so I wouldn't get mastitis. Sitting there in a cold room with a stranger watching me pumping for my baby that I can't see was very distressing and heartbreaking.
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I started to come back to reality in bits and pieces.
I started actually eating again and sleeping. They encouraged me to take naps and just to eat as much as I possibly could because I was essentially malnourished at that point. When you aren't sleeping, you have a sleep debt, so you have to pay back your sleep debt and sleep as much as you can. So that's what I did.
I started to come to terms with what happened, even though no one really could explain it. They encouraged me to stay as long as I wanted to, but after five days, I was ready to go home.
At that time, we weren't 100% sure that I was going to be safe to be around my son, which hurt a lot, but they didn't know what I was going to do. So he stayed with our friends on and off for a couple weeks.
He would come and stay with us during the day for part of the day or come and stay some nights. For about two weeks we did that just so I could recover and we could get me better. I wasn't allowed to drive, I wasn't allowed to be alone, but it still felt like I was tripping on mushrooms.
Everything, every sensation felt to the fullest amount and everything tasted sweeter, looked more vibrant. And I felt the love of God like I had never felt in my life, covering me, protecting me, healing me.
When I'd come home from the hospital and I was going through a box, I pulled out this bag and it was filled with just a few different things from my childhood. A rock my dad had given me, some old coins and things. And in that moment, my brain, still in psychosis, told me that my dad had abused me. But that never happened again.
All these things were completely being made up in my brain. These wild scenarios that never happened. So some of the things that I told people or I told therapists and medical staff, I'm still wondering to this day what all I said because I can't remember everything I said and I know that I made stuff up because I was completely out of my mind. I lost faith in myself.
because I thought I knew and my mind was hijacked. I wasn't in the driver's seat. I was going to mental health two or three times a week and they slowly started to decrease the antipsychotic that I was on over time as I started feeling better.
I just felt numb on the medication, like a zombie all the time. So I got off and I was fine. Reality started coming back to me slowly and some parts of my life came back quicker than others. At one point when I'd come home from the hospital, I tried to run away.
It was pouring down rain and I ran out of the house away from my husband and into the neighborhood and was hiding under a tree before he came and found me. I'm not sure what I was thinking in that moment, but I had moments where the psychosis would just come back in and hit me.
I would lose it. We would be in a store and I would think someone was following us still or people were watching us in the neighborhood. And it was like that for a good two weeks before I stopped having those delusions. They slowly became less and less. And then they stopped. Coming out of all of this, I was filled with shame.
I felt like I had been turned inside out from being at my lowest and ugliest and everyone saw and being poked and prodded and everyone asking me all these deep vulnerable questions and me just spilling my guts. And sometimes they were things that my mind made up.
Once I came out of the psychosis, I understood what had happened to me. And I felt deep sadness because I felt like my first weeks, those precious new moments with your baby, I felt like I'd been robbed.
I'm grateful I have pictures because there's a lot missing from that time and I want that back. I want that time back with my son. And I felt sad for him having a mom with mental health issues, which I believe will affect him even though he was just a newborn. I believe those things can have long-lasting impact. I'll never get those moments back with my son.
I felt guilty for putting my husband through this and my son. And I was angry at everyone around me, especially the doctors, for not listening to me and not taking me seriously. Blowing me off, saying this is normal after childbirth. My poor husband and all of this was probably feeling more guilt than I was.
He was going through his own struggles during this time being a new parent. And here's our baby who is constantly crying and there's not much he can do because I'm the one who feeds him. But I know that he had immense guilt for not paying closer attention and not taking care of me. And he still does.
But this taught him to listen and the importance of family. My husband thought that he'd lost me, that I would never come back. And even if I did, that I wouldn't be the same. And we've been together 10 plus years at that point.
I can only imagine the sorrow he felt and having our newborn son and feeling that he was going to be facing the world alone because his wife had lost her mind. I definitely blamed myself for him being a difficult baby for a long time because they do feed off of our energy. And when mommy is not well, your baby is going to sense that.
Because I was crying so much, he's crying too. So I felt responsible in some sense for how much he was crying. And he did get better after I got better. He started to get better.
We didn't think we were going to have any more children because when you go through postpartum psychosis, you have an over 50% chance of it happening the second time. So we weren't sure, but I did get pregnant when our son was two.
So that opened up a whole can of worms because it was very unexpected. So I immediately went to therapy preemptively to prepare and we felt that we could be different this time knowing exactly what to look for, what to avoid. When our second baby did come, another boy,
The third day postpartum, I started having really bizarre thoughts, racing thoughts, and then I was not able to sleep. And when my husband woke up, I didn't want to tell him because I didn't want it to be true, but I did. I said, yeah, I think it's happening again.
We immediately saw a therapist and I started on a very, very low dose of the same medication I'd been on before. Beyond the bizarre thoughts and the one night not being able to sleep, there was nothing more than that. Immediately, I nipped it in the bud. Much better outcome this time. When you are prepared, you know what to look for. During my recovery, which took over a year from when it happened,
I started joining support groups for postpartum moms and women who have been through psychosis in particular. I found that it's not as easy to find material on postpartum psychosis because PPD and PPA are much more common.
It was lonely to not have as many resources for something that happens to one to two in 1,000 mothers. Most people don't go through what I've been through.
and they can't imagine what it's like. So it's been isolating in a way, but I have found a lot of support groups, and I just hope that I can help other people along the way. I want people to be paying close attention to themselves and to their loved ones. Postpartum, don't be dismissive. Listen to people and encourage them to get help.
And if you still think something is wrong and you're not being taken seriously, get a second opinion. When I was recovering, I felt like I was on a drug trip, but I was utterly just cloaked in the love of God. And I saw him in everything. And as I came out of psychosis, I still see God in everything. Losing my mind...
brought me back to God, back to that helpless state that I was at when I was little and desiring God in my life, wanting to know him. And when I went through what I went through and I was in the hospital, I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know if I'd even given birth. All I had was
was God. I am so grateful for his love and the love and support of my family through this entire experience. Going through postpartum psychosis really showed me how little control that I have over really anything. The mind really is a fragile thing and it's important to take care of it.
Even if they're scary, even if you have feelings and intrusive thoughts, your feelings are valid and you can talk to someone. It might not be pretty, it might be really scary, but freedom comes when you are honest about what's going on in your mind.
It's uncomfortable and it really sucks sometimes, but it's worth it because as a mother, I do not want to repeat the same cycles. I think the general consensus of motherhood is that it has to be beautiful and it should be happy and tied up in a little bow. And that if you don't feel comfortable,
Like it is that way, that there's something wrong with you, that there's something wrong with the mother if she doesn't instantly bond with her child, or if she gets depressed after having a baby, or misses her old life. Those are all valid feelings. It's messy, and it's beautiful, and it's nothing to be ashamed of if it doesn't feel like sunshine and rainbows all the time.
My hope is that our generation breaks the cycle of being silent on things that are uncomfortable and aren't pretty. That we no longer sweep things under the rug. My own mother didn't feel okay to do that. And I think that's true for a lot of her parents.
So they just sit with whatever it is inside of them without ever thinking things could be any different. And there is a lack of people of faith talking about mental health. If you're having these issues, it's your fault. You sinned, you're wrong, and God is punishing you. But that's just not the case here.
And my hope and my prayer is that we are getting into a time of people being open about what they're going through. This generation of parents is starting to break the cycle where we're reparenting ourselves. I don't want my boys to have to heal from me and how their mom parented them.
I wish I didn't have these issues for the sake of my children. I wish they had a mentally healthy mom. And I am in a good place now, but I haven't always been. And the future is uncertain. There will be points. I will most likely always struggle with my mental health, but I am dedicated to working on myself and making myself better.
And it is paramount that we take care of ourselves so our children don't have to heal from us.
Today's episode featured Olivia Armand. You can find her on Instagram at TheRedHeadedAlaskan. That's at the underscore redheaded underscore Alaskan. And you can find her on Facebook. See show notes for the specific link to her page. Olivia also wanted to share some links to resources for those needing postpartum support, both in general as well as specific resources for postpartum psychosis. Please see show notes for specific links. ♪
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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 Reed 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.