Criminal - Patience

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

One Saturday morning in 2018, the police showed up at Patience Frazier’s door, and started asking her questions about something she'd posted on Facebook after she'd had a miscarriage. Caroline Kitchener’s article for The Washington Post is “She said she had a miscarriage — then got arrested under an abortion law.” Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. This episode contains descriptions of miscarriage. Please use discretion. Patients, here's a knock at the door. She goes to open it, and there are a bunch of

sheriff's deputies and police officers standing at the door. Several of them are wearing sort of full, like, SWAT-looking gear. They've got tactical vests on. In May of 2018, a 26-year-old woman named Patience Rousseau was living in a town in rural Nevada called Winamaca. A few months earlier, she and her two young children had moved in with a man who'd offered them a place to stay. It was a Saturday morning. when a group of officers showed up at her door. Here's reporter Caroline Kitchener. Her first thought is, you know, they're here for the guy that she's living with.

You know, she figures, you know, maybe he's in some kind of drug trouble. But then, one of the officers started asking patients about something she posted on Facebook earlier that month. And she realizes that they're here for her. About a month earlier, patients had had a miscarriage. Afterwards, she found a miscarriage support group on Facebook that suggested that it could be helpful to name the baby she'd lost. She decided to call him Abel.

She put up a small cross in the yard to remember him and posted on Facebook about him. She wrote, quote, I'm so sorry, Abel. The officers at her door were asking questions about the cross. At first, she told them the cross was for a cat she buried. One of the officers was recording everything with a body cam. Here's audio from that day. Yeah, if you knew anything about me, I rescued cats here for a while, quite some time.

Okay. And then an officer starts asking patients about the Facebook post. Well, let me explain something to you. Okay, and I see a post on Facebook. Oh, I'm so sorry, Abel. That's not something you would put for a cat. Why would you be sorry? Why would you be sorry, patients? I'm not allowed to have personal things in my life. Seriously, I had a miscarriage, okay? Why is having a miscarriage a problem? Why is this illegal, apparently? I've done nothing wrong. We don't know how far long you were.

The officer wearing the body cam and speaking in the footage is a sheriff's deputy named Jacqueline Mitchum. In the body cam footage, Jacqueline Mitchum and another officer continue speaking with patience, asking her questions about how far along she was, whether or not she currently has a job. What are we doing? Can we go? Can we stop this? Nope. Why? Because we have a search warrant. And you need to stay right where you are, okay? So what are you searching for?

We're going to search in the house, and we're going to search where the cross is. Okay. Okay? Later in the footage, Deputy Mitcham walks away from the house, towards another officer, holding a bucket and a shovel. He's standing near a small wooden cross. Did you see them going towards the cross?

I mean, what did you see? I watched him walk over there and I watched him dig him up and then unwrap him and then carry him into the van. And were they telling you what law you had broken? No. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Months earlier, in December of the previous year, Patience hadn't had a place to live. She was living out of her car,

trying to figure out how to take care of her two young children. She met a man at a bar who asked if she wanted to move into his spare bedroom. She said yes. Soon after that, in February, patients found out she was pregnant. She was worried that if the man found out, He'd kick her out, and she'd have to live in her car again. The baby wasn't his. Abortion is legal in Nevada, so patients decided to get one.

I mean, I didn't want to have another kid because I couldn't offer the ones I had a very good life at the moment. I called the abortion clinic in Reno and try to make an appointment. I was unable to get to Reno, and let alone afford the cost of it. Patience didn't have a working car, and Reno is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive away from Winamaca. There wasn't a closer option. Neither Patience nor the man she lived with had much money. At one point, Patience had to sell the tires on her car.

She says she didn't have a working phone. The man she lived with eventually became her boyfriend. Patience remembers he spent a lot of time smoking meth, and he would try to get her to join him. She says she tried to resist, but sometimes she'd give in. When she couldn't get to Reno for an abortion, she says she tried to figure something else out. I read online that if you took an excessive amount of cinnamon,

that it would naturally, without causing any harm, cause an abortion. There are some websites and forums talking about cinnamon and miscarriage where people suggest that cinnamon is a natural way to end a pregnancy. But there's no scientific evidence that this is true. Patients took the cinnamon capsules for a month. Then she stopped. She says she couldn't stand the taste, and nothing happened. Around 1 a.m. on April 21st, patients woke up with an intense pain in her back.

And I couldn't breathe. So I kind of, like, smacked the back of my rib cage here because sometimes it makes it easier to breathe because I have issues with my back and ribs. And that didn't work. So I went into the bathroom and took a shower. And that's when I noticed I was bleeding really bad. And I sat in the shower and cried for a little while. Patience didn't want the man she was living with to come in and realize what was going on.

He still didn't know she was pregnant. So I got dressed quickly. and ran out to the porch, trying to hide from him. And that's when I ended up having Abel. Did you know immediately that there was no life? Yeah. I tried giving him CPR. I tried everything I could think of.

I couldn't get any movement out of him. And then what did you do? I ran to the garage into where all of my stuff was in boxes. And I found some blankets and a towel and a teddy stuffed monkey. And I wrapped him up. And I went and buried, and buried him and put a cross-up. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comes from Quince.

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mintmobile.com slash Phoebe. Up front payment on $45 required, equivalent to $15 per month, limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on a limited plan. Taxes and fees extra. Seamint Mobile for details. After she had a miscarriage in the middle of the night, patients Rousseau decided not to call 911. She says she didn't feel like she needed to go to the hospital, and didn't want to leave her kids. Patience says she kept what happened to herself until she found the support group on Facebook and wrote her post about Abel.

And that Facebook post is what ultimately makes its way through a couple of different people to the sheriff's deputy. Deputy Jacqueline Mitcham and Patience already knew each other, Winamaka is a very small town, and they took their kids. to the same babysitter. Jack Mitchum actually was friends, you know, quite good friends with the babysitter, and they would often talk about patients. You know, the babysitter spent a lot of time with patients as kids. So, you know, she would sort of confide in Jack Mitchum and talk to her about

kind of what was going on with patients, sort of how often she was taking care of patients as kids. and I think there was a lot of conversation about patients' parenting. About a month after patients had the miscarriage, the babysitter told Jacqueline she thought patients had been pregnant and gotten rid of her baby. She showed Jacqueline a picture where patients looked visibly pregnant and a picture of the wooden cross. Jacqueline told reporter Caroline Kitchener

that the photos made her think about her own baby. She had a one-year-old son. She told me in that moment looking at those photos, she felt very confident that this baby had actually been born alive and that patients had killed it. Now, I think we need to pause and say that there's no evidence that that is the case, but that is, I think it's important to say because it's what she felt and she just had a real conviction about it. having no evidence, she still felt very strongly that that is what had happened. And that conviction was what drove her to really pursue the case, even when, you know, multiple people kind of told her to leave it be. But why did she think that? Why didn't she believe that this could have just been a miscarriage, you know? I can't say exactly why she felt that. You know, when I interviewed

her, she just said, you know, she kind of felt it in her bones for whatever reason. For Deputy Mitchum, who was also a mother of young children, this all just felt very personal, and it felt very emotional. And she really, you know, quite early on in this case, started to see this fetus or this baby that patients had lost as her own in a way and felt a lot of ownership over the case for that reason. But there were people telling her to let it be, to not pursue this. Absolutely, yeah. Well, her first thing that she did when she got these photographs was to drive, you know, right to the sheriff's office and go to her superior and her superior and say, you know, I've got to get a warrant. We got to get a warrant right now. And both of the guys above her said, no, you know, you don't have enough for a warrant.

And so she actually goes around those two guys, and she told me that she called the district attorney herself and said, you know, I really think I need to get a warrant for this. And she then went to find another detective who she thought would be more sympathetic to this case, and he was willing to sit down with her and write up a warrant. We reached out to Jacqueline Mitchum for this story, but she declined to comment. after she and the other officers dug up the remains, they brought them to the medical examiner. The medical examiner determined that patients' pregnancy had ended in the third trimester between about 28 and 32 weeks.

Was there any evidence that the fetus had been alive at birth? No, there was not. And that was something that really kind of came up again and again, was this fetus, you know, or baby, was it born alive, and there was never any evidence that was found to show that it was. Which meant Deputy Mitchum couldn't charge patients with murder. And so, you know, Deputy Mitchum talked with the other detective, detective walls, about, you know, other kinds of charges that they might pursue,

and it was actually Detective Walls that found this very unique and obscure 1911 law, and that law is titled Taking Drugs to Terminate Pregnancy, basically saying that you can't terminate a pregnancy on your own. Four days after the police showed up at patients' home, they brought her in for questioning. They told me I wasn't under arrest.

They just wanted to talk. So they took me through a locked door and then through a second locked door. into a conference room, and Officer Mitchum, Detective Walls, I think was his name, and another officer were in the room, and they shut the door. And they made it sound like they truly cared.

And I truly didn't believe I'd done anything that wrong. So I told them everything that happened. And soon as I was done talking, Mitcham told me to stand up and put my hands behind my back and that she was arresting me. Patience Russo was arrested and charged with manslaughter, as well as a lesser charge of concealing a berth. Although abortion,

is legal in Nevada, the 1911 law the detectives found prohibits what Caroline Kitchener calls self-managed abortions. The law says that if someone tries to have an abortion after 24 weeks by using, quote, any drug, medicine, or substance, or any instrument or other means, and succeeds in ending the pregnancy,

they can be charged with manslaughter. Nevada is the only state with a law like this. Here's Caroline. And so they need to prove that she took some action that ended her pregnancy and that she did that with the intention of ending her pregnancy. So there's a lot of talk about patients' drug use, and patients was a drug user. She did smoke, you know, quite a bit of weed, and then, you know, there was some evidence that she had also been smoking meth.

But the only thing that she did with the purpose of trying to end her pregnancy was ingesting the cinnamon. But it's unclear, you know, there's no kind of scientific link between cinnamon and having a miscarriage. At a preliminary hearing, Deputy Jacqueline Mitchum claimed that patients told her she smoked marijuana every day in an attempt to have a miscarriage. But Caroline says there's no record of patients telling the police she used to have. either meth or marijuana to try to end her pregnancy. If she was found guilty, patients could be sentenced to up to ten years in prison. She says she was worried about what would happen to her children. Her public defender made a deal.

If she pleaded guilty, the prosecutor would recommend a lighter sentence, probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail. She says her public defender told her it was her best bet, so she agreed. While she waited for a sentencing hearing, she got out on bail. It seemed like everyone in town knew about what had happened. She remembers that once at a grocery store, some teenage boys yelled at her, calling her baby killer and chased after her. I was messaged all the time being told to go kill myself.

And it became a lot for me to handle. In a court filing, Patience's lawyer wrote, quote, Wins of Prejudice have arisen. A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the city of Winnamaka. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Sacks Fifth Avenue. Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it enjoyable and effortless to shop for clothes and accessories that fit your personal style. The fall is here, and maybe you're thinking about adding classic, reliable pieces to your closet,

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It's so wild. I mean, these people are stoked right now. Look at this. Getting out. Ah, there we go. Nice little way here. You! Patience Rousseau's sentencing hearing was on May 7, 2019, nearly a year after her arrest.

Because of the deal she had made with the prosecutor, she expected to be sentenced to probation, drug treatment, and less than a year in the county jail. But the judge sentenced her to between two and a half and eight years in prison. She was taken to the Florence-McCleur Women's Correctional Center in Las Vegas, about a seven-hour drive from Winamaca. Between her arrest and her sentencing, patients had started seeing someone new, and they gotten married. Her kids stayed with her husband when she went to prison. And what was prison like for you?

It was awful. When I first got there, one of the other girls had gotten a hold of my paperwork and spread it throughout the prison. And what is it like to be in a women's prison with the charge that you had? You get treated like you're the worst of the worst. I had one lady threatened to pull me off my bunk and beat me with locks in a sock until I was not breathing anymore.

She said she tried to talk on the phone with her kids as much as she could that asked her when she was coming home. And then, about a year into her sentence, patients got a phone call. I honestly thought it was a joke at first. Why? Because it was too good to be true.

The call was from a lawyer named Laura Fitzsimmons. What did she say? That she believed in me. And what did she want to do? She wanted me to get free, to go home with my kids. She believed I was innocent. Laura Fitzsimmons had been a criminal defense lawyer. By the time she reached out to Patience, she was retired,

but was still involved in abortion rights in Nevada. In 1990, she helped pass a referendum to keep abortion legal in the state. One of the reasons abortion is still legal in Nevada, even after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Laura first heard about Patience's case when an acquaintance from Planned Parenthood reached out. And she called me, and she said, I just heard there's a woman in prison for terminating her own pregnancy.

And I said, well, that can't be. Laura started reading about Patience. She learned about Patience's background, that she'd been physically abused by her father as a young child and had her first kid at 16. She'd been physically and sexually abused by boyfriends over the years. Laura read the case files about Patience's miscarriage, and about the 1911 law.

She's the only person, as far as we can tell, and we've really searched for it, that was ever prosecuted under this statute. Nevada is a very pro-choice state, but we're the same state, the only state in the country that has a statute that subjects a woman

to imprisonment for her own pregnancy outcome. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, many states put abortion laws into place that can punish doctors and other people who help facilitate abortions, but not the people getting abortions. In any case, when Laura read Patience's case files, she realized the 1911 law shouldn't even apply to her. Laura started gathering witnesses that could testify on patients' behalf, the medical examiner, doctors, and other men. medical experts, and patients' public defender. Part of Laura's argument was that the public defender hadn't done his job properly, that he shouldn't have told patients to plead guilty, and at a hearing in front of a judge,

the public defender agreed. And he acknowledged that he, you know, he didn't do what he should have done, which is pretty remarkable because lawyers have egos, and that doesn't happen very often. and it was extremely impressive. The public defender said, quote, I fall on the sword. Patience wasn't allowed to be at the hearing, but she watched it from prison on a TV monitor.

The coroner was my first witness, and she said, listen, you know, nothing, I can't not say as a medical professional that anything patients did or everything she did, smoking pots, smoking meth, you know, taking cinnamon, none of that led to this pregnancy outcome. Another witness was this incredible OB-GYN. So he testified, and it was just a mind-blower. He said, listen, this pregnancy outcome most likely came from other factors in her life, such as trauma, such as all this stuff.

no matter how much you point your finger at this woman and criticize her, no court of law could conclude that she caused this miscarriage. About a month later, the judge made his decision. And he writes this really emotional 40-page decision. He says, patience has been portrayed as an Antichrist, but this judge thinks she is instead just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system. And he describes Patience's case as a, quote, total miscarriage of justice.

The judge vacated Patience's conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. Laura called to tell Patience the news and was there to meet her when she got out on July 8, 2021. She'd been in prison for just over two years. And I, you know, was waiting outside the prison gates, and she walked out, and that was the first time that I'd ever seen her. Laura's, she's awesome. If I could have a second, mom, it would be her. She's extremely understanding, but she's tough when she needs to be.

even when she knows I don't want to hear it. Lauren Patience flew from Las Vegas to Reno, and then Patience drove home. What was it like seeing your kids again? It was great. They had grown so much in the two and a half years. Patience and her kids left Winamaca and moved to South Dakota

to live with Patience's mother. So was that it? Case closed? It was over? Oh, gosh, no. Are you kidding? Sorry. You can tell I'm still really angry about this. Because the judge had vacated the conviction on the grounds that Patience's public defender hadn't done his job correctly, the district attorney still had the power to retry patients. For years, the possibility of being called back to Winamaka to stand trial hung over Patience's head. In 2022, patients had another child. She considered getting an abortion, but in the end, decided not to. I know from my conversations with her that she,

Abel really, he has stayed with her, and I think she felt like she needed to have this baby in some ways because of Abel. When she first got out of prison, patients didn't know where Abel's remains were. It wasn't until Caroline Kitchener wrote a story about patients for the Washington Post and interviewed Jacqueline Mitchum

that she found out. Abel's ashes were on a shelf in Deputy Mitchum's home. The remains have been cremated at a local funeral home and with patients in prison when unclaimed. So Deputy Mitchum told the funeral director everything that had happened and said, I'm taking him, that's my baby. The funeral director said okay. When Caroline Kitchener asked Deputy Mitchum about it,

she said that she was the only one who ever loved Abel. Laura Fitzsimmons is working on getting on getting. getting Abel's ashes back to return them to patients. She spent years trying to get patients' case closed for good, and in April of this year, almost four years after patients got out of prison, the judge who originally sentenced her issued a ruling. He said, I'm dismissing this case with prejudice. You don't have any evidence that can show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It's over. It means they can't, they can't touch me.

Patience and Laura stay in touch. They talk on the phone every Tuesday. For a while, Patience lived with her mother in Western South Dakota, but she and her kids recently moved across the state to Sioux Falls. It's a bigger city than Patience is used to. But she says it's work. for her kids to have more to do. They like to go to the lake and the zoo.

And she says they're planning to visit every park in the city, one by one. Caroline Kitchener's article for the Washington Post is called, She said she had a miscarriage, then got arrested under an abortion law. We'll have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, and Megan Cunane.

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