Criminal - The Less People Know About Us

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

SPOILER WARNING: Please listen to Episode 51: Money Tree before you listen to this one. Three years ago, we spoke with Axton Betz-Hamilton about discovering that her identity had been stolen as a child. When she found out who had stolen it, everything changed. We spoke with Axton again a couple of weeks ago. She said that since our last conversation she’s been conducting an investigation, going back to the very beginning of her own life, and reconsidering every memory.  Axton’s new book is The Less People Know About Us. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. 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

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. We spoke to you in the fall of 2016, which seems wild that it was three years ago. What have you learned about your mother since our last conversation? So every interaction I've ever had with my mother, I've had to go back and question the motives. And I believe at the core of this, mom was seeking attention. Do you still think she's a psychopath? I do.

Axton Betts Hamilton grew up as an only child in the small town of Portland, Indiana. In September of 2016, she told us her story for episode 51, Money Tree. If you haven't heard it, you may want to stop now and go listen to that episode first, and then come back for this update. We've got a link in the show notes. From the time she was 11 years old, Axton Betts Hamilton knew that her family was the victim of a complicated, relentless case of

identity theft. It started in 1993 when pieces of their mail were stolen. The family had a farm. It was called Up to Our Asses Donkey and Mule Farm. And one of the first unusual things they noticed was that the farm magazines they subscribed to, magazines like Mules and More, stopped arriving. They weren't getting their bills. The phone line was cut off. The electricity and gas were shut off. The family thought someone was driving by and physically stealing mail from the mailbox, so they got a P.O. box, but the mail theft

continued. What began with missing and unpaid bills escalated to enormous debts on credit cards that had been opened in their names. This went on for years and years. The family had a hard time getting the police to pay much attention. Back then, there weren't any federal laws designating individuals as victims of identity theft. It wasn't until Axton moved out and went to college that she realized that it wasn't just her parents' identities that had been stolen. Hers had been stolen too.

When she contacted the electric company to turn power on in her new apartment, she was told that she had such horrible credit she'd need to pay a special deposit. She was confused. So she sent away for her full credit report and learned she had a credit score of 380. Here she is back in 2016. Up until that point in my life, 100 meant perfect. You know, going through school 100%, you got everything right. So 380 must be almost

four times as perfect, given my schema. And there was a bell curve underneath the words, your credit score is 380. And that bell curve showed that my credit score was in the second percentile of all credit scores in the nation. And I drove to the Indiana State Police post and an officer took my report and it essentially said, unknown thief opened up credit cards in victim's name. And that was it. That was the entirety of the police response from the Indiana State Police at that time. So I was given a copy of the police report so I could have it to show to creditors as needed

and basically told good luck. And the first person I called was my mom and I started crying saying I will never own anything. I will never be able to own a car. I will never be able to own a home. I will never have a credit card. I will never be able to do the things that everybody else gets to do because someone did this to me. What did your mother say?

She was shocked, but she told me, whomever has done this to you and whomever has done this to us, it's likely not a personal vendetta. It was just an opportunity for them to gain financially, and you kind of got to live with it. Axton was able to live with it, sort of. She worked to repair her credit, but she also made identity theft the focus of her academic work. She did her master's research project on how people perceive identity theft and how they can protect themselves from becoming victims. Then, she went on to get her doctorate at Iowa State University, writing her dissertation on the experiences of child identity theft victims, like her. She became one of the first

experts in identity theft. She thought that by becoming an expert, she might be able to one day help her family. In February of 2013, Axton's mother, Pam Betts, died from a rare form of leukemia. About 10 days later, Axton got a phone call from her father. Here she is talking to us in 2016. He called me because he was mad at me, and he said, what were you doing running a credit card over the limit back in 2001? And I said, Dad, I didn't.

What are you talking about? And he said, don't lie to me. I have the credit card statement in my hand. And I said, what credit card statement? What credit card company was it? And he told me. And I said, Dad, that was one of the credit cards that was taken out in my name as part of the identity theft. And I asked him to put it aside.

I said it would come home over spring break in a couple of weeks and take a look at it. But he made another very chilling statement to me, and it was very chilling from the perspective of someone who's spent their professional life studying identity theft. He said, I don't know what's going on, but the credit card statement was in a file folder with your birth certificate. And that made my blood run cold because I knew instinctively that Mom's identity was never stolen. She ruined her own credit and stole my identity and Dad's identity. We spoke with Axton again a couple of weeks ago. She said that since our last conversation, she's been conducting an investigation,

not only using all of the professional tools at her disposal, but also traveling around the country talking to people who knew her mother. When I started my investigation, I wanted to know who Mom was and what she did with the money. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Now, you know, knowing all that you know and all this time, how much money do you think she took? In total, there's approximately $600,000 that was either misappropriated or still missing. In trying to answer her two questions, who her mother really was and what she did with all that money,

Axton has gone back to the very beginning of her own life, reconsidering every memory. You know, when you go through something like that, you know, your whole life is essentially blown up. You know, everything you knew about your mom is wrong, and for my dad, everything he knew about his wife was essentially built on a lie. She's written a book. The title comes from something her mother said to her again and again.

The less people know about us, the better. In investigating her own life, Axton found that what used to be a funny story or non-event feels different now. And now, looking back, she can see her mother more clearly. She remembers when she was little, her mother spent hours and hours on the couch, watching the home shopping network and QVC,

secretly placing telephone orders for jewelry. When the packages arrived, she hid them and made Axton promise never to tell anyone. At that time, because I didn't have a lot of outside influences, you know, I grew up without grandmothers. And so mom was my only female role model, at least the only one that, you know, she would allow into my life. So I thought it was normal. I thought all moms behaved that way. Tell me about the things that she was buying. Was it mostly costume jewelry? Would she show it to you and then kind of hide it away before your father got home? Yeah, so it

was primarily costume jewelry. And mom would show it to me. and at one point I questioned her on how much she was buying at 11. And how mom placated me was that she started buying two of everything. So if she would buy a ring, let's say, she would buy two of them and give me one. Did it work? To some extent, it did, in part because I misinterpreted it as mom was trying to connect with me, she was trying to bond with me, when really she was just trying to, for lack of a better way to say it, buy me off and keep me from telling dad about what she was doing. Will you tell the story about the milk?

So I was in third grade, and I had been allergic to milk my whole life. I still am. And when you're a little kid, at least back in the late 80s and early 90s, having a food allergy was a big deal, and it was a rarity. And at that time, when you went to the school lunch line, each kid had to take a carton of milk. And at some point, it was questioned that maybe I didn't have a milk allergy and that there needed to be some sort of proof that I had a milk allergy. And my teacher sent me home with a note and I gave it to my mother and the note was requesting proof that I had a milk allergy. And she took that note, and I could tell by her body language and her facial expression that she was enraged over this note. So she took me to my grandpa's house. So this would be her father, and we lived right across the driveway from him. So she marched me over to his house, sat me down at his kitchen table, took a glass out of his cabinet, opened his refrigerator, pulled out the half gallon of milk, poured me a glass of milk,

and said, drink it. I wouldn't. I actually clamped my jaw together. And I remember looking at the clock on the microwave and seeing that it was 3.30, and I remember thinking that if I just clamped my jaw shut long enough, Dad will be home, and he'll rescue me, because Dad was home by four o'clock every day and mom continued to yell at me my grandpa came to the kitchen from the living room and started yelling at mom saying pam just take her to the doctor what are you doing

she completely ignored him and just kept yelling at me to drink the milk. And I kept watching the clock, which it seemed like it took forever for four o'clock to come. And I clamped my jaw shut until my teeth hurt. And I heard dad's truck tires entered the driveway. And I could hear dad's truck door open and shut, came over to Grandpa's, saw what was happening, and took the glass of milk, poured it out in the sink, and I don't know what happened after that because Dad didn't have to tell me twice to get out of there. I was rescued. I was sprung. I ran home. You know, she would try to make you sick. Right. There was absolutely no logic behind it. And the whole time she's yelling at me to drink

the damn milk, Axton, and I wouldn't. Axton says her mother had a way of operating in life, a confidence that didn't allow for anyone else to be right. She remembers when the family received a foreclosure notice that they were going to lose the farm, and her father panicked. Her mother's response to her father was, you don't understand things like this. Don't even try. It always felt like she was the one who had all of the knowledge and wisdom,

and Dad and I were just her supporting cast. And so, you know, Dad questioned that along with a lot of other financial transactions over the years. But Mom had a way of making you feel like the dumbest person alive for questioning her. Axton tried to keep her head down. Her mother made a rule that all the curtains in the house had to be closed at all times for safety. Axton writes, anything and anyone outside those drapes possessed intentions we could never be sure of. We could only trust one another. She says she was always on guard, constantly nervous.

One day, when she was in middle school, a sheriff's car pulled in their driveway, and Axton immediately ran to hide in her closet. I was terrified. I figured it had something to do with the identity theft, but I didn't know what. So I buried myself in stuffed animals, behind shoeboxes, behind clothes. I hid in my closet

because there was a sheriff's car in our driveway. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I waited. The sheriff was there to arrest Axton's mother for passing bad checks. Her father told the sheriff that there was some mistake. He explained that they were victims of identity theft. And the sheriff listened to him and didn't arrest her. Axton says people in town trusted her father. He was honest. People were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But he was paranoid, too. He often repeated Axton's mother's line, the less people know about us, the better. And Axton followed instructions. That sense of paranoia somehow got crossed with a sense of duty,

of being paranoid and not talking to people and not making any effort to connect with people, I mean, even other kids at school. Or even when we were out in public and somebody would come up and talk to us, I would barely utter two words. It was almost like it was my responsibility. I'm doing the right thing. I'm helping our family stay safe. She monitored the property with so much care and worry

that she remembers that her neck and shoulders would hurt by the end of each day. So one day I was home and it was summer break and I got up. I was still wearing pajamas, you know, because it was summer. I didn't have anywhere to go. Nobody was coming over. Nobody ever came over. And I was laying on the couch and I heard a car come into the driveway, which of course made, you know, my adrenaline rush because nobody was supposed to be there. And I looked out the window, and there was this beat-up van sitting in the driveway.

And I watched through a crack in the blinds, and I wondered what they were doing. And this very scruffy-looking man gets out of the van and goes to the back of it. And this is a van. It looked like a utility van. So it wasn't a passenger van where there were windows down the side. It was one of those vans where you couldn't see what was in the back. And so in my mind at the time, it looked like a kidnapper's van. And one of the things that my dad had always said to me, well, after the identity theft started, he said, if someone crosses the gate, they're yours. You know, you have to defend the property. And, you know, if I was home alone, and I was in this case, and this man goes through the gate,

you know, and that was like a siren to me. I was like, okay, you know, it's go time. And I grabbed the biggest butcher knife that I could find in the kitchen. Still clad in my pajamas. I slept on my mom's old barn shoes. So they were these really ratty looking tennis shoes. And I snuck out the back door. And by this point, this man is walking towards the barn. And I dart behind trees in the backyard and I sneak up behind him and I yell at him and ask him who he was and what he was doing there. And by this point, the knife is

held high in the air over my head in a downward motion, like I could stab him because I thought, you know, I have to defend myself. There's an intruder here. You know, I don't know what I'm getting into. And he put his hands up in the air. He dropped everything he was holding. And he said, I'm the plumber. I said, what plumber? No one hired a plumber. And he said, well at him to get out, and he actually held his hands up and walked backwards down the driveway. And I held a knife to him the entire way and stood there until he got in his van, and I was satisfied that he left and he wasn't coming back. So a few hours later, my grandpa comes home. And I don't say anything because I wanted to wait until dad got home to tell him. And dad was proud of me for defending myself. And so we went to talk to grandpa to ask if he had hired a plumber. And grandpa had hired a plumber. And he told us that he had seen the plumber at the Legion before he came home, and the plumber said that there was some crazy girl next door

who chased him off with a knife and that he wasn't coming back. You know, it's kind of funny, right, that this girl with this knife, but it's also kind of disturbing that at such a young age, you were under this mindset that it was a constant war, that your family was under attack because your mother and father had told you that you were under attack. And so you had to be prepared with a knife for anything. Right. That's not a very peaceful existence. It was not a peaceful existence. You know, every day I was on high alert, but so was my dad, and we thought my mother was too.

When Axton was in ninth grade, she began having panic attacks. Her mother took her to the family doctor, who referred her to a psychiatrist. Axton says they visited the psychiatrist once. Her mother did most of the talking. And then they never went back. To be continued... recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters,

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Growing up, Axton Betts Hamilton wasn't allowed to interact with most of her relatives. Friends and neighbors had been pushed away over time. Her mother always said that whoever was committing the identity theft had to be someone close, so she didn't let anyone stay close. And so in the months leading up to her mother's death, Axton was surprised to see how active her mother was on Facebook. They weren't Facebook friends, but Axton would often see her mother on the computer at the hospital.

Well, I logged into Mom's Facebook account a few days after she passed away because really no one knew that she was gone. She insisted that she have no service and no obituary. It was like she just wanted to disappear into thin air. And we honored that, you know, because, you know, you honor the wishes of your dying loved one. And we didn't have an obituary, no service. You know, she was cremated. We honored her wishes of her ashes coming with me, which at the time we thought was odd, but we honored it. And I logged into her Facebook account just to tell people that she had passed away and to say that there would be no services and that, you know, if you want to share your condolences, here's how to contact me. You know, basic, simple, you know, think I'm doing the right thing. And I start going through mom's Facebook account and I find over 4,000 private Facebook messages between her and people she had gone to high

school with at Indian Lake and people from a local diner that she frequented in Albany. Axton stayed up all night, reading through the conversations. She says she didn't recognize her mother at all. The way she was talking, the things she was saying. Axton says it made her wince. Her mother was so flirtatious. It took days to read through all of the messages. They went back years.

And in each one, her mother presented a different version of herself and of her life. You know, as I was going through them, they became increasingly weird. And she started referring to her farmer. And I thought she was talking about Dad, you know, because he's a hobby farmer, you know, not a big deal. And then as I kept reading the messages, she started referring to John

and that she was divorced from John and how abusive John was. Well, John's my dad, so the farmer wasn't my dad so who's the farmer and I kept reading and I figured out who the farmer was and as I kept reading and she was having these conversations with multiple people it became clear that she was detailing an affair, which has been verified through conversations that I've had with her friends and also through bank account records. She was buying the hotel rooms and she was buying the alcohol to take to the hotel rooms. But she, you know, in these messages, she said that my dad had left her for a woman 20 years younger and that she was pregnant and that I was angry about it. And none of this is

true. But people believed it. People believed it. They thought my dad was abusive, that he was the one cheating on my mom. None of that was true. He was at home three miles up the road, you know, feeding the donkeys and going to work every day. Axton says that the identity theft wasn't the most painful part of all of this. It was reading the way her mother talked about her family. In one message, Axton's mother wrote, The first day John left me alone with Axton was the worst day of my life. Did you show these messages to your father? I did. And I, because there were so many, I cut and pasted the worst of it into a Word document and let him read

it. The worst of it you pasted? I think I would have pasted the easiest of it, I think, and hidden the rest. I thought about that, and I thought, you know what? At this point, we need the truth. Regardless of how ugly it may be, we've been lied to for so long that let's just see the brutal truth. Let's go right down to the bottom of it. Enough is enough, huh? Right. Before her death, Axton's mother had given John the passwords for some of her accounts. But when Axton tried to log in, none of them worked. Axton says it was like trying to solve

a Rubik's cube, guessing different combinations. Eventually, she was able to access her mother's email account. Then she was able to reset passwords and log in. As they went through the finances, Axton and her father usually found debts that her mother incurred. But once, they were surprised to find $5,000. John took that money and bought himself a motorcycle. One of the things that Mom had promised throughout their marriage was that

someday when she got a good job and was making lots of money, she would buy Dad the Harley that he always wanted. Well, now we know that was a lie and, you know, kind of a cruel joke. And so Dad used the money we found and bought the bike that he always wanted. Last time we talked, you said he felt like he'd wasted his life. Is he doing better now? So, wasted his life has now turned into the 46 years of my life with your mother.

Seems like a chapter of my life that when I talk about it, it's like it's not even me. And so, at this point, he's far enough away from it, it's hard for him to envision himself in that life. So in a sense, I do think there's been some healing there. And I think his new girlfriend has helped with that as well. I think the new girlfriend and the new bike have done a lot to help him heal. Oh, isn't that good news he has a girlfriend? Yes. I love that news news? He has a girlfriend. Yes. I love that news. A girlfriend and a motorcycle.

Well, you know, retirement should be on the horizon. In fact, it was my dad's goal to be retired long before now. He spent his 401K digging your mother out of debt. Right. He's still working full-time and he's going to continue working full-time because the extent of what my mother did financially is such that he will not be able to have the retirement that he thought he was going to have. And just because there aren't enough working years left for him to recover his retirement,

it's just not possible for him to recover in that way. But, you know, as he says, he'll be fine. You know, we're survivors. You know, we get knocked down and we get back up and, you know, we keep on going the best we can. We called Axton's father. And he told us that he still isn't very comfortable talking about what happened. He doesn't think he'll ever be. But he is proud of his daughter.

He told us, if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have made it. Axton has spent hundreds of hours investigating her mother, but she still can't account for where all the money went. She says there was an electrical fire on the family's property before her mother's death. A lot of Axton's mother's papers were destroyed, and now Axton wonders if her mother set the fire intentionally to cover her tracks.

Not everything was destroyed. Axton and her father have found home inspection records for properties they've never heard of, rejection letters for bank accounts she'd attempted to open in other states, loan documents, one with an interest rate of 521%. She's found some photos taken from inside a condo. You can see out the window that there's a clubhouse,

and Axton searched for communities that looked like what she could see in the picture. She found a match at Indian Lake where her mother had vacationed as a child. She believes her mother was in the condo and perhaps owned it, but there are no records under any names she's tried so far. She found similar photos taken from inside a lakehouse. She learned from her mother's friends that her mother had gone back to Indian Lake frequently

over the last 10 years of her life. So there may be properties you haven't found yet. Correct. And I think there are people out there that know things that they don't even realize they know. Because my last name is Betts Hamilton, people at Indian Lake aren't going to make the connection. They knew Mom as Pam Elliott. So there are people out there that

think that she didn't have a child, that don't know that she got married. And one of the things that mom would tell people was that she was very wealthy. And they may, if she spent money on things, they may have seen that as just normal for her. So I think there are people out there who know things that don't even realize that they know things that I want to know. So if anybody knows anything about my mom, no matter how small you may think it is, feel free to reach out to me.

Are there times throughout this process when you felt close to her? No. Axton has been trying to put together a picture of who her mother really was. She thinks her mother enjoyed playing with people. One person told Axton that her mother would send herself flowers at work for the attention. She often bragged about the men who wanted to be with her, the jewelry she said they gave her. Axton sat down

with everyone she could think of, relatives, old friends, people from Facebook, asking them to share everything they could remember about her mother, asking them why they think she would have done this. As one of her mother's friends put it, she wanted a life bigger than the one she had. She could tell convincing lies seamlessly and keep all of them straight and keep people who knew different versions of her away from one another successfully for 20 years. And I don't think you can do that as an average person. There has to be something psychologically, you know, gone awry with you to be able to manipulate and lie so well without mixing things up or somehow giving something away. And mom did not mess up for 20 years.

She's put a copy of her book about her mother on an easel, right beside her mother's urn. She says it's her way of telling her mother, I know who you are. Going home to Jay County, where she grew up, still gives her a, quote, special and violent kind of anxiety. But like her father,

Axon is doing much better now. She's happy to be building relationships with her extended family, people she wasn't allowed to see when she was a kid. She purchased her first brand-new car and got a good interest rate. She says it felt important, a clear sign that she's repaired her credit.

You know, our listeners, they always want to know how you're doing. They always, how is Axton doing? Will you check in with Axton? I'm so happy that I got to speak with you again, and that it sounds like you're doing so well. I am. I am. Since we've spoken, I've accepted a new position at South Dakota State University, which I'm very thankful for and love my new role and love that I'm still able to educate and help others regarding identity theft.

People write to her from all over the world, victims of family identity theft, to tell her what happened to them. She says that whenever she can, she refers them to agencies that might be able to help, but that no matter what, she always writes them back. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Roberson is our assistant producer. Audio by Rob Byers Special thanks to Mary Helen Montgomery

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal You can see them at thisiscriminal.com where we've got a link to Axton's book The Less People Know About Us A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition.

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