Criminal - The Mail

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

This episode contains adult content. Please use discretion. When Sarah Garone was 13 years old, she received something very strange in the mail. She didn't know who it was from, or why they would have sent it. And then it happened again. 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,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com.

That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode contains adult content. Please use discretion. Well, I was 13, and it was just a few days before my ninth grade year began. And I went out to check the mail, and there was a large manila envelope addressed to me. And of course, it's always exciting to get mail. But when I opened it up, it was page after page of black and white, photocopied, extremely graphic pornography. This is Sarah Garonne. The pages were images that appeared to have been cut out and arranged on new pieces of paper, and then photocopied, a stack of them, an inch thick.

I hardly even knew what I was looking at. And I think for that reason, it was extra horrifying, just not even knowing what on earth this was. And the minute I pulled it out, you know, you just have this gut reaction of horror. And I just remember I was trembling, shaking, I started to cry. This was 1996 in Chandler, Arizona. Sarah says she grew up in a very sheltered environment. Her mother and stepfather were very active in their local evangelical church. On the day she received the package, she remembers immediately taking it inside to show them. And I said, look at this. Someone sent me this. Why would someone send me this? There was no return address on the envelope. No other markings. No note.

Just pages and pages of these pictures. What did your parents think? I mean, what do you remember them saying about who did this? I think we all just were in shock from it and racking our brains about who would do this and why. I think they sort of interrogated me, are there any creepy boys at school or anybody who might have a crush on you or anyone you might have slighted in some way? You just kind of go through all of those questions in your head when you're trying to make sense of an incident like this. Because I think in my mind, it could have only come from, of course, someone that I knew and most of the people I knew were at my school.

So anytime anyone expressed interest in me in a sort of romantic way, I would add them to my list and kind of consider, well, could they have done something like this? Was this them? We decided to call the police. The police came, took it, made a report, and nothing ever happened. Every time Sarah went to get the mail,

she worried about what might be in it. But no more letters came. Weeks passed, and then months, nothing. And then, one year later, something else arrived. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. This time there was just a single business size envelope with my name on an actual printed label this time, no return address. And I opened this one and this time it was color photographs, each of which took up the entire page. And I would say it was two or three 8x11 sheets, again, of very graphic pornography. And this time there was a little extra there for me, which was a message scrawled in red, some kind of red ink.

It looked like it could have been paint or even lipstick. And this time it was addressed to me personally. And it said, Dear Sarah, I love you. I want you. I need you. And it was signed with the name of a boy at my school who I had a crush on. What did you do? I recall again, just shaking like a leaf, crying, epically freaking out. Just a mess that this had happened again. Did you confront the boy? No, no. I did not. I did not want to talk to him about it at all.

Sarah says she didn't believe it was actually from this boy. It was too similar to the package she'd gotten a year before, before she'd even met this person. He was a foreign exchange student who wasn't even in the country when she got the first package. What scared her most was that as far as she remembers, she'd never even told anyone that she had a crush on him. The only place that I had expressed that was in my diary. And I knew that it couldn't have actually been this boy who had sent it to me. So someone had to have either read my journal or been a very good guesser and put his name on this. I think I would have just been so flipped out. Yes.

And I think probably even worse because a year had gone by thinking maybe it's over and then thinking, oh, no, it wasn't. Yeah, exactly. And this time, that personal aspect and that personal violation to know it's very possible that someone read my diary. But then I would think of, yeah, those sort of creepy boys at school and think, oh, maybe somehow, like, it's so far-fetched, but you think, did they come in my house? Or I would think of my male friends who had, you know, come over for parties or to hang out and think, oh, when we were all out at the pool, did somebody slip into my bedroom and flip through my diary? And then things went really quiet for a number of years. And you start to think maybe that was just a weird incident from high school. Maybe it's over. I moved. I went to college in Chicago, and I never really heard much for about, I would say, five years. And then things began to happen again.

I was dating seriously, and I had just actually gotten engaged when the level of harassment really ratcheted up. What happened? First, my email was hacked. And initially you think, oh, I just, maybe I forgot my password. That's funny. Or maybe they ran some update on this website and I have to have a new password. My old password's not working anymore. And so, you know, that seemed kind of harmless at first. But then a lot of strange things began to happen with and from my email. I would suddenly get subscribed to things that I knew I hadn't signed myself up for. Things especially with a sexual connotation. After I got engaged, you know, and when you're young and in love, this was before the age of texts.

And so we were sending each other these really intimate emails. And then a friend came to me and said, did you mean to send me that email, that very intimate email that was addressed to your fiancé? She realized someone was logging in, copying her emails, and then sending them to new people from her email address. And then even a very good friend of mine, who I didn't go to school with at that time, she had emailed me a really painful story of experiencing a sexual assault. And then she began to receive anonymous messages about the details she had shared with me in that email. Sarah felt horrible, but didn't know what to do. She kept changing her password.

Her fiancé at the time, now husband, was studying computer science, and he started tracing the IP addresses for the emails that appeared to have been sent by Sarah. They came from Chandler, Arizona, where she was from. Sarah graduated and moved home to Arizona. She and her fiancé got married and rented an apartment in Tempe. She got a job working as a secretary at Arizona State University. And then one day, I came home from work, and there was an anonymous package on my doorstep. 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, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you?

And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. By 2005, Sarah Garone had been intermittently harassed for almost 10 years. Whoever was doing this to her seemed to find her wherever she lived. She and her husband had been in their apartment for about nine months when the anonymous package showed up on her doorstep. And inside was a dildo and someone had printed off

just in large caps, letters, my husband's name and taped it to this thing, which is almost comical, but at the time, really scary. She realized that her front door was unlocked. She knew she hadn't left it like that. She called her husband, but he was 30 minutes away.

So she called her stepfather, whose office was right around the corner. I was terrified that someone was lurking in my apartment. The person who had been perpetrating this harassment against me all these years. I thought, oh, here it is. He's finally going to have his say in person. So I waited outside until my dad pulled up. And I said, please look behind all the shower curtains and in all the closets and behind all the doors and make sure there's no one hiding in my apartment. And he did.

And he stayed with me. And we made a police report together. So when the cops show up, are you recounting not just the story of this package, but the fact that you've been internet stalked and received packages in the past? Definitely. I will say I found it difficult to really hold out much hope, though, because in the past, nothing had ever come of it before. And so when I made this report, even though this seemed more invasive and more intense than some of the previous incidents, I just still wasn't convinced that anything would ever come of it and that this would just go on and on. What happens next? It was probably a week later that I got a phone call and a detective introduced himself and that floored me. I just, like I said, I never thought any, you know, police action would ever happen on this. He introduced himself. We talked a little bit about what had been going on and he said,

do you know someone named Gary Hardy? And I said, yeah, that's my stepdad and we knew at that point if it was him this time it had to have been him all along and as it turns out my stepdad's secretary that morning as part of her job, she had been opening his business mail. And she had also been pretty horrified to discover a dildo in a box addressed to him at his office. And so she had closed it up surreptitiously, acted like she never saw it and put it in his office. When I called him and asked him to come to my aid, he told his secretary exactly what had happened and exactly why I had called and exactly what this object was that had arrived on my doorstep. And it did not take her long to put the pieces together

that he was not coming to save the day. He was coming to see my reaction. And so she went down to the Tempe Police Department, which was right down the street, and she made a report. Had his secretary called you and said, no, she didn't. And that's surprising because she was a friend of the family. In fact, she and my mom were very close. But I think she just felt it was her duty to make that police report and let things play out from there. Did you start going through all

the things in your mind, times in high school, growing up? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that was really revolting to think of how I had trusted him, even trusted him with the raw emotion of my reactions because I was giving him exactly what he, I believe, wanted from this. What other things did you start thinking about that were weird with him? Yeah. That you hadn't really thought about before? Yeah. Well, I think when I was a kid and he and my mom were first married, I felt pretty copacetic about him being my dad. But then as years went on and as I became

a teenager, I just would get kind of a yucky feeling about him sometimes. So if it was just me and him alone in the house, I recall that Monday nights my mom had a recurring event and it would be just him and me in the house. And I just would want, my mom had a recurring event and it would be just him and me in the house. And I just would want to go to my room or go to bed early. I just, I had a sort of a strange sense of not wanting to be alone with him. And then I also realized something that had never crossed my mind as being strange, but in retrospect really seemed strange, was that in my bedroom, which was on the ground floor of our house, I had these rolling blinds and part, just a little kind of corner, a little square of the blinds had been missing for a long time. And we had a cat. So my

mom always said, oh, you know, cats get playful. And the cat probably went behind there and just knocked out these, this section of blinds. But there would be times when Gary would go to take out the trash on that side of the house and I could swear that I heard his footsteps and then I would hear them stop. And I knew he hadn't come in the house yet. And so my suspicion is that I was being watched by him at those times. Sarah's mother and stepfather divided their time between Arizona and Illinois. They had two homes. Gary Hardy was a financial advisor and had clients in both states. So by the time the investigation had determined that Gary was the one behind the harassment, my parents were in Illinois. And so we needed to find a way to get him and them back to Phoenix.

And by this time, I wanted nothing to do with him. I never wanted to speak to him, see his face, any contact. So my husband and my brother actually jointly got on the phone, and they asked both my mom and Gary to get on the phone. And they said, the police have figured out who's been doing this to Sarah, and we're not at liberty to say anything about it, but they need you to come home to be a part of the investigation. And my mom calls and says, I have to know, is it Gary? Sarah's mother met Gary Hardy in 1991.

They were married six months later. Here's Sarah's mother, Sherry. How did you and Gary meet? We met at church. We were attending the same large church. We were in a music and drama ministry together, and then we really got to know each other better when we were in the same weekly small group that met in the home of mutual friends. And what was he like?

He was witty and funny, very intelligent. I know, I mean, he's a son from a previous marriage. He worked a lot, and Sarah says he was successful. His clients liked him. He had no criminal record. When Sarah told her mother that it was Gary who'd been harassing her, Sherry knew that the most important thing was to be calm and to get Gary on a plane back to the police in Arizona. So she had to pretend that she didn't know

and that everything was normal for a whole week. Yeah, so she spent the next week pretending like everything was fine. I had to go home and smile. I had to listen to him tell me he loved me. I had to sleep in the same bed with this man who sexually stalked my daughter. That was awful. And my mom started experiencing some strange things with him as well. So she would say, be out on a walk.

And suddenly his car would come pulling up beside her. And she hadn't told him where she was going. And he would just sort of say, oh, hi, just checking in. Or she went to her aunt's house, hadn't told him where she was going, and the phone rang over there. And it was him checking to see where she was, what she was up to. And that was not normal behavior for him. So he started watching her? Oh, definitely. And then she, newly alerted to this whole situation, began kind of going through the home with new eyes and found a lot of really incriminating stuff around the house. She found in his, he had like

a briefcase that she looked through one day when he was out and she found 40 credit cards with her own name on them that she had never taken out herself. And then she went down in their basement and kind of hidden away in a corner of the basement were all sorts of high-end gadgets and golf clubs and purchases that she had never heard about. The night before their flight was supposed to leave for Arizona, Gary began to behave even more strangely. He said he felt very sick. Sherry later recounted to investigators that Gary had gotten on the floor. He was shaking. He said something was, quote, possessing him. Then he stopped and he sat up and he said, well, I guess I might as well tell you this because I think you know anyway. And I said, I do. You're right. I might be in a position to help you, but I will not help you unless you tell me the entire truth.

Gary confessed to harassing Sarah, starting when she was 13 years old. Sherry remembers staying very calm and asking him, Okay, what else? And Gary kept confessing. He said that he had been unfaithful to her every day of their marriage, most often with prostitutes. I talked to her the other night, and I don't know how she did this, but she said, well, I think maybe for records, it would be best if you could write all this down and sign it. And she even got him to do that.

So she had a signed confession that he was the perpetrator behind all of these incidents for all these years. This must have been so horrible for your mother. It really was. Yeah, I think just about the psychological impact of that week on her. And I'm amazed that she got through it as well as she did. Sherry thinks that Gary believed that she would stick with him no matter what. When he went to bed that night,

Sherry remembers staying awake in a chair in the living room, and the next morning, they went to the airport. When they landed in Phoenix, they went directly to the Tempe Police Department, where Gary turned himself in.

Gary Hardy was charged with aggravated harassment and criminal trespass, both felonies. It was later discovered that he had been breaking into Sarah's apartment and taking things, including her journals. And then it emerged that he'd been stealing money from his clients, which brought a whole new set of charges. He was a financial planner, and what he had been doing was instructing his clients to write checks that went to an account that was really his personal account, in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sherry had been under the impression that she and her husband were extremely wealthy. She says she didn't realize they were broke until she tried to pay her divorce attorney.

I wonder, as a mother, the guilt you must feel. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. How could I have married this person? How could I have been so stupid and so naive? Has this changed your relationship with Sarah? Unfortunately, yes, it changed it. She was angry with me. She was angry.

She said, I'm sorry, but I am. When I said, Sarah, you have every right to be angry at me. You have every right to be angry at me. How could she not be angry at me. You have every right to be angry at me. How could she not be angry at me? Yeah. So. Today, Sarah lives in Mesa, not far from where she grew up. She's a freelance writer, mainly focusing on health. She and her husband have been married for 15 years now and have three kids. Do your kids know about this? I mean, they're young. Yeah. They know that Grandma was married to a bad man.

And that's, they know that he was a criminal. They don't know exactly what he did to me. And I'm not quite ready to tell them yet. Have you met with other victims who've had similar experiences? Never. I've never met anyone who's had an experience like this. And in fact, that's at the time what made it feel really isolating. So if anything, listening to crime shows, watching crime shows is kind of my way of resonating with other people who've been through anything similar. Do you like crime shows? Oh, I love crime shows. I love, my husband says my Netflix queue looks like I'm a serial killer.

Why? I don't know. There's all crime. You've lived your own crime show. Why do you worry? I don't know. That's a good question. Maybe I'm more messed up than I think I am. Maybe because my life has so largely gone back to normal and very safe and I feel very secure and great community, great neighborhood, friends, all these things. But it's like, maybe I still resonate on some level with that kernel of being the victim of a crime and wanting to see justice done for anybody that perpetrates crime on someone else. So you like to see how the story ends? Oh, yeah. I want to see the bad guy get put away.

Gary Hardy is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence at Iman State Prison in Arizona. © transcript Emily Beynon Special thanks to Susanna Roberson, Brandon Tenney, and Jeremy Umali. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or 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. From PRX. 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. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different.

Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com.