Hidden True Crime - STAMPIN' UP HEIRESS CHARGED IN MICROSOFT EXECUTIVE EX HUSBAND'S MURDER-- WHO IS SHANNA GARDNER?

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Expect many episodes this week as we introduce many new crimes we are covering. Today we we delve into the background of SHANNA GARDNER, a mother charged in the death of her ex husband Microsoft exexcutive Jared Bridegan. Bridegan was killed “execution style” in front of his two-year-old daughter. JOHN MATTHIAS is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist with 30 years’ experience in both clinical and forensic work. He serves as an expert witness for the federal government and has consulted on numerous high-profile cases for District Attorney’s offices and defense attorneys in several states. In the forensic area, Dr. Matthias has developed expertise in personality assessments, hidden behavioral motivations, complex trauma and criminal psychology. In the clinical realm, he has worked with numerous victims. He received his Master’s degree in Marriage, Family and Child counseling, as well his doctorate degree, from the University of Southern California. Dr. Matthias graduated with honors in philosophy from Princeton University, and he won the prestigious McCosh Thesis prize while there. In high school he graduated valedictorian from a large public high school in Chicago where he was chosen to participate in a ground-breaking valedictory study that continues to this day. Dr. Matthias has been an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Nevada Las Vegas clinical psychology doctoral program since 2007. He supervises UNLV doctoral students on forensic assessments, clinical case formulation, and various therapeutic approaches to clinical work. LAUREN MATTHIAS has worked as an anchor and reporter for ABC, NBC, and FOX News in East Idaho, Boise, Idaho and Salt Lake City, Utah. She spent a decade reporting on a diverse range of topics from high profile crimes to Presidential visits. Most recently, she reported for Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate News4Utah. In 2015 she received the Idaho State Broadcaster’s Association Best Reporter award. She left the reporting world to produce the Hidden True Crime Podcast along with her husband Dr. John Matthias, a forensic psychologist. Your support helps us produce these podcasts/videos. We have some big plans to explore the true crime terrain in a way that no one else has attempted. HIDDEN: A TRUE CRIME PODCAST is: CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY REINVENTED. Join us on a journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind and the unconscious motivations that drive human behaviors in order to understand the world and ourselves. WEBSITE: https://hiddentruecrime.com/ TO SUPPORT: https://www.patreon.com/hiddentruecrime https://paypal.me/hiddentruecrime Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It is hidden hour. We're so grateful to be with you today because we are going to talk about a new case, an important case, a case that John and I have been behind the scenes investigating extensively. It is a very heartbreaking story. It is a story of Jared Bridigan, You've probably seen the headlines.

The headlines are often framed Microsoft exec, Data 4, gun down, murdered in front of his two-year-old daughter. And that is all true, but we're going to definitely tonight go much deeper than the headlines. Three people have now been arrested in Jared Bridigan's death. It happened at Jacksonville Beach, Florida. as he was driving home to his home in St. Augustine, he had just dropped off his twins, his oldest children,

at his ex-wife's home after a date night with them. He was returning to his new wife, who he had two young children with, the two-year-old, Bexley being the oldest, and then they had a six-month-old named London at home. And he called his wife Kirsten and said, I'll be on my way home, honey.

And as he was making his way home, it was a drive he knew he was on a one-way street where the street narrowed, it grew darker, and there was a tire in the middle of the road. He stopped. He had no other choice but to stop. Bexley again was in the back seat in her car seat. The moment he stepped out, he took one step out of his car. He was gunned down, shot multiple times in the back. So yes, murdered in front of his young daughter who was alone for minutes until help arrived. That happened. That date was February. 16th, 2022. So it has been a year and a half since this young father of four was murdered.

Since that time, three people have been arrested. The first person arrested was in January, a tenant. Henry Tenon. Is that correct, John? Henry Tenon. Yep. Tenon. The second person was arrested in March of this year. That is Mario Fernandez. That is Mario Fernandez Sal D'Oldana. And he was the new husband of Jared Bridigan's ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, Fernandez. So all eyes turned to Shanna. Could you have done this? Could this, could you have really possibly been a part of this murder for hire that was starting to unfold?

But no arrest, no arrest, no arrest, until this month. And just a couple weeks ago, or just a week ago, Shana Gardner Fernandez was arrested, charged in her ex-husband's murder, the children of her father. Shiana Gardner Fernandez is an interesting character, and we have been delving into who she is and her past. And that is what we're going to talk about tonight. before we begin, and we're going to start with some body language in an interview that Shanna, Gardner Fernandez did, the one and only interview since her ex-husband was murdered. Yeah, we normally don't focus a lot on body language because, for one thing, it's not admissible in court.

So I think body language analysis is always a very, very small piece of the puzzle. But I think in this case that the interview she gave, I think there's a really obvious. obvious read on body language here. You know, the interview asks her the most pertinent question that everyone wants to know. And let's see what she said. And along, he was still the father of my kids. So I asked Shanna the question. Did you have anything to do with Jared's murder? No, I did not have anything to do with his murder. All right, Dr. John. What did you see there? All right. Let's discuss this. No. Normally, I think body language analysis is fairly subtle.

But here, she asked this question, just point blank, did you murder him? And notice that her first response is to close her eyes. Her first reaction to the question is she closes her eyes. And I don't mean blinking. I mean, her eyes are closed. She's not looking at the interviewer. Asked Shanna the question. Did you have anything to do with Jared's murder?

No, I did not have anything to do with his murder. Did you see that? I saw that. I want to stress that body language analysis is not admissible in court. It's generally not considered to be empirically validated. But that doesn't mean it can't be interesting at times. And I think it can be valuable if it's seen as a part of the puzzle. If it's seen as one small part of a larger puzzle,

And so I think it's interesting. When I watched this initially, I thought, wow, that's pretty blatant. You don't see that that much. And she asked the question, you get her eyes closed right away. She can't look at her. Then she looks at her briefly. Then her eyes go to the left. She looks away again.

So she's really, to me, it's very evasive. Now, I don't necessarily expect all the people I interview. and forensic interviews to look at me directly because obviously there's different issues with how we learn eye contact and what that means and there's certainly cultural considerations. But I think in this case,

when you're asking a question, did you murder someone? And you close your eyes right away? That's probably not a good sign. So why don't you just play it again? Okay. It's murder. No, I did not have anything to do.

with his murder. She did look to the side too. I saw that. Right. So she closes her eyes. They have anything to do with Jared's murder. No. I did not have anything to do with his murder.

We didn't always get along. He was still the father of my kids. And then she lets us know they didn't get along. Right. So I think this is an interesting way to start the discussion of Shanna and, and, and, And it goes hand in hand with something we've heard. One of the sources we've consulted, by the way, most of our sources want to be anonymous, so we can't identify them at the moment.

We might down the road. But one of our sources who knows these families quite well told us that Shanna has, was known to be a compulsive liar. And we'll talk more about that later. But I think when you combine this idea that she's potentially a compulsive liar, I mean, we can't prove that. This is coming from one of our sources. But compulsive liar combined with this inability to look at the interviewer,

she closes her eyes, she looks away. It definitely suggests that there's some evasiveness there. So it's probably not a great way to answer that question when that's the only interview you've ever done. You know, does that answer the question about whether she murdered Jared or participated in the plot to kill him? No, of course not. It has to be proven in court.

But it's not a great start. If you combine the fact that she's a compulsive liar with the fact that she's kind of, one of her tells hair appears to be evasive eye contact or a lack of eye contact and a very, very important question, it's not looking good. It's a tell, as you would say.

It's a tell. Yeah. It's a bit. of a tell. She's probably not the best poker player. Yeah, it doesn't prove anything, but quite the tell. Yeah. And of course, as always, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. In this case, there has been no trials. And in fact, there's not even right now a probable cause or an affidavit, arrest affidavit that we can read for Shana because she is going to be extradited back to Florida. She was arrested in Washington. And we are still waiting to read that. And Marios,

affidavit is highly redacted for the ongoing investigation. But there's still a lot we know. And yes, as John said, we've been talking to many, many people because Shanna lived an interesting life, a life that many of us are not accustomed to, a life of wealth when it comes to her parents' family. Do you want to talk about that, John, or why? Well, let's, let's, so in that same interview, she says, she says a lot of interesting things in that interview. But let's take the next step in this analysis from that interview.

And by the way, it's amazing. You know, I hope the people that follow us know this. But it's amazing how like with Rex Hewerman, you can take a five or six minute interview and learn so much about someone. And, you know, maybe it's my profession. Maybe I'm, you know, I'm in an interview room with a felon and I have to extract as much information. information is possible in a fairly short amount of time. So I'm kind of hanging on every word and I'm interpreting a lot. So perhaps I'm trained to look for this. But it's really phenomenal how if we really pay attention to what's being said

and how it's said that we can really pick up a lot. Let's go a little bit beyond body language and let's stay with this interview. If you could play the next clip. Yes. daughter sat in the car, strapped into her car seat alone for three minutes before someone came to help. I was shocked. I fell to the floor because I was devastated for what I was going to have to tell my kids. Jared died in that street, leaving behind four children. Again, she gives us one sentence, but what a sentence. Let's unpack this a little bit here.

So the question is, how did she respond to the news that Jared had been executed, essentially? Let's listen to it one more time. How did she respond to the news when she learned that her ex-husband, father to her twins, had been killed? His two-year-old daughter sat in the car, strapped into her car seat alone for three minutes before someone came to help. I was shocked. I fell to the floor because I was devastated for what I was going to have to tell my kids. I fell to the floor because I was devastated about what I was going to tell my kids. First of all, this falling to the floor, that might be a typical reaction to grief, right?

But she doesn't tell us, she doesn't fall to the floor in grief. She falls to the floor, we don't know why, apparently grief. but she falls to the floor, and this is a really critical part because what's omitted here is more important than what she says. She falls to the floor because she's devastated for what she's going to have to tell the kids. So think about that.

She's not devastated in learning about the execution of her ex-husband, who's the father of her children. That doesn't phase her at all. She's concerned more about, what she has to tell the children, right? To me, that's fascinating because it indicates that she really doesn't have much concern for her ex, number one. And number two, it seems like she already knew in that moment. I mean, the interview, of course, is after the fact, but she's describing her initial reaction. I think she's giving us a much more honest response than she wants to. But the

response is essentially, I knew that he was going to be murdered. I knew he was dead. So I really didn't care about him. I just cared about the kids. So she's devastated for having to tell the kids. She's not devastated for losing her ex, who happens to be the father of her kids and someone she loved. She's more concerned about the children. I mean, she should be concerned about the children, but the omission of anything to do with any grief or shock related to her ex is really telling. And people are pointing out, well, we always worry about our children. I think then that the response would be, I fell to the floor because I realized that my children's father wasn't going to be able to love them.

What she's worried about is telling them. You know, I'm sad because I'm going to miss him. He was such a good father. My heart breaks. But it was about how I am going to tell them. I think that's even more interesting. Sherry's also pointing out Sherry Douglas. This is probably the first time she maybe even considered how it's going to affect her children.

If she fell to the floor, I mean, was she even thinking about that before? We'll listen to it one more time. I fell to the floor because I was devastated for what I was going to have to tell my kids. Jared died in that street. There you go. Anything else, babe? No matter what animosity you have towards an ex, it seems to me you'd have some grief for a deceased spouse, especially the way it happened, right?

And there's just, there's nothing. There's just having to tell our kids and no grief, no mourning for the ex-spouse. I mean, let me point out, I don't, you know, I wasn't there, we weren't there. is speculation. You know, I'm clearly interpreting this and reading into it. Maybe she did have grief for him, but she certainly doesn't express it in this interview, right? And she's had months to think about this. She's saying this publicly. You'd expect someone who has slept on this for months, at least from a public relation standpoint, right, to say, I was devastated that I lost my ex-husband, the father of my children, and I was especially concerned for, you know,

in breaking this horrible news to my children. Like, she can't even bring herself to say something positive about her ex-spouse in a public format, right? Like, I mean. That's true. He was such a good father. We didn't always, we didn't always get along, but he was such a good father. He was, you know, such a good man for my children. No. Yeah. Right. And Stella, right.

Stella makes the point that there's no empathy and, you know, that there's no empathy for the kids. It's, yeah, right. It's in the sense that she's worried about telling her kids, almost as if there's an element of guilt, you know, that there's a guilty conscience. Yeah, you know, she knows, presumably. I mean, again, I'm speculating here and she's innocent until proven guilty. but seemingly this type of statement indicates that she knows that there was fall play. She knows exactly what happened or was supposed to happen, which did happen. And so she's not going to experience grief for him.

Right. No grief. And especially even the manner he was killed. Like what a horrendous thing. You know, who could do this to him? How could anybody hurt him? It's not just, oh, a car accident happened and I don't know what. I'm going to do to tell my children.

It's their father was like who would do this to such a such a man. Like I, you know, yeah, I agree. Agree. So it's, it's a really fascinating, you know, if, if, I don't know, somebody with a little more self-awareness who's going to make a public statement about this is going to get a lot more sympathy or empathy if they say this was such a horrible thing, even though I and get along with my ex. I was devastated by his loss. It's hard for me. Right. Like, there's none of that. There's just, I don't seem to care about him. I mean, yeah, there was

animosity in the relationship, but, but I mean, I don't know. It's just, to me, it's, you know, to me, not only does it lack any self-awareness, but it's just absolutely indifferent to her ex-spouse. agree agree so it makes you wonder how she could have gotten here how could we have all gotten here well does it right it raises the question about does she know is she is she showing us right there that she knew and she didn't she didn't have any grief because she knew he was murdered is she feeling guilty because she's going to have to tell the kids and she knows that she murdered him right like i don't know yeah it certainly seems like that's part of it again I don't know that this can be taken to court, but in the only public statement she's ever made,

this is not the kind of statement that's going to show you in the most positive light or show her in the most positive light. So apparently she doesn't seem to know that, but it's interesting. You probably should have fired her PR team, which apparently she had. I don't know. One and only interview she did. Well, I think we need to unpack who Shanna is. again, I mentioned she was a child of wealth. Her parents are the founders of a very well-known MLM,

multi-level marketing company called Stamping Up. Stamping Up is a multimillion dollar company. Shiana was raised in a devout Mormon home. We have heard from distributors of the company as far away as Cambodia, who shared that due to the families, values and beliefs that worldwide, no one was allowed to have alcohol at any stamping up event. This was a religious family and a wealthy family. And Shanna seemed to toe the line. She was the youngest of five girls. And she served in a Mormon or LDS mission to Spain for 18 months,

meaning that she dedicated herself for 18 months to the service of others. You proselyte and you also serve and help people with whatever they need on the mission. And then she came home and she met Jared and married him fairly quickly in the LDS temple. So it was a religious ceremony. And they were raising their twins in their joint religion. So from the outside looking in, it's hard to believe we got here that there was then a divorce, severe animosity, and then the worst part about it, you know, years later, a murder. Right. So, yeah, so the question always, the question we always ask on our show is, how do you get to murder?

Right. Like it's one thing to have a really angry spouse in a custody battle, but it's another altogether to have a spouse that's murdered in this type of fashion, right? So that's what sets us apart. How do you get to murder here? Well, so you mentioned the mission. Let's start with that. We talked to several people that were, that knew her from her mission.

And they all said very similar things. I'm going to read, I'm going to read a list of adjectives that some of the missionaries, some of the sister missionaries that were in Spain with Shana used to describe her. So these are just a few of them. But here's. She would have been Hermana. She would have been Hermanna Gardner on her mission. Sister Gardner.

Okay. And these are what people, yes, Sister Missionaries, fellow. These are LDS Mormon missionaries who knew her the year and a half she was. serving in Spain with her. These are words they use to describe Shiana to us. And this is when, you know, she was just so she was younger, right? She would have been roughly 21-ish, 22 somewhere in there. So they she would have served her mission when she was 21 years old, returned at 22 if she went, um, at the most common time to go back then when she went 15 years ago. Okay. So here's a list of adjectives. I, you know,

know, I would be tempted to make some diagnoses based on these, but I won't. So I'll have, I'll have our listeners, you know, kind of chime in and see what they think. But anyway, so these are some adjectives that multiple sources who knew her from their mission used to describe Shanna Gardner. And here we go. So kooky, nutty, she was off, mentally ill, unstable, moody, attention seeking, controlling. Controlling was one that came up a lot. Controlling seems to be a predominant theme here. They also used the words entitled and spoiled.

So one person told us that, and I think this is interesting and totally relevant to our analysis, but one person told us that whenever Shanna was around, it was what she described as quote, the Shanna show. That Shanna was always on stage. It was her show. Apparently she was very attention seeking.

So on her mission, you didn't just get a mission. You got the Shanna show if you were around. The one of the, our sources told us that there were two elements related to Shanna. Again, this is on her mission, that were well known, that anybody who spent any time with Shanna

knew in addition to knowing about the Shanna show, they knew a couple of things. The first was that she made it clear all the time that she came from a family with lots of money and privilege. So you knew that she was from a wealthy family and she would apparently put that out there all the time, which by the way, I went to school. I went to college as an undergrad with some fairly well-known, some very wealthy people that were classmates. And the only comment I would make about them, so they came from what I would describe as more old money families. I don't know if I can.

So one of the families of the person I knew that went to school with me as an undergrad, one of the last names is Rockefeller. And in the Rockefeller family, this particular member of the family, he drove like a Honda Civic. He dressed very casually. You would never in a million years know that he was a member of the Rockefeller family and that he was sitting on a huge amount of wealth.

Never would have known it. But here, with the Shanna show, you knew it because she would remind you constantly that her family was very wealthy. So I think that's interesting. You can, just because you come from a family with a lot of wealth and privilege, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to flaunt it or that you're going to know about it. That families, I think, like the Rockefellers that have had money for generations,

they're not going to flaunt it. So call it Nouveau-Riche, call it whatever. But certainly, so that was one component of Shana's mission is that she lets you know that her family was quite wealthy. she flaunted it. The other thing that you knew with Shana apparently was this element of her being a little kooky, to use the words of one of our sources, that she tended to do some fairly,

to quote the person, she would engage in sort of negative behaviors. And we can't share the exact behaviors, but it suggested there were mental health issues. So apparently when you were around Shanna, you knew that about the wealth and you knew that she was going to be a little off, that there were some things that were going to be peculiar about her. And as the person put it, it seemed like her family wealth was the only positive quality she had to offer.

That seems a little harsh to me, but I'm just quoting from our source. Yes. Yes. And people are bringing up some other interesting things about. Shana's family. Should we stick with Shana first and then get into her? Well, you know, I think they kind of go hand in hand. So if you want to, if you want to jump into, what are they talking about with the family? They're bringing something up that we have heard, here you go, Jennifer. Thank you, Jennifer. The father has been married multiple times. I know of two

marriages for him, but maybe there's one we don't know about. I know of two marriages. Shiana's mother was the babysitter and had an affair with Shanna's dad and ended up marrying him. That is, that is what we have also learned from our source is that she was actually the 17-year-old babysitter of the eldest daughter, who is now Shelley's oldest daughter, because she was Sterling's daughter, not Shelly's. So Shelly was the babysitter. I have met him. Megan and then Sparks Flew, I guess, with the much younger babysitter, the teen babysitter in this small town of New Harmony. New Harmony, by the way, is a very small town just outside of Cedar City.

I remember I used to report there sometimes, but very rarely because there are not many people there. It's a rural town, and it's actually also become a town where near-Hirks. Hilldale, Utah, Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City are well known for the FLDS communities. Those have been changing rapidly, and many of those people are now going, many of the FLDS members are now moving to other areas,

and New Harmony is one of those areas. So just a little side note, they grew up in rural Utah near the Arizona border. KNAB is another area that the gardeners live, also near this area, beautiful area. So, yeah, so that is how. the family started. That is the family origin, the falling in love origin. What does that mean for the family in general, too? If that's the origin story, yeah, I met your mom while she was

babysitting, your oldest sister. Well, yeah, that's it. Right. It's an interesting story. I think well, I think origin stories are always important because they kind of set the tone potentially for future generations. So when you have an origin story that's based on infidelity, I don't think it's particularly surprising that this theme of infidelity seems to continue to run through this family. Or at least it runs through the family with Shanna. So you, right, you kind of get the situation where the sins of the child or the sins of the mother get replayed with the children. as well to some degree here. And so, and that, which infidelity, by the way,

turns out to be an important part of the story with Shanna and Jared. So we'll get to that in a little bit. But what does it say? Well, you know, Shelley, Shelley Gardner has a blog that's apparently like a combination blog for stamping up and for the family. But the thing that she stresses all the time

and the thing she seems the most concerned about is family. And she says repeatedly on the blog, in many places how important family is and how family is everything. And so it's interesting that you have this origin story where she's breaking up a family. It would be very confusing, right? Well, you're right. I mean, if family's everything, then how would you, why start with disrupting a family that was already intact at that point when she was 17?

Maybe you could argue that she was young and naive and didn't quite understand the implications of what she was doing. But if family's everything and you're stressing the importance of family, then it seems a little hypocritical to me to essentially destroy an intact family when you're 17 to marry the husband at the time, the husband that's not with you. Right. Some people, a couple people are trying to tell me that, no, it was in Canabra,

this happened. And then they moved later to New Harmony so that people know. Canab and New Harmony are both in southern Utah area, not too far from one another, both very rural towns, beautiful areas. I used to report in both areas. So, yeah. So, you know, I think you have this scenario with the foundation of the family or the origin of the family starting with infidelity.

and it certainly seems like that motif continued on, at least with Shana. I don't know. We don't know as much about her siblings, her other siblings in their situations, and maybe they're all perfectly fine. But five daughters, the eldest is Sterling's daughter, and the four younger ones are both Shelly and Sterling's children. Shanna is the very youngest. And she came at an interesting time during this family's history.

So stamping up, some people are mentioning that stamping up was going on when they met. It was not. Stamping up was started with Shelly and her sister in Knav, Utah. No, I think it was started in Boulder City, Nevada. We got Boulder City, Nevada. It was started in Boulder City, Nevada in 1988. And as long as we're talking about this, let's dive into something else that's relevant. So if we're going to try to figure out how does somebody like Shanna from this type of family get potentially to murder?

And again, she's innocent until proven guilty. This becomes a big part of the story. So Shelly and her sister, Vana, start the company in Boulder City, Nevada in a garage in 1988. Shana is born in 1987, less than a year, less than a year before the company was started. So you have a situation where Shelley and Vana are becoming extremely busy. They start this company. They start this company.

I think they're overwhelmed and surprised. by the positive receptions receiving. And it's not hard to imagine that Shanna is not getting that much attention. It's that Shanna is in some ways, may perhaps be neglected. I mean, she would have been so young, she wouldn't have been aware of this, right? It would have been nonverbal. But it's not hard to imagine that there might be some attachment issues that Shelly was spending most of her time or perhaps certainly the majority of her time

with her other children, number one, when she had free time, but also on her business in particular. And so I think it's quite probable that you have this element of neglect potentially that perhaps Shanna feels some sense of abandonment or some sense of rejection that I'm imagining that the reins were handed over to Sterling. And I'm sure Sterling was a good father. And I'm sure he did a competent job. He seems like a nice guy. But having said that, you know, I don't,

I'm not sure he would be a good substitute for the mother. And if she had been attached to the mother for a year, again, she was born in 87. It is really interesting. When I first laid this out, I thought, oh, wow. She was born in 87 and the stamping up company starts in 88. John and I both know how much time it takes to start a business and a company that would have been difficult for a child to have that shift. Right.

She has her mother for less than a year and then she starts this company and it's taking all her time and energy. So there's the shift from being with the mom all the time to going to dad. And perhaps dad filled that role equally as well. But it certainly would, either way, it would have been a change. I don't know. And from what we've heard about Sterling, he's an exceedingly nice guy, but he doesn't apparently seem to be the most emotionally connected guy. In fact, the family doesn't seem to be very emotionally connected.

We'll get into that in a little bit. But I think this transition from. Shelley, and people have described Shelley as not being a particularly emotional either. But either way, this transition from Shelley to Sterling could certainly lead to some potential attachment issues, maybe insecure, you know, there could be some insecure attachment. There may be an anxious type attachment style in childhood, anxious ambivalent type attachment style in childhood. There might be some sense in which I think, and I think this does become a predominant.

theme for Shanna, which is this feeling of potentially of abandonment and rejection. And this is where it starts. I don't think it's difficult to see that these two kind of go hand in hand. What happens if this child then feels abandoned or neglected or something goes wrong? Then what happens? Then a lot of things could happen. and the child's going to have more difficulty finding an identity that makes sense to themselves. They're probably going to struggle to kind of figure out who they are.

And they might struggle some with depression that they're not getting the nurturance they need. They're not necessarily feeling as loved or connected as they might. So they might struggle with some sense of belonging and feelings of insecurity and a lack of safety. I think that this becomes the most evident as this company grows and becomes much more successful. I think what happens over time, and I don't know exactly when, but certainly it's easy to imagine that in the beginning here, that Shana's just, she's becoming secondary to the business. and at some point when the business is just making a ton of money, which apparently it does fairly quickly,

that it's not hard to imagine that in this family, that money becomes the main currency, that money replaces love and emotion as the currency that connects people. Yeah, that's interesting one thing too. The older children lived in this family when they were not millionaires. and now Shanna is raised in the era of money. The family has money. The entire time Shana is growing up.

And so that becomes a bit of a currency to kind of control the family maybe. Or it's love. It's the show of love takes over. I think it seems to me you have a family here that struggles with emotions anyway. They don't do great with emotion. and I think so it's not it would be easy for money to replace a motion as kind of the main currency and you know this wouldn't be atypical this is you know this this would be a quite common theme in many wealthy families by the way so this wouldn't be something would apply exactly to the

gardeners but I think what you said is is completely pertinent in the sense that The dynamic here applies mainly to Shanna in the sense that the other siblings aren't accustomed to this kind of wealth, whereas Shana only knows this love. By the time she's verbal and she's right and she's in kindergarten or some of her earlier grades, this family's already made it. They're already quite successful. So I think at some point, she, you know, she becomes accustomed to the fact that people aren't necessarily going to be there for her. but somehow money can make up for that,

whether that might be babysitters or whatever it is, caretakers, I don't know. Right. Money, her family won't necessarily be there, but money will. Right,

right. And she can use money. The family used money. And we know that there were stipends for things, everything. There was a large allowance. Go ahead, sorry.

Right, yeah. I mean, over time, right, as the wealth continued to accumulate and Shanna became older and all the, all the children became adults, apparently there were the family, which means Shelly, Shelley and Sterling, but probably Shelley in particular because Shelley is the one who eventually buys out the company from Vana and has complete control of it. So Shelly's the primary owner and leader and executive of this company. But they set up a sister.

apparently where the children would earn allowances, I guess, early on, but stipends when they were adults. So they would get money for reaching certain goals or milestones. Like if you got married, you got an X number of dollars. If you had children, you got X number of dollars. If you had right, like when I heard this, my first thought was, holy cow, they're running the family exactly like a business. Like, it's talk about replacing emotion or love with money. I mean, that's literally how you would do it, right? And it almost sounds to me like, it sounds like a performance incentive type system, right?

That they're applying to the family. You know, you do this, we'll give you a car. You do that, we'll give you a check, right? Like, you know, you have to, you wonder if instead of having like family meetings, they sat down and did like performance reviews and shelley was the supervisor or something so that would be like so next time we go on a date laura and just i might have to set up some type of performance review or give you a report card after the the date so just and you and likewise i guess you i'm going to say well then watch out because i've got a list no i know yeah i might i'm not a

performance list I'm writing so we can exchange that. I might have to be careful. You're worthy of allowance-wise in this family. Yeah. You want more books, John? You're going to have to check out my honey-do list. Right. I'm going to have to work towards bonuses, I guess.

But in this family, they did that. You know, there were stipends that. So that's, you know, so, so, I shouldn't laugh about it, but I mean, it's, I don't know, it's just so calculating and so businesslike, you know, there's just, there's just something, I don't know, so cold about it. And, and, you know, one of the people. As Liz says, it was their love language. It was their word language. business oriented love language. Yeah, you know, I agree.

I think that's true, Liz. But I think it's kind of a sad commentary or a sad situation when the love language is a language that involves buying and selling things and not connecting to people you love at an emotional level. And so I think, so that becomes. Yeah, and I like this, VC home. That is an MLM compensation plan. Right there. And so, but so as long as we're on this, let's continue with this because this becomes a big part of the story. This becomes a big part of the story of Jared and Shanna and how they met and how they got married.

So let's stay with this theme. So one of the things we learned, apparently, was we don't have this letter, but there was a letter on the mission. So Shanna had completed her mission, right? And she apparently wrote this letter or maybe several of the missionaries that had left. Do you know the exact story? Yeah, yeah, and I'll explain it too. So, yeah, when you when you serve an LDS mission, there is a mission president, an older gentleman over the mission.

He's married and has a wife, the mission president's wife, mission mom, as she's sometimes known. But this is a couple that are sent to also serve a mission, but they are over the hundreds of missionaries, young missionaries, in an area. And as a Mormon missionary, you get to really know the couple. They check up on everything. They choose who is going to be a companion or a roommate or partner to the other missionary. They put sister missionaries together and they put elders together, meaning the boys, the young boys and the young girls. And they choose who are going to be roommates.

They take complaints when two companions or roommates aren't getting along. They learn when they are doing wonderfully. I mean, they know the ins and outs of all of these young missionaries on the mission and keep tabs on them. And they do oftentimes act parental. They are parental figures because some of these people are young, especially the boys leaving home for the first time. And they take care of the mental health, everything.

So Shanna goes home. and the missionary mom let all of the other sisters, and we've learned that there were only about 22 sisters in the country of Spain serving. So the sister missionaries were a much smaller group. So they were really close-knit. They were really tight. So they wanted to know how all the sisters were doing that had gone home, that they'd all gotten to know.

And the sister, the missionary mother pulled them all aside while they were all together. on a day off and said, well, here's a letter from Shanna. Shana, you know, Hermana Gardner, is sharing with us a terrible date that she has had, a bad date. Let me read to you all the letter, and they all read the letter, and they all laughed about this letter, and Shanna's bad date. And then what happened? Another letter came from Shanna. And this time, she's letting her mission mom know and all of the sister female missionaries know that she's now engaged to her first date that was terrible just weeks later. So before.

And that would be Jared Bright again. Before we get into the, I want to get into the letter a little more, but before we do that, you have in the body cam, I wanted to play the body cam, to kind of reinforce this point we're making about the importance of business and money. And now we're going to take a quick break to hear from a few of our sponsors. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent.

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Her twins are there. That's heartbreaking. She has 12-year-old twins. They're there. Her mother, Shelly Gardner, who we've been discussing, is there. And that's who we know. And then, of course, a bunch of FBI federal. So here we go.

The most interesting part. Oh, sorry. Do you want me to get on your pants? We have orders on your, on the Instagram. So just have grandma help you get into. We can stop there for now. Abby is her 12-year-old daughter. What she's saying to her young daughter as she's arrested,

you have orders on the Instagram, have grandma help you in. That's good. Let's play it again. On your Instagram that is managing for you, you have orders. So just how grandma helped you get into. So I thought it was fascinating, but I couldn't put my finger on it. And then you watched it. And you gave me a mouthful, John.

Yeah. So I wanted to play this before we forget. As long as we're talking about this theme of business and the family being like a business and valuing business and kind of lacking emotions, I can't think of a better moment to show than this. And my mic's on, right? Yes. Okay.

So I'm nodding. So let's think about this moment and that comment. Let's step back and think about this, right? So you have an arrest going on here that means potentially that so. Shanna may never, ever get out of jail or prison again. She may never see the light of day again. She might, but my guess is that there's... Right.

I think there's a good probability here that this may be the only moment in the free world where she sees her children for the last time. Now, I don't know about you. I presume this would be true of you, Lauren, but I don't want to speak for you because I don't want to lose my stipend. But the... Too late. Okay.

I'll have to make it back. It's kidding. You'll get your stipend. Go ahead. So if I'm in this moment, number one, I'm going to be emotional. Like, I'm going to be so emotional. And I'm going to be thinking, I may never see my kids again in this type. You know, yeah, sure, they may come visit in prison.

But I'm never going to see them in this environment in the outside world. ever again. The last thing I'm going to be thinking about is you have orders to fill on Instagram. I'm going to be a mess and I'm going to be saying to my kids, I love you guys. I'm going to miss you so much. I can't, you know, I'm so sorry that this happened, right? Like what would a normal person? I can't, like, you get, you get no emotion from her, not only, not only a total lack of

emotion, but you get this concern about filling orders on Instagram relative to the fact that you have someone with a high probability of spending the rest of their days or maybe even get a death penalty in prison. And this is what she's thinking about. Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine. Yeah, and it wasn't, as we've heard as well, it wasn't a stamp and up order. Right. Her daughter was selling something, but who the hell cares? Right. Who cares? In the grand scheme of things,

she is never, there's a high probability she will never see her kids in that type of environment ever again. And this is what she says. I mean, it's mind boggling. So again, this, I think this reinforces this idea of a family culture that's very focused on business. They're focused on money. They're focused on power, right? They're not focused on connection and emotions and attachment and all the things that might go into making a healthier family culture or probably a healthier human being too. So this is a good example of it. So let's go back

to the, let's go back to the story that we were starting to talk about. And I'll explain how that's relevant. But so actually the, the letter, that Shanna wrote for the mission companions was, it was called the worst first date ever. And the worst first date ever, as Shanna described it back when she was on her mission, was with Jared. Yeah, that's what she wrote.

And the reason she considered it to be the worst first date ever was because essentially, just to summarize it quickly, because Jared was not into her. Jared did not apparently Jared wasn't feeling it he wasn't particularly attracted to her it didn't look good for Shanna

in terms of getting another date and but so this is where this gets interesting so Jared is on the verge of walking away and Shana becomes aggressive and starts pursuing him and she starts showering him with gifts she starts engaging

in all the things that expect someone with the money to do that wants to apparently woo you over with or impress you with your wealth. She shows up in nice cars like Porsche's. She's taking them on trips with the family or they're going on these expensive junkets, which by the way, continue. This family goes on vacation all the time. It actually reminds me a lot of like the Cox family, by the way. But we're not going to get into that.

But she's whining and dining. She's whining and dining him. And so as one of our sources put it, Jared felt like he won the lottery. He didn't win love. And he was never really into her, but he won the lottery. And so this is how somebody like Shanna can use her wealth and her family influence to, and it worked, sadly, but to attract somebody like Jared and to get him to marry her. Now, unfortunately, there's a real downside to this type of romance

because this type of romance lacks any type of emotional connection or emotional foundation. And so when they got married, the relationship started having problems. They had twins, and that was a really, obviously, that was a wonderful element of this marriage, or something that came out of this marriage. But because there was really no foundation and because Jared really wasn't into her,

ironically, what happened was that Shana began having an affair. Sheena... I want to also clarify some things with Jared. Jared wasn't purely marrying her for the money. He was also in a very vulnerable situation. Jared was young. Jerry didn't have even his schooling done.

Jared was, by all accounts, he had just gotten back from a mission himself. He had had to have left because of some health issues a little bit early, which I assume that probably cost him shame. He wasn't at the top of his game. I've also heard from another source that this is not the first time Shannon was aggressive and obsessive with men, that there was another young man who the entire family, it was in a family affair to get people married. Shelley got involved, Sterling got involved, I mean, the sisters got involved to get somebody

to marry in this family. Remember, there's stipends, too, allegedly. Right. Significant stipends for marriage. Yeah, yeah. So there was one gentleman who discusses being wooed by the whole family, like courted almost like by the entire family that they all wanted him to marry shana and he feels like it was a relief he got away because there was pressure involved it's not just like oh i've won the lottery

piece out here's a very very young almost like a child he was so young vulnerable and not just an aggressive female but a whole family sort of backing that up taking him on vacations letting him know he's loved letting him know he's part of the family so i guess i just want to lay the stage here This wasn't like a someone going, oh, I've got a sugar mom and that's what I'm looking for. She was a very vulnerable young guy who had never really had a really long-term relationship before. They never even lived together until they got married because it was a religious wedding. Go ahead. I just really wanted to get that up.

Thanks for clarifying that because, right, he wasn't using her in any sense. I think he was young, he was vulnerable, he was confused. he had never experienced this type of wealth or lifestyle he just right it was he was as somebody pointed out in the chat there was love bombing going on she was telling him repeatedly how much she loved him how she couldn't live without him right he was very confused by all this correct and so and so it i think in these types of situations oftentimes and also i should point out that the people pointed out that we've heard that that Jared was

a really nice, kind of overly compliant guy. He was the type of guy that had a hard time saying no. And so I think when you're bombarded with this type of aggression, right, and this type of love bombing, if that's the term we're going to use,

this type of persistently aggressive pursuit of a romantic relationship, it's hard. Sometimes it can be hard to say no. So I think this whole scenario was extremely overwhelming to Jared. Correct. So yes, this was not a case of a 45-year-old male saying, let me jump on the, you know, let me jump on the wagon here and use this woman. That was not the case at all. This was somebody who was very young, somewhat naive, probably very vulnerable. He was definitely a bit of a people-pleaser. I think he just didn't

see a way out, to be honest. I also want to say when you're 20, you don't ever know what you're doing. You're learning life lessons. When you have an aggressive person and they're Mormon and your Mormon and the families are like, this is good. I mean, think shiny, happy people. And then you're wanting to please. Right.

Exactly. You live and learn. So it gets married and this is where, I think this is where the story becomes, this is where the story starts turning a little bit tragic, is that Shana was never really interested in him to begin with. I think she didn't want to be rejected by him. She couldn't believe that he wasn't into her in the way that she anticipated.

And so usually in these types of situations, especially if there's someone with the potential personality disorder, which if we go back to the list I read of adjectives, my guess is that you're probably talking about some kind of personality disorder, at least ballpark, probably some of the cluster B personality disorders like narcissism or borderline personality disorder, one of those. I'm not going to try to diagnose here because I don't know enough, but my guess is that you're looking at, you're probably looking at something like a personality disorder, if not a personality disorder. And in those types of cases,

this becomes a game in the sense that if someone is rejecting, so in this case, if Jared is rejecting her and she can't tolerate it, because she's, if we go back to the fear of abandonment as a child and those attachment issues, she needs to win. So she wins, she marries him, now she's getting bored. Now she's not finding him interesting. So in other words, it explains this first date phenomenon. It was the worst day ever because he wasn't into.

to her. Yeah. But that, as Jesse says, the rejection is exactly what fueled her. Exactly. And she made the decision, I'm going to get him. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Thank you.

Right. It's the pain and the wound of being rejected as a child that Shana, Shana is trying to cover up. She's trying to, right, that's what she's compensating for with Jared. But the way that's going to play out is not in a healthy man. So when she has the upper hand, she apparently she joins a gym, a CrossFit gym. She gets really into it. She, because she convinces Jared that, or I don't know if she convinces him.

She wants to lose the baby weight or, you know. Yeah, she wants to lose some baby weight. Yeah, they've both gained some weight in this marriage happens, right, babe? Let's try some type-ins and see if we can figure that out. But yeah. Yeah, for sure. Right. And yeah, let's not get into that.

COVID doesn't help either. But this was pre-COVID. So I'm going to blame it on COVID for me personally. But anyway. Three years ago. But yeah. Yeah, some things are hard to change. Okay.

But anyway, the gains of weight. She wants to get fit. She joins a gym. She wants to lose some weight. She meets a trainer. She's smitten with this guy, apparently thinks she falls madly in love with them. So now that she's,

sees this as an opportunity to reject Jared, which she does. She's the one who files for divorce. She tells him she's leaving him. And now, by the way, by her rejecting Jared, she's come full circle. She's now she's not being the one that's rejected. She's doing the rejection. And so she's got the upper hand now, right? In her mind's eye, she's completed this cycle.

She's won this little game or this round. never mind that she's got twins and she's really hurt Jared. Right. But this is how it plays out. And now that she has this trainer, she feels like she has the security blanket of just switching from Jared to the trainer. And unfortunately, almost immediately after the divorce,

she tries to get serious with the trainer. And the trainer leaves her. So she just went from the up. upper hand to the bottom of the barrel. Right. So unfortunately, here she is rejected again. And oh yes, the story gets worse because Jared, this is when Jared meets Kirsten. And Kirsten turns out to be a really wonderful human being.

And they have from what we understand from talking to people and looking at the Instagram accounts, they have what looks like a really storybook type marriage and relationship. Jared finds love again. And not again. Jared actually tells this woman, I don't know if I've ever had love before. I imagine Jared didn't feel too great after this marriage either. I don't know what it was like,

but she cheats on him. She leaves him. He has two children. Bye bye to that's, you know, that the wealthy trips and jet setting and here he is, I'm sure young, wondering if he's ever going to find love again. I just assume, I mean, divorces are devastating, but, but he does. He finds love and she gets kicked to the curb by this personal trainer. He's like, yeah, I'm good. I'm good. You know, it was a fun little fling, but, but I've moved on, Shana.

I've got, I've got other fish to not, not only moved on, but he's found a lot of happy. happiness. Yes. And there's another component. Started a whole new family. There's another component to this, which is really critical. So you have, so Shannon's being rejected by this trainer. So here she's back to being rejected, which is exactly what she wanted to avoid. And she's noticing that not only is Jared happy, but the contrast with Kirsten is enormous in the sense that I think she senses like everything about Kirsten. And I mean, I don't know Kirsten, but just from looking at her talk and like kind of just assessing her body language and and how she comes across and just some of her actions

and behaviors and the Bexley Box foundation. This is someone I think that Shanna's senses is much more able. She's much more confident. She's much more. She's much more confident. She's much more expressive with her emotions. She's a good communicator. In many ways, she's precisely what Shana is not. And so you have not only someone who's a real good, excellent fit with Jared and who's a part of a very happy marriage, but you have someone who by contrast, I think, in many ways, has almost all the qualities or many of the qualities that Shams. Anna envies and wants. And so you have, now you have these two prongs of rejection by the personal trainer

and Jared in his new life, which is making her envious. And this is all going to be a set up for a really nasty custody battle. Because honestly, there's no reason for this custody battle. Except for, there's one reason for the custody battle. And that is that Shanna wants to create waves. and she wants to really harm Jared. And she can do it because of her wealth and the support from her parents. She couldn't do this, by the way, if her parents weren't supporting her.

So the financial support from her parents is essentially funding seven years of the most contentious, hateful custody battle that doesn't need to occur, but does. So the most contentious custody battle you could ever imagine. For no reason, other than she wants to undermine. Jared's happiness, his marriage, stability. She probably really has some strong dislike for Kirsten, right? She's been rejected. She finds, she ends up with Mario, which is a part of the story too.

But anyway, I think... Yeah, control. Can we even sum it up to control? She's jealous. She's envious. She's feeling rejected. And the custody battle is about control. This is a way she can still control him and the situation.

Right, exactly. That she's just not going to let go and she wants to hurt him. So I think, so these would be the essential ingredients that would eventually, assuming that she did mastermind this murder plot, these would be the ingredients that are now starting to fall in place that are going to lead to murder. Yes. So I think if the question is, how do you get to murder now, I think we're starting to get pretty close. If you throw in the fact that after she's rejected by the trainer, she finds Mario, she marries him.

Mario is, to quote the arrest affidavit, he is, quote, a maintenance man, unquote, who works at the CrossFit gym. She meets him, and I guess they fall in love. They fall in love, they get married. But there's a story about Mario. So if you want to know a little bit about Mario, I think this story is all we really need to know. And the story is that apparently in Mario's neighborhood,

there's a woman, one of his neighbors, that feeds stray cats. She has a real soft spot for stray cats. And she goes out and feeds them. And for whatever reasons, this really upsets Mario. He's incensed by this. He can't believe that one of his neighbors is supporting straight cats and feeding them and being kind of stray cats for whatever reasons. So Mario goes out with his pit bull.

Surprise, surprise, Mario has several pit bulls, by the way. But Mario goes out with his pit bulls, and he tries to intimidate the neighbor to not feed the cats. and he apparently there were some threatening comments made about the pit bull and the neighbor. I don't know exactly what. We don't have that police report, but the neighbor did complain, the neighbor did file a police report.

So there is a little bit of a, there are some criminal complaints on Mario. He has some fairly minor infractions like this. Of course, Mario described it as just going out, taking his dog for a walk. But the neighbor clearly, didn't see it that way. But the point is that Mario is someone with some history of aggression, some history of intimidating other people. I don't think that, I don't think, so her landing,

ending up with someone like Mario, I don't think it would take much to buy his loyalty with her type of wealth and her need for control. I think Mario is someone she could probably manipulate fairly easily. So I think Mario seems like kind of an easy mark for her. I don't know if she's finding him to help instigate these crimes. That's not clear. It doesn't seem like that was her initial intent here. I think it may have evolved into that.

But it's not hard to see this guy, Mario, is kind of a dupe who, you know, ends up with the rich girl for all the. the wrong reasons and and we know that she's the aggressive one you know she oftentimes is the aggressor the pursuer the you know look what i can do for you so it happens all over again with mario a lot of people are mentioning um some changes in shana as well um well of course there's nothing wrong with getting tattoos or or body piercings that's not necessarily the the thing that people are speculating over. It's the changes.

She went from a very conservative, Mormon, religious, you know, LDS missionary to then the moment she divorces, Jared, to getting an entire sleeve tattoo, to genital piercings that we have confirmed those rumors. and just a lot of unique changes when it comes to the way she was raised and acted prior to her divorce. What's that about? Well, I think, yeah, so I think she's acting out. I think she's rejecting a lot of her family culture. I think she's clearly rejecting the church. I think probably to a large degree

she's felt really repressed by her family culture and so I think by rejecting Jared she's sort of rejecting her Mormon past to a large degree and maybe she feels some degree of freedom I don't know anything about this trainer she's having an affair with or did have an affair with but perhaps he's not LDS like Mario he's not LDS

perhaps he's a little bit more on the wild side and she wants him to relate to that and her, right? There could be a lot of reasons why she's doing this. But I think the fundamental reason is she's really rebelling against her family and the church. And so, of course, it's ironic that now her family is swooping in to really help her at all costs. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Right. Yeah, it's just an interesting part of the story as well. well to see that shift a late rebellion of sorts yeah and it's it's possible to imagine that if there is some type of personality disorder that perhaps she kept an under wraps to some degree previously knowing that the that there was this controlling element of her family culture that she wouldn't get these stipends if she acted out right like there she was getting a lot of rewards from for not acting out we're not acting up for playing by the rules, playing by the expectations. And one thing we know about Shelley is Shelley was a very rule-based leader. Shelly was very concerned with, well, for

example, you mentioned this, that they have a strict rule in stamping up, that if you attend a stamping up conference, which all MLNs have these, you know, crazy, right, leadership conferences every year, cruises, in the case of stamping up, that they weren't allowed to have any alcohol whatsoever at any of their conferences or on any of these cruises in accord with kind of Mormon, right? And yes, people brought alcohol. Someone mentioned that, but, you know, they weren't supposed to have it. They weren't supposed to have it.

Yeah. Shame on those, yeah. Yeah, right. Shame on those alcohol imbiving heathens. But anyway, the. I think that there were a lot of reasons why if there were serious mental health issues or a personality disorder, that she would keep it under wraps until she felt some freedom to kind of let go. And I think by her rejecting Jared and kind of getting back at him for not being into her initially, I think maybe she feels this freedom. My guess is this trainer she's with is probably more inclined.

to support the lifestyle that she moves towards. Yes. Right. Whatever she wants to do. Right. The trainer is probably more of an ideal in terms of being a little wilder. I mean, I don't know. Mario, not the trainer.

No, the trainer. Oh, the trainer. The trainer would have been in the picture around the time she started doing this stuff. Got it. I see what you're saying. Not Mario. Mario maybe to some degree. Mario comes later.

So Mario, right. So I think they, get she gets married to Mario on 2018. The trainer's back 2014-15. So, but it was 2014-15, 2015 in particular when she just starts really acting out and going off the deep end. So, Liz, no stamping up for you. I'm just going to say that. She says, I'm LDS and enjoy, enjoying a glass of one watching this wonderful live show. Just kidding, Liz. Well, at the very least, no crews, Liz. If you, joint stamping up, you do not go on the cruise because you won't have any alcohol, I promise.

But unless you sneak it in. So, yeah. So I think that's an interesting component in the sense that there could very well be some type of personality disorder that's kept under wraps. And then she kind of unleashes the beast and becomes more of who she wants to be. she becomes a little more, you know, a little wilder, a little more off the chain. And which, by the way, I mean, if I had to throw, I'm not diagnosing here, but there do seem to be kind of some borderline-ish type qualities going on here. I sense, I kept telling John, I was pointing out some similarities with some other friends of mine.

and I have one dear friend who does have borderline, and I love her. And I was saying there are similarities here. And I see some, I see some characteristics of borderline personality. There you go, babe. Yeah. I said, what do you think of that? I'll tell you if you give me a stipend. Done.

The, just, yeah, the instability. So in the original adjectives that I mentioned about that she's unstable and moody and attention seeking and controlling and those all would be kind of consistent. They could be consistent with narcissism, but they might also be consistent with borderline personality disorder, kind of the acting out, the tattoos, the genital piercing. Like, you know, like that's pretty extreme. So when I think of borderline personality disorder, I think of those types of extreme. We talked about that a lot, potentially with like Lori Valo DeBelle. Like she kind of exhibits some similarities here, I think, to Shana Gardner. The important element of the acting out, though, is I think that type of behavior,

I think it's the instability that's important in terms of, again, we're trying to figure out how someone like this can get to murder. It's the instability. And oftentimes with borderline personality disorder, and again, I'm not saying she has that, but if she did, a lot of, one component of borderline personality disorder is rage. They tend to have a lot of anger and a lot of rage, especially when they don't get their way.

And she wasn't getting her way with the custody battles. Jared was putting up a fight. Jared obviously wanted his twins to remain in his life in some way. And so she wasn't, she was used to control, she was used to getting her way, She was used to bind people's loyalty and love. It wasn't working. So I think the rejection, the jealousy of Jared's new life and wife and lifestyle,

and maybe this component of rage about being thwarted in her custody battle, even with all the money in the world, she still, she was dragging it out and really harming him, but in the end she wasn't victorious. So I think you probably have, you have those components of jealousy, anger and rage, and rejection that really kind of set the wheels in motion for this murder plot. And that's how we got there. So that's kind of where I

would land. And here we are. Yeah. There's some interesting things. I want to continue exploring it later. You know, for next time maybe, the infidelity in this family. is interesting to me that Shelley's father was married multiple times. Lynn Goodfellow, he just actually recently passed away a businessman from Boulder City, Nevada. He

married many, many times. And then Sterling had an affair, of course. Shana has an affair. There are many things I want to discuss further on this. case that I find interesting and I think that we're just actually we have talked to several people now. Thank you to those who have reached out. But I think that we hope to talk to many more. We hope to continue following this case. I still have many questions. And, you know, we don't even,

again, we don't even have a probable cause yet or an arrest affidavit. Every state calls, calls these things differently. So that's why, you know, I've reported in different states and they all have a different, we don't even have the records explaining the evidence they have. So there's a lot more to come in this case

and it is a heartbreaking, heartbreaking case. Children, some children who have lost their father, other children who have lost both parents. We see Shelly Garvey. the mother, the founder of stamping up crying in the body cam footage. A few people pointed out, I want to say this, that, you know, perhaps Shanna was stoic

for her children. I want to just delve back to that because I imagine some people would feel like she was letting her kids down and she realized that and she was trying to maintain some normalcy. But even then, you can say stoic and stay, I love you. Let me comment on that. Let me rebut that quickly for a minute. Can I share a little bit more then? I would love for you to rebut that.

I received a text from a friend who suffered an arrest in front of her children. And I'm just going to read a brief section of this friend of mine, her text. When she first watched the arrest, she sobbed. It brought back horrific memories. I was hysterical, emotional. Well, that's already a difference right there. She was hysterical emotional as the cops were there to take me away with two young children by my side. I was in a desperate attempt to give them normalcy.

And I was desperately trying to help to calm them while also needing them to know that we respect law enforcement. Your mind is numb. You shut down. But the mother in you kicks in to protect your kids. You want to protect them at all cost. What would you like to say to that? Yeah. I mean, first off, she already mentioned she's emotional.

Well, this gets into a larger issue about family culture. So let's pick up on all these themes. So in the one interview that Shana does, there's a moment near the beginning where she cries. And she feels bad about it. And she says to the interviewer, if you go back and watch that interview with the news station, she actually apologizes for crying. So that suggests that she's not comfortable with it. for someone who's reasonably healthy,

they should be able to cry on camera and not feel badly about it, especially when they're talking about something so emotional, that something as emotional as having a spouse or an ex-spouse executed, tears should be fine. But she starts crying and she says, sorry, as if it's not okay. So clearly, this is someone who's not comfortable with those tears. And it doesn't even have to be tears. It could just be sadness or grief or comfortable with difficult emotions.

Being vulnerable. Being vulnerable. Grieving. But that gets to a bigger issue about this family and this family culture. So which has to do with what I would call a – So I think the family dynamic here is amashed, meaning that an amashed family is a family that essentially – where all the members kind of see each other as one. There's kind of a fused identity.

There's a closeness in terms of the family kind of closing ranks together and speaking for each other and kind of trying to be the same person. So that would be a meshed. But there's another side. What's interesting in this family is it's in a meshed family, but it's also a family that's disengaged. And when I say disengaged, I mean disconnected emotion. That's an interesting dynamic because a lot of times a mesh families will be in many ways overly connected emotionally.

But that's not true here. So what's interesting about that is that to be ameshed but disengaged means that you're trying to present the appearance of closeness, but without any connection, without any emotional connection. So again, getting back to this idea of this being a family that's more about money than emotion, it's similar to that. that the goal here for the Gardner family is to create the appearance of a perfect family with no conflict or turmoil. In fact, Shelly in her blog, I don't remember, you showed it to me.

I don't remember, I don't have the date on this, but Shelly and her blog made a statement where she said something like, this is a horrible thing. Please respect our privacy. And I think she said something to the effect of, we'd ask you to respect our privacy. and not discuss this or something, something like that, as if like, as if she can tell the public

to basically not say anything negative or, right, like, I mean, right, that's a big ask. But I certainly get respecting the privacy, but like asking for people not to discuss it and kind of shut things down, that's exactly what this family is. This is a family that they don't want that connection. They don't want people to look too deeply. They don't want to be embarrassed. They want to present this facade of being the perfect family. And yes, somebody just said Murdoch.

Right, exactly. Exactly like the Coxes and the Murdoch. Just kidding. He says, right, Coxes, Murdox. Right. Right. If you want to, right, exactly. There's a lot of commonality that if you want to, again,

we're trying to figure out how you can create criminals. These types of cultures do it. So these are very repressive cultures in the sense that they're more concerned about the way the family looks than they are about the emotional connections or the attachments between the family members. And so I think you have that here. In terms of why Shana is not comfortable with crying or emotion, it's because of the family culture. We were told a story about how, on a. A lot of, like with stamping up. So interestingly enough, the stamping up, the culture of that organization is almost exactly similar to the culture of the Gardner family in the sense that open communication and expressions of emotions, honest emotions, is not valued.

What the person told us was that when things get difficult in stamping up or when there's different, there's management issues that need to be discussed, what they do is they have a pizza. party or they go on a cruise, right? Or they go on a vacation. And so rather than, rather than diving into what's really going on and having an honest discussion about, you know, that probably involves an emotional level of emotions they're not comfortable with, you know, they would rather take a trip or have a pizza party and pretend that everything's fine. Right. So. Lemisa is stating there is still, no mention of a murdered son-in-law of her grandkids on the blog like hello and kcel continued that with correct she calls on her blog an unexpected death like talk about avoiding the situation and yes they have made some statements now discussing supporting shana but still not saying you know

what's going on that gets back to the type of family culture i'm talking about that it would be too painful and too reality-based or too real to acknowledge that perhaps her youngest daughter was involved in a plot to murder her ex-husband. That is not something that perpetuates this ideal of the perfect family. And the Gardner family is the perfect family. They have the perfect marriage. They have perfect kids. Right.

And so this shatters all of that, obviously. Right. And I think people want vulnerable too. I think people might be feeling a little bit more warm towards them that they were a bit more vulnerable in their statements and shared empathy towards Jared and his family. Yeah. And it was, yeah, the Curtin, McConkey law firm in Salt Lake provided the following statement. And I can't see the rest of it, darn it. But thank you, Melanie, for posting it there. But yes, there is a statement that they made. And I think, you know, some of this has to do with, we talked about the affair when Shelley was 17. And for those who have followed us for a while, we talked about the importance of secrets in the Murdoch case and how secrets can get passed on through generations and how they can really impact families. And I think, you know, in a way, you have something like that here in the sense that there's the secret of, of, right, there's the secret of infidelity that's starting this family. Right.

And it goes back generations, as you point out. Lynn Goodfellow. Lynn Goodfellow. So you have a lot of secrets being passed along here and families that are trying to deny those secrets and bury those secrets and buried secrets, you know, like it or not, buried secrets are hard to keep buried. As you always say, you always say it, John, you are a sane or as sick as the secrets you keep. Right. This is really one of the lessons here is, you know, it doesn't pay to repress emotion and to keep secrets and to keep things hidden.

And, you know, it's always a good idea to try to express things as openly and honestly and transparently as we can. And so I think, you know, in a way, this is a family that begins with a big secret and now potentially and sadly and tragically it could end. with a really bitter secret of a murder plot. And that's really unfortunate. It is. This, Jared's widow, the mother to the two children, the youngest, they had a six-month-old. She was home with her six-month-old waiting for Jared

and their two-year-old girl, Bexley, to arrive home, wondering where they were for hours. when she got a call from the police that she needed to come in, that Bexley was okay, but she needed to come to the station. If there's one beautiful thing that's come out of this, it's a nonprofit that the Bridegan family has started. Is this a good time to share this, John? Is there anything else to say?

And if any of you feel moved to help Kirsten Bridegan, the widow, in her quest. I think there is one beautiful thing that is coming out of this case and we want to share that with you now with a little video that was posted on the Justice

for Jared B. Instagram page. It's also another place you can go and learn more about this case and learn more about Jared. The Instagram page again is Justice for Jared B and then the Facebook page is justice for Jared B.

If you want to go there as well. So if anybody feels inclined to support Bexley's boxes, they've actually now have several across the country. We are going to continue to follow this case. Our hearts and minds have been drawn to it. We're so thankful for the people who have reached out to help us prepare. And if anybody has any additional information, please write us at hidden true crime info at gmail.com. Thank you again, as always, for your support. liking this video, subscribing to us, or heading over to our Patreon account, patreon.com

slash hit into crime, also helps John and I continue our work. So thank you so much in the bottom of our hearts for all of your support. And thank you, everyone, for being here tonight. Dr. Babe. Yep, thanks, everyone. Thanks, gems. We will continue. And we're just grateful you could join us. Thank you. And you'll be getting a stipend later. All right. Good night, guys. Good night. Hello, Hidden Jems. It's Lauren with Hidden a True Crime podcast. As a TV reporter, I learned the art of visual storytelling. So if you're like me, you enjoy listening, but also viewing. You can actually head to our YouTube channel, Hidden True Crime, to watch these interviews. Hit the subscribe button for surprise lives and breaking news. And for a

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