Let's Go To Court! - 82: Holding your wee for a Wii & the Disappearance of a Troubled Teen

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

In the winter of 2007, the Nintendo Wii reigned supreme. It was cool, new, and impossible to get ahold of. So when the California radio station KDND-FM 107.9 The End announced their “hold your wee for a Wii” contest, 28-year-old mother of three Jennifer Strange signed up. She and 17 other participants went to the radio station, where they were given water every ten minutes for nearly three hours. As the contest went on, the participants ached with discomfort. It was entertaining radio. But concerned listeners called the station. They warned the DJs that the contest was dangerous. Hadn’t they heard of water intoxication? One DJ said that he had, but he wasn’t worried. The participants had all signed releases. No matter what happened, the station couldn’t be held liable.  Then Brandi tells us one of her strangest stories yet. It’s hard to know what’s true about Treva Throneberry’s complicated life, but one thing is for certain — she was a very troubled girl. When she was in high school, Treva sought the help of police. She told them that her father had raped her at gunpoint, and that when she’d tried to tell her mom, she’d just laughed. Treva’s three sisters doubted her story, but they didn’t doubt that she’d been raped. They’d all been sexually abused by an uncle. Surely the predatory uncle had gone after Treva, too. But before anyone could get to the truth, Treva vanished.  And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases. In this episode, Kristin pulled from: “Woman dies after being in water-drinking contest,” Associated Press “Jury rules against radio station after water-drinking contest kills California mom,” by Suzan Clarke and Rich McHugh for Good Morning America “Radio station behind ‘hold your wee for a Wii’ promotion shuts down,” by Joon Chun for Chief Marketer.com “Wii death case resolved,” by Patrick Kolan for IGN “Trial over woman’s death in radio station contest to begin today,” by Andy Furillo for McClatchy-Tribune “Jennifer Strange case finds end, Entercom forfeits license,” by Dan Morain for the Sacramento Bee “No charges in radio contest death,” by Henry Lee for the San Francisco Chronicle “Sue from Fiddletown took a stand in the public interest,” by Dan Morain for the Sacramento Bee In this episode, Brandi pulled from: “The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared” by Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly “Treva Throneberry” by Rachael Bell, The Crime Library “Forever Young” by Emily White, The New York Times “Treva or Brianna” by Katia Dunn, Portland Mercury “Treva Throneberry” wikipedia.org

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A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. One semester of law school. One semester of criminal justice. Two experts. I'm Kristen Caruso. I'm Brandi Egan. Let's go to court. On this episode, I'll talk about holding your wee for a wee.

Ooh. And I'll be talking about the disappearance of a troubled teen. What is up with you and disappearances of teenagers? I'm on a little, uh... You get on these kicks. A little kick. I'm on a little kick. This is unlike any disappearance I've talked about before, though. Hmm. In what way? You'll just have to wait.

But first, we have a very important announcement. Oh my gosh, do we have an important announcement? Okay, well, just tone it down. No, it's so exciting. DP is coming back. Return of the DP. Once again. Daryl Pitts, my dear father.

Oh gosh, not on this episode, guys. Please don't get too excited. We're announcing that he's coming back on a future episode. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, if he was here, don't you think he would have spoken up by now? Oh, 100%. No, he's coming back next week. Being DP'd just once was just...

You need a DP a second time. People have been asking for it left and right there's been no end to the requests that we've received for dps anyway if you are a member of our patreon you already know that this is happening because we had you vote on our topic on our patreon you got to vote between either the theme of spoiled kids or bad dads we are currently tallying things up right now people people people uh stay tuned number machine stay tuned until next week to figure out that's right but if you're thinking oh my gosh i missed out on voting oh how did i let this happen You don't have to let this happen again. You can join our Patreon today at the Appellate District or Supreme Court. I did that terribly.

Well, you did it out of order. I tried to rush it and I'm very sorry. Well, you got some place to be. No, I'm just very excited. So to be able to vote on future episode topics like this, join our Patreon at patreon.com slash

lgtcpodcast. You get all sorts of other cool stuff. Hang out in the Discord with us, get a sticker at the Supreme Court level, get inducted, and of course, bonus episodes. That's right. Bonus episodes for days, folks. Mostly like two days so far.

If you do them one at a time. There is no end to the bonus episodes. Unless you listen to both of them and then they end. And then you gotta wait another month. I'm sorry. That's right. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Peanut. Oh, God. Peanut. Oh, look how in love they are you guys are so cute you guys what we're looking at right now is like when norman and i brady bunched our families which is like i had a dog he had a cat named boo um man at first things were not great because Peanut was super excited to... Oh, God. Now Peanut... I can't even talk. Lick her butthole over there? Well, always excited to lick her butthole.

But was super excited about Boo. Boo hated Peanut. But now that they're both senior citizens, they can rub all on up on each other. I think it's funny that Boo's a senior citizen because she looks like a kitten with her giant eyes. You know, she uses a lot of retin-A. It's on a nightly serum. I think that's the trick. Boo, what are your beauty tips?

All right. Shall we get started? You're going to talk about wee-wee. Wee for wee. Yes. Wee-wees. You have the advantage of seeing how this is written. How's that hot coffee?

How dare you bring it up? Kristen wanted iced coffee and her freezer makes no ice currently. You guys, by the end of this week, life will be somewhat back to normal. Oh my gosh. You only have one house. We're closing on the old house, thank God. We did a bunch of moving yesterday, the day before, a little bit today.

I forgot that we didn't have the water line hooked up to the fridge. I thought I had ice. Now I've just got brewed iced coffee that is hot like some hooligan. Anyway, let's talk about something let's talk about wheeze okay this was suggested by sachin sachin on the discord s-c-h-t-e-n session oh that's so much better really is that i that how it's... I don't know. That's how I would pronounce it. Okay, well, thank you. It was a Friday in 2007, and 28-year-old Jennifer Strange was excited.

She had three kids, and she wanted to get them the hottest new gaming system. The Nintendo Wii! Do you remember when this thing came out? Oh, yeah, you couldn't find them anywhere. Oh, my God. It was like the Tickle Me Elmo. Yes. I feel like a lot of people are too young for that, but just trust us.

It was like the... It was the weirdest thing. Everybody wanted this Elmo doll that laughed when you tickled it. Hatchimals. It was like Hatchimals two years ago. That Elmo guy turned out to be a... Oh, yeah. That child molester guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh. Okay, anyway, moving on from the chillmo. That's when you don't have a lot of time.

You shorten it. The chillmo. Yeah. I just... It was like specifically when you're talking about a child molesting Elmo.

That is hilarious. No, I just said chillmo because I'm a lady on the run. You know, I'm like every lead in every romantic comedy. It's like, I don't have time for this. Chillmo. you know i'm like every lead in every romantic comedy who's like i don't have time for this chill mo oh my god it makes so much more sense as child molesting so did you have the nintendo wii yeah back in the oh i'm sorry i didn't didn't realize you were so cool may surprise you i also had a wii i was dating a little man named the gaming historian not at this time but you know later anyway it's not important okay so you weren't dating him when the we came out no i think we started dating in like 2008 spring of 2008 um if you would pay attention uh 2006

holiday season 06. Excuse me. Yeah. I only interrupted myself like 12 times. Who knows how much we'll cut, but it's been like 13 minutes since I said the date. Okay, so it was super popular. Also, crazy pricey. Really hard to get.

So when Jennifer heard about a radio station contest called Hold Your We for a We, she was like, all right, I'm all in. The contest was held by a California radio station called KDND-FM 107.9. The end. It was pretty simple. They wanted to know how long you would hold your Wii for a Wii. Contestants would be given a lot of water and, you know, obviously whoever could hold it the longest got the Nintendo Wii. Jennifer was one of 18 people who participated in the morning raves contest. raves contest they started at 6 20 a.m and after that like every 10 minutes they'd get eight ounces of water to drink oh my gosh yeah so it's like it's like the little ones i mean that's a cup of water uh yeah no it's it's crazy every 10 minutes that's very frequent so

they're doing this thing on the air the djs are laughing they're having the contestants check in and talk about how difficult the contest is i mean i would not last a second no you pee so much i'm always peeing and it was pretty entertaining radio it was kind of like a weird, shocking contest. But not everyone was entertained. Why are you looking like that? I'm wondering how someone could cheat. Oh. Someone could wear a diaper. Someone could wear a catheter.

Oh, shit. Surely they... It seems like it would be an easy contest to cheat because you're at a radio station. They can't do a full body search. No, shit. Surely they... Seems like it would be an easy contest to cheat because you're at a radio station. They can't do a full body search. No, no, especially for a catheter. Yeah. Because couldn't you just tape something inside your... Yes.

Oh, God. So not everyone's entertained. Some people called in and they said, hey, you guys might not realize this, but what you're asking people to do is actually super dangerous. Really? I was surprised by this, too. So, first of all, did you know that there's, like, a limit to how much water you should be drinking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can, yeah, I've heard of this.

Okay. Like, I don't know, overhydration, water poisoning, something like that. Okay. See, I really didn of this. Okay. Like, overhydration, water poisoning, something like that. Okay. See, I really didn't know. Yes. Because your body is conditioned. I mean, I'm just glug, glug, glugging all day long. The one time I'm not drinking something, I'm on the toilet.

So, here's a transcript from that part of the broadcast. Caller. here's a transcript from that part of the broadcast caller those people that are drinking all that water can get sick and possibly die from water intoxication water intoxication that's the word i was looking for dj yeah we're aware of that and so yeah okay that's terrible court case here we come let's go to court so the caller tries to interrupt, and he goes, they signed releases, so we're not responsible. I bet they didn't sign saying they, okay, never mind. I'm going to keep my mouth shut and let you keep going. Is this like a whole new Brandy? Are you like turning over a new leaf?

You're like, I'm just going to sit here quietly. Please don't. That's my new podcast idea. You'm just gonna sit here quietly please don't podcast idea you talk and i sit here quiet no obviously i guarantee you those contracts don't say that they know they're entering into a dangerous competition hell no hell no continue later the dj says and one thing i was only listening to audio so it was hard to tell how many. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, they all talk like this. Oh, yeah.

So, you know, who knows? There could have been 12 of these dudes. From one DJ to another. Later, the DJ says, hey, Carter, is anybody dying in there? Carter. Uh, we've got one guy who's about to die. And then they all laugh. And at this point, there's, like like a bunch of people talking over each other.

And the DJ goes, I like that we laugh about that. Get the insurance on that, please. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Poor taste. So all this laughing and joking is going on. And contestants are dropping out. It's like too hard.

It's too painful. One lady was on the floor couldn't move and jennifer hung in there at one point the dj called her over and he said oh my gosh look at her belly are you pregnant come on over here jennifer you okay you want to lay down and he's doing like that creepy thing we're like oh i'm feeling sorry for you it it's the tone is predatory and gross and a woman in the background i think she's another dj goes she can't even walk dj you gonna pass out too much water and so for the first time we hear jennifer talk and she goes, my head hurts. And the woman in the background goes, oh, oh, my gosh, Jennifer. They keep telling me it's the water.

DJ. This is what it feels like when you're drowning. And he said drowning. I hate that. Yeah. So he's just an idiot. In case it's not clear, I think he's an idiot. At another point in the show, one of the women DJ said, can you get water poisoning and like die?

Yes. And the guy DJ said, not with water. Your body is 98 percent water. Why can't you take 70 percent water? You fucking idiot. Hey, when you're drowning drowning are you going to be worried about the percentages not with water your body's 98 water why can't you take in as much water as you want and the woman said maybe we should have researched this before oh shit this is all on the air yeah yeah they are having this contest it's sick

at one point someone brought up that okay had norman actually remembered this case i i had not heard of it or if i did i didn't remember not the gaming historian. But no, no, no. It's this other case I'm about to bring up. So just calm down. It happened at a frat. Oh. So this was a fairly well-known incident in California. Two years earlier, in 2005, a 21-year-old named Matt Carrington died during a hazing ritual. He was forced to drink a ton of water really quickly, and he died from water intoxication.

So someone at the station brought that up. Uh-huh. But again, the DJs didn't seem super worried. They were pretty sure that there were, like, other factors in that case. Okay. Not just water. No one could die from just a lot of water. Excellent.

The contest went on and on. And finally, the DJs started to worry because they hadn't researched this and the contestants did seem to be in genuine pain. Just kidding. They weren't. No, the reason they were worried was because their morning show only went on so long. It's a morning show.

Yeah. It's like three hours max. Yeah. And there were too many people hanging in in this competition. So they obviously wanted to declare a winner before it was over. Yes. So what'd they do? They changed the rules.

They gave people even more to drink. So like I said. Up the water. rules. They gave people even more to drink. So like I said, they started with those little bottles. They graduate to full-size bottles of water, I assume every 10 minutes. And of course, when they did that, people started dropping out much more quickly.

About three hours into the contest, it was down to Jennifer and one other woman. Jennifer's belly was unnaturally big and distended. She's like, she was a really tiny woman. And I mean, you can find pictures online. She does look like she's, I'm four months pregnant or so. She had consumed nearly two gallons of water. In how, in three hours?

In about three hours, yeah. Holy shit. Her head hurt so bad. The pain was too much. She dropped out of the contest. The other woman won the Wii. Jennifer did get a pair of concert tickets to see Justin Timberlake. But as she left the station,

her mind was focused on the tremendous pain that she was in. She immediately called one of her supervisors at work and said, hey, I'm going to go home. My head hurts really bad. She was crying as she talked to her supervisor. And that was the last that anyone ever heard of her. A few hours later, Jennifer's mom discovered her dead body. You shut up!

I'm serious. Oh my gosh! I thought about signaling you. I could tell by the way you were sitting and the way you were looking that you were not ready. Kristen, she died? She died. Before Christmas? So this was right after Christmas.

She did this for her children. She had an infant. Oh my. And she had two other children who were older and obviously of that generation were like, the Wii would have been like such a cool gift. She had a husband. I mean, it's just 28 years old. Oh my gosh. And she died from this stupid radio contest

okay let's hear how her husband now owns the radio station okay a coroner by the way how long do you think you would last in a contest because i feel like you would do really well in one of these yeah i would you go forever yeah It's the hairstylist training. Oh, yeah. Okay, you don't seem to realize that this is not a hypothetical question. I'm asking you, like, how long do you think you could last? Oh, I think I'd win. How long do you think you could go?

Hours. I regularly hold my pee for hours. Don't be bragging to me. I'm just saying. In front of my ill-trained bladder. Yeah, you have an ill-trained bladder. You pee in the salon when you're there getting your hair done. Oh, yeah.

Way more times than I do. That's not even fair because you don't, I don't think I've ever seen you go. Ever? You've never seen me pee? Okay, well, that's not right. But like, you know, I'm there for a long time. I got a lot of hair. Yeah, a lot of hair. Very long and, you know, certainly certainly you don't color it or anything but these cuts you do they just take

no i'm there for like three hours yeah and yeah i pee twice at least okay calm down you do pee at least twice when you're there usually right when you get there because the drive has just been too much it's true yeah all the hours that you have to drive to get there it's a 20 minute drive folks 25 no here's the thing i have a work from home bladder yeah you have just pee whenever a hairstylist i have a hairstylist bladder these are the different types of bladders so the coroner did a preliminary investigation and discovered that, yeah, more than likely she died from water intoxication. The more technical term is hyponatremia. And it occurs when your body's sodium level gets below normal. Yeah.

And when that happens, your brain can swell and the swelling pushes against your skull. No wonder her head hurt so bad. Yes. Yes. So in more mild cases you'll vomit, you'll feel weak, maybe feel nauseous. And in severe cases you can get a seizure,

slip into a coma, and die. I don't think you get a seizure. You don't get a seizure? I think you have a seizure. Oh, okay, yeah. You never ask for one. Jennifer's death was so upsetting. Like I said, she had three young children.

She died trying to get this gift for her kids. That's horrible. Her husband and the rest of her family were devastated. Pretty quickly after Jennifer died, one of her friends called the radio station and told them what happened. So they immediately called everyone who participated in the contest and made sure that they were okay. No, they did not. Nope, they sure didn't. Nobody saying anything ever again about anything ever.

What contest? No, so the following Monday morning, the DJs who'd conducted the contestant showed up for work. They were like, hey, what's going on? And the station fired them. Yeah. And told them they should probably hire attorneys so in total like 10 people were fired wow in the wake of this incident yeah which i mean i don't know how many people work on a zany morning zoo but i guess i

guess it's a lot meanwhile news of jennifer's death became widespread and a lot of people thought the radio station deserved some of the blame yes yes yes but yes you're about to get so mad oh no yeah but contracts say in the event of your death you can't sue us it's more it's more weird than that i think all right we'll see what you think so law enforcement was like you know this this was definitely a tragedy very upsetting but this isn't criminal jennifer participated in the contest willingly willingly Willingly. So we're done here. But did they explain the risks before entering the contest? I guess maybe that's not their job. Maybe it would be her job

to look into what the risks are. Hang on to your hat. Okay. Okay. The public sort of hated that response. And a few days later, the Sacramento County Sheriff announced that

they would conduct an inquiry into Jennifer's death. He said, we're going to address a series of questions to make absolutely sure there's no question of criminal culpability. It was a foolish, high-risk stunt, probably more so than any of the participants realized yeah i would agree the question is was there a violation of the law probably not see i think there was you do involuntary manslaughter yeah so i don't think they set out to do obviously i don't think they set out to do, obviously, I don't think they set out to do anything wrong. But when multiple people called in. And said, oh, you're totally right.

Yeah. Yeah. Negligence at the very least, right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think at that point they should have known. Yeah. We need to stop this. Yeah. Yeah. We need to stop this. Yeah.

Yeah. But Jennifer's family wasn't just going to wait around while law enforcement looked into a possible criminal case. Instead, they sued the station for wrongful death. Yeah. They wanted to stop the type of reckless, shocking radio that killed their loved one. Mm-hmm. Do you like shocking radio, Brandy?

No. No? No. We don't really have a type of shocking radio out here. We have a local Howard Stern wannabe, in my opinion. You are not a fan of? I don't like him. I like him i like him okay see the only thing i like about howard stern

are his interviews yeah he is the best interviewer you know who else thinks he's the best interviewer terry gross the other best interviewer you don't know who terry gross i don't know who that npr oh that's not how i was gonna say say. Who? Dax Shepard. Dax Shepard thinks Howard Stern is the best interviewer. I totally think he's the best. He acts so engaged and thrilled to have the person on his show, regardless of how big or little they are. Yeah. You know what else he does?

That dude lies in the best way. So he'll be like, yeah, I heard you got $67 million on that movie deal. And you can tell he's just making it up. Oh, but it gets them to say the truth. It gets them to be like, no, I made blah, blah, blah. Or I made less. And it's just like, I feel like he does that a lot in his interviews. And I love it because he can get away with it because he's not a journalist.

Yeah. But man, dude is good yeah as far as shocking radio goes i know i don't typically like it i hate secondhand embarrassment yeah like horribly it's like one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world for me and so no i'm just not into it i don't like prank shows i don't like dax shepherd gotta start on a prank show punked yeah so how do you how do you deal with that your best friend by the way how dare you but anyway um i think there's something there's something different about punk to me because it's done to celebrities, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It feels different. But like, Impractical Jokers, fucking hate it. You shocked the shit out of me when you told me you did not think Impractical Jokers was funny. I think it's so funny. It makes me so uncomfortable. Secondhand embarrassment. I cannot handle it. It's so funny. It makes me so uncomfortable.

Secondhand embarrassment. I cannot handle it. There are times in that show when I get the cringe. Okay, can you watch something like 90 Day Fiance where, like, it's super cringe? Yeah. I'm not super entertained by it, though. Okay, yeah. Like, I don't watch a lot of reality TV because of that.

Like, I can't watch, like, The Bachelor, Bachelorette, any of that. Because I feel like the things people do when they watch it back, they will be so embarrassed. And so the idea of that just makes me. You just feel terrible for them. I do. Brandy. I do. You're such a nice lady.

Okay. I didn't really know that. Yeah. Can't handle it. What about when something embarrassing happens in front of your own eyes in real life? What do you do? I had a very awkward situation when I was a teenager where someone that I worked with was embarrassed very badly in front of a group of people. And it was over something little, something stupid. It was about condoms. Like it was something stupid, but the person was super embarrassed by it. I was so uncomfortable like with the secondhand embarrassment. I had to leave, like, I had to walk away from the situation because it made me so uncomfortable for that person. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was someone that I was good friends with that was being embarrassed. And so, like, I tried to diffuse the situation a little bit. Yeah. And when, like, nobody else was as uncomfortable with the embarrassment as I was, I was like. Gotta go. I gotta go. Yeah. Secondhand embarrassment.

So like shock radio and stuff is just not entertaining. Yeah, not your thing. Nope. Okay. A few months later, authorities wrapped up their investigation. By that point, the coroner had concluded with certainty that Jennifer had died of water intoxication. But Sacramento County prosecutors declined to press charges they said that what the radio station did didn't rise to the level of criminal activity what they did was not involuntary

manslaughter okay so i was getting all fired up yeah so then i was like well okay just how the hell does california define involuntary manslaughter yeah so i looked it up it says so first of all of course definition of manslaughter manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice okay so no ill will you didn't like set out to do yeah yeah just happened involuntary can be the commission of a lawful act which might produce death. And I'm clipping a little bit from this definition just for the relevant part here. Involuntary can be in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death without due caution and circumspection. I think that fits.

I think it does, too. I mean mean it's a lawful act. Their contest was a lawful act which might produce death. They definitely learned that through the multiple calls they got. One of them I believe was from a nurse practitioner who identified herself as such. They didn't use their due caution. Wow. I think that totally fits. So in the statement, the DA said, there were no observable indications or symptoms that Jennifer Strange was experiencing a serious medical emergency, which would have required station employees to seek or administer medical aid to her.

Again, I disagree. She said her head hurt yeah and if you've had someone call in and say hey that's water intoxication people could get water intoxication pull up your damn google machine yeah and you'll see right there bada bing bada boom wow swelling of the brain oh my gosh pushing against your skull oh that sounds terrible i mean yeah it's horrible yeah i feel like this fits the definition i think so too i really i mean obviously they didn't want to like get too in depth because then they might have been like well i guess i guess we're wrong here but But they also pointed out that Jennifer knew what she was getting into and that she had the option to quit at any time. Thoughts?

I mean, yes, I do agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, she knew she was in a contest. Yes, she could have walked away from the contest at any time. I don't think she knew the dangers of what she was doing. No. I do not believe she would have put herself at that level of risk if she'd known, oh, what's happening to me right now is my brain swelling.

Yeah. Yeah. There's no way she would have continued. Here's a question that I think is very important. Of course, because I came up with it. What would you do for a Klondike no um how much of what the callers were calling it about could the contestants hear okay that is a very good question so I was only able to listen to snippets of this. But it seemed to me, and this makes total sense, that the contest itself with all the contestants was going on in like the break room for the radio station.

So away from the actual lines. That was my suspicion. Yeah. So it's not like she was standing there in the room when someone calls in and says, hey, this is super dangerous. People could die. And who knows? Like I said, maybe they were in an area where they could hear part of it. But what I gathered, and I did spend a little time in radio where like, yeah, the booths where you record, they're super small.

And you don't want a whole bunch of people in there, especially a bunch of yahoos who are there for a contest. You might shout stuff out. That's too big a risk. It's definitely happening in another room. You would want them far away. Maybe you'd be allowing them to listen. We know that just from recording here. You can't have all that sound pollution going on in there.

Nobody would be able to hear anything speaking of by the way okay we're we're very lucky right now there are no cicadas out our last couple of cicadas for days it's been so loud our last few after dark episodes you would think we were recording around a campfire so i'm folks, just grab some s'mores. That's right. That's the Midwest for you in the summer. Anyway, the FCC, which licenses radio stations, also opened an investigation

into Jennifer's death. But nothing came of that either. So it all came down to this trial. The painful death lawsuit. It began in September of 2009. And I hate this. Hate this this hate this the judge put a gag order on the attorneys so they couldn't talk about this publicly and it also makes it made me think like okay surely media was allowed to be present yeah

but i think that maybe since the attorneys couldn't talk about it like no one knew it was happening so the number of articles you can find on this it's like everyone wrote about the aftermath everyone wrote about it going to trial like no one had it yeah so i'm doing my best here yeah anyway roger dryer represented jennifer's family he said that the radio station's only concern was for their ratings. In a pre-trial brief, he wrote, To the morning rave, good radio meant edgy, risking, exciting, even dangerous radio. A contest where adults might soil themselves just to win a video game? Might vomit publicly? Might be embarrassed and humiliated in the most personal and unhygienic of ways?

How marvelous. How cutting edge. How captivating. That is why Jennifer Strange died. Not because of an oversight, but because Intercom cared about ratings, not risk. It's Intercom that owns the radio station? Yeah. What?

What? Because Intercom was involved in a big radio lawsuit here oh was it um 96.5 yes okay what was the deal there so they so 96.5 is our is our alternative station here in kansas city it is the edgy station the dj that you mentioned not liking yes that's the afternoon show on that station so a few years ago the morning show which was hugely popular and i loved the morning i loved the morning show too hugely popular they were talking about porn stars and somebody called in or texting they have a text line somebody texted in and said there's a local there's a porn star that lives in the here locally in the johnson county area and so i think they're talking about how much porn stars make or something like that right so they did like a quick google search and they said a woman's name and called her out as a

porn star on the radio but she wasn't a but she wasn't a porn star. And she sued the radio station for defamation. Yeah. And she won a million dollars. Wow. Yeah. And like it was it was a huge deal. All of the DJs were off the air during the trial. I remember that because I used to listen to them every day.

And all of a sudden it was nothing. And everybody was sure that all of the DJs would end up getting fired over this. And it ended up not happening. And they turned it into something good. Because when it happened, people were like, well, let's donate the money to the radio station to save everybody's jobs. And it turned into this big fundraiser where they raised money for Hope House, which is like a really cool charity. Domestic violence. Domestic violence charity here.

And so they ended up raising a bunch of money for that. They turned it into a really good thing but yeah a million dollars over like a a 30 second conversation where they said somebody's name and called her a porn star well i mean i wouldn't want to be called i wouldn't want to be called a porn star either you know unless it was true and then you know give me all the free advertising you can get right yeah yeah wow but yeah they specifically i think what they did the reason she was able to win the lawsuit is they called her by name. They said where she lived, the city that she lived, like I think she lived in Olathe.

And they talked about what high school she went to. That is so stupid. Yeah. And so they were able, she was able to argue in court that they were specifically identified. Yeah. Yeah. I can't believe they were that dumb. I know.

Yeah. I feel like we're smarter than that. I agree. But yeah, that's an intercom station. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Huh.

So Donald Carlson and Douglas Sullivan represented Intercom Sacramento LLC. And the company's head of operations, John Greery, just the local Sacramento area. And they said, there's no doubt this is a very bad situation. They didn't try to debate, oh, it wasn't water intoxication. She for sure died from water intoxication. But who could have predicted that someone would die from drinking too much water?

Anyone who did a small amount of research. No, no, Brandy. Anyone with access to the Google. Brandy, as a human being, you know that we're always told to drink more water. So how could more water be bad for your health? That's their argument? That's dumb. See, this is all about foreseeability.

No one could have foreseen this. They could have because people were calling in and telling them. Yeah. Yeah. And they talked about that guy who died two years earlier. And if anyone here was negligent, don't you think that... Oh, are they going to say the victim was negligent? Don't you think that Jennifer Strange deserves part of the blame?

Oh, that's terrible. Ew, gross. After all, she participated in the contest. Wow. She stayed in it even after she was in pain that's a disgusting argument see i knew this would be unpopular for me to say this i'm gonna go ahead it made me think a little bit of the hot coffee case the stella liebeck case where

she i, they served her coffee that was way, way, way too hot. But in that case, the jury obviously found against McDonald's. But they did decide that, OK, because Stella put that cup between her legs to pour in the coffee or pour in the creamer or whatever, that, you know, part of that is on her. Yeah. And I do think, you know, if you sign up for this contest, you're in significant pain. Mm-hmm.

Maybe part of it can land on you. Yeah, you should have no one to walk away. But overall, no one to fold them. No one to walk away. I mean, I would have just pissed my pants. I don't know. I'm sorry, we're not going to finish? Oh, I'm sorry.

No one to run. No wind to run. You looked so mad just now. We said three of the four lines, and then you're like, I would have just pissed my pants. That's not what Kenny Rogers says. That's the new line. That's what he does. The jury deliberated for two weeks. Wow.

What? I know. I know. Ultimately, they sided with Jennifer's family. They awarded them $16.5 million. So I thought this was all kind of interesting. So they said that Intercom Sacramento LLC had been negligent when they conducted the contest. Obviously.

Obviously. Interestingly, they also... I believe negligence is the exact word that I used. Oh, man. Where did you get your law degree, Brandy? It was from the Google machine? From the Google machine. The Google School of Law?

Was it from the Google machine? From the Google machine. The Google School of Law? Interestingly, they also unanimously agreed that Intercom's parent company was not responsible. This was all the local branch's fault. And again, there was not a lot of info. But I assume from one of the interviews they did with a juror afterward, that this all came down to the fact that they should have kicked this contest up to legal. Yeah. And I assume legal was part of corporate.

Right. And I know they didn't kick it up to legal. So I think that must have let the parent company off the hook. Yeah. Because, I mean, if they didn't know about it, what could they have done? Yeah, exactly. By a vote of 10 to 2, they decided that Jennifer deserved no fault in all of this. There had been no contributory negligence on her part.

They spoke to another juror about this, and this juror said that for her, it all came down to those phone calls. During the contest, multiple people, including a nurse practitioner, called in and said, hey, this is dangerous. You guys could kill somebody. And the DJ said, yeah, we know. And they kept going.

Intercom was at fault. And contrary to what the defense argued, the jury felt that Jennifer's death had been foreseeable. So in the end, obviously Jennifer's family got some measure of justice. But these DJs are, you know, I mean, nothing happened to them. I saw one thing where they were, were like one of them was complaining about how it was hard to find a job after it's like yeah boy i don't know that i would be complaining no shit apparently one of them works in wichita

kansas at a radio station i know as for the station well let me talk to you about a woman named Sue Wilson. She's a former television and radio reporter, and she runs the Media Action Center, which sounds really big and fancy, but it's really just like the scrappy woman in a tiny office with bad cell reception. And the guy who wrote this article about her was clearly like a little sassy because he was like, you know. Anyway, so she was livid about this whole contest. And she kept telling people something that I feel like most of us don't know, which is that when bad radio happens, we can do something about it. So several years after Jennifer died, the station's license was up for renewal. And Sue petitioned the FCC not to renew the license.

By that point, the FCC had already acknowledged that there was evidence that the station wasn't operating in the public interest. So, here the FCC was, all poised to examine whether this station had failed to serve the public interest and you know if they had failed they wouldn't get their license yeah I think that Sue scared the shit out of intercom because in February of 2017 intercom asked the FCC to dismiss their license renewal application. Wow. So the station was just dead. Wow. I don't know if anyone has bought it up.

I'm sure it's been bought up since then, but that's the story of holding your Wii for a Wii. That was much darker than I thought it would be. I know. I was feeling bad because I was looking over at you and you were kind of smiley. Yeah, Wii. I remember Wii. Oh, my God.

Much, much darker than I anticipated. All right, let's talk about a disappearance. A disappearance. Disappearance? Disappearance. Is this kind of like chill mode where you're like just losing letters for the fun of it? Okay. So as I mentioned, this is a disappearance unlike any I've talked about before on this show.

And I have talked about. So many. So many. Huge shout out to our boy. David Kratjic. Nope. Nope. Our boy.

Skip Hollingsworth. Skip Hollingsworth. We only have so many boys. The vast majority of this information comes from an article by him in Texas Monthly that is... Skip, thank you. So good. You kill it every time. Every time.

Every time. Okay. We're in Electra, Texas. It's 1985. There's a thin, pretty girl with a spray of freckles and light brown hair just above her shoulders. She was a quiet girl, but well-respected and very polite. She was the kind of student who always yes-ma'amed and no-ma'amed her teachers.

She played on the school tennis team, but was not very good. And she had like an old wooden racket. She didn't have those new graphite rackets that all the kids had. In the afternoons, she waitressed at Whistle Stop, which was the local drive-in hamburger restaurant. And she would take orders there, run food, whatever.

Her name was Treva Throneberry, which sounds like a made-up name. It does. And I keep wanting, every time I read her last name, I read it as Thornberry. Yeah, no kidding. But it's Throneberry. Okay. And I'm not positive that her first name is pronounced Treva. It's T-R-E-V-A.

Could be Treva. Okay. Could be Treva. I'm going with Treva. Okay. Okay. And the town of Electra was so small that pretty much everyone knew everybody. So she was well known. She was never like an unhappy girl and never complained.

But there was just like something about her that seemed just a bit off. Years later, when people were asked about her, townspeople, no one could ever come up with anything, like, real specific that she had done. But there was just something that came off as just kind of odd, a little crazy, not typical. Okay. Was this just, I'm in a small town and I don't fit in? Probably. Okay. Was this just, I'm in a small town and I don't fit in? Probably. Okay.

Also because while she was a cute girl, she often had like this kind of vacant look, kind of just stared off into space, didn't make direct eye contact and, you know. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. There were a couple of incidents as she was growing up. Like one day at school, she drew like her parents got a call because she drew like a weird drawing at school of a girl standing under a tree with no leaves. And the girl's face was blue and the sun was black. And she told the teacher that it was a picture of her world.

Wait, the parents got called over that? Yeah, I mean, I guess it was you know alarming for that small texas town she didn't draw a yellow sun and a happy girl sorry when you said a drawing i was thinking okay how many people were dead in this right yeah okay oh she had a blue face so maybe she was dead a blue face one day at her Pentecostal church, she went up to the front altar and she fell on her knees. And she began yelling to Jesus that she didn't deserve to live. And then there was a time when she was a little bit older when her niece, her young niece, stayed the night at the Throneberry home. And she told people the next day that Treva had shaken her awake in the night and told her that there was a man outside their room with a gun.

But that wasn't true. There was no man. Hmm. Yeah. But kind of everybody shaked these things off. Just you odd phases. Things girls do,

young girls might do for attention. Just, you know, no big deal. Right. You know, girls get emotional. No idea what you're talking about. They were sure that Treva

would turn out just fine because she didn't drink or smoke cigarettes like the other girls her age. Then, that December, Treva, who was 16 at this time, just stopped working at the whistle stop. She stopped coming to school and she basically just disappeared. Nobody knew where she went. But it didn't take long for rumors about what was going on to sweep through this small town. Treva Throneberry had last been seen at the police station giving a statement that her father had raped her at gunpoint oh no she told the police that her mother she had gone to her mother and told her what had happened

and that her mother had just laughed in her face when she told her what had happened so she the police officer was stunned by this information and called child welfare, which sent in a social worker. And they took Treva away and granted her an emergency protection order and temporarily put her somewhere else while they investigated the claims. But as I mentioned, this information spread through town very quickly and it was the town was buzzing was it possible that mr throneberry had raped his own daughter it is so upsetting to me that she went and told this to a police officer and then all of a sudden it got out all over oh yeah yeah multiple people need to be fired yeah treva's father carl and his wife patsy were very well known in town they were good country people they worked hard they had had a big family treva had three sisters, I believe, and her father had always worked hard to take care of them.

Yes, sometimes Carl admitted he had trouble making ends meet, but he'd always made sure his children, I'm sorry, so four daughters, she had three sisters and a brother. Treva was the youngest. He'd always worked hard to make sure they were fed and dressed properly for school. He adamantly denied the claims against him, said he had no idea where Treva could have come up with these stories. He told the police that if anyone had raped Treva, it had to be one of those fanatical members of the Pentecostal church that she went to. He told them that he knew for a fact that they had been trying to brainwash her into becoming a missionary. But so the police questioned some of the church members and they said that they'd been trying to help this young girl who was in obvious distress for some time now they said that in the weeks leading up

to her rape allegation that treva had been telling them that she was scared of being at home and that she'd been slipping out at night to sleep in a vacant house next door or sometimes even slipping out and sneaking into the church and sleeping in the pews. So when she was granted this protection order and taken from her parents' home, she was put in a foster home in Wichita Falls, which is a bigger town in Texas, right next to Electra. Okay. And so the social workers were kind of perplexed by Treva's behavior at her foster home. So her foster mother um this woman sharon gentry was a middle school science teacher so she had lots of experience dealing with kids about treva's age i mean she was a little bit older she's 16 but you know she said that she would often find her at

night curled in the fetal position in the corner of her bedroom covered with the the comforter from her bed she said on other nights she would find her banging her head against a wall murmuring in her sleep please don't hurt me i'll be a good girl um this woman sharon gentry was very touched by triva's overall character and personality she said she was super general around the house she was super soft-spoken very polite and in the time that that this woman was fostering her treva began attending wichita falls high school and she did well there she was would write poetry sometimes and she was obsessed with the bible she diligently read a bible carried a bible

with her everywhere so as this investigation is going on back at home um treva has spent weeks now in this foster home and things have kind of progressed and become a little bit odd. Her foster mother began finding kind of odd things around the home. She found like handwritten notes from Treva that said things like, sometimes I wish I were dead. Sometimes I don't. Life seems impossible and death seems eternal. I will have no life after death.

One morning Treva came out of her bedroom and told her foster mother that she'd been dreaming about shooting herself. And in her dreams, she said that she could see the bullet entering her head. And then the more comfortable Treva got with her foster mother, she started to tell her things about her past, She started to tell her things about her past, about her childhood. She told her how she'd been kidnapped when she lived in Electra and she had been taken blindfolded by members of a satanic cult. And they'd taken her to an abandoned oil field where she was tied to a stake and people in black robes danced around her and slit the throats of cats and dogs and forced her to drink their blood. Man, she was right on time with that satanic panic stuff, huh? Right on time with the satanic panic. Okay, okay.

So her foster mother's like, something more is definitely going on here. Yeah, you don't just make that shit up and you've got a perfect life yeah yeah yeah so it's clear that she was lying yeah that that did not happen but there's obviously some motivation there where did that come from so by may of 1986 triva is still attending wichita falls high school and she's been sent to see the counselor there like she's having regular counseling situate like sessions with the guidance counselor at the high school is that just like we can't afford a therapist probably i'm guessing yeah yikes okay yeah and the counselor was very concerned about her because she regularly said odd things.

One day she said she was thinking about jumping off of the roof of the school. And so he is like, you know, one of those mandatory reporters. And so he calls the police and the police come and they take Treva from the school and they take her to the state hospital. And there she was put like in the adolescent unit where there was like nobody else. So she spent long periods of time by herself. And according to the hospital report, she was seen crying a lot. She rarely ate. She always had this blank look on her face.

They put her through a bunch of tests to try and figure out, you know, what was going on. They asked her if she felt detached, if she felt hostile, if she felt withdrawn, if she felt lonely. They prescribed Xanax for anxiety. They prescribed another drug, which they said were to combat what they thought, what they called thought disorders, which I'm not sure what they thought what they called thought disorders which i'm not sure what they would call that now but i'm guessing like intrusive thoughts and stuff like that to me that sounds like generalized anxiety anxiety i agree and don't worry guys i'm a doctor so and then they also subscribed her or subscribed her prescribed her um an antidepressant yes they prescribed her an antidepressant in addition to all of that they put her in a weekly group therapy sessions um where she sat and talked with other adolescents

she kept in contact with her foster mother she wrote her regular letter she also kept in contact with this boy that she'd met at the wichita falls high school but she wrote disturbing things in the letter um in the letters to them to the boy she wrote i feel like a living robot i walk when they say walk i sit when they say sit i do everything they say because i have to i can't take it anymore i have to die oh yeah yeah horribly sad but the doctors were baffled by treva nothing she did none of her behaviors fit their expected behaviors for what they were trying to diagnose her with and so they diagnosed her with some kind of broad generalized thing called character logical disorder okay one doctor wrote she's kind of quiet and secretive and she may have a personality problem problem they just couldn't figure out sure what was going on with her she just didn't fit their textbook definitions for you know. Right. And so hoping to kind of move forward and see more

into the catalyst for all of these things that had happened, they actually had her parents come to the hospital and do a group therapy session with her. She had not seen her parents since she had made the accusation against her father, though her parents had been at the hospital regularly demanding to see her she had refused every time but they um and worth noting at this point the district attorney's office ultimately um dismissed the sexual um assault charge against her father saying that there was no evidence that anything had ever taken place though there wouldn't be exactly i'm kind of rolling my eyes because it's like there's rarely there would be no evidence absolutely and especially if she's troubled which this is what i hate as you would be yes then oh she's not a good witness yeah absolutely so

yeah it's that's that doesn't convince me that nothing happened. I agree. But so she sat in this group therapy session with her mother and father in the presence of a therapist and a social worker. And her parents asked her to admit that she had been lying about the rape. And Treva got up and said that they were the ones who were liars, that they didn't love her. And then she said she had nothing more to say. And she left the room. After that, Treva made little progress in the five months that she spent in the hospital. They determined that she was no longer suicidal

or severely depressed. The meds had worked. But according to her doctors, her biggest issue was that she was unpredictable. So she was discharged in October of 1986. But they didn't really know what to do with her. She begged the social workers not to let her go home to her parents. She did not want to return to that home. And her parents didn't want her home. They said that they wouldn't welcome her into their home until she recanted her rape story. Oh. And so it was decided that she would be sent to this residential treatment center in Fort Worth for troubled adolescents.

And there they kind of put together a therapeutic and plan to improve her mental health. They worked on her self-confidence. They worked to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships. And she enrolled at a nearby high school to finish her senior year. Things went okay. In June of 1987, she graduated, she received her diploma, she seemed to be doing pretty well. And she had just turned 18, which meant that she could no longer be under juvenile supervision. So she would be completely on her own from there on out. on her own from there on out. She had told her counselors at this residential center that she just wanted to live a normal life. She said she wanted to go to Bible school, to a Bible college because it didn't require an SAT test. She was a terrible test taker, but a smart girl. And so she wanted to go to a college that didn't require that. And one of her counselors remembers her saying, all I want is to be and to feel normal. I want to live life, but I want to be normal.

Most of all, I want to live a normal life. I just feel like that's definitely somebody who's been subjected to a lot of therapy and stuff and testing and been told you're abnormal to just let that be your keyword. Or you're crazy. You're crazy. Yeah, absolutely. So she's graduated high school. She's on her own now. Before taking off for Bible college or wherever she intended to go, she did return to Electra

for a couple of days. She didn't go to her parents' home, but she visited with her three older sisters. And they said to her, Treva, what you said about daddy is breaking his heart. You need to go apologize to him. But her sister, Carlene, is the one who said that and said that Treva didn't respond she just stared at the floor and her sisters asked her what was bothering her um why she couldn't move past this why she was holding on to this allegation well what if it happened they didn't believe that it happened they did not believe that their dad had done anything to her but i hate this shit they did believe that someone had done something

to treva because they themselves had been abused inside their family home what they wouldn't come come out and say this for years later until years later but all of the daughters had been molested by carl's brother his older brother billy ray had molested all four of the girls to the point that the three older girls had all married while they were teenagers to get out of the house oh my god she was 16 years old oh my god and they left treva behind she was the smallest she was the quietest and she became the one that took the brunt oh of the abuse um that is so upsetting. Oh, yeah. So.

When. Treva accused her father. Of rape. The sisters. None of them believed that it had happened. And they actually spoke out against Treva. During the investigation. They said no. There's no way that happened.

But they didn't say anything about the abuse that they knew was going on in there that they had all been subjected to as well. I'm. Yeah. So what they believed was that Treva had kind of created this escape plan. Reva had kind of created this escape plan. She knew that this would be the way to get out of the house, that child welfare would interfere. It would get her out of the house. It would get her away from the abuse. But that she couldn't say what was actually happening to her so that this was what she came up with.

happening to her so that this was what she came up with and the sisters all assumed that she would handle the rest of her life the way that they had handled their suffering and silence praying that they would be able to get through it but it became clear to them as treva got older that she had been the victim of much more abuse than they had and that she it had been subjected to it for much longer than they had as well how did they know that just like the way the ages broke down and when everyone was out of the house yes gotcha gotcha so in this like reunion with her sisters when they're like i don't know why you can't move past this i don't know why you can't move on like again as i mentioned this is before they have all spoken about what was really going on in the house they wouldn't do that until years later yeah they're still processing

they're still absolutely absolutely and so they're they're like why can't you you have to tell you have to tell the truth you have to say that daddy didn't do this to you and then she starts telling them all kinds of stories that seem to them crazy she told them the story about being kidnapped by a satanic cult which forced her to drink blood and all of that and they're like trevo why what are you talking about there's no way any of that happened and that was the last time they ever saw her the next day triva left electra she never went to college she never called home again she just simply disappeared wow off the face of the earth. Her sister said, we never really did look too hard for her. It wasn't that we didn't want to see her.

We figured that she wanted to get away, to get a new start. At least that's what we hoped she was doing. That she was alive somewhere doing her best. was alive somewhere doing her best um years passed and nothing more was heard from treva throneberry most people in town assumed that she had been killed her parents maintained a three thousand dollar burial insurance policy on their daughter which i didn't even know was a thing no but it like just covers funeral costs apparently and then in 1993 there was a rumor that treva had been at the branch davidian compound in waco when what the yeah when the big the whole david koresh thing went down and so did she drink the kool-Aid? I don't know. Did she? Oh, my God.

Brandy, continue. So one of the social workers sent Treva's dental records to the authorities who were investigating the fire to see if they could identify Treva as one of the victims there. But she wasn't there. Hmm. And rumor turned out to be nothing more than a rumor. She wasn't there. Hmm.

The rumor turned out to be nothing more than a rumor. But in a little town in Oregon, 2,000 miles away, there was a teenager named Kelly Throneberry Smith working at a McDonald's and staying with a family she had met at a church. She told people she preferred the name Kelly Smith. In fact, she went to court to get her name legally changed to Kelly Smith because she said she was hiding from her father, who lived in Dallas. She told the police that he'd already found her once, forced her into his car, and raped her.

forced her into his car and raped her. But the police never could track down Kelly's father, and eventually she disappeared. The next summer, she surfaced in Portland, telling the police there that she was on the run from a sexually abusive father. This time, the father in her story was a Portland police officer. Once again, an investigation was opened, nothing was found, and Kelly disappeared. She reappeared again in the summer of 1994 in a small town in idaho where she told police that her name was

caroliana davis this time she had a new story about a tragic past she said her mother had been murdered and her father who was a police officer had been a member of a satanic cult and had repeatedly raped her this story is getting so weird yep so she spent two months in this small town in idaho and then she vanished vanished again later that same year she showed up in plano texas which is a suburb of d. And she told police officers and social workers there that her name was Kara Williams, and she was 16 years old. She told them that she'd been born and raised in a satanic cult, where she was taught that her destiny was to honor Satan and die in a lake of fire. She said that most of the children that she'd grown up with in this cult

had been sacrificed, that they'd been stabbed to death with daggers, and that her own mother had been murdered by her father, the leader of the cult, who also happened to be a police officer in another suburb of Dallas. Uh-huh.

He had also repeatedly raped her and at bedtime would force her to chant prayers to Lucifer. Was, okay, was Trina's real dad, was he a police officer? No. Okay, okay, so the police officer is just this new fun thing. Okay, gotcha. So she's in this new town telling this a different version of the same story basically right um and one detective was so drawn to kara and felt so terrible for her and all that she had been through this cute young gentle girl that she drove to this neighboring town to look into this police officer who was the leader of a satanic cult sure did she have trouble finding him yes in the meantime this social worker takes cara under her wing and like is trying to show her that there's all these good things in the world she takes her to the mall. She takes her to Six Flags.

They, you know, find her places to stay where she'll feel safe. All of this. So she's at one of these foster homes and she accuses a male staffer of sexually abusing her, of molesting her, which she moved again. This just kept happening over and over again. The detective that went to the neighboring town to find the police officer, father, satanic cult leader, was like, yeah, I couldn't find anything. I couldn't find any record of a Kara what's-her-butt. I couldn't find her father that she mentioned ever working on the police force. Like, something's not checking out here. Like, something's not checking out here.

Finally, in September of 1995, Kara's at a new home because she's made another accusation about something happening in one of the homes that she stays at. And she's at a residential treatment center this time. And there's an employee that works there from Electra. And she calls, this employee calls the child protective services worker who is overseeing Kara's case and says, this woman's name is Suzanne. So this employee calls the Suzanne woman and says, I don't know how to tell you this, but I'm pretty sure that I know Kara and that she is not a 16-year-old girl. I'm pretty sure kara is a 26 year old woman named treva throneberry yeah and so that's a weird call okay and so they look into this and they gather up all of this stuff and they confront kara with it yeah they bring records, pictures, handwriting samples. They're like, here you go.

Here you go, Treva. She didn't, she wouldn't admit to anything. In fact, she protested so adamantly that they believed that she believed that she was really this other person. Wow. Okay. believed that she believed that she was really this other person wow okay they there was a court hearing uh to determine what to do with her well i mean they had fingerprints, right? I mean, they could figure out definitively, right, who she was. There was no mention of fingerprints yet. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm jumping ahead. But basically, they do this court hearing because they need to move her out of the juvenile system because she's not a juvenile.

She's a 26-year-old woman. And they need to discharge her from this government supervision program. And so they hold this court hearing, and basically they're like, here's the number for a homeless shelter. Get some help. And they send her on her way. one of the, one of the, the people who were involved in the,

in the juvenile system at this point, like confronted her at the end of it and was like, here's a list of phone numbers. Here's some money to make some phone calls. Get yourself some help. Like that. Yeah. Oh, little attitude.

There was a lot of attitude, but Kara maintained that she was not treva throneberry and again she disappeared and then in june of 1996 a 16 year old teenager named emily cara williams arrived at what point do you decide i can't pretend I'm 16 anymore? Well, you'll be surprised. Okay. So she shows up in North Carolina this time, Asheville.

Oh, lovely. And again, she tells police officers that she's on the run from a cult in Texas. And then, you know, they start an investigation. She disappears again then she shows up in pennsylvania where she told the police that she was on the run from her father in tennessee who was involved in a court and now a child pornography ring oh well now that's new yes points for creativity but i mean she just can't help herself right because like if she would just go and show up in a town and just not talk to the police. Yeah.

So this time a social worker like is watching her go through a notebook and she sees a mention of a Suzanne Arnold in Texas. And so this woman, this social worker, does some research and she finds out that Suzanne Arnold is a social worker in Texas who had been working the Treva Throneberry case. So this is a case that has kind of in the social work field has gained some notoriety and people, you know. And so this name triggers something with this woman. And so she calls. And sure enough, this woman that's purporting to be this 16-year-old Stephanie Williams now is none other than treva throneberry she was arrested and sent to jail for nine days for providing a false report to law enforcement at one point that social worker in pennsylvania actually tracked down treva's parents and called them and asked them to speak to their daughter and like try and remind her who she was.

Whoa. And so she talks to her parents. She talks to her dad and her dad says, hi, baby. It's your daddy. And Treva said, you sound like an awful nice man and I wish you were my father, but you're not. I'm not who you think I am. And he said, honey, you'll be be treva throneberry until the day you die and her mom got on the line and said stop playing games and treva said oh no you've got me mixed up

with someone else but someday i may just get that way to see you. Ooh. Yeah. That seems ominous. Right? Okay. Yeah. So she spends nine days in jail, and then they release her, and again, she disappears. She pops up in Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio.

Every time she'd show up at a youth shelter with some luggage, a Bible, a tennis racket, a teddy bear. And she kept reenacting the same scenario over and over and over again. She kept trying to get back to the one place every teenager wants to leave. High school. She kept trying to enroll in high school. But why?

Why had Treva Throneberry used at least 18 teenage aliases since the early 90s? And why was she spinning these crazy tales? Was she a con artist? Pretending to be a downtrodden teenager to receive free foster care and free education? Or was she suffering from what doctors call psychiatric Munchausen syndrome, in which she was intentionally feigning intense emotional distress to receive attention. Couldn't it be a little bit of everything? Or.

And could she be a real victim of something? I absolutely think she has to be a real victim of something. Something has happened to her. Yes. Is it possible that she was slowly descending into some kind of insanity or mental illness unlike anything doctors had seen before? I think it's all possible. Yeah, and I wouldn't say slowly descending. I mean, I think she's there.

Okay. So now we're going to take a little break from Treva's story. And we're going to talk about another girl. A girl named Brianna Stewart. Is this truly another girl or did she mix up her names? I'm going to talk to you about Brianna Stewart now. Oh. Why don't you be the judge? Oh, okay.

It's 1997, and Brianna was the new girl at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Washington. Did she have a 27-year-old's face on a 16-year-old's ID card? Did she? I don't know. Brianna had arrived wearing bib overalls, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes, and her hair was in braided pigtails. She was more shapely than most of the other teenage girls with wide hips, but she had an appealing, slightly lopsided smile and a childlike voice with a little hint of a southern drawl. And she was always seen carrying her graphite tennis racket and a Bible. Brianna told school officials that she was 16

years old and for almost a year she'd been living in Portland, Oregon, walking the streets during the day and sleeping in youth shelters at night. She'd been attending services at Glad Tidings Church, where she met a young couple who took her into their home after hearing her testimony. That couple, who had been instrumental in getting Brianna enrolled in this school, had seen that she was full of potential and determined to succeed and that she just needed a chance to get over her past. Mm-hmm. What?

What was that past, you might ask? Well, Brianna had been raised just outside Mobile, Alabama, by her mother and her Navajo stepfather, who was a sheriff's deputy. Of course. Brianna told the school officials that when she was a child, her mother had been murdered. And after that, she lived with just her stepfather. But about the age of 13, she ran away and started hitchhiking from state to state. And was making her way to the pacific northwest because she remembered her mother telling her that her real father lived somewhere there and she came to the area hoping she could find clues to her past

they had brianna tell this story to the school guidance counselor because they were like fuck we don't know the to do with that information. And he said it was the most unusual case he had heard in his 30 years of counseling students. Sure. When he asked about

her education level, Brianna said that she had been homeschooled. But she promised that she would be a good student. She said, I've never had a normal life.

And that's all I want, to be a normal teenager like everyone else. So they enrolled her in the 10th grade. At the 19th grade? At the 1900 student school. And one of her first classes was algebra. She walked in, she took a seat toward the back. And then she glanced over at the boy next to her and he said hi to her.

And she smiled shyly and said, hi, I'm Brianna, I'm new here. His name was Ken Dunn, and they immediately became friends. And then maybe a little more than friends. Oh no, Ken. Poor Ken. Brianna was just thrilled just to have the chance to go to Evergreen High. Every morning she rode the city bus to school. She struggled a little bit. She struggled with math, but she...

Well, she shouldn't. She's taken it like 12 times she was really good in english she was able to quote entire passages of macbeth from memory um and for extra credit she wrote poems and stories and including one about a little girl who only had imaginary friends as playmates every day she wore the same outfit overalls a t-shirt and tennis shoes uh and she always wore her hair in her signature braided pigtails what year was this uh 1997 well that was kind of in then wasn't it yeah all right not not too bad but same outfit every day yeah yeah uh-huh she stuck out not just because she of her wearing the same thing she just was very awkward she didn't know how to interact with the other kids and so she felt like more of a mother figure to him but she quickly became close with ken that boy she met on her very first day don't tell me this poor ken ken was a sophomore and he said brianna was unlike any girl he'd ever known i'm

sure he said i liked the way she walked and i really liked the way she talked referring to her Southern accent. They started, they became study buddies. And then he started coming to her tennis practices and cheering her on, despite the fact that she was easily the worst player on the team. He helped her run lines for her drama class. He was big into drama and was actually like a really good actor. And I guess Brianna was pretty terrible, but you know, well, she couldn't have been too bad.

So in this, in this article by our buddy skip, he said that the drama teacher put her in the course of the school's production of man of La Mancha, perhaps out of pity. Oh. All right. So they started out as friends. No, Brandy.

But they started swapping. That's where it ended. They started exchanging flirtatious notes. Hi, Brianna wrote in one. What's up? I know. The blue sky. You're the best guy I've ever known. As a friend.

You're more than that to me, though. Class of 2000 rules! Oh, God. The rapee has become the raper. Brianna is 16, Kristen. We've stopped talking about Treva. We're talking about Brianna, the 16-year-old. Yeah.

The 16-year-old sophomore student. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. With her womanly curves and her knowledge of pop culture from the early 80s not buying it uh ken drove a 1978 uh brown el camino which was known as the turd tank around school and he started taking bran out on dates in it they drove to downtown vancouver to the roller skating rink to the mall they would sit in the food court and talk and hold hands he started going to her church with her and then to thursday night youth group and he would listen as she gave her testimony which she gave like

oh i'm sure constantly uh-huh and he was shocked by the amount of scripture that Brianna knew. He told his parents that she must have studied the Bible for years. I'm sorry. Kristen. I'm sorry. It's like she had an unfair advantage over all those kids in there. Good grief. So, in the beginning, Brianna was shy about talking to Ken about her past.

She just let him in on little details here and there. And then one day... Yeah, like any good predator. Here's a little nibble. Here's a little nibble. Oh, and then one day, oh my God, there's something you don't know about me. Uh-huh. One day, they were sitting in the food court.

They attacked me one day. And Brianna took a deep breath and said to Ken, I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone. And then she told him that she had watched her stepfather stab her mother to death and carry the body away. Okay. She told him that after that, he then made tapes of himself and his friends raping her which he sold on the black market oh and then when she was 11 or 12 she became pregnant

by him and he pushed her down a flight of stairs to force her into a miscarriage oh lord almighty she told ken that she'd gone to the police station to make a report about it but no one would believe her and that they had called her stepfather to come pick her up and that instead of going home with him she Fleed. Fleed. Fled. Fled. She'd fled. She'd hit the streets. Don't laugh during this very real story. And started hitchhiking her way to the Pacific Northwest.

Oh, my goodness. You know, she had my genuine sympathy for so long in this story. But she drags this kid into it. And I'm just picturing him. They're sharing a baked pretzel with the cheese dip. And he's hook, line, and sinker. So Ken would later remember this is his thoughts on what? On this horrible story that his girlfriend, basically, at this point, just told him.

He said, here was this beautiful girl who had been forced to endure unimaginable atrocities. And yet here she was at Evergreen wanting to make something of her life. I wanted to help. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted her to know that someone cared for her. And so he took her to the school's Sadie hawkins dance they dressed in matching blue all overalls and red shirts and didn't she take him to the sadie hawkins well i think probably yeah yeah come on skip yeah it's always a surprise there's nothing better sadie hawkins dance in my khaki pants. There's nothing better.

So they're at the Sadie Hawkins dance and the DJ plays You're Still the One by Shania Twain. Still the one. The two took to the dance floor and Ken looked into Brianna's eyes and said, no, I love you. No, Ken. Oh, oh, poor Ken. And Brianna replied, eyes and said, No. I love you. No, Ken. Oh, poor Ken. And Brianna replied, I love you too. Gross. I hate it.

And then Ken pushed her hair back. No. No, no, no. No physical contact. And kissed her on the mouth. Oh. And she kissed him back. Gross. I was 16. And she was 16. No, she wasn't. You recall? It was the. And she was 16.

No, she wasn't. You recall? It was the perfect teenage romance. No. I couldn't imagine that anything could go wrong. Poor Ken. I know, right? Jeez.

Yes. Ugh. By the fall of 1998, Brianna was in her junior year and had become quite well known at Evergreen High. Every student in the school had heard of her tormented childhood. Well, I mean, when you've got the same outfit on every day, you're walking around like Superman. Yeah, I bet people know exactly who you are. But Brianna had set her sights on the future her goal in life was to become a lawyer focusing on children's issues she spent all of her time reading books about the law or

you know researching different like things about child abuse abuse and all kinds of things so that she could pursue a career and help children. Kristen, why does your face look like that? Because now she's a child predator. She is a child predator. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Brianna's 16, Kristen. Brianna's 16.

Great. So she's looking into how she can one day become a lawyer. Meanwhile, she could be one now. Mm-hmm. Meanwhile. Mm-hmm. Brianna is still searching. You better not tell me that she and Ken have sex.

Oh, God, no. Okay, okay. I mean, they might have. I don't know. Oh, God. They probably did. Gross. I know.

So, meanwhile, Brianna is still searching for the answers of her past. She's still searching for her father that's somewhere there in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. And she would tell basically anyone who was listening that she didn't know where she came from and that she desperately needed a social security number that would identify her as Brianna Stewart. If she could just get that, she'd be able to move on with her life, get a driver's license, go to college, get a job. The problem was that she couldn't get a social security number unless she could track down her birth certificate or find her real father. That's a real pickle.

It's a real problem when you've completely made up your identity. No! Brandy! It was just very complicated because Brianna had just only very hazy memories of her past, of her childhood. Well, it seemed pretty clear to me, you know, that Navajo stepfather. Well, so before she was three, she didn't know much of anything. Well, that goes for most of us. I don't know anything before I was three either. I do know I was in a satanic cult.

Yeah. So Brianna wasn't sure she even knew what her real name was. So why not make one up so she all she knew was that her stepfather had started calling her brianna because in navajo it meant bright eyes which i don't think is true at all i was gonna say i don't know she told um a reporter for a port Portland newspaper who interviewed her about her search for her past. I may not know who I was before I was three. I probably wasn't always Brianna Stewart. I do know who I am now, though.

Well, that's a beautiful quote. So she spent some time with some mental health professionals in vancouver i don't really know how she got lined up with them probably because the stuff she said about to the counselor well sure if everyone knows this story then everyone's going to pitch in and help yes um and they thought that maybe she was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder or some kind of like protective amnesia where she had blocked out parts of her past to protect herself okay you know that actually sounds kind of right on the money for the real it's actually probably yeah it is possible for the real story yes absolutely so her story's out there that she just wants a social security number

she just wants to know where she came from. She just wants to have a normal life. And so numerous people are coming forward willing to help her. Of course. A social worker did this crazy record search looking for any evidence of Brianna, her mother, or the man that she said was her stepfather. But they found turned up nothing. A staff staffer like an employee at the indian health services looked into it again nothing they scoured the national database of missing children and even asked brianna to submit blood samples um in hopes of finding a dna match was she a little

too busy to do that um no word on that um she even asked the fbi this fbi agent that she was put in contact with to investigate whether she was possibly the victim of this unsolved kidnapping from salt lake city this would make an amazing novel right uh-huh turns out no she was not okay um and then she went out to montana with a sheriff's deputy to find out if she was some girl who went missing in 1983 from montana no turns out she was also not her every lead came back a dead end She wasn't any of these people. But Brianna was determined to find out where she came from, who she was. In January of 2000, she took a little time off from school.

The bullshit. From school. And she went to Alabama, where her story was that she was raised. And she spent several days with a detective there. she was raised and she spent several days with a detective there the detective drove her around hoping that she would see something that would you know jog her memory she said and and lots of little things did would you believe it kristen she saw a swing set at a park that she remembered playing on she saw a table at mcdonald's where she was sure she once sat lunch. I'm sorry. Right? Well, I don't know if she knows,

but there are multiple McDonald's locations across the United States. Many of them have the same interior. Weird. But no one could find any evidence that she'd ever lived there. There was simply no record of Breanna Stewart.

At what point do we stop blaming the records so there became a little there was a a break oh a lead some kind of clue when brianna went to a dentist in portland the dentist so after seeing this dentist the dentist actually called the social worker who When Brianna went to a dentist in Portland. The dentist. So after seeing this dentist, the dentist actually called the social worker who was like in charge of Brianna's case. Because remember, Brianna's a minor. And so she's in the social, like she's in the system. Right.

She's staying with foster parents and whatever. And so the dentist called the social worker and said, um, so notice something odd. When I was in Brianna's mouth today, her wisdom teeth have been removed and her scars are completely healed. Oh, my gosh. Super unusual for a 16-year-old girl. Uh-huh. And so the social worker asked Brianna about it. And Brianna lost her fucking mind. Uh-huh.

She went on this rant about how her word means so much to her and how could anybody doubt her story? And when I give my word that I'm doing and being as honest and upfront as I can be with the information about myself, I mean it. Sure. Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah.

I supply the stories here. Not anybody else. And so Brianna's so upset about this. And she goes to talk to Ken about it one afternoon. And he was like, huh, that's super weird. Do you think there's anything to that? And again, Brianna lost it. She said, how dare you think I'm not 16?

Okay, see, this is why she's being dumb here. Because he's just saying, okay, you don't know anything about your past. Yeah. You know nothing. Yeah. This dentist says you might be way older than you think. Yeah. No one's assuming yet that she's full of shit.

Right. But she's reacting that way. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Come on, Trina. So she flies off she's pissed how dare you not think i'm 16 how dare you even ask that and you say you love me blah great so ken tries to kind of push this out of his mind but deep down he's like hmm this is odd She's got those crow's feet coming in. She's got those gray hairs.

Yeah. So he wants to reassure her that everything's fine between them. And so for Christmas, he gets her a sterling silver ring and has it engraved with her favorite line from the new Romeo and Juliet movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. And Claire Danes. Don't forget about that. I'm sorry. And Claire Danes. My goodness.

So inside the ring, he has it engraved, I love thee, which is Brianna's favorite line from the movie. What a lame line. Super lame. Oh, gross. You know what that means? What? That means she and her stupid overalls was telling

this child i love thee all the time that's what that means yeah and you know how old she is how old is she really oh i'm sorry she's she's 17 years old she 36 no no okay hold the fucking phone poor little ken he's a child he doesn't count everyone else in this story the adults get it the fuck together i wasn't sure i was going to show you this yet but show me the picture of her right this instant brandy here is the picture of them 36 at the trying to try oh god it looks like he's there with his mom, doesn't it? Okay, let me see. Okay. I knew when I saw this picture, and you do now, too. Yeah. Obviously that she's not who she says she is. I think she looks old in this picture.

But everybody says she passed for a 16-year-old girl. I think she looks so old. But I was like, maybe it's just because i know she's not a 16 year old girl that i think no she looks like a mother of three kids holding on to one of her kids okay okay brandy every week does the little collages we will put this picture in it no okay we've got to describe oh my god no yeah no she looks like i think she looks so old she looks every bit of mid-30s i totally agree i totally agree but everybody thought she was 16 no what is wrong with these adults when a woman that old shows up and says yeah i'd like to enroll

in high school they should have been like and what's the name of your child i mean that's okay wait let me show you let me show you her her yearbook picture okay Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Okay, I'm saying gross because... She looks like someone who is 35 years old clearly trying to look much younger. Yeah, it looks like she's in costume. Yeah. You know what?

I don't even like on SNL, sometimes they'll have the actors play children. Yeah. For some reason, i find that creepy yeah that's what this this is so great look at her i know that is an old ass woman in little overalls god i can't handle it with this poor 16 year old boy oh my god poor 16 year old boy okay so he picks her up in the turd rumbler or whatever the turd tank turd tank she meets his parents yeah his parents are looking at her like yeah hello so they went to the like the sweetheart dance

later that year and his mom made her her dress because she couldn't afford a dress oh my lord no that i know i know no this is so disturbing this is ridiculous everyone you have to look at these pictures this is This is ridiculous. I don't understand how she passed for... I don't either. I don't think she can even pass for 32. So, he gives her the ring.

Oh, poor Ken. Oh, my God. But then something happens that would devastate Ken. So at the end of their junior year, Brianna had started staying with the Gambetta family. So they had a son who was good friends with Ken. And something happened that led to Brianna staying with this family she had told them that something uh the family that she was staying at could no longer afford to keep her or something like that and so they took her in and they'd been they put her up in her own bedroom um she'd been able to put

posters on the wall they were giving her a ten dollar a week allowance like it was perfect but then in may of 1999 Brianna called the police. And she said that the father, David Gambetta, had been spying on her. He'd put miniature cameras in the light fixtures in her room and was making videotapes of her as she undressed. Oh, my God. So the police did an investigation and found nothing, of course. It was completely made up. The Gambettas asked Brianna to move out.

You think that dude was secretly a child pornographer? No, Kristen, I do not! And for the first time, Ken really believed that Brianna had been lying about all of it. He started to question every bit of her story. He thought back on all of the dramatic stories she had said. And he said to his friend, he said, my God, what if Brianna has been making everything up? You know, Ken is a smart cookie.

Because I think the tendency in that situation would be to like, well, I don't know that I believe this one thing. But to go ahead and make that leap to holy shit what if everything she said is untrue that's that's a tough leap to make yep so they broke he broke up with her he was like i don't know what's going on. We're drifting apart. Could be the age gap. Could be that you're 36 years old. I'm not sure. So in June of 2000, Brianna Stewart graduates from Evergreen High School.

At graduation, she and Ken talk, and he says, you're going to have a great future. You know, I'm really proud of you. You're going to do great things. She had managed to talk to a community college in Vancouverouver and they said that they would allow her to enroll without a social security number she told them some stop sob story about not knowing who she was or where she came from and they're like that's please don't help me figure it out though yes so she spent the summer of 2000 she worked on the nadir campaign for a while really yeah in the summer of 2000. She worked on the Nader campaign for a while.

Really? Yeah, in the summer of 2000. But she really spent most of her time working on getting a social security number. Sure. She wrote this letter to the governor of Washington asking for his help. And then she also enlisted the services of two lawyers, one in Portland and one in Vancouver. Though she didn't tell either of them that she was working with the other for whatever reason. And so the attorney in Vancouver, this is really interesting to me.

This is so weird. So the attorney in Vancouver sued the state to force the vital records office to issue brianna a birth certificate so in order to support this claim he provided letters from the school officials um he he provided brianna's high school transcripts her state picture id and the medical statements about her mental health so that's the that's the route the lawyer in Vancouver took. OK. Meanwhile, the attorney in Portland took another route. He chose to petition the federal government government directly.

He asked them to issue Brianna to submit a fingerprint just to make sure that there was no chance she could be someone else. And she was like, no, thanks. No. She did it. What? She submitted the fingerprint. So she does that. He sends off his petition to the federal government.

And so she's got that working on this side. And the Vancouver guy has his petition working. And he gets news a few weeks later that the attorney general is not going to oppose their suit. They'll issue the birth certificate. Everything's great. All Brianna has to do is appear for a oppose their suit. They'll issue the birth certificate. Everything's great. All Brianna has to do is appear for a simple court hearing. They set it for March of 2001. Brianna's fight for her identity is finally over.

She's about to officially become Brianna Stewart. Until March 22, 2001. It's one week before the hearing in Vancouver. Mm-hmm. A police officer, police officer. That's a weird way to say it. How many H's were in that? So many H's.

A police officer arrests Brianna on charges of theft and perjury. Theft? Mm-hmm. Because the fingerprint had come back, and it turns out that Brianna was actually, I was wrong about the age, by the way. Oh. Brianna is actually 31-year-old Treva Throneberry. Well, throneberry i'm gonna tell you she's had a rough life she doesn't even look 31 looks she certainly doesn't look 16 i'll tell you that so yeah the the fingerprint had come back and matched her as treva throneberry yes so they arrest her

on perjury and theft charges theft of uh foster care and free public education oh i see okay got you theft of a young boy's heart so word gets out about this so ken dunn's mom calls him he's working at disney world now he's like a performer of some kind i wish people could have seen the gesture brandy just briefly performed he's a performer of some kind his mom calls him and he says that he when he heard the news he nearly dropped the phone he said well yeah mom i went to homecoming with a woman 12 years older than me yeah yeah disturbing very very my god so word of this spreads through the high school. And most people were convinced that Brianna had pulled one over on them. That all of it, the awkward behavior, all of it had been this great act.

The fact that she'd received a D in classes that she had obviously taken many, many times. received a D in classes that she had obviously taken many, many times. And that she had lost all of the tennis matches. Was all part of this great act to pull off this fake identity. Okay, well, I don't know about that. I think she was genuinely bad at tennis. She probably was. And I mean, you can still be kind of dumb.

Others, though, were fascinated by it. That after 15 years of high school, she could still barely pass the class. One girl said, it just goes to show you how algebra can really suck. Yep. But there were

people who thought that there was more to this this wasn't just some grand act by someone who was trying to pull something over there was probably real mental illness working here which i completely believe so the prosecutor believed that that was not the case that he thought that treva needed to be treated as a common criminal. What we're dealing with here is a woman who knows exactly what she's doing, he said. How does he know that? I know. This drives me crazy.

Oh, absolutely. So they move forward with these charges against her and the prosecutor offered Treva a plea bargain. They would give her two years in prison in return for her admitting who she was. But she wouldn't take the deal. She then fired her court appointed attorneys. Oh, no. And she learned that they were planning to argue that even though she was indeed Treva Thornberry, she had no idea she was committing a crime because she really believed that she was Brianna Stewart. Yes, that's exactly the argument. Oh, I think that's the perfect argument. Yeah.

I think that's the perfect argument. So I think that's the perfect argument. And I believe it's probably the truth. She had convinced herself that she was this brianna stewart so she refuses to let them argue that because she's not treva throneberry so she fires her attorney um and she told the judge that she wants to exercise her constitutional right to defend herself. Oh, great. Because she read a law book a while ago. Yep. Okay. She told the judge that she was going to convince the jury that she truly was Breanna Stewart. You know what, though? If you can look like that and convince people you're 16. Maybe you maybe you should become an attorney. It is very important for me to clear my name, she told the judge. And the judge could do little to keep this from

happening. He had to let her represent herself by law to act as your own counsel, all she had to do was demonstrate that she understood the nature of the charges against her and what punishment they carried. Wow. Yeah. It doesn't matter if you're mentally ill or anything, huh? So she was deemed competent to stand trial and deemed competent to represent herself. Wow. Okay. Wow. Okay. Yes.

That shocks me. Um, when there was like a big debate about this going on, um, the prosecutor spoke to the press and he said that Treva was perfectly competent. I mean, she's graduated from high school at least twice.

Oh my God. Okay. Okay. He's a little sassy yeah and so they brought in like a court appointed uh psychiatrist to prove her competence or prove her incompetence and that person told the judge that he could not find sufficient mental problems to prove her incompetent. Okay. She could stand trial. Okay. Jeez. Her trial began in mid-November 2001, and each day, Treva came into the courtroom carrying law books and notebooks.

She often wore her hair and her signature braided pigtails, but she didn't wear her overalls. She wore denim skirts that came down to her ankles. Yeah, got to class it up for court that's right and she greeted the judge in her in her little girl voice oh geez and the judge was so thrown off by her that at one point he said hello miss stewart i mean miss throneberry or whatever the poor judge i wouldn't i wouldn't know what to do either okay so here is a picture of her

at trial i actually think this is the youngest i've seen her look okay, the irony. Yeah. But she's dressed like a little kid again. Yeah, and I think dressing like a child in a big sloppy sweater. Yeah. With your hair all scraggly. Yeah, that'll help you look a little younger. But you look at her face. Oh, yeah. That's the face of a grown-ass woman.

Yes. That's the face of a grown-ass woman. Yes. So she was allowed to represent herself, but they did have a court-appointed lawyer sit next to her so that she could ask questions about court procedure and stuff like that. But that person was not arguing on her side or anything. They were purely there just for her to ask questions to. Right. Okay. And she seemed fairly comfortable in her role as her own or anything. They were purely there just for her to ask questions to. Right, okay. And she seemed fairly comfortable

in her role as her own defense attorney. She would object to things and appeared to know what was going on as much as she could, I guess. Oh, jeez. On cross-examination, she would ask pointless questions

that had nothing to do with, you know, the case and stuff like that. Like she asked when they had an investigator testify about the fingerprints that had identified her as Treva Throneberry. She got up and on cross-examination asked about the ridge patterns on specific fingers. And the guy just like answered them and then was like what's your point yeah what's what's the point of this um and then uh when another police officer testified about um when she was going by the name kelly smith in oregon she got up and asked an odd question she said why would someone come up with so many names it makes no sense and then she kind of turned and looked at the jury like, and the witness was like, I don't know, man.

Right, like only you can answer that. Only you can answer that, exactly. The prosecutor was really focused on proving that Brianna knew she wasn't Brianna. And that he called, so he called this woman to the stand who was an employee at a Vancouver convenience store. And she testified that she remembered Brianna once coming into the store with some teenagers to buy cigarettes. And she testified that she remembered Brianna showing her an ID card with the name Treva Throneberry on it. with the name treva throneberry on it but brianna called witnesses to contradict contradict thank you i could not think of that word to contradict this testimony they said that brianna never they had never seen brianna smoke and that none of them could remember ever going to a convenience store with

her. So hard to know. Yeah, that is hard to know. Yeah. Treva's foster mother from the very beginning, that very first foster mother that she stayed with, she came in and she testified that she had known Treva in 1985 when she was 16 years old and apparently this moment was super emotional in court brianna triva whatever didn't know that this woman was going to be there and she had a super emotional response to it apparently this woman showed a bunch of pictures and they were like of triva and her foster mother and so treva looks at these pictures and she says she looks at this woman her name was sharon gentry so she looks at this woman and she says this treva in these pictures what what was she like and the woman said she was a very polite young lady she enjoyed church she enjoyed tennis

she had a wooden tennis racket she was always very appropriate very thankful she always apologized if she hurt my feelings and then there was like a long moment of silence where Treva was just kind of like looking down. And then she looked up and she said, was Treva smart? Oh, gosh. And the woman said, oh, yes. She loved to read and she really enjoyed school activities. She made good grades. And then there was like this other silence.

And she said, did she work hard? And at this point, this woman's like barely holding it together. She started crying. Yeah, she would later say that she wanted to like stand up and like just hug her and hug her. Yeah. And but instead, she she maintained her composure and said she worked very hard she tried very hard treva was a wonderful young woman and treva said oh thank you yeah i mean oh god yeah this is this is not the craziest case like you there i'm feeling all kinds of i know because you're like oh my gosh she's totally like some weird predator to this poor Ken guy. But then something horrible obviously happened to this girl. Of course, of course. Something obviously horrible happened to her. Yeah.

Obviously, Treva was not a lawyer. She didn't really present much of a case. She attempted to introduce a report from a therapist in Vancouver who had once guessed that Brianna Stewart was about 20 years old, but the judge ruled that inadmissible. Um, she called some former... Someone thinks I look like I'm 20. Yeah, exactly. She called some former teachers and counselors to testify that all she had wanted was a social security number so that she could continue her schooling. And so she asked, I wanted to go to college so i could take care of myself isn't that right she asked like the her former counselor and not have someone take care of me so this is

how she's proving like i wasn't just trying to milk the system like i really just wanted to do these things to better myself but if you'd already graduated high school before exactly so in the prosecution's final arguments the prosecutor was he was tough he stood over the jurors and he said if you feel sorry for her we don't give a damn about your tears oh that's not why we're here oh i don't know that that's the tactic either. And then he mimicked Treva's voice and told the jury that she just wanted to remain a pampered child and that she wanted a free financial ride. In her final argument, Treva told the jury. I still say I am Brianna Rebecca Stewart.

I don't pretend to be anyone else but me. Which is not true. But I believe she probably thinks it's true. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, the jury found her guilty. Turns out not having a law degree is a huge disadvantage. The judge sentenced her to three years in prison.

And the attorney that had been there to assist her, basically just to answer questions, he actually made a motion at the end to try and get her sent to a state hospital rather than a prison. But the judge said it was too late he said the judge said he wished he could send her to a state hospital but his only legal option was prison because she had been deemed competent yeah oh treva told the judge that she would immediately file an appeal and as she walked out of the courtroom, she said, it's so unfair. It's so unfair. A reporter who was standing nearby said, what's unfair?

Are you talking about what happened to you long ago? And she said, she looked, the reporter said that she looked at them and said, my name is Brianna Stewart and I'm 19 years old. I'm 19. I'm not guilty of anything except being a teenager. Oh. Oh, no. oh no so brianna stewart treva throneberry whoever you want to believe she is served her three years and then was released from prison in 2016 she resurfaced under the alias brianna kenzie and accused a man of sexually assaulting her while she worked as a hotel employee um she was later fired from that job and no word of where she is today

be looking for her at your local high school yes oh my gosh yeah that case was nuts it was so good okay i 100 believe something terrible happened to her. Yes. And that she, it's very likely that she does not believe she's Treva Throneberry. That she has that crazy protective amnesia or whatever that one doctor hypothesized. Yeah. I think, or that she has just convinced herself that she's not. Yeah. I think she's probably very seriously mentally ill. I think it also makes sense to be like, you know what?

Treva had a terrible, terrible life. I don't, I'm not identifying with it. Yeah. I'm, that's, I'm disassociating. Mm-hmm. It's not me. Yeah. Oh, my.

I think there's gotta be something to the fact that she kept coming back to high school, though. Like, that was her. She enrolled at 15 different high schools. I mean, if something really traumatic happens to you at a certain point in your life, like, they say sometimes you get stuck. Yeah. I don't know. i don't know i don't know in a way i feel for her and another way she became a predator like because but is she a predator if she believes she's 16 yeah she's still a predator she's still an adult woman who i mean i'm sure they had sex right right? I mean, we don't know. I don't know, but I would guess.

Yeah. I think maybe you can make an argument for it makes it less heinous if the person truly does not know that what they are doing is wrong. Yeah. But it still happens. Yeah. You know, doesn't change the facts yeah poor ken yeah hope he's doing okay i do too and uh again big shout out to skip hollinsworth for that

amazing article on that that is incredible so it's really cool though the way the article is structured is it like cuts back and forth from like treva to Brianna. And so you don't know until like much farther in that they're the same person. You put it together, but it's a really well written article. It is called the day Treva Throneberry disappeared. It's so good. Oh, amazing.

Loved it. Loved it. Crazy story. You know what we got to do right now? Supreme Court inductions. That's right. Boy, how do I tell you? Guys, remember, if you're wondering how you can get inducted into the Supreme Court.

All you have to do is head on over to patreon.com slash lgtcpodcast. Join up and we'll give you an induction on one of the future episodes. It's pretty exciting. I love it. I love the thing we're doing right now, which is favorite words. Yes. So on this round, we will be reading your name and your favorite word. Here we go. Jamie Burden.

Blink. Cause duh. 182. Which apparently, hi Jamie, we're best friends. Jillian. Meat castle. Robin Torres. What is that word?

Concapenate? Concaatenate. Robin, how dare you? How dare you give us such a terrible word, which means to combine data. Robin. How dare you, Robin. Akash Thirumalai. Chalupa.

Dustin. Butthole. Jennifer Betancourt. Conjubilant. Shauna. Piercing. Emma. And she wrote, go wild.

I love the pronunciation. Ema. Colossus. Wendy. Huzzah! Welcome to the Supreme Court! And huzzah to all of you! Also, butthole to all of you!

Thank you all so much for joining. Oh my gosh, you guys are amazing. And a hat tip to our new Supreme Court members. Use your powers wisely, please. That's correct. Only for good, not for evil. Don't pretend to be a 16-year-old girl if you're really 31 years old. If you're 36, it's fine. Oh, gosh.

You know what? I do find it really interesting because what do you think that the backlash would have been? Would it have been different if she was a 31-year-old man pretending to be a 16-year-old boy? It would have been way worse. It would have been way worse, right? This is one of those rare cases where it's worse to be a dude. It's hard to mess up male privilege, but sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can't yeah because i i think there's a tendency to kind of be like oh i'm sure ken's fine yeah but yeah but maybe ken's not fine that would be horrifying

yeah and i i just think i think we are the appropriate amount horrified by old creepy men going after young girls. We're not appropriately horrified by old creepy women putting on a pair of overalls and heading into the high school. And I just want to say that while most of her reports of being raped and attacked were false, that's so rare. Yes. No one used this as an example of what false reporting does. Something horrible obviously happened to her at some point. And

again, false reporting is super rare. Super duper rare. So everybody just thank you for attending my TED Talk. It's funny because I feel like most of the people who listen to this podcast probably know that. But still, I think it needs to put it out there. You know, we really do. I just got into an argument with someone about this. Yeah. So yeah, false reporting, super, super rare. Please

do not use this case as an example. It just has occurred to me recently that some people think that the Me Too movement, they're confused about who the victims are in that. That's our little thing we're throwing in there. Okay. Okay. Hey guys. It's me again.

Brandi. Barack Obama. Perhaps you heard me talking for the last two hours and 23 minutes. Perhaps you remember me. Perhaps you heard me talking for the last two hours and 23 minutes. Perhaps you remember me. Perhaps you remember me from 20 seconds ago. I'd like to ask you to do something

for me personally. Head on over to our social media and help Brandy find her real father. We're on Facebook. We're on real father we're on facebook we're on twitter we're on instagram we're on youtube we're on reddit and we're on patreon we should find us all of those places and then while you're at it head on over to itunes leave us a rating leave us a review and then be sure to be sure be sure to join us next week when we'll be experts on two whole new topics and now for a note about our process i read a bunch of stuff then regurgitate it all back up

in my very limited vocabulary and i copy and paste from the best sources on the web, and sometimes Wikipedia. So we owe a huge thank you to the real experts. For this episode, I got my info from the LA Times, the Sacramento Bee, ABC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and newspapers.com. And I got my info from an amazing article by our buddy Skip Hollinsworth,

as well as articles for the Crime Library, the New York Times, and the Portland Mercury. For a full list of our sources, visit lgtcpodcast.com. Any errors are, of course, ours, but please don't take our word for it. Go read their stuff.