Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: TalHotBlond

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

In 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery logged onto an online gaming site, pretended to be an 18-year-old Marine, and fell into an intense romance with a young woman who called herself Jessi. What started as a fantasy quickly curdled into obsession. When Jessi began talking to one of Thomas's younger coworkers, jealousy consumed him, and in September 2006, that obsession turned deadly. But the murder was only the beginning of the story, because almost nothing about this online love triangle was real, and the truth about who Jessi actually was would stun everyone involved. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy is joined by Sabrina Deana-Roga, host of Crimes of Reddit, to trace one of the earliest and most infamous catfishing cases in American history, the layers of deception that fueled it, and the innocent man who paid the price for a fantasy built entirely on lies. Please note, this episode contains discussion of suicidal ideation and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with

You have to see this, except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. Think about the last person you talked to online who you'd never met in person. Maybe it was a stranger in a game or a comment thread or a message that popped up out of nowhere. wherever it happened, you probably pictured a face, an age. You filled in the blanks with whatever the profile told you, and you mostly believe it because why wouldn't you?

Back in 2005, before catfish was even a word people used, that kind of trust was the whole point of the internet. You could log on and be anyone you wanted. For most people, that was harmless. But for a few, the person they invite, invented online started to feel more real than the life they were actually living. And in a factory town outside Buffalo, New York, one of those fantasies collided with a flesh and blood young man named Brian Barrett. Brian was 22, working his way through college to

become a teacher as ordinary and decent as the life he was building. What he couldn't see was that someone else's lie had already twisted into something dangerous, and he was standing right in its path. This is the tall, hot, blonde case. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Today is a special episode of Murder Mystery Fridays because I'm joined by Sabrina Deanna Roga, host of Crime House's newest show, Crimes of Reddit. Thank you so much for having me,

Carter. It is such a pleasure to have you here. And I have to say this newest version of Crimes of is such a smart idea. Every Tuesday, you and Alexis Link Letter take on the darkest true crime stories to come out of Reddit. The posts, the threads, the mysteries that whole communities of strangers try to crack together. You can watch full episodes on YouTube or follow along wherever you get your podcasts. As for today, Sabrina is going to introduce the story and then she'll be back at the end so we can really dig in. We'll get into the case together, talk all things, crimes of Reddit, and send you off with a special preview of the show.

I cannot wait. This is quite a case. Now let's get into it. But before we get started, be advised that this episode touches on suicide and self-harm. Please listen with care. Today's story is one of the first great cautionary tales of the Internet age, and it's one that I covered before on Crimes of. In 2005, a middle-aged factory worker named Thomas Montgomery started chatting with an 18-year-old girl on a gaming website

and fell so hard for a person he'd never met that he blew up his own life to chase her. When a younger man got between them, that obsession curdled into murder. But if you strip away the screen names and the online drama, what's left is painfully human. It's a story about how far someone will go to hold onto a fantasy, and the people who got hurt along the way. All that and more coming up. Picture of a Little League field somewhere in upstate New York on a summer evening. Parents in folding chairs, kids kicking up dust around the bases.

Down near the dugout, one of the coaches is a lanky young guy with an easy smile, the kind who's got more patience for the kids who can't hit yet than the ones who can. By all accounts, that's what Brian Barrett was like. Brian was 22 from Lockport, New York, a small city northeast of Buffalo. He'd gone to Star Point High School, where one of his old coaches later said he couldn't imagine anyone saying a bad word about Brian. By 2006, he was in college, working toward a degree so he could make a career out of what he was already doing on that ball field.

He wanted to teach. The coaching wasn't a one-off. Brian helped with Little League and pitched in on youth soccer. alongside his dad. People who knew him tend to describe the same guy over and over. Easygoing, generous with his time, the one who noticed the kids sitting alone

at the end of the bench. He wasn't the loud one in the room. It was the steady one. To pay for school, Brian worked part-time as a machinist running metal parts at a manufacturing company called Dinah Brade out in the Buffalo suburb of Clarence.

It was steady work on the factory floor, often at night, and it's where he crossed paths with a man more than twice his age, a co-worker who, by the fall of 2006, Brian had every reason to think of as a friend. And the night shift at a place like Dinah Braid throws people together. He spend hours next to the same faces, running machines, killing time on breaks. Brian and this older coworker had always gotten along fine. and they even played some of the same online games in their off hours, which is exactly how Brian ended up close enough to the older man's private life to get tangled up in it.

That co-worker was Thomas Montgomery. On paper, Thomas was about the most ordinary man you could imagine. He was 46 and lived in Cheektawaga, another Buffalo suburb, with his wife Cindy and their two teenage daughters. They'd been married more than 15 years. He went to church. He taught Sunday school. He was president of the swim club his daughters belonged to.

He'd spent six years in the Marine Corps when he was younger and had worked the machines at Dinah Braid for years. From the outside, Thomas seemed like a church-going dad, a veteran, a guy with a steady factory job. The problem was, by 2005, Thomas Montgomery couldn't stand the life he'd created. His marriage had gone cold. By his own account, he and Cindy weren't sleeping together anymore.

His days had flattened into a loop. Wake up, drive to the plant, run the same machine, drive home, dinner, bed, repeat. He loved his family, but he felt like he was disappearing inside his own life. So, like a lot of people in the mid-2000s, he went looking for something to fill, the empty hours online. In May of 2005, Thomas logged on to a website called pogo.com. If you weren't online back then, Pogo was a massively popular casual gaming site, cards, bingo puzzles, with chat rooms attached, where mostly grown adults killed time after work. There were no real names, no profile photos you could trust, no verification of any kind.

Just a screen name and whatever story you felt like telling. This was years before catfish was even a word people used. That wouldn't catch on until around 2010, but the behavior was already everywhere. Because for a certain kind of lonely person, the chat room wasn't just a way too past the time. It was a second shot at being young or beautiful or interesting. you could log off from a life that had disappointed you

and log on as the person you wished you'd become. Thomas's reinvention started with the screen name he picked, Marine Sniper. It was a nod to his six years in the Marines, though even that was a bit of a stretch. He'd qualified as a sharpshooter, but he'd never trained as a sniper, and he'd never seen combat.

Still, the name, made him feel like a stronger, younger version of himself, and that was exactly the man he wanted to become. One night in one of those chat rooms, a message popped up from a screen name he'd never seen. Tall, hot, blonde. Her profile said she was an 18-year-old girl from West Virginia named Jesse. And one of the first things she pointed out was that Thomas was in the wrong place. A room meant for teenagers. When she asked how old he was, he panicked. He didn't want to admit he was a 46-year-old man chatting in a teen's room, so he told her he was 18 too. He later described the decision as almost casual. He figured they'd never actually meet,

so where was the harm and playing along? And just like that, Thomas Montgomery stopped existing and a kid named Tommy took his place. Tommy was everything Thomas wasn't. In the story he told Jesse, he was a young Marine about to ship out to a rock. He was six feet tall, a black belt in karate, with a body covered in scars from combat.

When she wanted to see a photo, he sent one, a picture of himself in uniform. What he didn't mention was the photo was about 30 years old from his own days in boot camp. The real Thomas was balding, heavyset, and wore glasses, but behind the screen, none of that existed. And Thomas didn't just invent a body. He invented a whole tragic life for Tommy.

He told Jesse his mother had died of cancer when he was 12 and spun out a long, sad story about guilt and loss and searching for some kind of purpose. He said that was the reason he'd joined the Marines. He gave Tommy wounds inside and out, and the sadder the story got, the more Jesse seemed to want to take care of him. For a man who'd felt useless for years,

that was the whole draw. He'd finally found someone who needed him, and Jesse fell right along with him. She sent photos of her own, a pretty blonde, smiling, 18-year-old who looked exactly like her screen name promised. And the more they talked, the deeper it went. The messages turned romantic, then explicit. They started talking on the phone.

And Thomas knew how to keep her close. At one point, he told her he'd thought about ending his life until she made him promise to stay alive for her. it was intoxicating. And the way he described it later is chilling. He said the online version of the relationship had become more real to him than his real life. And the lies kept getting more elaborates because they had to. To keep the story going, Thomas started inventing a supporting cast, including Tommy's strict father, Tom Sr. He would occasionally message Jesse himself to explain that his son wasn't allowed on the computer that night.

A grown man was now playing two made-up people just to keep a teenager he'd never met from drifting away. And he committed to the bit completely. He told Jesse he'd gotten her name tattooed on his arm just weeks after they started talking. That wasn't true, but he wanted it to be. It could also be possessive. When Jesse put together a little video montage of their photos set to an Aerosmith song, Thomas didn't melt. He got angry, fixating on a couple of pictures of her he hadn't seen before

and accusing her of sending them to some other man. Then, on Christmas Day 2005, only about eight months after they met, and having never once been in the same room, Tommy asked Jesse to marry him. She said yes. To celebrate, she mailed him a custom set of dog tags engraved with both their names. By now, Thomas wasn't keeping any of this quiet. At the factory, he started bragging to the guys on the floor about his beautiful young girlfriend and his plan to leave his wife and kids and move to West Virginia to start a new life with her.

His coworkers did not find this charming. What they saw was a middle-aged married man fantasizing out loud about running off with an 18-year-old he had never met. Behind his back, some of them called him creep. Meanwhile, at home, Thomas got careful the way people do when they're hiding something. He told Jesse he was deployed to Iraq, which conveniently explained why he could only talk at odd hours in short bursts, early morning or the middle of the afternoon. That was when his wife and daughters were least likely to be around. He was running a secret second life in plain sight in his own house on the

the family computer. None of it slowed him down. As the new year came, he wrote himself a kind of resolution on a notepad at work. On it, he wrote that the 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery would cease to exist and be replaced by an 18-year-old Marine moving to West Virginia to be with the love of his life. He fully believed it was going to happen. But there was a detail Thomas had gotten careless about. All those gifts Jesse mailed him, the letters, the dog tags, they were going to his actual house, the house he shared with his wife. And in February of 2006, the package address to Tommy landed in Thomas's mailbox.

Cindy was the one who found it. Nobody called her husband Tommy, and despite Thomas's best efforts, she could tell something was going on with him. She'd spent months watching him vanish in front of the family computer every night, snapping at their daughters when they wanted a turn, going shifty whenever she asked who he was talking to. Something about that package felt wrong. So she opened it. That one decision set everything else in motion. Because the second Cindy tore open that package, the secret life her husband had built online, stopped being a secret. And it was about to wreck more lives than just his own.

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I'm Josh Mayakowitz, and I hope you'll join us for Season 5 of Dateline Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case, and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery. Search Dateline Missing in America to listen completely free or subscribe. described a dateline premium to unlock new episodes early. In February 2006, Cindy Montgomery opened a package addressed to a man named Tommy and found a pair of women's underwear inside.

Her stomach dropped. She'd spent a long time telling herself there had to be an innocent explanation for the way her husband had been acting, standing at the mailbox in the February cold, holding a stranger's underwear addressed to a version of Thomas she didn't recognize, and that story finally fell apart. She went back into the house and started searching, and it didn't take long to find a hidden stash of women's things her husband had squirled away. Suddenly, all those late nights at the computer made a terrible kind of sense. Cindy went into full detective mode. The family shared an email account and Thomas had used it for the affair, so the trail was right there. Cindy found the

chats. She found the emails. She found the proposal, the dog tags, all of it. And she realized her 46-year-old husband had spent the better part of a year pretending to be an 18-year-old boy so he could chase an actual 18-year-old girl. She confronted him and told him she wanted a divorce. But Cindy also felt something else. Responsibility. There was a teenager on the other end of this who'd been lied to for a year. So Cindy sat down and wrote Jesse a letter by hand.

In it, she laid out every one of Thomas's lies. That Tommy, the young Marine, wasn't real, that he was a middle-aged married father. She tucked in a photo of herself and their daughters, and she warned Jesse to be more careful about who she trusted online. It was a generous thing to do. Cindy had every reason to be furious at the girl she thought had been carrying on with her husband. Instead, she treated Jesse like the victim she figured she was,

a teenager who'd been manipulated by a much older man, and she tried to protect her. Then she moved Thomas down to the basement and started the divorce. Now, if the story ended there, it would just be a sad, strange marriage falling apart. But Jesse didn't take Cindy's warning to heart. Heartbroken and not wanting to believe it, Jesse went back online looking for the truth. She pulled up Marine Sniper's list of online friends and started messaging one of them, a screen name called Beefcake.

That was Brian. Barrett. Remember, Thomas had been bragging about his young girlfriend at work for months, so Brian already knew all about Jesse. When she reached out asking whether the awful things Cindy had written were actually true, Brian confirmed it. Tommy was really Thomas Montgomery, 46, married, two daughters, all of it was a lie. And then Brian did the decent thing. He tried to comfort her. Soon, Brian and Jesse started talking all the time, playing games together on Pogo, and before long, things got romantic. For Brian, now this looked like a trap. From where he sat, Jesse was a girl close to his own age, who'd just been badly deceived by a much

older man. A man Brian knew and had watched act stranger and stranger for months. comforting her and then falling for her was about the most natural thing in the world. The painful part is the contrast. Brian was, in a way, everything Thomas had only pretended to be. He was young. He was close to Jesse's age. He was studying to be a teacher, working an honest job. And unlike Tommy, Brian wasn't lying about a single thing.

But the relationship also had a mean streak running under it, aimed squarely Aunt Thomas. Together, Brian and Jesse decided to punish him. Every time they saw him log on, they'd spread word through the chat rooms that he was a middle-aged man who'd been posing as a teenager to get close to a young girl. They painted him as a predator, and at one point he got kicked out of a chat room entirely. Jesse even handed Brian her password so he could log in as her and torment Thomas directly. It ate at Thomas. The girl he loved had handed her identity to another man,

which meant that at any moment, the messages tearing him apart might be coming from Jesse or from Brian wearing Jesse's name. He couldn't tell which anymore. The one relationship still holding his crumbling life together, had been turned into a weapon and pointed straight back at him. At the factory, it got worse. Brian started talking loudly and openly about dating Jesse right in front of the same men Thomas had bragged to about marrying her.

The guy who'd been fantasizing about his beautiful young fiancé and was now the punchline humiliated in front of everyone. And here is where it gets genuinely tangled, because even while she was seeing Brian, Jesse never fully cut Thomas off. She kept privately messaging him, telling him she still had feelings for him that even though he wasn't who he'd claimed to be, he was still the closest thing to the Tommy she'd fallen for. That meant Thomas was living inside a nightmare of his own making.

In public, he was being mocked and called a. predator. In private, the woman he was obsessed with kept pulling him back in, telling him Brian didn't really matter. The messages from Jesse ran hot and cold, furious with him one minutes, longing for him the next. It sent Thomas deeper. He begged, he threatened. His messages swung from love notes to something much darker. He warned Jesse that if he If she was lying to him, she'd lose something very close to her. He talked about leaking her home address so strangers could find her. Over and over, he'd announce he was going to cut her out of his life for good, and every time

she'd talk him back from the edge. This went on all through the summer of 2006, toxic, unstable, on again, and off again. By now, the man at the center of all this was barely holding together and the people around him could see it. And then at the end of that summer, Thomas found out that Jesse and Brian were talking again after Jesse had promised him she'd stopped. For a man already circling the drain, that was the thing that broke him. And the prosecutor who handled the case later said you could watch it happen right there in

the chat logs. the obsession curdling into jealousy, then into a hunger for revenge. In Thomas's mind, there was exactly one thing standing between him and the life he'd built up in his head, his co-worker, Brian. And this time, it wasn't just talk. In the weeks around all of this, Thomas had actually mentioned to a coworker how he'd kill someone if he ever wanted to, with an old military rifle, sniper style, and he wouldn't leave any shell casings behind. Nobody took him seriously, but they should have. In those final days,

the chats between Thomas and Jesse turned vicious. He hammered her with insults and threats. Then, in the early morning hours of September 15th, he called her and unloaded on her over the phone, and Jesse did the one thing that for Thomas was unforgivable. She calmly ended it for good and hung up. But Thomas thought he could still fix everything. He just had to remove the obstacle. Thomas knew. Brian's schedule at the factory, so on the night of September 15th, 2006, he drove to the dinabrade

parking lot and waited. He dressed for it, camouflage and something to cover his face. He was carrying a 30-caliber rifle and oddly a peach. Some time after 10 p.m., Brian finished his shift and walked out to his pickup truck, parked in an isolated corner of the lot. He had no idea anyone was waiting for him. As Brian climbed into his truck, Thomas raised the rifle and fired three times. The shots tore through the window and struck Brian in the neck and left arm. He died right there in the driver's seat. then Thomas went home and got back on the computer sending Jesse messages that hinted at what he'd just done meanwhile Brian's body stayed in that pickup in the far corner of the lot until a co-worker spotted the truck two days later on September 17th and found him he'd been killed at the end of an

ordinary shift and a lot he pulled into every day by a man he worked right alongside he was 22 years old and the strangest part of this whole story was still to come because the girl at the center of it all the one two grown men had just torn each other apart over wasn't who any of them thought she was Not the police, not Brian. Not even the man who pulled the trigger had the faintest idea who was really on the other end of that screen. The investigation into Brian Barrett's death came together faster than Thomas Montgomery ever imagined, and it came together through the people around him. For weeks, co-workers had heard Thomas Fume about Brian. Some had even heard him talk about how to get away with murder.

So when Brian turned up shot to death in the company parking lot, more than one person picked up the phone and pointed the police straight at Thomas Montgomery. From there, the detectives pulled Brian's cell phone, and they found Jesse's number in it. Reading back through the messages, they uncovered the whole love triangle in Thomas's months of escalating threats. That's when the investigators got scared for the girl at the center of it. If Thomas had killed Brian over her, then Jesse might be next. On the way one of the investigators put it, their first concern was simply making sure she was still alive.

They called the number and reached her. Then, just to be safe, they arranged for a local officer in West Virginia to go knock on Jesse's door in person. And that knock is where this case cracks wide open. When the officer got to the house, a woman answered the door. She was 45-year-old Mary Shiler, and she said she was Jessie's mother. She also told the officer that Jesse wasn't home and couldn't be reached, which made no sense. Police had just been talking to Jesse on the phone.

The more they pressed, the more evasive Mary got, until finally she broke down and confessed. the thing nobody in this story had seen coming. There was no 18-year-old girl. There never had been. Mary Shiler was tall-hot blonde. She had been the one messaging Thomas Montgomery and then Brian Barrett this entire time, posing as an 18-year-old using her own daughter's name and photos to do it.

The real Jesse was a real person. and those really were her pictures, but she'd had no idea any of it was happening. She had never spoken to Thomas Montgomery. She had never spoken to Brian Barrett. Her own mother had been living a secret double life in her name. And this is the strangest turn in the whole case. It's also the darkest.

Mary had been quietly taking photos of her teenage daughter, some of them in swimsuits at the pool and sending them to grown men online, along with pieces of her daughter's underwear. To be clear, prosecutors said the photos weren't nude, but she was using her own child's face and body to run a fantasy, and her daughter never consented to any of it. Those photos that first drew Thomas in, the pretty smiling teenager who seemed to match the screen name so perfectly, were pictures of an actual 18-year-old girl, one who had no idea she was being used as bait to reel in grown men. In a case built almost entirely out of invented people, she was one more real person quietly turned into a lie by the one adult who was supposed to protect her. When it all came out, Mary offered her own explanations. She said her connection to Tommy had felt more motherly than romantic, that he seemed lonely and lost. She claimed that once

she knew Thomas was a fraud, she kept talking to him because she'd rather he fixate on her than on some real teenage girl. And she said that when it came to Brian, she just didn't know how to turn him away without admitting who she really was. You can decide for yourself how much of that holds up. What's not in doubt is the result. Two lonely people in their 40s had each invented a beautiful teenager to hide behind, fallen for each other's fictions, and dragged one genuinely honest young man into the middle of it. The detail that outraged a lot of people was this.

Mary Shiler never faced a single charge. Investigators looked hard for something to pin on her, but in 2006, catfishing simply wasn't a crime. She had trampled every ethical line there was, but she hadn't broken a law. The one person the law could reach was Thomas Montgomery. He was arrested on November 27, 2006, and charged with second-degree murder. At first, he denied everything. He claimed he'd gone out to dinner that night and made it home before Brian ever got off work. And in a detail that tells you how far gone he was, he tried to pin the blame on Tommy,

talking about his online persona like it was a separate person he couldn't control. But the evidence buried him starting with that peach. Thomas had spit the pit out in the parking lot. and investigators found it at the scene. The trouble was Thomas refused to give them a DNA sample, so during questioning, when he asked for something to drink, and they handed him a can of Mountain Dew, they just waited. When he left the can behind, they swabbed it,

and the DNA on the can match the DNA on the peach pit. Then there was the rifle. When police asked about his guns, Thomas showed them his gun cabinet, and the old military rifle wasn't in it. But hanging on the wall of his house was a family photo, and in the background of that photo was the very same gun cabinet with the rifle sitting right there.

On top of that, his computer had thousands of messages, including the threats he'd sent in the days before the killing. There's a grim irony in how it all came undone. For years, Thomas had built himself up online as Marine sniper, the cold, capable professional who'd brag to a coworker that when he killed someone, he'd do it cleanly, sniper style, and leave nothing behind. But there was nothing professional about any of this,

and in the end, the master's sniper was tripped up by the most ordinary things imaginable. A soda can, he forgot to take with him, a peach pit left on the pavement and a photo hanging on his own living room wall. On August 20, 2007, Thomas Montgomery pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter. Then he tried to take it back, asking to withdraw the plea and stand trial instead. His attorney floated a defense nobody had really tried before, the argument that the internet had so blurred the long, between fantasy and reality that Thomas hadn't been in his right mind.

If the case had gone to trial, it might have been the first defense of its kind in the country. A man arguing that living online had erased his grip on what was real. Whatever you make of that as a legal strategy, it gets at something true about this case. Thomas had spent so long being Tommy that by the end, it wasn't clear if he knew. where the character stopped and he began. The judge wasn't having it. November 27, 2007, exactly one year after his arrest, state Supreme Court Justice Penny Wolfgang refused to let Thomas withdraw the plea

and sentenced him to 20 years in prison with five years of supervision after that. Thomas was 48 years old and by then his divorce was final. during the case he'd been placed on suicide watch more than once. Brian's father stood up in that courtroom and spoke about his son. A young man who'd been a student leader with an easy smile who wanted to spend his life teaching kids, he said he couldn't understand how someone could gun down a boy over simple jealousy. The judge called it a totally senseless killing,

and the prosecutor said that in all his years, Thomas was about the most manipulative defendant he'd ever faced. For the Barrett's, the plea was a bitter kind of comfort. They'd hoped for the maximum, 25 years, but they were told that 20 years on a guilty plea meant more certain prison time than a murder trial might have delivered, so they accepted it. But none of it brought their son back.

Meanwhile, Mary Shilers' life came apart in its own quiet way. Her husband divorced her over the deception. As for the real Jesse, she didn't even learn what her mother had done until the murder made it public. Once she did, she cut ties with Mary and moved away, living with relatives while she started college. Mary spoke publicly about the case exactly once to the BBC, and all she did her. she really said was that it had been stupid and that it never should have happened. In the aftermath, Brian's family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Thomas, against Mary Shiler, and against Dinabrade. Part of their argument was that the warning signs

had been sitting in plain sight. They pointed to the threats, the chat logs, the open hostility at work, the man who talked out loud about how he'd kill someone. They said the people around Thomas could have stopped it before it ever reached the parking lot. However, the case was ultimately settled, that argument is hard to shake. A lot of people watched the danger in Thomas Montgomery build for months, and nobody managed to stop it. As for Thomas, he served his time in New York's prison system. According to recent reporting on the case, he was released in early 2004, after roughly 17 years behind bars, and remains under supervision, although those claims haven't been verified. When I step back from all the strangeness in this case, the fake Marine, the fake

teenager, the underwear in the mail, the whole cast of people who weren't real, I keep coming back to one simple, brutal fact, the two people pretending to be someone else. Thomas Montgomery invented a young soldier named Tommy. Mary Shiler did something colder. She used her own teenage daughter's name and face to become a girl named Jesse. Two lonely middle-aged strangers reached their 40s, decided their best days were behind them

and built younger, more exciting versions of themselves, to escape into. And the cruelest detail of all, Thomas and Mary never met. They never met. even knew each other's real names. Two strangers fell in love with each other's inventions. And the only person who died for it was the one man in this story, but was telling the truth. Brian Barrett didn't have an alter ego. He didn't lie about his age or his job or his face.

He was just a 22-year-old who was kind to a girl he thought was hurting and who happened to work at the same factory floor as a man losing his grip on reality. And he's the one who paid for all of it. He never got to finish school. He never got to stand in front of a classroom or coach another season or grow out of being 22. We tend to remember this case for the twist, for the shock of who was really on the other end of that screen. That's the part that made it famous. It spawned a documentary, a TV movie, and 100 reads.

tellings, almost all of them built around that reveal. But the twist isn't the story. The story is that a genuinely good young man was killed over a person who never existed. And more than anyone else caught up in it, Ryan Barrett deserves to be remembered as exactly what he was. Real. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people that affected. But first, like I promised, it's time for an extended conversation with Sabrina Deanna-Roga, host of Crime House's newest show, Crimes of Reddit. And be sure to stick around after because we've got a special preview of the show coming your way. Sabrina, there is nobody. I wanted to break this one down with more than you.

Because for all of its twists, Tall Hot Blonde is an internet story from the very beginning. It starts with a screen name in a chat room and it ends in a factory parking lot. That space where the person someone invents online collides with a real flesh and blood life is exactly where your new show lives. That's totally right, Carter. The internet didn't invent people pretending to be someone they're not. It just gave them a bigger place to do it. And this case is basically the blueprint.

And I honestly could talk about it all day. I can talk about it the entire week. This case kind of blows my mind as we've been talking about. before. Crimes of Reddit is one of my favorite show concepts for a true crime show in a long time. And there's a lot of true crime out there. So I'm impressed that there's something that feels this new and innovative. So tell everybody what it is, how it works and what these Reddit cases are really like. Yeah. I mean, each week we'll be covering different themes in the Reddit true crime space. So stalkers to relationship drama, to finding out that your dad wasn't really who he said he was and who you thought you grew up with. Yeah, and it's kind of disturbing, but also really, really fascinating because I think people feel safe posting their truths on Reddit because there's this anonymity. And then also, similarly, people feel very safe to weigh in and give their opinions. I'm sure there's a lot of that totally. Like, it's a place where some of the darker stuff might come out a little easier than the real world in some way.

So it is the right place to dig. And now a big part of why the show works is your specific. to the crime? What's your process like and how do you tell a true crime story the right way, especially when the material does get dark? Yeah, it does get heavy. I think the nice thing with this show is that it's not always ending in murder. So there's a little bit more levity. But yeah, it's hard because you're looking at humanity and realizing there is a really, really dark side to it. That someone you've lived your entire life with might be someone completely different is like a harsh truth to face. Yeah. And now is that something that, do you find it affecting you when you're like,

wow, this is out there a little more than I realized? Or like, because it's not just murder. It really is like, oh, it's not that bad, but there's still some crazy things going on out there. Yeah. It makes you not trust everyone. But then I also, you know, I grew up with interesting, complex family dynamics that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. And some of these stories make me feel less alone, you know? So there's connection in it as well. Totally. Seeing what everybody is trying to navigate sometimes poorly, unsuccessfully, but you're like, yeah, it's not easier, simple, for anybody out there. Okay, last thing before we send everybody your way.

In a lot of ways, this case is the perfect crimes of Reddit story. It just happens to have arrived before Reddit even existed. Everything that played out, though, was behind a screen name, a fake Marine, a fake teenager, a relationship that felt more real than real life, and two lonely people who fell in love with each other's inventions. Sabrina, I know this isn't your first time with it. You covered Tall Hot Blonde back on Crimes of.

So what is it about this case so tangled up in the Internet that sticks with you? And how does it connect to the kind of stories you're telling now? Yeah, I mean, when I first heard the story, I was like, how was this real? But then I also understand where you can create this whole new reality online. And you can pretend to be someone else and you just get caught up in it. But it's devastating. It's a really, really tragic end. to, you know, we talked about before recording this episode, if they had just confessed being

themselves and that they were unhappy in their relationships, could they have found a connection just by themselves? But maybe they wanted to get caught up in a fantasy. And that's why I feel like it is such the internet cautionary tale. And also it makes sense that it happened early. It's like, it almost feels inevitable to me that something like this would happen where you're like, oh my God, what if these two middle-aged people had just been like, hey, I'm lost and lonely. Me too. And yet you're like, no, it's the invention that we all know from putting on the facade of like, even on social media, even if you're portraying yourself, there's a slight facade and presentation to it. Even in dating in general. Like, you know, when you start a relationship via texting, you're kind of performing. Yeah, this case is truly the kind of perfect symbol of what's on the internet and what is going to make your show so amazing. So Sabrina, thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for having me. Always great to talk with you. And please, everybody, check out. Crimes of Reddit. And a reminder to everyone listening, go follow Crimes of Reddit wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube for full video episodes. New episodes drop every Tuesday and stick around because right after this, we've got a special preview of the show. Murder, True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media. at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder, true crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad-free. No waiting for part two. Plus, ad-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episode.

every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios.

This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Bertofsky, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. My mother-in-law suddenly passed away in a car accident last month. At the same time, my stalker disappeared. Coincidence? Probably not. Probably not. Oh, that's so sad. Messed up. So my mother-in-law and I have never had a good relationship. She has tried to sabotage my relationship with my husband since the day she met me. I wasn't good enough for her handsome and successful boy.

Which is a crime on its own of like women protecting their sons like this and being obsessive with their children. My handsome successful boy. Vomit. Anyways. You can think your child is successful without being obsessed with them. And you can think they're handsome without babying an adult man. Yeah. I contemplated ending my relationship several times, but my husband always showed that he is on my side and I love him.

Okay, that's good. A few years ago, I started getting very threatening and scary emails and texts from a Pax. So Pax is the name of the texter emailer. This Pax knew everything about me. It didn't matter how many emails and phone numbers I changed. They or he always found me. I made several reports, but nothing happened. My husband tried everything to trace these emails.

Nothing came out of it. Okay, so this is going in the direction of what's that documentary where the mom was That documentary unknown number. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so this is the direction it's going in because I went when you read that like subreddit or the title of the post, I thought it was going to be like the stalker accidentally killed the mother-in-law. But now we're like, oh. Okay.

Okay. Well, yeah. And to torment your own high school daughter is so deranged. Yeah. It's like that is a dangerous, dangerous woman. And we'll talk about how tangled relationships are when you even find out your parent is doing something like this, how hard it would be to accept. But the husband in this situation was really helpful in trying to get to the bottom. Which I appreciate. Great husband.

Green flag there. Totally. So no matter what, Pax always found her. And she was under the impression that Pax was a guy based on the language that. was being used. And the original poster says, I made several reports, but nothing happened. And this past year, I basically never left the apartment alone. So saying that she got so scared of this, that it was, she was afraid to leave the house. To be alone, yeah. So she says, I haven't received a single threatening text or email from Pax in a month. After a few days, I wasn't surprised.

I felt like I always knew it was my mother-in-law deep down. My husband hasn't reacted yet. He's consumed with his grief and I don't want to bother him, especially when he bitterly told me, you must be very pleased now when we heard the news and I tried to comfort him. He apologized later and said he was just feeling guilty that he loved and chose me more than he loved her. Well, that's so complicated. Yeah. That's so complicated. And also, it would be one thing to find out your mom was this like PACS person while she's still alive.

but to be dealing with the grief of losing your mom, regardless of how complicated your relationship is, you could hate your parent, and if they die, people still have so much grief and that feeling of loss. It's primal. They're the most foundational relationships

human beings can have. I mean, they mold who we are, and we feel totally intertwined with them. So it makes total sense, like it's impossible to let go. Oh, that's so sad. So she continues. Okay. Now I'm waiting for my husband to connect the dots.

Will he get it? If he does, will he talk to me about it? I don't know if I will ever bring it up to him. Also, I won't relax and go back to my normal life just yet. But I know in my heart that it's over and I can't be happier about my life. Well, yeah. And she's entitled to feel that relief because she was being tormented by this woman. Also, I'm curious if, and maybe this will be in updates, but

when like you lose someone and you like start to go through their things do they find anything that proves it was i've actually heard a lot of stories like that yeah where you know one story i heard was this woman was dealing with like constant people stealing her identity constantly and like basically her financial life was in ruins and when her mom died she found all the documents that it was her mom and then it's like you can't do anything with the anger yeah because they're gone yeah crazy So do you think you'd tell the husband or do you think you'd wait? I would wait because I would empathize so much with their processing the grief.

And then I would be able to like sit with my relief of it being over. But I wouldn't want to throw that on them. Right. What about you? I think I would have started accusing the mother-in-law the second I suspected it. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of like. Yeah. I'm not, I can't be calculating like that.

Yeah. So my husband at the time of her death would have already known that I thought it I do agree with that, but I think if you didn't put it together until after, I wouldn't. Yes. Choose then. Yeah, I wouldn't choose then. To bring it up for the first time. Yeah. Hi, it's Carter.

Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this, except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube.