Nobody Should Believe Me - Revisiting Season One: Sisters

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

We're going back to the beginning with an extended version of our very first episode! Be sure to stay tuned until the end for a special postscript with Andrea as she gives a behind-the-scenes look at how this show began. *** We meet accomplished novelist and loving mother Andrea Dunlop as she embarks on a journey to understand the series of events that tore her family apart. We learn that her older sister has been investigated twice for Munchausen by Proxy abuse, which inspired Andrea to learn everything she could about this complex and misunderstood issue. We see Andrea become captivated by the story of Hope Ybarra and go along with her to meet Hope’s father, sister, and brother: the first people Andrea has ever spoken to who’ve actually lived through a case. But can anything prepare Andrea for the truth? Click here to view our sponsors. Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   If you have a story about medical child abuse that you are ready to share you can tag @andreadunlop, email [e-mail] or leave us a voicemail at [phone]   Follow host Andrea Dunlop on Instagram for behind-the-scenes photos: @andreadunlop  Buy Andrea’s books here.  Note: This episode contains sensitive content related to child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.  Download the APSAC's practice guidelines here.  ***  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True Story Media. And we have some really big things in store for 2024. We're going to be bringing you two full seasons, and we're going to be bringing you new content every week in the feed. So we are officially an always-on podcast, which I am really excited about. And we are starting with a look back at the very first season of the show, which aired in 2022, but I actually made mostly in 2021. So if this is your first time hearing these episodes, welcome to the first chapter of our show. And if you have already heard these episodes, please do stay tuned because after each episode, I'm going to be including an update either with just me, where I'm going to be sharing some behind thescenes stories, some reflections on the making of this show, some stuff I have never talked about before.

And in a few cases, we are going to be following up with guests from that season and getting updates on how their lives have unfolded since they talked to us and just what it was like for them to be on the show. So in the meantime, between now and season four, we're also going to be bringing you new episodes on what's happening in Lehigh, Pennsylvania. We're going to be bringing you an update on the Kowalski case and some other stuff as well. If you want even more from us in the meantime, you can subscribe on Patreon or on Apple,

and we've got lots of exclusive bonus content there, including full coverage of the Kowalski trial, recaps of the Gypsy Rose Blanchard Lifetime series, and coming up, I'm going to be doing a deep dive with Dr. Becks, who is my frequent contributor there, on the Justina Pelletier case, which is something that a lot of you have asked about. So in the meantime, please enjoy the very first episode of Nobody Should Believe Me. Well, friends, it's 2025. It's here. This year is going to be, well,

one thing it won't be is boring. And that's about the only prediction I'm going to make right now. But one piece of news that I am excited to share is that the wait for my new book, The Mother Next Door, is almost over. It is coming at you on February 4th from St. Martin's Press. So soon! I co-authored this book with friend and beloved contributor of this show, Detective Mike Weber, about three of the most impactful cases of his career. Even if you are one of the OG-est of OG listeners to this show, I promise you are going to learn so many new and shocking details about the three cases we cover. We just go into so much more depth on these stories. And you're also going to learn a ton about Mike's story.

Now, I know y'all love Detective Mike because he gets his very own fan mail here at Nobody Should Believe Me. And if you've ever wondered, how did Mike become the detective when it came to Munchausen by proxy cases, you are going to learn all about his origin story in this book. And I know we've got many audiobook listeners out there, so I'm very excited to share with you the audiobook is read by me, Andrea Dunlop, your humble narrator of this very show. I really loved getting to read this book and I'm so excited to share this with you. If you are able to pre-order the book, doing so will really help us out. It will signal to our publisher that there is excitement about the book and it will also give us a shot at that all-important bestseller list. And of course, if that's simply not in the budget right now, we get it. Books are not cheap. Library sales are also extremely important for books. So putting in a request at your local library is another, which you can also find more information about at the link in our show notes. These events will be free to attend, but please do RSVP so that we can plan accordingly.

See you out there. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what.

Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Playoff football is here with BetMGM. And as an official sportsbook partner of the NFL, BetMGM is the best place to fuel your football fandom on every game day. With a variety of exciting features, BetMGM offers you plenty of seamless ways to jump straight onto the gridiron and to embrace peak sports action. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

Must be 19 years of age or older. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance, call the Connex Ontario helpline at 1-866-531-2600. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com

to connect with professionals who can help. People believe their eyes. That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this, is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If you questioned everything that everyone told you, you couldn't make it through your day. My older sister has been investigated over suspicions of abuse brought by the doctors who were treating her children.

I'm Andrea Dunlop. This is Nobody Should Believe Me. I am a mom. I am a novelist. I am the author of three books, including most recently We Came Here to Forget, which is inspired by my family's story. My sister has been investigated for Munchausen by proxy child abuse on two occasions that I'm aware of, though I want to be clear that she has never been charged with a crime. I'll get into a little bit more detail about my family's involvement in the first investigation in a future episode. The second investigation concerned her younger child, whom neither I nor anyone in my extended family has ever met because we've been estranged

from her for over a decade. The extent of my involvement in the second investigation was to share truthful background information with a detective who reached out to my family and several other relevant authorities. Everything that has happened with my sister has had a huge impact on my life, and this podcast is really about me looking for answers. The stories I'm going to be sharing about my sister in this podcast concern my lived experience with her and mostly happened prior to her having children. I'm not a medical professional, and any opinions that I share in this podcast are just that, my opinions, informed by research and my own experience. We're going to be getting into all of the nuances of this in future episodes, but I wanted to start you off with a working definition of Munchausen by proxy, because there is so much confusion around this term.

We used the term Munchausen by proxy a lot in this podcast because it is the most well-known of the terms used for this. But Munchausen by proxy actually encompasses two different things. One is the act of medical child abuse, which involves a parent or caregiver fabricating, exaggerating, or inducing illness in their child. The second is factitious disorder imposed on another, which is the DSM term for individuals who commit medical child abuse in order to obtain emotional gratification. So even though this is a mental illness, it is rarely diagnosed and it's never diagnosed in the absence of a conviction for medical child abuse. Even in the most famous case of our era, the Dede Blanchard case,

she was never officially diagnosed with infectious disorder imposed on another or Munchausen by proxy. She was also never charged with a crime. When I started writing my third novel, We Came Here to Forget, I really quickly realized that it was going to be about sisters. And then I started getting into the topic

of Munchausen by proxy more directly and realized that it just felt very urgent for me to write about. And I think that a huge part of that was because I was working through my own feelings about that while I was getting ready to become a mom. When I first came across Hopi Abara's case, it was in Deanna Boyd's reporting for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. There were just these uncanny similarities about really Hope's life and the story of her family that struck me right away as being so similar to my sister and my family's story.

When I was pregnant with my first child, the specter of these investigations into my sister and my family's story. When I was pregnant with my first child, the specter of these investigations into my sister just hung really heavily on me. And in addition to that, you know, her absence from my life during this time was really palpable. She'd been out of my life for many years by the time my daughter was born. And after some of the things that she'd done, which I'll get to, I felt really strongly that she needed help.

Because of that, she cut me and my entire family off. After the second time she was investigated, I set out to learn everything I could about Munchausen by proxy in an attempt to come to grips with what had happened in my family. As most people would, I went online and I found the website of Dr. Mark Feldman, who is a professor at the University of Alabama and one of the foremost experts in the world on Munchausen by proxy and other factitious disorders. And I reached out to him. The American Psychiatric Association since 1980 has recognized factitious disorder as an ailment when the person induces or feigns illness in themselves. And that's called either factitious disorder imposed on self or more

commonly Munchausen syndrome. When the person is feigning, exaggerating or inducing illness in another person, that's still a factitious disorder, but we refer to it often as Munchausen by proxy. And then malingering is when a person does it not for emotional gratification, but more to acquire tangible goals like money, disability payments, or other rewards like evasion of criminal prosecution or evasion of military service. So there are subtle differences, but they're important because in some sense, Munchausen by proxy is paramount because it's a form of child abuse. The others are not. have Munchausen, that psychopathology, they get a dopamine rush from the attention that they get for having a medical issue. So it can be seen like an addiction. So when you understand it in those

terms, it's a lot easier to understand the why. It's a maladaptive coping mechanism that people use to get attention that they feel they need and can't get otherwise. Why a particular person develops it, that is more of a mystery than what it actually is or like how it functions. So all I knew was that my big sister had lied to me about something really serious. And that is a very hard thing to wrap your head around. I've spent the last decade of my life trying to make sense of my history with my sister. And it is complicated. And it's complicated to talk about. The truth is, there is so much about our shared history that I will never know. And I find myself still trying to make sense of memories that don't make any sense.

There are some incidents where I do know definitively that she lied. And those are the memories that I can share with you. Many others, I can't. So I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Munchausen by proxy at the time. I was doing interviews on the topic. I was talking to a lot of experts. And throughout all of that, you know, I found that this story of Hope Ybarra and her family just really stuck with me. I just had this very strong feeling that I could get to the bottom of something that I needed answered for myself by talking to Hope and her family. I started trying to get in touch with Hope's family members.

I knew she had three siblings. I reached out to Robin Putscher, and she just happened to be living at the time about an hour and a half south of me. So she was actually the first person that I sat down to talk to face to face. You ready? My producer Tina and I, who both live in Seattle, drove south to the Tacoma area where Robin was living at the time. She's so nice to me. You too. Yes, I'm such a hugger.

Me too. I do have a dog. Perfect. So what was Hope like growing up? She was like the perfect sister. You know, she was the perfect student. She was the oldest, and she had all the responsibility in the house. And she never let that bother her.

You know, like parents put a lot of weight on their kids, especially a mom of four. Dinners and getting us in the shower and the laundry. And that was all Hope's kind of responsibility. And she just carried it. It wasn't like at the end of the day, she goes, I shouldn't have to do this. Or why do I have to make dinner? She just carried it. It wasn't like at the end of the day she goes, I shouldn't have to do this or why do I have to make dinner? She just did it. As I was talking to Robin,

that feeling that I'd started out with of Hope's life and family being a parallel to my own was just deepening in this really extraordinary way. I really wanted to talk to the rest of her family and just fill this picture out. And so I was able to get in touch with her father, Paul Putcher, and her younger brother, Nick Putcher, who both live in Fort Worth, Texas. My name is Paul Putcher. I'm the father of Hopi Bar. We didn't really notice anything, any issues whatsoever, before anything started happening.

And it was, everything was cool. Hope's younger brother, Nick, really looked up to her during their childhood. So Hope was the oldest of the four of us. We were really, really close, especially as I got into high school. And that's really where my relationship with Hope had grown a lot. She was the first person in my family that had gone to college. Mom and dad were always really proud. She did really well. She was doing well in her life. And it was kind of an inspiration for me. I could talk to her about what she had gone through, how she got to where she's at,

and lean on her for kind of a resource because I wanted to go to school. I wanted to eventually be able to help take care of mom and dad and do all of that stuff. Again, Robin, Hope's younger sister. You know, she participated in all of our stuff. My brother and my sports events and she would take us. She would be our taxi, our chauffeur. And she still had such an exuberant social life. You know, she had friends and she was in clubs and she was in marching band.

In jazz band, she played the saxophone and then she played the clarinet in marching band, you know, and she could play the piano and her and my mom shared that commonality. I could never learn, you know, she just was very outgoing. I'm just sitting here smiling because I think talking about this part, it reminds me so much. You know, my sister was so fun. She had this incredibly lighthearted personality. She was magnetic. She was smart. She always had a ton of friends. She had this really close circle of friends from band. She played the French horn. I looked up to her in terms of, you know, just in the way that little sisters look up to big sisters. She just seemed to have things, you know, more figured out. She always had boyfriends. She's incredibly warm, very smart, and so funny. It's so silly.

People loved her. Pretty, green eyes, really all-American girl next door. Sounds like Hopeless, really similar. So striking to me. That's scary. Yeah, it's almost like it's a little eerie. There was certainly a definitive moment where I lost my sister. You know, 10 years ago, I remember really vividly having what may turn out to be the final conversation that I have with her in my life. But at the same time, I also felt like I lost her little by little. In my memory, there's a person who is this funny, vibrant person with all of these interests, someone who's a swimmer, loves horses, and who was the partner in crime to all my childhood adventures, someone who was this loving, warm person. And she just disappeared little by little over the years, and her strange behaviors just escalated.

Here's Hope Ybarra's father, Paul Putscher, who told me about an incident that happened to Hope in high school. So, you know, it really wasn't until about 16 when she fell out of bed. We just tiled her floor, and she fell on the tile floor and hurt her back, supposedly. Like, she couldn't walk, and she fell on the tile floor and hurt her back supposedly like she couldn't walk and she was uh you know she was in a wheelchair for a couple months and thinking back this was probably the first sign of something's amok but being young parents ourselves we just kind of blew right through it and rolled her around in the wheelchair and she was in the band. And so we went to Texas Stadium, and the football team was playing in playoffs,

and the band was out on the field, and we rolled her out in her uniform out onto the field. And my boss got to roll her back, and we're doing wheelies and everything. And it was a good six months, eight months of heavy caregiving, heavy, you know, heavy, heavy love for all of us. And finally she got better, but there was no rhyme or reason. Two or three doctors said there's nothing wrong with her. There's no reason she shouldn't be walking.

My sister had the same thing at the same age, not from falling out of bed, but she had, when she was 16, she was really active, had always been healthy. She was a swimmer and she had this mysterious back injury and it wouldn't go away. And she was wearing this big plastic brace. She convinced doctors to do surgery on her. I want to clarify here that I didn't know then, and I still don't know, how many of my sister's ailments that she had in high school and beyond were real and how many were fabricated. She had a series of surgeries on her back and knee

that look different to me and my family now, looking back, knowing what we know. There is one incident that stuck with me because we did have evidence. When she was in high school, she started losing her hair. Obviously, that is like the sort of nightmarish thing for a teenage girl.

My mom took her to the dermatologist to have a look at it, and the dermatologist pulled my mother aside and said, she's not losing it, she's shaving it. That was a very definitive, like, oh, we know that she was faking that. I think my parents tried to get her to go speak to a therapist at the time,

and she just sort of blew them off. You know, she was always able to explain these things away. She always had an uncanny ability to just sort of like move forward. My parents have gone through all that same thing of like in the light of what happened after. But, you know, so much of what doctors base everything off of is what the patient's reporting their pain to be, right? Again, Robin. So seizures in high school,

and then the paraplegia that came along with that, and then her miraculous recovery came about her senior year. So her goal was to be able to walk across the stage. So she managed to be able to regain her ability to walk just in time to be able to walk across the stage and graduate. And then she was walking, and then she went to college. Yeah, it was really similar with my sister, actually. It was, there are things that I think for my parents,

they can look back even further. For me, definitely high school is where, yeah, she started having all these problems with her knee, with her back. She had a couple of surgeries. And even then, it's just, you know, the doctors were basing what they were doing off of what she was saying. That summer, they packed her up and they brought her to school over in El Paso, Texas. And it was this very typical taking your child to the university. My mom and dad went and helped her pack into her dorm.

And she was doing great, you know, very typical things. She was participating in band, obviously. She also picked up jujitsu and was taking classes at night to be able to, you know, defend herself. And she was all of a sudden just thriving again in school. And then my mom got a call that Hope had had a seizure at school. They had found her in her dorm on the ground. And so my mom, of course, rushed down there

and mortified that her daughter is so far away and needing her. And so she got her back on her feet, got her back into school, made sure everything was fine. Then when she was in college, she'd met her husband-to-be, Fabian Ybarra, and they had actually had their first child while Hope was still in school. She managed to have this baby, and she supposedly had complications, broke her tailbone. So my mom was there nursing her back to health, you know, with this new dad and this new mom and the new dad didn't know how to take care of a child. And they shared funny stories. He peed on them, the first diaper change. And still at this point, she was a couple of years into her

schooling. She was going to become a veterinarian. She decided now as a new mom that she couldn't do that because she had to take care of the family. And so she changed her program and got her degree in chemistry. And so then they got married, a great, beautiful wedding, and had another child after that. Very typical family she was working, is a chemist. He was a school teacher. They were raising their now two children. They had a home. Just, I could say, the all-American dream.

Even at this point, everything we have been through, nothing said something wasn't right. It really seemed like Hope had everything someone could want, including a happy marriage and beautiful family. When we spoke to Fabian Ybarra in Fort Worth, he had a somewhat different take on things. I don't think we were in love. I think we were just trying to make it work. After the second year, my son, I think that's when it started. Something clicked. I believe when my first daughter, the middle child, when she was born, that was, that's when you saw everything changed. And they had a two-story house, and seven months along, Hope fell down the stairs and went into preterm labor. And so here this baby was born.

28 weeks, she was a pound and a half or some ridiculously small weight, and she spent months in the NICU. And so here we are now, a family dedicated to taking care of Hope and her family and her kids, and she's power-throwing everything and still being a devout mom and wife and managing it all so well. That's whenever you could start to see that things were changing a little bit with Hope. I can't even say that she lost her light at that point, but that's what sets the rest of things into motion.

After Hope had her second child with Fabian, she later told her family that she was pregnant with twins. This detail of the pregnancy with twin girls really stuck with me because we'd had an identical situation in my family where my sister told us that she was pregnant with twins. So when I was in my 20s, she was with a partner, and she got pregnant. You know, they were engaged, so it was a really exciting thing. It was like a really happy piece of news. And she told us that she was having twins and they were twin girls.

And I was living in New York at the time. I saw her when I was home for Thanksgiving and I was so excited. I knew their names. We bought gifts. My parents and I, we were all out of town. I think we were out of town together. We were in Las Vegas. And my sister called us. She was about six months pregnant at the time, so pretty far along.

She called us, and she said that she was going into labor early, and she was going to the hospital, and my parents scrambled to get a flight home. She was calling and giving us updates and I was having these long conversations with her and she was saying, they've got me in the hospital. They've, I'm, you know, they're holding me upside down so the babies stay in, kind of like a little bit gallows humor about it. And, she lost the babies. And I was so sad. I was so sad for her. I was so excited to be an auntie. And I really felt that grief of like losing those two little girls. And then things started to unravel really quickly. I think it was my dad

who called me and said, you know, there's something about all of this that's not adding up. And I spoke to the friend who my sister had told me took her to the hospital when she was losing the babies. That friend told me she had the understanding that my sister's fiancé had been the one to take her to the hospital and that they'd been there together when she lost the babies. That was impossible because he was living in Tennessee at the time and, unbeknownst to me at that moment, was no longer her fiancé. When I got his version of events many years later, he told me that he'd had doubts

throughout the pregnancy and eventually surmised that she had probably never been pregnant at all, which is the conclusion that we'd all eventually come to. I did confront her on this once during my final conversation with her that I had, which was during the first investigation into her. And I asked her how she expected me to believe her when she'd lied about something as serious as an entire pregnancy. She didn't deny it, but said indignantly, I don't know why you're bringing that up now. This fact of the fake twin pregnancy is the most striking similarity between my sister and Hope. And I asked Robin about it.

Do you remember finding out that the pregnancy hadn't been real? So I remember her losing the twins and us coming and mourning with her. My sister's belly was very real. I saw the ultrasounds. I held them. My sister was pregnant in that moment in my mind. So when my sister was pregnant purportedly with twins, I put my hand on her belly and felt the baby kick. And I now know that that wasn't real, but my experience was real, and I don't even know what to do with that. The twins that she lost were Alexandria and Alexia, so my son's name is Alexander after the twins,

that come to find out they never existed. It took us probably a couple months to realize that the babies weren't true. We mourned these babies. The final deciding factor is my mom found the urn. And she opened up the urn and it was empty. That, to my mom, was enough closure to realize that my sister was not telling the truth about anything. For me, the thing that I could never do and that I do not foresee having an opportunity to do in my life is to sit down with my sister And say. I can help you. But that's true.

That I could help her. Like one of the things I've really wrestled with. In this podcast. That I didn't really even realize. I was holding on to. Is this hope that I'll do this. And that she'll hear it. And say.

I'm exhausted. I want to come home. Help me come home. What's up, Spotify? This is Javi. I remember this one time we were on tour. We didn't have any guitar picks, and we didn't have time to go to the store,

so we placed an order on Prime, and it got there the next day, ready for the show. Whatever you're into, it's on Prime. I want to tell you about a show I love, Truer Crime from Cilicia Stanton. My favorite true crime shows are the ones where I feel like the creator has a real stake in what they're talking about. And this is definitely the case with Cilicia, who got interested in covering crime because like many of us in this genre,

she experienced it. In each episode of the show, Cilicia brings a personal, deeply insightful lens to the crime that she covers, whether it's a famous case like the Manson murders or Jonestown, or a lesser-known case that needs to be heard, like the story of a modern lynching. She covers these stories with a fresh and thoughtful lens, helping listeners understand not just the case itself, but why it matters to our understanding of the world. Her long-awaited second season is airing now, and the first season is ready to binge. So go check out Truer Crime with Cilicia Stanton wherever you get your podcasts. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that I have very strong

feelings about what is and is not responsible true crime content. Maybe you've heard me make some pointed comments about the producers of a certain film, or perhaps you've heard one of my dozen or so rants about a certain journalist whose name rhymes with Schmeichel. And if you've been with me for a while, you'll also know that getting Nobody Should Believe Me on the air was quite the roller coaster. Podcasting is just the wild west, y'all. And these experiences are what led me to launch my new network, True Story Media, where we are all about uplifting true crime creators doing the work and making thoughtful, survivor-centric shows. And I could not be more thrilled to announce our very first creator partner,

You Probably Think This Story's About You. The first season of this enthralling show from breakout creator Brittany Ard took podcasting by storm in 2024. Zooming to the number one spot in the charts on Apple and Spotify as Brittany revealed the captivating story of a romantic deception that upended her life and traced the roots of her own complicated personal history that led her there. Brittany is back in 2025 with brand new episodes, this time helping others tell their own stories of betrayal, heartache, and resilience. If you love Nobody Should Believe Me, I think you will also love You Probably Think This Story's About You for its themes of deception, complex family intrigue, and its raw, vulnerable storytelling. You can binge the full first season

and listen to brand new episodes each week by following the show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it at the link in our show notes. Oh, it is intense listening back to that last moment of the first episode. And that scene was captured in a moment of brilliance by my producer, Tina, who had the tape running while we were in the car on our way to do the very last interview of the season. And it is very strange to listen back to that now for a whole bunch of reasons. I think, number one, just listening to this whole first episode, my voice sounds so different than it sounds now. And I listen to my voice a lot, which can be kind of a strange experience for anybody else who's done it. And it sounds so different in more recent episodes than it does in these episodes. And I don't know what combination of that is, partly just because I was

completely new to podcasting. I'd never done anything like that. I'd done some media for my book stuff, but never anything like this with this much audio. And so probably it was just me getting used to talking into a mic. But also I think just that I was at a really different place with regards to this story that I talk about from my own life, this history with my sister than I am now. And so I think I can hear that. I can sort of hear the difference. And, you know, one of the things that Tina, who fortunately came into this project with so much experience and was such a, you know, was such a mentor for me, making this first season of the show in particular, you know, said that that's really something that you sort of have to be in a different spot to get your voice more in your

body. And so I think part of that's that I learned that, but part of it is I can also just hear so much more emotional and my voice is kind of in my throat a lot. So yeah, it's strange to listen back to that. And I think I also feel like a little bit sad for myself thinking about making the first season of this show and remembering that I really did have a little bit of hope that, I mean, I don't think it was a huge amount. I think there was some part of me that was realistic about it, but it's amazing to me that I had any hope that making this project was going to be, you know, something that could bring about some kind of resolution with the situation with my sister or that she would interpret me doing this as me sort of reaching out. And I did want to do that, I suppose.

I really made this show because I was getting involved in the professional sphere in Munchausen by proxy. I'd joined this committee that's part of the American Professionalist Society on the Abuse of Children by then. It was really meeting those experts that was the impetus for making this show. And I think what's always been driving me in that direction is this relationship with my sister. So it makes sense, but I think it's almost strange to think

that I even thought that was a possibility, especially given what actually happened as a result of this show coming out between my sister and I, which I will get into a little bit more in my postscript to the second episode. So do stay tuned for that. Lots more to come. Yeah. And the other thing that I really, you know, sort of made me nostalgic just thinking about doing my first interview for this show. In this episode, I'm talking to Robin Butcher, who is the younger sister of Hope Ybarra. And that was the very first thing that we recorded for the show. We found out when I was, you know, when I set out to make the

show, I did not know who would be willing to talk from the case. You know, Mike Weber, who was a detective on the case and who I knew, hadn't really stayed in touch with anybody from the family. And he wasn't sure if that was going to be the right way to get ahold of anybody. He wasn't sure sort of how they felt about him when he was, you know, when we were talking about it. And so I ended up just reaching out

to Fabian Ybarra on Facebook, and that's how I got in touch with everyone. And, you know, several of them were willing to be interviewed, obviously. And several of them were willing to be interviewed, obviously. And so Robin was the first person that we talked to and we found out that she lived just south of Seattle. So Tina and I drove down there. We spent about a half a day with her. She lived on this really cute little farm with all of these goats. And we just, we really had a lovely time. We sat at her kitchen table and talked and it was this really surreal experience for me

because it was the very first time I had ever talked to someone who'd had a case in their family. And obviously the Hope Ybarra case played out very differently than my sister's, but there were so many similarities, you know, that I talk about in this episode. And Robin and I, you know,

just down to these details of of them both being in the band and sort of even looking alike. And it was just very, very strange and really wonderful. I mean, it was really healing. That was the first time Robin had ever talked to anyone outside of her family who'd had that shared experience. And so that was just really profound and very emotional. I think it was going into this project, I originally had the idea that I would just talk about at the time, Lisa Gray, kind of always maybe knew that it was going to eventually include my personal story.

And I was very resistant to that at the time for a whole bunch of reasons. You know, I had talked a little bit about my personal experience in the media up until then and had gotten pretty strong pushback from my sister and her lawyer. So that stuff that had happened around the novel coming out, you know, that was not a pleasant experience. And also just, you know, I didn't really, I'd never talked about anything really personal in public. That's just not an experience I'd really had before. And that felt very vulnerable. I was concerned about, you know, my parents are very private people. Like, there's just a lot of things I was concerned about. But I think as soon as I started really making the show, as soon as I started having the conversations, it just became really clear that it was not going to be possible for me to sort of, you know, wall that piece off. And also that it was just

going to make a much better, more authentic, more moving project if I did disclose my connection to it. And that also, you know, it wasn't genuine for me to pretend that I was experiencing this as a remove. And, you know, sometimes people will, you know, as a criticism of me reporting on this topic, talk about how much bias I have. And that's true. I have a tremendous amount of bias. I have, you know, all of the baggage in the world that I bring to this topic, and that's why I'm here. And so I think it's always even felt sort of more ethical and more honest to disclose that. So obviously, that sort of came up

right away in the conversation with Robin. And that was very emotional experience. It was really wonderful. She's just a lovely, sweet person. And, you know, it was very warm and very easy to talk to. And, you know, but I left that recording, you know, my producer and I went and had lunch and I think we just were both sort of like sitting in how, I think this project kind of felt big right away. Like it felt like, oh my gosh, we're sort of doing something that hasn't been done before on this topic. And I think that there was sort of like a gravity I felt like that settled in on me as I was recording these first few sessions. And I called my therapist on the

way home from that conversation. And I was feeling really overwhelmed. I think I am the kind of person that will take things on and get excited about them and not necessarily think about the consequences. And I felt like I was really feeling like I'm not sure I can do this. Like, this is really overwhelming. I'm not totally sure that I'm ready to just excavate all of this stuff. And this might not be the best decision for my mental health. You know, my daughter was still really young at the time. It was very much, you know, it was right after, well, not right after.

It was smack in the middle of the pandemic. It was right after the vaccines came out and we all got them. And it was right in that period where we all thought that was going to be the end of everything. And like, hooray, the pandemic's over. And then, of course, that's not totally how it played out. But it was sort of in that first period of hopefulness, which is a strange time all around. And I remember talking to my longtime therapist who's known me through this whole thing about it, and then just waking up the next morning and feeling really good about the conversation and

feeling like, you know, actually, no, I think I can do this. And I think this is going to be a really worthwhile project. And, you know, I was not thinking about this as, oh, I'm pivoting my career to becoming a podcaster. I just really wanted to make this project and pull these stories together and sort of go on this journey. And it was quite the journey. And I will share a little bit more

about the rocky road of getting this show out into the world after the next episode. So thank you for listening. And please stay tuned for episode two and an update from me afterwards. In the next episode, we'll do a deep dive into Hopiapra's case and talk to her family about what it was like to try to unravel all of her lies. If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at munchausensupport.com. We have resources there from some of the top experts in the country, and we can connect you with professionals who can help. If you are curious about this show and the topic of Munchausen by proxy, follow me on

Instagram at Andrea Dunlop. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash nobody should believe me. And if monetary support is not an option for you right now, you can also rate and review the podcast on Apple and share on your social media. Word of mouth is so important for podcasts, and we really appreciate it. Our lead producer is Tina Knoll. The show was edited by Lisa Gray with help from Wendy Nardi. Jeff Gall is our sound engineer. Additional scoring and music by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Shupak.

Also special thanks to Maria Paliologos, Joelle Knoll, and Katie Klein for project coordination. I'm your host and executive producer, Andrea Dunlop. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that I have very strong feelings about what is and is not responsible true crime content. Maybe you've heard me make some pointed comments about the producers of a certain film, or perhaps you've heard me make some pointed comments about the producers of a certain film, or perhaps you've heard one of my dozen or so rants about a certain journalist whose name rhymes with Schmeichel. And if you've been with me for a while, you'll also know that getting Nobody Should Believe Me on the air was quite the

roller coaster. Podcasting is just the Wild west, y'all. And these experiences are what led me to launch my new network, True Story Media, where we are all about uplifting true crime creators doing the work and making thoughtful, survivor-centric shows. And I could not be more thrilled to announce our very first creator partner, You Probably Think This Story's About You. The first season of this enthralling show from breakout creator Brittany Ard took podcasting by storm in 2024. Zooming to the number one spot in the charts on Apple and Spotify as Brittany revealed the captivating story of a romantic deception that upended her life and traced the roots of her own complicated personal

history that led her there. Brittany is back in 2025 with brand new episodes, this time helping others tell their own stories of betrayal, heartache, and resilience. If you love Nobody Should Believe Me, I think you will also love You Probably Think This Story's About You for its themes of deception, complex family intrigue, and its raw, vulnerable storytelling. You can binge the full first season and listen to brand new episodes each week by following the show on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcasts you can also find it at the link in our show notes