Nobody Should Believe Me - S06 E02: “How Could Someone Do That to a Child?”

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Lisa’s second child, Angellyn, was born prematurely and in a medically fragile state. Mishelle and her aunt Sabrina recount a troubling pattern: just as Angellyn would be cleared for hospital discharge, doctors would abruptly reverse course, warning that she might not survive the night. Andrea speaks to a nurse, “Judy”, who was working in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at the time of Angellyn’s hospitalizations. Judy walks us through the medical team’s growing suspicions and their decision to install surveillance cameras in Angellyn’s hospital room. The footage reveals deeply disturbing behavior by Lisa and Carey’s utter compliance, prompting an investigation into the parents. Ultimately, custody of both Mishelle and Angellyn was revoked, and the children were placed with their maternal grandparents. *** Andrea’s June 28th event with Lisa Jewell: https://townhallseattle.org/event/lisa-jewell/ Andrea’s August 1st event with Gregg Olsen: https://www.libertybaybooks.com/event/west-sound-crime-con-2025-local-authors-gregg-olsen-and-andrea-dunlop Order Andrea's new book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy.  Click here to view our sponsors. Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have full episodes and lots of bonus content.  Follow Andrea on Instagram: @andreadunlop Buy Andrea's books here.  For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit MunchausenSupport.com The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines can be downloaded here.  *** This season covers sensitive subject matter involving allegations of child abuse, medical child abuse (also known as Munchausen by proxy), and the death of a minor. All information presented is based on court records, first-person interviews, contemporaneous documentation, and publicly available sources. The podcast includes personal statements and perspectives from individuals directly involved in or affected by these events. These accounts represent their experiences and interpretations, and some statements reflect opinions that may be emotionally charged. Where appropriate, the reporting team has verified claims through official records or corroborating sources. Nothing in this podcast should be interpreted as a legal conclusion or diagnosis. All subjects are presumed innocent unless convicted in a court of law. This podcast is intended for informational and public interest purposes. This podcast contains audio excerpts from two phone conversations recorded in the states of Georgia and Alabama, respectively. Both recordings were obtained by a third-party source, who acted in accordance with the relevant one-party consent laws of those states, which allow for the lawful recording of a conversation with the consent of one participant. These recordings were subsequently shared with the producers of this podcast after the fact, and were not made by or at the direction of the podcast team or its parent organization. The podcast producers have made good-faith efforts to confirm the legal compliance of the original recordings, and are presenting these materials in the context of public interest reporting. The inclusion of this audio is intended for journalistic, educational, and documentary purposes in alignment with the principles of fair use and First Amendment protections. Listeners are advised that the views expressed in the recordings are those of the individuals speaking and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or affiliated entities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 munchhousensupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. So I am currently on my way to tell my mom and dad about the podcast, and that I'm gonna sit down and do it. And I feel like my flight or flight has kicked in. I feel like I'm gonna throw up.

And I don't know, I've been putting it off for a while. I have made dates that I planned on doing it. And then I changed it for one reason or another. But I'm just tired of feeling like I'm hiding it. Um, and something my therapist and I have talked about, and I've tried to really work on something she said that just like stuck with me was I've put so much thought and process and energy into worrying about how this whole thing was going to impact my mom and how it was gonna impact her life and what it could

potentially do or not do or how she was gonna handle it or not handle it. And my therapist was just like do you think she honestly stopped to think about the, with the same amount of care, the number of podcasts that she's been on to tell your brother's story and to be able to tell her side of things. Not that she's publicly spoken about anything to do with my sister or anything to do with like my child. Lisa McDaniel has done plenty of interviews about her work at the Guthrie Jackson Foundation, but no one's exactly asking her tough questions.

The media coverage of Lisa, in fact, paints her as heroic. As a caregiver, I feel like you have lost part of the life you knew beforehand, before your loved one got sick, because your life changes. So that grief is really real. A caregiver mourns their whole way of living, and I think that grief is very, very real. That's such a great point. It's just so selfless, the work that you do. You put yourself in the situation to see other people doing well, and that's just a tremendous selfless act every day.

Well, you know, I appreciate you saying that, Corey, but as you know, I don't like to be patted on the back for those things. I love what I do. I love working with the people that I work with. I love being able to help patients. That's who I am at heart as a helper. And again, I find that more selfish than anything

because I think I get just as much out of this as what the people that I'm able to help do. That's Lisa McDaniel on a podcast called The Power of Rare, chatting about her work with a colleague. A helper, a caregiver, selfless. That's the brand that Lisa has cultivated in her 12-year career as the Director of Patient Advocacy at the Guthrie Jackson Foundation. To Michelle's point, Lisa rarely mentions the existence of her other children, let alone her conviction for abusing one of them. And the folks who hired Lisa to do this advocacy work with NMO patients and their families, turns out they don't exactly have the full story.

People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me. You can listen to the entirety of Season 6 ad-free right now by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon. You'll also get bonus content from this season as well as access to our subscriber-only show Nobody Should Believe Me After Hours.

We also have a free tier on Patreon where you can sample some of our bonus episodes and participate in weekly episode discussions. If monetary support is not an option, telling friends about the show and rating and reviewing on Apple are also great ways to support. If you want to get in touch with us, you can leave us a comment on Spotify or send us an email or voice memo to hello at nobodyshouldbelieveme.com. All of that information can be found in our show notes. Thanks for listening. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. The Chevrolet employee pricing event is on now.

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I don't know, where do you begin? Um... Geez. I mean, I guess we can just begin with my sister, right? So she was born, and I just remember being told that she was really sick. And I was staying with my other set of grandparents, my dad's parents, for a little while while because they were in the hospital. And so my mom kind of left me there and was in the hospital with my sister. And pretty much from what I remember, just pretty much lived there.

Like she was there, my sister was born at like 27 weeks. She was born pretty early, especially this was like 97. And we were in Savannah, Georgia. And so that was pretty early, you know. And so she just pretty much lived there with her. In the last episode, we heard from Lisa's younger sister, Sabrina, about her bizarre and difficult history with her sister and Lisa's odd behavior during her pregnancy with her second child, Angeline.

And it's these events that lead up to this story taking a very dark turn. In a setup that is, unfortunately, all too familiar from these cases, Lisa McDaniel gave birth to Angeline terrifyingly early, on May 30, 1997, when the baby was months from her due date. This early labor seems likely to be related to the fact that, as Sabrina witnessed and recounted in the last episode, Lisa kept falling down the stairs, a detail that parallels many other stories, including the Hopiobara case that we covered in season one.

When she was first born, I don't remember how many, I want to say 28 weeks gestation, we were led to believe that it would be very touch and go for a long time because she was a pound 12 ounces. And we couldn't touch her because like literally her skin was so frail she would rip, like her skin would rip. A baby born as early and as small as Angeline

is certain to have complications, and her life began with a lengthy stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. You would go in and you would see her and she would do really good and then she may not do so well. But if we could get her lungs to fill up, because you could not hear her cry. Her lungs were so weak and stuff that her mouth would open like she was crying, but you physically could not hear her cry. Like, her lungs were so weak and stuff that her mouth would open like she was crying, but you physically could not hear it. Michelle had been looking forward to having a baby sister, but the reality of Angeline being born so fragile was harrowing. I had been waiting

all day to go back and see her in the ICU. I finally, I got to go back and see her for like just a minute. It was literally like just a minute. And I don't remember all of it. I hate that, but I remember seeing a lot of the pictures. And so I imagined for me that young, that was probably a super scary like place to see her because she was hooked up to every core and imaginable and IVs and a trach and a feeding tube

and like all these things. That's really my first core memory, I think, is like her. After three months, Angeline was discharged in August of 1997, with a lengthy list of complications, including breathing and feeding issues that were due to her premature birth. Between trips to the hospital and Michelle being passed off to grandparents, Michelle got the message. Her care and her needs were low on the priority list. Sometimes my dad would come pick me up and we would go back to Savannah and I would stay for like a weekend or something. So I remember them really, really pressing of how medically fragile my sister was, to the point where they were like, you have to wash your hands and you have to be very careful and you can't have germs and yada yada.

And so there was an instance where I literally was washing my hands so often, like I had huge like rashes on my hands because I had just washed my hands like till they were raw because I was like, I'm just taking care of my sister. That was the core of most of my life. It was how my sister was doing, how my mom was doing when they were coming home. It's like this overwhelming sense of keeping an eye on everybody and everything and like

just making sure that they were okay. Even after Angeline's initial discharge from the hospital, she was never out for long, and the first 21 months of her life were a series of repeated hospitalizations. An emotional rollercoaster. You're emotional already, but you would get a call. Oh, they're talking about letting Angelin come home if she keeps doing well. And then two days later, you would get a call. Angelin's so sick, if you want to see her,

they say she may not make it through the night. If you want to see her, come. I believed and was told she was fighting for her life and that weight, just walking around with it all the time. My life revolved around that and there was like a pond that my grandparents had that, you know, me and my granny would walk down sometimes, spend some time at the pond and like listen to the birds and I don't know if you can hear in the background there's so many like birds and stuff out because I'm talking about all this in my grandparents house. You could constantly hear birds chirping. My days revolved around the phone call. It was you know was waiting for that phone call of how my sister was today. And I remember I would like,

I remember asking granny like, I have the call today, what's going on? This was a lonely time for Michelle, who at six should have been taking her first big strides into the wider world as a kindergartener, except the McDaniels had decided not to send her. So like my dad would come back and forth and visit like on weekends and stuff. Me because I was staying at my grandparents house when my mom stayed and then occasionally

they would both like come and I don't remember how often it was or anything. I just remember sometimes they would both come and see me at my grandparents house when my sister was in the hospital and they would come and like try and do some like brief weird like Homeschooling things but it was also like we're doing this once every however often very much not like a daily, you know thing because they were Kind of opposed it feels like to me going to public school for a while Do you have any sense of what their beef was with sending? Um you? I feel like from best I can gather it was very religious based because I was very religious growing up and my dad was like a Baptist preacher

growing up and so it felt very like my homeschooling curriculum was very like religious based and I can't remember the actual thing they use now. I guess I had like questions of like why like I couldn't be over there. If I'm here, why can't I be with my parents? Or why can't I stay there, whatever? And she was in ICU, so there was no feasible way for me to be in there. I wasn't even supposed to be in there with her at all.

But I would go sometimes over weekends and stuff. I would go either with one set of grandparents or the other. Sometimes my dad would come pick me up and we would go back to Savannah and I would stay for a weekend or something. So I remember that. I remember a lot of back and forth. And every time Angeline's health started to improve, it would take another nosedive. As she grew and got bigger, got stronger, it was almost worse than when she was first born

because you're thinking, okay, you're on the road to get to come home. They started making out a plan. Okay, this needs to happen, this needs to happen, these things need to happen. If she can do so many days on these feeds and not have any issues and her heart rate stay up and her breathing and everything stay intact,

then this is the plan of action to go home. That's when it was, okay, Angeline may not make it through the night. If you wanna see her come on. So she would be improving and kind of in this preparation for discharge and then suddenly take a turn towards, as you understood it, like imminent death?

Yes, that's how I understood it. Like when you get that call, the doctor says she might not make it through the night. And you're still thinking, okay, at this time, you have to understand we didn't have a clue. We bought into everything that we were told. As a parent, there's nothing more frightening than the idea of something happening to your baby. Both of my babies, luckily, were born full term and with no complications,

and even so, those early days are really hard. I remember not being able to sleep some nights because I would stir awake at every little peep they made. I struggled with breastfeeding with my first and I remember just torturing myself to make it work. It's hard to overstate how, especially in those first few months when your baby is just so helpless and your hormones are raging, every cell in your body turns itself over to keeping this tiny,

precious thing alive. And again, that's without complications. Angeline spent the first 21 months of her life critically ill, so it's easy to see why the family rallied around Lisa and Carrie. Parents deserve support, and babies deserve every chance at a healthy life. The weather has been nice here in Seattle, and this past weekend we got out all of our summer stuff. The pool toys, the slip and slide, the deck furniture, and I also turned over my closet

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How did you first come to meet the McDaniel family? Just as a patient in the PICU. so she was an ex-primey. I honestly don't remember the very first time I met them, but it wasn't unusual. This is Judy, which is the pseudonym we'll be using to protect her identity. She was a nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, or the PICU, in Savannah at the time

Angeline was being treated there. Angeline was being treated there. Angeline was born very premature. Was it pretty typical that you would see babies born on the more extreme end of being born premature, that they would have a lot of visits to the PICU? Yeah, it wasn't surprising back then to see them visiting a lot. If they got sick, they would not get sick the way your children or my children would get sick. They could become very violently ill and even in danger of death if they got sick with,

let's say, sepsis or they had a very bad pneumonia. You know, there's a lot of things that would make them, the physicians, be very concerned about their outcome and that's why they would need to be with us so we could watch them very carefully. Something I've become well acquainted with making this show over the past few years is what strong stuff Pick You and Pediatric Emergency Room staff are made of. This is work that requires an extraordinary amount of empathy, calm, and emotional endurance. And listening to parents about what's going on with their child is a huge part of this work. Listening to parents about what's going on with their child is a huge part of this work. I would imagine there's almost no instance where you're not meeting someone on one of the worst days of their life, right?

If your child is in the PICU, that is just an incredibly stressful and upsetting situation. Yes, it's terror-inducing for pretty much everybody. It's very stressful for all of them. Everybody has a story. Everybody believes that their story is the most important and so I always tried to be very cognizant of that when I was talking with them about what was going on with their children. And so I always believed I would have probably about five minutes to make that, I called it the click, because I would just go in the

room, start doing stuff and the minute I called it the click because I would just go in the room, start doing stuff. And the minute I felt that little click, I was like, yep, I'm good. I've connected with this family. Now I can just go in and do my job. But I want to put them at ease. I want to see their shoulders come down. You know, I want them to be able to talk with me and not just have that awful deer in the headlights look. So it's really important for me to make that connection. Lisa, who was still in her twenties at the time, was reportedly charming and popular with the number of hospital staff

who she'd often go to lunch with. Judy, however, had a different reaction. As she explained to me and my producer Taj, who is the other voice you'll hear in this clip. producer Taj, who is the other voice you'll hear in this clip. Did you have a moment, like a click with Lisa? I did not have that with her. What I had with her, I had the other reaction where

the hackle stood up on the back of my neck is about the only way and I thought, this is somebody that is best for me not to be around. And then some of the things that happened while Angeline was in the unit, like when she would, they used to have a phone outside the door, so she would ring to come in and visit. And there was one time we heard all this banging

and we opened the door and she was like lying on the ground outside the door looking like she was kind of pulsing. It only lasted a brief period of time. And then one time she said that somebody had tried to attack her outside of Ronald McDonald House. And the nurses, you know, we were all friends. They would tell me some of the things that she had confided in them about. And I was just the more I was exposed to all of that. It wasn't so much what was happening clinically

with Angela at that particular time. It was just the other stuff, just mm mm mm. Yeah, so you just had a bad vibe basically from her, it sounds like, and I mean, it also sounds like the take on Lisa at the hospital was that she was quite capable of taking care of her child. This was not a situation where, because of course these situations do happen, right? Where a parent is having such severe mental health concerns that they're not able to

take care of their child adequately. And it doesn't sound like that was anybody's read on Lisa. No, not at all. Though there were only brief periods during this time when Angeline was able to leave the hospital, Michelle has vivid memories of one homecoming in particular. She had her own room at the crib, and then there were still tubes attached to her,

and feeding tubes, and her breathing tubes, and all that attached to her trach and and her breathing tubes and all attached to her trach and all this. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to her alarms just blaring because I was like, I think I was across the hall from her in my own bedroom and I go in there and she's not breathing and she's like blue, like dark blue. And I remember screaming for my parents and my parents coming running in there and I remember my mom making just like this big deal out of me the next like two or three

days that was like, you saved her life, like you're the only reason why she's alive and like all this and really internalizing like, okay, well, that's just another sign like I got to protect her like this is my job now. And this traumatic event solidified Michelle's understanding of her place in the household, not as a child with needs of her own, but as a caretaker, as a rescuer, a heavy weight for tiny shoulders. To my adult ears, the logistics of this story seemed odd. If you have a baby this fragile, why is she not in the room with the parents? Lots of babies sleep in

the parents' room when they're little anyway, and when my babies had so much as a bad cold, I'd want them near me throughout the night." This detail also stuck out to Sabrina. I can remember asking my husband, why do they put her in that room so far away? Like, so far away, where you, and at this point, she still, when she cries, you still can't, like, you can hear her if you're close to her, but you can't, even if you're the next room over, you still can't hear her. I mean, so she's still like, you know, it was very quiet. I was like, why would you, because that's a lot for a little kid to come in and find.

It never made sense to me why she was on so many machines and all this stuff and you had her where you couldn't even hear her. The medical team had been tracking Angeline's troublesome pattern of declining each time she was on the precipice of going home from the hospital. And they began to suspect that they weren't getting

all of the information from Lisa. So they were in and out of the hospital, sounds like in the hospital more, you know, for for quite a long period of time. How did this all take a turn? I believe, if I remember correctly, that the physicians were concerned enough to send her for a second opinion in Atlanta. And while that they did that, they installed the surveillance cameras in the room that she often stayed in.

And they were getting to the point where she was having these infections that didn't make a lot of sense with organisms that weren't normally found in those particular areas of the body, which is why they sent her up to Atlanta and then came back. As Sabrina explains, the doctors weren't the only ones who'd begun to suspect something

was very wrong. And then my husband said, like, and I was, like, when I say this, I was really mad at my husband at the time that he said this. He's like, it's just weird to me that she is so well she can come home and then in less than a day she's so sick she's gonna die. He said, do you think your sister's doing something to her? I thought I would beat him to death. I'm not kidding.

Because it just, how could you dare say that, you know? And I'm like, don't ever say that again. And he's like, I'm just asking. As this dramatic cycle continued, things got increasingly tense for the whole family. One time my mom had called from the hospital. And so I'm outside like playing with my friends or whatever and my granny comes outside and she was just like, hey your mom's on the phone with an update about your sister and I was just like I just really want to finish this game like can I call her back and I remember them all getting really upset with me and like

like I made the wrong choice of like I wouldn't go like talk on the phone at that moment you know what I mean to like hear about it and like I remember that being like the first true like guilt that I felt of like, Oh, okay, obviously, like, I'm supposed to go take care and listen to me even if I couldn't do anything, right? That was like a phone call. You know, like six, five or six ish. Yeah, probably maybe closer to seven, like the issue. Yeah, yeah, small. And just being like, yeah, like that was to seven, like the ish. Little? Yeah, yeah, small. And just being like, yeah, like that was a really, I think, moment for me to realize like that's not my place here.

Like my place is like when mom calls you come. Like it doesn't matter. And as Angelin continued to fight for her life, Sabrina's own suspicions began to emerge. I mean, it just got to the point where it was basically's own suspicions began to emerge. I mean, it just got to the point where it was basically, y'all just don't come. Which I'm like, that's weird. Because we've been all this time back and forth

killing ourself to go. And now all of a sudden, you don't want anybody to go. I'm like, that's weird. And so then my husband said again, something to your sister, there's something going on there. And I'm like, don't say that. But in my mind, I'm like, could he be right? I mean, could he be right?

And it was actually several months after they went back to Savannah that we actually found out anything that they had the video or anything like that. In December of 1998, Angeline, then just a little over 18 months old, was once again hospitalized with polymicrobial sepsis. But this time, because Lisa had been placed under video surveillance, there was no mystery about what had caused it. PICU nurse Judy remembers what happened next. The incidents happened.

I came in the next morning and she had already been removed from the hospital. And then every day that I worked, I took care of Angela until she was discharged into foster care. So I was quite comfortable, you know, talking with them and dialoguing with them. I said, I'm going to call the supervisor in the county. And I did. And that's kind of how the whole ball got rolling of them investigating, you know, what was going on at home and how that all was going to play out. Oh, interesting. So the hospital had already reported because of the videotape.

Mm-hmm. And then you also made an additional report to DFACS. 100%. Yeah. Did you ever see the video of Angeline? I remember watching it, but I was watching it because the DA at the time had asked me to come to a meeting of child fatality review and it was like a staffing they call it a staffing meeting and he wanted me to interpret the medical parts to it to the people that were at the meeting so I don't remember like watching it intently

but I would point out you know that's a tracheostomy, that's what goes in the neck, an ambu bag where people deliver oxygen, central line. So it was more of a medical thing than it was for me to watch it intently and go, oh, that's happening, that's happening. What these videos captured would change the course of this family's life forever. Video evidence is somewhat rare in these cases, and it's not always a slam dunk. My sister Megan was captured on video dumping a syringe of anticoagulant medication meant for her daughter into her bedsheets.

My then five-year-old niece subsequently ended up in the PICU with a life-threatening blood clot, which would not, as hospital staff reported to the police, have been possible if she'd received the full dose of that dumped medication. Unfortunately, my sister's lawyer managed to successfully argue that this wasn't what it looked like because the syringe the hospital was using wasn't, according to him, the syringe the hospital said it was using. Maddening. To this day, Lisa appears to have mostly stuck to her version of what the video surveillance captured. According to Lisa, she had been attempting to flush

her daughter's trach out with water because she was concerned about a buildup of mucus. This story isn't so much a minimization of Lisa's behavior as it is an outright fiction. Here is her sister Sabrina remembering what she saw on these videos and just a warning that the following is extremely disturbing and graphic. Well, when you're sitting there watching videos like that, and I couldn't watch them all, and there's, I mean, to this day, I don't ever want to see them again, as long as I live, but when you're sitting there with your dad, and keeping in mind, this is a man that

I look up to, I'm my daddy's kid, okay? And it brings him to his knee, where he just, he couldn't say nothing, he couldn't even move. I got nauseated to the point, I pure had to go vomit. It made me so sick. But to sit there and see her taking these seeds, But to sit there and see her taking these things out of a diaper over a kid and putting it down her trach. And like I say, Angelin's still not to the point that she can cry out like a normal kid. She had the ability to cry, but it still wasn't very loud at that point.

And then you're thinking, I don't know. This is not a person I know. This is not somebody I know. And then, you know, because Lisa's still maintaining, she hadn't done anything, she hadn't done anything. There's so much video, there was so much video in it. Over the two or three week period, there was incidents every day. Multiple times a day.

I know there were at least 50 incidents. And it was always of like feces being put in her trach or the saline getting put down her trach to try to drown her. Like she would put like whole syringes of the saline water or whatever down her trach and wouldn't suction her back out because you know when you're sticking something like the nurses would put like a drop or two to help you know kind of loosen up her secretions or whatever and would suction it right back out and so when you're sticking a 10 millimeter syringe down worth of fluid down a trach and letting it sit there yeah you're drowning somebody. We really try not to spend too much time on the gruesome details on this show, but this

can be a difficult balance because we also can't shy away from the seriousness of what's happened. Hearing Sabrina tell this part of the story was incredibly heavy, especially given that Michelle was also with us. This is the kind of memory that you can never erase, no matter how you try. It's these details that follow you into your nightmares. It's a horrible thing to reckon with, that someone in your family would do this to a baby. And it's remarkable that Angeline even survived.

Can you give us just from a medical perspective, just a sense of like how risky these behaviors are. All of them very high risk behaviors that could lead to someone becoming violently ill or die, particularly the part about the tracheostomy, which is basically someone's lifeline, because it bypasses your nose and your mouth. And so if you cover that, you're essentially suffocating somebody. There's always the question of how family members will react to the information that their loved one has committed abuse.

All too often, spouses and parents choose denial and defend the perpetrators even in the face of very strong evidence. But for Lisa's father, no shred of doubt could survive what he'd seen. When my daddy saw the videos, he never had a relationship with my sister after that, after that day. He never, it just ruined his whole perspective. It ruined everything. He just, because for him, and I mean for me, but my dad, it was just, you did the unimaginable. You did something that was absolutely in my dad's mind, unforgivable. Listening to Sabrina talk about her and Lisa's dad is gutting, especially after watching

my own father grapple with something similar. Nobody wants to see the best in us more than our parents. Nobody wants to believe more in our innate goodness. And dads, they do anything to protect their little girls, right? And Carrie has said, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. I didn't see it. I didn't see it.

And then to see him be sitting in the same room with a newspaper, pulled up to his face like you're reading a newspaper. Like on the video? Yes, on the video. She leases out Angelin's crib doing this. And Carrie is sitting in a chair. You know, you're in a hospital room room so the rooms are not very big.

Across from the crib with a paper up like this to make it look like he's reading and then you see him fold that paper down. He's watching her. He knows exactly what she was doing. Discover the magic of BetMGM Casino, where the excitement is always on deck. Pull up a seat and check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer. From roulette to blackjack, watch as a dealer hosts your table game and live chat with them throughout your experience to feel like you're actually at the casino. The excitement doesn't stop there. With over 3,000 games to choose from, including fan favorites like Cash Eruption,

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby.

It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. Fathers play a crucial role in these cases in protecting the children. —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——

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—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— Carrie was very detached, passive. Lisa was definitely the alpha female in the house, for sure. Sabrina has an even more pointed tick.

He knew, he knew exactly what she was doing. And that, I mean, that to me, that even made it worse. Yeah. Because it's like, okay. But it even, like I say, in watching the, and like, there and watching the and like there's so much video there were so much video in it but literally after you this is like over two weeks I think this is not one incident this was it was either a two or three week period but over the two or three week period, there was incidents every day.

Multiple times a day. Multiple times a day. I know there were at least 50 incidents, but after a while you just quit reading it. Because of the video evidence and the severity of what Lisa had done, this wasn't the kind of complicated investigation that we often dig into in these cases. But even with evidence as straightforward and shocking as this, the police, child protective services, and the courts still had to do their jobs. And there was still plenty of room for error. The detective who took this case appeared

to have a shaky grasp of this abuse. He explains to Lisa at one point that this syndrome was discovered by a man named Munchausen. He does interestingly note that they get a couple of cases a year and that it's not terribly uncommon. On December 31, 1998, Detective Bill Sharpley from the Savannah Police Department interviewed both Carey and Lisa McDaniel separately and then together. Jeff Baker from the Department of Family and Children Services, or DFACS, also sat in. Unfortunately, we don't have any tape of it, but we do have transcripts. Kerry goes up first, and the cop explains to him that because of the video surveillance,

they suspect Angeline's blood infection was caused by Lisa. They also mention that they have additional concerns about him, given the fact that he was also in the room. Carrie immediately starts defending his wife, and says that they were both tired of seeing Angeline suffer through all of the tests and the 19 surgeries she had endured." And right away, Carey says something extremely revealing. He tells the police, We both said this. And like I said at first was that, you know, if this is going to be her life, I'd rather, and we're Christian people, that I'd rather God go ahead and take her onto heaven instead of having her suffer.

One of the many things I think this investigation overlooked in terms of the actual threat that Lisa and Kerry posed to their children was this piece, the intent that a statement like this telegraphs. Sabrina, however, saw it more clearly. I don't really think she ever meant to leave the hospital with Angeline at any point. I don't think it was, I don't think she ever meant for that child to live. Detective Sharpley walks Carrie through the tapes, but it doesn't seem to make a dent.

He offers them the same explanation that Lisa will go on to offer, that she was just trying to suction Angeline's trach, which of course doesn't explain even a fraction of what the video captures. When pressed, Kerry says that he just quote, "'Can't really see what she's doing.'" They continue to walk him through additional videos, even bringing a nurse in to help explain, and Carey refuses

to give an inch. At one point, he says he's not even 100% sure that this is his child, though he does concede that the woman in the video is his wife. Given Sabrina's description of this video, which is corroborated by transcripts and court documents, it's impossible to see Carrie as anything other than entirely complicit. At one point in the interview, he asked the detective, is there any chance that I can protect my wife from this?

When Lisa is questioned by the police, she reiterates the story about trying to suction the trach and admits that she knew she wasn't supposed to do it. When this explanation clearly doesn't suffice, she deflects, blaming her stress and her fear about taking the child home given the level of her needs. Reading through these interviews is frustrating. It's impossible for me to know, of course, how much of this is tactical on the part of the detective. But throughout these interviews, there's an emphasis on what a loving mother they all know Lisa is, and how she just really needs some help.

The baby, who had nearly died because of Lisa's actions, is an afterthought. Ultimately, the courts did remove custody from both parents, as Sabrina recalls to Michelle. So you were placed first, and then Angeline came. Mom and daddy had to get medical training to know what to do to take care of her once they got her. And they had to make sure that they were comfortable. And then I was like, me and my little sister were like the backup to, you know, if something happened, mama couldn't be there.

Even though they all now knew that Lisa had been the cause for many of her issues, Angeline was medically complex, which made her placement more complicated, as our nurse, Judy, explains. I knew her foster parents because her foster mother and foster father, her foster mom was a nurse in my unit in the PRN pool.

So I still got to see her. In fact, I babysat one night for her because she was on a ventilator. So it's not like you can just call the babysitter to come watch. They're also picky about who's babysitting your kid that's in foster care. So I babysat for them, but I have a picture of all of us. We all went to one of the parks and had like a cookout. And you know, there's a picture of me holding her and stuff.

So I still got to see her after she got discharged while she was with her foster parents. It was after she went back to the grandparents that I never really got to see her again. As the court was evaluating next steps for the McDaniel family, they called in one of the country's top experts on munchasm by proxy, Bea Yorker. Yes, so DFACS, or the state of Georgia, became the parents of Angel and of Michelle. So they took custody of both girls. First, Angel was placed in a foster placement that cared for medically fragile kids because she did have a trach

and had been a preemie in the NICU and she needed to stabilize. Then, when Angel was stabilized, she joined her older sister at Lisa's parents' home, which was a drive. I can't remember if it was an hour, 30 minutes, whatever. It was a distance away from Lisa and Carrie. So I made at least one home visit to see six-year-old Michelle and 18-month-old or 2-year-old, yeah, she's probably 2, 2-year-old Angel at their grandparents' home. I vividly remember spending a few hours in the living room, looking around the home, seeing how the family interacted,

and spending time watching the grandparents interact with the girls, particularly with Angel. Angel had long red ringlets. She was using a little two-year-old walker to help her walk. She had to put her finger over her trache hole for her to talk and she was babbling and she was talking a little bit. She had glasses because there were some visual corrections that were needing to be done.

She was a beautiful, lovely little girl who seemed to be well on her way to thriving and recovery. The biggest question that I had for those grandparents is I said, are you, because we are very doubtful and it's a high bar to place victims of lethal munchausen by proxy with relatives because of the influence and the ability of perpetrators to get back into the family system. So I said to them, are you able to protect these girls from your daughter. And I remember specifically the grandfather looking me in the eyes and saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, we are on to her. She has lied to us. They went on to describe several crisis situations that had

happened when Lisa was in high school. They were telling me that they understood that there was to be no unsupervised contact. And they even said, they doubted that there would be very much even interaction with Lisa and Carrie as long as they had the girls in their care. Just a disclaimer here, because she was never a treatment professional for any of the McDaniel family and was not involved until after the girls were placed, Bee is able to speak to us about her

experiences in this case, where she served as an expert consultant for defacts. Her role was to explain this type of abuse to the court and explain how to keep the girls safe. She is speaking from her knowledge of what happened to the girls since they reached out as adults and from reviewing records and materials provided to her by Michelle. In Lisa's absence, Angeline thrived and both sisters were safe. But unfortunately, the safety would not be long lived. As we said in the first episode, what Lisa did to Angelin is only the beginning of this story.

So my parents wanted to take my grandparents back to court for custody of me and my sister again. I was very ready to go home. Like in my mind like that were my parents, that's where I belonged. I was still very angry at everybody else like I was ready to go home. And so my grandparents knew that and they saw that for years. And so I remember sitting down with them one day and my grandmother being like, okay, like if you're sure we're not going to keep you here if you're ready to go, like we have kind of the attorneys have kind of talked and we were ready to sign the paperwork for you to go back home. And in the meantime, my mom had had another whole child.

So it was after my brother was born. That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our supervising producer is Mariah Gossett. Our senior producer is Taj Easton. Assistant editor and associate producer is Greta Stromquist, research and fact checking by Erin Ajayi, engineering and mixing by Robin Edgar, and administrative producing by Nola Karmouche. Music provided by Blue Dot Sessions, Sound Snap, and Slipstream Media. you