Nobody Should Believe Me - Unbridged interview with Detective Mike Weber

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

In this bonus episode you’ll hear host Andrea Dunlop's full interview with friend of the show Detective Mike Weber.   Mike—who wrote the FBI guidelines on investigating medical child abuse—digs into the police report about Maya Kowalski and helps Andrea put it in context, revealing the serious and disturbing nature of the case.   NOTE: We recorded this interview in September before the Kowalski v Johns Hopkins All Childrens trial, so information revealed during the trial will not be reflected.   *** More about Mike Weber: https://mikeweberconsulting.com/   Munchausen Support accepts donations and volunteers at www.munchausensupport.com   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.  Download the APSAC's practice guidelines here.  ***  Note: This episode contains sensitive content related to child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True Story Media. you will know that Detective Mike Weber is a frequent contributor to Nobody Should Believe Me. He is the national law enforcement expert on Munchausen by proxy, medical child abuse. And in fact, he wrote the guidelines for investigating these cases for the FBI. So just a note about this interview that we talked pretty early on to Mike about the Kowalski case. So what we are talking about in this interview concerns mainly the police reports that we had access to before the trial and not anything else that's come out in the meantime. So we are going to also share some of those documents on the blog, as well as the full audio of the interview between Detective Stephanie Graham and Jack Kowalski. For those of you that

just can't get enough of deep diving this case, I know you're out there. And there's still a lot happening with the situation. So we will be bringing you intermittent updates. And in the meantime, enjoy this conversation with Detective Mike Weber. 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 way that you can help. So you can pre-order the book right now in all formats at the link in our show notes. And if you are in Seattle or Fort Worth, Mike and I are doing live events the week of launch, 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. Calling all sellers. Salesforce is hiring account executives to join us on the cutting edge of technology here. Innovation. Isn't a buzzword. It's a way of life. You'll be solving customer challenges faster with agents winning with purpose

and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent first future together. Head to salesforce.com slash careers to learn more. When did we as a society forget that TV isn't real life? When did this happen? I don't know. I mean, it's not even supposed to be reality. Television, which we sort of understand TV isn't real life? When did this happen? I don't know. I mean, it's not even supposed to be reality television, which we sort of understand isn't real. And I mean, I think that's like even a good place

to start with the conversation is that the thing that we're critiquing is the way in which this documentary and much of the media that's covered this case and that covers this issue in general is so incredibly skewed and seems to me to start out from a place of this mom is being falsely accused let's find everything we can to support that and either not look any closer or you know know, I don't know the process of the filmmakers went through. I haven't been able to get any of them to talk to me, but,

you know, or purposefully leave out anything that damages that narrative. And so I think what we can do that will be really informative and helpful for our listeners to be better consumers of this content is to point out what those omissions were and how they better contextualize this story. Because what we're not going to be able to do is determine whether or not Beata was innocent or guilty. And that also, it's worth saying that the other side is not going to be able to do that because she died by suicide less than three months into this investigation. That's very early in the process. And the other thing that we're not going to be able to do is say whether or not Maya had this condition of CRPS, right? We don't have access to her medical records.

The family has not made those available to the media. So I think what we can clear up is that the fact of whether or not she had CRPS, which obviously the movie Fixate very much is this sort of smoking gun. If she got this positive diagnosis and the hospital was billing him for him and whatever else, you know, that actually that's a pretty common misconception about medical child abuse, that proving that someone has some kind of legitimate condition does not disprove the suspicion of abuse. And so I think that that's, you know, that's always just a really important point to talk about. So what's that question here? What's that question in this, you know, talking about this story? And what's that actually at question in the lawsuit that is happening?

You know, this is the subject of a $220 million lawsuit that Jack Kowalski is filing against the hospital on behalf of himself, his children, and the estate of his wife. And I feel almost a little naive that that was not the first thing that came to mind as a motivation, because I sort of thought of all of his emotional motivations maybe before that. But obviously, it's worth noting that two of the main people featured as talking heads in this movie were Jack Kowalski and his lawyer, Deborah, who are both people who stand to make a lot of money if this lawsuit is successful. So what is at the heart of this lawsuit is not, was Beata innocent or guilty? It's not, does Maya have or not have CRPS? I'm sure that that team will try and make it about those things, and certainly the movie made it about those things. But what is at issue is, was there sufficient evidence for this separation to happen and for this

investigation to go forward? And I certainly feel like what we've uncovered in this documents can answer that question. And so I think that is how I want to frame this conversation. That is the sort of responsible way to talk about this, because I think something that makes me a little crazy is that some of the media that covers these cases, I don't think they're appropriately weighing the risks of framing doctors as, quote, falsely accusing a parent when what they're doing is reporting suspicions. And that lack of nuance can really do a lot of damage.

Sure, yeah. And it can cause doctors not to report. Doctors are human beings. They're subject to the same types of pressure as all of us, right? And if they see, you know, societally that they could be vilified for this, the incentive to report is going to go away. Yeah. And who's going to yell about that? Well, me, but only us. If it comes to light, right? But if they don't report, it never comes to light. We never know. And the child just continues being abused. Right. And I mean, I think it's not just doctors, right? It's doctors, it's DCF or CPS, you know, the child welfare organizations.

It's the detectives office or the police, it's the DA. It's everyone that sees like, wow, this is how a case can play out. Even if there is quite a lot of evidence, which we will talk through and which we have discovered there was. Well, and if you can get it to the point of an arrest, as we've talked about numerous times, the arrest warrant affidavit is public record. And that tends to quell a lot because you, as a detective, I have to put my probable cause in that arrest warrant affidavit for a judge to sign it. So evidence of the abuse is going to be public. Right. And which it can't be any other way. Right. Right. Doctors, medical records are protected. CPS is not going to comment. That's why a law enforcement investigation is just so important. So two of the pieces of documentation we have to work with are the transcript of the interview between Jack Kowalski and Detective Stephanie Graham,

who was the Sarasota detective from the Sheriff's Department who was investigating this case. So we have a transcript of that conversation. And then we also have Stephanie Graham's police report. So these are things that were, by and large, the information in this was left out of the film. The only piece, I believe, that made it into the film at all was the snippet of the conversation between Detective Graham and Jack Kowalski, where she is saying, I don't care, I will put you in jail tomorrow. And him saying, no, no, I love my kids. It was this very short piece. And then it was followed up immediately by his lawyer commenting on it.

Well, that's what he had to say because, you know, that's the only right answer. And it was completely decontextualized. And what this actually came from was a lengthy conversation that he had had with a detective. He was not being detained. He was not being detained. He was not under arrest. She reminds him multiple times that he is not being detained and does not have to answer her questions and even points out that his lawyer is probably not going to be happy that he spent this much time talking with her. And he reassures her that he just really wants to protect his kid and that that is his motivation and that is why he is talking to her. So one thing to point out is the timeline of both Maya's, you know,

alleged CRPS and the timeline of the separation, the investigation is very obscured by the movie. So Mike, one of the things we can see from this documentation is that Beata's death happened very early in the detective's investigation. She was separated from her daughter in October of 2016 and Beata's death happened in January of 2017. So can you give us some context about a typical timeline for a medical abuse case from a detective's perspective? Sure. And I can give you some context on this one just from reading Detective Graham's narrative. She had located numerous social media accounts, had preserved them, had issued warrants for them. And just at the end of December, shortly before death, she had obtained the social media records.

Now, once you obtain social media records, they are often voluminous. When I do an investigation, I obtain them from the birth of the child forward. So for Maya, that would be 10 years of social media records, right? And it would be 20, 30,000 easy pages, easy. And what's also interesting about where she was in her investigation at the time of Beata's death is that she had just received Dr. Smith's full report on all medical records that she had reviewed. When did she receive that report? I believe it was either late December or early January. So shortly before.

So shortly before the death. And this, I think this is another thing that gets obscured in the film is that it really is laying so much of the blame for what happens on Dr. Sally Smith, who was from the Suncoast Center, which is a community-based care organization that provides support to DCF. So again, that's another thing that comes up in the movie where they make it sound as though Florida has this privatized system. And even actually in the description of the film that's

on the production company's website, it describes it as a for-profit system. It is not. These are all community-based nonprofits that help with DCS Investigator. These are a result of reforms that happened in the 90s to, you know, cut down on the time that children were spending in foster care and also to reduce child deaths. So, you know, it is not this sinister thing where they are being paid to separate children and families, but a lot is laid at the feet of Dr. Sally Smith. You know, her role in this investigation would only to be to review the medical records. So this investigation, the police investigation started before the detective had that report. That's correct, right? That's correct.

And actually, the detective received that report on December 5th of 2016. So just basically a month before Beata's death. And after reading the report, she began to set up interviews with the doctors that she needed to interview for this case. Those interviews were going, you know, there were going to be multiple doctors and it would have taken time to do. But she was on top of that. And as far as her social media presence, the detective obtained warrants for nine social media accounts, including two Facebook accounts, two Instagram accounts, a WordPress account, a GoFundMe account, a YouCaring account, a YouTube account, and a Twitter account. Now, a couple of these were Maya's, but the detective notes in her narrative that most

of these appeared to have been ran by Beata. Well, and if you have a 10-year-old, they're not really on social media of their own volition. I mean, that's not even, I haven't checked the rules lately, but I don't even think you're allowed to, I mean, you're not allowed to open your own account as a 10-year-old. So, I mean, it's sort of six of one, half dozen of the other. And so, can you explain why those social media accounts, like why was the detective looking at all that?

What makes those social media accounts? Like, why was the detective looking at all that? What makes that social, those social media accounts so important? They are so important because Beata is posting in her own words about what is actually happening with Maya's health care, right? So, you can then take those and compare them to what's actually going on in the hospital during visits and what she's telling the doctors. And oftentimes those two things are very, very, very different. I've had cases where they're claiming things that simply aren't happening at all. They're claiming diagnosis that never occur. We don't know. I want to be very clear. We have no idea if that's the case in this case because it never got to that point in the criminal investigation. Beata's death occurred before it ever got there. Right. And I mean, I think we cannot overstate how complex these investigations are

because you're talking about interviewing all the doctors, and these cases are hallmarked by children spending a lot of time at a lot of different doctors, right, which was certainly the case here we can see even from Stephanie Graham's report. You're talking about checking all that social media, which is usually voluminous. And certainly in this case was because there's many different accounts. You're also talking about interviewing, you know, doing these collateral interviews of the other parent, maybe doing a forensic interview with the child, interviewing neighbors, friends, other family members. So, I mean, these investigations usually take, it's usually a matter of years, not months. Is that right?

I don't know about years for a criminal investigation, but something like this with Maya, and again, it all depends on your laws, right? Florida's laws appear actually to be a little bit better than Texas laws in addressing this. So it would have taken, you know, from what I have, I want to be very clear, from what I'm looking at, probably another two to three months for her to come to an arresting decision. Now, the investigation doesn't stop when you arrest. You continue the investigation. But to arrest, you have to have probable cause. And I think the detective has said, even in an interview in her deposition, that she was well on her way, that she felt, to obtaining that probable cause. Yeah, she said that in her deposition, and she also says that to Jack. So I want to talk about the conversation with her and Jack Kowalski, which we have a transcript of it. I believe it's north of 170 pages. So this was a very long

conversation. And, you know, we already kind of explained the parameters of this conversation. This is, you know, if you are, if you, unless you are, unless you subpoena someone, right, as a detective, when you're in this point in the investigation, you can't force anyone to talk to you unless they're under arrest. And then they can also, we can always ask for their lawyer to be there. So Jack was not under any, you know, onus clip of her saying, are you protective or are you complicit? And, you know, I don't care. I will throw you in jail tomorrow if I basically if I find out you've been complicit in this abuse, which to me, to be honest,

is not a reasonable thing to say, I don't think. But they clearly were framing it, especially with the follow-up comment from the lawyer. They were clearly framing it as this guy is being put under so much pressure that if he doesn't say that he will choose his child over his wife, they will take the child away from both of them, they'll put him in jail, et cetera. So they were trying to make her look like bad cop,

for lack of a better phrase. And they chose the most confrontational moment of a very long interview that was very cordial, right? Right, watching that, I will say, before I was able to read the whole transcript of the conversation, watching that, I think, you know, my thought was, okay, if I was in a situation as a parent where my spouse was being investigated and I was talking to the detective, you know, would I make it clear to that detective?

Like, absolutely, at the end of the day, if I'm presented with compelling evidence that my spouse has done this thing, I will be protective. I will ask him to move out. I will, yes, I could imagine saying that. But there was just so much context left out of what he said. And I can't imagine doing, and we'll get into some of the specifics, but what I can't imagine doing

is what Jack Kowalski did in this conversation, in fact, which was offer a lot of reasons all on his own that he was concerned about the situation and sort of these other things that had come up. And I don't think I would sort of take the tone of, you know, now that I think about it, it does seem like this might be happening. To me, this seemed like a very friendly, cooperative exchange. I mean, was that your take on it also? Sure. It was a long conversation. It was very clear that he was doing this voluntarily. They chose intentionally the most confrontational moment, which has to

happen in that interview, right? She's judging on whether he's going to be protective if she gets to the point of arresting Beata. And it's just so out of context and it's I you know I view it as extremely dishonest yeah no I I agree with you it's hard to sort of frame it any other way given when you do read this whole conversation I mean really like they're you know they're relating to one another they're at some point she has to go and make sure that she's not going to get a parking ticket so like the idea that Jack couldn't have left this conversation any time, that there was, like, any pressure on him was just completely misleading. Well, and I think it's important to point out that this isn't some magical information that we've uncovered.

The filmmakers have this information. Yeah. They absolutely have it. Well, right, clearly, because they have the audio of the entire conversation. So, presumably, they listened to the audio of the conversation and pulled that clip. So, no, you're right. I mean, I, you know, I sort of, I guess I sort of want to be, I want to be judicious in not assuming bad intentions on the part of the filmmaker or on anyone that's covered this case, because I understand, you know, this case in particular and all of these cases, it's so emotionally charged. And I would really like

to talk to someone who has put together one of these pieces that I sort of take issue with, right, that I see these omissions in, to just get some understanding of like where they're coming from when they make those choices, because they are making editorial choices and you know same thing with mike hickson bogg who obviously covered my sister's case and has covered many other cases i have not been able to get anything out of him about why you know clearly you had access to the same information why leave it out why make that choice so indeed i have that same question for these filmmakers whether or not anyone will ever answer it i don't know like, yes, we can assume that they knew more than what is included in the film. And the film takes a very strong perspective.

I mean, I think by letting both Jack and his lawyer, who are, no matter how you slice it, no matter whether you think they're in the right or not, the reality is that they do stand to greatly financially benefit from winning this lawsuit to let them be the people who are explaining, for instance, what Munchausen by proxy is. I mean, they left that to the defense attorney to explain. That just seems it seems like a strange editorial choice for a documentary. Well, and I think that they willfully did that. I don't, I, you know, you say that the filmmakers will not talk to you. Mike Hicksonball will not talk to you. If you're an honest reporter, you would defend your work when it's questioned. I will say there are some caveats here because there is this upcoming lawsuit.

There may not be able, you know, they may have sort of, you know, that was the answer I got from the film company was we're being protective of the Kowalskis at this time and etc oh that's that's an excuse that is i'm sorry that's that's definitely for dad right that has nothing to do with the filmmakers and their process and what they gathered and how they got it and how they used it that's an excuse and and it's just a blatant excuse i'm sorry no it's okay i's okay. I know we have strong feelings. It's not that I don't share your feelings. It's that I'm trying to be open-minded. I know, I know. So I think what was really interesting,

you know, and I'm someone who has read probably more than the average number of transcripts of police investigations because you and I are working on this book together. So I've read dozens and dozens of yours. And I thought Detective Graham had a good strategy in this, which is that she, you know, talked to Jack, she got, and this is a lot of times the tack you take, Mike, and I wonder if you can kind of walk us through what the strategy of talking to a parent like this is, right? That she first started by getting in Jack's words, what is going on with your daughter? What happened?

And then sort of after that saying, well, here are some of the things that have come up. Here are some of the things your wife said in the hospital. Here are some of the things that Maya has said behind the scenes. Here are some of the things that have come up in the medical paperwork and sort of seeing how he responds to that. So can you kind of walk us through what she did here and why that's an effective strategy? Sure. And it was a very effective interview. She, again, and honestly, she is just seeking the truth, right? But what she is also doing is letting dad lead her through that, right? And then giving dad pieces of information that she has to get dad's reaction to that information and kind of gauge where he's at on this. is this father completely unaware of what's been happening? Or is he a suspect? Or is he also a suspect?

Is he also, has he been complicit in enabling this abuse in a more active way, right? So to get things from his perspective, you know, that's kind of one tool. Does he tell the same story as Beata? And she's also doing this before she has all the financial records. So she may also be considering, is this a financial scheme? Are they doing this for financial benefit with all

of the fundraisers? Right. Because that is actually kind of a different, there is a sort of different kind of case where someone will be just making up an ailment. Now, we do not think that that is what happened here because there's a lot in these documents that would say these medical treatments were actually being carried out on the child. We know that, right? She was, in fact, being given high doses of ketamine. She was being put in a ketamine coma, et cetera. So there was this actual threat to her health. But there have been other cases where parents will claim to have a sick child in order to do this fundraising on places like you caring and GoFundMe. And in fact, it does appear that this family had spent a ton of money on out-of-pocket

care because neither Dr. Kirkpatrick, who is the doctor who is originally prescribed the ketamine, was not covered at all by insurance. Dr. Hanna was, but this Dr. Cantu that they saw in Mexico was also not covered by insurance. Correct. Hanna was, but this Dr. Cantu that they saw in Mexico was also not covered by insurance. Correct. But this is all information that I believe she didn't have at the time of the interview with Mr. Kowalski, right? So she's also trying to determine, is this a financial fraud also on top of child abuse, right? Is this also child exploitation, depending on Florida's laws on it? She's trying to determine a whole number of things in this interview with Jack, and she's also trying to get information about the actual child abuse case itself and whether this medical child abuse

is occurring with Maya. And she's gauging where dad is. Is dad going to be protective if she ends up arresting mom? There were definitely many things during this conversation that jumped off the page at me as being, you know, similar to other cases we've seen. And also just, you know, the demeanor of Jack and kind of looking at other spouses in these cases. So I wonder, like, what just in an overall sense, what stood out to you about what Jack said in this conversation? What was very interesting to me is, especially for the medical abuse aspect of it, is it's very clear that the primary medical provider for Maya was Beata. Jack makes that very clear. Jack doesn't know what medication she's on. Jack doesn't really know the treatments. He doesn't know the amount of

ketamine she's getting each day. It's very, very clear that Beata is the one administering her medical care. Now, that's important to Detective Graham because that is identifying who your suspect is in the medical child abuse case, right? It's going to be the person who is actually medically caring for the child and presenting the false symptoms. As we see in these cases quite often, the fathers leave the care of these children completely up to the mother. They don't have the criminal culpability of committing this crime. You could argue that they're criminally negligent or reckless, but I think you'd have a hard time proving that. Yeah, and I think we've seen so many other cases, right? Like, you know, if we think about Fabian Ybarra, who we talked to in season one in the Hope Ybarra case, you know, he like this is a pretty normal dynamic that moms are the ones who are responsible for the medical care, you know, fairly or unfairly. That's not out of the ordinary for, like, the mom to be the one that knows, you know, what's going on medically with the kids, that knows when their doctor's appointments, that has ever gone to a doctor appointment.

I mean, that is very common. And, you know, in Fabian Ybarra's case, right, he didn't, nobody in Hope's family just had any reason to suspect her until they did, right? And, I mean, that's, I think, I always want to extend some grace to the people who are surrounding these people that it seems like when you're looking back at a case sometimes, like, why did this person not do anything? But, in fact, in a lot of times, they just really aren't aware. And I think, you know, some of Jack's explanations, the detective in here, speak to that. You know, he said, well, she's the one who's, she's a nurse. You know, she was an infusion nurse. She's the one who has the medical background.

This is a really complex medical CRPS, you know, complex medical issue that like I don't, you know, most of these doctors don't even understand it. So how could I understand it? And I mean, that is an explanation that at least on its face makes sense. I thought something that was interesting that is a little different than some of the cases we've looked at where you have the dad, you know, like in Fabian Ybarra's case, where part of the reason he wasn't as more doctor's appointments because he just was really busy. But Jack is retired and actually he was a stay-at-home dad. So I thought that was kind of an interesting element of like, well, in that case, I would expect him to be going to more of these appointments. Now they did have a younger child, so that's, you know, he was probably

just busy with Kyle. So to this question of like how involved was Jack in the medical care, the detective, you know, in kind of the latter half of the interview, pushes him on it, right? Which is this question of, yes, you understand you're leaving a lot of this to be out of, but we are talking about very extreme treatments. So how did that part of the conversation strike you? It struck me as he's just the typical dad in these cases. I think we just from what was even documented in the documentary, that Beta was definitely the alpha in this relationship. He says himself that she was very opinionated, outspoken. It struck me that he was the typical passive father that we see so often in these cases.

Yes, me too. I will say he did seem an extra degree sort of clueless about the medical stuff. And that's just my impression. I just think probably the reason that struck me was actually the same thing the detective brings up, which is, okay, yes, if you're talking about your wife is taking your child to the pediatrician or into an emergency room when they have a high fever, okay, that makes total sense. But when you're talking about subjecting your daughter to life-threatening treatments for a pain disorder, which doesn't make any sense. I mean, we're going to get into that with a doctor and talk about kind of more of the medical stuff that came up. But CRPS, it is very painful. It is very serious, but it is not life-threatening

in and of itself, which the movie misrepresents because they sort of let Dr. Kirkpatrick's comment about she will die a long, slow death if she's not given ketamine, which is a wild thing for a medical professional to say. Well, and then she didn't, right? Right, of course she didn't. But I mean, and CRPS cannot kill you, right? So it was a little extra degree of passiveness that you would let your spouse move forward with a highly experimental treatment that you cannot get in the US that could be life-threatening

without maybe doing a little bit more of your research. I mean, did that occur to you also? I thought that that was smart of her to kind of confront him on that. Yes, it did. And he just, again, he's just a typical passive dad who's going to let mom do whatever she wants to with the care of the children. And it's something I see with exception on some of the dads that I've had, but on most of the dads, we see that quite a bit. I thought it was so interesting with the way that she sort of shared information with him and let him respond to it, which is, you know, which is obviously is a good tactic in these conversations.

Exactly. good tactic in these conversations. So she first let him tell the story of Maya's condition. And indeed, the way he tells it, I mean, something that struck me, having done only the tiniest bit of research into CRPS, the way that he describes it would be a very atypical onset with this that she had, you know, the story was that about a year and a half earlier in 2015, in the summer of 2015, she had had an asthma attack that left her bedridden. And then she was not able to move and then started having all this pain. And then they determined eventually that it was CRPS, which is just, that's sort of a wild medical story. And a few things about that story jumped out at me. Mike, I want to know how that read to you when he was describing what happened to Maya. In the police report, it's noted that they could find no diagnosis of asthma for Maya. But when it

was noted by Detective Graham, they hadn't got all of the records yet. Now, they do have the records when the report is complete, but Detective Graham never comes back and says whether Maya had asthma or not. If there is no diagnosis of asthma, then what is this asthma attack? And another interesting point is that pulmonology, when she was inpatient after removal, cleared her and said she did not have asthma. Can you talk about asthma and breathing issues as a part of this pattern? Because this is something that comes up a lot. Right. And again, a lot of the asthma diagnosis are made on history, right? So we see it a lot in these cases.

I've seen it in some recent cases. And it's just one of the many things that you can claim and you can get treatment for without a doctor actually seeing a symptom. Right. And actually, in fact, Joe, who we both know and who was on the first episode with us, believed that they had asthma until about a month ago and finally realized that they didn't.

And that just shows the psychological manipulation. I think we need to point out that Maya is absolutely a victim here. Absolutely a victim. You can talk about what she's a victim of but she's absolutely a victim and in joe's interview i think it's very important because joe talks about the psychological manipulation that joe's to this day still undergoing right so it's very long term for these victims to recover from right yeah and i think it's important to i'm glad you brought that up because I think it's really important to make sure people understand that we are not intimating that Maya was faking anything. That is assuming a level of agency that if she was being victimized, she did not have, right? There is a huge difference between having these reactions when you're being manipulated and believe that you are sick because your parent keeps telling you that you're sick or believe that you have to behave like you're sick to please your parent.

I mean, that's coercion and control and manipulation. That's not the same thing as like, oh, the child is lying or the child is sort of, quote, faking it. So I think that's a really important distinction. I think it's important to point out also that, you know, children rely on their caregivers for their medical history. If you tell a child that child's sick and as their parent, that child is going to believe that they are sick and they're not going to have a baseline for health and they're not going to know what health is. And I think there's evidence of that in this case. I mean, if you look at what the detective said about some of the social media posts, you know, Maya dancing around. Now, she never was on her feet, but she was, she would be on her knees. She was clearly not in any type of distressing pain. Those social media clips, and these are social media clips that Detective Stephanie Graham had seen, you know, she hadn't gotten the full records yet, but she had seen videos, I believe, on the YouTube channel or on Instagram of Maya dancing around. And this just did not match the description that even that Jack gave in that interview, right, where he said she was unable to walk, she was unable to use her arms she couldn't lift a spoon we had to

help her go to the bathroom and I mean even to me and I wonder if this struck you as well Mike like even watching the film and given the angle this film is taking I have to assume that if there existed film of Maya in the hospital looking miserable and in pain, they would have used it. And in fact, all the footage of her in the hospital, she just looks bored. I mean, she looks bored and she looks, you know, she's just hanging out in bed. And in fact, you know, there is a lot in here. There is, you know, we do not have access to the medical records,

but we do have some of the testimony from some of the doctors that were there during that admission. And one of the things that comes up again and again is that Maya is not proactively reporting herself to be in pain, but every time someone asks her if she's in pain, she says she is, and that she would only behave as though she was in pain when Beata was in the room. So when the detective confronts him with this piece of information, now, if I really didn't suspect my spouse of abuse, I would think to say like, oh no, that's not the case. I've seen her in pain many times.

Doesn't he start to agree with her that he can see the signs? He says, actually, I've noticed the same thing too. I will be home with her during the day because he was her primary caregiver, his stay-at-home dad. I'll be at home with her during the day and she'll be fine. And the minute her mom walks in the door, she'll say she's in pain. So I've noticed that too. That's a very telling statement. The fact that dad is saying that he's noticing her behavior change whenever Beata comes in the door and then she's claiming to be ill that is obviously concerning that that she is I mean she's 10 so she's obviously been conditioned yeah to present herself that way to her mom yeah and you know his reports of like how her pain functioned and with the understanding that CRPS is a disorder that can sort of have flares and get better and worse.

You know, it would not get better and worse depending on who was in the room with you. Right. Like so worried about my sister. You cannot marry a murderer. I was sick, but I am healing. Returning to W Network and Stack TV. The West Side Ripper is back. If you're not killing these people, then who is? That's what I want to know. Starring Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina. The only investigating I'm doing these days is who shit their pants. Killer messaged you yesterday? This is so dangerous. I

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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 rollercoaster. 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. So I think the other thing that really struck me in this interview, at some point, the detective brings up directly, there is a suspicion of Munchausen by proxy and asks Jack if he understands what that is. And Jack says, yes, I looked it up and I see where they're going with it. Yeah, yeah. And that sounds textbook what we've been through.

That's what his quote is. Obviously at that point, he's seeing it, right? But again, I think he falls, you know, I'm not a psychologist. I just know what I see in these dads. And these dads are extremely gullibly influenced by their spouse. And I think that, I think it's pretty clear that Jack had vacillated back and forth between believing she did it, not believing she did it. Even on the documentary, even when they show him confronting her on the documentary, you know, he obviously is at some point either trying to change her behavior, right, by saying we just need to cooperate. So you're talking about the audio recording they play of the two of them having an argument about her trying to interfere too much while Maya was in the hospital when she was under

shelter care. Tina mentioned something that I had not even thought about. Who recorded that? I mean, he must have recorded that fight for some reason, right? I mean, he had to have. It wouldn't have audio of it otherwise. So there were a couple of things, and this I think is something that probably stuck out to me that might not have stuck out very much to anybody else but there was two incidents that they talked about during the conversation with Jack and the detective that really struck me as being within the pattern again or just being a parallel with these other cases and that there was two these two of these major major events within the narrative of Maya's illness, right?

So the onset of the alleged CRPS and when she suddenly, you know, was bedridden and couldn't move and had pain all over her body. And I think July of 2015, they had some kind of parade. She was riding her bike. She seemed fine that day. This is according to the Kowalskis. And then that night, you know, she had an asthma attack and then she like couldn't get out of bed, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So that happened right before Jack Kowalski was going to take her and Kyle on a big summer trip that he talks about in this

interview where he was going to take them on daddy camp, he called it. And he was going to take them on the two of them just with dad and they were going to go on a big trip so that happened right before that and then for some reason when she had her ketamine coma when they took her down to Monterey to see this Dr. Cantu to put her in a five-day ketamine coma that had to be scheduled for some reason the same day that Jack's eldest daughter was also getting, who is not Beata's daughter, who is a daughter from a previous marriage, Jack's eldest daughter was getting married in Mexico and the whole family was supposed to go. And then Beata decided that that was when Maya had to go and get a ketamine coma. And the reason those two things stood out to me is because a lot of people and myself included, one of the things that can be a part of this behavior pattern and the sort of attention

seeking part of it is that whenever there is something dramatic, either positive or negative going on with another family member, this is something Brittany Phillips, family of origin described, that they will have some kind of crisis to sort of divert the attention. And that seemed to me that Detective Graham was actually sort of getting at that in her interview. Yeah, I think she was getting at that. As far as how that can be used in criminal court, I think it's just more of a red flag. Yeah, it's definitely more of a red flag than anything, but it's not a hard time introducing that as evidence in criminal court. Right. And I think there's a lot of things in here that are sort of red flags. But part of what putting these two cases together, I mean, certainly like not everything that you're going to get from a family member or a friend or even a doctor is going to be part of a criminal case. But you're always looking to build a picture of the offender.

Is that right? Correct. Yeah, of course. And it does go to show attention seeking motivation. Right? Yeah. Yes. As far as maybe not in court, but the to to an investigator it goes to show that

something else i wanted to bring up when we talked about jack's interview he talks about maya doing water aerobics and swimming i mean is she just using her arms when she's swimming is she using her legs right the pool therapy the pool therapy and what does that consist of? And she likes to do it with her friends. I don't know. And that's a good question for a doctor as to whether, you know, if you have that regional pain complex, kind of how would that play into it? It seems like that would not be comfortable. No. And I mean, the way that it's been explained to me, and again, we will get a doctor on here, but is that with CRPS, usually, and again, we can't say for sure whether or not

she has it or not, but we can talk about what is typical and atypical. And the typical, you know, way it has onset is that you have some kind of injury, like you break your wrist or something, and then some small percentage of people develop this chronic pain disorder in that area. So really the description of it, there was lots of things about the description coming from Jack of what her pain was like that were pretty inconsistent. So there was another thing that really struck out to me. Again, we were sort of talking about what the movie does with some of these timeline things and the sort of way it frames things. And one thing they said that was just, I mean, honestly, it was flat out wrong, is in the movie, they say, they claim that the hospital, while Maya was there, because the

hospital, the hospital did suspect that she was fabricating symptoms. But again, we talked about that's a very psychologically complex thing with someone that you suspect is a medical child abuse victim. So they did not necessarily think that she was like just quote making it all up. You know, it's not that simple. But they said in the film, they described it as they changed the diagnosis to Munchausen. That's totally inaccurate because if you have an investigation ongoing for medical child abuse, you know, it's just a real misnomer, right? It's not like they haven't made a determination whether Munchausen by proxy was happening or not. And it takes quite a lot of time to make that determination. Right.

I think we can say pretty confidently that on 12-5 on December 5th of 2016, when Dr. Smith turned in her report to the detective, the fact that the investigation didn't end, that that report was a determination of medical child abuse on the child. Right. By someone, right? We don't know who. I mean, we can all guess, but we don't have that report. But what we do know is the investigation continued. The detective didn't wrap up her investigation. She said she read the report and then she scheduled these interviews. She wouldn't be scheduling interviews if her investigation was done, if the report said, no, this is abuse isn't happening. And we know there wouldn't be a documentary if that report said that. Right. And, you know, there's also, again, we've talked a little bit about how they framed Dr. Sally Smith's role in an incorrect way,

but they made a big deal of the fact that Dr. Sally Smith only spent 10 minutes talking to them. But it's not really, it's not her role to evaluate the child's health. It's her role to go back through the records, which I'm assuming were extremely voluminous, and look for these patterns of deception and these patterns of medical child abuse. So that is not something, the fact that she spent, you know, they frame it as she spent a few minutes talking to this family and just made her mind up. And that's not what happened. I mean, we can see that in the records that that's not what happened. She was still working on her report, even during, you know,

this first part of the investigation. Right. And her report was a 45-page report. So it was not, you know, it was not some small document. And it obviously was not put together haphazardly. One of the notes that the detective did make in her narrative that was extremely interesting to me was that an allergist had actually charted concerns for Munchausen by proxy in Beata in December of 2015, a full eight months before this investigation kicked off. And that's another doctor having the same concerns. And there was another hospital that had reported her as well. There was a hospital that she had seen.

There was a rehabilitation nurse that had actually made a report. One doctor just put it in his notes, I believe, and then there was another doctor that actually called it in. And to be fair, they do mention this in the movie, that she'd been reported by more than one place, but they rushed past it pretty fast, and they don't really give any details on that. And to me, I mean, I think to me, one of the strongest indicators that something is amiss

is if you have multiple people who have no communication with each other reporting concerns, right? That really points away from, oh, this is all at the feet of one overzealous doctor. I think it's also important to point out that, you know, a hospital like John Hopkins is a huge place. You're going to have multiple people caring for this child that may not even know each other. Are we to believe that they're all in some big conspiracy? Right, because I think it was seven different people from just this one hospitalization at JJC reported these things about Maya, that she was only exhibiting pain when her mother was in the room, that she had made these comments. So I think one of the most compelling things to me that came

through in these documents that was absolutely glossed over in the documentary, the documentary really presents Beata as having made some enemies at the hospital because she was pushy. The lawyer describes it as she must have really offended someone over there. And they made it sound like, oh, she was being difficult. She was being insistent. She was trying to advocate for her daughter. She was telling them she knew what would help her. And in fact, it was quite a lot more alarming than that. So the one thing, you know, we talked about a couple of these comments in the other episode, but you know, she had said, Maya wants to go to heaven. No child wants to live like this. And the most chilling thing that she said during this hospitalization, and she's saying this,

while a bunch of people are in the room, while Maya is in the room listening to her, is that she said that she mentions getting enough drugs to finally put Maya in hospice. And that is really chilling because this is not a child that was dying. And the mention of hospice particularly got me because this is something we've seen come up in other cases. With the Olivia Gantt case specifically, right? Right. And, you know, there was also a prescription that was written that someone wrote terminal on the bottom of it. She had actually told Dr. Kirkpatrick that she wanted her declared as terminal. And Dr. Kirkpatrick said he wanted her declared as terminal. And Dr. Kirkpatrick said he

didn't write terminal on that prescription. He wouldn't do that because he doesn't have the ability to declare that. I mean, there's a lot of questions. And to be very fair, those questions were not answered because of Beata's death, right? So we don't know who wrote that on the prescription. Would the detective have found out? Absolutely, I think she would have. Yeah. But one of the other things that comes up in this paperwork is that Beata was found out for committing prescription fraud, for getting a hold of prescriptions fraudulently. So there was that that happened. And obviously, Beata is also an infusion nurse. She had admitted also to giving ketamine by infusion into Maya's port against the advice

of Dr. Hanna, who told her that it should only be administered orally. So I think, you know, and again, yes, there's so many questions we're not going to be able to answer because they terminated this investigation when Beata died. But again, you know, if what we are seeking to answer here is it was their reason to believe that this mother could be a danger to their child. And to me, someone who is threatening to leave the hospital when the doctors refused to put her daughter immediately into a coma, that seems very, I can see why people are alarmed. And she's making all of these comments about Maya's mortality and that she seems to be saying that she's going to die

or she's going to try and put her in hospice. We've seen that in other cases. We've seen that in the Anita Tutt case. You know, she was planning the child's funeral and had bought caskets and was asking nurses to discontinue feed so he could go to heaven. I mean, we have seen these patterns before in other cases. And can you remind us how Danita Tutt's child is doing today? The last update I had, he had played high school football and he is an active, healthy guy. And she ended up serving five years in prison for attempted murder. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and I think that story, the sort of, you know, that even reminded me a little bit of some of the things that Hope Ybarra wrote on her blog before when she was writing about her impending death, which of course was not impending because she did not have cancer, but she was writing about her impending death, which of course was not impending because she did not have cancer, but she was writing about her daughter

joining her in heaven. And I think it is really alarming when a parent who has a child that does not have a terminal illness starts talking about them as though they are going to die. I can see why that was very alarming. And so I think as to the question of, was that the right call to put that child in shelter care, it seems very evident why these professionals would be so concerned, even from what we have, even from the documentation we have, which, hadn't even really thought so much about until

she said it, was she asked Jack, can you imagine what this is like for your daughter to have your wife saying, I know there's a 50-50% chance she'll die from this ketamine treatment. I don't care, do it anyway. And one of the things that Maya had reported to some of the, you know, she had had like a, I think a neuropsych evaluation at the hospital before this conversation between Detective Graham and Jack happened. And during that evaluation, she said a couple of really telling things. Maya did, you know, one of which was that she said she didn't want to be sick anymore, but she was afraid that it would upset her mother and said that the ketamine treatments, yeah, and like said that the ketamine treatments really scared her because of course they did because she's, you know, sitting around

listening to them talk about how she could die from it. And it's a scary process. I mean, when you are coming out of this coma and they show some of that, they show some of that footage and audio in the movie, you know, you have these hallucinations. Ketamine is also a street drug, one that I was never going to mess around with because it sounds terrifying. So, I mean, this was a really, this is really like these treatments she was putting her through were really a lot.

And there just isn't any real reason to believe that she needed it. And again, we're going to talk to a medical professional about that to sort of help us contextualize this. But it also this, you know, this timeline of how fast these treatments escalated to go kind of from zero to ketamine coma. I can see why that on its own is pretty alarming. Well, and also let's look at how these treatments de-escalated once she was removed from her mother's care. She was on 25 different medications when she came into the hospital. She was down to three by 1027 of 16, which is what in the hospital, maybe a month, maybe not even that long.

So she's, you know, the de-escalation is also extremely important, right? Because what do we know about these cases? How do we prove this? What is the gold standard? You separate the child and see what medical conditions the child actually has. And they were able, yeah, this was reported on 10-13 and by 10-26, she's already, so 13 days, she's been weaned off of that many medications. You know, the film and even the description of it on the production company's website, and then the way Jack talks, the way Dr. Kirkpatrick talks, they keep saying that she was deteriorating in the hospital without these medications. And she just clearly wasn't.

I mean, there's no evidence that she was deteriorating. And even the video they show of her in the hospital, she's not deteriorating. The only thing the police report notes about that is she started not wanting to participate in physical therapy after visits began with Jack. So, and they were unsupervised, which should never happen. That's important for people to understand. And I feel like we can't emphasize enough because of course, on the surface,

it looks incredibly cruel that they weren't letting her mom see her and that they were even, you know, limiting some of Jack's visitation. But in fact, you know, one of the things the detective mentions to Jack is that Maya had said, and, you know, so Maya did have some physical issues when she was admitted to the hospital because she had been wheelchair bound for a year at that point. So she had some atrophy in her muscles.

So that was one of the things that they were actually working on in physical therapy in the hospital. And apparently, you know, Detective Graham mentions to Jack that Maya had told him, oh, I stood up today by myself for 10 seconds in physical therapy, and that he didn't give her a positive reaction to that. And that was one of the reasons that Detective Graham was concerned. And he sort of said, oh, I don't remember that. I, you know, I would always encourage her to be healthy. I would always want her to be healthy. But that's really important because one of the reasons that you have to impose separation is because it's not just physical. It's not just that you're worried that the offender might poison them or might, you know, do something to them, but it's the psychological of seeing them, you know, and they were reporting that Maya was doing worse every time she had a visit. And so it can be that sort of reminder that if the child feels that they need to be sick for their parents, and they also talked about that Maya was very aware that her parents had spent a lot of money on her

and a lot of time. And it, you know, seemingly that she felt some pressure to play that sick role. And so that can also be really damaging to the child and can mess with your sort of results from a separation test. Is that right? Sure, yes.

And, you know, when you're taught, when your only method of gaining love from your parents is to play the sick role, you are going to play the sick role. And if you're reminded to play the sick role in any slight way, you're going to do so. Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but that's what I've seen in these cases. And I'll comment on it from a very layman's point of view. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that is backed up by the psychologist that we've talked to and, et cetera. So we're not just shooting from the hip.

So one other thing that came up, Mike, that I noticed that, again, really stuck out is that reportedly when Maya was admitted to JJC, you know, she was brought there because she allegedly had stomach pain, right? And I thought it was really interesting that Jack mentions that he wasn't bringing her from home. He was bringing her from the Ronald McDonald House, which is not mentioned in the movie. But Ronald McDonald Houses are places where children go who are getting such intensive ongoing care that they need to have accommodations to live close to the hospital. So that struck me as strange. And so what Jack said happened was Beata was kind of, you know, they have this other son, Kyle, at their house. And so he and Beata, it sounds like, were taking turns being at the Ronald McDonald facility with Maya. And the Jack took over in the evening, and then Maya started complaining about these stomach pains.

And then when they admitted her to the hospital, they said that she hadn't been allowed to eat in five days. And I would think, again, I'll check this with the doctors, but I would think if you were getting high doses of oral ketamine on an empty stomach, that could give you stomach pain. But that piece of it, and then also some medical professionals had witnessed, you know, the doctors were encouraging Maya to eat because she was very underweight. And that Beata was discouraging her from eating. And again, feeding issues is just one of the most common pieces of this pattern as well.

So did that strike you as well? It did. And, you know, if you go five days without eating, your stomach's, my stomach's going to hurt. Yeah, that did strike me. And the fact that she was withholding food, right? That's something we see in quite a lot of these cases. Normally is to get a G button issued.

It'd be great to see if the medical records are there to see if she's saying she can't eat and she needs a G button. We don't have those records. We don't know. We don't know what all she has pursued, right? We only know what we're told by the people who did the documentary. We don't have a full picture. You know, they frame it in the documentary as all that was wrong with Maya when they brought her in was stomach pain.

I was like, well, if that was all that was wrong with her, why were you staying at the Ronald McDonald house? That just doesn't quite add up. And that was never covered in the interview, was it? No, no, no, they didn't. They didn't really elaborate on it. You know, the other series that we got, you know, there was a report after Beata's death that was included in the public record.

And there were some really interesting pieces of this. And obviously, you know, again, this is Jack tells the story in the film. And he says, you know, the judge made this decision. And there was, you know, they played some of this audio and the, I can't remember exactly what the hearing was about, but they were at a hearing. I mean, there's a million of these hearings when you're going through one of these cases. So the judge said, Beata had asked if she could hug Maya and the judge said no. And then they go to the lawyer saying, you know, and you can never get that hug back. And Jack says, you know, I know that's what killed her.

She was so upset, you know, on the car ride home. And then he describes the night when she died and says she was alone at the house. He took Kyle, their younger son, out to a birthday party and came home and didn't see her, didn't check on her. And then it was her brother, who I take it lived nearby, Beata's brother, came over to the house the next day and was looking for something in the garage and discovered the body. Obviously, and they play the 911 call. Obviously, that's incredibly upsetting, so traumatic, so traumatic for the little boy. But I think it was, it was again, just interesting to see the rest of the story. And I just kind of don't know what to make of it.

So the night before her death, she had, and this is one of the things that came out in this paperwork, she had taken Jack's gun out of his safe and disappeared for a number of hours to the point that Jack filed a police report because he couldn't find her. You know, she obviously eventually came back. She was found. And then, so this is the next night. And I just, I sort of can't stop thinking about this moment because I just think, okay,

if you know your spouse is suicidal, which obviously you do, if my spouse disappears with my gun for hours, and obviously she was extremely distraught, and it's worth mentioning that there's always a suicide risk in these cases. There should be a safety plan in place always in these investigations because, you know, we can talk a little bit more about that, but it just seemed like such strange behavior that you know your spouse is having suicidal ideation and then you leave them alone in the house the next day and don't check on them till the next morning. And I'm not even inferring anything. It just seemed like really strange behavior and maybe points at the fact that things had really deteriorated between them more than he was letting on. I just sort of didn't know

what to make of it, but it seemed so bizarre. It's just, I hate to judge anybody on, and I'm not judging him, but I hate, you hate to sort of make judgments about anybody based on what they did in like one of the, you know, worst times in their life, but it just seemed so strange. And I wonder if anything about that struck you as well. Well, yeah, it definitely strikes me that they came home and no one was concerned about where she was, right? They come home that evening and no one's concerned about where she is after what had happened the previous evening. That is concerning. Why? Obviously, I think that speaks to a breakdown in the relationship at that point in time.

I don't know what else it could be. Yeah, because, I mean, why wouldn't you call, especially if her family lives nearby, like, call someone to sit with her? I mean, if you think someone's suicidal, you don't leave them alone. It just seemed so strange. And I think. And let's give him the benefit of the doubt that she had some story when she got home and he, and he believed it and he didn't think she was suicidal.

Even then, I mean, Andrea, you're married. When you come home and you don't see your husband, are you going to look for him? Uh, yes. I mean, it is a weird detail. What it means, we don't know. And she mentioned that, you know, he even mentions in the film, I believe, that she had been sleeping in Kyle's bedroom. But okay, Kyle was home. So they knew she wasn't in Kyle's bedroom either because presumably Kyle went to bed. I mean, again, it's like we could parse it to death. It just, it seemed like such a strange,

I mean, even if I was so angry at my husband, if he had disappeared with a gun to the point that I filed a police report because I couldn't find him 24 hours later, I think I would just skip the birthday party or I would call a friend or someone to come sit with him. And he just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And I guess it's also just also to say

one of the things that looks the most heartless in that documentary is when they show the doctors texting each other about news of the suicide. Those texts are extremely out of context. I mean. Right. I mean, yes, they're out of context. And I think it's also sort of worth mentioning

that these are extremely difficult jobs and that there is a sort of... There's gallows humor. Trust me, I'm a police officer. There's certainly gallows humor in the job that we do is how we keep our sanity. It's a coping mechanism, right? And the fact that, you know, they call her ketamine girl. And obviously taken completely out of context, that seems cruel, but that's why they would never have said it, probably in a public statement. There's a reason they call her ketamine girl,

because they can't use her name in a text message. HIPAA. Oh, interesting. I hadn't even thought of that. Right? Number one, I don't text the medical professionals about cases. I do that through secure email. This is one very good reason why, right? Because your text messages can be got, you know, I have a county phone. My text messages are open to the public and they can see whatever I'm texting. Even many times by email,

if I'm communicating with them by an insecure email, let's say it's an insulin poisoning case, I very well may text them, hey, insulin girl is doing this or that or another. That way, I don't have to say the patient's name. It's not a HIPAA violation for them to respond. You know, so we can talk about the case that way because no name is out in public and no one knows who we're talking about. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing I think that, you know, was framed as being very heartless was that one of the people in the text exchange said, yeah, I've had another mother do this. And so I think the film was meant to frame it. See, they're driving all these poor women to

suicide. Let me address that because whenever I make an arrest in one of these cases, I always put these offenders on suicide watch. Why do I do that? You have just taken their entire identity from them and you have flipped their identity and cast them in an entirely opposite identity. They've gone from being the caring hero mom now to the, as we always hear from the news media, the monster in these cases. And that is a huge psychological hit for anyone to take, just ripping away their entire identity. And, but also then casting them in the exact opposite identity as a, and I sometimes have to fight with my mental assessment people over at the county jail and say, no, no, you put her on suicide watch. It's on you. If you don't, I'm sending you an email because again, these offenders don't fit

the normal profile of someone you put on suicide watch, right? They're going to claim they're fine. They're not going to say they have any problems. So I think that's worth noting that. So she should have been on suicide watch from the minute that this investigation started. Well, I mean, there's no way for police or anyone to put her on suicide watch, right, until she's in custody. Oh, okay. I'm talking about when they, right? Until she's in custody. Oh, okay. I'm talking about when they're arrested.

But it's a risk. I mean, it seems like someone should have told the family. Yeah. So just a couple other things. So there were two notes. Well, actually, there was three notes that Beata left when she died. So there's two emails. And then when they found her cell phone, there was a piece of paper attached to it that said retaliation. So they do cover part of the suicide note in the film. And I noticed actually that when they put the text of the suicide note out, they actually blank out parts of it. And there I can see why they blanked those parts of it out. So, you know, there's the one note, there's to the judge, he's heartless, it's like a Nazi camp, etc.

So there's that note, right? And then there's a second note, which is sort of more with regards to her children and, you know, who she's leaving behind. And in that note, I mean, two things really struck me that were not mentioned in the film. Number one, she attempts to leave custody that were not mentioned in the film. Number one, she attempts to leave custody of her children, not to Jack, but to her brother and sister. Right. Which I found very odd. Right. I mean, again, to me, that speaks to this couple was far more at odds than what he's... Right. It definitely speaks to deterioration in the relationship, you know, as does Jack not

finding her when he came home that night, right? definitely speaks to deterioration in the relationship, you know, as does Jack not finding her when he came home that night, right? And why is that, why is that a significant omission from the narrative of the film? I think it gives us a picture of a relationship that is not well. And I think in the suicide note, her putting that in the suicide note is pretty much a direct shot at Jack. It's a direct aim at him. I don't want you to have our kids. I want my brothers to have them. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to read it any other way.

I, yeah. And the fact that Jack never looked for her the night before when he got home. That just goes to show that there is something off in that relationship at that point in time. Like pretty deeply off, yeah. And so there was two other things that struck me. So one of the phrases, so she sort of talks about her kids

and mentions Kyle and talks about Maya. And this is where the film shows that part of the note, and it shows some of it and then has some of it whited out. And so this is where the film gets its title. So she says, take care of Maya. But the second half of that sentence is whited out. And the second half of that sentence is, but don't let her suffer. No child deserves that. And to me, that coupled with the comments about her death and comments about hospice and trying to label her as terminal was really chilling. And I think that's more of a message to Maya than it is to Jack. I think that...

What do you think the message is to Maya? I think the message is to Maya that you're sick. Remember, you're sick. We've seen in other cases. Let's look at the Brittany Phillips case. You know, with her sending pictures home with the foster mom of Alyssa still in leg braces. The movie Tangled, you know, the psychological manipulation of these victims by these offenders is ongoing. And especially with a child Maya's age, it has to

happen, right? She has to have that psychological control. Otherwise, a 10-year-old is going to say, I'm fine, right? Right. And that it's so deep and pervasive and watching these offenders sort of justify, oh, I thought that that's what I had to do to get her the help she needed. I mean, that's something that Hope Ybarra said to us. But I mean, I think it's also just this one thing that we do know about offenders. And, you know, again, we will never know without access to, I mean, I think it's also just this one thing that we do know about offenders. And, you know, again, we will never know without access to, I mean, because the investigation wasn't completed. We'll never know if Beata was or not. But one thing we do know is that they will stick to their story, you know, regardless of what evidence there is. And so that also kind of like, yeah, sending that message to Maya or just like really making her sort of final

case of this is a terminally ill child. Like I'm telling you all this is a terminally ill child. Right. Which no one had told her that she had made that determination on her own. I mean, I think that the whole narrative around Beata's, you know, and yeah, it's very worth saying that only Beata knows why she took her own life. And one of the horrible things about suicide is that people are always going to be wondering, you know, what drove a person to that place. And this film takes a very strong stance that Beata, and this is what they are suing over. I mean, this is the damages that Jack Kowalski is suing over, is the idea that this, quote, false accusation drove Beata to suicide.

That is the narrative of the film, and that is, in fact, what the suing is about. I mean, that's what the damages are, you know? And so I think that it then calls into question if what you're after here is the truth, if what you're after here is a complete picture of what happened, why do you leave out this incident the night before where there was a police report about Beata disappearing with a gun for hours? Why do you blank out on the screen these parts of the note that don't seem to fit the narrative that you're trying to say? And then why leave out these details,

like the fact that they discovered Beata's phone with a piece of paper attached to it that said retaliation? And this premise that the only way for Beata to get her daughter out of the hospital was to kill herself, which is how the film is framing it, that that's what was going through her mind. I mean, they're very strongly taking that stance, that this was a desperate act by a mother who felt like that was the only way to get her daughter out of harm's way. I mean, that is the stance the film is taking. And that's just not correct, is it, Mike? No, I don't believe so. And there is a lot

of things that were intentionally left out of this film. They barely touched on the detective's investigation. We have it. We read it. Did they not? If they didn't, it is either incredibly irresponsible filmmaking, or it is intentional lying in order to create a narrative. And, you know, for what? For money? I don't know. To have a successful documentary? I don't know. The harm it's going to do going forward is substantial. I feel. Yeah.

Why bother, right? Why even bother if this is what it's going to cause? Why bother? Right. Is what people are going to think. I do want to make one thing before we go. I want to talk about the detective's investigation as a whole, because she did many, many, many things right. And I do believe initially she had a they immediately had a multidisciplinary meeting about this case.

They got everyone exchanged evidence. They had a plan going forward. She was obviously very detailed in how she approached this. She'd already got social media. I believe that would have led her to Beta's devices, her cell phone, which she would have analyzed. You know, they got her cell phone after the suicide, but for a different reason, right? She would have analyzed it. There's no longer a reason at that point to analyze it for the criminal case. Criminal case is gone when Beta passed.

That's a really good point, actually, because the film portrays it. And what Jack says is that he was able to take Maya to some specialist in Rhode Island who gave her a positive diagnosis of CRPS. And then they released her from the hospital. But in fact, in the records, that's not what happened. No, she was returned to Jack because there was no longer a threat. Beata had passed and Beata was the threat. And that's what really struck me initially before we even had all this documentation. That's pretty clear. If you know how these cases work, that's pretty clear that that's what happened and what ended CPS's involvement in the case. But she does a really good job. She was on her way.

She was going to get the vices, which would have led to a whole bunch of other evidence. But again, everything ended with Beata's suicide. There's no reason to continue down that investigative path. And I want to be very clear, that's what should have happened in an investigation, right? I mean, there's no reason to continue on for that detective. You have no more suspect. Unless the dad's going to go on a media tour, for instance. And yeah, I mean, I have to just, I'm joking. Well, and here's the thing. Hey, civil attorneys for the hospital, subpoena her Facebook accounts.

The police department has them. Subpoena whatever they have. Get her cell phone, look at the data on it. Have people go through it. That's what they should be doing. Are they? I don't know. I don't know that they know to do that, to tell you the truth.

Yeah. But yeah, that's, I mean, all of that is still there. It can be done, but it's not up to the police detective to prove a crime when the suspect is dead. There's no point in it. One of the things that really haunts me about this situation, I think I was more sympathetic to Jack Kowalski upon watching the film than I was after reading all of this documentation and his conversation with Detective Graham. And now I think that he, you know, he's putting his children in a really vulnerable situation and he's putting his traumatized children under a massive, massive spotlight. Yes. You know, they are 16 and 17.

Yes. This has a potential massive financial payout for him. I just do not see under what circumstances this is good parenting behavior. And, you know, I'm pretty reticent to judge anybody else's parenting, but I'm extremely concerned for this young girl because she may have been victimized once and may be re-victimized by being put in this position

where she needs to now uphold this narrative that she is ill. And that just turns my stomach, it does. And what frightens me is, with this continuing to be impressed upon her what's going to happen with her kids when she has yeah i mean the the psychological damage of this abuse and it's a you know regardless of what happened i don't think it's a responsible thing to put your child through this kind of media circus.

I just don't, period, end of sentence, story over. If, in fact, this child was a victim of abuse, which, again, there is a compelling evidence, even in what we found, that that may have been the case. Then by bringing her around on media to talk about how she was really sick and how her mother didn't ever do anything is exploiting her all over again. And it's really reprehensible. That does go to the heart of like, we can't say for sure whether or not she did or didn't. But these filmmakers also cannot say for sure whether they did or didn't. So by taking this very strong stance that she didn't and then expanding it to this, you know, and this doctor, look at all these other families she accused without presenting any evidence that those people were falsely accused, you are taking the risk that you, without all the information that you need, are actually platforming abusers and

that you are putting them forward as victims. And that is just, that's a dangerous thing. And people should be very careful before they let someone say that they were falsely accused. They should have evidence that that person was actually falsely accused. And that's all I'm asking. You know, I'm not, I don't think everyone needs to see this with, you know, this huge assumption that anyone who's accused of this is guilty. Of course not. But if you're going to paint someone as falsely accused and the doctors as having done something wrong, you need to have the evidence to back that up.

Well, and doctors, they are not responsible for an investigation. They are not responsible for a family law investigation to determine custody. They are not responsible for a police investigation that determines criminality. Right. They are simply responsible for identifying and reporting abuse. Period.

That's it. And we have seen many, many cases, including in my sister's, where the family court judges, et cetera, absolutely do not listen to the doctors. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I have many, many, many stories I can tell you personally. Yeah. So the idea that a doctor

could just go in with a report and that that would be just like the judge would take it, you know, no questions asked is preposterous. So Mike, after you first watched this movie, Take Care of Maya, what were your initial impressions of the film and what questions did you have? The immediate thing that jumped out to me was they have one clip of one police interview that was extremely short and very out of context.

Where was the rest of the police investigation? What did the rest of the police investigation? What did the rest of the police investigation say about this case? What was the detective doing? Were they doing their job? Had they got her Facebook records? Were they talking to doctors? What was going on with that investigation? They leave that aside other than the one clip that benefits their point of view. That's the first immediate thing that jumped out at me. And then, of course, everything that was just so slanted. There was no legitimate questions asked about the opposing opinion. There was no legitimate expert on medical child abuse or munchausen by proxy brought in to say, this is what this is. This is how this occurs.

Right. They let the defense attorney do that. Sorry. Yeah. I'm just so preposterous. Yeah. It reminded me very much of the A&E program on the Danita Tutt case, where they presented just one side and then magically she's found guilty at trial of attempted murder. And everyone's outraged because how can she be guilty with what we saw in this 30-minute TV show? Folks, it's a TV show. It's made for profit. It's made to get views. Always, always, always remember that, even if there's a tag slapped onto it that says documentary.

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 Bogg. 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. Britney 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.