Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Teacher is in BIG Trouble // The JoAnne Chambers Scandal

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

JoAnne Chambers, a first-grade teacher at Coolbaugh Learning Center in Monroe, Pennsylvania, seemingly endured an 18-month nightmare of terrifying harassment. However, investigators eventually discovered that Chambers herself was the mastermind behind the entire campaign to frame her colleague, Paula Nawrocki.

So this woman really loves attention, so much so that she pretends to be her own stalker. Now the woman's name is Joanne, and Joanne's around 42 when the story starts, and she's living in Pennsylvania, working as a first grade teacher. And Joanne has a problem. She really seems to hate this other teacher at her school. That teacher's name is Paula. So for whatever reason, Joanne can't stand Paula. Maybe there's some deep-seated jealousy going on, maybe she's just a petty person. We don't really know, but Joanne hates her.

And one day in 1993, she decides she's going to destroy Paula's life. So she comes up with a plan. She's going to convince everyone around them that Paula is stalking and threatening her. And if it all goes right, Paula could end up in serious legal trouble. So Joanne gets to work on this plan. She sends an anonymous letter to the school principal. And in the letter, she spreads a bunch of damaging room. rumors about herself, like that she once brought marijuana to school and showed it off to people.

I guess her goal here is to make it look like some anonymous person has a personal grudge against her and is trying to hurt her reputation. Then she'll start blaming Paula for it. So she starts mailing threatening letters to herself. Some get sent to her home, others get sent directly to the school. But every letter paints the same picture. Some unknown individual hates. Joanne and is obsessed with making her life miserable. But then she takes things a step further. One day, she hides a whiskey bottle in her own desk drawer. Then she removes some of her own things. The next morning, she shows up to school and she pretends to act all shocked, and she goes and she tells the school admins that someone broke into her desk and stole her things

and planted a whiskey bottle there to make her look bad. And she convinces them that it's time to get the police involved. So the school gets the police involved. And police investigate, and pretty quickly they conclude that the letters are likely coming from someone connected to the school. Because whoever's writing them has specific intimate knowledge of the school's internal workings and schedules and staff and stuff. And that is exactly what Joanne wants them to believe. Because that leads her to the most important part of her plan. She needs police to start thinking, Paula is behind all this. So in the next anonymous letter she sends herself, she refers to the principal of the school by a specific nickname, Colonel Klink, who's a character

from the old sitcom Hogan's Heroes. The thing about the name Colonel Klink is that Paula had once used it as a nickname for the principal. I guess she thinks the principal looks like Colonel Klink. And so once the police find out about that, they start suspecting Paula is behind all these crazy letters. And so Joanne is pumped about all this. I mean, her plan is working and it's working well. Then she decides to keep the scheme going. And she continues writing anonymous letters to herself and planting more clues that all point back to Paula. And as time goes on, she decides to raise the stakes and this is where her antics get really crazy. One day, Joanne gets some human feces and she places them on her own chair at her desk. Then later, she pretends to discover it like,

oh my God, someone pooped on my chair, and she acts all horrified, and she tells everyone that the person who's been sending the letters must have pooped on her chair. After that, Joanne gets a photograph of herself, and she cuts her face out of the picture, and she pastes it onto an image of a nude woman from a spicy magazine. Then she makes copies of this doctored image, and she distributes them around the school. She leaves some around the schoolyard and other places where the students can easily find them. She also mails some of them directly to the homes of the parents of some of the elementary school kids. She even pastes them directly onto the front of a local grocery store for the general public to see. So people are just walking by and they can like see this

doctored nude image of a local first grade teacher. And if that isn't diabolical enough, I guess she gets someone to call the parents of some of the kids at school? And on the call, the anonymous caller claims that Joanne is a lesbian. I guess that was a big deal in 1993. And she also says that this lesbian shouldn't be teaching the children because she has AIDS. And so this campaign of extreme harassment has gone on for like 10 months by this point. It seems like Joanne's got a lot of time on her hands. But anyway, because she keeps presenting herself as a victim more and more

people start to believe that Paula is guilty of harassing her. While poor Paula has no idea why people are accusing her of all this weird stuff. She's like, I never smeared poop on someone's chair? What the fuck? Now, police who are still investigating, they don't know what to make of all this, but they know something doesn't feel right. So they decide to have both Joanne and Paula take a polygraph test. Now, I say this to you guys all the time. Polygraphs lie detector tests, they are absolute pseudoscience.

That's why they're not allowed to be used in court. Like anyone at any given time could pass or fail a polygraph test for reasons that have nothing to do with lying. So anyway, they have them take these polygraph tests and something unfortunate happens. Joanne passes hers while Paula fails hers. And so now police are convinced that Paula is lying, and that she is the one behind the whole scheme. But, lucky for Paula, police suspicion isn't enough.

I mean, they can't arrest her. They need evidence first. Well, they go and get a warrant, and they search Paula's home looking for some. And they seize papers and typewriters and other materials to see if they can match the threatening letters. But after extensive testing, they find that none of Paula's equipment was used to create the anonymous letters. So now the case is at a standstill, because, you know, police can't charge her with anything. But they do decide to transfer Joanne to another school, for her own protection, supposedly. So Joanne starts working at this other school, and there she creates another anonymous bizarre incident.

She gets a Barbie doll that looks like her and dresses like her, and she slashes its neck with a razor blade, and she covers it in red paint to make it look like blood. Then she puts it in a pink shoebox, along with a threatening note, and she leaves it on the doorstep outside the school building. And again, she pretends to find it, and she pretends to be shocked, and she presents it as another threat against her. After that, she keeps going. One day she tells police some bullshit story about how she was driving along, and suddenly Paula was driving near her, and skit, she forces her car off the road. And, you know, none of that really happened, but whatever, now police have enough probable cause to finally arrest Paula. And so, bam, they arrest her.

And she gets charged with harassment and stalking and assault. And the school immediately suspends her without pay. On two. While she's out on bail, Paula hires a private investigator to help her out. So the PI investigates, and he discovers that saliva recovered from one of the, the stamps used in the anonymous letters contains partial DNA. So they get this DNA tested and it does not match Paula. It actually matches Joanne. So from here, Paula sues everyone over this harassment and these false accusations. She sues Joanne. She sues the school. She even sues the police

department. And ultimately, Joanne ends up settling with her and pays her $25,000. Then the school settles with her and pays her $600,000, while the police department did not settle with her, and she took them to court and she actually unfortunately lost. And the police was not found liable for mishandling the case. So that sucks for her, but I mean, at least she got $625,000.