Something Was Wrong - S10 Ep2: [Megan] Shocking Realization

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

This week survivor Megan shares her story. While in college, Megan’s close friend Anne passes away suddenly leaving her and their inner circle of friends totally shattered. In the midst of Megan’s grief, she meets Katie, who she believes to be another one of Anne’s friends but over the course of two weeks, they quickly realize this woman is not who she claims to be. ** Resources: For free mental health resources, please visit SomethingWasWrong.com/Resources  Sources: MedicineNet: Pathological Liar vs. Compulsive Liar  Medical Author: Karthik Kumar, MBBS Medical Reviewer: Pallavi Suyog Uttekar, MD, Medically Reviewed on 11/30/2020 ** Something Was Wrong’s theme song was originally composed by Glad Rags and is covered this season by Basic Comfort. Website: Basiccomfort.band IG: Basic_Comfort Twitter: Basic_Comfort  FB: Basiccomfortband  

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Oh hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the credit counseling society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with

the credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and help me along the way. You had a ton of debt. And you're saying credit counseling society helped with all of it? Yep. And now I can sleep better at night. When debt's got you, you've got us. Give credit counseling society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. Something was wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes can discuss topics that can be triggering, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, suicide and murder. I am not a therapist or a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit

Something Was Wrong.com slash resources for a list of non-profit organizations that can help. Some names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by the guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or AudioChuck. Resources

and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. According to a medically reviewed article by MedicineNet, a compulsive liar lies out of habit. Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large or small. For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable, while lying feels right. Compulsive lying is usually thought to develop in early childhood, due to being placed in an

environment where lying was necessary and routine. A lot of compulsive liars find it easy to avoid confrontations with truth. Hence, they still. to lying. Compulsive liars may or may not experience a mental disorder. Compulsive liars are not overly manipulative and cunning. Rather, they simply lie out of habit, which is an automatic response that is hard to break and one that takes its toll on a relationship. Compulsive liars lie due to several reasons. However, it may always be easy to find out if they are lying because their stories do not add up. They are also obvious and display the classic lying behaviors, such as avoiding eye contact, breaking out into a sweat, and tripping over their words or rambling. They often lie for no clear

reason and sometimes for no real benefit. They make up lies more spontaneously, don't do much thinking, and prefer to tell the sorts of lies that they think people want to hear. They know the difference between reality and lies. They're more likely to admit to lying when confronted, though this might not stop them from continuing to lie. In contrast, a pathological liar lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little awareness. It's viewed as a coping mechanism developed in early childhood and is often associated with some other type of mental health disorder

like antisocial personality disorder. It could be that they lie to avoid something traumatic that happened in their lives, such as abuse, or the condition may be genetic. A pathological liar is often goal-oriented, and they have very little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others. They're often considered manipulative and cunning. They create extravagant stories that may be maintained or tweaked over time,

and they often believe their own lies or have a weak grip on reality. Unlike the compulsive liar, pathological liars are near impossible to catch in the act. These people are excellent liars because they lie constantly and make stories up unnecessarily, and often it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between the truth and false statements. Pathological liars know how to be confident while lying and use their pathological lying trait as a defense mechanism, such as fixing their gaze upon you rather than looking away. Some of the symptoms of a pathological liar are, they lie to gain something, exaggerate things, keep on changing their stories, and they live in a false sense of reality.

If confronted, they act offensive and never admit that they're liars. Lastly, they hold no value for the truth. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is, something was wrong. Hi, my name is Megan, and I'm about to tell you a story about, how we figured out something was very wrong. That fall, Megan was a few years into college at a large university. She had a close group of friends that she met through Greek life, Anne, Brooke, and Rachel. We did all the typical best friend things.

We would study together. We would actually pick each other up from class, hang out all weekend. And in our friend group, we had two little friend groups. It was myself, Megan, and Brooke, and then Rachel and Anne. we're best friends. But in the end, we all hung out together. In the fall of 2013, I get a call very late into the evening from my best friend Brooke. The calls came at a mile a minute. They were coming in so fast. And when I finally answer the phone, I get the absolute most heart-wrenching news any friend could ever have. My friend Anne was involved in an act of incredible violence

that night that took her life. And since then, justice has been served. but it has affected us to this day. The community was rocked as nothing like this has ever happened to our little college town. We were actually a neighboring town to a large city, and it made the headlines in our city that we were in. So everyone was very aware what happened, how horrible this act of violence was, and people really wanted to come together to honor her

and really share love and light and just be with one another and comfort each other. And since our Greek life was small at our school, we decided rather than have a lot of people go to the wake and the funeral out of respect to the friends and family, we decided to hold a candlelight vigil on our campus. A memorial service was held for Anne for students to gather, and I actually headed that up for my friends. Thankfully, I wasn't there the night of the incident. I was asleep in my bed, but some of my best friends were with her when it happened and witnessed some of the most horrendous. experiences I can't even imagine even to this day that they're still dealing with. As I was getting the students together, I was working with our school. We were able to hold a beautiful

ceremony where the community was able to gather and show their respects in a way that wouldn't upset the parents and have thousands of people come out to this. I thought it was my duty to help my friends that had experienced this as eyewitnesses to this crime. They were dealing with a lot more than I could ever imagine as I was asleep in my bed when all of this happened, and I wanted to make it right for her. A few hundred students gathered, and we had a beautiful ceremony for her. The evening after the university vigil, Megan received a social media message from someone named Katie.

At the time, I was getting a lot of Facebook messages from different news outlets, just people in the community reaching out. But I was also tagged in a social media photo with Anne. That was her profile photo. and I think that's how a lot of people found me. Also, by being the person that organized the vigil, I was the first to speak, I introduced all of my friends, and I really made an effort to be there for my friends

that were having a really hard time with this. At 9.14 p.m., I received a message from someone that came to Anne's vigil. It was from Katie, and I'm going to go ahead and read the message verbatim. The message reads, Hey, I know we don't know each other. I was good friends with Anne, and she's been wanting me to meet you for a few weeks. I just been so busy with school. I don't have a lot of friends at our school, and she said I would love you.

I'm praying tonight was so good. Let me know if you need anything. As someone that was going through a point of grief that severely, I wasn't reading into these messages the way that I probably would now if someone sent me something like this. Now looking back, I find the first huge red flag that should have set me off was someone describing a vigil for someone that has passed away as so good. For me, that's how I would describe a night out with friends, not a time in my life where I'm gathering with people to mourn a loss where people are sobbing and coming together and embracing one another. So right off the bat, looking back now, I should have realized if someone is describing a vigil as so good, it's probably someone I don't need to associate with. But being me, I have always been a really empathetic person.

And later years in life, it has gotten me into toxic relationships because I do have such a big heart. And so does my best friend Brooke. If you ask anyone in life, the two of us are some of the nice. cis girls you will ever meet, and we really do go out of our way to make sure we care about our friends. We're there for them. We support each other. And more than anything, Brooke is an incredibly empathetic person as well. And I think that's really how all of this got started. I decided to message Katie back. We got to talking and I'm the type of person. I'm not going to judge someone's friendship, even though I've never met her before. I've never even heard her name come out of

Anne's mouth. If she's saying that they're good friends, I'm going to take her word for it. I told her, I was like, look, I'm so sorry. And me being the empathetic person I am, I extended the hand of kindness. And I told her, if she would like to go with us to the wake or the funeral, she was more than welcome to. It's not really my place to tell someone how to live their life. I can just be kind and compassionate and try to see the best in people. So she ended up taking us up on that offer. Before the University Memorial Service took place, Megan attended Anne's Wake to honor her friend's life. I don't remember Anne's wake at all, so I don't even remember if Katie was there. It was the first open casket wake I've ever been to in my life, and I essentially have blacked that out of my memory.

I remember the funeral almost like it was yesterday. I drove us to the funeral, and I know at least myself and Brooke were in the car, and Katie came with us. And as we arrived to the funeral, we are greeted by the ushers, and they escort us into the friends and family row. I remember that we weren't in the first row because that obviously was for immediate family, but given the nature of how we were best friends with Anne, we were seated. I believe in the second or third row, and Katie sits down right next to me. Megan thought it was a little odd sitting next to Katie as she had just met her and couldn't recall Anne ever mentioning her before, but she was grieving and her focus was elsewhere. But then again, me trying to see the best in people, I took it as if I were to go to a funeral

and I sat somewhere, that's probably where I would feel like I needed to sit. So I kind of figured if she feels comfortable sitting in the seat next to me, she probably should be up here because her and Anne have a relationship that I'm obviously not aware of. But the one thing that did stick out to me was during or after the funeral, Katie comes up to me and goes, hey, I have to leave. I actually need to go study for a test, which normally that wouldn't really throw anyone off. Everyone has tests in college. and we were actually in the middle of midterms and all this was happening. The reason that it was so odd was due to the nature of the crime

and the fact that the entire community knew what was going on. Our professors were very aware of how impacted we were by this event. And so because of that, they really wanted to work with us to reschedule our midterms, to make sure we were in a good headspace. The community was just very supportive. The school was fantastic. The dean of the school even told us that we could have a medical withdrawal from the semester if we needed to. But Anne was really passionate about her education and getting a great degree and then landing an incredible job after graduation.

I found it odd that if she was as close with Anne as she said she was, that Katie was leaving something so monumental as the funeral. and I actually believe we were going to the burial after and she didn't attend for that because she had to go study. After the services, Megan decided to take a few weeks off from school so she could give herself some space to grieve before heading back to finish the semester. Once she felt ready, she returned to school hoping her studies would distract her from her pain.

It was really hard for us to be on campus, given the small footprint of our campus, people just had a really hard time being around us. We would go into the dining hall. People would just stare at us. They didn't know how to approach us. They didn't know what to say. In a way, it kind of felt like we were a little outcast from our school,

but not in a negative way where people didn't want to be around us. People just didn't know what to say. And so by being with Katie, she treated me a little more normal than most people. So I think that's why I sort of gravitated towards her because she did provide me that sense of normal. where I walked in and had a conversation with one of my professors about rescheduling my midterm, and she starts hysterically crying, and then I start hysterically crying. And so just being on campus was a hard environment to be in.

Looking to get away from the awkward interactions on campus, Megan decided to go study at a coffee shop. And since Katie had been so eager to hang out, Megan invited her to come along. And she told me that she actually had a few classes with my friend Anne. Once we started talking, we realized that we had the same, similar interest of playing soccer. She played collegiically at the time at a nearby, very large school, and I actually played in high school, and I played intermural as well. So it was nice to be able to talk about something other than being incredibly sad or how weird people were treating us or what comes even after this and just take your mind off of things. I remember that conversation

now so vividly for what's to come in the next upcoming days. Megan and her best friend Brooke hung out nearly every day, and she was often staying the night at Megan's place at this time so the two friends could support one another while grieving the loss of their friend Anne. We were literally two peas in a pod, and we would hang out together. She would spend the night. So at the time during all of this, Brooke was staying at my apartment a good bit just so we could be with each other and have that support.

During that time, Katie came over a few times, and I remember in our conversations, we figured out that we actually lived in the same apartment complex, which was like such a small world. And I told her, I was like, I've never seen you at the pool. I haven't really seen you around. And I think it was her school, or maybe she just moved in. But I never seen her around our complex,

but it was a student complex where only students lived there. So all of the people there were super young. there was just a ton of people out, and you could live there for three years, and you might not run into the same person twice. It was one of those places. So I just kind of chucked it up to be, it's a big enough place and enough college students. It's not super weird if I've never seen her here before. But I remember telling her I could always go over to her house,

and she would always shut it down immediately, which now looking back should have been red flag number two or three. As the week went on, Megan and Brooke started to distance themselves a bit from Katie. After all, they didn't know her from before Anne's death, and they were focusing on taking care of themselves and their own mental health, while also grieving and going to college. When we started trying to get back to a normal life, she started incessantly texting us, and she would want to hang out all the time, and we would tell her, hey, sorry, Katie, but we just don't need to hang out all the time. I'm just not that person in general. You know, I like my alone time,

and I think it's important to have your alone time to be able to think about things the way that you want and journal and reflect and just be able to mourn and grieve. And when we started distancing ourselves from her was when things got very escalated very quickly. Megan and her friends were shocked to see what Katie wrote next, that her boyfriend had just died

and she needed to come over to Megan's apartment immediately. And obviously this is shocking news. I've seen a photo of this person. I could put a face to who they were. I felt horrible. But it wasn't the fact that her boyfriend just died that was a big red flag to me. It was the fact that out of all of the people in the world,

the two people that she would want to come see after such a horrible loss, or two people that she's known at this point for only a week and a half. If that were me and I had lost someone, the last person I would want to see is someone I barely know. I would want to be with my very close friends, my parents, my siblings, my relatives, not someone that I've known for about a week where I've never even met this person. So I found it very odd that out of all of the people in the world that she would want to immediately see after hearing this news were two people she basically didn't even know.

That's when we start figuring out all of these red flags are starting to come together. It was a few days later, and Brooke is actually over at my house. At this point, all of these weird little red flags have started to add up, and that's when Rachel calls us and gives us an insanely shocking realization that she's had.

her and Anne were best friends and when I say that they were best friends they were also roommates co-workers and in the same program at our school and she realized that she had never once heard Anne ever talk about Katie and if someone knew who Katie was it would be Rachel

gives me goosebumps so after we find out this news we are freaking out I remember sitting on my bed with Brooke, we're like holding each other, shaking, and things are starting to come together in our minds at this point. And mind you, it's only been about a week and a half since she had first contacted me. So this all moved really quickly. We decided to Google Katie and see what we could find and see who is this person. We actually don't know anything about them. And this was before the time that you basically Googled every single person you met immediately upon meeting them. So we decided

to Google Katie and we were shocked by what we found. We found her blog and we found out that she was almost 10 years older than us and had already graduated college and didn't even go to our school. As Megan and Brooke are desperately searching online for answers, they realize that they have a friend who plays soccer for the university Katie claimed to play for. So they called and asked this friend if she had ever heard of Katie, and she hadn't. And the way we found that out was because I actually played soccer and had a connection to that school. We asked a player at that school if they have ever heard of Katie and they said no.

We also did one further and looked up multiple years of the school's soccer team roster and she was nowhere to be found. To top it all off, we found out that Katie wasn't full. friends with Anne on any form of social media. Looking back, the first thing you do when you meet someone is look them up on Google and then you go look them up on social media. And we did neither. She used her real name so we were easily able to find her. And we were able to figure out that this person had been lying to us the whole time and that something was seriously wrong. So we decided, since we didn't know this person and we didn't know what their intentions were with us,

or really what she even wanted from us, being almost a decade older than us, why did she seek us out? Why did she want to insert herself into our life? We decided we needed to cut ties with her immediately. I thought about confronting her, but then I kind of realized what good would come from that. What am I gaining from this experience, which would be just more heartbreak.

And essentially, I don't know what this person is even capable of. If they've lied to me about so many different things, especially like their whole identity of who they are and who they know, why would I want to go out of my way to meet this person face to face and see what they would do once confronted with this news? So what I decided to do was I told Katie that I got in a huge fight with my roommates since she knew where I lived. And I was terrified that I was going to see her coming through my door at any given second.

So I didn't want her thinking I lived in my apartment anymore. So I told Katie that I moved out and I had to move out within a day. And then I was going to cut all ties after that. And the final straw for me was when I told her I was moving, she said, what a surprise. I'm also moving and asked if I needed a roommate. It was in that moment I decided I never. want to give energy into this human being ever again.

So I decided to block her on everything. I think I gave her one last thing of, hey, I'm going through a hard time. I need to be alone and get over this. So she wouldn't just show up thinking I changed my number or try to find me or make a fake social media profile and try to reach out to me. So I wanted to give the idea that even though I was going through an insanely hard time, I wanted her to think that I needed to be completely isolated to deal with this, and that

included isolating myself from her. She sent me three final social media messages, and they were over the course of two days, but all sent at different times of the day, ranging from 2.30 p.m. to 10.55 p.m. And one reads, hi, the next day at 4.17. Hey, girl, hey. Later that evening at 10.55 p.m., one last hay, and then I block her off everything. Megan decided to completely cut ties with Katie and block her number and social media profiles. Her friend Brooke took another approach. My friend Brooke decided if she was coming for her, she wanted to know at least she was on her way. So she decided to not block her on anything, but just completely go unresponsive.

And possibly one of the strangest things about this entire story was for about a year or two after, Brooke would get one-line text messages from Katie, ranging from, I need you to call me. Hey, call me now, even to Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. It was just very strange for someone that we knew only at that point for about two weeks to try to carry on a conversation for two years. And the messages eventually stopped and we all were able to get over it. But it was really hard. And now looking back, you never think that someone is going to try to take advantage of you when you're going through such an immense form of grief. We had so much support from our community, our friends, our family, our school. That's honestly what I thought this person's intentions were. And to this day, it's been almost a decade since.

this has happened, I still cannot figure out what she was trying to gain by getting close to us. I don't really know if she's ever done it again. And it's one of those things where obviously you weren't really that good at it if we caught you in two weeks and you were using your real name. So I really don't know if this was her first attempt to try something like this or if she's gone on to do this again, which I really hope not. It is a scary experience to go. through such a tragedy and then when you're mourning the loss of a loved one to have someone try to take advantage of you in such a horrible way, but then leave you with all of these loose ends. But at the end of the day, we needed to protect ourselves. And by blocking her,

that was the only way that we knew how. You can't get a restraining order against someone for being over-text or lying. So we really had no legal way to protect ourselves. So we had to do what we thought was the best case scenario. And that was just to cut off all forms of contact with this person. I hope that this story can help someone out there not have to experience two tragedies like this within a two-week time period. We were at one point on my bed hugging each other, shaking because of how rocked we were by the events of Katie. thankfully we got all out safe and no one else was harmed but if if anyone can take anything away from this is to do your research and it's always so important to be better safe than sorry it doesn't

hurt to look someone up it doesn't hurt to ask questions and more than anything it doesn't hurt to follow your gut if your gut is telling you something is wrong trust yourself don't trust what someone else is telling you because you know you. And at the end of the day, you can protect yourself more than relying on the kindness of someone else's heart to be good to you. I just want to thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your story. And I'm so incredibly sorry for yours and your friend's loss of your friend and having to deal with something that's already so traumatic and then to have this person take advantage of that grief and manipulate it and exploit it. It obviously was very harmful. And so I really appreciate you sharing this story because I think it's a very

unique circumstance, but one that really speaks to, like you said, the importance of just fact-checking the things that people say and just taking a little extra time to look into them. And it's sad that we have to do that, but, you know, that's where we're at in the world, unfortunately. Absolutely. Everyone's life is online. And this happened almost a decade ago. So at the time, when I went into college, I still had a MySpace where, you know, no one has that now. You had a Zanga where there's people listening to this that probably don't even know how to spell Zanga. And it's with an X if you're wondering. So I think more than anything, we were just really naive and vulnerable.

And now I'm a little bit older and hopefully much wiser from it. It just really threw us for a loop because you really want to expect the best in people. people. And it's hard to look back and know that you let yourself be manipulated by someone. And for a long time, I gave myself a lot of grief over it of why didn't I see these red flags sooner? And telling this story, it's so easy. They just pop out like a bright red flag. But when you're going through so much grief and the first thing on your mind is that is someone trying to manipulate me to gain something from who I am and my grief, that wasn't what was going through my head. I'm still a very empathetic person. And I think you can still be a kind person and you can extend compassion and love to anyone

around you. But at the end of the day, you have to protect yourself because sometimes you're all that you have. Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing your story and taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. And I absolutely love your podcast and what you're doing to raise awareness for stories like mine because this story has been really untold for almost a decade because there really wasn't a platform that was like this where it wasn't like a crime was committed against me. But I feel like an injustice happened that has affected us that could affect someone down the road much more negatively than us. So I think what you're doing is so important of sharing these survivor stories.

And even though nothing illegal occurred or no crime was committed during those two weeks, something was wrong. And it's just sad that that's the type of world that we live in now. But it is what it is. And I think what you're doing is absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for letting me share this story because it has been almost a decade. and there really wasn't a platform out there that's doing what you're doing. So I just want to say keep up the incredible work,

and I think what you're doing is absolutely fantastic. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. That really means a lot. Something Was Wrong is an Audio Chuck production, created and hosted by Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Basic Comfort. You don't know me well. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?