Something Was Wrong - S9 Ep7: Treasure Hunt

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Through a shared bond of trauma and desperation for the truth, Kenji and Danielle worked together to expose Ardie’s true identity. Follow @SomethingWasWrongPodcast on Instagram  For free mental health resources, please visit SomethingWasWrong.com/Resources

Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes 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 guests on the show are their own,

and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or audio chuck. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. Kenji was horrified when he got a phone call from one of his and Darcy's mutual friends, telling him that Darcy and Artie had been arrested and were in jail. And I'm like, what? That was not what I expected at all. And her friend didn't have any information for me.

So I'm like, what the hell is going on? So I called Darcy's parents that evening, and they didn't have any answers either. They didn't know why she was in jail. But I guess Darcy had called them to ask them to bail her out, and her parents refused to bail her out. She was upset, so she spent that night in jail with Artie. The next day, July 6th, we figured out that both her and Artie were arrested on domestic violence charges and were both being held on $50,000 bond, and they were scheduled to be arraigned the next day to 7th at 8.30 in the morning. So nobody was going to bail either of them out.

So we kind of took this opportunity to help Danielle get her car back. I contacted Danielle and said, hey, just to let you know, Artie and Darcy are both in jail. And his car is parked in Darcy's garage. So if you'd like to come get it, my in-laws can help you. There was so much stuff in that car that it would take us days to go through everything we found in that vehicle. And upon immediately going in, I remember opening the glove box and seeing pairs of women's lace thongs just pop out like those little like can of worm joke things, those old-timey things or you open the can and all these like things sprout out. Like that's literally what happened when I opened the glove box.

I moved those aside, obviously super disgusted. And in the glove box alone, I see Polaroids of a naked woman who, from the picture she sent, I knew to be Barbara. This whole claim that she was just his friend, obviously we knew that wasn't true. So now I've got girlfriend number two. And then we did find out there was actually a girlfriend number three named Valerie. there's a wad of fake money and we're like, oh my God, it's like in a money clip and it's this fake wad of $100 bills. And even me at first, I'm like, oh my God, is this real? I pick it up and I'm looking on it and it says on the front of the bills, it's a prop for movies. And I'm like, this motherfucker

picks up on women and goes to bars with a clip full of hundreds, making people think that he's got this money. And we found tons of stuff in there. That was just kind of peripheral. I didn't want to necessarily go through it all there right on their property because there was just so much stuff. So I got the car over to because we actually needed to like reprogram the car. The key would only get me into the car, so I had to have it towed so they could reprogram it all. So I had the tow guy tow it there and we pull up to the parking lot because I wanted to grab everything out of the car before they had it for a couple days to reprogram it. And the service technician comes up and he's like, I recognize this car and I basically gave him a short version of the story and he's like, this guy

is such an asshole. Everybody knows who he is here and nobody likes him. I will be happy to help you in any way you need. My dad and I, I think we spent a good hour just pulling everything out. We were just like putting it in a bag so we could transport it back to the house and kind of go through it and figure out what it all was. It was so crazy. It was like he literally kept his entire life in this vehicle. It was like being on a treasure hunt. We would find something and it would be like, Kenji, look at this.

Or he'd find something and be like, Danielle, take a look at this. The treasure trove that was in that car, he happened to mention that Artie had stolen some items from her, and that was something that they had brought up when we met them, right? Her AirPods, the sonograms of her children.

So he personally wanted those sonograms back if they were like in the car. which I totally understood. And I was just like, listen, you can come over and sit in my parents' backyard with me and go through this stuff. I found Darcy's earbud, so I let Kenji take those back to her. I found a hand-painted sign that he had written about, will you marry me? He'd actually proposed to her. And there was tons and tons of different types of medications, a lot of opioids.

Tramadol, things like that. Viagra. A lot of it. There was the fake hospital ID badge that he had shown me all those years ago. He had business cards that he was a physician. And the bank statement that he had used to show Darcy that he made $5 million. Then I found two documents that were pretty fucking mind-blowing. I found a court transcript for a restraining order hearing against a woman named Tammy.

And when I read through it, it outlines that she had met him in April of 2017 and had gotten pregnant shortly thereafter. And found out that he was cheating on her, although it doesn't say in the transcript who it was. At this point, I knew of multiple girlfriends, so it could have literally been anybody. It might not have been me. And so she attempted to get away and was still pregnant. And Arty had threatened to harm her, harm the family, get her fired from her job. He had threatened to abduct the child. This is all in the court document, I read.

and so she had filed a restraining order. We later found photos they had gotten married, him and Tammy. So at this point, I highly suspected that my engagement ring was her wedding ring. And later on, I've only talked to Darcy once after that first initial meeting. That came up and she said she had wondered the same thing and had gotten him drunk one night and he admitted that that's exactly what had happened. And also that time frame when he was dealing with the incident with the friend from work and everything like that was actually him dealing with her. And so when he came to me and said that we would help his friend take care of this child, should he get custody, this guy would have made me raise his child with another woman by telling me it belonged to somebody else.

As Danielle was putting the pieces together in her mind, she realized her daughter had a half-sibling. I was not sad. I was angry. I was in disbelief. I was just relieved to finally have answers, to finally validate those feelings of something being off and something not being right. And like I've said, just a profound gratefulness for having to have a... having my freedom back and from being free from this alternate reality I was living in for eight and a half years. So we also found a court transcript of the restraining order case between Artie and Tammy back in January of 2018.

Reading through that, it was just like reliving Darcy's situation all over again. This poor woman went through pretty much the exact same thing that Darcy was going through. And it was very clear what was going to happen to Darcy if she didn't put a stop to things. Long story short, she just recounts in the court transcript that slowly over time, Arty became more distant, more aggressive, more violent. He became very controlling over her phone in the same way he did with Darcy. She started to have questions about his identity and whether or not he was really a doctor. And that seemed to really upset Artie.

Artie began to use the baby as a pawn in their relationship too. and say that he would kidnap their baby or take their baby away from her or do all kinds of stuff to her in the child. And that's when she decided to file for the restraining order. And after filing for the restraining order, I guess, already came after her and got Tammy fired from her job. She was a school psychologist, I believe, at a high school. And he did basically the same thing he tried to do to me where he went to Tammy's boss or whoever at the school and told the boss that, oh, Tammy had sent him some explicit messages or inappropriate photos of herself to him during school hours or something like that and got her fired from her

job. And reading the court transcript, Tammy is just terrified of this guy because she doesn't know who he is or what he's capable of. She ends up moving back up north to live with her parents. And she has her baby up there and she's able to get some distance between her and Artie. So I think she's still safe from him as of today. And yeah, Danielle and I have reached out to her several times to try and see if she would come forward and talk to us. But she hasn't so far. There was a huge document. I read Artie was trying to state that his ex-wife from 2005 had abused him in their relationship and he was traumatized by it and that for the past 12 years he was unable to sleep.

He was unable to function and hold down a job because he had such a bad PTSD from this trauma he experienced from his ex-wife. And attached to his application was a police report that he had filed against his ex-wife back in 2005, and I read the police report, and apparently there was an incident between the two of them at her home where they had gotten in an argument because it sounded like his ex-wife had found out already had been cheating on her, as he has been, it's his character, and they got in a huge argument over it, and she told him to get out and he refused to leave. So I think things got a little physical. I think he tried to bait her into a fight, and apparently his ex-wife, who was listed at, I think,

five feet tall and 93 pounds in the police report. This ex-wife, this tiny girl, takes a curtain rod or something and starts to hit Artie with it because he won't leave and they're chasing each other around the house and she's chasing them with this curtain rod. And in the immigration documents, he's painting themselves as this poor, innocent victim being chased by this violent woman with this curtain rod and he's been traumatized by this curtain rod. And that's why he needs to stay in the United States because he's just been a victim of this awful woman that he was married to. and it was kind of the same thing that happened to Darcy. They both got arrested for domestic violence that night.

They both spent the night in jail. Part of the documents, he also cites an incident where his ex-wife tried to commit suicide in front of him by shooting herself in the shoulder with a shotgun. And I don't know how that's possible when you're only five feet tall. You know, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I didn't think there was any credibility to that either.

So he's trying to claim this woman's tried to kill herself in front of me. She's abused me with a curtain rod, and I can't sleep for the past 12 years, because of all this, I can't function. I don't have an appetite. I'm depressed all the time. There's typical sociopath behavior. Another interesting thing, you know, I found in that police report was when they described

his ex-wife, they said that she had a tattoo of Ardi's name on her right thigh. And so I thought, oh, that was interesting because both Danielle and Darcy have tattoos of Arty's name on them. So this must be one of his marks. This must be something he gets all his victims to do for him. So ever since I read that, I've been one. how many other women are out there with Artie's name tattooed somewhere on them, and I'm sure there's more than a few.

Danielle and Kenji also found photos of Artie and Tammy, taking a cross-country road trip together in 2017, when Artie had told Danielle he was in New York for a hospital conference. And in addition to that, there was an album of wedding pictures in there. So apparently in, I believe, May of that year, or June of that year, they had done a backyard wedding with all of Tammy's friends and family present. And there's photos of Artie dressed in a tux and Tammy in a wedding dress, cutting a cake and exchanging vows and doing everything you would do at a wedding.

And the whole time he's in a relationship with Danielle. And Danielle's at home thinking that Artie's out on a business trip. And it was just so disturbing to see this poor girl and her family so happy to get married to the psychopath who has no intention of actually following through, raising this child, doing anything to fulfill his vows. So, yeah, I mean, it was just kind of sickening to see. Freaking getting married to someone else, exchanging vows with another person.

Another document we found was a worker's comp case that he had filed against a company he had worked for. And in this worker's comp case, he basically says he heard his back. by carrying a box down the stairs and falling. And it outlines him getting disability for this fall, which was so ridiculous. I mean, just the description of the fall,

I was just like, this is out of control. Months later, Danielle actually contacted the owner of the company and let her know that Artie was making false claims. I gave her that information as well. She was super grateful. The third document I found, it was interesting to say the least. This third document is his immigration application for his U visa. His U visa.

According to the U.S. citizenship and immigration services, the U visa is set aside for victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity. It says the legislation was intended to strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies

to investigate and prosecute cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking of non-citizens, and other crimes while also protecting victims of crimes who have suffered substantial mental or physical abuse due to the crime and are willing to help law enforcement authorities in the investigation or prosecution of the criminal activity. This is actually a really important status, right? It's so important that we do have something like this in place. In this documentation, I did get confirmation of his real identity

because there's a copy of his Mexican birth certificate. There is a copy of his Mexican passport in there. And it does basically state that he was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and that his mother brought him here to the United States when he was three months old. I just want to say a side note real quick, like very progressive about social issues. And I think dreamers should have absolutely, every right to become citizens.

There should be a path to citizens for people in these situations where they grew up in the United States. There's so many good people out there that are working for a living and paying taxes and doing exactly what they're supposed to. And then there's Artie. And I wish there were more protections in place for weeding out people like Artie. Because right now, in order to protect the people that are following the rules, it basically means that people like already slipped through the cracks.

He has to give this reason about why he can't go back to Mexico. And they basically print off your standard Google search of like all the gang violence out there. And he lists my name in this document. I can't go out there with my fiance Danielle and our daughter, Carrie. Like this whole document is about me and Carrie and like how would he take care of us? and all these things. And the only thing I could do is just laugh. I'm like, he's using me as this prop and using our daughter as this prop to get legal status here in the U.S.

But also, how is he going to take care of us? This guy never gave me a single dime for our daughter or for anything else for that matter. This made Danielle think back to her breakdown at the pediatrician's office the day after their daughter was born in New Orleans. light. I lose my shit because I'm sleep deprived. I'm hormonal. I'm like, there's no fucking way in hell. I can survive a night alone with this child. I am in tears. I think about this moment when I think about was anything real. Did he even love me at all? And my answer is no. Because how could he look at me in that moment, the mother of his child in tears sobbing because he had to go to work and him look at me and still leave to go wherever the fuck it was he went because it sure a shit

wasn't work. He was with another woman. He did not fucking care about me. And so that's how I know none of it was real. None of it was ever real. He never ever actually loved me. And so when we talk about the different varying degrees of narcissists versus sociopath versus psychopath. I really believe that when I've done the research, I read that book you've mentioned before, The Psychopath Free. When I do the research and I look, I think he's really a full-fledged psychopath. He has no empathy, no emotions, no sympathy, nothing. It was just crazy to me that someone would keep all that stuff in the trunk of their car.

He had successfully used this fake idea. identity for about 10 years and really gotten away with it. You know, he got slapped with a couple of restraining orders, but that was the extent of it. So I can see why he'd get sloppy. We found a lot of the keepsakes that Darcy said went missing. They were in the trunk of his car, including, and this really upset me, including our own kids' ultrasound pictures and videos. He had stolen those and kept him in his trunk.

He used it to blackmail her to control her, saying, I'll destroy these unless you do X, Y, and Z for me, but that one really pissed me off because those are our kids. That's just fucked up to steal something so sentimental like that. Danielle and I poured through like every single thing that was in the trunk of his car, and it was just amazing how much crap he had in there. After their shocking treasure hunt, Danielle and Kenji took their research to Google to try and find Artie's family members. They thought they had found Artie's parents, but didn't try to contact them.

I think we both believe that he's estranged from his family, probably for good reason. I'm sure they want nothing to do with him either. That was just crazy to me. When I saw Mexico on the birth certificate, I was just like, he probably could have gotten away with this if he had chosen a country other than England, maybe Canada or something. I don't know. But to try and impersonate a British person when you're from Mexico, that's, I don't know. That just seems like too much work.

But obviously he invested the time into working on the accent and he had gotten away with it for about a decade. So I'm sure he felt like he could get away with anything at that point. That was the first of many bonding moments for Kenji and I. It was definitely like, did we just become friends? It was the first of many, many moments that we would connect on and lean on each other for support. Because literally, there isn't one single person on this planet

other than Kenji that can truly understand this for me at this point. I've said that I call Kenji my liberator, but he's definitely been a big rock. And maybe that's part of why the healing process has been a little easier for me, because I have had somebody who understands it that I can go to. With Kenji, we can call each other for every little thing, no matter how many times a day or week, it happens. And neither of us are going to be like, this again, because it's something that's prevalent and relevant for both of us. So I do think that that's been a huge source of my healing and being able to move on so quickly as being able to talk through that with somebody.

So yeah, I mean, it was just kind of sickening to see. It was a long 24, 48 hours for us. We uncovered Ardi's identity in the trunk of his car. We're digging through all this stuff. Meanwhile, Darcy and Artie had been sitting in the local jail. Artie actually gets bailed out before Darcy does by some friend. We don't know who bailed them out, but someone had to post $5,000 to get them out of jail. And they lost the $5,000 because the next day the charges against both of them were dropped by the DA

because there was no evidence or not enough evidence. So the next day Darcy's pissed because she can't believe that Arty got bailed out of jail and that no one would bail her out. She goes on a tear because she's complaining that, oh, how could you leave me in jail? She's trying to blame me for her getting arrested. She said, you're the one that called the cops. You're the one that got me arrested. And I'm maintaining, like, no, I just called for a wellness check.

I have no idea what they arrested you for because this whole time Darcy is trying to claim like nothing was happening. There was something she was leaving out. And it wasn't until months later where she admitted that Artie was the one who had gotten them arrested. And I think our therapist, I mean, mine at least was looking forward to it because It's like a movie. My therapist every week to be like, okay, what happened this week?

She's just dying to know what kind of crazy shit happened. And every week, I had something to tell her without fail. And she's just like, this is just bananas. She couldn't believe it. And I couldn't believe it either. Living it, I can't believe it sometimes. On July 7th, Danielle and Kenji received word that Darcy and Artie had posted bail. So now, instead of thinking he'd be in jail for like three weeks,

I had to figure out real fast how to get the hell out of the state for a minute. I packed me and carry up in a couple of hours, and I think I could only get a flight in the morning. So we had security come again for that evening. And then I ended up getting on a flight and got it out of town for a couple of weeks. Darcy's released from jail, and the DA drops the charges against both her and Artie, for lack of evidence.

Clearly, the most concerning part is that Darcy's still in this relationship with Artie. Even after spending 24, 40 hours in jail because of Artie, somehow she's still wrapped up with him. Artie gets out of jail, realizes he has no car anymore, that it's been repossessed. And so all of us think that Artie's just going to slowly go away because, well, he doesn't have a way to get to Darcy anymore. He's not going to be staying with her. so we're not sure what he's going to do. We figured he's going to go back and stay with some other family member or friend or we don't know.

But pretty much the very next day, Arty shows up back at Darcy's house with a different car. Darcy mentions this to me in a phone conversation. She says that Arty showed up and he was driving a different car and she noticed the car keys looked very feminine. Like they had some type of charm on them and looked like a set of keys that belonged to a woman. And I happen to drive by later that day, and I see his car parked in front of her place. So Danielle and I, with the help of a friend who works for the sheriffs, we have him run this license plate, and it turns out this car is owned by a woman named Valerie.

And Danielle and I are like, who the hell is Valerie? Here's yet another woman's name that's popping up. With this new information, Kenji decided it was best to reach out to Darcy to fill her in about Artie's other, other. girlfriend, Valerie. I say, hey, that car he drives, there's a reason why the keys, you know, look like they belong to a woman. It's because they do. Here's her name.

Here's her address. And immediately, Darcy's like, oh, that's the woman that he's bragged about cheating on me with. If this is the woman that he's cheated on her with in the past, then he's clearly still in a relationship with her. So Darcy is going back and forth about finally ending her relationship with Arnie because of all this, but she disappears for days at a time. She doesn't talk to anybody for days in time, which is always a sure sign that Artie's in the picture because he doesn't want her talking

than anybody. In spite of everything that's happened so far, in spite of showing up with multiple cars belonging to other women, in spite of spending nights in jail together, she's still choosing to bring Artie around. I can understand a lot of women getting into these situations where they're stuck because they don't have any family nearby or anyone that can really help them and they are legitimately stuck. They don't have anyone that they can go to. So I can see that. They don't talk about it with anybody. But Darcy has the opposite problem. She has no problem telling people about what's going on, obviously, including me. And multiple, multiple people have offered to help her, including her own family. And she's is just choosing Artie

every single time. Danielle and her daughter were granted an emergency order of protection by law enforcement in early July. But in order for Danielle to get a permanent restraining order from Artie, she had to appear in court for a judge to rule on the request. On the 21st, became when we would be in front of the judge, so she could determine if this would turn into a permanent restraining order against him. I had wanted to at least get one year of permanent restraining order. I was hopefully asking for three years.

I was absolutely terrified, and I still am, that he would get his hands on my daughter and take off with her. And what was to stop him from doing that? He created a fake identity that nobody found out about for almost a decade. And he has a Mexican passport and a Mexican birth certificate. So what exactly would stop him from taking off with her, disappearing, and creating an entirely new identity for both of them because we've already seen him do it. And that's my biggest fear.

And so, you know, I hired a lawyer because I could have gone in and represented myself, but I didn't want to take any chances whatsoever. He did show up to court that day. I wouldn't talk to him. I didn't even look in his direction. My stepmom was there with me and another friend of mine

who was there for moral support. After checking into court, Danielle's lawyer gave Artie copies of all the evidence that would be presented. Arty then requested a continuance in order to review the evidence. He left that courtroom so quickly that he didn't even wait around to find out when the next court date was going to be. And when the bailiff came out to give us the new court date and was looking around for him, this bailiff's like, where'd he go? We're like, he left. And he starts kind of like,

Levy is like, this guy has been in this courtroom before. And he's like, yeah, he was like standing there telling me he's this doctor and he makes thousands of dollars a day and blah, blah, blah. And he's like, and my first thought was like, well, then why are you representing yourself? So we asked him, we were like, was he speaking in a British accent? And he's like, yes. Yep, he was claiming he was this British doctor. And we were like, did you hear an accent today?

And he's like, no, actually, I didn't. And so we kind of filled him in. And he's like, oh, my God, this guy. And so here's the bailiff of this courthouse being like, oh, this is absolutely ridiculous. Arty was able to get the court hearing date pushed back a couple more times before they finally made it to court. So we go in and it was pretty stressful. I brought up him threatening to abduct her and him threatening violence and just constantly trying to keep everyone safe during this time period and not feeling safe enough to leave. And so at the end of this trial, this judge, she says, okay, I'm ready to share my

verdict and she said that she did not find my testimony credible. Part of that was because I had notes on the station. She's like, you're reading from your notes. I'm like, I promise I'm not reading from my notes, but when you have nine years of stuff, I had to jot bullets of what happened when. And so I would just glance at them just to kind of refresh my memory. When my lawyer was like, what happened in January 2014? I'm like, I don't know. I have to like glance at my notes. So she saw this as me being non-crash, credible. And she said she didn't find my testimony credible, not just because she saw me reading from my notes, but because if I had really felt threatened, I would have left the first time he made a threat. Or I would have removed the guns the first time he made a threat. And all I could think in that

moment was, wow, thank you for victim shaming me. I was like, wow, this is a real kick in the vagina for all fucking domestic violence victims out there. To hear that coming from a female judge, I was enraged. And she goes on to say that the text message where he had sent it to my stepmom that gave me the emergency protective order that says nobody in this family is going to be safe. She said that was too vague to be considered a credible threat. And so he got away with I didn't get a restraining order against him. She dismissed it. And I was so angry. I asked my lawyer, I said, can you ask the judge if I could say something? I was already towards the end of the day. She wouldn't allow me to, but good God, I just wanted to tell her how ashamed she should be of being a

female judge. Yes, he didn't physically assault me, but that didn't make my fear of him any less real. and my fear of what he would do with my daughter, since it was not the first time he had threatened to abduct a child because he did it with Tammy's daughter too. And we had brought that up in court as well. It's like basically telling a woman, you should have left the first time your husband hit you or the first time your boyfriend hit you or whatever.

It's not that fucking easy. And I just wanted to tell her for one second, you should fucking know better. And quite honestly, it's probably better she didn't let me talk, because I probably would have said those words to her, and I would have given zero fucks about it. Because she deserves to hear that message. Even my boss, you know, she's a female CEO of her company.

She's like, I want this judge's name. I want to know who she is. I want to write a letter. She was just so enraged for me. You can imagine, like, how I was feeling. I was like seeing red. Honestly, I would love to put her name out there if I could because I feel like, here's a judge that got.

elected and people should know what she's doing. And this isn't about fairness or rightness. It's, I don't know, it's victim shaming. Telling me he's been in the army and he shot children and that I would hear constantly about how he has no problems hitting women. He might not have hit me, but he fucking served the fear of God into me that he might actually do that. Fast forward to August 2020, Ardi filed charges against Kenji, alleging that Kenji had threatened Darcy. Kenji thinks this claim may have stemmed from an argument that he had with Darcy. He had been extremely angry and frustrated with her about continuing to date Artie. I just couldn't understand how she could continue bringing this guy around, especially around our children, after everything that's transpired.

And he's obviously taking my words, twisting them around and threatening me with them. And of course, he says he's going to call the police or the police are going to show up soon. Police never came that day. So the following day, I decided to try and reach out and contact Valerie. That's next time on Something Was Wrong. Something Was Wrong is an audio chuck original. Thank you so much to our team. Executive producer Ashley Flowers.

producer Mike McDonald. Mixing and mastering by Kyle O'Connor. Created, reported, and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Gladrags, covered this season by Midwest Originals. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?