The Binge Cases: Scary Terri - What She Buried | 3. The Money Part

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Kwaneta had always argued she hadn't wanted Michael dead, but the paper trail she left behind told a very different story. - Want the full story? Binge every episode of What She Buried ad-free now by subscribing to ⁠The Binge+⁠. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to ⁠GetTheBinge.com⁠. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at ⁠Patreon.com/TheBinge⁠. What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. - For more of Justine’s work, read Unreasonable Women, which follows three women who have been punished for defending themselves. The result of seven years of reporting inside U.S. prisons, it's a gripping, urgent look at how survivors are criminalized, called "required reading for anyone who cares about women and justice," by Bookpage, "remarkable... riveting," by Kirkus, and "true crime at its finest," by Booklist. Available now on ⁠Amazon⁠ or ⁠Bookshop.org⁠.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone.

The Miles Zero murders. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to every episode of What She Buried, add free right now when you subscribe to The Binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else, get exclusive bonus episodes, and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe,

or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. The bench. When I first got in contact with Quenetta, she was just another name on my list, my list of 10,000 people held in women's prisons across the country. I sent surveys out to all these women, and I ended up writing a book, Unreasonable Women, About Them. I've now spent eight years reporting on survivors of violence who've been criminalized for protecting themselves. And as time has gone on, I've come to see that while a few cases are culled,

and dry wrongful convictions, most are more nuanced. I no longer expect to find perfect victims. At first, Quenetta had declined to answer the survey. Instead, she'd written me a letter, and then we'd corresponded for a while, before she decided to finally send her survey response. It was ten dense handwritten pages. She answered my questions in detail, mostly expanding on her life in prison and her experiences in the legal system.

but there was one question Quenetta declined to answer entirely. I'd asked that she'd tell me about the days leading up to Michael Giles' death. To that, she responded, if I told you, he wouldn't believe me. So, I'd rather not. Over time, I guess it became clear to Quenna that I probably would believe her.

And she began, bit by bit, to tell me more. I never pushed her on it, not until we were sitting across from each other at Lane Murray Prison. That's when I asked again about the days leading up to the death of Michael Giles. So what was going on for those three days?

Arguing, went out to eat, went to the movies, went to something called spaghetti warehouse, went to a half-priced books, we don't have that in Michigan and I was like I went to what do you

it's a furniture store and arguing sex sex yeah we had sex one twice it kind of sounds like a romantic weekend we were fussing a lot

we were arguing a lot but it was cute at first it was look what you wear and how you wearing that And then it just escalated. I knew some of the evidence in Quenetta's case. The hole, the concrete slab, the red stain on the couch, the renter who'd been told, do not dig in the backyard.

All of that evidence led to Quenetta. So, at the very least, back in 2007, she knew a lot more about Michael Giles' disappearance than she was letting on. But there was something else that took investigators a bit longer to unravel, something that made the prosecution's case against Quenetta pretty hard to dismiss out of hand. I'd never really asked Quenetta about this. Not until that February day when we were sitting across from each other, separated by the

prison glass. After. Which part is after? Well, after he was dead. Well, I don't know which part is after. The money hurts. So the thing is with the money. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media,

this is what she buried. I'm Justine Vanderlone. Episode 3. The Money Part. In late June of 2006, almost two decades before I visited that Texas prison, Quenetta told her mom, Roberta Powell, that she was going on a trip out of town.

She'd be visiting her friend Kim, who she'd met back when they were, both Air Force wives on the base in England. But when Quintetta came home, she didn't look like someone who'd just spent a few days relaxing with an old friend. She comes back, and I knew something wasn't right. She's got the Sequoia pulling his vehicle at Nissan, and she was just white. And I said, what's going on?

Quenetta shrugged it off. She said she and her boyfriend D'Andre, the man she was living with at the time. It had some kind of disagreement. I didn't get into it, but she wasn't sad. Roberta wasn't satisfied with Quenetta's explanation. Why are you so pale? What's with the SUV you suddenly seem to own? Where to come from?

Again, Quenetta didn't have any good answers. So I had my friend in the Detroit Police Department. Runny's place. And they was registered to Jivehouse. And I asked her gear, what's going on with this vehicle? She covered it. I don't know what she said, but she covered it. You know, this is a girl that never really had a reason.

A lot of me. I believed her. But how do you cover that you have this guy? Well, she said something about it. It was something to do with Kim's husband, and he was dying of cancer. Kim. The friend Quinetta had told Roberta she was visiting.

I even tried to catch her, and she always tell me the story that she told about how the girl's husband had got injured in the accident. So she said her husband had got injured in the accident and it was his trouble. And he did end up dying for cancer. But was the injured, injured or cancer? He ended up dying from cancer. Yep. So yeah. Maybe Quenetta didn't have such a consistent story

about why she had towed a truck back from Texas. I knew about the truck, but I didn't know about the truck. Princess Powell, Quenetta's cousin and friend, was also wondering, where did Quenetta get this new truck? This new truck was kind of funky. I got in the truck, the smell. Smell like old blood.

You know, I actually thought something dead, like a mouse or something, was in the guts of the truck or something. You know what I'm saying? It just had an off smell. And she said, we've been trying to get this smell out. We've been trying to get this smell out. And I was like, you know, you sat in and it was an awful smell. And then the air of it felt thick. It was just like you didn't want to be in that truck.

The truck was unsettling. And so was Quenetta's appearance. She had scratches on her face. and her eye was swollen. I can tell she's been in the fight. And I was like, what happened? I said, did Dee find out about Charles? You know, and she just looked at me, and she let me believe that.

D. D. Andre Knight. Quenetta's boyfriend. Whatever princess thought had happened between Quenetta and D'Andre, it seemed to have passed quickly. because not long after Quenetta returned from Texas with the new truck and the scratches on her face, she and D'Andre looked like they were doing better than ever. Actually, their life was, suddenly, very comfortable.

Quenetta's son was already attending a prestigious school, and now Quenetta applied to get her daughter into one of Detroit's finest private kindergartens. She dropped 25,000 just to enroll her. And I knew something was off. I didn't know what had happened or whatever, but I knew something was off. Princess had the same job as Quenetta. They were both LPNs, licensed practical nurses.

They monitored vital signs, gave meds, helped with dressing and bathing. You definitely couldn't get rich that way. So where was that money coming from? Princess didn't think that the fathers of Quenetta's two children were paying those tuition bills. And Quenetta's boyfriend, D'Andre, he was in construction, not a bad living, but not the kind of money that would explain dropping $25,000 or all the other stuff Quenetta was suddenly splashing out on. She was rebuilding DeAndre's house.

They totally stripped down the kitchen. They put in a sliding wall. They, I mean, from ground up, ground up, and then she finished her mama's house. The attic up there, that whole attic is redone. She refinished that attic. She paid off her mama's car. And the mama said it to me, too. She said, I knew she had too much money.

I knew she had too much money. But, yeah, she paid off her mama's car. So all the cars, they were driving. And then I know DeAndre had got a vet. A vet. A corvette. Princess couldn't work it out. Then, Quenetta let her in on a little secret.

She sold me her account. She had like $80,000 in her account. No, $180. I said, where the fuck you get all this money from? I said, why would he give you that much money? I said, that doesn't make sense. Why would he give you that much money? Before this podcast, I wrote and reported another podcast about a different woman who had been convicted of murder.

It was called Believe Her. That was literally the title. Believe her. And that's my approach to my work. The people I report on, the people I've written a whole book about now, they've usually experienced pretty relent. sexual and domestic violence all their lives. And they usually haven't been believed, particularly after they fought back.

I've seen cases, many cases, where these women were so clearly trying to protect themselves. But then when police, prosecutors, even the media, get their hands on these stories, the narrative flips. The women are portrayed as nothing more than cold-blooded killers. liars, drama queens, fabulous, master manipulators. Exactly what they called Quenetta.

I very purposefully counter all of that when I approach women in prison. As a starting place, I believe what they say about their lives. I don't think they're going to tell me every detail with 100% accuracy from the beginning. Who could? but I start with belief, and then we go from there. It's a process. It's how I interacted with Quenetta. It's how I first received what she said and wrote,

about her past, her experiences, and about the days and weeks surrounding the death of Michael Giles. Quenetta had always been clear with me. She had killed Michael Giles. But she had also always told her. told me that she believed the killing was justified. She said there had been an altercation, and it was him or me. Everything that came after, Kouinetta said, was done in a panic.

A messy attempt at a cover-up. Not good. But you can sort of understand it. But then there was the money. The first time I really understood the extent of the money, was on one of my trips to visit Roberta, Quenada's mom. Roberta had gone all out on this immense spread of food that she kept trying to feed me. Got a fruit about and a cul-lade.

I have a wonderful for now. Pink lemonade. Resistance was futile. Put this tray out of you so you can nibble something. There was also cheese, pink marshmallow fluff, olives, mixed nuts, and a full shakudery board. So a lot of eating. But in between bites, I would fit in questions about Quenetta, or Roberta would reflect on her daughter's life, how it could have gone differently. So what's in here? That's the cheese. You've got to give you some of that girl.

I don't know where her life would be, but she would be successful. She'd be raising her children. That's why I tried to do things for them than I knew she would have did in step. She would have sent them to good school. She would have sent them to college. No question to my man. No, no, I think she would have been free. She would have been happy. Quenetta was free for 35 years.

For a long stretch of that time, I don't think she was too happy. Sure, she presented as independent, capable, self-assured, fun, even when she felt low or desperate. This was out of habit, Quenetta told me, and necessity. She once wrote, society expects black women to be strong. Carrie waits. Never complain. Behind the scenes, in the years before Quenetta's arrest, there was so much turmoil.

I was just thinking about if the problem was men. Every woman in corrections. Yeah. Every woman in corrections, because of men. I've obviously seen plenty of cases where this is true. She's locked up because she fought back, or because she protected her kid, or because he made her take part in a crime under duress, or she stayed loyal, or she was too scared to speak out to her own detriment.

It felt like Roberta was helping me make sense of Quenetta, fleshing out this portrait of the woman I knew, a woman with so much in common with other incarcerated women. And then, Roberta went to a back room and came out, with a box full of documents about Quenetta's case. What else in there? You see the discovery yet? It's me running them folders.

The discovery, or this roughshod version of it that Robertha had, included police and prosecution files. Documents that the state had been legally required to hand over to the defense. The records weren't super organized. Roberta's system seemed to be to put it all in piles. I started rooting around the papers. I didn't know. Oh, is the incident report.

That's it. That's it. These were reports from the police department in Garland, Texas. On one page, there was a summary of a checking account. A joint account belonging to both Michael Giles and Quenetta Harris. So this says here, 53,000 to you. For what? That's what it says.

They said that out of this account, 40,000 went to her, 53,000 to you. She never gave me a dime. Never. Big record. Unless they was flipping it, it was covered. I don't know about it. How do you flip it?

Well, I know that her attorney, as he was at the signature, my girlfriend was with me. I said, I didn't write it, but Quenetta knows how to write like me. Mm-hmm. Quenetta knows how to write like me. In other words, she could have forged Robertha's signature to move the money around. And there was a lot of money moving around. Some checks to family and friends. and far bigger sums wired to accounts owned by Roberta, Quenetta, and D'Andre.

The majority of the checks and debits occurred in Michigan. Huh? Wow. They never really read. Really a lot going on with checks. And then, in the piles, there were photos. Oh, I got a picture of her and Dianre in Vegas. This is where she...

Is this after? All of this. This was he supposed to kill in July. This was taken in September. Just one thing they did. Oh, my God. The picture was a snapshot of Quenetta and D'Andre in a red Ferrari,

set against the backdrop of Caesar's Palace Casino. I'd known that Quintetta stole money from Michael Giles after he died. I thought, that's poor form, okay, but it's not unheard of. A perverse decision, yes, but could be spur of the moment. a one-off.

Or maybe you do it because you're desperate, because you need the cash to live. But in the picture, Conena and DeAndre don't look desperate, or torn up. They look jubilant. And the checks. There were so many for such a long time.

Fifteen months' worth of checks and transfers. I mean, but... So, like, what... Okay, in the most... In the most... I mean, it looks... I mean, it looks... It's not great.

It's not great. No. It's not great. I'm Sanju Bascar, this week, sitting in for Simon Mayo. And I'm Mark Kermode this week sitting in for Mark Kermode. And Mark, what films will you be reviewing this week? We have suburban dinosaurs in the end of Oak Street. We have a restaurateur biography in Tony and Lady with our very special guest, Sean Clifford.

Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone.

The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. In all the police reports, the forensic notes, the interview affidavits, you'll find very few details pertaining to the actual killing of Michael Giles. No witnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon. Michael Giles' body was discovered around 15 months after his actual death, in a state of advanced decomposition. In life, he'd been husky and tall, but his remains weighed only 80 pounds.

Lodged inside the left orbit of Michael Giles' skull, just behind where his eye would have been. There was a partially deformed bullet that police later concluded had been fired from a 9-millimeter handgun. The gun seemed to have been aimed at the base of Michael Giles' neck, fired upward.

Then, buried along with Michael Giles' remains, investigators found a pillow, a pillow with a small hole cleaned through it. Police believed that the pillow had been used to muzzle the sound of the gunshot. But that was it. The gun? Never located.

The bullet. No forensic evidence that would lead back to anyone. The pillow? Nothing helpful there either. In the end, though, authorities didn't need those connections, that proof. Because the money, the money pointed straight to Quenetta Harris. A perfect paper trail. We had all the checks, so we knew who they went to and who to go look for, and we just had to find them.

A few weeks after Quenada was arrested in Detroit and transferred to Dallas, Gary Sweet returned to Michigan. We wanted to go back in all these people that received money, $10,000 checks. Mother received a $50,000 check. And I want to think at that time, and my numbers may be off, but I want to think she was making about $29,000 a year at that time working at this nursing home. In fact, Quenetta's W-2 for 2006 shows that she made just over $21,000. And she was sending her kids to a private store. school. So we're like, what is she telling these people? When you write a check to a friend for $10,000 and just give it to them, I don't have any friends like that that just give me that

kind of money. Every story we got was different. Mostly, though, Quenetta told some variation of this one. One of the friends or one of the acquaintances that she gave a check to said her actual biological father wasn't who she thought it was and that he was a rich, famous attorney, and she got a large inheritance. Cornelius Pitts. That was the name of Quenetta's fake dad. I saw that name in the file as I ended up pulling. For a while, I assumed it was made up.

Until one day I googled the name. And there he was. Cornelius Pitts, famed Detroit criminal defense attorney, with silver hair slicked back. It was an absurd lie. It was also creative. And, at its root, sad. Quenetta's biological dad, a Vietnam vet,

he rarely showed up for her. When Quenetta was a kid, Roberta hid the truth, that he suffered from PTSD and severe mental illness. Quenetta always wondered, did I do something? Did he reject me? Later, she learned that he ended up in a group home, talking about how Ryan Seacrest owed him money.

Cornelius Pitt says a father, that was a far grander tale. She'd been telling it since she was a girl. She used to tell people her daddy was a judge, you know, was this judge that was on Detroit TV all the time. Cornelius Pitt? Yeah. Okay. She said, yeah, she should tell people that that was her dad.

That wasn't her dad. Princess Powell obviously hadn't been told that the mystery money came from Cornelius Pitts. She'd been given a few different explanations, and so she'd also been caught up in Gary Sweet's investigation. They came, they flew up here just to talk to me, pulled me off my job. She was questioned.

She signed an affidavit. I showed her a copy. I did write this. That's my handwriting. I, Princess Peoples, and I was married at the time, swear that I'd been told by my second cousin and co-worker, Quetta Harris, that she received her lump sum. of money as a gift from a friend named Tim.

That was another lie, too. Who received $10 million selling it where her husband was killed by a J.B. Hunt truck on his way to work. That's what she was telling people where she got the money from. That was the lie. Yeah, but she ain't ever gave me a nickel. I wouldn't accept her shit because I knew,

I just thought that she was scamming it. So I didn't want no money. I didn't want no money, no gifts. My conscience is clear. Now comes the part that, perhaps more than any other thing I uncovered during my reporting, complicated how I approached this story. Because it totally scrambled the narrative of Quenetta as a survivor, first and foremost. It made her, instead, not just someone who fought back, as she had said,

but someone who had then perpetrated a pretty intricate series of financial crimes. The details are as follows. Over a period of months, Quenetta seems to have stolen more than $200,000 from Michael Giles. His investment accounts were liquidated. His military pension payments were siphoned off. Any cash he had lying around? That was long gone. The money moved from account to account, so it's hard to know exactly what Quintana bought with it all.

She apparently made some car payments, and Princess remembers that Quenetta finished Rebertha's attic. The small Detroit bungalow now had one. one extra room. Some of the money went to a few of Quenetta's friends, the ones who are hearing stories about Cornelius Pitts, or stories about Kim's cancer-stricken husband and his deadly run-in with the J.B. Hunt truck. Other payments, authorities believe, went to Quenetta's kids' tuition. And a decent amount of money, it seems, went, tellingly, to benefit the man Quenetta was living with, her boyfriend, D'Andre Knight, who, according to what we've heard, apparently got a Corvette, a motorcycle, and a finished basement.

And D'Andre knew, at least to an extent, where that money was coming from. We found a notarized power of attorney granting her access to everything. The document was dated and signed by Michael Giles on September 27, 2006, which was nearly three months after Michael Giles disappeared. And we want to find out who signed that, because he's dead. To get a power of attorney, you need it notarized. But to actually transfer the proceeds of Michael Giles' investment accounts to his bank, you needed to go a step further.

The bank required an agent to come and collect signatures in person. In this case, the agent was a man named Donald Eberley. We find Donald Eberley. basically trying to get the story, how this woman got on the accounts. And he says, yeah, she showed up with that power of attorney. And he says, I told her, I have to actually see him sign it. And she's, well, he can't. He's had a stroke.

Donald Eberley agrees to meet with Quenetta Harris and stroke survivor Michael Giles, who also was in a serious car accident. So she sets up in time for him to come to their house. And he shows up at the house. And he tells us there's a guy in a hospital bed, bandaged all up, and so that it resembled enough of Michael Joss, who he had never met, but, you know, had the driver's license. The ailing, wounded person in the bandages is, understandably, not doing great.

He's speaking in a whisper. But he's able to get out that, yes, he does want his investments transferred to his savings account. And yes, he wants to add Quenetta Harris as a joint owner on that very account. Donald Eberley holds out the first of several papers for the bandaged man. And he scribbled the signature on it, and there goes the money. Okay. Assuming Michael Giles was, at that time, buried under a concrete slab, who was actually on the hospital bed? It wasn't much of a stretch to see the obvious suspect.

DeAndre. Same bald head. Same broad build. He bore a decent enough resemblance to Michael Giles, especially if you imagined him wrapped up like a mummy and lying prone on a hospital bed, mumbling. So Gary Sweet asks the Detroit police to find D'Andre. They arrest him and bring him to the station where Gary is waiting.

And Gary figures, we don't actually have that much on this guy. This is probably a waste of time. I had a running bat with a guy with me. I said he's not going to admit to any of this. You know, he would be dumb to admit to it because we, I mean, we don't have a real strong case on him. He admitted to everything. What do you mean he admitted to signing the paper? He admitted to forging the power of attorney.

I mean, he confessed to all the stuff we thought he did. He spilled immediately? Almost immediately. I don't know. I was shocked. But yeah, it was within the interview. within four or five minutes, he's telling us everything of all his involvement and her plans and plot.

DeAndre gave her up right away. The mother of his baby girl, born just 11 months after Michael Giles disappeared. But he didn't have any instinct to protect himself or to protect her. The her here, by the way, is Quenetta, not the baby. No. Is that unusual? In the criminal world, probably not. I mean, I think he probably knew what was about to happen with her.

And what was about to happen to her? Well, basically, she was going to find herself quite trapped. And when she understood that she had no clear path out of the mess she was in, it seems that Quenetta went to unimaginable, desperate, and reckless lengths to forge one. I can't remember what she her name was, but she played like she was in, I don't want to offend anybody by sense, but African or a different race. She, you know, changed her voice. She was like, hey, I have this opportunity. That's next time on what she buried.

Don't want to wait for the next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of What She Buried Early and Ad Free right now by subscribing to The Binge. And it doesn't stop at What She Buried. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Search for The Binge on Apple podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to subscribe directly. What She Buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media. This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Banderlune. Eric Benson is the executive producer.

Ashley Ann Crigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice, Mosy Secret, Emily Martinez, Sheba Joseph, and Michael Meyer. The story editor is Matthew Cher. The series was mixed in sound design by Garrett Tiedemann with support from Ewan Lai Tramune. Fact-checking by Matthew Giles. A special thanks to our operations team.

Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingell. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatus, and Matthew Cher. If you enjoyed what she buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.