True Crime Campfire - Chasing a Shadow: The Stalking of Joanne Chambers

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

In the early 1990s, a beloved first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania began receiving harassing, threatening letters from an anonymous sender. Her school principal, fellow teachers, and the parents of some of her students soon began receiving them too. As the ordeal wore on, the stalker slowly escalated from taunts to vile accusations and death threats—and then, finally, violence. From early on in the case, the police thought they knew the tormentor’s identity, but it took 18 months to finally gather the evidence needed for an arrest. The trial to follow would be one of the most bizarre the state had ever seen. The case took twist after twist before reaching a conclusion nobody saw coming. Sources:Forensic Files, episode "Sealed With a Kiss"The Morning Call: https://www.mcall.com/1996/01/21/accused-stalker-says-victim-framed-her/The Morning Call: https://www.mcall.com/1997/01/30/custodian-says-teacher-was-often-upset-testimony-continues-in-pocono-mountain-stalking-case-at-school-fellow-instructors-job-is-at-stake/Pocono Record: https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/2000/12/14/pm-pays-600000-to-settle/51084692007/https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/2000/11/04/odd-teacher-harassment-case-returns/51083383007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&Forensic Files Now: https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/2020/06/27/joanne-chambers-and-paula-nawrocki-strange-lesson/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In the early 1990s, a beloved first grade teacher in Pennsylvania began receiving harassing, threatening letters from an anonymous sender. Her school principal, fellow teachers, and the parents of some of her students soon began receiving them too. As the ordeal wore on, the stalker slowly escalated from taunts to vile accusations and death threats, and then finally, violence. From early on in the case, the police thought they

knew the tormentor's identity, but it took 18 months to finally gather the evidence needed for an arrest. The trial to follow would be one of the most bizarre the state had ever seen. The case took twist after twist before reaching a conclusion nobody saw coming. This is chasing a shadow, the stalking of Joanne Chambers. So, campers, for this one, we're in Coolbaugh Township, Pennsylvania, 1993. The principal of the Coolbaugh Learning Center School got a strange anonymous letter in the mail. The typewritten letter was all about one of his most popular employees, rock star first grade teacher, Joanne Chambers. Joanne was one of those teachers kids remember forever, the kind who makes class so much fun that they forget they're actually learning something.

She was always doing something fun and creative, like making big paper palm trees for the classroom or showing up to class in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and shorts. At the end of every class, Mrs. Chambers told her students, you are wonderful and beautiful and you make my heart happy. Aw. Her students loved her, and so did their parents. But apparently not everybody loved Joanne. Whoever wrote this letter sure didn't. The author roasted Joanne up one side and down the other, blasting her for everything from her career choices to her dress sense. Now what do you think of Miss 1977, the letter said. I'm not sure what that means, but you can hear how contemptuous the tone is right away. I'm sure she didn't tell you about her mistake. She didn't fulfill a parent plan, Miss Wanna Be Superteacher. The letter went on about this supposed mistake Joanne had made, accusing everybody of covering for her, or as the letter writer put it, protecting the playground queen. They also made fun of her for not applying for an assistant principal job that had come up earlier in the year. She would rather use her skills to lead every teacher into a water fight, the letter said. Joanne had done that recently, and it was like the funnest day ever, obviously, for both the teachers and the kids. The letter writer, though, was not amused. Later, they made fun of her clothes, too. Who wears shorts and jeans to school? The writer was almost taunting the principal for not doing something about Joanne Chambers.

A leader will lead, they said. The principal couldn't think who would send him a letter like this, but he figured it was somebody who had some sour grapes about Joanne. She was a really popular teacher, everybody's favorite. Maybe somebody thought she didn't deserve to be. He didn't think too much more about it. but it wasn't long before another letter showed up. This one with some pretty serious allegations against Joanne.

Chambers brought pot into school and then showed it in the faculty room like it was just a big joke, the letter said. Later, look in Chambers' desk and you'll see she seems to like Jack Daniels. Sure enough, when Joanne checked her desk drawer, there was a bottle of Jackie D. And there were some things missing, too, the most disturbing of which was a picture of herself and her 10-year-old son. At first, Joanne said she felt sure that the letter writer was a fellow teacher she'd somehow pissed off. She said she figured eventually the anonymous author would out themselves and they could sit down together and work out the problem, whatever it was. But then Joanne started to receive harassing letters, too, and so did some of the other teachers, all letters bashing Joanne. They were disturbing.

Some of them had creepy sexual innuendos. They referred to Joanne as that bitch. And some of the letters mentioned the school superintendent, calling him Colonel Clink. And that sounded really familiar. Colonel Clink was an authoritarian character from the TV show Hogan's Heroes, and it was the snarky nickname for their school superintendent, given to him behind his back, obviously, by a first-grade teacher named Paula Naraki. Both Joanne and Paula had been teaching for around 20 years,

and they both had great reputations with colleagues and parents. But Paula's teaching style was very different from Joanne's. She was a much more traditional teacher, and she ran a tight ship discipline-wise. Joanne was always looking for new ways to make class fun. Could there be some resentment brewing there? Could the buttoned-up teacher be annoyed at all the attention and praise the laid-back teacher was getting? Maybe so, the police thought. Paula denied having anything to do with the creepy letters, and she agreed to take a polygraph test.

She failed. But, of course, this wasn't enough for an arrest. It was enough to make the police give Paula the side eye, though. And as gossip spread around the school, some of her colleagues gave her the side eye, too. One morning, Joanne sat down at her desk to start the day's lesson. She reached down to grab the seat of her chair so she could kind of scoot up to the desk, and when she did, her fingers touched something squishy. Yeah, it's exactly as bad as you're thinking.

Somebody had smeared shit all over Joanne's chair. Letters are one thing, but shit on the chair is a whole new level of commitment to the cause. At that point, you've got to know somebody seriously has it in for you. They hate you enough to handle shit. Yeah, that's dark, man. I don't know if I've ever been irritated enough with anybody to bring poop into the mix. Each. Even worse, parents around town started getting letters too, and these had pictures to go with them.

The letter writer had taken a cut out of Joanne's head and pasted it onto the bottom. of a naked woman in a porno mag. What creeped Joanne out the most was the picture they chose was the one they'd stolen from her desk drawer, the one of her and her son. One of these pornographic collages turned up taped to the window of a local store. And when I tell you, these were graphic. We'll post a couple on social media if they'll let us keep them up. We'll censor them.

These were straight up porn pictures. There's one where the model is performing a certain act. on a man? Oh, you mean the one that rhymes with low snob? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, that's the one. One had words cut out of a porn mag. Lick it, lick it. Another one said in huge letters, drown me in your hot. Okay, I think we see where this is going. We get it. And, I mean, Joanne was a 41-year-old first-grade teacher with a husband, a kid, and a cute little blonde bob haircut. She was a soft-spoken, mild-mannered lady, not exactly a femme fatal.

It must have been so disconcerting for people to see her head pasted onto these naked, spread-eagled porn star's bodies. Yeah, they're kids' teachers' head. I mean, I just can't even imagine. The stalkers' accusations got wilder and wilder in these letters to parents. She was a lesbian, they wrote. She had AIDS. She was immoral and shouldn't be teaching their children. The worst accusation was that Joanne had molested a young boy.

Oh, my God. I thought my career was over. I thought I was going to jail, Joanne told forensic files years later. Determined to find out who was doing this and why, school administrators worked with the police to set up a hidden camera in Joanne's classroom. If the stalker decided to leave any more whiskey bottles in Joanne's desk drawer, they'd catch them at it. And it didn't take long for this to bear some interesting fruit. One afternoon, the camera picked up several of Joanne's colleagues going in and out of her empty classroom while the kids were at lunch or recess or whatever. One of them entered the room alone, walked over to Joanne's desk, picked up her coffee mug, and walked out again. This set off the investigator's radar immediately. One of the

most recent letters to Joanne had said, I had four chances to drug your coffee this week. Did I drug your coffee? The teacher who'd taken the cup was, once again, Paula Naraki. When the investigators confronted her about the surveillance footage, Paula denied that there was anything sinister going on, She had gone into Joanne's room to grab her coffee cup, Paula said, but only because Joanne asked her to go get it for her. Once again, Paula denied being the anonymous letter writer, but she said one thing that pricked up the investigator's ears. You'll never prove it was me. It just struck them as an odd thing to say. Paula also gave the police permission to search her house. They collected a typewriter and took it in for testing against the typewritten letters from the stalker, and no joy. the test revealed that it was not Paula Naraki's typewriter that had created the letters.

At least, it wasn't the typewriter they took from her house. At one point, the investigators had Joanne wear a wire to try and get Paula to say something incriminating on tape, but it was a total fail. Not only did Paula not say anything that made her look guilty, she even sympathized with Joanne saying stuff like, I just can't believe somebody's doing this to you, and I can't imagine what all this has been like. And by the way, I have to say, mad props for the investigators in this town. I mean, how many times have we seen stalking victims end up murdered because the police tell them, yeah, we can't really do anything unless it gets violent or it's not a crime to leave notes on your car or whatever.

That attitude was especially common in the early 90s. So I don't know why this police department took this case so seriously, but I wish all departments would go this hard on stalkers. They got the FBI involved at one point, for God's sense. That is just terrific. And the police response must have gotten under the stalker's skin. One afternoon, a bloody animal liver showed up in the school's mail addressed to one of the investigators. It was probably a chicken liver.

Ew. The stalker wrote letters directly to the investigators, too, threatening to make things worse for Joanne if they didn't call off the investigation. Eventually, for her safety and to try to get the whole thing to die down, Joanne was transferred to another school. But this didn't stop the stalker. One day, a box showed up on the doorstep of the cool boss school, neatly gift-wrapped in pink paper. Inside was a Barbie doll. Someone had cut the doll's hair to look like Joanne's haircut.

And they'd gone to the trouble of finding and dressing the doll in an outfit that was almost identical to one Joanne wore a lot. Like, how'd you find that? How did you have it special made? Did you make it? Like, that just blows my mind that the Barbie was wearing an outfit that looks like her outfit. That is so wild. Stuck into the Barbie's throat was a razor blade, and the stalker had dripped blood-red ink all down its neck. Freaken creepy.

As the months wore on, the letters got more and more threatening and vile. The letter writer threatened to grab Joanne when she least expected it, take her way out into the woods, and torture her to death. You whore, I will make you. you pay. I can get you in one try. No one will ever prove it. They may not think so, but I'm smarter than all of you, you stupid bitch. Hmm, you'll never prove it. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Later, Joanne told the press that she started making a special point of saying goodbye to her husband before she left for work every morning. She wanted to make sure he remembered

their goodbye fondly, just in case she didn't make it home. And it seemed like she was on the right track in thinking that. Before long, the stalkers' threatening words escalated into actual violence. One afternoon, Joanne put her hand on her car handle to open the door and jerked it back in pain. Her fingers were bleeding. She bent down to look at the car door more closely, into her horror, she discovered a razor blade taped to the handle. The cut took eight stitches to close. A few weeks later, Joanne got another anonymous note. It said simply, you're sliced. Yeah. Another creepy picture showed up, too. Joanne with red markers spattered all over her like blood.

It's not over, the note said. You die. By November of 1994, the harassment of Joanne Chambers had been going on for a year and a half. There had been suspects, Paula Naraki, chief among them, but nothing could be proven against any of them. And then, one day as she drove home from school, Joanne noticed a car following way too close behind her, bearing down on her. She tried to get out of the way, but the car stuck with her, inches from her back bumper. Terrified, Joanne tried to shake the car, but she couldn't get away. The other driver finally succeeded in running her off the road. As she was slamming on her brakes on the shoulder of the highway,

Joanne looked over and saw the other driver fly past her. For a split second, she got a good look at who had been following her. Their eyes locked. It was Paula Naraki. No doubt in Joanne's mind. Paula had looked right at her. And that was it. After an 18-month reign of terror, Paula Naraki was arrested and charged with 100 counts of stalking, terroristic threats, and reckless endangerment of life, among others.

If she was convicted, she could serve five years in prison. And people couldn't help but notice that after Paula's arrest, the harassment of Joanne Chambers stopped cold. Everybody went out of their way to support Joanne as she struggled to wrap her head around this insane turn of events. even the school janitor did his best to cheer her up stopping by a classroom to do his famous Elvis impression for her. That's how beloved she was at the school. Yeah, and this was probably the poor dude who had to clean the poop off her chair. So bless his heart all around, right? Yeah, there's a tidying theory I like where you take an item and if you decide that you'd wash it off

and keep it if it was covered in poop, it's worth keeping. Isn't that great? And to me, I don't think I'd keep anything. I don't think I'd keep my flipping wedding. ring if it was covered in, boom. Yeah, to me, office chairs don't fall under that, but I know school budgets are tight, so. I would just throw it away. That's a biohazard. Hose it off. Burn it.

Gross. Meanwhile, Paula Naraki's life had become a living hell. Sheen her husband were hounded by media. Other teachers refused to sit with her at lunch. At a baseball game, a whole group of her colleagues were very obviously cold shouldering her. A lot of the teachers she worked with made it clear that they thought Paula was guilty as hell. And apparently, some of the parents agreed. One couple asked that their son be taken out of Paula's class. She ended up getting put on paid leave. Her

husband Leonard told the morning call newspaper that they felt like they didn't have a friend in the world. But Paula wasn't going to go down without a fight. Calling the charges ridiculous and absurd, she hired a top-notch defense attorney and a private investigator. She told them both she wasn't guilty. They both figured she was probably lying. Paula sat them down and asked if they could get permission to do a DNA test on one of the stamps and envelopes from the stalker. We can, they told her, but it'll be expensive, and it'll have to come out of your own pocket. Do it, Paula said. The defense attorney was skeptical. He told her, look, if this comes back a match to your DNA, you are six kinds of screwed. It won't, Paula said. She and her husband dug into

their savings and came up with the $7,000 for the testing, and I'll be damned. The DNA didn't match Paula or anybody else in her household. Holy butts. So now Paula's defense team knew they had something red-hot to throw at the prosecution. And that wasn't all they had. That private investigator was a good hire. He immediately set out to find any and everything he could about Joanne Chambers and turns out our girl Joanne had a couple skeletons in her closet. Back in the 80s, she'd worked at a small school called Lackawanna Trail Elementary. Teachers who had worked with her there said they'd had a great work culture before Joanne was hired. Everybody got along fine. But when Joanne started working there, suddenly there was drama, just one thing after another. They got the

impression that Joanne liked to stir shit up, pit people against each other. This was a really small school. There were only like six or seven teachers working there, so a manipulative person could do a lot of damage. And damage, Joanne did, according to her former colleagues. Jane Pardue, one of the teachers there, later told the morning call that Joanne started making up, quote, tales that weren't true to get the other teachers in trouble. She'd run to the school superintendent with these stories. She said she'd been receiving upsetting phone calls, creepy sexual stuff, threats. She was afraid for her life.

Several other teachers had told her they were going to set her house on fire. And most interesting of all, she claimed that somebody had smeared poop all over her chair and desk. Now, we've heard that one before, haven't we? Hmm. It's worth noting that Paula Naraki didn't even know Joanne at this point in her life. At one point, the school principal at Lackawanna had summoned all the teachers to the faculty lounge to grill them about who was harassing Joanne. It has to be someone in this room, he said. He thinks he's in knives out or some shit.

Nobody spoke up and everybody just got the hell out of there as fast as they could after the meeting. Joanne's fellow teachers weren't the only ones who'd been caught up in the whirlwind of drama that seemed to swirl around her wherever she went. Police in the town where she used to live reported that they'd been called out about a dozen times to Joanne's house for burglaries, little fires, things like that. Always something kind of bizarre with investigations that led nowhere. And apparently, these weren't the only bizarre stories Joanne had told friends and colleagues. In one, a fire broke out at Marywood College where she went to school, and she had to jump out of a window to save herself from the flames. She broke her leg in the process, she said.

But to another colleague, she said she jumped out the window to escape from a convent full of sinister nuns who were trying to keep her there against her wishes. Okay. Those both can't be true, Joanne. which is it. I mean, like, unless the nuns were also on fire and she neglected to mention it, but I don't know. Flaming nuns, Ron. Flaming nuns. It's the name of my punk band. Paula and her defense team were stunned. All this seemed to point to an inescapable question. Could this woman have been stalking herself all this time? Was that a thing people did?

Yeah, for me, this clinches it. If she's told the same kind of stories before, at another school before she even met Paula Naraki, then that's about as damning as it gets for me. Yeah, I saw someone call this Munchausens by Stocksy. Yeah, which is delightful. But it gets worse, for Joanne, that is. Much better for Paula. They already knew that the DNA on the stamps and envelopes

didn't match Paula or anyone else at her house. Now that they suspected this whole thing was a frame-up, they wanted to see if the DNA matched Joanne. But how could they get a hold of a DNA sample without cluing Joanne into their suspicions? I mean, these weren't the police. This was Paula's PI. It's not like they could just apply for a warrant. So they used a tried and tested police technique.

Very specialized, very technologically advanced. They went through Joanne's trash. See, legally, once you put your trash out on the curb, it's not yours anymore. It's fair game for anybody who wants to rummage through it. So Paula's defense team skulked around Joanne's house until she put out her garbage and snuck up and yonked it. And they managed to find several things that would do nicely for DNA testing. Some earwax on a Q-tip, ew, some snot, also ew, and a couple of napkins. They sent it all off to the lab to compare to the DNA from the stands and the onelot flaps.

And I know y'all aren't going to be surprised at this point. The DNA was a match. It wasn't a perfect one-in-a-trillion match, but enough for the defense to make a strong argument that Joanne was the one who had licked those stamps. So, as you can imagine, Paula and her defense team assumed this would be it. The prosecutor would drop the charges and Paula would go back to a regular life. But no. Whether because they really still thought she was guilty or because they just couldn't stand admitting they were wrong, the prosecution decided to go ahead with a trial. Good Lord.

At first, things seemed to be going Joanne's way. The jurors could be heard whispering stuff like, oh, that poor lady, as witnesses described the creepy letters and pornographic pictures they'd received. But it started to turn with the introduction of the defense witnesses, especially several of the teachers Joanne had worked with at the Lackawanna School in the 80s, who testified about the tall tale she told them back then,

the harassment she claimed to be experiencing years before she ever met Paula Naraki. The poop cover chair. What were the odds that she'd had two different tormentors at two different schools a decade apart, and that they both decided to smear poop all over her stuff. Right, like, come on, it just didn't pass the smell test.

Oh, uh... Sorry. So, confronted with the DNA evidence, Joanne Chambers still denied faking the stalking campaign against her. She had an easy explanation for the DNA. During one of her meetings with the investigators, she said, they left her alone for a few minutes

with some of the evidence. She'd picked up one of the envelopes and the stamp fell off. it. She said she tried to reattage it by licking it and sticking it back on the envelope, but it wouldn't stick. So she stuck it back on with a glue stick she had in her purse. Not an unlikely thing to have in your purse if you're a first grade teacher, I guess. But a forensic scientist testified that this was highly unlikely. She didn't find a trace of glue stick type glue on the stamp. Paula took the stand in her own defense, and it didn't

take long for reporters who were watching the trial to notice that the jurors seemed to be believing every word she said. At one point, Paula's defense attorney asked her, do you think Joanne Chambers has been harassing herself? Paula said, yes. A couple of the jurors nodded slightly. After a trial that lasted a little less than a week, it only took the jury two hours to acquit Paula Naraki of all charges. She cried. On the way out of the courtroom, several of the jurors went up to Paula and hugged her, told her how sorry they were that she'd had to go through this. Joanne Chambers left the courtroom without any fanfare. So Paula's name was clear, but in addition to the emotional trauma the case had cost her,

she and her husband had spent over a hundred grand on her defense. Yowch. Media were all the way up Paula's ass after the acquittal, and she hated it. She was on dateline, movie studios reached out with offers to buy her story. Trash TV shows like Jerry Springer, Lisa, and Mori hounded her. Some people might be into that sort of thing. might want to bask in their 15 minutes of fame, but that wasn't Paula's style. She just wanted everybody to leave her and her family alone. But that wasn't all she wanted.

She also wanted to teach both Joanne Chambers and the Pocono Mountain School District an unforgettable lesson. She was super pissed at the school, especially, because even after her acquittal, they put her through a whole internal investigation for immoral conduct and negligence in violation of the school's employee code. job was at stake with that. They found her innocent, too, but damn, you know, was that really necessary after the trial? So Paula sued. She sued Joanne personally, and she sued the school district, and she made out like a bandit. From Joanne, she was awarded $25,000. And from the school

district, who boy, she got $600,000. Oh, damn, and that's in 90s money, too. And good for Honestly, she went through absolute hell and so did her husband and her kid. She lost friends. She had to deal with her name in the papers all the time. Everybody thinking she's a violent psychopath? I mean, she deserved some compensation for that if you ask me.

As for Joanne Chambers, she's never been charged with any crime in relation to the 18-month stalking and harassment campaign. In fact, she went right on teaching for years. By all account, she was really good at it. So why did Joanne, allegedly, do this?

Was it just for attention? Was she fully aware she was doing it? Or could she have done all this in a sort of fugue state? Was she delusional? Did her husband know or suspect? There's actually a decent-sized body of literature about fake stalking. And I went way down that rabbit hole while I was researching this case. And it's really interesting stuff.

For example, researchers have identified five subtypes of people who fake or falsely report stalking. There are the ones who are actually delusional, like they really believe they're they're being victimized. There are those who have actually been victimized by a stalker in the past and become kind of oversensitized to the point where they feel like people are stalking them. Like if a friend they haven't spoken to in a couple of years reaches out on Facebook, they'll freak out thinking the person's obsessed with them. Then there are the role reversal fakers. They're interesting. These people are stalkers themselves. They're the ones doing the stalking, but they claim to be the victims, usually to divert attention away from their own crimes.

I've seen that before. There are the malingerers who fake victimhood for some kind of personal gain, money, stuff, getting out of some kind of trouble or responsibility, something like that. And last but not least are the factitious victims. This, I suspect, is the kind we're dealing with with Miss Joanne. These people pretend to be victims in order to get attention and sympathy, just like the people with Munchausen syndrome, which is actually called factitious disorder now. In 1996, Joanne and Paula both gave interviews to the TV show Forensic Files.

When they asked if Joanne orchestrated the harassment campaign herself, she said something interesting. She said, I could never, ever do this stuff to myself. I don't think that I could be functioning in the world as a parent, as a teacher, as a wife, if I were that sick to do that to myself. But here's the thing, she could be. People can be really good at compartmentalizing their lives. I mean, look at some of the serial killers we've heard about, over the years. Ted Bundy is a good example, and so is BTK. They both led regular lives,

had regular jobs, dated or married, had kids, and didn't arouse anybody's suspicions for years. Meanwhile, they were doing some of the sickest shit you could possibly imagine. Yeah. Paula's PI was on that episode of Forensic Files 2. He said, I think this was all a stage for Joanne. And I think he's exactly right. Clearly, she had a history of doing this kind of stuff already. not just at school, but at home too, calling the police to report fake break-ins and fires. And it sounds like she went years without doing anything suspicious between her time at Lackawanna Elementary and the year this story started, 1993. I really wish we had more sources on this case, because if we looked into Joanne's personal life at the time,

I bet we'd find some kind of precipitating stressors going on every time she started this fake harassment stuff. I tried like absolute hell to find the court transcripts from Paula's trial, but no joy unfortunately. And as some of you have probably already remembered, this isn't the first time we've seen something like this on TCC. Remember the Cindy James case? The Canadian nurse who reported years and years of escalating harassment ending in her death. Katie and I both changed our minds about 10,000 times about whether she was actually being stalked or whether she did it all to herself. Like Joanne, Cindy's case involved actual physical violence in addition to the stalking. At one point, the stalker allegedly knocked her unconscious and pinned her

hand to the floor with a kitchen knife. Joanne had the incident with a razor blade on the car handle. And then there was the one about Colonel Shue, the military psychiatrist who reported an anonymous letter warning him about a murder for hire plot his ex-wife was trying to set in motion against him. His new wife said he was terrified he was going to be murdered. And then one morning, he crashed his car into a tree, and police found duct tape around his wrists and ankles and signs of torture all over his body. The investigation was pathetically awful and there ended up being a lot of debate about whether the colonel was murdered or whether he killed himself and whether the anonymous letter was genuine or written by Colonel Shue himself. Like Joanne Chambers, Colonel Shue had a history of reporting

weird incidents of harassment. Now, it was not as extensive a history as Joanne, but there were at least two things in his history that kind of made you go, hmm, okay, maybe he did do this to himself, although this one's murkier, I think, for me than the others. Yeah. There was a woman named Ruth Finley in the 70s who fabricated an entire stalking campaign against herself and her husband, really similar to what Joanne Chambers did in this story. And this was during the BTK thing. So everybody was an extra freaked out. And they had a nickname for the stalker called The Poet because they would send these creepy little ones, you know.

There was a TV reporter who faked her own stalking in 2023. So this does happen more often than we might think. Yeah, and like Tracy Richter did it by staging her own attempted murder by luring a mentally disabled neighbor to her house and shooting him. And she almost got away with it. Yeah. She'd be one of the malingerers, I think, like just doing it cynically for some kind of gain. So creepy.

And, you know, it's my first reaction to be mad at Joanne. Like, damn, woman, look at all the stress you caused. All the police and FBI resources you wasted. All the worry you caused your fear. you caused your family and friends, not to mention the hell you put Paula Naraki through. She could have gone to prison for your dumb ass. Yeah, I think it's interesting that she seemed to be targeting Paula from the beginning. Like, she was setting up this fantasy about the straight-laced teacher being unhinged about her fun, carefree co-worker.

It feels a little bit like self-insert fan fiction, where the main character is beloved by everyone, but the evil, jealous antagonist who victimizes Mary Sue for the simple pleasure of seeing her suffer. Yeah, I mean, there was definitely an intentional frame-up, I think. But, you know, it might be more complicated than just, oh, wow, you're a horrible person. I mean, if you're doing stuff like this, surely you're not okay mentally, right? Ruth Finley, the woman I mentioned a minute ago finally ended up confessing in an interview with the magazine writer. She said she'd been going through some horrible depression and anxiety at the time she faked her stalking. She got really fixated on the BTK killer and was scared and she said somehow this made her feel like she was in control

of it somehow. I mean, she was not well in the head, obviously. Not that this makes it okay if that's the case. It absolutely doesn't. If you're in that situation, you need to ask for help. Your mental health isn't your fault, but it's your responsibility and all that. But I don't think we can necessarily decide that these people are just assholes and leave it at that. I don't know. You may disagree. I won't be mad at two if you do, because, you know, Joanne did an awful thing. She passed away last year, by the way, at the age of 76. As far as I know, Paula Naraki is still alive. I hope she's doing well. The scary thing to me is this was almost a perfect crime. If Joanne had thought to use plain water on a sponge to wet her stamps and

envelopes, and I think there's a pretty good chance Paula Naraki would have been convicted. But, of course, DNA wasn't as widely understood then as it is now. True crime was a niche interest then, not mainstream like it is now, so a lot of people weren't very forensically aware. It probably just never occurred to Joanne that her saliva could give her away. I also think it's very likely that Paula would have been convicted if she hadn't had the resources to hire that defense attorney and that private investigator. So I think this is a case that should chill us to the bone shows how easy it might be to be wrongfully convicted. And it teaches us to try and reserve judgment until all the facts are in, right? Too often we form super confident opinions

based on a tiny little amount of information. Like people hear, this lady's missing and they immediately assume her husband killed her and analyze his body language when he speaks to the press or whatever. And I grant you, that's often the case. But it's also often not the case. I can think of a few high-profile cases that are good examples of that, where a poor husband got dragged through the mud and then they found the lady, you know, like gone girl or whatever. A little girl goes missing and people decide her parents killed her. The Madeline McCann case is a perfect example of this. People put their opinions all over social media and the people involved in the case have to live

under a cloud until the full story comes out if it ever does. In Maddie McCann's case, everybody thought it was her parents and then a couple years ago, they arrested a German pedophile who abducted and killed her. Bless her poor little heart. So anyway, and I'm not judging about this, by the way. I've done it too. We have all done this, made snap judgments and expressed opinions of it. It's not, you know, I get it.

Yeah, think what you want, but remember, you're not a junior detective on the case or whatever. Like, maybe keep you're speculating to the DMs. Yeah, exactly. And as Paula Naraki told the Pocono record way back in 1996, people need to stop for a second, and remember that the people involved in these stories are real people. And sometimes things aren't what they look like at the start. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week.

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