Who Trolled Amber? - Dangerous Memories: Episode 5 - Who is Anne?

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

What motivated Anne in her work with the young women and did she believe what she was leading them to believe? In the search for answers, Grace turns to one of the only people who has heard Anne’s side of the story directly from her.This is episode 5 of 6. To binge-listen to all 6 episodes ad-free from today, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.To find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail]: Grace Hughes-HallettProducer: Gary MarshallAdditional reporting and production: Imogen HarperSound design and original composition: Tom KinsellaTheme music: Far Gone (Don’t Leave) by Pictish TrailPodcast artwork: Lola WilliamsCommissioning editor: Basia CummingsExecutive producer: Ceri Thomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just a warning before we start. This episode contains references to child abuse and sexual assault. I should probably explain how I come to the story. I'd love to hear that. Yeah. Yes, please. So this was 2016 and I received a telephone call from somebody I know asking whether I wanted to talk to Anne Craig.

And at that point, I had no idea who Anne Craig was. I'm sitting in a glass walled meeting room inside the busy newsroom of the Daily Telegraph newspaper with a journalist called Mick Brown. He's a dapper man, neat grey hair, round tortoiseshell glasses, and a crisp white shirt. There's something of the old school about him. Mick usually writes profiles. Over the years he sat down with Marvin Gaye, Brad Pitt, Aretha Franklin, but occasionally he does investigations and in late 2016 he received that call from a source. I wanted to kind of suspend judgment about what the rights and wrongs of the case were, who was right and who was wrong. But I was obviously very intrigued by the case.

Mick had never heard of Ann, her arrest, the allegations made against her, or her vehement denials of any wrongdoing. He hadn't heard about the events affecting Huey, Tori, Phypsey and the other young women. He had no sense of the story in front of him. But what he was hearing from this source was that Anne's story had been misrepresented. It was Anne who was the victim in all of this. And despite her doing nothing wrong in the eyes of the law, she was still being harassed. As a result of that, I telephoned Anne Craig, arranged to meet with Anne Craig,

and that was really the beginning of what turned out to be an investigation that took months and months and months and months and months. investigation that took months and months and months and months and months. And I'm here because for that months long investigation, Mick actually sat down with Anne Craig and listened to her version of events over the course of hours and hours. He's the only person to have really heard it directly from Anne. He got to know her, what she believed and why. And I want to know what he discovered before I contact Anne myself. I'm Grace Hughes-Hallett and from Tortoise, this is Dangerous Memories. Episode 5. Who is Anne?

Anne was sitting on the top deck of a London bus the first time Mick got hold of her. It was November 2016 and the police investigation was two years behind her. They spoke on the phone for around 20 minutes and over the sound of traffic she told a sprawling tale of everything that had happened. And there was one crucial point she wanted to make. And she said, I haven't told anybody my side of the story. And I want to tell you my side of the story. She spoke with a great certainty about what she was doing and a palpable

sense of, of, of grievance that she was the victim here. And these terrible families who've already inflicted, so she maintained, already inflicted these terrible things on their children. Now they were coming for her. And the reason they were coming for her was to shut her up, and in a way to shut the girls up from this truth as she saw emerging. The parents were still trying to get their children back because despite the doubts that had crept into their minds while Anne was on bail, Huey and Tory were back seeing her

for sessions. And then one morning I got this call and it was Anne and it was like six months ago she was like Huey Huey Huey and I couldn't believe it was her it was like I couldn't believe I was speaking to her. When the police investigation into Anne Craig came to a close Anne was released from bail. That condition that she couldn't make contact with her clients, was now over. She said, I'm not going to charge you. And my life had really turned to shit.

I mean, really bad. So I wanted her help and there was no doubt in me that I would, I would work with her. And so yeah, it all started again, all these sessions. But it seems to me that this marks a turning point, a shift in the power dynamics of their relationship. When Huey first went to Anne, Anne told her she was too young, maybe wasn't ready to do this kind of healing.

And now she was the one asking Huey to come back to her, free of charge. But it's funny, I guess the time away from her, and especially those conversations early on with Tori, it made these cracks and like these, I guess these seeds of doubt had kind of been sown around Anne and so even though I really needed her because I couldn't function she just didn't have that same grip on me. Huey wasn't the only one to receive a call from Anne. Tori did too with the same offer of free sessions. And like Huey, she accepted. She was very insistent that we did. I remember her being concerned, thinking that I'd kind of strayed from where I was meant to be. So in the spring of 2015,

around six months after she had been arrested, Anne was free to take Huey and Tori back on their journey to the root of their problems. And in the months that followed, the press got hold of the story for the first time. The Daily Mail and The Times covered the allegations made against Anne by parents, friends and by former clients. And there was more coverage when Tory's mother, the Countess of Caledon, unsuccessfully

applied to the High Court in an attempt to seize some of the documents from the police investigation into Anne. It's that moment that I found one of the most striking in all of this. When Anne came to the High Court hearing to listen to Tory's mum's lawyers put their arguments to the judge. Tory sat beside her, Anne, in the courtroom. They'd come together, a united front against Tory's mother. When Anne had been contacted by journalists at the time, she only offered statements via her lawyers to say that she wasn't responsible for Hughy and Tory cutting contact with their families, and that she hadn't psychologically manipulated them. But now, in late 2016, she wanted to tell Mick everything.

And on the face of it, that seems like quite an extraordinary decision. The police had moved on and coverage in the press had quieted. So why rake this up again in the public eye? Well, she was still under siege by the parents. They weren't going away. And maybe in her mind, speaking to Mick would be an opportunity to expose them. How did she come across on the phone? She came across as somebody who was slightly dogmatic. She sounded like somebody who believed that she had been grievously wronged, that she was being harassed, that she was being victimized, and that she was just trying to do

her best and these terrible families were coming after her. That was the general thrust of what she had to say. She was definitely on a mission. She was definitely on a mission. I don't know if it clouded her perception of what she was doing or whether it just added fuel to her conviction that what she was doing was correct. And I do think she had a conviction and convictions are very dangerous things. After that first phone call, they agreed to meet in a cafe on Sloan Square in Chelsea, West London. Would you describe meeting her? The person I met was fairly small in stature, very pale, rather drawn. One thing that stuck in my

mind was I offered to buy her a tea and she said, I'll have a chamomile tea. They didn't have chamomile tea and I came back and she brought her own tea bag. She would carry her own tea bags with her. So I fetched some hot water for her and she put her chamomile tea bag in. I guess what you could draw from that is that she saw herself as being somewhat separate from convention. They sat in that cafe for over an hour and drinking the same flavour of tea she offered

to her clients as they arrived for a session. She told her story from the very beginning. And so we talked a little about her history, about how she'd been born in Ireland, how she'd come to England, and worked first of all in the airline industry, then worked in HR. When Anne explained her professional background to Mick, she started with her time up in the skies in the 1970s. She'd been an air stewardess for over a decade working for Britannia Airways,

but over time she'd stopped flying and started training others to do the job. She became a training manager. The work involved one-to-one sessions, classroom teaching, safety, first aid, and in her words, personal development. And over the years, she worked in similar roles, teaching employees how to relate to their colleagues, how to be better managers, how to progress in their careers. And she talks about working at one point in a mushroom factory. The person who'd employed her said, well, I can see you're going to come in here, you're going to take us apart

and you're going to put us back together again. It was a phrase that Mick would come to think about a lot over the course of his investigation. So, as she put it, she had extensive professional work experience in this field. But this field was not the field of therapy. It was to do with personnel and working in offices with people and talking about their difficulties that they may be experiencing at work and so forth. Anne stayed with the Mushroom Supplier for three and a half years.

But when she moved to London for her husband's new job, she left her old life behind. And she got thinking that maybe it was time to go out on her own. She told Mick that she set up a private practice and that her first client was someone who got in touch looking for career advice. This person ended up asking if they could see Anne as a client and then she told Mick she started seeing more clients who needed her help professionally and emotionally. And I should emphasise she didn't describe herself as a therapist,

but to all intents and purposes, that is what she was setting herself up to be. According to Anne, she'd been seeing clients for several years before the Florence art school crowd started arriving at her door. So the problems that we're talking about really began when her daughter was in Italy and met a girl who was in art school. The woman Mick is speaking about isn't Huey, Phypsey or Tory. She is part of the same group of friends though.

She'd rather not speak to us, but we know that she did see Anne Craig for a time and that she was the first of that Florence art group to do so. And it was that girl who then became the fulcrum really because she then introduced a friend of hers to Anne Craig and so began the cycle of friends of friends introducing them to Anne Craig. We know that by the time this woman arrived she was using techniques like dream interpretation, left-hand drawing, spirits, techniques that presumably she hadn't developed from her time at Britannia Airways or Blueprints Mushrooms. Anne did tell Mick she'd received a certificate in counseling from the Royal Society of Arts and Counseling

in the early 90s when she was working for a local council. But beyond that, there's no evidence of any training or qualifications in the field of mental health. She was working in her own self-styled work as a personal development coach. The world of personnel, the world of HR was long, long left behind. And it had become something completely, completely different from that. Did you believe her story? About the...

About her own life? Yes, I would have liked to have known more about it. What struck me was that in the course of these conversations that I had with her is that Anne Craig herself had been and was a deeply troubled person. And she having been cut off from her family as it were and then come back to England. And she talked about this, talked about the period of sort of emotional turmoil

that she'd been through. And she eventually met somebody whom she described as a holistic healer. And he in a sense became her mentor became almost her guru. And I think I'm right in remembering that it was 15 years that she was with this, this holistic healer. And she told me that everything that she had applied in her own practice she had learned from from this guy. This guy is a healer called Russell Jenkins. The first thing I did was type Russell's name into Google. I was hoping he might still be practicing and that there'd be a website I could look at. But

instead I found something else. What I found was a court document detailing the unusual circumstances that led to the death of Russell Jenkins in 2007, aged 52. One day when he was walking around his home, Russell stepped on an electrical plug attached to an iron. It might not sound like much, but foot injuries can be quite dangerous if you have diabetes, which Russell did. Particularly if the wound becomes infected, which in his case it did. You'd expect that most people in this situation would take themselves to a doctor and ask for antibiotics or the most appropriate treatment, but Russell didn't do that.

Instead he consulted his inner being about how best he could treat his wound. And one of the methods he ended up using? Manuka honey. And even when the wound got worse, he remained steadfast. He didn't want to seek conventional help. And that decision persisted until he developed septicemia, which ultimately led to his death. It's a sad and unusual story, but I'm telling it because I think Russell, how he lived and died, is perhaps the best insight into Anne that we've found so far. I wanted to know if anyone could tell me more about Russell's connection to Anne,

and after some digging I found his partner and we spoke briefly over the phone. his partner and we spoke briefly over the phone. She couldn't remember Russell ever talking about Anne and I asked because my hope was that she could help me understand how Anne developed her techniques and honed her belief that conventional therapy didn't go far enough. What she could recall from some time in the 90s was once seeing Anne Craig in the healing centre that Russell ran in Portsmouth. She didn't know how Anne had come to see him as a mentor though. Before I put the phone down, we ended up speaking about Russell's work. At his small healing centre he offered Reiki, aromatherapy and reflexology. And there were other things too. Specifically something called esoteric healing, which according to the people who practice it is a form of healing that aims to balance a person's energy.

Russell would scan his clients bodies with his mind. He said he could feel what was wrong with them and that he could sense spirits and beings in his presence. Past traumas, past lives, dreams, repressed memories, all of these featured in Russell's work. His partner said to me he would help clients tease out from their own psyche what their dreams were about. It all felt very familiar. His partner told me she'd received over 100 cards when he died, some of them telling her of how wonderful he was, how inspiring he'd been to people. That made me think about how in well-intentioned hands these types of healing techniques, though not backed by science, can truly provide comfort

and reassurance. But the problem is that you don't have to have a malevolent intent to damage someone. You can have the best intentions in the world, but delving into people's problems, fears and traumas without the proper qualifications can do serious harm. Just like it wouldn't be safe for a well-intended but untrained doctor to perform heart surgery. There's nothing to suggest Russell used these techniques to do the damage that Anne did, but he did believe in them. To the point that when he had an infected foot, he refused conventional medicine and

died, all because he stepped on a plug. There's a line in the court document that stands out to me. Had he received timely conventional medical treatment, Mr Jenkins would have made a substantial recovery. And it got me thinking about how Mick described Anne, that she had a conviction and that convictions can be very dangerous things. As we talk more and more about the techniques that she would use and I would challenge her on this and I say well this doesn't sound you know, this doesn't sound like therapy. You don't have the qualifications. You're not a psychoanalyst. You're not a trained therapist.

And her answer would be, well, I've been to counsellors myself, I've been to psychoanalysts, and they never get to the root of the problem. So she really did believe that she was the only person qualified in her mind by virtue of her own experience, the only person who could actually get to the root of the problem and this was a phrase that she kept using the root of the problem. What's revealing to me is that Anne was so open about this. I'm like a dog with a bone at times. In fact, she made a point of telling Mick that she relied on her intuition, what she could feel from the person sitting opposite her.

If I sense with the person we haven't got what we need, I'm not going to let that person walk out of the room. I'm going to quietly stay with them, encourage them to get it. And then the two of us will instinctively know, yes, we've got it. And then they can leave and start working on that. And I won't let go of something until... I can be incredibly annoying at times, but also incredibly insightful. I just instinctively know when the person has got something.

I mean, that's's chilling isn't it? Mick Brown wanted to hear from everyone involved in the story as it was unraveling in 2016. Everyone who was caught up in Anne's web. Everyone who was feeling the effect of her mission. One point she said to me, isn't it suspicious that they're trying to shut me down? Because the fact that they were trying to shut her down in her mind was just further proof that they had something to hide and that she was the one who was going to expose it. She was definitely on a mission. She was definitely on a mission. Mick was trying to untangle the sinister suggestion that Anne was making,

that the parents were not trying to separate their daughters from Anne because they loved them. Instead, Anne was insinuating that they were trying to stop her before she exposed the paedophile network she said they were connected to. Mick got in touch with Hughie's parents. He met with Sarah and Henry in their London flat, and they told him the stories that they've told me. And so we sit down, and the first thing Mick Bryan says to me is, have you ever sexually abused your daughter?

Me? And I just, I mean, you know, the shook sort of hit me. And my first reaction is I wanted to laugh. And I knew I mustn't laugh because I suddenly realized this was serious, you know, so I dug my nails into my hands and, you know, and forced myself to concentrate and I just looked him in the eye and I just said no, I have never sexually abused my daughter. The other parents Mick spoke to also denied ever sexually abusing their children. Of course, Mick wanted to speak to the young women for himself. He wanted to hear what Huey and Tory had to say. And Anne was happy to introduce him to them.

And I think she had a clear reason for doing that, is that she believed that they would be advocates on her behalf. And they were very difficult conversations to have, and rather extraordinary conversations to have. Mick met with Tory first, in a cafe near Kensington Palace in West London. He'd seen photographs of her from before she cut herself off from everyone.

Tory's 21st birthday party at her parents' country estate was covered by the society magazine Tatler. The Tatler photo of Tory depicts a smiling smiling dancing girl in a jewel-encrusted white silk mini dress. Mick described the young woman in that photo as looking as fresh as spring, and the Tory he met in 2016 as drawn and pale, someone in the midst of a deep midwinter. And when I suggested that the things that she was accusing her family of having done who had been implanted were implanted memories and she denied this. She said, well how? She didn't think it was possible to implant memories.

How can someone put memories in your head that weren't actually there? But the impression I got was of somebody who was traumatized. Mick tried to probe Huey, as he had with Tori, about Anne. Talking to Huey, I asked her whether she was not concerned that Anne Craig had no qualifications for what she was doing, that she'd never trained as a therapist. And she said to me, but I don't know how much they could have taught me to open myself up, which is what Anne has taught me. She has this talent to help people understand their traumas.

And she described Anne Craig as a friend I dearly cherish, someone who's very wise and can help me. And he continued to speak with Anne. They'd have the occasional meeting or phone call as he was meeting with Huey, Tory, their families, their friends and with experts. The more I spoke to her and the more this went on and then hearing from the girls that had been her clients, the more clear it became that she was actually, rather than listening to them, that she was in the business of directing them and manipulating them and in telling them, I think you need

to do this, I think you need to do that. And so the more I talked to people about this, the more I talked to the girls, the more convinced I became that Anne Craig was deeply in the wrong and that these allegations about Atlantic Force memories was correct. Mick was reminded of the phrase Anne's employer at the Mushroom Supplier had said to her in the interview, I can see that you're going to take us apart and put us back together again. And that phrase really resonated with me because effectively that's what she was trying to do with these girls. She was trying to take them apart and put them back together again. But what she was putting back together was her idea of what they were, not what they actually were.

And she was trying to put them back together in a way that would demonstrate that her suspicion of pandemic sexual abuse was in fact correct. And I think she did take them apart. That's what she set out to do. She set out to take these girls apart and to almost recreate them in her own image of what they should be rather than what they actually were. Hi, I'm Salima Shivji and I'm a reporter here in Mumbai. We're gearing up for the biggest election in history right now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi looking very likely to win his third term. And whether you love him, hate him, or know nothing about him, there's no denying, Modi is one of the most powerful political figures out there right

now. Learn why in the newest season of Understood. Modi's India Understood, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Around the time Huey started seeing Anne again in 2015, she started working in a pet shop, cleaning out fish tanks, that kind of thing. It was enough money to tide her over. During one shift, she suddenly heard the owner in a panic. All of his fish were dead so we were in his thing and suddenly he just started shouting he was like oh my god oh my god what's happening what's happening all the fish were suddenly dead and it was like I don't know what happened. It was shocking and upsetting but it seemed to be an

accident. Someone had put the wrong chemicals in the tank or something like that but it stuck with her and she mentioned it to Anne in the next session. Huey says that Anne's interpretation of the incident was that it showed that one of Huey's family members had in fact murdered people. In Monaco, murdered children in Monaco and that I'd been his assistant and helped him do it and that this is why I had this fear that I'd been his assistant and helped him do it and that this is why I had this fear that I'd done awful things and couldn't remember and I just remember in the past it would have been like this awful thing and I

have to go away and feel it and it would be also terrifying but this time I was like it's just too obvious that's just too literal like this doesn't make sense and and it seemed different, she was wearing makeup she'd never worn before, she just seemed different, she was more snappy and more irritable and I just knew it was just wasn't right. The doubts in Huey's mind that had begun to surface when Anne was on bail had now grown into something bigger. But that still wasn't enough to separate them. The version of Huey, the one that Anne had put back together in her own vision, was built on layers upon layers of Anne's

influence. And that's not something you can undo overnight just because of some doubts creeping in. When Mick emailed both Tory and Huey asking to meet again for some follow-up questions, they both replied that they had no wish to be in contact with him. And I don't know what happened to Huey because she, as far as I was concerned and as far as her parents were concerned, she very much vanished off the map. My biggest curiosity with this story is, A, what motivated her,

and B, was she conscious of what she was doing? I think her motivation is actually quite clear in a way. The more I spoke with her and the more I asked her about her family and her own background, you know, a picture began to emerge. Towards the end of my time with Mick, I wanted to get his impression. Not just about what Anne had said to him, but what he'd felt when he sat across from her. I wanted him to help me answer my question of whether she really believed in what she was telling Huey and Tori. Mick thought her

mission could be traced back to a period of turbulence and self-reflection in her own life when she cut ties with her own family back in Ireland. And as a consequence of that, she had begun to re-examine certain things that had been going on in her own life. She said at one point that her mission as it were, and I think there was definitely something rather messianic about what Anne Craig was doing,

that her mission was to seek out abuse wherever she could find it and to expose it and to help people who have been victims of it. Now, the question here is the problem here is the which may in a sense be a very commendable, very commendable ambition, very commendable purpose in life. commendable ambition, a very commendable purpose in life. The difficulty becomes, are you actually finding sexual abuse or are you in your mission, in your messianic undertaking, are you in fact finding evidence of sexual abuse where there has been no sexual abuse? There was something else Mick picked up on. Something I've been thinking about too. One thing that did become clear to me was that there was quite a high degree of class animus in this.

I was going to say, what do you mean by class animus? A resentment about the upper middle classes. And I think she felt that sex abuse, paedophilia, these were things that were rampant in the upper middle classes. The idea of sort of upper middle class people getting away with something seemed to be something that was very much high in Anne Craig's mind. Before I even spoke with Mick, I had a sense that Anne had a complex relationship with class and privilege. At times she made it clear to the women I've spoken to that she resented the English

upper class and the wealth they have. Huey told me that Anne was damning of her privilege, that she believed the English were responsible for destroying Ireland and that her family had suffered as a result of that. She thought Huey should take personal responsibility for this. And yet, Anne seems to have enjoyed being in close proximity to this very thing she claimed to deeply dislike. All the former clients of Anne we've spoken to are from a similar posh background, and she would outwardly signal that she was part of that world, like when she asked Mick to

meet her and Peter Jones, a department store favoured by the old school Chelsea set. She sent her daughter to a renowned boarding school too. When we tracked down someone who briefly went into business with Anne, they told us that Anne had told them her dream was to travel in a chauffeur driven car on her way to meetings. In her sessions, Anne to Mick, she expressed deep-seated views about the rot in this elite part of society. Yet in her own life, she wanted to live and work among them. And there was a rather alarming point in my ongoing conversations with her where she said, and I had a dream about you the other night, Mick, and I dreamt that you were taking the

side of the families, which I was rather unsettled to hear. I don't like people dreaming about me, well, not in a bad way. And I said to her, you know, I'm just trying to be, which was the truth, I'm just trying to be the objective observer in this story. But I think by that point, she clearly was beginning to realize that I had serious doubts and reservations and questions about her techniques and what she was doing and what the consequences of what she was doing were. So perhaps in that case case her dreams were correct. In April 2018, a little over a year after Mick's first phone call with Anne, the article was published. Do you have any unanswered questions after reporting this story?

Yeah, I mean, lots. I mean, it's the one about whether it's conscious or unconscious. That's the main one. Yeah. Was she conscious of what she was doing? We're certainly conscious of the fact that the consequences of what she was doing were highly damaging and destructive

and causing untold pain on people. She could not have failed to be conscious of that. Whether she saw it as being destructive of Huey and Torrey, I don't think she did. I think she said that the fact of the parents becoming involved, the police becoming involved, the investigation, me becoming involved, this had all kind of disturbed the work that she was doing.

And if she could have just had another two or three years to carry on doing this work, then something would have really come out of this. The truth would have finally been revealed, you know. So it was the world, everybody around her, everything around her was conspiring in League to stop this truth, fundamental truth that she believed, this mission that she was on, were conspiring to stop that. And I don't think, certainly in the time that I was talking with her,

I don't think, certainly in the time that I was talking with her, I don't think for one second she had one iota of doubt about what she was doing. I have to say, I mean, I've never worked on a story that has had such an impact on me and that has sort of resonated for so long in my mind and trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Tori and Huey because they are the central figures in this saga. And what happened to them, I think, is it's extraordinary. It's bizarre.

It's almost incomprehensible. It's such a salutary story about the dangers of meddling with people's minds and how malleable the human mind is. While Mick had been consumed by this story, the young women's parents had been working away in the background. After the failure of their own confrontations with Anne and her husband and the disappointment of the police investigation. They changed tactics again and they'd found someone who made them a promise.

Follow these steps and you just might get your daughters back. Coming up in the final episode of Dangerous Memories. I just needed to leave. I needed to leave England. And she just said, well maybe we'll just never speak again and just hung up. My legs just buckled under me. And I mean it was completely extraordinary. And then about a year ago, I wanted to start dealing with Anne. In a response to further questions from The Telegraph, Anne Craig emphasised that all her clients had been over the age of 21

at the time she was consulting with them. She denied that she had ever suggested or encouraged her clients to reduce or cease communications with their families or friends and stated that the personal development, she taught, comprised a number of well-recognised methodologies. she taught, comprised a number of well-recognized methodologies. In the past, Anne Craig has issued categorical denials of any wrongdoing. She has denied responsibility for mentally abusing or psychologically manipulating clients. She has said that she is a victim of a campaign of harassment. If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, you can send us an email. It's dangerousmemories at tortoismedia.com.

Thank you for listening to Dangerous Memories. If you're enjoying this podcast, you can listen to all episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple podcasts or by downloading the Tortoise app. And you can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates. Or to hear more podcasts from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts. Dangerous Memories was written and reported by me, Grace Hussallat, and by Gary Marshall.

The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting and production from Imogen Harper. Fact-checking was by Xavier Greenwood. Sound design and original composition from Tom Kinsella. The theme music is Far Gone, Don't Leave by Pictish Trail. Podcast artwork by Lola Williams. The commissioning editor was Basher Cummings. The executive producer was Kerry Thomas. In case you haven't heard, in the US it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of, this is America.. No, no you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History Hit we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week

where we look to the past to understand the United States of today with the help of some amazing guests. Let us introduce you to the Founding Fathers, guide you through the West Wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by to find out just how we got here. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. you