Transcript of 3: The Ambush

This is exactly right.

I'm Bridget Armstrong, host of the new podcast, The Curse of America's Next Top Model. I've been investigating the real story behind that iconic show.

I ended up having anorexia issues, bulimia issues.

By talking to the models, the producers, and the people who profited from it all.

We basically sold our souls, and they got rich.

If you were so rooting for her and saw her drowning, what did you help her? Listen to The Curse of America's Next Top Model on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up and his body was stiff.

I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast about a string of mysterious suicides at a Missouri University, and the fraternity brother tied to them all, Brandon Grossheim. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before their death. Was he profoundly unlucky or was something much darker at play? Listen to The Peacemaker podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the podcast Betrayal. Police Lieutenant Joel Kern used his badge to fool everyone. Most of all, his wife, Caroline. He texted, I've ruined in our lives. You're going to want to divorce me. How far would he go to cover up what he'd done? The fact that you lied is absolutely horrific. And quite frankly, I question how many other women are out there that may bring forward allegations in the future. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look, there's another little road down here. Do you think there's a bridge down there? In 2001, a year after they'd arrived in Costa Rica to live in their four-story round house in the middle of the jungle, John and Anne Bender went to see Dr. Rosemarie Bradley. Hi. Is Rosemarie there?

Hi, Becky. Did you get here? All right?

My producer, Poppi and I, are retracing their journey. You have to cross the river over a bridge. It was a spring afternoon in late April. John and Anne set off in the car heading for the outskirts of Perez Zaladon. They had no idea what was about to unfold, that the old life John had left behind in America was about to collide with his new life in Costa Rica, and the utopia they'd carefully constructed around them would be shattered. It would lead to Anne and John, who shared a battle with mental illness to fear for their lives. Their acute need for privacy had already made them unpopular in the valley. Now paranoia would take hold. They would retreat further and further into the jungle and isolation, and they would ramp up their security. Their lavish home, high on the hill, would become a fortress. The Benders It's prisoners. From ExactlyRight Media and iHeart podcast, produced by Blanchard House, this is Hell in Heaven. I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter 3, The Ambush. We arrive at Rosemarie's. Did you get to? All right? Well, we're outside a big green gate.

Okay. Yeah, I'll just go across.

You'll just come across? Yeah. Rosemarie appears a few minutes later, husband in tow.

Hello. You're Becky, and you're Pocky.

Yeah. Come on in. They take us through the gate and a little further down a small road, and at the bottom is a fast flowing river with large boulders. The only way to get to their house is across a narrow, rusty hanging bridge, which bounces and creaks as we walk across. It's slatted so that if you misstep, you'd go straight through into the river below. This was where the benders came that afternoon back in 2001, an afternoon that would change them both. Safe on the other side and up through their lush gardens, we come to their house. It's surrounded by trees with views of the valley. Fantastic.

Yeah, that's called the India dormida.

Rosemarie points to the dramatic mountain range, the Sleeping Indian, she says. The peaks form a distinct profile of a woman lying down as though asleep.

If you look at her, she's pregnant. See, that's her nose, that's her chin, that's her breast, and then there's her pregnant belly.

She overlooks your house. They have an airy, spacious outdoor area with a concrete floor, corrugated roof, and wire fencing for walls. Rosemarie is 71 with alert, intelligent eyes. She She's a scientist, a soil microbiologist, to be precise. Her partner, Marco, is Costa Rican. Rosemary is originally from the UK.

I came to Costa Rica in 1989 and found this beautiful place to build a house.

Back in 2001, she ran a business selling her unique mixture of native seeds.

One was a grass and one was a legume.

The idea was that if you planted them, they would grow to provide an eco friendly, nutritious diet for cattle.

To substitute the imported maize and strawberries.

And also to nurture the soil and prevent erosion, because the legume in particular has long roots. It was at the time a revolutionary idea and one the benders were interested in. It's growing in her garden.

They get fertilized and then goes down there and then it digs down into the soil. In fact, you can see where it goes. There's one, for example.

Oh, yes, I see. It goes deep down and keeps the soil in place. Back in 2001, Rosemary was busy. People would come from across the country to buy her unique blend.

Lots of people bought our seeds, and one of them was John Bender.

It was Rosemarie's produce which had brought the Benders on a rare trip away from their home. Their dream house was being built on top of a hill and close to the ocean. The slow unraveling of that dream was a few years off. For now, their concerns were very practical: soil erosion.

You often see that in that part of the Coast, is that houses are being built on very steep slopes, and some of them are actually just falling down the hillside. I mean, it's crazy what people do where they build their houses. They must have known about us through the grapevine, right? Here everybody finds out about what's going on through just talk, talk, talk. Everybody talks a lot.

On that afternoon in April 1: 00, around three o'clock, the benders arrived and parked on a quiet country road on the outskirts of the town near Rosemarie's house. They crossed over the bridge to meet Rosemarie in her laboratory. Rosemarie remembers the couple clearly Anne, she noticed, was badly affected by Lyme's disease. Remember, Anne wasn't being treated by a conventional doctor for her condition. John was trying to fix her himself by using plants in the jungle.

She limped a lot. She used a walking stick because of the Lyme disease, but she had a very pretty face. She was shy, timid, whereas he was less so, I would say. Deep, deep voice. Yeah, nice guy. I mean, you got He was good-looking, too. I was fascinated by him, fascinated.

Rosemarie and Marco were excited to meet people who took a real interest in their business and what they were trying to do. For Rosemarie, that was pretty rare.

We tried to make friends with them. We invited them round and stuff, but they didn't want to.

They weren't offended. In fact, Rosemarie sympathized. She hadn't found it easy to run a business in Costa Rica, trying to do something new, something different. Sometimes it was hard. She'd had her own dreams of a flourishing global seed business. It wasn't to be. These days, she and Marco find themselves very hard up.

I think you can get quite paranoid here as a foreigner and feel that everybody's against you and just live your own little private life. I think that's what they were doing. You create your own bubble. I mean, we've done that here.

So the Benders and rosemary had a lot to talk about.

They were very interested in the seeds of this forage peanut and how they were produced and so on.

John and Anne bought some of rosemary's seed, and while Rosemary prepared their order, they went back over the bridge to their car.

Presumably, it was to get the money.

Then, Rosemary froze.

Think back to the early 2000s. You're flipping through TV channels, and then you hear this. I was rooting for you.

We were all rooting for you. How dare you learn something from this?

But looking back 20 years later, that iconic show so many of us love.

It's horrifying.

Robin, first of all, is too old to be starting a model.

She's huge.

I talk to cast, crew, and producers who were there for some of the show's most shocking moments. If you were so rooting her. Why didn't you help her? With never before heard interviews, The Curse of America's Next Top Model examines why this show was so popular and where it all went wrong.

We basically sold our souls, and they got rich.

Listen to the Curse of America's Next Top Model on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up and his body was stiff.

I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast investigating a string of mysterious deaths at a prestigious Missouri University, and the fraternity brother at the center of it all. A few years back, two fraternity brothers died by suicide, just weeks apart in shockingly similar ways. Both were discovered by the same student, Brandon Grossheim.

I laid him down. I tilted his head back and presenting him in mouth-to-mouth and CPR.

At first, people gave Brandon the benefit of the doubt. But when three more acquaintances died the following year, the tide turned. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before their Yes. Was he profoundly unlucky or was something much darker at play? Listen to the Peacemaker podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Tell me what you heard.

All I heard was a shot.

At this point in our interview, Marco leaps to his feet and starts gesticulating towards the bridge. He remembers very clearly what happened next.

. It was three in the afternoon, he says.

He'd been working at home, and he'd heard the phone ring. It It was the intercom from the external gate across the bridge. It was Anne's voice, shouting and screaming, Help, help, help. Vamos, he says.. Let's go and moves quickly to the bridge. We try and keep up. He wants to show us what happened next in situ.

He went running ahead because they were saying, Help, help, they're kidnapping us.

He shows us how fast he went across that rickety bridge after hearing the gunshot. It's not easy at speed. The whole structure feels pretty dangerous. Rosemarie was close behind him. Marco takes us to the front drive, and slightly breathless, he describes the scene which confronted him the moment he came through the gate.

.

He points to the road. There was a white pickup truck blocking the drive. He turns and points to the gate. There, he says, Anne was there standing by the intercom.

.

John was furious, and now Rosemarie picks up the story.

John was a huge guy, right? He got really angry. He raised his voice. And they don't like that. They don't like that. If you live in Costa Rica, you must never lose your temper. That is a very important rule.

Rosemarie and Marco's staff, who were in the roadside office, were also terrified. They'd seen everything. A vehicle breached to a stop, blocking the drive, boxing in the vendor's car, and armed men jumping out, waving guns in the air. What did they tell you that happened? That staff member saw one of the armed men shoot at the ground near John. The gunshot Rosemary and Marco had heard back at the house. Anne said later she thought it was a kidnapping. He fired the gun between John's legs and held it up to John's head. Anne was terrified.

So that was what was scary about it. They thought they were being attacked by robbers. They were going to be robbed. That's what they thought.

And John and Anne were in a bad way.

They were trembling. They were terrified.

Once Rosebury and Marco had taken in the scene, they suddenly recognized one of the armed men. It was someone they knew. These weren't robbers at all, but law enforcement.

And then we found it was a friend of ours, right? Who'd actually fired the shots.

Rosemarie reassured John that they weren't being kidnapped.

We were just trying to calm him down, if I remember correctly, that it was okay, that it was just a matter of documents.

They tried to find out precisely what the problem was. What had the benders done wrong? The police wouldn't tell them, but they did want to see the couple's ID. John and Anne were having problems understanding the police officers. Their Spanish wasn't that good. So Rosemarie said she would go with John to the police station and help translate, while Marco would go with Anne back to their house to pick up the passports. Rosemarie and Marco were used to hearing gunshots and shooting around the place. John and Anne would have been, too. Kidnappings and vigilante groups are quite common where Rosemarie lives. In fact, there was a banner stretched above the road when we arrived. A picture of a rat, a symbol for a criminal, crossed out, and a message that vigilante groups are operating in the area. The sign read trapped rat, lynched rat. The banner itself had more than a dozen holes made by gunshots. Rosemarie told us there'd been a recent killing a few doors down.

Just a couple of weeks ago, driving a motorbike up here, one of these delivery guys with a pizza. They attacked him, and then these two guys who lived just across the road, and the police did not do anything about it.

Marco and Anne went to get the couple's passports. They arrived to meet John and Rosemarie at the station, ready to sit down with police.

We were there for hours.

Rosemarie and Marco didn't understand what it was all about. They would find out later. They eventually left John and Anne to it. But Marco did notice something which he thought was odd about their documents. John and Anne's passports were from Grenada. That's a notorious tax evasion hub. There's no inheritance, wealth, or capital gains tax. Apparently, the passports had aroused the police's interest. John's father, Paul, says that he was worried about his son's decision to give up US citizenship and move his fortune abroad. I guess the one thing that bothered me about what he was doing was when he started thinking about moving offshore and not living in the United States. I said, Why are you doing that? He said to avoid taxes and stuff. That I did not like. Did you tell him? Yeah, I told him he didn't care. But he did that, and that was disturbing. For Paul, using tax havens like this, giving up your passport, went against the spirit of the law he had committed his life to upholding as a legal scholar and passport. He was also worried about his son not having the protection that a US citizen is entitled to.

But it wasn't all about passports. There was another reason for the police pulling John and Anne in, one which would fuel John's suspicions and convince him that his enemies were after him. A few days later, Rosemarie called Anne to find out if they were okay. They were fine. John and Anne were kept at the police station until late and released the same day. But that wasn't the end of the matter. Far from it. Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up, and his body was stiff.

I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast investigating a string of mysterious deaths at a prestigious Missouri University, and the fraternity brother at the center of it all. A few years back, two fraternity brothers died by suicide, just weeks apart in shockingly similar ways. Both were discovered by the same student, Brandon Grossheim.

I laid him down and I tilted his head back and presented him being mouth to mouth in CPR.

At first, people gave Brandon the benefit of the doubt. But when three more acquaintances died the following year, the tide turned. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before their deaths. Was he profoundly unlucky or was something much darker at play? Listen to the Peacemaker podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Think back to the early 2000s. You're flipping through TV channels, and then you hear this.

I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. How dare you learn something from Yes.

But looking back 20 years later, that iconic show so many of us love is horrifying.

Robin, first of all, is too old to be starting a model.

She's huge.

I talk to cast, crew, and producers who were there for some of the show's most shocking moments. If you were so rooting for her, why didn't you help her? With never before heard interviews, The Curse of America's Next Top Model examines why this show was so popular and where it all went wrong.

We basically sold our souls, and they got rich.

Listen to the Curse of America's Next Top Model on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

The police operation had deeply upset John and Anne. John couldn't shake the feeling that people were after him, that he and Anne were vulnerable. As Rizueldo, their head of staff, remembers him being completely traumatized. John decided that they needed more protection.. Jose Pizarro, former chief of Costa Rica's Police Force, a popular guy who is better known across Costa Rica as El Toro, the Bull. He's a solidly built man with a broad smile and well known for being a friendly guy, he tells me. Toro. El Toro. Toro. Bull. Toro. So friendly and liked that if people saw him walking down the street, they would call out El Toro. Jose agreed to meet John at his house, Boracayán. He'd had enough years in the police force to recognize trauma. He knew instantly how threatened they felt. John told him that it had changed his life. He was especially worried about Anne's safety, he says. He thought their house was beautiful but isolated, so his priority was to make it secure. John told him he wanted him to set up an entire security system. Jose Jose brought in more armed guards, secured the entire 5,000-acre property, and became their personal bodyguard.

A bond of trust developed very quickly between us, he says. They were very special people. Jose tells us that John had his own nickname for his new head of security, Colonel. When Jose went to town with Anne, he tells us that John would call out... Cuidado de mi esposa, You take good care of my wife, Colonel. It's the only reason I'm relaxed because she's with you. Jose told us that John and Anne's extreme reaction to the arrest was not only down to the way it was carried out. Of course, if they believed they were being kidnapped, it would be extremely frightening. John confided in Jose that he suspected that the police operation was a cover for something more sinister. The questions about their passports were a ruse. John felt there was something very strange going on, Jose tells us. Jose agreed there was something which suggested this was far from a routine check on the couple's papers. And he knew the police officers. These were police officers attached to the Special Investigations Unit in an unmarked car and in plain clothes. The strength used was so unnecessary, Jose told John disclosed something else to Jose, which he believed, backed up his hunch that people were after him and Anne.

When they were at the police station, there was another man, a lawyer who he didn't know, who served him papers, which means John was being notified of a lawsuit against him. John, Jose told us, was being sued by a former associate who claimed that he was owed millions of dollars by John. The stakes were extremely high. Were the police acting on behalf of someone else? Was someone after John? Was there a threat of kidnap and abduction? Or were these the rantings of a man in shock. Jose says that the way the police went about the arrest was strange. This was totally out of line. That wasn't the proper protocol, Jose says. John sued the police in the end, and they were all fired. Jose did look into whether there had been a kidnapping plot to get him out of the country, or maybe extortion or blackmail. I personally never found any evidence of that, Jose says, but it wasn't an extensive investigation. Jose was more focused on setting up the security around John and Anne and their property. After all, Jose's job was to protect them. John's theories that people on the ground had been hired to kidnap him or abduct him might appear implausible, especially as Jose had looked into it and found nothing.

Perhaps it was a symptom of living in extreme isolation with a wife whose health was going downhill, and John was slowly and steadily detaching from reality. But then we came across a witness who suggested just the opposite, that John may have had every reason to be paranoid. Testimony which throws a completely different light on what happened that afternoon at Rosemarie's Seed Farm. We were given the man's number and told to ring him. We had no other information. The man who we're calling Michael was quite elusive at first, but I eventually got through. He didn't want his voice used, so we're using an actor for his side of the conversation. My audio is from the original call. Yes. Hi, my name's Becky Milligan. My colleagues and I work for a podcast company, and we're doing the story about John Bender. First up, I asked Michael to explain what he does for a living. What would you call yourself? How would you describe your job?

We're not related to military at all. It's really interesting. Basically, I don't like the term I don't like the term. What do you call it?

Mercy?

Correct. I don't like that term, but basically, that's what it is. I worked for different governments in the Middle East for many years. I worked for the US, I worked for the Israelis, I worked for Spain, and I was basically a private contractor. So wherever the army can't go in or won't go in or whatever, they usually send us. So when they had a potential interest in a person in particular, for whatever reason, obviously it was all related to terrorism and all that, then we would go in and extract that person and hand them over to the party that was contracting us.

Are you involved in this work still?

I retired in 2008, but I still had some clients in Central America.

It sounds like a pretty dark and murky world. I wondered what he was asked to do when it came to John Bender.

I was contracted by a third party to intercept Mr. Bender and send him to the States. We worked on intelligence to get Mr. Bender's whereabouts. And what we did, we mounted an intervention to capture him.

The problem was that when he turned up, it seemed he wasn't the only person interested in John Bender. Why did you all get there at once? I don't know.

I don't know if it was a fluke or it was a coincidence or what happened exactly. But that day, we actually bumped into local law enforcement equivalent of the FBI in Costa Rica.

We heard Rosemarie and Marco's version of events. This is how Michael says it played out on the ground.

Everybody got to the location where we had decided to intercept Mr. Bender, and they didn't know who we were either. It was pretty intense for a few minutes. I was going to get paid when I got Mr. Bender, right? If I didn't get Mr. Bender, then I wasn't going to get paid. I wasn't there to play around.

Michael, realizing that his mission might now be scuppered, contacted the contractor who, by the way, he wouldn't name. And there was a back and forth.

At the end of the, let's say, 20 minutes, half an hour of the intervention, I was told to pull back and not intervene.

The contractor said he'd get his money anyway. Away.

This was not foreseen, and therefore not my mistake or my problem. But if they told me, You got it, bring it to us, then I don't know. I mean, we were ready for that, but up to a point. Anyway, very, Very, very intense. Very, very intense.

I asked Michael if he'd been told why his employer had asked him to abduct John Bender.

The person that gave us the contract was apparently very interested in getting Mr. Bender back to him somehow. I guess he was either involved with Mr. Bender or Mr. Bender owning something because it was quite obvious that we were going to intercept Mr. Bender and get him out of the country back to these people.

Sorry, I just want to get this straight to my head. So were you on your own?

No, I had three people with me.

Oh, you had three people, too. Do you remember it quite well?

Very clearly.

Do you know when you were asked to do this, did they give you a reason why? Or did you know why they wanted him? Because it's basically, for want of a better word, kidnapping him and bundling him out into America, I suppose.

I don't know what their intentions were exactly, but they were there for him, and they were there to arrest him.

You wouldn't have arrested him, would you? You would have just...

No.

What would you What have you done?

Well, taking him away. I guess we can discuss that when you're here. I was going to be told where to bring him, and they were going to fly him out.

He said he'd meet us in Costa Rica. He stood us up. We made another date. Again, he didn't show, so I left him a voice message. It's Becky here. Just checking if everything's okay. I've been waiting at the front desk. We'll be around all day, so just give us a ring or a message and let me know. All right. Cheers. Bye. We asked Rosemarie whether She had seen another car at the scene. She had no recollection of one. The staff who'd witnessed what had happened didn't want to talk. So we can't be sure that Michael was really there. We have no way of standing up his story for now. We did speak to someone who did confirm that they had hired an investigator on the ground, but they wouldn't go on the record, and we don't know if that investigator was Michael. Knowing what had happened only a year or so after they'd moved to Costa Rica makes more sense of all those armed guards and the barbed wire fencing around their property. They were a couple who didn't just protect their privacy. They were terrified because they believed that people were after them. And those papers that were filed at the police station, we investigate in the next episode.

Was the passport issue a ruse for the police hired by a creditor to serve him? And who hired Michael? The same people or another interested party? Just who exactly had John pissed off? And were they working together to bring him back to the US? Next time, it's a real change of scene. We head to the streets of Philadelphia to the 1980s in search of a young John to find out who he really is. Is that what he believed himself to be, a genius of sorts?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. He knew it.

There was not a question about it. We would be together and he'd say, I was just talking to this guy.

He's like a famous math professor at Harvard.

But can you believe what an idiot this guy is? He He was on another level.

And when it came to the big money and you're in that game where you're playing for high stakes, there was no Mr. Nice guy.

Just who was this guy who amassed a 600 $100 million fortune and believed he could cure his wife's serious illness and who someone wanted to kidnap? You've been listening to Hell in Heaven from ExactlyRight Media and iHeartPodcasts, produced by Blanchard House, hosted Written and produced by me, Becky Milligan. The producer and co-writer is Pwopy Damon. Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell, and Tobi Matamol. The Sound Recordist and Head of Sound and Music is Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer is Volkhan Kiseltug. The artwork is by Vanessa Lyluk. For ExactlyRightMedia, the executive producers are Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producer, Lily Laderwig, and Associate producer, Jay Elias. The Creative Director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pi. The executive producer and Head of Content at Blanchard House is Laurence Grisell. Listen to Hell in Heaven on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whenever I got through the window, I tried to pick him up and his body was stiff.

I'm Ben Westoff, and this is The Peacemaker, a true crime podcast podcast about a string of mysterious suicides at a Missouri University, and the fraternity brother tied to them all, Brandon Grossheim. The lawsuit says Grossheim was one of the last people to see each victim before their death. Was he profoundly unlucky? Or was something much darker at play. Listen to the Peacemaker podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Bridget Armstrong, host of the podcast, The Curse of America's Next Top Model. I've been investigating the real story behind that iconic show. I ended up having anorexia issues, bulimia issues, by talking to the models, the producers, and the people who profited from it all.

We basically sold our souls, and they got rich.

If you were so rooting for her and saw her drowning, what did you help her? Listen to The Curse of America's Next Top Model on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the podcast Betrayal. Police Lieutenant Joel Kern used his badge to fool everyone. Most of all, his wife, Caroline. He texted, I've ruined our lives. You're going to want to divorce me. How far would he go to cover up what he'd done? The fact that you lie is absolutely horrific. And quite frankly, I question how many other women are out there that may bring forward allegations in the future. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.