Transcript of Episode 3: Red Flags New

This podcast discusses issues such as drug use, self-harm, sexual abuse, violence, and assault. Listener discretion is advised. Particle Entertainment.

Hey, so I just wanted to come on and say something. I read something on Facebook about Somebody committing suicide, that is a very sensitive subject. And I want to point out something, okay? Because the way they said it was that they did not want to wait and finish out God's plan. All right, you cannot kill yourself. Your time of death is already set before you're even born.

"The audio you heard is from a video posted to Facebook in 2019, less than a year before her passing." After Natalie's death and the talk of a potential drug overdose became more widespread, people wondered if it could have been intentional, if she had killed herself. Natalie battled with mental struggles for much, if not all, of her adult life and was not taking her prescribed medication for bipolar disorder. There are also rumors that she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, though Elaine told me she wasn't. Natalie was strapped financially, had just left an abusive relationship, and was in a custody battle with her ex-husband—all factors that could wear a person down.

But there's nothing that can kill you if it is not your time to go. That is one thing that I tell myself when I have suicidal thoughts, because at times I do. I mean, it's it gets bad. Like, I do have depression. My mom has major depression. My dad has major depression, and like, I don't even know what all he has. And growing up and just things that have happened in life, I mean, my mind gets a little twisted, you know? And I fight through it, and I keep on going because there is hope and there is a way. And I look back, I look at where I'm at now, and I look back a year ago, and It is so different. My life, my kids' life is so different. And I still believe that to this day. No matter what happens, no matter what goes on, I know in my heart that God has a plan. And I know in my heart that I have a forever home. I'm not going to try to, like, kill myself.

With suicide a possibility, No matter how remote, friends and family wondered: could things have been worse for Natalee than they knew? Is there something more they could have done? Natalee was a devout Christian, attending church regularly. Suicide seemed to go against everything she believed. She seemed to be self-aware, confident, and have strong faith in God. Had something changed in Natalee's thinking? Did she lose a battle she had been secretly fighting? Or was this her preordained time to die? I'm Sean Kite from Audiochuck and Particle Entertainment. This is the truth about Natalie. When a bag containing less than 1 gram of meth was found on the passenger seat of her car, one immediate and prevailing theory was that Natalie had likely overdosed, as there were no clear signs of any physical trauma. But her toxicology results coming back negative for meth and a myriad of other drugs kind of turned that theory upside down. Both the toxicology and autopsy reports explicitly stated that no drugs were detected. I've read them both. But also in Natalee's case file, I found a second copy of the toxicology report with handwritten notes on it, though I don't know for sure whose handwriting the notes are in.

These notes suggested that the meth found in the car might have been contaminated with fentanyl and referenced the detection of trace amounts of meth, fentanyl, Benadryl, and lidocaine, commonly used to cut drugs. However, it remains unclear whether these were theories or conclusions based on additional testing, as none of these were found in Natalie's system according to the documents I have seen. For clarification on exactly how these toxicology tests are conducted, I went back to Dr. Whedon, the forensic pathologist I spoke to previously. I asked him specifically about false negatives. Meaning Natalie could have had drugs in her system that for whatever reason didn't show up. Here's the thing. According to Dr. Whedon, the testing methods used for Natalie's tox screens were, by all standards, already comprehensive. They're called GC-MS, or gas chromatography mass spectrometry, and LC-MS, or liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.

I should tell you that that is the primary way most forensic toxicology is done in this country now. These are very good methods. Very good methods.

So then how could Natalie have overdosed and died from meth and it not show up using these advanced testing methods? How does it all really work?

It's generally a process of chemical analysis, and they can discover a large number of organic toxins in the body.

Now, I'm not trying to take us all back to science class here, but I think it is really important for us all to understand exactly how these tests work.

The GC, gas chromatography, is a way of separating molecules. So if you take a piece of paper and you put an ink in it, and then at the one edge of the paper you put it in alcohol, That alcohol will diffuse through the paper, and as it gets to the ink, it'll separate the ink into different colors, right? Paper chromatography. You've seen that. That is liquid chromatography. Here is gas chromatography. So it separates the molecules. Mass spec means you're separating the molecules by weight. And so now they're in different compounds. Are separated when they go in the mass spectrometer, which weighs the compound, and it weighs it for the number of ions.

And it does say, uh, negative, uh, with the liquid chromatography, negative for cocaine metabolites, certain barbiturates, certain cannabinoids, um, negative for all that.

Well, certainly it would include fentanyl and methamphetamine. Those are so common, they make sure that their instrumental analysis We'll test for it.

Investigator Boswell also told me that there was no fentanyl found in the meth recovered from her car. I mean, obviously it was tested. It was meth. Nothing else in it? It came up in testing in the sample. No fentanyl, no nothing. No. So if not from an overdose, how did Natalie die? This got me thinking about the meth that was found in the car. Who says it was hers at all? Could it have been left behind by someone else or even planted by someone? And though the contents of the bag were tested, there were no fingerprints recovered from the bag itself. I'm not even convinced that a real attempt to find prints on the bag was made. Strangely, Boswell didn't have much of an answer for me either. Were there fingerprints taken from the baggie that it was in, or attempt—

was there an attempt made for that?

I know that we sent it to the crime lab. To make that attempt. I don't know what the result of that was. Okay. I mean, I don't know because we didn't get anything back from them indicating that they were able to get any fingerprints off of it. Huh. But you never heard one way or the other? No. That could be important. It could be. I'm not saying they didn't do it. I'm just saying that, yes, we collected it with the purpose of attempting to get fingerprints off of it. Seems like something worth pursuing.

So how do we know who handled it? And that rolled-up dollar bill that was laying just under Natalee's car seat? That was apparently not able to be tested due to the bill being saturated with fluids brought on by decomposition and insect matter and feces. So at this point, there's nothing that tells me unequivocally that the bill or drugs were Natalee's or that she used meth that night. To complicate things further, In the case file are several statements from people who attended the Fourth of July party describing Natalee as seemingly under the influence of something when she arrived. I spoke again with Jennifer Peterson, the first person who told me about Natalee.

She got there and she appeared slurry, is how it was described. And this is a direct conversation that I've had with Steven one-on-one in person.

Jennifer is referring to Stephen Ford, the ex-boyfriend who invited Natalee to his family's lake house that night. Several people described her as being slurry with her words, and while there are any number of reasons for it, most would assume alcohol or drugs.

All of them said that. All of them said that. All the testimony between him, his brother, and his mother. Those were the only three that had statements given to law enforcement. When I talked to him, I met him at a restaurant, sat at the bar, and, you know, I'm squaring him up, basically. I'm looking like, "Do you know something?" You know, he was like, "Natalee has never been one to do drugs because she saw so many people around her doing drugs, including family members. She'd never wanted to be that." He said, now, she did smoke pot. It helped level her out, so to speak. And she hardly ever drank. So he was like, I knew that it had to be something else. This wasn't meth. It wasn't cocaine. It's not an uppers that she was on. This was something that, like, spaced her out.

I'm told Natalee stopped by her house before heading to the party and smoked pot. So maybe it's as simple as that. Though the tox report does not indicate that she had pot in her system when she died either. I don't know what to make of that yet. Aside from slurring her words, there were other things Stephen noticed about Natalee's overall demeanor that night, things that stood out.

She was off. Something was off.

After learning that Natalie was described as being "under the influence" by people at the Fourth of July party, I reached out to her ex-boyfriend, Steven. He was polite, said he wanted to help. He was willing to speak with me, although due to some personal issues he was dealing with at the time, I could never actually get a proper interview scheduled. So, this audio is from when Steven was interviewed at the Heard County Sheriff's Office.

Okay, and it's, um, it's Stephen Ford with a P. Yes, sir. Uh, how long— when did you meet Natalie?

Stephen gives investigators some basic information about how he had invited Natalie to his family's lake house. He said he didn't invite her kids because he just didn't feel it was a good environment for children as everyone was going to be drinking, nothing more. Though I suspect it was more that he wanted to rekindle their romance. When she arrived around 6:30 PM or so, he says something immediately felt off about Natalee. She wasn't quite herself.

I didn't know if maybe she was dealing with something, something was bothering her. She was just kind of spacey. All I know is that when she got there, she walked around, she nursed a beer for like an hour, walked around, and I knew something was kind of off. She never took her sunglasses off, so I, you know, I couldn't like look into her eyes and see if they were bloodshot.

Then Stephen begins to reveal more about Natalee's actions and demeanor that night. Though she was always a picky eater, it struck him as odd that she had no appetite.

We finished up a cornhole game. It was maybe an hour or so, and then we went inside and ate.

I was like, come on, let's go eat.

We had a bunch of food. Anyway, she had 5 little shrimp on a plate. She wouldn't eat them. So I ate, and then I ate her shrimp. And then after that, we just kind of milled around, and we went to shoot fireworks. I mean, it was— she was off. Something was off. Somebody kept texting her while we were there. She was sitting on my knee right here. Somebody was texting her, and you know how somebody will hold their phone off to the side where you can't— and I wasn't trying to look. I just noticed that she was texting somebody. I mean, it kept going ting, ting, ting. And this is while the fireworks were going off. I wasn't trying to pry, right? I tried to respect her space, her privacy. Because after that, like, her tone kind of changed. Like, she kind of got distant from me. She walked out to the end of the peninsula. She was just looking around, you know, like she was in deep thought.

I didn't really think nothing of it. Stephen said that Natalie appeared distracted, even sitting by herself at the edge of the lake, isolating herself from others at times. What was troubling her? Natalee's phone blowing up is the key takeaway here. Her mood appeared to change. Who is she texting? And why was she making a concerted effort to keep Steven or anyone else from seeing her phone? A phone that was never found by police. After fireworks, Steven tells investigators that he went and laid down. It'd been a long day of eating and drinking, hornhole and boat rides, and he thought Natalee would come to bed with him when she was ready.

I eventually went and laid down, fell asleep, and I guess she walked around and talked to people for a little while, you know. Then I remember, I guess before she left, she had come down there and kissed me on the cheek. I thought she was spending the night, that she was going to stay. So when I found out she left, it was, you know, I was disappointed because I thought that maybe, you know, Who knows, maybe she got her act together and we could, you know, hang out.

After Steven went to lay down, Natalee milled around for another hour or so, talking to his mother, Cindy Tucker, while waiting out a storm that had blown through. At about 10:45 PM or so, Central Time, she left, saying she had somewhere she needed to be in the morning. Cindy is who Natalee sent a text message to at 12:52 Eastern Time saying, "I made it. Thanks again." Cindy also told investigators that Natalie acted strange in the first part of the evening.

Um, but when she showed up, I thought she was under the influence of something. Her words was kind of slurry and her motions seemed to be a little slow. She just wasn't the same person that I knew a year ago. But to me, she didn't act like to me she was on meth.

I hate to make an assumption and it not be right. She acted like she was high on something. She was kind of slow motion. My mom noticed it. My sister noticed it too.

In a video Natalie herself posted to Facebook back in 2019, she briefly addressed her own drug use. I'm not addicted to drugs.

The only thing I've done was smoke green. Like, on a normal basis, as far as I've tried, I tried meth one time. I didn't even know what it was. I was 18 years old. Somebody's like, "Do you want to try this?" Okay, that scared me the crap out of me. I never touched it again.

It's hard to make out what was going on with Natalee that night. Was she under the influence of something? Was she honest about her drug habits? No one knows and likely never will. I've spent so much time already talking about whether or not Natalee could have used meth the night she disappeared, because it's really that important. It's what law enforcement alleged caused her death despite a negative toxicology report. It's the difference between an accidental overdose and foul play. We now know most of Natalee's movements before and during the party. We've examined the scene where she was found and investigated the state her body was in. But still, there are several big unknowns about how and why she ended up there in the first place. Early in the investigation, partial data records were pulled from Natalee's phone. They used the RTT, or round trip time, data and signal pings off local cell towers to give an approximation of where she might be located while awaiting detailed data from her cell provider, like text and call history. But even with RTT data, locating her proved difficult.

Initially, what we did was we got a ping from Verizon. And it gave us a general area of where the cell phone had pinged from. In this particular case, that's a big area. So one of the things we did initially was State Patrol was like, yeah, we'll fly for you. So we had them go up and just fly the area. And during that same time, you know, patrols are driving around the area. I'm driving around the area going down logging trails just to see, because you, I mean, you don't know where a person might be. It's almost like a needle in a haystack.

Natalie's phone data showed that she made it to within just a few miles of home that night, but then her cell bounced off numerous other cell towers in the area, some around 30 minutes away. Natalie appeared to be bouncing around from location to location in a crisscross pattern with no apparent reason for her path of travel. It's as if she was just driving around for several hours, or rather that her phone was moving around before stopping where she was found 3 months later.

Her phone pinged all over Heard County, back into the Corinth area on the 4th. When it went dark on the 5th, which is suspicious because it's not, you know, it's not near where her body was found exactly. That area where she was found in comparison to where she was living is way out of the way. It is not any route. That she should have taken to get home directly. It's way out of the way. It makes zero sense to me.

Natalie knew this area well. She grew up here, so she wasn't lost. She deliberately had to have gone out of her way to get to this path. I mean, in theory.

Or she made it back and something happened and her phone was taken. Or if she went— if she met someone that she trusted and they went back out to go do something, perhaps.

I posed the possibility of Natalee having some kind of location spoofing app on her phone, like a VPN, which is meant to intentionally hide your real location.

When you think about using a VPN, right, I mean, it changes your IP address. It makes you look like you're in Washington, D.C., or you're over here in Fort Lauderdale, or then you're over in Rhode Island. So it's essentially throwing off the, cell tower and the transmission between the phone and the cell tower. I personally, my theory is that she did make it back somewhere where she was parked. And the reason that I believe that to be true is because of the text to Cindy Tucker. It is in her style of typing. If you kind of compare different typing styles that she's done in text messages, there is an email draft saved in her Gmail, and it was at 1:52 AM Eastern time, and it said, "Hope you had a great Fourth." That draft was never sent, and that was a big red flag to me. It proved, in my opinion, that she was stationary and that she was still alive.

So, now we can assume that Natalee was alive until at least 1:52 AM Eastern time because she had typed an email but never sent it. This cell phone data moving around from tower to tower becomes even more strange when remembering that her cell phone was never found. One theory proposed by the district attorney was that perhaps she simply lost it. Well, yeah, maybe, but did she also lose her sandals, sunglasses and the belt she was wearing in the middle of the night, because those items weren't recovered either. There aren't many ways that a phone can truly "go dark." The battery could die, you could lose it, or it could be broken, whether accidentally or intentionally. Natalee was never without her phone, so her losing it is a long shot, especially since she was theoretically in her car the entire time that night. The battery wouldn't likely have died because, when she was found, she was actually sitting on a charging cable plugged into her car. One would think that during the hour-and-a-half drive home, her phone would have been plugged in. Most people do that when using apps like Google Maps, which we know she used on the way to the party.

We know that from her phone data. If she lost her phone somehow, her battery likely wouldn't have died so soon afterwards. She had an iPhone, and the battery lasts a long time when idle, which it would have been. So what if the phone was stolen, taken, or intentionally broken then? That could mean that she was with someone else at some point. Was Natalee really alone that night? Also, if Natalee really did pull off the main road into this turnout to use fentanyl-laced meth, as has been alleged, doesn't that still constitute a crime? Would the person who gave or sold it to her not be liable for her death? These perplexing circumstances lead me to a theory that's gained a lot of traction. Gained traction over the past several years. It goes against the sternly defended theory that law enforcement believes, that Natalee's hot pink car was stationary for over 3 months just off a busy road and no one saw it. Because if by some chance it wasn't, then there is an entire piece of this story missing, opening a Pandora's box of other questions. I asked her mother Elaine if she felt that the car was there for the entire 3 months.

No, I don't think her car was there. I know her car wasn't there the entire time. That car was clean as what you could pull out of a showcase, you know. It was that clean. I'm not saying it wasn't there maybe a month or 3 weeks before, but evidently it wasn't there September 26th because they looked at the land, you know. They went right there at the land and it wasn't there.

According to supplemental reports in Natalee's case file, it was actually on September 11th, 2020, when Investigator Boswell and fellow Heard County Corporal Nick Holman searched the area where Natalee's car would be found just days later. They didn't see the car.

I remember that day, and I was in that area. In fact, the little access cut-through where the power lines go through, where you go to where Natalie was located, I actually had pulled up in that spot. The grass and everything was grown up, and you're talking September timeframe. So, I mean, you think about how it looks now, 3 months later, it's completely grown. And so I didn't drive up in that area. And at the time, I just didn't even think about it because I wasn't thinking somebody would pull off into an area like that. I'm looking more somebody being on a roadway or being on a dirt road, which we have a lot of here in Heard County. So I went down every driveway, I went down every dirt road to look for that pink car, just like everybody else had been doing for the last couple months. We just didn't see it.

I mean, you can't not spot a hot pink car if you're actually looking comprehensively, one would think.

And so maybe they missed it, but could everyone else traveling in this part of the county have simply missed this hot pink car as well? One major point of contention from the start between many locals and law enforcement in Heard County was Natalee's car. In particular, whether it was parked at the location where it was discovered for the entire 93 days she was missing. Here's Jennifer.

We've had people that have come out from behind the scenes that live on that road. They have stated they drive that road every day. It's a very well-traveled road. Most of the people that are driving up and down that road, a majority of them are in trucks. There are, like, logging trucks, like, bigger, you know, a step above, like, your normal truck. I mean, we've heard accounts of, "Yeah, like, my kids were riding four-wheelers on that exact spot. There was no car there a week before." There were people out there coon hunting. They were in that exact circular-ish cutout of where Natalee's car was. It's— weeds or not, you would have seen it.

Hot pink stands out against everything. So, even if there were some weeds or brush growing up around the car, any visible part of the car would stick out like a sore thumb against the green foliage. And that's if you're not really looking for it, you just happen upon it. But aside from law enforcement, there were dozens of people looking specifically for Natalee's car nearly every day. People who all say the same thing.

We just rode and rode and rode, looking at all them, the back roads. And we were riding slow and looking in the woods, and we never saw anything. We rode that road how many times would have seen that car if it was there? I do not believe it was there. You could clearly see that pink car from the main road. If it would have been there the whole time, somebody would have seen it. I think that whenever Natalie went missing, that they had her in her car, and I believe that that car was kept somewhere out of the weather.

That car was not there. When they pulled that car out of the woods, that car was cleaner than my car that I drive on the highway every day. They'll never convince me that car was there. These are just a few of the dozens of people who were out searching for Natalee and her car daily for months. They all mentioned the cleanliness of the car as unusual, and there is a popular theory among locals that it was possibly housed somewhere else or covered for at least part of the time Natalee was missing. And while I wouldn't personally say Natalee's car was showroom clean—it wasn't—I would expect it to be dirtier than it appeared. Could her car really have been moved there several days or even weeks before being found? If so, that's a really big deal. When I asked investigator Boswell about this theory of the car being moved into place shortly before it was found, he seemed almost annoyed at the idea.

You know, that car was there the whole time. She was in the car the whole time. I know that. I mean, when I looked down that area, because you could see that there had been an opening there at one time, right? But there was no tire marks, no tracks, and it was grown up.

The weeds were grown up. That leads me to something else that stands out as odd. The position in which the car was parked. If Natalee had parked there under her own free will, she wouldn't have been able to get out of the driver's side door. It was butted flush up against brush, briars, and trees. And when looking through the file photos, I noticed that while the passenger side door is closed, it's not closed tight. You can see a small gap, meaning the door wasn't latched all the way. So was someone else in the car that night? And again, the trunk was popped open slightly too. So if Natalee needed to get something out of the trunk, why would she have parked so close to the brush that it would force her to climb in and out of the passenger side door. It doesn't make sense. And one more strange observation, the lack of animal activity in or around the car.

It's subjective, I will say, but like trunk popped open, decaying body. You've got raccoons, possums, coyotes, vultures, buzzards. You've got foxes. It's dense woods out there. Why is there nothing on the hood of the car, on the top of the, the car, that— no bird droppings, no animal poop, no claw marks?

While not conclusive by any means, this is a good point. Even though the car was closed, I would expect to see evidence of some kind of scavengers making attempts to get inside the car. The scent of a decaying body should attract more than just flies and beetles. With the trunk open, one would think that at least one animal over a 3-month period would attempt to make their way inside the trunk and start scratching around, if only to inspect before giving up, as the rear seats block access into the rest of the car. But there was no sign of this.

You can drive in a rural remote area and see buzzards swarming, and you know it's probably like a dead deer or something is dead out there. There. None of that happened. But the point that I want to make with this is you had a Heard County corporal that lived right across the street that had a clear view right into that easement from his driveway. At no point in those 93 days do you ever step outside to go check your mail, hear something, see something, smell something.

You've heard previously that Heard County Corporal Nick Holman assisted Lieutenant Boswell on a search of this area on September 11th, 2020. It might be hard to explain this in a way that makes sense without a visual aid, but basically, at the time, Holman lived catty-corner to where the car was found just 3 weeks after the search of this area was conducted. I wanted to see how this car could have been missed and what this location looked like for myself, as opposed to relying on the dozens of photos and maps I've seen. The only way to do that was to go there myself. I met with Elaine, Jennifer, and two other advocates for Natalie, Jen, and Becky. We piled in my car and they took me all over Heard County to see relevant sites from that night. The first place we went was to the location her car was found. As we pulled off Roosterville Road onto the small access path, I was surprised by the condition of the path leading to Natalie's car.

This is not what I thought it was going to be. So like, this is almost four-wheel drive. Yeah, and almost— I don't know, I guess it's That's not what I was expecting. This little road, even going the path going back in there, I just thought it was more like flat.

It's not for a car to go back through there.

Yeah, I mean, you certainly obviously can get a car back in there, but being a woman alone at night, it's just like it would be so pitch black.

Yeah, there's no street light.

The path leading back to Natalie's car, while only about 150 feet or so long, was covered with grass and at places there were weeds almost up to my knees. At night, even with headlights, it would have been a little dicey driving back here in a small Chevy Cavalier. I parked just off the main road and it took less than a minute to walk to where the small forested area opened into a circular clearing. Just to the left is where Natalee was found. The 5 of us delicately chattered about various aspects of the case as to not upset Elaine. And though we all tried our best to downplay the emotional gravity housed in this nondescript tract of dirt and weeds, it was there and it was heavy. This was the exact location that Natalee may have taken her final breath. Elaine held strong for a while, but eventually it all became too much for her and she was overcome with emotion.

I know this is really difficult to be here and to talk about this stuff, Elaine. I just want you to know that the whole purpose of this is to find answers and find out what happened to your baby. I know. If it gets too much, you tell me. We'll take a break. I know.

Whatever we need to do.

In the short time I've known Elaine, she's come across as strong and handled the emotional complexity of discussing her daughter's death well. When you're in a continual search for answers like she is, you are forced to talk about and relive traumatic memories over and over, making it difficult difficult to move forward, but seeing her break down reminded us all that she's simply a mother who's lost her baby. I stopped the conversation and just gave her a long hug until she was ready to continue. After comforting Elaine, we all began to dissect different aspects of the case when Becky noticed something. Oh, wait a minute.

So we're standing here and I just saw that white truck, all of that. Yeah, and nobody saw it all the way down here, right? I've never stood here before just to see, but I like to see that there's some confirmation here. I can see the cars passing. They should be able to see us standing here. I'm, I'm 5 foot nothing.

It was when a trucker went down the road. I, I could see up in their truck.

If we can see the drivers of passing cars, then they can see us. And you would think that they would be able to see a hot pink car. When the man that found Natalie's car while bush hogging stumbled upon it, He had already done several passes in the clearing. Initially, he says he thought it was a hunter parked there. I reached out to him several times with no response.

When he spotted the car, he thought it was a hunter. Who is gonna hunt in a hot pink Cavalier?

Well, that and why would a hunter be parked with— Yeah.

You know, that just doesn't make sense. That wouldn't make sense in any circumstance, you know, to pull up right against all this Because how are you getting out? Standing in the spot where Natalee's car was parked up against the tree and brush line, something else becomes apparent to us all. Why would Natalee, or anyone for that matter, have parked in this spot? You have to remember, under the influence of something or not, this was an attractive young woman, alone, in the middle of the night, in a very dark wooded area. And Natalee had recently purchased 19 acres of land, located just a few minutes away from the spot we were standing in. Why not just pull over there, on your land? Why is this location, one she visited several times that night, one just feet away from a Heard County police officer's home, so important? Something definitely felt wrong with the theory that Natalee just OD'd. I began retracing what I'd learned so far. Looking for anything that stood out as suspect. For me, the big question became, when did things begin to go wrong that night? Natalie's ex, Steven, had mentioned that while at the party, she seemed under the influence of something.

He also said that her phone kept blowing up and that she was constantly checking it and would tilt the phone away from him when she did. So why did she seem so distracted? Who was she talking to? When police finally received Natalee's full cell phone records from Verizon, they pored through every text and email, every private message sent or received through her social media accounts, and scoured her web history. They wanted to know who she'd communicated with in the days leading up to her disappearance. And what they found from there shocked most people who knew Natalee, and it became clear that she did, in fact, have secrets.

She would go up to the altar crying. She was feeling guilty for the things that she was in, but she wanted to get out of it.

We want to paint Natalie as this, you know, angel, sweet, struggling mother, two kids, doing what she had to do. But then when you look at what she was doing and her involvement acts and her choices, it's not all angelic.

Episode 4 will be available next week. New episodes drop weekly, but you can listen to the entire series right now ad-free in the Crime Junkie Fan Club. Use code TRUTH for 50% off your first month at the link in the show notes. The Truth About Natalee is an Audiochuck original produced by Particle Entertainment. I wrote and produced the series. Executive producer is Ashley Flowers. Additional research provided by Community Advocates for Natalee Jones. Original music written and performed by Jackson Epley. And a special thanks to Elaine Gordon and her family. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available at the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233. You can find me on social media @SeanKipeOfficial or at SeanKipe.com, and you can email me any information about this case to info@SeanKipe.com. Don't forget to rate and review the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Casts. And as always, thanks for listening.