Make More Pie
Murder Journal: Munchausen by Proxy
Hey, Nancy Rowan here. So sometimes people will ask, where do you get ideas for stories? I'd say one place that I've gotten ideas for stories is when I read a very, very small item, someplace else. For instance, I saw a small item in Bon Appetit magazine a long time ago about how you know when there's a forest fire and then mushrooms are going to grow and that kind of stuck with me and then there were these amazingly gigantic forest fires in Alaska and I thought, you know what? Next year there's going to be a bumper crop of morels. So I pre-sold that story and then went up and hung out with the mushroom hunters and wrote that for Los Angeles Times magazine. That was actually a super fun story. You could just see something that just also doesn't make sense. I would say the bulk of articles that I've walked into that are about murder are usually like that. There's a reason for this. So if you work at a daily paper and there is a body found, you have a deadline pretty much like the next day to explain what happened where you can't really answer why, not in that short amount of time. Now, you could possibly commit yourself to doing that story, but you're on staff at a paper and there's 14 other murders maybe in the next couple of weeks or couple of months. So, you kind of report the news and then you go on. As a freelancer, it has its perks that you can have time. I did this with my book to the bridge. I read an article about a woman dropping her kids in the river in Portland and then the story sort of disappeared and I was like, wait a second, wait, what? Why? Why has nothing been answered? So the story I'm going to talk about today was really curious. It was a very short item in the metro section of the Oregonian and let me give a little backstory of what happened. At the time, this was in 2007 at that time, my husband had a coffee business and used to sell coffee at a farmer's market on the weekends and when there wasn't staff, I would stand there and sell cups of coffee. And I was there on a, I believe it was a Saturday and a woman came up with a young girl maybe in her young teens in a super complicated wheelchair. You know, a lot of wires going to the girl to keep her sort of steady and the mom was super sweet. We're having a really nice chat. The girl was not verbal and I was explaining to her, you know, if you ever want to bring her by the shop, my husband has the coffee roast to write there, she could watch it if that was fun and the mom gave me this look like, yeah, maybe it's sort of complicated to get her, you know, out of the house and understand we had a cup of coffee and that was that. And I went home that day, so about an hour later, I happened to look at the paper and there was an article about a different mother who lived right over the border in Vancouver, Washington. Her name was Lori Wrecked and the article basically said, you know, this poor woman, Lori Wrecked, she'd been a sickle mother of a child who was, you know, medically compromised. She had cerebral palsy and other things and things just got so hard, like it was really hard because Lori herself had fibromyalgia and she just couldn't take it and she apparently there was a murder so it's I, she killed her daughter by overdosing her with pills and then killed herself, the bodies had been found and I was like, wait, what? And the article, at least in my reading was a little, it was a little like hearts and flowers like, wow, look at this tragedy story, but hey, you know, these things happen when people are overwrought and I thought, wow, maybe or no, I just met a woman who certainly has a very compromised child and she was cheerful, at least when I saw her, I thought this doesn't make any sounds at all. So I decided to look into the story. I was writing a lot for the independent paper up there, the all weekly called Willamette Week and I contacted the editor at Chiefy said, yeah, look into it and I really, really quickly found out that this mom might have been faking certain things in her daughter. Now I didn't know completely, it's hard to know because you're meeting a lot of different people and people are like, oh, yeah, oh, you know, like at the school or friends or at their synagogue, like, you know, we just, we just really wanted to, you know, take care of her because of all these hard things that were going on. Well, it took me very little time and I will say a little bit, I could kind of fault the Oregonian here for not like spending seven minutes googling, that this woman, Lori wrecked years before when she was a student at a, a state university in New York had, had said that she had been the victim of a hate crime because people had gone and spray painted SWAT stickers, SWAT stickers on her dorm room door and in the hallway and, oh, well, as it turned out, there were security cameras and she was caught doing it herself. That's a federal crime, apparently, when you're doing it at a state college, so she had a bit of a record there, but then she sort of disappeared. Anyway, I started talking to a lot of people and then it's really funny, people want to be good, you know, they want to take, they want to believe one of the reasons is because if you're not a liar yourself, if you're not trying to hoodwink people, you don't expect people to hoodwink you, right? And also people want to be good, they want to take care and this girl, Rebecca, who was 14, who was Lori's daughter, biological daughter, was just apparently a really darling and sweet girl who, you know, was medically compromised in all these ways. Well, I dug and I dug and I dug and I dug and, yeah, Rebecca was not medically compromised. She became somewhat compromised by what her mother did to her in a syndrome called Munkhausen and my proxy syndrome, which is when caretakers, usually women, either fabricate or create usually medical emergencies or other emergencies in others in order to kind of garner an attention and sympathy for themselves. Lori had done this, I wrote a story about it, that story is here, that it did run in Willamette Week, I added a few things here that came out after the story had been published. Well, one of the reasons, excuse me, I wanted to talk a little bit about it was because I am going to be doing a bit of a series on mother to kill her children and also people who sort of try to get things over on others and I want to talk about the power that fabricators have to charm you because it makes you feel good about yourself to be helpful to them. And just to have you believe, now it's very hard when you've been, let's say, when you've been in a relationship where you were taken advantage of or maybe someone that you trusted stole something from you, people feel like fools and they don't want to. They don't really admit what happened, they just rather like go away, this happens a lot with like Ponzi schemes or when people are ripped off, they just feel like it's their own fault. It's one of the reasons, unfortunately, that elders are preyed on because there is an entire industry of people that know how to prey on the elderly and maybe we'll talk a little more about that. I've certainly seen it in my own family where they call them and they either butter them up because they know these people are lonely or they're scared or maybe they have excessive not excessive income, but like maybe some extra income and maybe the children are not around, grown children and they just think that they can take care of things themselves because they always have and then they have, they get hoodwanked, they get robbed and they just feel so bad. Well, with Munkism by Proxie, there's a bit of a twist on it, people don't want to admit that they were fooled because they don't want to believe that they themselves are filled but then they have to reverse engineer everything that happened, they have to believe that the person they thought was their friend was actually using them. They have to believe that the child they loved and cared for was actually, had really been taken advantage of by her parent all these years and I'm going to give you an example. So one thing that Lori rekt told people is that when her daughter Rebecca was born she needed emergency, open heart surgery. I mean, this is a horrible thing for an infant, a newborn to have to undergo and I heard these story from several people. I also found out that just about everything else had been fraudulent in terms of what had happened to Rebecca and of course we know then her mother killed her and then killed herself. I found photos of Rebecca as an infant and she has no scarring whatsoever on her chest. I talked to a surgeon, I was like, you know, is there any way that you do surgery in another way for open heart surgery on an infant, it's like, no, this is, you know, you go through the chest and you do that. Well, I did, you know, posthumously after Lori and Rebecca were dead, I spoke with one of Lori's big champions and I said, you know, that story wasn't true, Rebecca never did have open heart surgery and she looked at me with such contempt and she's like, that's because they went through the back and did it. This is not true, but she couldn't, she couldn't disconfirm her own story for whatever her reasons were. Anyway, it's a tragic story of a mother killing her child, but I will, I'm going to finish this little kind of, I guess, addendum to reporting the story with, I don't know if it's hopeful or not, but about six months after the story ran, I had a dream and Rebecca came to me in the dream. Now, I want to preface this by saying Rebecca, by all accounts, loved her mother very much, might be hard to, hard to imagine, but it's not if this is, you know, people love their mothers and she was so reliant on her mother and her mother made sure she was reliant on her. Anyway, I had a dream and Rebecca came to me and she said that it was okay, that she was okay with what had happened and I thought, well, okay, anyway, the story's here, if you want to read a little more about it. Thanks.