Colton Harris-Moore: The Barefoot Bandit's Cross-Country Spree of Hacking, Theft, and Flight

We are exploring a story that truly feels like a Netflix plotline: the bizarre and incredible journey of Colton Harris-Moore, a lanky teenager who turned a simple escape into a legendary crime spree. This is the story of the fugitive, often called the "Barefoot Bandit," who captivated the nation by being relentlessly one step ahead of the law.

• The Escape Artist: This lanky teen broke out of a halfway house in his small island town and went on the run, but he wasn't hitchhiking—he was teaching himself new criminal skills every day.

• A Self-Taught Spree: Colton Harris-Moore had an astounding ability to acquire complex skills, seemingly from sheer desire and YouTube tutorials. He stole cars, broke into homes, and even began hacking computers. His ultimate flex? Teaching himself to fly planes and then stealing them to continue his getaway.

• The Scale of the Crime: His crime wave spanned multiple states and included grand theft, burglary, and multiple instances of dangerous aviation. We detail the full scope of his journey and how he became a legend in the world of high-profile fugitives.

• The Crossover: This week, we are also joined by Patia and Hannah from The Knife podcast for a special crossover episode. After we tell the story of the fugitive, they will take over with their own compelling case.

Join us as we detail the facts of this unbelievable case, the incredible resourcefulness of this young criminal, and the bizarre set of circumstances that led the Barefoot Bandit to escape his troubled past by soaring into the sky.

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Hey guys, and welcome to the Moms and Mysteries podcast, a True Crime podcast featuring myself, Mandy, and my dear friend Melissa. Hi, Melissa. How are you? I'm doing so great this week. How are you? I'm doing great as well, Mandy. I'm super excited for what we're talking about today. I am as well. So we recently got to chat with Peisha and Hannah from the Knife, which if you have not heard that yet, it's an amazing True Crime podcast and we think our listeners are really going to love them.

And so we decided to do a little crossover and what we came up with is this. We each brought a story to the table and putting the full episode on our feed, and they're putting it on theirs as well. Yeah, so you'll hear our story first in our episode, and then Peisha and Hannah will take it from there.

And you can find more info about their podcast than knife in our show notes. And after you listen, be sure to follow and subscribe to their show so that you don't miss an episode. So this [00:01:00] week's story feels a little like a movie. Like if we told you this was a Netflix plot line, you'd probably believe us, but you'd still be like, well.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure. So we're talking about this lanky teenager from a small island town who escapes from a halfway house and goes on the run, but not just any run. This kid steals cars. He breaks into homes, he hacks computers. He flies actual airplanes that he taught himself how to fly. And he learned all of this on YouTube, and he does it all.

This part is unfortunate barefoot. Have you guys, Melissa hates that. I hate that part. Um, I don't care how good his feet are, anybody's feet, I don't wanna see them. But have you guys heard of Colton Harris Moore, the Barefoot Bandit? I have not, oh, this is such a treat. I'm so excited to, um, be bringing this to you.

What a big day for us. So Colton Harris Moore, he is six foot five, 200 pounds by the time he reaches his [00:02:00] full internet legend status. So he is someone that lives in the woods. He's slipped through police traps. He somehow captured the imagination of thousands of people who were rooting for him online.

Think like Luigi. Uh, that we just had going through the news, like, man, yes. Like that kind of a hype though, when people following his story, um, like when Facebook was still kind of early days and stuff, but as wild and as me, worthy as his case is, it's also sad and messy because. He wasn't some kind of anti-hero or anything.

He was just a teenager who has been failed by really every system in his life. Yeah. So Colton was born in 1991 and he grew up in Camino Island, Washington. So this is a very tight knit island with only about 1500 residents. So you're thinking like it's in Washington, woodsy quiet. This is the kind of place that you really want to escape to or get away to, not the kind of place that you're usually running away from.

As we said, Colton didn't really have [00:03:00] the peaceful small town life that you know, you would expect a child growing up in this area to have. His dad left when he was just around two or three years old and was in and out of his life until he finally disappeared for good, and his mom struggled with addiction and mental health issues.

She reportedly would let Colton just kind of come and go as he pleased. And that was even during the height of his crime spree. You know, she was. Still allowing him, you know, free access to her home. Yeah. She would straight up be like, uh, my son was hungry and he came over and What do you want me to do?

Not feed them when the police are like, you're Aidan and abetting, you know, a criminal. She's like, right, my son's hungry. I am gonna feed him. So she did not, she was not to be messed with in this entire story. No. So by the time Colton was seven, he had already been arrested seven years old, which is heartbreaking.

And also like. What happened? Right? I'm sure that's probably what everyone's thinking. What would a 7-year-old possibly do? [00:04:00] Well, he didn't hurt anyone, but he would sneak into vacation homes, literally looking for food and shelter though. So like you have this little kid that's breaking in, entering into vacation homes.

He's hungry and he wants a place to rest. So his behavior though, did escalate over time. Not necessarily because he was a bad person, but literally it was a means of survival for him. And eventually he did end up in a juvenile detention center and then a halfway house, and that's where things really took a sharp turn for him.

So it was just days before his 17th birthday. Colton escaped the halfway house, not in like a chaotic middle of the night, you know, running through in slow motion kind of thing, but more like a very carefully planned out route through the woods that he knew all of the woods, like he literally grew up there.

And in there he was someone who lived in the woods a lot. And from there he launched one of the most bizarre and infamous two year crime [00:05:00] sprees we have ever seen. He knows the woods, like I was saying, better than. Anyone. He would build a camp. He would stash his supplies. He'd even set out little hideouts near the houses that he was targeting, and police would like randomly stumble into his camps and think they're close to getting him.

But within hours he realizes they've seen it and he's off to a new place. One thing I read was like during this time he was in the woods. He was like. A mile away from his mom. Like he was in a very small area and they could not catch this kid at all. But it went further, not just breaking in, you know, stealing food and stuff.

Locals start noticing strange things like their credit cards are being used online to buy things like bear spray or computer hacking software or. GPS tools and of course porn. He wasn't just stealing random things. He was literally studying, researching, and upgrading his gear. In one particularly bold move, he broke [00:06:00] into a police station, disabled their alarm system, and was able to make out with a few things, and another time he broke into a fire station.

Here's where I say he's kind of pretty smart. Install an infrared camera. That way he could scan houses to make sure no one was in the house before he would break in. That way, you know, he's just going in getting what he needs and he's leaving smart for thinking of having like thermal imaging before you break into someone's home just to make sure they're not there.

I appreciate, I appreciate it, that effort very much. For his safety and the homeowner as well, but also not really smart to get one from a fire station. He did it just fine. I can only imagine how law enforcement felt like he's breaking into our facilities and we cannot catch him. It's gotta be embarrassing, but to use our equipment against us, basically, like to use, you know, like it's, it's all just completely bizarre.

To even think that a teenager like was responsible [00:07:00] for this whole thing. Yeah. Can I ask a question real quick? Sure. So you had mentioned like, okay, so he's using credit cards. I'm guessing that's 'cause he was breaking into people's homes and maybe like taking their wallet or something. And you had mentioned that he was also buying porn.

Did he have, like what was his connectivity as far as, did he have like a. Internet access. Did he have a phone? He had a laptop. Okay. Um, I don't remember if he had a phone, but he did have a laptop. Like as the story goes on, he literally will post pictures of himself on Facebook laying in the woods and everyone's trying to figure out where he is, where he is.

I mean, and you'll hear more about the credit card thing in a minute. It's probably my favorite part of the story. So eventually, uh, by the time he was, you know, in his teen years, he now has found a partner in crime for some of his. Crime adventures, and this was a friend of his named Harley. So the two of them started breaking into vacation homes together, and Harley later said that he was mostly just in it for the cash, but Colton was always looking for other things, [00:08:00] as Melissa was saying, laptops, credit cards, anything, any tool or anything that he could get his hands on that might help him stay one step ahead of the authorities.

They would even find keys to cars and they would go take these cars on Joy ride. So Grant. Theft auto. Now they're just all the crime stacking up. But in a weird twist of conscience or maybe chaos, they would sometimes return the car full of gas cleaned and park it back in the driveway. Can you imagine coming home and thinking, someone's messed with my car, but I have a full tank of gas, and they cleaned it.

I don't know that I would call the police. I'd be like, this was the, you know. The car angels, the car car visited me. I feel like if I'm one of these owners of a vacation home, this is like the lure of the island and I want him to break in. Right, right. I wanna be next. Yeah, right. No kidding. So it was around this time that residents started calling Colton Teen Houdini, which I feel like is very apt considering that they really could not find him and he would [00:09:00] appear and disappear and just continue to confuse law enforcement every step of the way.

So as words spread about this barefoot bandit, teen genius that was just slipping through the cracks and you know, was not able to be captured, that was how kind of this legend was born. And there were really early YouTube videos about it. Facebook fan groups started popping up. There were even people making and selling t-shirts with his name or you know, barefoot Bandit.

Like some funny, like it was just a big. Joke, but it really wasn't a joke. So that's where it's like very ironic. So the barefoot thing though, he was doing this all the time in the woods, everywhere. I don't know that it was necessarily, he didn't like shoes or he liked his feet or he had a thing with me, I don't know.

But it was very like obvious everywhere he went. 'cause they would see his footprints. One time he even pours I think flour somewhere like on the ground and walks through it so they could see it like he was leaving his calling card. Everywhere. And [00:10:00] unfortunately his calling card, his feet, I can't yuck. I know it's too much.

After all of the links that he went to. I know, I know it. But he really, he, the thing with him is he really does think he's smarter than everyone, and in some ways he is smarter than a lot of people. He, he has like a will, a determination, like he's doing this for himself and he hasn't had a lot, even education.

He really hasn't had a whole lot a hurting anyone. That's the other part about this. Yeah. Yes and no. You know, there's no victims, but there kind of are. If you think about it, if somebody broke into my house and. Just like that sense of security, you lose that sense of security. So in that sense, like, oh, well, I absolutely, yeah.

I mean, he's not physically like going out and looking for people to like assault her or anything. Right. So I feel like of course, of course this is still wrong and these are still crimes. Absolutely. I just mean he's not out, he's not, you know, physically hurting, harming people. Right. Totally. He's not out there like looking to like actually hurt people and you know.

Unless you have flower in a physical way, um, then he's gonna take it from you unless his [00:11:00] feet get all over your stuff. Yeah. Ugh, gross. Burn it down. So at one point, uh, police find one of his recent camps and they spotted something unusual. They found his dog, and so he very much loved this dog. The police decide we're gonna take the dog in, and they hoped that it would lure Colton in, and it did sort of, instead of turning himself in though, would you like to guess what happened?

Anyone. He stole the dog. Thank you. He broke in, stole the car dog. I mean, it was his dog. I don't know if it counts as stealing, but we don't know the original place that he got this dog true from, to be honest. So true. He stole someone's dog out of the, uh, out of there. This was kind of funny to me. They called his mom, who he had like a relationship with, but it was obviously very rocky.

She was like, let me get his dog. And they were like, absolutely not. This dog is part of evidence. She's like, what? It's not evidence. But come on. She would've been like, Hey Colton, here's some eggs and here's your dog. She was not gonna stop him, or, you know, not [00:12:00] give him his dog. So, and then there are the planes.

Colton was obsessed with aviation. He could actually identify aircraft by the sound of their engines as they went over him. He would sit by the air fields and watch them take off and land. He would steal credit cards and use them to buy flight manuals online. And if you're like. Wait a minute, why is he using credit cards?

How is this stuff getting to him? He doesn't have an address, right? Right. Good question. Good question. One time he stole a credit card from a restaurant, got the tracking number, had it sent to the restaurant. When he saw that the tracking number said delivered, he broken and got the book and got back out.

So. He needed the internet as part of this for sure. He taught himself everything. As I said, he has this manual, these books. He's reading them. He's watching thousands of hours on YouTube, which I can't remember how much was even on YouTube at the time. Um, he's doing everything he can to learn about flying literally.[00:13:00] 

Anything to become a pilot. He wasn't really interested in becoming a pilot at some point in his life. He was literally studying for the moment he could try it for real, which is a great way to, uh, great attitude to have towards flying an airplane. I mean, really, why, why do it later when you could do it now?

Not great, right? And, uh, lucky for Colton, he didn't have to wait very long. The opportunity came a lot sooner than he or anyone ever expected. Uh, in the midst of all these news reports about this kid. He stole his first airplane and promptly crashed it, but somehow YouTube flight school, he didn't survive and he got away.

He slipped away. The authorities actually didn't even suspect Colton was behind this plane theft and crashing because literally, why would you think that this kid. Barefoot Bandit. You wouldn't put that together and think, well, maybe he now has stolen an airplane. They actually assumed that the plane was stolen and crashed by a drug runner, um, who crashed the plane and took off.

But one little plane crash though [00:14:00] was not going to stop. Our friend Colton, he just really kept right going. From that point, he broke into six different airports just trying to find the right plane. I don't know how he was like, anyy, Mey, mighty mowing this or something. I mean he, I don't know how he was choosing.

He knew how to fly one, I guess based on videos based, and he was like looking for a very specific one. I guess he didn't learn to fly a lot of 'em, so it should have been millions of hours on YouTube and maybe he could have just had his pick of the litter. I wonder if it's like, you know, when you're learning how to drive a car or even when you're purchasing a new vehicle, like I know that I look at driving.

Smaller car differently than driving like a big thing. Sometimes I get freaked out if I think about like, could I drive a semi-truck? Like I couldn't do that. Maybe it was the same with the plane. Maybe he was like, I can't take a passenger. I can't take a 7 37. Right? Like I can't drive. He at least knew that much.

He had to find like a small enough plane that he thought he could, could handle. Right. Know your limits, you know? Yeah. I'm imagine these are like small, you have to know your limits. Planes not, they're like little cessnas and stuff. [00:15:00] Yeah. But wouldn't it be great if you did Right. Pretty wild, which there's so many of those little planes up there getting to the, the islands.

Right, exactly. So he really could just get them there. That's true. So over the course of this spree, he did find a few different airplanes that suited his fancy. Um, he actually stole several and crashed at least four of them, but somehow walked away unscathed every single time. Either he's like got nine lives or he's just not flying very high and is a very lucky person.

But by now. The internet was bought in. Everybody was in on this story. Everybody wanted to know more. He had thousands of Facebook friends, and as Melissa was saying, he's loving it. He loves the attention. He's posting pictures of himself just laying in the woods, just taunting the police and the authorities that are looking for him, enjoying the fact that people are literally writing.

Songs about him. They're using his mugshot and putting it on merch. They're calling him a modern day Robin Hood. Um, at one point, a veterinary clinic [00:16:00] employee in Raymond Washington found a hundred dollars bill and a handwritten note that read, I had some extra cash. Please use it for the animals. And it was signed.

Colton Harris Moore, AKA, the Barefoot Bandit. I don't know. He did seem like he was an animal person, so maybe it was him, but you know, sometimes I'm like, people do weird things. He had some extra cash. Strangers do weird things. No buddy, you stole that. You need the cash. It is very, uh, Robinhood, I guess too, have done that.

Yeah, it is. So some people are of course, rooting for him, but others are exhausted, especially the local police department. I can't imagine having to stand up there and say. We still can't find him, and they're like, his feet are on the windows. We still don't know where he is like that has to get old really quick.

But of course, Colton's actions weren't completely harmless. He did leave people afraid in their own homes. As I was saying before, he broke into government vehicles. He stole guns. Law enforcement across multiple states, spent countless hours and resources trying to find [00:17:00] him, and he would just keep moving.

He'd steal a car, drive it until it ran out of gas, and then ditch it and find another one. He actually started hopping islands by boat, avoiding capture again and again. Eventually though, he has an idea, he wants to get to The Bahamas, so he is going to drive across the US stealing cars, abandoning them as he.

You know, runs out of gas and then grabbing a new one. But finally in July of 2010, it all comes crashing down. Literally, Colton stole one plane. This one is in Indiana, and flew it all the way down to The Bahamas, which right there, how did you, how I wouldn't even know how, if I was up or down if I was flying a plane.

I wanna know how come no air traffic control picked this up and was like, why is this random plane not flying at all correctly? Um, going all the way from. Washington, no, Indiana. It, it's much better just Indiana. It [00:18:00] still, it's also like you hear that once you become a parent, you never sleep through the night again.

'cause you just worry about your kids. I mean, this mom is operating on another planet. Absolutely has to be. Can you imagine? Oh my gosh. So this time his flight, believe it or not, he crashed Lands. Once again, these are smaller planes. It's gotta be him running out of gas. I know at least a few times like.

Pretty low to the ground, but still I, Mandy knows I would die if I just fell out of a plane. All my bones would break. I would be a medical emergency, like I can barely survive the day and he's just getting out of crashes over and over again. But of course he's not done. He gets to The Bahamas, he's crashed now.

He's gonna get a boat. So he takes a boat and he leads the Bahamian authorities on a high speed, speed water chase before they finally catch up to him and are like. If you try to drive off, we're gonna shoot your boat. And so when he tries to do that, they shoot up his boat. He's alive, he's fine. But he was scared, obviously, at that point.

And [00:19:00] police were finally able to capture him. And just like that, the barefoot bandaid was grounded. Wow. Grounded. You're grounded. He needed to be grounded a few more times. He did. Starting at seven, he did, uh, the Bohemian authorities extradited him back to the US and once he was back in the US he faced over 30 charges.

They ranged from everything including burglary to aircraft theft, which apparently is its own separate crime. I did not, didn't know that. But he was facing multiple years of incarceration. And that is of course, unless he could get himself a great defense attorney, and you bet he did. So you might know this guy.

His name is John Henry Brown and. It is the same John Henry Brown, who once defended Ted Bundy. So in 2012, Colton pleaded guilty to multiple federal charges and he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. He went on to service time really without any incident, surprisingly, because you would think that the Barefoot Bandit would like barefoot Bandit his way right out of.

[00:20:00] Prison as his, you know, last act of just like complete deity. You know, he thought about it, but absolutely, he definitely thought about it. He definitely thought about it. Uh, but after his release, his legitimate release in 2016, Colton reportedly went to a halfway house and worked in construction and expressed interest in becoming an aviation mechanic, which definitely makes sense.

Might be a great career path for him. He definitely was persistent and he had. At least a little bit of knowledge already going into it. So maybe that would be a good thing for him. But now that the media circus has moved on, his story, of course lingers as one of the weirdest true crime rabbit holes that we've ever been down.

We actually, years ago, talked about this story, uh, for our Patreon listeners. It's been such a long time ago, they did a documentary about this. It's on Amazon Prime. It's not great, but, um, there's like 48 hours. I thought it was great. It's like a weirdly animated thing in part so many feet. [00:21:00] One time he's just sitting in the plane.

I re-watched it and just his foot is up there in the most odd way you could ever put your foot. But I'm like, we get it. He's barefoot. They just couldn't stop. I have a very hard time with the barefoot thing. I gotta be honest. It's too much. That's too, I mean, teenage boy bare feet like, ah, okay. Yeah, you, you really brought it too.

It's too much. Mm-hmm. That is way too much. But of course we know Colton wasn't actually violent unless you count the aggressiveness. He portrayed his feet. The amount of times I've seen this kid's feet is upsetting and unsettling, but of course it wasn't. Exactly harmless. He was failed by all the adults in his life, really by the system, and by the structures that were supposed to protect him.

And he learned to survive on his own. And somewhere along the way, survival turns into a spectacle. And thanks to internet hype and media fascination, that spectacle turns into legend, really. But behind all the headlines and memes is a boy who really never had a fair shot. Of course, you know. [00:22:00] There's a ripple effect of his actions and it stretches far.

It's in people's homes, it's in their communities, and in the lives of people who are still dealing with the consequences. I will say from that documentary, this is kind of peeling back what I just said, but there's a lady who, I guess Colton had ran through her yard and she took the. Footprints made like casings and tried to sell them on eBay and I wanna know if she sold them, but she was like standing up in the documentary with two feet and I was like, lady, this is too far.

We've gone way too far. So yeah. So that's really the story of Colton and his barefoot banded bandit. Badness, I guess. Wow. What a great story. And I'm from Washington State and I'd never heard of it. Really? Yeah, it's, I didn't know this one in real time. I will say I'm normally like pretty good on those things.

I didn't know this one in real time, but I've been fascinated by it ever since. Wow. It's so interesting. And you know, you're right, like he's breaking into people's home. He is causing some level of [00:23:00] damage and fear, but you can really also feel for him, like he was this kid that really never fit into.

Society and maybe didn't really have a chance. So then he was like, I'm just gonna make my own way and do whatever I want. And was clearly, you know, is clearly intelligent in, in some way. And he is resourceful. You cannot say that he's not resourceful. He paid attention and kind of. He was always one step ahead.

Obviously he knew what he was doing. I mean, and I don't, I genuinely don't believe that he was trying to like harm or scare anyone for sure. I think it was just him just trying to take care of himself and to get by. For sure. Yeah. It's like, I don't know what the job is, but there's a very specific job out there for Colton.

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Can you even imagine, and when you were saying Mandy earlier about the planes being stolen and how that's like a federal offense or whatever, it's so funny 'cause you know there is somebody in the FBI whose job is like plane recovery or something. We always run into that. We'll be like some FBI [00:24:00] agent in charge of art theft.

I'm like, really? But I mean, I guess it does make sense. So there's a job for Colton and there's a job for everyone, I guess. All right, so the story that we have today is the story of. Sally Chalen, I'm gonna start the story. In 2010, Sally, whose real name is Georgina by the way, but she goes by Sally and Richard Chalen had been married for 31 years.

They had two sons who were both grown both in their twenties in 2010. Sally was 56 years old and Richard was 61. They lived in Surrey, England, which is southwest of London. And about a year prior in 2009, Sally had actually moved out of their family home. Their youngest son, David, was living with Sally and their oldest son was living on his own.

So Richard was the only one living in the, the house that they, you know, had lived in for years and raised their sons in. And the reason for this was that they were gonna. Get [00:25:00] divorced, but they actually had, they, they were actually in the midst of reconciling, so on the morning of August 10th. 2010. 2010, Sally went over to their family home where Richard was living with the idea that they were gonna spend the day cleaning out the garage, getting ready to sell the house.

And one of the ideas they had was they were going to use some of this money from the house sale to go on a trip to Australia together, but before they started cleaning out the house. Uh, they wanted to make breakfast, so Sally actually left, went to the store to go buy bacon and eggs to make breakfast.

She would later say that she had the suspicion that Richard told her to go to the store to buy these ingredients, to try to get her out of the house. And she was suspicious about this. So when she got back, she checked his phone and it showed a phone call between Richard and this woman, Susan Wilke. [00:26:00] This was a person that Sally was already suspicious of, that she had Googled the day before.

And it turns out Richard had met this woman, Susan Wilkee, on a social networking website called Dinner Dates. And when Sally asked Richard about this, he responded with, don't question me. So Sally made breakfast. Richard sat down at the table to eat this breakfast, and when he did, Sally took a hammer from her purse and hit him over the head more than 20 times.

Until he was almost dead. She then stuffed a tea towel into his mouth to make sure he was dead. She wrapped his body in some old curtains and wrote a note and left the note on his body that read. I love you, Sally. And then she left. She went back to the house where she was living. The next morning she got up.

Uh, she drove her 23-year-old son David to work and then she left [00:27:00] Surrey and drove 75 miles south to Beachy head in East Sussex, England, which is on the southern coast and has these massive cliffs that overlook the ocean. It's beautiful from pictures I looked at online, but sadly, it's also a very common place for people to go, uh, and end their life by jumping off the cliffs.

And actually, in 2010, the Wall Street Journal listed it as one of the, among the top three most common suicide spots in the world. And if you go there, there are signs, um, with phone numbers. The phone number to the Samaritans, which is a charity aimed at providing emotional support to people, and they're available 24 7.

And the local community and the police are also aware of this, so they're sort of on the lookout for people that might be trying to do this. Reportedly, Sally called her cousin and confessed to killing Richard. And said she planned to jump from the cliffs, but the police were [00:28:00] called and it took three hours of them talking to her to convince her to come away from the ledge, and she was taken into custody and charged with the murder of Richard Chalen.

The police discovered his body around 1:00 PM on Sunday, which was the next day, and a postmortem exam that was conducted determined his cause of death to be severe, blunt trauma to the head. So Sally immediately admits to having killed Richard, and so she's taken into custody at that point, and this is August of 2010.

And so during her time in custody, she is, um, assessed by two different psychologists, forensic psychologist, and the first one of those he. We'll get into their her trial, but he said that he did not conclude that Sally had been suffering from any mental disorders or personality disorders. Then a second forensic [00:29:00] psychologist also assessed Sally and.

His conclusion was different. He said that he believed she was suffering from a depressive disorder. He also noted that Sally told him about sexual and physical abuse by Richard, that included that Richard would rape her as a form of punishment, and that she hoped that when he did this, it would sort of.

Make him happy and make him love her. And she's a woman in distress. So this trial takes place in June of 2011 and the trial takes place over seven days. Um, and during her trial, Sally is portrayed by the Crown as constantly checking Richard's phone and email being jealous and possessive. And having said at one point, if I can't have him, then no one can.

And the jury was also told that Sally had been stalking Richard online. Spying on him listening to his voicemails. It was really a, a picture of a. [00:30:00] Scorned love a woman who refused to move on from her failed marriage. And Sally's defense relied partially on something called diminished responsibility, which means yes, she's saying that she killed him, but her responsibility for killing him cannot be murder.

Because she was experiencing things in the marriage that were taking away her capacity to think clearly. So Sally's defense during her trial is, is saying. You know, is introducing this concept of diminished responsibility. They're basically asserting that although Sally broke the law by killing Richard, um, her mental capacity was impaired, and this ought to protect her from full criminal responsibility.

And the goal here is. That Sally doesn't end up with a murder conviction, but instead manslaughter because manslaughter carries a much lighter sentence and they felt it was appropriate [00:31:00] given what she experienced during her marriage to Richard. Unfortunately, Sally is convicted by a unanimous jury in June, 2011 after only 11 hours, and that they convict her of murder, so she appeals her conviction, but it was upheld.

The only thing that comes her way is that her sentence is reduced from a minimum of 22 years to a minimum of 19 years served, and the entire time that this is going on. Ever since Sally is charged at all, she has the support of her family and her and other people who are standing in solidarity with Sally as a victim of domestic abuse.

But you know, we've learned so much about domestic abuse since 2010 and have so much more language around. What that can really mean. And so as her legal team is preparing for another appeal, this whole other picture of Sally's marriage [00:32:00] begins to emerge through interviews with her attorney, she starts to sort of open up and we learn about like what was actually going on inside their marriage.

And you know, it goes all the way back to the beginning and actually. Sally was only 15 years old when they first met, and Richard was 22, you know? So she was still basically a child. She was a baby, yeah. Yeah. And there basic, there's accounts that, you know, he was controlling like pretty much right off the bat.

He would control like. How she acted and wanted to control sort of like who she talked to, and she was still in school, but she would stop by his apartment after school to clean. And cook for him. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You know, this was like, I think this was like 1970 or something. Um, so definitely different [00:33:00] times, but still pretty alarming.

And she got pregnant at 17 and ended up having a late term abortion. Her older brothers brought her to have this done and they then confronted Richard about this, you know, as like protective older brothers. And he supposedly said like, kind of like shrugged it off and said, uh, it could have been anybody's like, baby.

Oh gosh. She also told her attorney that around this time, like around like age 17 ish. She confronted Richard because she found out that he was still like sleeping with other women and he dragged her down the stairs and threw her out of the apartment. She said that she was basically afraid from then till the, throughout their whole relationship of like confronting him or pushing too hard in case he might react physically again, like that, they ended up getting married.

Her mom, Sally's mom, never liked him, didn't want them to get married, but people say like she just like really like. Seemed to love him and and always [00:34:00] hoped that things would get better. He was really into cars. He would end up going on to start a car dealership and was very successful and like. Like made pretty good money.

Their home, their family home in Surrey in 2010 was estimated to be worth about 1 million pounds. But you know, things didn't quite, you know, things didn't get better. Neighbors and friends would later say that he would often criticize her in public and in like in social settings, often commenting on her weight.

That she was, she did all the cooking, all the cleaning, took care of all the household stuff for them while he worked, so she was mostly a homemaker while the kids were little. But then when their youngest turned 13, she went and got an admin job. But then her husband Richard, then required her to use her salary that she got from her job to pay for all of the household expenses, and he kind of kept his money for himself and he would buy himself expensive cars and watches and go to Grand Prix [00:35:00] events.

Their youngest son, David, ever since his mom, you know, was arrested and charged. Become an advocate for his mother's release and he recently wrote a book called The Unthinkable, A Story of Control, violence, and My Mother, so, and he talks. A lot about what he observed of his parents growing up. You know, he talked about his dad being this sort of like, looming presence and he, he, he really, he watched as his dad would criticize his mother and come home and just criticize like the food that she cooked.

He said that beyond that, his dad was very controlling, like very controlling of things like the television. Even when he was gone all day at work, he didn't want. His mom or the boys watching TV because he said it would like diminish the life of the television. Oh my gosh. What? That's like taking, I don't, you know, you always hear about like dad things, you know, like they always want you to shut off the lights or they always want you to do this, but like not watching [00:36:00] TV because you're scared that it's gonna diminish the life of the TV is.

A new extreme of just dadism. Totally. Yeah. Totally different than like, shut the door, don't air condition the whole neighborhood. Right. I've heard that before. Classic dad. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it was just like this, like pattern of him being incredibly controlling and he also controlled who Sally could be friends with.

So one time she was like cooking in the kitchen. She was gonna host a new friend that she'd met. And Richard didn't like this, so he just like threw the food across the room and said, well, I guess you can't have her over anymore. So there's definitely a pattern of him controlling her, isolating her, not wanting her to have friends.

And then it sounds like he also was continually having affairs like that happened when they first met, and it sounds like it never really stopped. Certain times Sally seemed to sort of be believing him, and other times she would question him. Their son. David remembers when he was [00:37:00] around 18 that he found out about some affairs his dad was having and he even confronted his dad and he said his dad just would never hear any of it.

He wasn't receptive to anyone else's feedback. And over and over, anytime Sally would question him about something in their marriage, he would say the same thing. He would say, don't question me, which was interesting 'cause that's like the last thing he said to her. Yeah. You know, before she killed him in 2004, Richard and Sally, they went to Australia for a family's wedding.

Richard brother. Lived there with his sister-in-law and even his family remembers seeing him interact with Sally and thinking that something was wrong. They didn't like the way he was treating her. Reportedly, he just only wanted to dance with all the young women at the wedding and wouldn't dance with Sally seemed to be like just to, just to embarrass her or something.

And Richard's sister-in-law spoke with her at that time and. And asked her how things were going and she [00:38:00] said, she told her if I left Richard, he would make my life hell. He was also charged with fraud. In 2006, he owned a Ferrari, which cost him 92,000 pounds, and he had taken it to an F1 track in Belgium and wrecked it.

And instead of reporting that he shipped it back to Surrey and tried to make an insurance claim saying that it was hit by a truck. So that's wild. But they like figured out what was going on. He was charged with fraud by 2009. Sally, you know, her, her sons were older and her son, David's specifically, was very like supportive of her.

Trying to get out of this marriage. She had finally left Richard. She had a small amount of family inheritance, which she used to buy a small house a few blocks away. And you know, she had finally done it. I mean, she was in her fifties at this point and she had started dating him when she was 15 years old.

So that's like. You know her [00:39:00] whole life, basically. Yeah. And according to her friends and family, it just was really difficult. She couldn't really figure out how to do things without him. She was distraught and soon she was hoping to get back together with him. Richard, on the other hand. I think used this as a way to manipulate her further and said that he would start to reconcile with her only under those circumstances that she agreed to get legally divorced.

He wanted to give her 200,000 pounds, which would be far less than she would actually be entitled to. And she had to agree in writing that when they went out in public, she wouldn't talk with strangers and she would never interrupt him when he talked, Ugh, I hate this guy. Yeah, yeah. So she, you know, agreed to it, but she was also.

Suspicious that maybe he was just using this as an excuse to get legally divorced from her and keep most of their assets under the guise that they were gonna reconcile. So that was sort of [00:40:00] the, the situation leading up to that day. In August of 2010, her divorce attorney said that she had started and then stopped divorce proceedings 13 times.

So there was a lot of just like indecision and she had become obsessed with trying to find out if he was. Still cheating on her. Um, you know, it sounds like she was hoping that he had changed, but also wondering if he was just still doing the same thing. Yeah. And so this, as Sally dives deeper into what was going on in her marriage with her legal team, through this appeals process, it becomes clear the extent of the abuse that she was experiencing.

And so. In February, 2019, which, you know, she was convicted of murder back in June of 2011. She's been, um, imprisoned this entire time in February of 2019. She has a new legal team and it consists of her solicitor, whose name is Harriet Wirick, and she's actually the [00:41:00] director of the Center for Women's.

Justice in the uk, their mission is to hold the state accountable, um, and challenge discrimination in the justice system around male violence, against women and girls. She also has a woman named Claire Wade on her side, who is her trial attorney. And, um, her practice really dives into, um, murder, manslaughter, sexual offenses, and serious violence in the context of domestic homicide.

So these two attorneys team up for Sally's defense, and they get her appeal seen by a three judge panel. And part of what comes out during that appeal is that there's this new term called coercive control that has come to light and it really speaks to honing in on. Why Sally had that diminished responsibility that her defense said she had way back in 2011.

And there's an American professor named Evan Stark, who never assessed Sally personally, but can really speak [00:42:00] to this, um, term of course of control. So he actually spoke during her appeal. And he is quoted as saying that course of control was designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt. It achieves compliance by making victims afraid, depriving them of their rights, resources, and liberties without which they cannot defend themselves.

Escape, refuse, demands or resist. It produces a hostage like condition of entrapment. And at the time of her trial, he says it was not widely understood. So. These judges, you know, are, are gonna determine if she's gonna spend another 10 plus years in prison. And outside the courthouse, there's people holding signs free.

Sally, her sons are still there standing by her side. You know, as Hannah mentioned, people who were on Richard's side of the family had even witnessed the abuse. After this appeals process, Sally wins and the crown had initially convicted her. Wanted a retrial. They didn't get it. She is [00:43:00] her. Her charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter, and so she was released because she had already served that time.

Her manslaughter sentence would've been over nine years, which she had already then served, and so she was released and her son, who Hannah mentioned, said it was just an incredible experience too. Watch his mom walk out of free woman and, and for people to understand that she wasn't this, you know, cruel murderer.

She was a woman who was experiencing coercive control and didn't know a way out. And I think also learning so much about her history and this being her first relationship from when she's 15, it's like. That. I mean, you don't know anything else. I can see why she filed so many times and then tried to reconcile.

It's like your whole self-worth is tied up in this person because you don't know anything different. She's only been an adult with him. That's her whole adult life. But it [00:44:00] makes me think of like, you do hear those relationships like 20 something, 15, and you have to wonder like how much of that is because.

I mean, obviously there's laws against it, but how much of that is because they are just looking for someone to be able to control and manipulate, even if that doesn't seem like their intention, like there's really no reason a 22-year-old and a 15-year-old should be getting together. That's. Again, a baby, like that's just a person starting their life.

So totally unreal and it's unreal. And in the wake of her appeal, this term, coercive control, they're realizing, okay, this applies to the case of these other women who are imprisoned on these murder charges. Um, because we didn't have an understanding of domestic abuse and course of control like, you know, at the time of their trial like we do right now.

And so there were successful appeals following Sally's successful appeal because of this sort of ability to convey to the [00:45:00] judges what she was actually experiencing. Oh wow, that's amazing. That is such a wild story, not one that I can personally relate to. I only can relate to the part of the story of meeting your spouse very young.

I was 17 when I met my husband. We're actually about to celebrate, uh, our 20 year togetherness anniversary next week. But I relate to the feeling of just like not knowing any other, anything different. You know, whenever you don't know, you don't know, even if you know that you don't want to be in the situation you're in, it's really scary to think about.

Leaving that situation and going off into something that you don't even know, you know, at least the devil you know is better than the one you don't, or whatever the phrase is. You know, you kind of know what you're into with what you've been used to, but if you leave and go off on your own, you don't know really what you're getting into.

So you can see how that would be really scary for someone who got into that type of relationship when they were only 15 years old. That's just really hardworking. Oh, especially like living under this. Threat. Like he's gonna make her life hell if she divorces him. And it's like, okay, [00:46:00] well what does that mean?

'cause my life was already so terrible with you. Right? Like right. So scary. How could it be worse? Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for listening to our interview with Peisha and Hannah. We appreciate them coming on and doing this little crossover with us, and we hope to do more things like this in the future.

Yeah, it was awesome. So excited we got to talk to them and hope to do something soon. All right guys. That was our story. We'll be back next week. Same time, same place. New story. Have a great week. [00:47:00] Bye.