EP 22 - Angelique Pt. 2

He took the police report and he gave it to me, and he said, one day, when you're ready, you should read this. There's some stuff in here that I don't think you know. It's actually diabolical.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. When Angeliqe Robletto was seventeen, she found out she was pregnant. She decided that this baby would be her second chance. She got clean from drugs and made a new friend, another pregnant teenager named Cassandra. But one day, a casual hangout with Cassandra took a sinister. Angelique had a gut feeling that something was wrong, but she didn't

I take the diver bag and I keep explaining to them. She said she had this present for me, like the explanation is in this bag, and as I'm doing that, I put the bag on the counter. I breached my hand in the bag and I feel these two metal objects, and when I lift them and pull them out, they're two large butcher knines, and I dropped them on the counter and I just start screaming.

She backed away from the bag, trembling. The cops stepped in and they come and pull out.

More They found, like scissors, disinfectant, alcohol.

The items painted a dark picture of what Cassandra might have been planning that night, and Angelique realized the gifts you'd been given weren't for her at all.

Everything that she gave me was one of everything. To take my son, to make sure my son had a newborn diaper, to make sure my son had a baby onesie, a receiving blanket, to wrap him in a blanket so he didn't get cold, a carrier to carry my baby out with. She had one of everything to take my child and to leave that house.

It all finally clicked for Angelique. Cassandra had been planning to stab her and run away with her baby.

I just remember sitting on the couch staring at a wall, and I just kept repeating the same thing over and over and over again. It was like a trance. I told you she was going to kill me. I told you she was going to kill me. I told you she was going to kill me. My mom said that I sat there for hours.

The rest of that night was a blur. She was in shock. She remembers the cops taping off the scene.

They had blocked both of my streets off so that nobody can get in, nobody can get out.

What had been a potential arson was now in the attempt of murder investigation. Later that night, a police investigator came to speak with Angelique.

When the detective comes in, me and her very much know each other because of my past. I've got arrested by her at least once. It's a small town that she knew me by name, Hi Angelique.

You know, she was surprised by how the cops spoke to her.

They were laughing, they were joking, Oh, are you sure this didn't happen, And she says, you guys are smoking marijuana in your room. You know it's no shocker because Angelique has done things in the past, but it wasn't a joking situation.

They hadn't been smoking weed. Angelique knew what happened. She just couldn't prove it to the cops.

They had me write it down and then that was it for the night. They just did their investigation and they left. So the next morning comes I call them and they don't have any news. They know that she left the hospital and she's not there anymore. They know that for sure, and I'm like, okay, well, what are you guys going to do? Well, we're trying to find her.

She was afraid Cassandra might come back and follow through with the plan.

This lady literally came to my house with butcher knife and tried to kill me.

But the cops weren't necessarily convinced.

Well, we can't prove that. We can't say that that's what happened. We don't know if that's what happened.

She didn't feel like they were taking her seriously. And now Cassandra was out of the hospital roaming free, Angelique decided to take matters into her own hands.

I think when people think of survivors and they think of people that are victims, they think that we go into this weird moment of poor me, or like I'm scared. It's not like that. It's quite the opposite. We go into this moment that we need to figure out what happened. I was ready to investigate. I was very much I watched way too much SVU. I know what to do. That's how I felt.

She got to work online, so I.

Started googling my little heart out and found things about her. I found this news article on her, and I found out that they stated that she was a danger to herself and society. So that was like a little clue.

And then she found a surprising connection.

Her cousin is somebody that I knew from middle school, and I called the cousin.

Cassandra's cousin had a lot to say.

Found out from the cousin. She said, my cousin's crazy. My cousin is very dangerous. That's when everything started to click.

After the fire, Cassandra was brought to the hospital because she was having contractions. Angelique had a friend who worked at that hospital at the time, a friend who was willing to break the rules to help Angelique get some answers, and what her friend saw in Cassandra's medical record was a bombshell.

She actually saw the test that she took at the hospital and they were able to confirm that she was not pregnant.

Up until that moment, Angelique fully believed her friend was pregnant. In fact, that had been the basis of their entire relationship. But now she had confirmation that it was all a lie. She felt like this information was important to her case.

I gave it to the cops and they were like, oh, how did you find those? And I'm like, are you serious? Right now? It felt like they were not taking my case seriously, and it was extremely frustrating.

For the cops to move forward, Angelique would need to get Cassandra on the record contradicting her original statement to police, because.

Her story was that we were in the room, we were smoking marijuana, we asked out my pipe and it set my closet on fire.

So they asked Angelique to do a recorded phone call.

My goal was to get her to admit that she was in the room alone before the fire started. So I had to call her and ask her, how are you doing? How did everything go at the hospital? I had to pretend like I had no idea what was happening, because she didn't know what was happening. She has no idea that I found the butcher knives. So she admits it. Yes, yeah, I remember when I was in the room. Yeah, you were in there by yourself. Yeah, I was there by myself.

Then Cassandra started to catch on.

I could tell that she wasn't alone. There was somebody in that house with her, because we all heard a man say, hang up the phone and then click.

Angelie got what she needed, but it was anti climactic. The police basically thanked her and sent her on her way, but almost immediately from.

That moment, I had went into labor.

She went straight to the hospital. Because Cassandra still hadn't been arrested. The hospital took precautions to keep Angelique safe.

They have police outside my room. They had me down as Jane Doe. You have to have a code to get inside my room.

She spent four days in labor.

I probably should have had a sea section, but I think they were trying to be mindful of the whole situation that I had just gone through.

After all, someone had wanted to steal her baby and brought a butcher knife to do it. So she was adamant about not having a sea section.

As much as I wanted my son to be born. I felt like the only safe place was inside of me. But at the same time I was feeling like, okay, well inside of me isn't safe because someone just tried to kill me. So I was going through all of these emotions.

The stress had led to high blood pressure, and now Angelique had pre eclampsia. It was a high risk birth.

Finally, my water broke and it was just an intense birth, as heart rate had dropped at some point. It was honestly, it was scary.

Finally her son was born. He was healthy and in her arms.

I went through such a traumatic event that seeing him alive was just a blessing. I could not imagine him being with anybody else.

She hoped that after he was born she'd find some relief.

And finally, once everything is okay, I still can't sleep because a I'm freaking out on nurses, making them show me their badges too. I think I'm destined to die, and I just want to spend whatever moments I can with my son. And that's all I remember. Actually being in the hospital is I was worried about someone coming to steal him or me dying.

While she was in the hospital, her family worked to renovate her bedroom to repaint it and make it livable again, but after she was discharged, she struggled to relax at home.

Coming home is such a blur. I didn't go back in my room. I refused to go in my room, so I slept on the couch.

Josh, her son's father, stepped up to help. He wanted to be a safe place for Angelique, so every night he stayed with her on the couch next to their new baby.

He helped me feel safe when nobody else made me feel that way.

But even with him by her side, she couldn't let her guard down.

I just wasn't myself. There was nothing that was right or okay about me.

When Josh or her family tried to talk to her about how she was doing, Angelique shut down.

I pushed everybody away. Josh would say something and I would be like, I'm fine, but really up dying inside.

She wanted Cassandra arrested, but the cops weren't sharing any information about the case.

I felt like I was completely in the dark when it came to my investigation. Anytime I try to talk to somebody, nobody give me answers and It was just super discouraging because I had gotten out of the hospital and I expected to feel safe, and I didn't feel safe. I expected for her to be caught. She wasn't caught.

She didn't even feel safe taking a walk around her neighborhood.

I just never left my house. I stayed inside of my house and never left.

One night, about a month after her son was born.

I fell asleep one night and I remember my mom coming into the room. It had to have been like midnight, and she woken me up and she said here, and she like hands me the phone, and I'm like, who is it.

It was the lead detective on her case, and she was like, we got her. Cassandra had been arrested. After weeks of waiting. Angelique was losing faith that Cassandra would ever be held responsible, but then she got the call. Law enforcement was finally able to make an arrest. Cassandra was facing multiple charges.

She is being charged with attempted first degree murder, which means that it was plotted. It was planned out, so tempted first grea murder, arson burglary. She said She's going to go away for a very very long time.

Cassandra had made a full confession.

And I started crying and I said she admitted it, and they said, yeah, she admitted it.

She admitted that she'd planned to murder Angelique in order to steal her baby. Cassandra was now behind bars and she would stay there until there was a trial, and I.

Just remember crying and being so happy. That was the first night that I actually slept.

The news brought a lot of relief. Angelie could breathe a little easier, but the arrest didn't take away the trauma.

As a mom, you imagine they're going to be this happy family. You're going to teach him how to say mama. You're going to teach them how to walk. You're going to teach him, you know, figure out if his first food is going to be peaches or carrots. All of these things are things that I thought about. I don't remember any of them. It's like it was all stolen from me.

She recently saw a video that was taken when her son was one. He was learning how to walk for the first time.

And I say it, Oh my gosh, it's his first steps. I can't I don't remember that video. I don't remember where that video was taken. What time, like I and I was standing right there talking in the video.

In the wake of everything, she wasn't living.

She was surviving my family, my friends. They distracted me. I can't tell you how because I don't remember, but I know that I survived.

When everything went down and League had to fight for her case to be taken seriously by the cops. And after Cassandra was arrested, she didn't hear anything from law enforcement or prosecutors for twelve months.

I just remember thinking, like, when is this going to happen? Like what's going to happen? Maybe I should just be thankful that she's in jail, But nobody has communicated anything with me.

That was until she got a call from the District Attorney's office.

They tell me, we're going to be completely honest with you. We don't think this should go to trial. And I was completely thrown back, like what do you mean this shouldn't go to trial? They said, well, through our investigation and through everything that we've done, the cops did not reader her Miranda rights at the time of the confession, and I was like, wait, what, Like, what do you mean that they didn't reader her Miranda rights?

The full confession police got out of Cassandra wouldn't be admissible in court.

If we go to trial, her whole confession is thrown out and can lose this case because it's not illegal to carry butcher knives around the city. Technically, it's not against the law, and we cannot pinpoint everything in here without her confession.

But Angelique knew there was physical evidence from the fire.

And I was like, well, what about her fingertips on the kiunt the candle, and they said yes, they said, we want to try to do a plea bargain.

The DA's office informed Angelique of Cassandra's defense strategy. She was going to plead insanity.

The picture that they painted for me was that she was there to take my child because she was mentally ill and believed that my baby was her baby, that she was pregnant and this was her child.

And in that moment, Angelique almost felt bad for her. The prosecutor said that Angelique could.

Decide do you think she should go to prison or do you think she should go to like a mental hospital, And I asked if they can give me some time to think.

About it up, she slept on it and realized that without the confession. The prosecution's hands were tied.

I didn't feel good about this whole thing, but I really trusted, like they're the professionals. This is their job, Like who am I to tell them what's right and what's wrong.

The state offered eight years in a psychiatric hospital.

And so that was our plea bargain.

At the sentencing hearing, Angelique was able to read a victim impact statement.

I wrote this long letter to her. I said, I don't want to live my life hating you. I don't want to have hate in my heart. I don't think I can live my life that way, and so I'm going to tell you that I forgive you because they're mentally ill. I ended it that way just from my conscience for me. A judge told her, Cassandra, is there anything that you would like to say to this woman? She stood up, put her hands together. She looked at me and said, no, your honor, and sat back down.

Almost immediately it became a media circus.

Everybody was outside my door, I had every single news station. I had people calling me. I had Andrewson Cooper calling me. I don't even know how they got my number.

Everyone wanted to run with the story. Angelique became reduced to a headline. It felt like something was being taken from her and not on her terms.

If I could take back some of the shows that I did, like doing the Doctor Phil show, I would have not done that. Absolutely. He used me for my trauma to get views.

A few years after sentencing, a local journalist came over to interview Angelique the story and he was the first one to ask her.

Have you ever read the police report? And I was like no. At the end of our interview, he took the police report and he gave it to me and he said, there's some stuff in here that I don't think. You know, you should read this.

But at the time Angelique wasn't ready to hear it.

So I know I did. I shredded it. I shredded it all. I shredded everything. That is what trauma does.

It wasn't until eight years later, when Cassandra was released from the psychiatric hospital, that Angelique finally revisited the case.

And that intrigued me to open everything back up because I felt like I was in a better state of mind. I was older. I feel like I'm ready to start digging. So I went deep. I went deep down this rabbit hole. I went to the police station. I pulled all the police reports, I pulled the tapes, I pulled anything that they would give me, and I sat in my car for hours listening to these CDs, listening to me like Me Talk, listening to all, listening to everything. It took like four to five hours.

She started with Cassandra's taped confession and on it she learned Cassandra's story what Cassandra was really doing the night the fire started.

The fire was never meant to happen. It was an accident.

Her plan was to kill Angelique with a butcher knife and steal her baby. That's what she was preparing to do when she sat Angelique on her bed in the dark and counted to three.

She said that she felt a moment of weakness when she was going to stab me. When she had me bent over, she had her hand on my shoulder, she had the knife physically to my back, and she was ready to push the knife inside of me.

But then Cassandra got cold feet.

When she started counting. She started to feel guilt, and she says, I started to second guess it if I could actually do it.

When Angelique stood up, the initial plan fell apart, so Cassandra moved on to Plan B.

She said the fire was supposed to be a distraction, and she was hoping that I would be overcome with smoke and I would pass out, and then she'd be able to perform the C section with me being passed out on the ground.

Cassandra thought it would be easier to kill Angelique if she were unconscious. The whole thing was like a horror movie.

It's actually diabolical. It's almost unbelievable though, that an eighteen year old can come up with this.

It turns out the plan wasn't entirely hers, or at least that's what Cassandra stated in her confession.

At the very end before they cut the tape, she talks about how she was a part of a.

Gang, and in this gang, Cassandra confessed that she worked for one man in particular.

She was his like his possession basically, and she had to do what he told her to do, and it was all his plan. And she was just doing what he asked.

Cassandra claimed that she was part of a gang operation and her boss had a plan to sell Angelique's baby.

She says he has done this before, that they sold babies in Mexico, and that they were going to get a certain cut. She talked about how much they would get for the baby, and that they were going to stay and live in Mexico.

This was all news to Angelique. These tapes suggested an alternate motivation for why Cassandra did what she did, and it didn't match up with what Angelique heard from prosecutors back when they offered a plea deal. At the time, her understanding was that Cassandra was mentally ill and thought the baby was hers.

But in the confession, not once did I ever hear her say that she wanted the baby for herself.

And there was something else in Cassandra's confession another thing Angelique heard that didn't square with what the prosecutors told her.

I heard them reader her miranda writes.

Prosecutors had told Angelique that Cassandra's confession wasn't admissible in court because no one had read Cassandra her miranda rights. While reviewing the case file. Years later, Angelique discovered that wasn't true. They had read her her Miranda rights.

I even had it circled where it says they read her rights and then it goes on to her telling her confession.

This supposed procedural error was the reason why Angelique was okay with the plea deal. So why did the prosecutors tell her this story? Well, Angelique has a theory.

I think that we were used as a plea bargain to help catch bigger fish. I don't think anybody will ever be able to confirm that for me, But if she had more information to help them catch bigger people, they don't have to necessarily tell me all the information on what they're working on.

If Cassandra was telling the truth, maybe she could help law enforcement catch higher ups in her gang. Angelique got back to all the phone calls. Cassandra had taken the ones in Spanish, and she'd taken a call in the middle of the attempted murder. Angelique had believed she was talking with Edwin, her husband. So was Edwin the mastermind, the gang leader? The cops met with Edwin and they were very surprised to hear he.

States, Yeah, she's someone I dated. No, we haven't talked in years, and we're not together. So this guy Edwin, who she told all of us was her husband, was not actually her husband.

Edwin was a real guy that Cassandra had dated, that he hadn't talked to her in years. So who was actually on the other end of the phone? In her confession, Cassandra does name someone besides Edwin, but the cops couldn't find a record of this other guy, and that's where the police file ends. For Angelique, it felt like they gave up. She's had to make peace with the fact that she might never know who Cassandra was working with, she might never get the full story.

I think about it a lot. I contemplate all the time if I want to know the truth, and I always go back and forth with yes, no, yes, no. The thing is, it's not going to do anything except for maybe piss me off. So I just stopped looking for answers.

She's come to accept that the police report may just be another version of the story, and can she even trust Cassandra's taped confession. After all, Cassandra was clearly unwell by the time Angelique heard the tapes. Cassandra had served her entire sentence. Angelique felt like reopening the case against Cassandra would be a dead end.

I found out way too late. We're talking about nine years now. I can't go back and bring them all this. I just thought every person there was doing their job for me. I thought this was a big case. I thought this was abnormal. I've never heard of fetal abduction. Like I just figured that everyone was in my best interest for her.

Reopening the case would only bring back bad memories. The damage was already done.

She stole my first few years between me and my son, and I'm never going to get those back. There's no money in the world that could pay for that. She stole that away from me.

Her healing process wasn't linear.

There were moments in my life where I remember being like, I'm healed, I feel so much better. I'm going to be just fine, and then like five weeks to go by and I would be like, I'm so triggered right now. And it's just been a cycle. It's been a vicious cycle, and that's what healing is. It's been almost fourteen years since my trauma, and I feel like I just had an epiphany just a couple of weeks ago.

She recently drove past the house where the crime happened for the first time in years, and instead of feeling overwhelmed and triggered, she felt a powerful calm.

I realized, it's just a house. That's all it is. It's just a house that something bad happened to me in. But I'm here, I'm alive, I'm okay, and I have my son. You can't push or rush healing.

Josh, her son's father, has been a constant in her life and in her healing.

If you were to ask me where my safe place is, it's with him. I am scared of everything. It can be as simple as I don't want to get into a lake because I'm scared of their drown I'm scared of life because something traumatic happened to me when I had no idea that it could happen. So because of that, my husband has been there to push me into different directions that I don't think I could have done without him.

They dated throughout their first few years as parents.

And come twenty twenty, we decided why not. So we actually got engaged in twenty twenty and we got married.

She and Josh had two more children together.

We live a happy life altogether. We're a very big sport family. We do football, softball, soccer, rine quads, go hiking, go to the lake.

The sun she nearly lost is now thirteen.

When I look at my son, I just think about how lucky we are and how blessed we are, because not everybody gets this happy ending. I always tell him, you were absolutely meant to be here. I don't know what life has to offer you, but I just know you were meant for greatness.

Angelique's also become an advocate for preventing fetal abduction.

When I was seventeen years old, I didn't know that this was even a crime that could happen. I didn't know that because it was never talked about.

Feudal abduction is incredibly rare. There have been less than twenty documented cases in the US in the last decade, and of those cases, very few of the victims survived.

My motivation is not just to get my story out so that other mothers can understand that this is something that happens. I feel like it's an opportunity for me to be a voice for not myself and my son, but also for the mothers that are not here that didn't get to survive this crime.

She's also done something astounding. She wanted to help others grow their own families, so she became a surrogate.

Carrying a baby who wasn't mine and allowing that baby to leave my body and go to somebody else was a huge step for me and absolutely healed me in ways that I didn't know that I needed to be healed in.

We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question, why are you telling your story?

You think about how that one second that it took for me to turn around is literally what saved my life. I would not be here if I did not listen to that gut feeling. It's okay to be naive. It's natural, it's who we are. We're only human. Just listen to yourself, trust yourself a little bit more, sit there and start to learn what that intuition feeling is and listen to it. Maybe it'll help save somebody's life.

On the next episode of Betrayal.

I get a phone call and it was is this Dawn Harris and Astidy as it is? And they said, this is so and so with the Dallas FBI office.

We'd like for you to come in.

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