EP 7 - Heather

My dad was like, I want to talk to you about something. Let's go talk for a second outside. He started this whole preamble of like, you have taught me the importance of honesty. You have been such a positive influence on my life, Like you are an inspiration. And he was looking me in the eye and being really emotional about it, and he said, because of that, I want to be honest with you. They're gonna have a little bit of trouble coming up.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. At Betrayal, we hear lots of stories about romantic betrayals, marriages and relationships blown apart by deception. Sometimes we encounter another kind of betrayal, one that's not a violation of vowels, but instead the violation of a more inherent trust, the trust a child puts in their parents. That's how we found Heather summer Lad.

As a really young child, I had no idea that there was anything bizarre about my family.

Heather grew up in Elpaso, Texas, in the eighties and nineties. She was the youngest child in a blended family. We're not going to use her parents' names here. We'll just call them mom and dad. Her earliest memories of her parents are fond ones.

My parents were everything. They were really silly, they were really fun. My dad, he used to play this game with me where he put me on his shoulders, like a piggyback ride. But he used to call it a camel ride for some reason. I don't know why, but he said that he was my camel. So I never called him dad. I only called him camel. I thought he was the funniest best father in the world.

Heather's mom was also playful and charming.

My mom wasn't strict at all. There was this kind of running joke in my family. Anytime I quote unquote acted up or threw a tantrum, she'd make me sit in this little pink plastic chair, probably from the Dollar Store or whatever, and it was called the attitude change chair until my attitude changed. But then she would feel so bad about making me sit there that every single time she made me a chocolate malt she would joke about it. She'd give me the malt and be like, oh,

Her mom was part of a tight knit Mexican American family.

I always like to joke that my mom didn't teach me Spanish so that she could talk about me in Spanish to other people, and then I wouldn't understand.

Heather says her mom treated her more like a confidant or a friend and not so much like her child.

I never had a bedtime, and I remember asking my mom for a bedtime because all my friends they had bedtimes. But it was a free for all, like we could do whatever we wanted.

When Heather was in second grade, she was confronted for the first time with something that would become a major theme in her life, money, or more specifically, debt.

I have a pretty specific memory of being in line at school for lunch and I had my little tray and I walked up and the lunch lady just looked at me and she was like, your parents owe us a lot of money. You can't keep taking trays, And a shame, you know, that washed over me, and also the anxiety of just like, wait, what do you mean they owe money?

At home, meal times were always a crisis.

Dinner would roll around and we'd be like, we're hungry, and then my dad would act surprised that we were hungry. And then it was dinnertime. When we didn't have money, my dad would have to go like basically forage for food or money. He would leave for like a few hours, and we wouldn't know when he was coming back, and we didn't know where he was, and then he'd come back with Sometimes it was full blown takeout, and my

Heather's childhood revolved around her parents payday.

That was such a big day in our house. Everything was centered around when was the next paycheck? When are we getting paid again? And so we would get the paycheck, and you know, it was like celebration that first day. We'd got to eat, or we'd go to the movies, or my mom would go shopping and we'd live it up. We'd have all this stuff, but the money seemed to always be gone a few days after pay day and then a few days later we didn't have anything.

Between pay days, Heather and her dad would usually take a trip to the pawn shop.

I used to go with my father to pawn things as early as first grade. We would drive around to all the different pawn shops. I mean, to me as a kid, it wasn't bizarre. It was like, oh yay, like we're going to the pawn shop, We're going to Applebee's tonight.

But here's the thing that still doesn't make sense to Heather about her childhood.

We weren't poor, or at least their salaries suggest that we shouldn't have been poor.

Both of her parents worked full time as teachers. In fact, when she was growing up, her father was an assistant principal at a high school.

We should have been, I think, pretty clearly middle class. Especially the cost of living where we were from wasn't really that high, so it was bizarre that we never had money.

They lived above their means. When the paychecks came in, they bought things, including jewelry and expensive electronics. They spent so quickly that between paychecks they would run out of money and wouldn't have enough to eat, so they pawned whatever they had just bought. She began realizing this was strange, especially when she made friends at school.

My friends. A lot of their parents were teachers, and seeing how they lived in comparison with how we lived was eye opening.

When she was in fourth grade, Heather was finally allowed to go over to a friend's house for the first time.

One of the craziest things is they would offer me food. They were like, oh, do you want dinner? And the idea that somebody would be offering me food willingly and that I was welcome to it like it just didn't feel real. So that, I think is when I started to realize, like, this is really not normal.

And there was another thing Heather noticed.

She had her own room. That was really I hope, because I never I got my own room maybe like four times in my childhood out of like the seventeen houses we lived in.

The seventeen houses they lived in. Her family moved every single year of her childhood, and Heather shared a room with her half brothers or slept on the couch.

We always knew it was because we were getting evicted. There was no cover story. We heard all the fights, we knew everything.

After every move, Heather watched her mom become increasingly defeated, exasperated, and angrier with her dad.

Because that was the girl. I think my mom relied on me emotionally. Oh, your father did this and he's done that. It started to become really clear that the things he was doing were really shady.

Heather quickly learned that her mom didn't approve of her dad's behavior, and it rubbed off on her.

I started to see my father as the quote unquote problem and my mom. I always thought of myself as her protector.

Heather's mom would even confide in her about wanting to leave her dad.

She was always talking about leaving him. She never would leave him though, because like, oh, I don't want to be a burden to my kids, or I'm saving as much money as i can.

Right before Heather started high school, her dad just walked out.

He just said he couldn't take it anymore, so he left. And that was great. I was helping my mom budget. Family and friends came to help. My aunt paid some bills, people brought us grocery. It was just great. And I remember going with my mom to a divorce lawyer too, and just like really like trying to support her and actually going through with a divorce.

But within a month or two he started coming back around.

My dad would start to come over in this period when they were separated. He would come over because my mom needed him to fix a light bulb or something, and then he'd come over, and the next day it was just say a little bit longer, Oh, let me fix the light bulb and also do your laundry. And then he lived there again.

He promised that this time things were going to be different. He started taking steps towards financial stability.

And so my dad started seeing the pastor and was supposedly getting all this help with budgeting.

Heather didn't believe him at first. She was angry with him and angry at her mom for letting him back into their lives. It was a lot of pressure on a child, too much pressure.

I have memories of sobbing in front of my parents and then just kind of like going about and eating breakfast while I'm there, just sobbing about getting evicted again. My mom just like eating her grapefruit and kind of like ice colds and giving no comfort. My dad just like catering to her needs.

Heather retreated into herself emotionally when she started high school. She fixated on the one thing she could control.

I was in the gifted program at school, and part of how I connected to other adults was trying to excel at whatever I did. So trying to excel at school, making good grades, not being rebellious. And I played the violin, which my mom wanted me to do, even though.

It wasn't her passion. Heather was a gifted violinist, and she started dreaming about a future, one that was far away from her parents.

Wanted to be a writer. That was like a big part of my childhood. And there was this writing contest. And as I was looking up the writing contest, I discovered Bennington College.

Bennington College is a small liberal arts school in Vermont. It's known for creative student led coursework. It promised the one thing Heather craved the most. Freedom.

Everything about it just seemed like paradise, and it was like two thousand miles away. So I just got it into my head that I really wanted to go there.

From that moment on, Bennington became her goal, her only goal.

I just had that determination. I just knew I needed to get the fuck out. My body just couldn't take it anymore.

One day, during her senior year of high school, Heather got a letter in the mail the letter she'd been waiting for.

It was just a normal day and my mom got the mail and there was an envelope for me and she handed it to me. It was from Bennington. I remember opening the envelope and I was like, Mom, I got in and her face just dropped like it went ice colds, and she started walking away. And I was like, oh, maybe she's getting me a present or something.

But she wasn't getting her daughter a present. Instead, Heather's mom felt abandoned by her decision to go to college so far away. To Heather's surprise, it was her dad who swooped in, and it was him who said the things she desperately needed to hear.

Like Oh, I'm so proud of you. This is great, congratulations. I will talk to your mom for you, like, let me smooth this over for you, because I really want you to be able to go to this school.

Her dad worked hard to earn her trust back. He acknowledged his mistakes and promised that he was going to be there to make her dreams come true.

My dad really made me believe that he was on my side. He would say things like, after everything that's happened, I want you to go to school. I want to help you do this, like I will figure this out for you.

For the first time since she was a child, Heather trusted her dad.

I wanted that cammel relationship that we had had because after a while I stopped calling him anything, Like I didn't call him Cammel, I didn't call him dad like I think for a while, I was referring to him as my biological father. So to have him put this olive branch out of like, yes, you know what, I know. I did wrong. I'm learning from my mistakes and I want to help you. You're an eighteen year old kid, you're gonna eat that up, which I did.

Heather had been accepted to her dream college, Bennington, two thousand miles away from El Paso, Texas and the chaos she'd grown up with. There was still one big obstacle between Heather and Bennington, money, but her dad was there to help.

When it came time to filling out the paperwork for financial aid. You know, he was the one helping me. He was like brainstorming, and then he was like, I've worked it out with Bennington. We've got this payment plan.

Heather was skeptical at first, just a few years ago, they didn't have enough money for food even with financial aid, how could they afford regular college tuition payments. But her dad reassured her.

We're budgeting and we have more money now, and like, I know how to do this, and I want to do this.

So Heather enrolled at Bennington. She finally felt like her life was starting. There was one upfront cost that financial aid didn't cover. A few thousand dollars she needed for travel to Vermont, a laptop, and textbooks. The family put their heads together to come up with the money.

I remember one day he came and was like, I've got a co signer for you for a loan. Because my parents were never going to be co signers. They didn't have the credit for that, and I didn't have any credit. It was a small loan for I think three thousand dollars, and that was the loan that was going to get me to school. It was going to buy me a computer, it was going to get me my textbooks. He came home he was like, I've got it. I've got you a co signer. She's already agreed, it's

When August came, the whole family took a trip to Vermont to move her into college. As they began the drive, Heather was overcome with anxiety.

I kept expect there to be some sort of issue, and the whole drive up to her mom, I was like, I'm going to die. We're going to get into a car crash. My dad is going to have a heart attack and die. Just the most awful situations just kept replaying in my head because I didn't think that I was actually going to make it there.

Behind her catastrophic anxieties was a much more realistic one.

I'm going to show up and they're going to tell me that I'm like denied or something like the payment plan didn't work out.

When they finally got to campus, I go.

And I ask for my ID. It took my picture and everything like here, and I was like, Okay, this is real.

It was a huge relief. Her parents took her shopping for dorm supplies and helped her move in. It all felt shockingly normal. When it came time to say their goodbyes, Heather expected her mom to be upset, clinging or even angry, but she wasn't.

She was kind of like, Okay, we had, you know, just to have fun. And I was kind of like, what is happening. This is very bizarre, and I was like goodbye, and I was on my own. As far as I knew, I was leaving my childhood behind and entering into a new life with my parents as supporters.

Bennington was everything she expected it to be. She finally felt free.

Oh my god, I loved it. When the leaves started to change. Oh my gosh. My friend took me in her car and we just like drove around and it was just like the best freaking day ever.

She thrived at Bennington, even though she wanted to be a writer. She ended up pursuing a degree in music. But in the back of her mind, she always felt a nagging guilt that her parents were breaking the bank to send her to college, and Heather felt a special guilty that she had left her mom alone with her dad. So she was surprised when her parents called to tell her.

That they were moving to Boston. It was a shock that it actually happened, and they just kind of up and moved.

Her mom loved Boston and always talked about moving there. So maybe Heather's dream was allowing her mom to live hers as well. For the remainder of her time in college, Heather's parents were just a few hours away in their new Boston apartment.

They moved to this really nice, cute little apartment, three bedrooms, two stories, a tree lined street, and they were there for a couple of years. For my family, like that was huge, Like staying anywhere for more than a year met things were great. They're not only paying for my education, They've also got this amazing apartment in Boston, and so when I would go back home to visit, I have this nice place to be.

Even though her parents were doing better than ever, the cost of Heather's tuition was still a strain. She had financial aid and then that small loan she'd co signed before she started college. Everything else totaled about five thousand dollars a semester, and her parents were covering it out of pocket pretty much.

Every semester. I would get a late notice of payment in my box, like your past do with your tuition, And I'd always call my dad and I'd be like, listen, I know you're working really hard. You know, whether you can be able to make the payments.

Every time she had to make a call like this, it racked her with guilt.

My parents would be really stressed, like, your mom's been working so hard after school doing tutoring to get some extra money, and I'm doing this, that and the other. We've almost got it. We've almost got it.

The day before her senior year started, she was staying at her parents' house. Before she left, her dad wanted to talk. He sounded concerned.

It was like a really beautiful day. My dad took me up to the back deck and he was like, oh, let's go talk for a second outside. I want to talk to you about something. So he started with this whole preambled like you have taught me the importance of honesty, Like you have been such a positive influence on my life, Like you are an inspiration. And he was like looking me in the eye and like being really emotional about it. And he said, because of that, I want to be

He asked Heather if she knew how loans worked.

I was like, you said that we didn't have to take out loans for this year, like you said, everything was all set and he was like, no, actually we did have to take out a loan and everything is all set, but you're going to get this paper and just give him this. And he started phishing something out of his back pocket and it was just like this piece of paper he was a promised story note and he was like, you just give him this and everything should.

Be get The next day, when Heather got to school to start her senior year, there.

Was a note in my box. I went to the business office and they told me that I had to leave and that I couldn't be on campus unless I came back to school with a bank certified check for twenty thousand dollars.

The number didn't even make sense. As far as she knew, her parents only paid about five thousand dollars out of pocket every semester. How could they possibly be this far behind on payments.

I called my dad and I kept on being like hey, like they said twenty thousand dollars, How do we owe twenty thousand dollars? And he was like, Oh, those guys, they're real jerks over there at the business office. I couldn't get anybody to tell me what was going on. My father didn't know anything. My mom didn't know anything. I just knew that I couldn't be at school until this money was paid.

Without any real answers, Heather's spent a few days at her parents' house. I'm sure if she'd be able to continue her education. Furious and exasperated, she stopped asking for answers from her dad. She just wanted to go back to school, and somehow.

It got cleared up. I can't even say I know how. I was just like, I don't want to know anything about this. I just want to go back to school. I just know that at the last possible second, I was able to graduate. That's when I started to realize, like, Okay, something fishy is going on here, but I just wanted to graduate. I didn't want to think about it, and.

She did graduate with a music degree. She planned to move to New York City to work as a musician. She felt her dad had done something fishy to mysteriously settle the bill at Bennington. That made her more concerned than ever about her dad's behavior and what it meant for her mom.

I remember telling my mom, look what happened with Bennington. He's going back to his old patterns. You have to leave him. Like, I was so upset, and my mom kept being like, yes, I'm going to leave him, I'm going to leave him, And you know, I told her, like, Mom, you're in an abusive relationship, and she was just like, oh, I know, I know. I know.

That summer, Heather worked gigs and odd jobs off of Craigslist to get enough money to move herself to New York. Even though she was in survival mode, Heather was still worried about her mom.

It got to the point where I even asked my roommates if my mom could come live with us for a little bait, which didn't go over very well with the roommates. They were like no, that's how desperate I was to get my mom out of this situation.

One day that summer, Heather got a message out of the blue.

And as soon as I saw that it was like an eight eight eight member. I was like, oh, I knew what those kind of numbers meant. They're looking for my parents, because you know, we were always getting deck collector calls and stuff. So I called them back and I gave them my name, and the guy on the other end was like you're past due for your student loans. And I was like, what are you talking about? What student loans?

As far as she knew, she didn't have any student loans, just that initial three thousand dollars loan she signed for before starting school.

He said I had twelve student loans that were in collection and that it was a really, really serious matter. I asked him how much and he said it was one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars that I owed.

Shortly after she graduated college, Heather summer Lad received a call from a debt collector. She was overdue on her student loans, twelve student loans, totally one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars student loans with her name on them that she never knew existed.

It was like feeling the chain and getting clipped to my collar. Who's like, wow, I still feel it in my body. I feel that anger in my chest and my chest constricting.

In addition to the overdue loans, there was something else. Heather would be on the hook for a fraud charge. Turns out there was a co signer on some of the loans and their signature had been forged.

So of course I have visions going to jail and being framed for something that I didn't do.

Heather knew immediately that her dad was behind this crisis. She tried desperately to explain it to the deck collector.

I was like, trying to tell the story my dad, you know. I was like, no, you don't understand. My dad. He's the one who did this.

Heather hung up and immediately dialed her parents' house. Her mom picked up.

I told her what happened, and she was like, hold on, there was no he did what. I was like, oh my god, she knew. So she handed the phone to my dad. He was just like trying to flip it back to me. He kept talking about how I was too expensive, your violin cost ons money, and your education costs the switch money, and we did this, that and the other for you, and you're not letting me talk. I remember him saying that you're not letting me talk.

Her dad had taken out one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars in loans in Heather's name and forged her signature. He'd also forged the signature of a co signer, someone who was family friend. Her dad wouldn't admit to it directly, but Heather saw the documents with her name signed in her father's handwriting. Realizing the extent of his deception, she immediately feared for her mom's safety.

I always saw her as a victim of my father's abuse. I wrote this to her in an email too. I was like, I don't understand why you're still with him. I don't know if he's threatened to kill you, if he's threatened to kill us, like, if there's violence involved.

She'd never seen her dad be violent, but there had to be a reason why her mom never spoke up. Her dad said he would fix this, that he would be responsible for making the payments.

But of course, my dad never made payments.

Heather was done with her father. She told her mom that she wanted no contact with him, and if she came home, he couldn't be there.

And so we started on that dynamic word It's like my mom and I, as long as we didn't talk about the loans or my father, we were cool and my mom was happy to respect that.

Now with her father out of her life, Heather got another call about overdue payments. This time she was ready.

I immediately was like, give me the fraud department, and so through that process, they told me to file police report, and so I did. I went to the police and I filed the report. Who wants to file a police report against their father? You know? I didn't want to put my dad in jail, Like, I really didn't like. I didn't want to be the kind of person who did that.

We've seen these police reports and filing them wasn't easy for Heather.

As soon as I said it was my dad, they were like, well, how else were you supposed to get an education? I had to provide copies of my signature. That was actually really hard because I had to go through old, old, old paperwork. They needed signed and dated from within the time that the occurred.

Through the process of filing a police report, Heather learned more about the fraudulent loans. She discovered that her actual signature was on one of the loans. She didn't know about. When she saw the date of the signature, it jogged her memory.

It was something that my father had said was a gift for my grandfather, a check that was made out to me that turned out to be one of these loans. He didn't present me with a loan. He presented me with a check and was like, this is a gift. You just have to endorse it, which I did.

She was held responsible for that one. After the police report, the debt collectors stopped calling and sending mail about the loans.

Months later, I got the letter back saying that the loans had been written off except for three and those can remain on my credit report forever.

I can't imagine being out of debt anytime soon.

Her dad was never arrested or charged for the fraud. She's still left wondering how he was able to get away with it.

There were five states involved, and my dad is also really smart, and I'm guessing he probably knew this, and maybe that's why they ended up moving to Massachusetts. So suddenly, I think that he had an overarching plan for how this was going to occur and how he was going to get out of it.

The fraudulent loans had a lasting impact on Heather's finances. It impacted her ability to buy a car, rent an apartment, or take out a credit card. Today, nearly twenty years later, she's still working towards financial stability.

The repercussions of this financial devastation are huge. They're going to reverberate forever. Once you are in a hole, it's really hard to get out. It's like being buried alive.

But this isn't the end of Heather's story of betrayal. For a decade after she ended her relationship with her dad, she remained close with her mother, and life moved on. She met the love of her life and got married. Her mom was even at her wedding. But one day, just a few years ago, all of that changed.

My wife and I decided to move back to her mind. As we were moving into our apartment, I had all my identity theft paperwork and I was looking through it and I opened the envelope where all the forged disbursement

She thought her dad was the one behind the fraud. For her entire life, Heather had been manipulated into seeing her mom as a victim. She'd spent decades feeling protective over her mother, supporting her and hoping that she would finally find the strength to leave her dad.

And it shifted my perspective on all those times that my dad got away with stuff and she wouldn't leave, And I started to think, like, was he getting away with it or was my mom like helping him out.

Of the one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars, her parents would have only spent forty thousand on her education, So what did they do with the rest of the money.

They were definitely living on it. When I think about the nice place they lived in in Boston, I feel like, oh, maybe I was funding that, you know, any help then might have given me, like it was actually me maybe paying for it.

Her mom finally achieved her own dream of living in Boston, and she did it by nearly destroying Heather's life. That's why she wasn't so upset when Heather went to college. She and her husband were taking out fraudulent loans in Heather's name and using them to fund their new Boston apartment, and it left Heather on the hook for a hefty

They knew that if I were to confront her, nobody was going to tell me the truth. She was willing to go this far for this long, and she knew she was an accomplice. There was nothing more to be said. She knew how devastating this had been, so I just stopped responding to her. She would text and call, and I just never texted or called back. After a while, she just stopped trying to contact me, and I never contacted her.

That was it. In twenty twenty three, she learned that her mother had passed away. She says it's a complicated grieving process, especially when she tries to explain her story to new people.

A lot of times people are like, oh, were they desperate, Like maybe they were like really desperate for something, And it's like, I actually think they just enjoyed it. The thrill, the adrenaline rush of having to run all the time, or having to avoid debt collectors, or just the thrill of seeing whether or not I'll find out or what I'll do when I find out. It was like psychological warfare. So I wouldn't put it past them that it was more like an experiment or something.

Heather has been in therapy for years unpacking the trauma her parents put her through.

When I think about my dad, oh well, he is a sociopath, he is a criminal.

She's also learning to find the words for what she experienced, words like familial fraud and abuse. Heather is leaning on her chosen family, starting with her wife. Today, she's a music teacher and musician in Vermont and her wife are in the process of building their own house. She's also found healing through writing. She's working on a book about her story.

The idea of writing the truth for me as a kid was really daunting because it's like I wasn't allowed to tell the truth. Shame around telling the truth stuck with me for a long time. But the process of writing it started out as a catharsis and has since become more of an artistic process where I am learning to make meaning from that pain. So, yeah, anybody wants to publish it, that'd be awesome.

We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question, why did you want to tell your story?

I think that people need permission to remove themselves from family systems that aren't safe and to understand anger is a healthy and appropriate emotion when people do this kind of stuff to you. I mean, we talk about forgiveness, and I think it's because society doesn't want to grapple with the uncomfortable truth that there are some things that are just unforgivable and the emotional repercussions from those things are very real. Everything in my life was a lie.

On the next episode of Betrayal.

He had bamboozled a physician and if he treat her, what else had he come up with.

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