S2: Bonus Ep 2 – A Stranger in the Share House

Topics featured in this episode may be disturbing to some listeners. Please take care while listening. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is our second bonus episode of season two of Betrayal. Betrayal is a universal feeling. The shock and hurt that deception creates from someone so close crosses all cultures, and we found that the secrets and lies we've heard in

It's quite surreal to actually talk to you because you've just been in my years while I've been running what happened with me? In October twenty seventeen, I just met this guy on an app. He lived in a different town, like eight hours away, so he had just been chatting and then about two months into our chatting, he made a trip to my city and we met up for the first time and we hung out and we had

About four months later, Melanie's new guy ended up leaving his job and moving closer to her. She lived in a cosmopolitan town in South Australia called Adelaide. Housing in that part of the country is expensive and hard to find, so even though the relationship was still new, he ended up staying with her. Melanie was living in what's called a sharehouse down Under. That refers to a rental house where people who may not know each other rent a

He was looking for a place to live and the sharehouse was really cramped and we were like spending all our time together. Anyway, we just decided like, oh well, we'll just move into like another sharehouse together. Things were going well. I guess, like he treated me really well, almost suspiciously well, Like he just behaved like I was the greatest person he'd ever met in his life. He was always going out of his way to do nice things for me. He would like think of me and

There were some subtle things that bothered her, but they weren't exactly red flags.

He didn't talk too much about his past. He'd come out of like a seven year marriage prior to this and had a four year old daughter from his previous marriage. He didn't have custody of his daughter, but he still saw her fairly regularly and was having FaceTime calls with her and stuff like that pretty often.

And their physical relationship shifted pretty quickly.

After the first few months of the relationship. He just kind of stopped being interested in intimacy and he had like really bad performance issues. I definitely was confused by it. It made me feel like there's something wrong with me, like he doesn't find me attractive, But that didn't really liigne with how he was behaving the rest of the time, so it was just very confusing.

Melanie worked during the day and her partner worked in the evening. I spent much of his day home alone, and.

Then I guess it finally came out at some point in conversation that he had been watching a lot of porn during the daytime.

Melanie started to wonder if this was impacting their intimate relationship.

I think I started to get concerned about what his interests might be and what he might be watching. That kind of spurred me to do some digging.

So she started by looking at his recently viewed files.

There was a video called dog, and I was like, what is this video.

I'm going to spare you any more details about that, but it's exactly what you're thinking. Fucked up, Yes, relationship ending, Hell, yes, illegal, God, I hope. So Melanie was down the rabbit hole now and steeled herself for whatever other information she was going to discover.

I clicked on a folder and it opened. I could just see a thumbnails. It was just all of these images. These are small children in horrifying positions. There's no mistaking what that was. I slammed the laptop shut. You're aware that this material exists, but actually seeing it is very different. You had spoke to someone earlier on the podcast who describe it as beyond imagination and like the seventh circle of Hell or something like that. Yeah, that's what it is.

The realization that the man she shared a bed with was getting sexual pleasure from that material was revolting. Eleanie was upset and infuriated.

At this point. It was like eleven PM and he was going to be coming home from work, and it was just so late at night. I didn't know what to do. I was still trying to process everything that happened. So I had gotten into bed and I just pretended to be asleep, and then he got into bed next to me, and I just laid there in the dark, just like praying that he wouldn't try to touch me

She slipped out of bed and went downstairs to call her family back home in Canada. They were scared for her. Who was this guy. Obviously she didn't know him at all. They urged her to get away from him as soon as possible. He found her asleep downstairs on the sofa in the morning, and unable to contain herself, she confronted him.

He just didn't really have an answer for it. He was just like, I'm sorry, I forgot I had that. I downloaded it a long time ago. I'm not interested in those things. You know. I'll get rid of it, or I'll leave if you want me to. And I was like, do you understand what this is like? This is a very serious crime.

He didn't seem to really be grasping the gravity of what he had done. Melanie reached out to his family. They didn't seem to grasp it either.

His mother was concerned about whether or not I was going to report it because she was like, oh, what if you lose access to our granddaughter, and his brother was like, oh, well, would you consider trying Popple's counseling.

She made it clear he needed to leave. Then she erased every trace of him from the house.

It just felt like he had died one day. There's this person that you think you know and you're in a loving relationship with and the next day that person is just gone.

Melanie grieved the loss of the relationship she thought she had. She also felt compelled to turn him into law enforcement. After all, he did have a daughter. A lawyer friend of a friend accompanied her to the police station.

It's just it's this little police station and he just like a little reporting counter, and there's like constantly people reporting things there, Like the person ahead of us in line was like reporting like a stolen bicycle. He took us back into a separate little room and then I gave this incredibly detailed statement. It took about an hour

She heard Ashley's case on the podcast. The Riverton police had gathered evidence and made the arrest quickly. That didn't happen here.

This is where it gets really surprising. I imagined, like they're gonna want to swoop in on him and get the hard drives and get all of those things, and that's just not really what happened. They did arrest him, but it took two weeks.

Melanie feared that was plenty of time to dispose of the evidence.

But he didn't delete the material. Maybe he deleted some of it and not all. Like, I have absolutely no idea. They, I guess took him in and questioned him and took all of his devices. I don't think he spent a night in jail, and he was just kind of instantly out on bail. He was just like out in the world, and he went straight back on Tinder and just started dating other people. At one point, he did send me a bunch of messages on Facebook, just apologizing and being like,

She forwarded those messages, admitting his behavior to law enforcement. Then she wanted to be done with the whole awful experience. But soon after she saw online that he had a new girlfriend.

Adelaide is the sort of city where like everybody knows everybody, but I don't know, you're never more than two degrees away from anybody. I didn't know this woman, but we had mutual friends and she had a job working with children, So I ended up reaching out to this woman. We spoke on the phone. I was like, hey, I don't know how involved you are with this guy, but this

But there was something she learned from her new friend that she couldn't let go.

She told me that nobody contacted his ex wife and told her. His family didn't the police did it, and so he was still seeing his child in this period of time. It's not up to me whether he sees this child or not. I have nothing to do with that. But I was just so stunned that nobody gave her this information so that she could make an informed decision. At this point, I was like, is it my job to tell her? Do I get involved in this?

It's maddening. Doesn't it feel like something law enforcement or protective services should do? But they hadn't. And this is where we want to say bravo and thank you to Melanie because she stepped up. She took it on for no other reason but concern for someone else's child.

I phoned her and I was like, I know, this is weird. I just see five minutes of your time. I told her what had happened, and she was understandably horrified, crying on the phone because she was married to this man. For seven years and had a child with him, had no idea that any of this had happened. And that was kind of like the last that I had to do with it, because I was like, I now need to step away from this.

You may remember from the podcast and erin situation, it took three years for the state of Texas to bring her husband to justice. It seemed to be similar in Adelaide.

At the time that they had arrested him and taken all his devices and stuff like that. The police said they had such a backlog of these cases that it could be like a year, year and a half before they even got around to searching his drives, because that's how common these crimes were. This wasn't even priority. It was like more than a year later that I finally followed up with them because nobody contacted me. I was like,

Melanie's story resonated for a few reasons. She listened to her gut and didn't dismiss her feelings of something being off with her partner. She refused to accept excuses that made no sense, and she went to great lengths to protect women and children. She doesn't even know. No, people like Melanie don't get parades, but I'd give her a cape. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. That's