This episode contains references to suicide. You can find links in our show notes to support services. For over twenty years, Natalia Burgess has created online fantasy worlds using photographs lifted from the social media accounts of others. She has crafted worlds where she's pretty popular and surrounded by a group of friends who are equally beloved. She could have stopped at breathing life until all these characters and just basked in the attention that they received, living as Abbi Becker,
Rachel Kayley and all the other names. But she went so much further. She's the writer, director, and producer of her own cinematic universe, where the most extraordinary things can and usually do happen, and often they happen because Natalia engineers it to be so. Remember, she has called herself up a tear. She's convinced people to become online friends, lovers, surrogate grandparents for children who didn't exist. Her characters have
fallen pregnant and miscarried. She's killed off characters with car accidents and suicide, then broken the news over the phone to people who shock at the loss. Is still palpable today, as you've heard over the last three episodes. Many of those full Bonatalia have strong feelings about her behavior.
And to this day always looking over my shoulder. I don't want friendships because of this.
It's her and annoy that she's done all this for what what reason would she get out of doing this?
It was crazy. It was like she knew where to hit us were her.
She's just shadow stalker. I don't trust people. You just want to co sort the skirl ours, give her a shake and say what's wrong with you?
That was almost to the point where it made me sick and the stomach well of what this woman.
Was do we I'm so so and agree with her.
She just doesn't get the fact that she's messing with people's lives.
She's a monster. She is a monster with no conscience.
You can understand the pain and heartbreak that these people have felt. It took years for some of them to realize the truth about how they have been betrayed. Many are still living with the pain and trauma from those incidents now. But another thing many share is a need to understand Natalia, to understand why someone they didn't know caused them so much pain. My name's David Fisher and I'm the investigative journalist who exposed Natalia thirteen years ago,
and ever since I've wanted that too. I want to know what makes Natalia tick, and I know just the right person to help me understand the puppeteer.
I'm doctor Justin Barry walf She, a forensic psychiatrist. Have been doing that for about thirty years. What that means is I am a psychiatrist that works with people that come into contact with law in various ways, particularly those people that can make criminal offenses.
Justin works with a wide range of people with mental health issues who have committed crimes from the low to the most serious end of the scale. I met Justin because of the work he was doing identifying people who have particular fixations with politicians.
I work as the lead clinician for the Fixator Threat Assessment Center, which is a novel service that deals with people that communicate in concerning and threatening ways with politicians. The reason for doing that is not tech politicians, but because it identifies a group of people are often an urgent need of intervention and mental health treatment.
As a journalist, when I'm writing about people who do unusual things, I find it possible to ignore the question why. It's a question that scratches at me because it's not just an enough to explain what someone is doing. Rather, I need to understand what drove someone to do what
they did or behave as they have. When it came to finding a mental health professional with an expertise and people who had fixations who was stalkers, Dr Barry Walsh is the perfect sounding board to help me understand Natalia. I provided Dr Barry Walsh with as much base information as I could, and that included all the stories published, But I first encountered Natalia and the judges sentencing notes from twenty thirteen and the parole reports when Natalia sought
to be released from jail. First though a caveat, one from me and one from Dr Barry Walsh, but both with the same message. What we learn here is speculation, albeit speculation informed through three decades of experience. Here's Dr Barry Walsh with the same message.
I qualify what I'd say first by indicating I've never interview this woman. So there's a great deal. I don't know about it.
But there's enough there to get an inkling, a speculative inkling that for me rings true. With all I now know about Natalia.
What strikes me about this woman is from a psychiatric perspective. I see it primarily as having difficulties and profound difficulties based on the information that's available to me in her personality functioning, this sense of identity, and the way in which she expresses herself, and that includes presumably in her sexuality, and in her ability and facility to relate to other people.
I think these are the kind of things that probably are contributing to this extraordinary pattern of behavior that we're seeing.
An extraordinary pattern of behavior, well, that's one way of putting it. But before we get any further, we need to take a step back. For three episodes, we've heard from a lot of Natalia's victims. We've been talking a lot about Natalia and her characters, but not as much about the woman herself. I think it's about time you met Natalia properly to give you a better, more rounded picture of who she is. I need to share what
I've learned about her over the last thirteen years. And the first thing I'll tell you about Natalia is that, in spite of all that she has done, I like her. She's a bright, bubbly personality. She's also self aware and she's fragile. This is chasing ghosts, the puppeteer, and it's time we met the woman who's pulling the strings. Natalia
raved Burgess was born in nineteen eighty four. She's of some own ethnicity and adopted into a Parlagy or European family who adoptive parents are hard working, church going people whose lives have largely revolved around their service to the Salvation Army. The Natalia Io Church is an important part
of her life. With her parents' lives dedicated to service through the Salvation Army, they moved around a lot, so while Natalia might have started in Hamilton, there were periods lived in Palmsden North and Christchurch and for a period on the West Coast of the South Island. The West Coast is one of New Zealand's least diverse communities. In twenty twenty three, when nine percent of New Zealand's population identified as Pacifica, the community on the West Coast was
a fraction, not even two percent. It's hard to describe how isolating that experience would have been. In her nineteen ninety two class photo from Westport North School. Natalia is one of the few facing the camera who is not European, and of those kids, she's the only one who's not Malory. By her teenage years. Though Natalie was in christ Church
at Avonside Girls High. In classmates I've spoken to, they remember her as trouble, someone who gossiped, caused drama, and this was something she acknowledged later in her interview with sixty Minutes.
I started stealing to buy friends, and that's probably where it all started. From buying friends. I can remember very vivili asist your money and then invite everyone in the classroom fish ships for lunch.
It was around this period she told me that she began to abuse alcohol and drugs.
It started off.
Just like alcohol and we done in christ Church and agree spa hero one for a little bit. And then I went to Rehead and supposedly that saved the whole world, but it didn't.
It was just a great, big lie. And then we came up here and I was introduced to pee and then that was.
The end of it.
How's that decade old audio quality? If you've been listening since episode one, then you may recognize that crackle and all that background noise. That was back in twenty eleven when I interviewed Natalia for the first time at the Muffin break in the Westfield malland Monaco, You'll recall that it took me a while to get the interview with Natalia. I'd written several stories by the time Natalia finally agreed to chat, all of them from the perspective of her
victims and those who have been hurt by her. But this was the first time I really got to know her story in her own words, though her story can also be found through court documents from around the country. There's a lot of darkness in Natalia's backstory, drug abuse, addiction issues, gang connections.
I don't know who I.
Am without the drugs because the drugs have been in my life since I was Bourte. I'd been part of different games. I've been part of, you know that kind of stuffed at I was Bourte.
And there's prostitution as well in her past.
So motions related to with a six week no But you've been fought by police workers six weekly.
Why did you do that?
Where did Jandigo past hitch?
Yeah, when you're quite young then was that it was a long time ago down there.
I was fourteene.
Yeah.
Natalia left christ Church around the age of seventeen or eighteen and moved to Auckland. That criminal offending continued there, which was when Natalia started down the path that leads us to this podcast. Back in twenty eleven, Natalia told me that in christ Church she had never used the Internet because the family didn't have a computer. But in two thousand and one, when Natalia moved to Auckland with her family, she did have access, and that's when her
relationship with social media began. Back then, the Internet was very much in its infancy, the age of dial up modems that you couldn't use the same time in order to make a phone call. When Natalia ventured online, she found a corner of the Internet called usenet, a network of online discussion forums broken up into specific interest areas used at birth a lot of the terms we now use online, such as faq or spam and sock puppet,
the term used for online false identities. And that's where Natalia started using a character called Chickadee and creating an online persona. That was the beginning of sprawling fancy worlds that would last for decades.
Yeah, that was like when we first moved to Auckland, and that was the found a net that was using different handles rather than different personalities.
Then it was just an emits of thing.
As technology developed, it created further richer opportunities.
And the more the years prose, I think, the more I got better at it and the more I got clever, and all technology came into handlight elf wound.
It's difficult to track when exactly catfishing became what appears to be a full time job for Natalia. I can guess that as more social media networks launched that she slowly found a way online. It was MySpace in two thousand and three, Bibo in two thousand and five, and the big one, Facebook in two thousand and six. We know, for example, that one of her first fully fleshed out characters was called Amy, who found life on Bibo in
its early days. We also know that it was around two thousand and six that she started taking the photos that formed the basis for the Laura West character. At this time, Natalia was in Wellington because court documents show that she lied to the charity for Pregnant Young People about expecting a child, and while in Wellington, there were
two teenagers that she became involved with. I can't say too much about the case, but I did speak with the mother of these boys, who recalls the Talia calling with some big news.
She said she was pregnant to one or the other of the boys. This was our first grandchild. They thought they could handle it, but she's obsessive.
This was around the time Natalia sought shelter at the Home for teenage Mums. Ultimately, she was convicted of ford because well, she wasn't pregnant.
I don't know if she knows herself where the truth ends and the facts begin.
She tells so many stories.
She weaves in these stories, she finds out about all their friends and weaves in people in the neighborhood.
By two thousand and eight, Natalie was in prison and even from behind bars, was able to reach out and connect with those she was falling. Another mom I spoke to a woman whose son Natalia formed a relationship with through a false character record communication, with her switching from mainly online to mainly tell her phone. It was only much later that she learned Natalia had been in prison and at a time inside overlapped with the increase in voice calls, but it wasn't only voice calls. Even when
in prison, Natalia claimed she could go online. When I introduced Natalia to the woman who was the face for Laura West, this is what she said during that conversation.
All those times there was chances for me to go online, still pretend to du online. We could guard there would bring.
Us uff in.
By twenty ten, Natalie was out of prison and living with her parents back in Auckland, not far from Monaco. She told me later that she'd given up drugs at this point, which we'll come back to. We also know that she was obsessed with Shortened Street, New Zealand's longest running soap opera at the time. She would go on to link her false characters to several of the actors, claiming either a connection by family or in one case,
claiming that she was carrying an actor's child. Speaking to me in twenty eleven, a year later, Natalia said that she had wanted to give it all up.
I think I was just trying to get rid of it, Like I got rid of Amy and then I got seen to jail.
End the story.
Amy got rid of I got rid of got seen to Jaile Inger player story and I dad.
Deal with anybody ir again. And then when I got out of jail, I'm not what happened.
I think I just went on Laura's a great profile and then I just he hatted talking Van and I had a horrible day at home.
I think in the probation.
Officer they had really about session and then I just ended up starting.
All over you.
The death of Amy is not the last time Natalia killed off her character, but she had plenty of other characters to take her place. Laura, Rachel Becker, Abby, this was their time to shine. That's when Natalia's schemes and machinations went into high gear. The number of people she engaged with ramped up. This is when she started catfishing the likes of Ethan and Sam from episode one, when
she met the mother and daughter Bernie and Emma. When she went after around forty boys from Saint Thomas's School in Canterbury, it was all consuming, an all but guarantee that someone somewhere was going to take action, and that turned out to be me revealing her identity in twenty eleven. Two years later, she went to jail and when sentenced, the judge told the court Natalia had around forty convictions in total, multiple convictions for fraud in number for not
complying with court orders. There she stayed until May twenty fifteen, when she was released on parole. That is, until she was caught in breach of a parole condition that she wasn't to access the Internet, and that led to a return to jail and another six months on her sentence. She was eventually released in November twenty fifteen. Then at some point in twenty sixteen, Kaylie Rose emerges We're in the face of Crystal Jenna and starts messaging Danica Baxter.
With all that in mind, let's go back to Dr Justin Barry Walsh, and again I must stress he is speculating.
Look, the first thing is that she sounds like she's been doing this since the internet's been available to do this, which leads me to speculate that even prior to that, she had a proclivity for or a tendency to invent or to fantasize about herself and who she was. Because that doesn't just start suddenly. I think that it highlights
that there are enduring aspects of his secological makeup. One of the things that strikes me is she has this incredible capacity and tendency in quite a self destructive way, ultimately to lie and to lie about everything, to lie about her identity, and to exaggerate in kind of grandiose and fantastic ways at times as well. You don't look at all these dramatic things she's claimed. Now, there is a term for that. It is just a description of
the behavior. We call it pseudo logia fantastic, which just means a fantastic lying when translated in my experience and from the limited literature about this as a behavior when it emerges in the context of personality disturbance, because there can be other things sitting underneath it, it often seems to relate to someone who has a profound sense of inadequacy about who they are, not sure who they are, and a desire to lie in order to be or to possess things that she doesn't have.
Which from reminded me of something that Tarlie has said on Sixty Minutes.
I've never felt a traits of and I've never felt love a mess. I literally didn't like how I was, I hated my life and so that's when I first created Amy.
Back to Dr Barry Walsh, as I've had a sense of inadequacy and low self esteem in terms of who she is and what she aspires or would like to be. I mean, so it suggests that one of the functions of these fantasies is to meet this terrible need that she has to fill this awful gap. She doesn't know who she is, and she feels very bad about how she views herself.
I told Doctor Barry Walsh about the elaborate family tree I'd found which mapped out the relationships between the personas the one reference back in episode three.
That's an extraordinary amount of time and commitment to create that kind of family tree. All of the stuff that she does takes an awfu way work. So this consumes her life. She's spectated in a sense, on this endless drive to engage it in these ways. She's not just doing it in her spare time.
That actually feeds back to one thing that Talie has said to me in twenty eleven that stood out.
As much as everyone says they were all faked, that was my life. I was living on the end of that cat room, you know.
I got up in the morning, I went to church, I did the work stuff, I did whatever I was doing in a normal day.
It wasn't my fake's life that I was living. It was my life.
That makes any sense, it kind of does.
But but you didn't put your life or your life gets dissminated through a different place, personalities or whatever it might be, or.
No, because when I talk to people on the phone and it's fake, it's fill my life.
That I lived.
She definitely was investing a lot of time in this. At one point in our chat, she guesses it creating about ten differentiles, though also stresses how complicated tracking multiple accounts can be.
But I don't usually talk to more than one person at a time. I didn't horribly compared.
I don't know how you keep tracking it anyway, you keep tracking things.
In or.
Stuffed up. So many times I've called this wrong person, I pulled myself the wrong name. I've called the wrong boy the wrong name.
You go.
It should be stressed here. And doctor Barry Walsh did stress this when we spoke that while we have some insight from Natalia herself, we are doing a fair degree of speculation. We also have parole reports which make reference to mental health and the sentencing notes. There's also Natalia's own words in which she has spoken of a diagnosis.
We know from what you've written about that she's set to you has borderline personality disorder.
That's right. Here's me talking to Natalia in twenty eleven, had mental health assessments.
Do you want another day?
Yeah? I do.
I really want to know because I want to try and understand why this has happening.
Ball on my personality disorder. Yeah, the musciple personality disorder. So when I create these people, I actually think I am these people. Sometimes when I get that caught up in those worlds, I.
Used to think I was that person.
Doctor Justin Barry Walsh called this a somewhat problematic diagnosis.
What it's trying to capture is a group of people who do struggle with their sense of identity and struggle in their relationships with others. And one of the things you commonly see with these people is they're both terrified of being abandoned and feel threatened by intimacy. And it may be that she's got that to do an extreme degree, and that she has this terrible need to establish relationships and it's easier for her to do it online. It's less threatening for her, and it's easier for her to
sustain those relationships of the relationships mostly online. Another thing that supports the speculation is the extraordinary sense of drama connected to so much of what she does and the stories that she tells, and that's I'm guessing both to elicit sympathy and support. But I wonder also whether because of her lack of sense of self, of good stable identity, she actually struggles to properly feel emotions, so she needs
exaggerated and extreme events to feel real. I think one of the other striking things about this is how little regard she shows for the feeling and welfare of other people,
because the amount of harm that she creates. And it may be that she's just really impaired in her understanding of how other people are and therefore really impaired in a capacity to feel empathy, so that there isn't the restraint that most of us would have from us acting in these ways, because we would understand just how ghastly
and distressing it may be to other people. Don't know the details of a treatment, but it's pretty clear that it is resistant to the kind of things that might change our behavior in most of us, particularly criminal sanctions.
But he thinks there's a deeper issue here.
I think this woman is looking for relationships. I suspect that she really struggles in real life relationships, and it is this drive for relatedness, this wish to feel connected, that is another motivation, and that would be consistent with her then seeking out these kind of relationships where she can function as younger than she is, so maybe less mature and maybe a little bit regressed, if you like, in more need of care and support, and have a
kind of maternal relationship with the older woman that is sustained for years. So it has been my thought that looking at this, if you look at it from a relationship perspective, there's both clearly a sexual aspect to the behavior, but also this need for her to establish relationships. When I looked at the materials that you sent through, what she starts appalling and the harm that she's created is terrible,
and her baby is have been exploitative. Yet you can't help but feel sad for a woman that seems utterly lost and as you say, without love.
Let's just pause there for a minute, since we set out to tell the story. I've had a lot of feedback, and a lot of it is really negative towards Natalia, and I understand that she's had a terrible impact on a lot of people. But one of the issues I've had in trying to understand Natalia is knowing there's a gap in her life that she'd been trying to fill
for twenty three years. Like Dr Barry Walsh, I've also been unable to shake a feeling of sadness the Natalia's plight, and yet it can be so difficult at times to put to one side the damage she's caused, so I can see clearly this person who's been such a wrecking
ball like this. For example, when we first met in twenty eleven, Natalia spoke of an eighteen year old with whom she had formed an eight month relationship through the persona Abbey Abby, you recall, was Laura West's sister, the one who announced her car crash death to the world and then called Bernie to break the news in person. Well, Abby was also being used to catfish men and form relationships, and one young man's relationship with Abby led to eight
months of drama until Natalia killed abbe off. This time it was death by suicide. It's worth noting that while one version of Abby died, the version that would later call Bernie was still alive. There weren't just singular versions of these characters. Natalia had her own multi verse that she was working with. Less soap opera now and maybe more Marvel movie anyway. Off the back of Abby's death, Natalia used that incident to berate the young man herself.
We thought once and I blamed him for Abbie's peace, and I got quite aratical Edhiman yelling and screamed and was great grinth and an abusive shit.
Adam, you created a fake pershono. They have a romantic relationship with an eighteen year old boy and then killed her.
That's that's second. That's really awful. There were times when I just wasn't sure how to respond. I don't think she was particularly interested in or even aware of any judgment I might have. There was a lot of which she seemed unaware, and even when interviewing Natalia, she struggled to separate her fantasy world from the real world, or to even really get her facts straight. She claimed during our interview, for example, that she had been in Palmston
North in two thousand and nine. Yeah, I know she lived there at one point, but she was in jail between two thousand and eight and twenty ten. She also told media that by twenty eleven she had spent much of the last six years in jail, which isn't entirely true. She certainly would have been on remand a lot due to the sheer number of charges against her, but at that point her only long term prison stint had been from two thousand and eight. Means that trying to actually
make sense of Natalia's story can be really difficult. She doesn't really know her own story and what she does know, I'm never really sure what I can believe. As a journalist, I'm best working off the facts, and the only definite facts we have in this case are her times before the courts didn't help back in twenty eleven, that at every opportunity Natalia minimized her actions.
It started off.
Running games and then it turned into the great big mess representment.
Right now, I don't think anyone's going to think it's very funny being rung up and.
Told that a friend of theirs is dead. I wanted to do that again that isn't quite true. There's Bernie, Emma's mum, who Natalia directly phoned to break the news that Laura West, her niece, was dead. But she also confronted an eighteen year old about Abbie's death as well. And back in twenty eleven, I also spoke with a young woman who'd been friends with Amy Marie West, Natalia's original fake account.
I thought she was my best friend, my sister. We talked on the phone about everything.
In two thousand and nine, Natalia as Laura called her to tell her that Amy had died from suicide.
I felt there was nothing I could do for myself anymore. Amy had texted me just before she committed suicide saying she loved me and she was sorry. Then I got that phone call, which completely broke my heart. It is a twisted, messed up story, and it has affected a lot of people.
That young woman went on to receive psychological care after this ordeal. I kept saying to her that her targets, those she had hooked into relationships and those that she had manipulated, that they were just kids, That there was so much younger than.
She was, seventy year old boys, and girls. That does seem to me, like that's a ten eleven year age to fruce, but not.
When you say you're eighteen.
I was that caught up in my own little fancy will that the rest of the world like this around me didn't exist.
I didn't really care as.
The building next door fell down the steps and broke his head, because that wasn't part of my online will, in my online fancy.
Natalia also seemed to think that people shouldn't just believe her.
Attend to somebody that a friend of theirs was dead their friends.
I didn't know that they must dog notether than my shit they came out of my mouth. If it sounds plausible.
And that distancing from responsibility, well, that echoed some of what Natalie had messaged me online.
Who got hurt? If I wanted to have sex with them, I would have made it happen, don't you think? But I never did. Everything was fake. Nothing was real, fake plane tickets too, Just a tad hurtful. But hey, you play they with fire, you will get burned.
Natalia told sixty Minutes that she got a thrill out of creating the characters and then putting the scenarios into play.
They were the puffets, and I was the puffetier, and I was just pulling the strings and sitting back and watching the show.
I was the puffetier and I was.
The audience, you know, and I kind of got off and that sometimes when I used to watch and fight over me, kind of made me feel like I was fifteen again, you know. People were fighting over me and fighting over the fact that they wanted to be my friend.
And she told me that the kick she got was like drugs. And so each time she says she's going to stop, it has continued. The only quiet period I've found over twenty three years, aside from dialing it down a bit when she was in jail, there's been this last year when Natalia found out I was investigating her again, and perhaps that's because she knows what happened last time I broke the story. The media went wild, police got
into gear, and she went to jail. It's a bit like the theory which Dr Barry Walsh felt carried some weight, that she's moved away from underage boys because she'd been caught. It's as if she's trying to avoid the trouble she knows is coming down the track, but Natalia held the view that she could be stopped only not through her own actions. I had asked her about this in twenty eleven, putting forward to her what seemed like an obvious way
to stop her from going online. Do you think you should get rid of the computer?
I don't.
I don't have my phone now, But you've.
Been online in the last three or four days.
Yeah, my phone, right. Do you think you need to get rid of your phone too?
No?
This may be freeing.
Rather, this was the Tarlia's view of how she and we could be free from what she herself has called sex little head games.
What does work is a mental intervention.
Then I get put in places like respite where I have to face up to what I've been doing.
People can all.
Talk about what they can do to help me and what they do, but no one actually steps up and goes we'll calcurves, We'll make you'll find out what's going on in that horrible A look at it first.
The more I learned, the deeper I studied Natalia, I found myself caught between a horror and her actions, and a surge of empathy towards a woman who's more to deal with the most, and I have to keep reminding myself, pulling myself back to the damage that she has caused. Even more than that, understanding the long and deep hurt that she has created. For this investigation, there were many interviews carried out, and many of those reminded me of
the toll Natalia has exacted from the world. While they all moved or provoked me in one way or another. There who interviews particularly which will sit with me for a long time. The other one, well you'll hear that in the next episode. But right now, in a story that's not as black and white as it seems, is a particularly haunty darkness in the form of Peter Russell's mom.
Laura Laura West. She was a stunning, beautiful, blonde haired girl. He really loved her. He talked to me about her, tell me what his plans were.
She just played games with him, you know, I just really played games with my son and really got him in a bad place, to the pot where.
He couldn't deal with life, and he went and committed suicide over her.
This is rawn Ford. You heard her back in episode one. His son, Peter Russell died in twenty ten. His name has come up a few times in this story. He was dating Emma, and you've heard some of Peter's stone in earlier episodes, but now you're going to hear much more, and you're going to hear it from Raywan his mum. And what you will hear is a grief that is
deep and raw. For all the time that has passed since Peter died, it's going to be hard to listen to, but it's a necessary part of this story because it shows just how dark the saga is the impact and ramifications of behavior by Natalia Burgess. Peter Russell died on October twenty seven, twenty ten. When Raymond and I spoke last year, it happened to be the thirteenth anniversary of his death. It wasn't planned that way, but the anniversary of his death hung over our interview like a cloud.
It's today.
It's the last day that I ever see why son alive. My son was dead by midnight tonight.
I was twenty one years old when he died, based in christ Church, had a young son at the time from an earlier relationship, and three months before his death, he had been in a relationship with Laura Jane West. He thought he was dating a vivacious, blonde, twenty year old Aucklander, a young parent like him who had a small daughter called Kaylee. Peter thought Laura was at the center of a bubbly online social group of young women. In reality, there was no Laura and no social group
of young women. It was all Natalia for Peter, though. It was real, so real that he and his real life girlfriend Emma went their separate ways. When I spoke to Emma, she told me that she had stepped aside so her first love, Peter, could forge a relationship with Laura, the woman that she believed was her cousin. It was so real, and Peter he got about as serious as it gets.
Give me that much to him. He asked her to marry him, though really he must have loved her deeply. He was happy.
He was so happy that, you know, he had found somebody and he was going to go up north and he was going to meet her and get asked her to marry him, and they were going to get married.
And then she went.
Overseas and married somebody else, and he really broke his hearts when undone what he done.
I need to be clear here that this is Raven's opinion, a mother's view on why her boy took his life.
There was an.
Official inquiry into Peter's suicide, but the coroner ruled that any findings as the cause of his death in that official setting could not be made public. Natalie was not held responsible in any capacity for Peter's death. Raven, though she links Peter's death to his heartbreak after the collapse of the relationship that was the only solid thing he could rely on in a tumultuous phase in his life.
The game she played with that boy and the mental anguish that she put him through was just unbelievable. One minute she'd be in contact with him, and then next minute she'd be in hospital when something had happened. And then she'd been overseas and she married somebody else, and then she come back and wanted to be with my son again, and just juent games.
It was an intense relationship that played out almost entirely online. The timeline of when it started is a bit vague. Natalia, when I spoke to her in twenty eleven, she put the start date around April twenty ten, and she linked their relationship to her quitting drugs.
I gave up the drugs the day me and Peter got together.
So April eleventh, two thousand and ten, was the day that I gave up all.
That was like the day after I got al jail.
It was that much though, that Peter proposed to Laura, posting his video on social media asking her to marry him. It's possible that their relationship could have started while Natalie was in prison. We know from other victims and from Natalia's own words that she was still able to access the Internet while she was inside. At any rate, Peter and Natalia never met in person despite the escalation and
their relationship. Laura, as she was, accepted the wedding proposal, but later canceled their first physical meeting, which was to take place at Christchurch Airport two months later, like Natalia did with Emma and Bernie and later with Danaka and Lisa. There was a reason why Laura said she had to go to England instead, because her father had a heart attack. It was in June twenty ten that Raymond understands Laura broke up with Peter, claiming she'd married someone else instead.
I should note that Natalia has a different version of events on how the relationship ended and her decision to not meet with Peter.
I think because towards the ended it was forwards the end of the relationship. I said, I was going to go down to the Zeeca and thanks.
She's got too much for me mentally, trying to pretend to big R plus physically it got too much. Like me and Peter used to argue towards the end of the last three or four weeks of.
Our relationship, and oh my god, when when he.
Argues with me, I used to argue back twice to set and I think I just got there, got too much.
So I was just like that stuff I And so when he ended it, it was such a relief.
His mom and she ended it.
I ended it.
Yeah, No, he ended it.
If I saw her the Bigo page, I show you the message that he ended.
I tried, my very very hunt, tried to get us back to Heaven, Laura back together and to.
Try and stop the fighting.
But both us, both of us, we were getting sicker and sicker, and I just I just there wasn't any like I couldn't tell him anything.
Again, given Natalia's tendency for fabrication, it's difficult to know how much weight to give her version of events. One thing that one of Peter's cousins told me back in twenty eleven was that Peter had told family members of his fear that naked videos he had sent to Natalia would be released online, and that may also play into the family's blame of Natalia. Natalia, though has denied ever
having any naked imagery of Peter. There are many things Raymond will never forget from that time, load the knock on her door eight o'clock on a Thursday morning with news that no mother wants to hear.
Well, everybody heard me screaming, and the worst thing of always having to go and actually identifying my baby.
There's part of the interview with Raymond that we can't broadcast. That's because New Zealand Lord prohibits talking about the means by which someone has taken their life. It's intended to shield the public from details that might put ideas of self harm into people's minds. I can tell you Raymond wasn't shielded from anything. When she went to formally identify Peter's body, she could see clearly what he had done to himself every day.
I still go to bed now, thirteen years down the track, and when I go to sleep, but I still see my son land in a wall, and that's something I can't get rid of. No mother should either have to go to sleep like that at night and see those pictures in her head.
At the time her son died, Raymond had no idea and Natalia existed in her grief. She abandoned their home in christ Church and fled to Nelson, and there some years later, she met Daryl. It was her first life and together they rekindled something special in the seven years it took before she could return to her hometown. And it was in Nelson in twenty eleven that Ramond picked up a newspaper because she saw Laura West's face on the front page, and that's when she learned what had
really happened. So distraught, so upset, Roman took the newspaper home to where she kept Peter's ashes.
And I showed him look at what it was with so angry. I'm so so angry with her. She just doesn't get the fact that she's messing with people's life.
And she remembers how that left her feeling.
Really really angry, really angry. My son took his life because he thought he was in love with a beautiful woman.
She's a lonster.
Incredibly, Natalia had approached Peter's younger brother before the suicide, and then again after when the teenager sixteen at the time, visited family in Auckland. Natalia sought him out in person before being told to leave by a family member.
Honestly, I wanted to go looking for as Caleb and Peter's mother, I really wanted to go and look for her, and I really wanted to hurt her badly, but it's not worth it.
The loss of Peter was a bomb that sent blast waves through Rawn's life. She has other children that she no longer speaks to, and the haunting knowledge Peter's son will never know his dad.
She's just totally destroyed us.
There's one thing Rawn wants to know from Natalia.
I want to know how she felt. How did she feel when my son took his life? Because I don't know. I know how I felt. I don't know how she felt, but I'd like to know, and I'd like to know it from her voice.
Well, I can answer that. As Natalia addressed her guilt over Peter back in twenty eleven.
I do feel guilty. Yeah, do you know when Peter died? If we're going to go talk about that.
When Peter died, I went to choose the Friday night and I've never ever ever been one to cry in front of people.
I wrote down and tears.
Yeah, I had to lie about what had happened and why I was upset and what Peter was to me.
But I so felt so shockingly horrible.
And then because you know, his mum thinks that you're the reason why Peter like said, yeah, I know she doesn't.
I think you're not the first person to tell me that.
But I don't understand how you can blame somebody because it was like it's cruel and horrible, like what I used to do.
Like what I used to do. Another example of Natalia claiming she'd given up catfishing, and we know how that ends, don't we. Peter would be thirty four if he was still alive today.
A mama's boy, Joe anywhere in everywheel with mum, go shopping, go to housy, go to the pub, make sure mum was all right. You know, when he was a little kidd he decided to paint his sister, bright yellow, bright canary yellow from head to toe, a little rugby h I miss those things. I love him most.
I'm sorry that he hate to go through what he went through.
I'm sorry that he couldn't talk to me about it.
Those things there you were saying sorry about it sounds Raven as if you feel guilt about what's happened as well.
Because I up and I should have protected him. I should have known what was going on with him, but I didn't. Also, in your he was talking to Laura on casebook. How can you heal a shattered heart?
You can't.
You can mean a broken one, but you can't heal a shattered heart.
It was a big step for Raven to speak with me. She canceled once because the thought of it was just too much. And I understand that I'm a father myself, and over the years I've talked to many people who have lost children. I've never understood how they can find words to put to those feelings of grief and guilt and love. But then Raven messaged me back and we did arrange to speak, and this is what she said when I asked her why she changed her mind.
I have to take a stand for my son.
I have to be his voice because he's not here to talk, and if I could try and stop her, I'm going to do everything I can to do it. There's no other parent should he have to go through what life is Amily's gone through?
Why does she do it? What is she lacking in her life?
I honestly thought after my's son committed suicide over what she had done, that that would have been her wake up call.
But it's not.
She's still doing it.
Why can the government not step in and put protocols in place to protect people? Surely there must be something out there that the government can do.
I've spoken to a number of people for this series who've been victims of Natalia in various ways, but Raven has hurt more than most of them. Yet all of them have had their lives ruined, touched in an adverse way by Natalia. Crystal has been fighting her stolen photographs for a decade now. Danika and Lisa were deceived for six years and still feel the heat thirteen years on.
Bernie told me how she still can't trust people. Countless other people who I spoke to back in twenty eleven and approached again for the series who don't want to talk again on the record as the memories are too painful. So while Natalia's life has been difficult at times, that certainly doesn't excuse the things she's done and the impact
her catfishing has had. For two years in jail in twenty thirteen might seem like a reasonable punishment for her crimes, but those came after earl instance in jail as well, and in all the years since she left prison at the end of twenty fifteen, she has faced no consequences for the actions that followed. When Crystal Jenna emailed me at the end of twenty twenty two, it was the first time in years that I'd thought about Natalia Burgess.
My interest in where she was in the world and what she was up to had largely ended in twenty thirteen when she was sent to jail. In hindsight, it feels like maybe I should have checked in, but I didn't. Perhaps I thought the conviction and sentence would have sent message that had been listened to. Perhaps it was that
Natalia's behavior was so outlandish. I thought that lightning couldn't strike twice, but it did, and here we are now, as the evidence mounted that Natalia had been catfishing again. I knew I had to track her down and get her side of the story that had been years without contact. So I started with what worked last time, visiting her parents' home in Monaco, and that didn't help. Natalia's parents had moved and the neighbors had no idea where they're gone.
In the court file and other documents, well, the only address that held was the old address. In the end, cross referencing property records with a public registry on which her dad was listed gave me a new address. It's a road which repeats numbers as you go through suburbs. So there was a bit of door knocking until finally I found her parents' home, and perhaps only they wanted nothing to do with me. I was hoping to find Natalia right bye, here, Can you tell me where I could find nice?
You were very nice to us at times?
Why should I help you?
Well, because she's doing the same thing again and you might want to stalk.
Well, I'm not helping you out.
I don't like you.
I can understand your feel that way. While they didn't talk, it did spark Natalia and I reconnecting in her preferred environment, Facebook.
Leave us alone. You're trespassing if you go near me and my family again.
I replied, reminding Natalia of our past interactions and letting you know that I was doing a podcast on her.
What have my parents got to do with this?
I was trying to find you. You're the person I want to talk to.
What if I just want to leave the past in the past.
The past isn't in the past, is it. I've been talking to Crystal.
Okay, fair coll But life is good right now, so let me think about it, and it's not going in the paper.
In the thumbnail photographs that accompanied those messages, Natalia looks happy. She's smiling at the camera, and at his side, a clean shaven man leans and snuggled at her shoulder. Natalia didn't want her story to again appear in the newspaper because she didn't want her parents to see anything. She figured they might not see a story online and almost certainly weren't going to listen to a newfangled podcast, but they would see it in the letterbox when the morning
newspaper was delivered. I couldn't promise her that all those old strands of media have blended together now, so there's no guarantee in New Zealand Herald podcast won't end up on the front page or elsewhere in the newspaper, and we don't promise people where their coverage will and won't go. Regardless, I think Natalia would have always gone cold on me. She didn't want to talk in twenty eleven, so it was no surprise she again didn't want to talk to
me in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four. What she wanted to do was to keep me at arm's length, far enough away that I'd never be able to finish this podcast or write about her, and clearly that didn't work. The more I investigated, the more I found there were questions which Natalia, in my view, really needed to answer. As the months went by, we stayed in touch. Sometimes we'd talk on the phone, other times we'd message, and
there was a blended nature to those conversations. Partly it was Natalia trying to work out how much I knew. Partly though, Natalie was also trying to push me off into the future just another week, just another month, or trying to control what we might do, like insisting on no photographs for a few months. The conversation went quiet. I took a break for a long planned family vacation,
and Ethan, my producer, was working through other projects. I started messaging to Tarli again during this time, but despite that contact the trail had gone cold, and Natalia she stopped picking up calls and responding to messages. I didn't know where she was, possibly Auckland, possibly funk at a possibly elsewhere in the country. As the launch date for episode one got closer and closer, it was becoming an increase in concern that Natalie wouldn't talk to us at all.
And then, just days before the first episode went live, I sent Natalia one more message, one that included a long list of questions I wanted answered, one that let her know the podcast was about to be released. There was a message that let her know there were no more tomorrows which you might push the future away, And with that it seemed now finally she wanted to talk, so next time. In the final episode of Chasing Ghosts, the puppeteer no characters, no stolen photos, no computer screen
to hide behind. For the first time in thirteen years, the Tania Burgess fronts up. You've been listening to Chasing Ghosts the Puppeteer. Follow the podcast and the Chasing Ghost Feed on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find more on this case at inzid Herald dot co dot z ethanselves is my producer, with audio engineering by Alistair Boys. Thanks to my colleagues for lending
their voices to this episode. If you have a story about this case, contact me at David dot Fisher at inzid, herold dot co dot zen. And if you believe you've encountered behavior online that matches what we've discussed in this series, you can if won't help it netsafe dot org dot m Z. But if you feel at risk, don't hesitate, contact police