Hey, Chico here. Just wanted to let you know that this episode has a short mention of self-harm. Please take care while listening. It was the middle of the night. Patty's face glowed in the light of her phone. She was still awake and still scrolling through Instagram. So I was not sleeping because I was like searching for her and then I had to work. It was now more than three months since her best friend Desiree had ghosted all her family and friends.
and moved in with her supermodel life coach Kat Torres. And every day, Patty spent hours searching through social media for any clues to their whereabouts. Her friends had begun to notice the effect it was having on her. The people around me, they're a little bit like, maybe she just don't want to talk to you. And Patti was beginning to wonder if maybe they were right. Maybe you should live your life and not spend too much time. Search for someone that they don't want to talk to you.
But then she got a message on WhatsApp. It was an invite to a group chat called Friends of Desiree. There was a lot of people in the group and they are trying to find her, to help her. One of the people in the group chat was Lau. She had met Tessire a few years before at an English language school. There was so much going through my mind. All I could do was worry, you know. I kept thinking.
Am I going crazy? Lau, by the way, is not her real name. Her words are spoken by an actor because she and other members of the group still fear retaliation. And there were other members of the group who didn't even know Desiree, like Lau's friend, Mada. She said, you know, one of my friends disappeared and I'm really worried. So I told her, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
Let me see what we can do about finding her. Her words are also spoken by an actor, by the way. Patty felt relieved to join the group. I felt a connection with them, this love for a friend that everybody was trying to do something. People were talking about good times they had with Desiree. We could see that We were looking for someone that deserved everything the friends were doing for her. She deserved that. But it also made one thing very clear. Patty wasn't the only one who had been ghosted.
everyone who loved her out of her life. Okay, so something is wrong, really wrong. Petty was sure if she could just talk to Desiwe, reason with her. Maybe she could find a way to break Cat's spell. But to do that, she had to find her first. I'm John Robbins and joining me on How Do You Cope this week is the author, activist and journalist Amanda Knox. This has been my life all along. This is my life.
And there is no other alternate reality that I should be living. This is it. Just this is it. Okay. Now what? So that's How Do You Cope, with me, John Robbins. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Raza Jafri. And in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Ewan Montague and Charles Chumley, the spy who duped Hitler. 1943. Winston Churchill wants to capture Sicily, the key to breaking Hitler.
Churchill's spy chiefs devise Operation Mincemeat, one of the war's most daring deceptions, that hopes to make the enemy look in the wrong direction. The success of the plan relies on the unlikeliest of heroes. a deceased homeless man named Glindor Michael. Glindor is given a new name, a cache of fake war plans, and is dropped into enemy waters. Montague and Cholmley now wait.
to see if German intelligence have been fooled by their ruse. If it fails, then it could spell disaster for Europe. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Duped Hitler early and ad-free with Wondery+. From Wondery, I'm Chico Felitti, and this is Don't Cross Cat. Episode 2, Searching for Desiree.
Even in a very online world, it's surprising how hard it is to find someone if this person doesn't want to be found. Desiree had been silent for over three months now. All the searchers really knew was that Desiree and her life coach Kat... were living together somewhere in Texas. But they had no real idea where to even begin to track them down. At first, they thought they could just outsource it all to a detective. But they quickly realized.
None of them had that kind of money. So they came up with another plan. That's when we started playing detectives ourselves. Each of the women had turned their homes into makeshift investigation headquarters. Lau and Madai in Brazil and Patty in Canada. They covered the walls in printouts of everything they knew about the case. And they kept a close watch on Kat's social media, trying to find new clues.
Kat did lots of live streams, promising her followers that if they listened to her, she would show them the truth and free them from troubles. Sometimes she mentioned the witches that worked for her. Thank God my girls are trained. They're super happy and they're doing so well. Kat said. But it was tough to find out anything specific about Tessiree. And there were so many videos of Kat to go through. Like a true influencer, she boasted a lot.
Patti would join other searchers on video calls to talk about clues. Everybody was so involved. No one was sleeping. We were talking 24 hours a day. Hey, are you awake yet? Are you watching the live stream? You should record it, please, quick. As Patty and the others scrolled through Kat's old content, they began to find videos that were a little strange. You had that one where she is wearing this kind of a bath. A special ritual, which Kat called an alien bath.
Cat stood in front of the tub wearing a see-through black blouse. One of her assistant witches sat behind her, drinking wine. It's for the energy or beauty, but she's just throwing in the bath, like, some plastic or glitter. She put in some rubber toys, a bag of Gumby bears, bath pumps, plastic packaging and all, gold tinsel. It all seemed pretty harmless. until Cat added razor blades to the bat. Cat said the blades couldn't hurt because she was an alien.
As weird as this alien bath ritual was, Cat's followers on social media seemed to be into it. People was there, oh my gosh, I want to do that. And you had the people that believed that was a real thing. That's when we started to realize that Kat had many, many, many... Loyal followers. I'm talking the kind of followers who idolize her completely. Followers would write comments praising Kat for her psychic abilities and her beautiful life.
She's so strong, they would say. She's a phoenix reborn from the ashes. Lao's friend Mada didn't know Desiree directly. But as she watched all of this unfold... it began to dawn on her what was happening. Wait, it sounds like a friend is in a coat. It wasn't just Kat's followers who believed in her powers. It also began to affect the searchers. Some of them got scared of Kat's abilities. One of them even feared that Kat could put a curse on her. Patty, Lau and Mada...
realized that if even some of the searchers started believing in Kat's powers, then there were so many other young women out there who could easily fall for her. They had to do more to warn people about Kat. They had to go public. We created an Instagram profile and we call it at Searching Desiree. They created a public Instagram account and uploaded a photo of Desiree.
We wrote that we thought Desiree might be in a cult led by a fake guru in the U.S. And we asked if anyone had any information about her to share with us. Searchers use this new profile to flood Kat's Instagram with comments. Where's Desiree? What have you done to her friend? Mostly Kat just blocked them. But soon, word began to spread about their efforts. One day was, I don't know, like 60 people following us on Instagram. The next day, it was 41,000, I think.
For sure, more than $30,000 in a day. Every time Kat posted a new video, the group sifted through it looking for clues. We will see Kat in a restaurant. We look where that restaurant, where exactly it is. Petty Lau and Mada kept a giant Google Doc of every clue the group found. And little by little, they began to piece together a location. All the evidence seemed to point to somewhere in the middle of the state, near Austin. It was something, but still not enough.
The group was consuming Patti's life. She'd found a new job as a teacher, but her mind was often with Desiree. Every night, I would wake up with her voice in my mind. and was like she was telling me something. Even when she was asleep, she couldn't shake the mystery. It still tormented her. Maybe because I was asking so much to the universe to help me to find her. Just to find if she was okay. And then, one day...
A message popped up in the Searching for Desiree Instagram account. It was from a middle-aged couple from the small town of Perdoines in southeastern Brazil. They said they had a 21-year-old daughter. Her name was Leticia. She had been a follower of Cat. And like Desiree, she had gone to live with her in the U.S. They had been searching for their daughter for a long time.
It had been about five months since they last heard from her. And we could tell they were desperate. Now it was clear to the searchers. This wasn't just about Desiree anymore. There were other women missing too. Bye. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're talking about the singer and songwriter John Lennon. His band, The Beatles, smashed musical conventions. hysterical adulation.
and are still the biggest selling band of all time. But that adoration obscured a complex and combustible character. He might have been singing Give Peace a Chance, but his personal life was often far from peaceful. So who was the man behind...
the round glasses and how does his legacy hold up today? What about you, Aphrod? What's going to ring your bell about John Lennon? Is it the man, the music? There is something about the iconography of Lennon. He's got such mystique around him and I cannot wait. to dig in and separate facts from fiction and find out who he really was. And of course, he started the Russian Revolution in 1917. Oh no, that's a different Lenin altogether.
Follow Legacy now from wherever you get your podcasts. And binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+. It follows Katya Faber's fight for justice after her son, Alex Morgan, was savagely killed by an ultra-rich socialite. Katya spent years working as a barrister in some of London's most shocking criminal cases before her son was killed. Yet the truth about what happened to him turned out to be more extraordinary than any case she'd ever dealt with before.
This is a story about the psychology of wealth, a mother's love, and the terrifying consequences that can play out when the 1% stand accused of homicide. Listen to Injustice Killer Privilege exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The searcher struggled to process the fact there was another young woman missing. Leticia had only been 14 when she first started to follow Kat's teachings. This really, really hit Patty.
One of her own children was about the same age. She couldn't stop thinking about Leticia's mom. You could just imagine how she was, right? And the way that she was living this whole thing with her daughter. Leticia's family told them they had been urging the police to take action, but progress was slow. Patty and the others kept up the search, but it wasn't until Desiree had been gone for six months
that they finally got something to go on. At first, it was just another notification on Patty's phone, one of the many she got every single day. She tapped on it and froze when she saw the face on the video. She took a breath and hit play. There on her screen was Desiree. Stop looking for me. Stop asking about my whereabouts. If I've blocked you, it's for a reason, she said. She was so skinny talking to the camera.
Like she was reading something that's so aggressive. Like, stop looking for me. You are all demons. I don't want to talk to you anymore. This is absurd. I'm outraged, Desiree says. At first, Patti was just relieved to hear from her. She was alive. That was a big win for us. But the death story Patty saw in the video wasn't the one she remembered. It was so weird and everyone agreed she didn't look great. She was very pale and it seemed like the whole thing was rehearsed.
The searchers watched the video again and again. It's like the person you knew, she's not there anymore. She's another person. The look around her eyes was really a look of someone lost. Someone is not there anymore. To the searchers, it looked like a hostage video. It didn't seem like her. Had that serie been forced into filming it? That's the moment that I think people really got scared. The searchers began to cycle through all the worst-case scenarios.
Could it be something much bigger? We didn't know if Kat was involved with the Russian mafia or she was connected to people who did human trafficking. We just didn't know. We're spiraling. She lives in Texas. It's really close to Mexico. So you're like, oh, maybe the cartel took misery. As in the drug cartels. even though Austin is nowhere near the Mexican border and Cat had no connections whatsoever with the cartels.
If it's the cartel, if she is with a big organization, maybe they will come for us too. Now Patty was really scared. Not only about what might happen to her and her friends if they kept poking. But about Desiree's safety. Maybe that video is from months ago. Maybe she's not alive anymore. Hours after Desiree reappeared in that video, Another message came through. We received a text from Kat. It said, stop chasing this girl. Stop making people want to commit suicide.
because they can't stand that their family and supposed friends are stalking them. Kat ended the text message by writing, this human being just wants to live and be happy. This got Patty's mind racing even more. Oh, why is she talking about suicide? The line about suicide spooked Patty. Up to now, she had thought Kat was just a scammer. But what if she was actually capable of harming Desiree and the others? If you don't stop, maybe she's going to kill her.
Then, as fear swirled around the group, people started to drop out. They would text me and they would be like, oh, I'm sorry, but I have to stop. I'm too scared and I don't want to be in danger. Patty got more and more worried as the group dwindled. This was a crucial moment. Desiree was in danger. Someone needed to talk to the media. Someone needed to reach out to the authorities.
Someone needed to give their contact details out to new witnesses. Everybody started being scared. So no one wanted to be the face of the search and be the person talking to other people. And Patti was scared too. She had a new job. She had her family to take care of. I also share my life on social media, right? So I was like, oh, it's so easy for someone to find me where I am with my kids and everything.
But even in moments of doubt, Patti remembered Desiree. She wanted her friend back. Someone needed to step forward. So she made a decision. I decided to be the face. But being the face of the search meant also becoming a target, even for someone who Patty fought would never betray her.
I'm Mike Bubbins. I'm Ellis James. And I'm Steph Guerrero. And we're convinced that our podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going to be your new favourite comedy podcast with just a little bit of sport thrown in. You don't have to love sport, like sport,
or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic. And it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey, but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s British Icom, a lower low instead. I didn't use the word nuance in your... for a lower low. He's not cheating on his wife. He's French. It's a different culture. If you like me and Mammoth or you like Alice and Fantasy Football League,
That he'll love our podcast. Follow the Socially Distant Sports Bar wherever you get your podcasts. The Socially Distant Sports Bar, it's not about asymmetrical overlords. James! podcasting from his study. And you have to say that's magnificent. About a month after the hostage video, Patty was sunbathing on the beach. She had booked a vacation to visit her family in Brazil. It was her once-a-year trip to recharge, and this year she needed it more than ever.
But it wouldn't last long. I got in the hotel. I opened my phone. I had this crazy amount of people texting me. People try to call me or people send me a screenshot. She went online and checked Kat's profile. And there it was. My address in Vancouver. My phone number, my name, my kids' names, my kids' pictures. Kat had released Patty's private personal information for anyone to see. All of it. But that wasn't even the worst part.
And she was saying that I forced my kids to have sex with men for money To be falsely accused of such harmful things And with real pictures of her children and with their names, addresses and phone numbers, it was unimaginable. Just crazy things. That became something really challenging because I had to do with my own feelings as a mom because she was sharing my kids' pictures. So it was really like hell.
Because I didn't know how to deal with that. It was hell. And there was something else eating at Patty. Where did Kat get her information from? Kat didn't know her address. She didn't have access to photos of her kids or even their names. There was only one person who could possibly have shared that with her. Patty's own friend, Desiree.
She had to be behind this. Why is she doing that? Why did she let Kat send me this text? After everything she had done to help Desiree, this was a thanks she got? Maybe she don't even deserve what I'm doing for her. Here's the thing. Patty was convinced that there was another reason Kat had done this. It was because of something that had happened in the weeks before. Something that made Patty more sure that Desiree was in danger.
Someone found this page. It was a website called Eros, as in the Greek god of desire. Like, oh my God. On one page were photos of a semi-naked woman. and a list of services. Dancer slash escort offering fetish and fantasy. It was Desiree. It was kind of sad to see my friend. It was pictures on their fake names. And the question was, did someone force her or she's doing that, right? But why would she do that? Look.
All kinds of people with different personalities get into sex work, right? But to Patty, Desiree was one of the most romantic people she knew. She wasn't into casual relationships. Her friend, the Desiree Patty knew... wouldn't go on an escort website on her own. Why would she let her life in Germany to do something illegal? What's the goal? So yeah, someone is forcing her.
Patty knew she had to warn the world about what Kat was doing to her friend. So not long after, the Searching for Desiree Instagram page had a new post. It said... Kat was using the vulnerability of Brazilian women to lure them into prostitution. Days after that post... Kat published the photos of Patty's kids. So yeah, Patty knew what Kat had done, had completely crossed the line. But it showed Patty that Kat was desperate. She was willing to do anything to stop the search.
which made Patty even more convinced. She was getting closer. And even if Desiree had given her kids details to Kat, Patty was still determined to find her. There was one other photo on the escort side that caught Patty's attention. A woman with the name Star. Patty knew the face instantly. It was Leticia, the other missing girl. whose mother had asked for help. There was no way Patty was going to drop the search now.
Follow Don't Cross Cat on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com. If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at Wondery.com.
From Wondery, this is episode two of six of Don't Cross Cat. Don't Cross Cat is hosted and reported by me, Chico Felitti. Producer is Andres Caballero. Senior producer is Fernanda Echavari. Associate producers are Giovanna Romano Sanchez and Otávio Bonfá. Additional production assistance by Beatriz Trevisan. Fact-checking by Zoe Sullivan. Voice acting by Renata Sauda and Caroline Cota de Melo Freitas.
Theme song by Mariana Romano. Sound design by Stephanie Lebeau and Jacob Rossati. Additional mixing by Julia Caruso and J.J. Carubin. Sound supervisor is Marcelino Vialpondo. Managing producer is Heather Balota. Development producer is Olivia Weber. Senior development editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Production services by Futuro Studios. Executive producers for Futuro Studios are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia. Executive producers for Wondery are Russell Finch.
George Lavender, Marshall Lewy and Jen Sargent. From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And we're the hosts of British Scandal. And for our next series, we're taking you back to the 80s. This is Thatcher's Britain. These are the boom years. Hmm, but boom is... Notoricy so often followed by bust. It is, and that's the case for Asil Nadir.
He built one of the UK's biggest conglomerates of the 1980s, a jewel in the FTSE 100. And he built it with just his bare hands, a fertile imagination and a whole heap of lies. Ah, yes, the important ingredient. We love lies on British scandal. This sounds absolutely perfect. The only thing that could make it better would be the Prime Minister herself, maybe a trophy wife... and a bonkers escape from the law on a two-seater propeller plane.
I live to serve Alice. This story has all that and more. To listen to Thatcher's favourite fraudster, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts and binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+.