Hey, it's Stephanie back with another bonus episode and just a content disclaimer here, we will be talking about pregnancy loss. In episode six, you heard about how content creator Dave Neil and journalist Megan Fox discovered a Fiver logo on an ultrasound that Laura Owens had given Greg Gillespie. They made this discovery while Dave was on a live stream.
We already knew she had a pension for lying. We knew that she was faking and stealing all these ultrasounds.
The ultrasound that Dave Neil is talking about, the one they discovered a Fiver logo on, didn't just appear out of thin air. It was taken from somewhere, and Dave Neil's community tracked down the real person behind this ultrasound.
This lady in Texas had written a blog about enduring the death of one of her twins. She's a member of Men's Mothers and or Neonatal Death. She's an advocate for helping women going through such a devastating time.
The blog was originally written in twenty fourteen by a woman named Stormy. We're not going to use her last name here for her privacy, but she later gave a statement to the Maricopa County Investigators where she said she'd started a blog in twenty eleven to help her cope with grief after she had a stillbirth. She posted about her next two pregnancies on the blog, including a pregnancy
she had in twenty fourteen. When Stormy went for her first ultrasound, she learned she was having twins, but a few weeks later, one of the fetuses died and was absorbed by the other twin. The blog was about something called vanishing twins syndrome, which actually happens in about twenty to thirty percent of twin pregnancies. In most cases, the other twin will develop normally, which was true in Stormy's case. She wrote about it on her blog.
And now, several years later, her own story is being used against her because somebody stole the ultrasound off the Internet.
Members of Dave's audience ultimately found the source of the ultrasound through a reverse image search on Google, and Dave got in touch with Stormy.
We reached out as compassionately as you could because we're reopening a wound. We just wanted to help her, and we really felt like she should know and maybe find out from us rather than from someone else that she had this stolen.
Stormy told Maricopa County investigators that when she saw the ultrasound Laura was using, she immediately recognized it as her own. She said the image holds special significance to her because it's the only physical evidence she has that this second baby existed.
It's important to know that because Laura would later steal this lady's story, which I don't need to tell people how offensive that is. We all understand this lady's put together a mission to help out other mothers because this was such a tough time period of her life.
The blogs since been taken down. Stormy said she didn't know anyone outside of her friends and family had been looking at it. Something I've learned throughout my research for this story is that Dave Neil and his community always want to help out.
I just knew my audience wanted to do something good, and a lot of times in cases like this, you have to wait for the court to play out and you really can't do much. And my audience has been known to help fundraise people in the past, and I said, let's just put together a fundraiser.
Dave started a GoFundMe for Stormy.
We raised a bunch of money and think we raised prively six thousand dollars and we just said, go at it, have fun.
Dave's community was hoping they could raise enough money for Stormy to throw her son an extra special birthday party or take a family vacation.
There's so much collateral damage from this story. There's so many victims, and you watch a story like this and it feels senseless, It feels like you can't do anything. And it was just another instance where the audience almost proves Laura wrong. Like she decided to live in this hostile world. My audience didn't. My audience is in a world of justice, compassion, and we have to just constantly remind each other that even though it's such a tough
subject to cover, we can focus on the survivors. We can focus on the victims and not on what might happen to Laura throughout this Whatever happens to her is a consequence of the truth coming out.
Dave and his community have played a huge role in this story, not only in covering it, but also in supporting those who never wanted to be caught up in it. So with six episodes out, I called Dave to talk about the release of the show. We've spoken so much over the past nine months as I've been reporting on this story, but Dave Neil has been covering it since the news broke about Clayton eckered. In twenty twenty three, I chatted with Dave to talk about the case. We've
both been consumed by. So what has it been like for you now that six episodes of Life Love Trapped are out and you've listened to them and you're kind of reliving this as it played out.
It's so trippy and surreal, and I'm like, on one end, like you know, like a typical I don't know, YouTuber or comedian, I'm like judging what I'm saying, Like did I get that? Did I get that note? Right? Do I sound unhinged? I'm just trying to communicate my emotions, and those emotions for this case went from frustration to relief, to vindication to feeling very defensive of the community. It's
definitely surreal. I covered this on like sort of a PhD level where we got so deep into it and you're covering it telling the story three dimensionally, not just through my own noggin. And I think that's really really great to hear all of the different stories of Wood, Nick the lawyer, and Clayton and all of the people that are involved, because yeah, everyone's got everyone's got like a similar through line, but we've all been affected differently.
So in episode five, you have a line in that episode and you I will make as many videos as it takes to get this thing right. My question for you is how many videos do you think that is at this point?
Oh man, I'd have to guess over two hundred and fifty. I don't know how did you count? That's a lot.
I haven't had time to count.
I can totally see how people don't like YouTubers. They get a bad rap. So it was easy for her and her attorney to paint this picture like I'm just some douchebag. But it's not my first rodeo. I've dealt with this for so long. Like I know, I knew covering it to just try to clean my hands and
be as like immaculate as possible. And the one thing that I've learned is just like follow what's interesting to me and my intuition on this one was that it was going to be probably the biggest story I ever covered. It's been quite an investment of my time, but I don't regret it. You know. I made some good friends out of it. And again, the story's not over, and who knows. My fingers are still crossed that one day she'll want to tell me the true story.
Thank you so much for listening. If you want to go down the rabbit hole with Dave Neil, you can find him on YouTube or check out his twice daily podcast, The Rush Hour, and stay tuned for new episodes of Love Trapped and more bonus content on the feed