Kyoda, I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. In twenty eleven, ends at Herald journalist David Fisher became aware that a woman had been caught catfishing dozens of teenage boys and young men across New Zealand. Catfishing is a term used for people who use stolen photos to pretend to be someone else online, usually to form.
Relationships with real people across social media.
Fisher would go on to expose the woman behind the false online accounts as Natalia Burger's.
She referred to herself as the Puppeteer.
Fisher interviewed her on several occasions before she went to jail for charges related to her online activity. He thought she would have learnt her lesson, but two years ago he received an email from a woman who had her photos stolen by Burgess and it was ruining her life. Fisher explored Burgess's actions in the true crime podcast Chasing Ghosts the Puppeteer, and he joins us today on the Front Page.
To discuss what he learned. Fish.
When you first reported on Natalia Burgess in twenty eleven, did you think you would still be talking about her thirteen years later?
Back in twenty eleven, this story, the Facebook predator story, as it was known at the time, it seemed to me that it was going to exist like most stories do, that it unfolds with in a fairly confined space and then becomes consigned to our cultural memory, consigned to history. It wasn't something that I thought I was going to come back to. Her being sent to president twenty thirteen
seemed to draw a line under it. And it's perhaps the naive side of me that I can't scrub out that thought, Well, she'll learn a lesson and move on with life, and that will be that fish.
Can you sum up in your own words what Natalia Bird just did back when you first investigated this case and when she went to jail.
So the thing that was striking about this case from the outset was police had said that they were seeking or investigating an individual who had catfished or formed online relationships, was how police phrased it at the time, with around forty boys that were out of high school in christ Church, and that kind of set the tone for the investigation that followed. It seemed most of Natalia's online interactions were very much focused on teenage boys and forming romantic relationships with them.
There was another stream.
Of style of offending us supposed, which was forming almost high school clique girly type groups with others that she had encountered on social media. And it was also fascinating that she created her own clique of half a dozen false characters that would travel as a pack. So that was really the main focus was forming romantic relationships with teenage boys.
And then you got the email from Crystal Jenner in twenty twenty two.
I'm sorry to bother you, but the article you recently published and the above subject was sent to me by a friend, as Natalia Burgess has been using my images since twenty fourteen till current catfish multiple people, both men and women. I've had four men and one woman contact me in the last four months.
What was your first reaction to learning Entalia was doing it all over again.
It was almost deflating, actually, in the sense that I'd read Crystal's email and I thought, really, is she really still doing that? We're almost ten years down the track, or in fact, we were beyond ten years down the track at that stage, and she seemed to be bagging the same drum. It was intriguing, but plainly I felt somewhat deflated. I felt that I was going to be writing about the same person doing the same thing in the same way, and that didn't initially hold a huge appeal.
You've investigated this case across five episodes of the latest Chasing Ghosts season The Puppeteer. You spoke to a number of people who had dealings with Natalia, but I understand that you contacted many, many more people about this. Why didn't they want to talk?
Almost universally from those people that didn't want to come forward was the pain that they were left with, the trauma that they had experienced as a result of their interactions with Natalia. And this was part of broadening my knowledge as well as to the nature of her offending because it had shifted since she had come out of prison.
She wasn't targeting teenage boys quite so much, and there was also the discovery that there was another pool of victims that she deliberately and relentlessly targeted, and that was teenage girls and their mums, who she went on to form very long and very meaningful relationships with through her false characters, and so it had evolved quite a bit in the nature of the story, and as I spoke
to them, the drawball was plain to see. But the thing that really struck me was how deep those relationships have been. The previous encounter with her back in twenty eleven. The boys that she was forming a relationship with online, and a lot of them were boys as young as thirteen. Those relationships might be a matter of months, perhaps six months, even stretched out to a year or so, but when it came to those more familiar, less romantic relationships, they
would stretch on for years. There was a mom and daughter in Australia who feature on the podcast. They've been involved with Natalia's false character for six years and for them discovering that the person they thought existed, this character Kaylee, was fake, was incredibly painful.
It's so so damaging, really hurtful.
I thought, well, how can this person do this for so long, tending to be someone else? Why would they do it?
You know, because it's she treated us like her mom and her sister, and it's her.
And annoying that she's done all this for what what reason would she get out of doing this?
So upsets me the most.
You know, and that was a feature with many of the people that I'd encountered. There was one woman who had agreed to an interview because her and her son had been instead by Natalia Goodness fifteen years ago or more perhaps, and she was initially keen to speak to me, but when she checked it with her son, it created a spiral of mood, a downward spiral of mood, and someone that's now man fifteen years on and was just too painful, too difficult for him to contemplate his mum speaking about it.
It is incredible to learn about the web that Natalia weaved over so long a period, and it's obviously traumatized a lot of people still, even like you said, over a decade later.
We should take a moment here.
To specify as well that Burgess herself has her own mental health issues in a pretty rough past as well.
Right, Yeah, that's correct.
Natalia really went through a very very difficult time as a girl and a teenager, and as I partly learned and have discovered much more with this recent round of reporting, she has serious mental health issues with which she's wrestling borderline personality disorder and more recently diagnosed schizophrenia really complicate the way that she sees the world or the way that she interacts with the world.
How difficult was that in making the series, balancing her victims stories and Natalia's issues.
I think it was really just about listening to Natalia and listening to the victims and understanding the direction from their respective positions. It would have been very easy to have listened only to the victims who had such compelling stories, whose pain was so close to the surface that it was impossible to miss, to listen only to those victims and to be close ed to Natalia.
But you can't do that. In journalism.
It's all sides of the story there for the investigating, and we have an obligation, I think, to approach all sides of those stories in the same even handed, empathetic way. And so the more that was learned about Natalia, and the better picture that developed of how she saw the world and how she interacted with the world, it became I think evident as we work through the podcast that she had a very compelling story to share in terms of how the offending that she committed came to be.
It didn't invalidate it doesn't date any of the victim's stories. Speaking to the offender, and most of all, listening to an offender when you write about crime stories does not invalidate the victims of crime or the stories that they
have to tell. I think what it does is it informs our understanding of how that crime happened in the first place, and one would hope provides our communities at a wider society the tools that they need to stop that kind of offending from happening again, or at least finding a way to deal with it better than we have before.
I understand that I've hurt people, and I've understand that I don't have any empathy. I'm sorry, but I don't. There's one thing I don't have. I had it when I was young, but then I just stopped caring about people.
These stories develop over time while you're making them right. I understand you explored online safety a bit more in depth, and if the laws we have in New Zealand are working, what did that safe tell you about the state of internet safety in our country.
There were some real big picture issues that came into.
Focus through the course of investigating this, and that was about the environment in which Natalia and the victims of her behavior were existing that online environment. I wanted to get a really good understanding of the state of our laws in New Zealand and also global perspective of whether these social media giants were good community citizens. Did their business help our world function better and help our communities
be better than they were before. And so yes, net Safe and police and others were interviewed as part of this, And where we got to was that the introduction of the Harmful Digital Communications Act in twenty fifteen really provided a good pathway in New Zealand for people who had been on the end of behaviors such as Natalias, to raise with authorities the issues that they had and try
and find some sort of a resolution. So net safe provides a mediated resolution, Police provide a criminal pathway, and so those tools are there and they're available for authorities to use. They're available for those that have suffered at the sharp end to take advantage of. What I did discover is that the problem here is volume and also I suppose the pyramid of online offending.
So when I talk about the pyramid.
I talked to police over the years, spoken to our intelligence agencies about national security style issues, and at the top of the pyramid are really big, really complicated issues that our enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies are very much focused on because of the devastating impact they could have to a wide number of US And so I'm talking about national security, terrorism type issues, transnational organized crime, the
extraordinary financial crime reporting that my colleague Lane Nichols has done such.
Remarkable work on.
And when you get down to the bottom of the pyramid, those things that happen lots, but they happen to individuals. There's this type of thing that Natali was doing, I mean, her mode of behavior and what she's doing really as well out of the box. It'll be hard to find I think anyone in New Zealand and possibly even wider afield that has done what she's done at the scale she's done it for the time she's done it, goodness,
twenty three years. But that volume crime, it's kind of like burglary if you moved it into the real world, the sort of crime that happens at a really really high rate and it affects a very large volume of people, some of whom will be really badly affected, but broadly it's an awful invasion and one that people find a way to incorporate in their life and move on.
Very very large numbers of victims.
And for police, they have to investigate this investigated the same way that they would have very serious crime if they're going to do it to the fullest of their abilities. It requires large numbers of officers to do canvassing of the neighborhood. It requires a scene of crime forensic technicians to dust down and look for fingerprints and other signs. It requires police to use an expertise in matching up
with other crimes that are of a similar nature. So it can be incredibly, incredibly time consuming and it's a very difficult area for police to perform effectively in because of the share volume of it. And I think it sits in the same space, but with it sitting in the same space, there's a further complication too. And police acknowledge this that their transition from policing in our physical world to policing our online world is a work in progress.
Across the nation, we have more than ten thousand police within the cyber crime or high tech crime unit. There's two hundred and that's number that's going to have to grow. Significantly over time, along with building capability so that you don't get fresh comfortable sitting down at a computer wanting it,
trying to work out how to turn it on. So you've got this vastly growing volume crime that's happening, not a huge amount of policing resource that's focused on it, although that's growing and there's an awareness that it needs to grow further, and it makes it difficult from a domestic enforcement perspective to really get a.
Grip on him.
And you also put cybercrime and these laws to the relevant ministers.
Hey, what did they have to say?
I approached Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith's office and Police Minister Mark Mitchell and their response was largely, we're doing things and look at the things that we're doing, which were these really big picture stuff, the stuff that's at the
top of the pyramid. And so that very much has New Zealand keeping in pace with partner agencies offshore and when it comes to the top of the pyramid, it does put us in a better position as far as information sharing with foreign partners goes, as far as addressing those top of the pyramid types of crime, not so much down the bottom end.
Of the volume crime area, and Mark.
Mitchell did have some acknowledgment that there were changes that were taking place that did need to and.
Were happening there.
I think perhaps the speed at which those things are happening is an issue that police should be talking about and talking with wider communities about. But yeah, it's not something that's off the government's radar. But again, it's the burglary thing. There's plenty of big, nasty, angry beasts out there before you start dealing with rats and mice.
One thing I saw in the Facebook comments on the stories of Natalia was people think she just must be enjoying the attention the series is given her.
Is that a relevant concern to you?
Well, I can say that she's not enjoying it. Natalia is discomfort with her activities being inquired into again, and she's made playing to me on a number of occasions, and there's a number of reasons for that. Some of that self preservation in terms of concern about what may happen to her. She's also deeply concerned about the impact on her parents that she doesn't want them to see
her in the public sphere having her behavior talked about again. Yeah, so I do have some concern that people would assume.
That she's getting out of this things that she is not.
And for those that do think that this is all fun and games for her, it's certainly not the case.
She told you when you interviewed her again in this year for Chasing Ghosts, that she's stopped.
And you're here telling me now that you've.
Stopped about a year ago.
Yeah, how can I know that's true?
You can't.
It's my word against your word and every other girl that I've ever stolen pictures from.
But she told you that before.
Hey, And speaking to colleagues around the office, because we've all been listening, the consensus is that people don't believe her at all. What's your final takeaway? Do you believe her?
I think there's a lot of things that Natalia says that are difficult to believe, and I don't necessarily think that she has a total control over those things because of the various mental health issues that she's wrestling with.
I will wait.
And see whether I get another email a year down the track or ten years down the track that tells me that she's doing it again. I think it'll be overly bold to think that that is going to be the case right now, right this minute. I do think, though, that it's highly likely that she will not be using the images that belong to Crystal Jenna, the young New Zealand woman who's living and see if his paradise in Australia. She was the face for many of Natalia's recent false
personas that she created online. I don't think that Crystal's image is going to be used by Natalia again, and I think that's because of self preservation. I think that Natalia will consider Crystal to be too hot to handle and leave her be.
I think something I really struggled with listening to Chasing Ghosts the Puppeteer is I've got empathy obviously for the victims and the trauma that they've experienced at the hands of Natalia, but also you see the other side as well, with Natalia and you, and you kind of I felt guilty for empathizing with her.
I'm wondering how you felt doing this.
I when reporting on these stories, I find that, and I've long found this, that my feelings don't come into it, and it's possible to box those up and put them to one side. My obligation is to the audience and to journalism, and that might sound a bit idealist, but I am and I've.
Got to live up to that responsibility.
It would be letting down journalism, which I love and our audience for whom I have a huge amount of thanks and respect for to inject my personal feelings into.
Something like this.
Thanks for joining us, David, and you can listen to Chasing Ghosts the Puppeteer.
Now wherever you get your podcasts.
That said, for this episode of the Front Page, you can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at zat herold dot co dot z. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sells with sound engineer Patty Fox.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.