Novel.
I started reporting on the case when Derek had been arrested but not yet sentenced.
This is Rachel Monroe in twenty seventeen. She was a reporter for The Atlantic, and she set about covering a huge story unfolding in Texas.
They live in Texas, and so everything's bigger in Texas, including the crimes.
The arrest of Derek Wodrett for scamming a woman in the colony.
This was kind of the first time that there was like a hope that this is all going to be connected. You know, people are going to understand that this isn't just a bunch of individual crimes, but like a larger pattern. On the one hand, I think they wanted to share about the case and like make it really clear that this was a pattern of behavior. But also at the same time they were cautious because he cut so many times before and it hadn't really seemed to matter.
But the process of writing the piece wasn't exactly smooth. A lot of women had spoken to the media before in twenty fourteen. In twenty sixteen, before any arrest was on the horizon, meticulously reported pieces alleging a long history of fraud.
I do want to give a ton of credit to Laura la Manchek, who's the reporter in Minneapolis who really broke this story and did a lot of the legwork. So some of these women had told their stories publicly with some level of anonymity through her. But I had a hard time tracking these people down, and so I flew to Minneapolis, like not knowing whether anybody would speak with me or not.
And even when she did, they were also really spread out all over the country Texas, Hawaii, Arizona, and a whole bunch in Minnesota. And even once Rachel tracked them down, she encountered a growing hesitancy to speak to the media.
They were reluctant, I think for understandable reasons.
Probably the key reason among those understandable reasons was.
This, I can't describe the bashing that the public gave us. People are very powerful behind their computers.
Even the most thoughtfully, carefully sensitively reported stories can't guarantee how an audience will react.
You know, everybody said we were stupid to give him money. How can we be so stupid?
If you've been listening closely, you'll know as well as I do that this is a stupid question for anyone to be asking any of these women, let alone dorry.
None of us gave him money. He went through files, he went through purses, he went through wallets, he went through checkbooks. He waited till you were out of the room. People just absolutely crucified us.
It didn't really matter how exactly actually got his hands on the money. Every time this case got reported over the years, the women at the center of it came face to face with a pervasive idea that they were, in some way or another, partly to blame for what happened to them, that they were at best vulnerable, naive, and at worst.
Oh, how stupid are these women? They're just desperate, y'all are an embarrassment. Y'all are pitiful.
Rachel's article came out in twenty eighteen, four months before that sentencing here in Showdown. It's good, really thoughtful and sensitively reported, but her peace didn't escape the inevitable backlash either.
I think there's a resistance to admitting. Part of the pleasure of these scammer stories is like, as the reader, you're kind of occupying this all knowing position, like it's already happened. You know that it's a scam, and that kind of gives you a false sense of security. I think that like, oh, I'm smarter than that. Yes, I wouldn't. I wouldn't fall for it.
I'm fascinated by this kind of response. Deep down, if we're honest, maybe we all sometimes think it couldn't happen to me.
You can kind of intellectually know like, oh, this could happen to anybody. But truly, these techniques are time tested and they really work, which means they could work on any of us.
It's been a few years now since Rachel Monroe's article came out, so she's had some time to reflect on it all. I asked her to sit down with me, give me the benefit of her hindsight, explain how it all unfolded for her.
He's like in his jail uniform as a fraudster, and he's telling me this stuff, and I'm like, oh, amazing, Yes.
And tell me about her face to face with Derek.
If anybody should know better, If anybody should know better, it was me. You learn a lot by being hom old.
I guess.
I'm Annasonfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, you're listening to the girlfriends trust me both bonus episode one, Get back down here, Off your high horse.
Maybe every story is a manipulation, but in true crime the stakes are pretty high. What drew you to the Derek Aldred case a person who is close to me had fallen for a romance. Just learning about it through her it kind of caught me off guard. Having it hit close to home made it feel much more visceral. And then also just like a really incredible woman, like super savvy, super attractive, and this scam lasted for like months and months and months, was incredibly elaborate. You know,
the guy like knew her kid's names. You know, they would have these like long, long, long phone conversations, and the fact that so much work was being put into, you know, scamming this like one individual person, that it was happening at this really intimate level, and then also just seeing how it impacted her life and her emotions. You know, it's one thing to lose a bunch of money, and it's another thing to lose trust in yourself and
lose trust in the world. And you know, just seeing the emotional ramifications made me think that this form of it is new. It certainly seems to be growing, and it's like having an impact beyond just you know, financial loss. I remember looking at the FBI statistics and seeing that this was, like, you know, among the top ways that people were losing money online was to these romance scams. If you think back like seven or eight years ago, this kind of romance scam was really not on the
radar of a lot of people. I think that now there's been a lot of Netflix documentaries and podcasts like this one, and it's much more well known. At the time, I think it was something that was certainly happening a lot, but not necessarily getting the attention that it deserved. And that just kind of blew my mind that it was the scale of it combined with how much it wasn't being talked about. So that was also something that was interesting to me, like why why aren't we talking about this?
The kind of scamming Derek was doing seemed like such an extreme example of the kind of thing Rachel was reading about.
In order to scam these women, he was paying so much attention to them and like really kind of watching them and listening to them and learning about them to know like what would work on them and what they wanted and what would appeal to them. And it's pretty close to somebody like listening to you and figuring out what you like and trying to please you because they
like you. I was single at the time, and I was dating, and so I think there was also like a personal element for me where thinking about those early stages of getting to know someone and that feeling of like really falling for someone, which happens like way before you actually know them. The feelings kind of come before the facts in any case, like even if it turns
out to be like a really good situation. And so I think thinking about how the romance scammer performs so many acts that like a good boyfriend also does, and it's just you know, like how do you know which one is which? It's really kind of scary.
Yeah, of course, like you fall in love with the fantasy of someone when you were like dating before you actually know who they are completely God help the people that you were dating while you were reporting on this story, were you like quizzing.
Them, show me your fan, who are you talking to?
Rachel would go on to speak to a lot of women who were scanned by Derek for her peace in the Atlantic, but building trust after all they'd been through was a challenge.
They had been deeply violated by this experience. Somebody that they trusted had lied to them, So there was like that level, and then I think a lot of them felt really traumatized by how they had been depicted, just this idea that they were dupes, that they were suckers, that they were pathetic. So I think that there was some hesitancy to trust, and understandably so.
One of the central women in Rachel's article is Linda. You've not heard from her directly in this series, but some of the details of her story will sound familiar to you. Linda was in a relationship with Derek Wodread back in twenty sixteen when he was pretending to be Richie Peterson, the military vet. Linda went public with her story that same year.
We met at a restaurant and then she and then afterwards she was like, let's go get a pedicure, and so I just remember sitting in the salon, you know, side by side, getting her toes painted and buffed, and that's when she really kind of started to open up. I've never done that on a reporting trip before, but It helped me understand her as a person, and there was some feeling of like female solidarity I think in you know, just sitting side by side talking about her
dating life before, during, and after this guy. That helped me connect with her emotionally, and it broke down some of the barriers that can sometimes be there as a journalist, and sometimes we need those barriers. But it was a way to really feel like, how this head hurt her.
I love that It's such a nice opportunity when people are up for just kind of doing a thing with you.
The people working at this land must just have the best gossip of anybody. I do remember, you know, after kind of having this bonding moment at the salon with Linda, she suggested that we go over to Missy's house, which I was like, that's yes, that's amazing, let's go.
Missy was another woman that so called Richie Peterson had been dating at the same time. She had discovered the truth about Richie that he was actually Derek after finding his real ID card in his wallet while he showered. She also found Linda's credit card, looked her up on Facebook, and reached out to her, warning her of the truth. Like Dorian Tracy over in Texas. Linda and Missy had struck up a friendship.
And seeing the two of them together, Linda, she's a real kind of strong, blonde Texas woman, and Missy was really different, you know, the small and dark haired and just has kind of a single mom, had like a different energy about her and looking at them, at the two of them, and just you would think like, there's no way they would have anything in common. They never would have met otherwise, but they connected through sharing this experience that most people haven't had.
But just show how broad Derek's scope was when it comes to the sort of women that he was pursuing.
Yeah, if anything, the pattern was that these were all like kind of savvy professional women, and it makes sense that if you're trying to scam people out of money, you want to have find people who are like doing well. That really was kind of the only consistent thing about them was that they were women who, in a lot of ways we were thriving in their lives and you know, just looking for a man to kind of add to the picture. And he was good at presenting himself as a catch up.
Until that point, Rachel had been focusing a lot on the harm and pain and the story.
And just seeing the two of them sprawled on the couch with Missy's daughter, like watching TV, you know, eating snacks, like gabbing. I was like, oh, yeah, this is a really important part of the story too, like how these women were able to take care of each other when they were being in some cases failed by law enforcement and dismissed by other people in their lives.
What was the public reaction to your piece, specifically when it came out.
I remember getting so many emails from people being like, I have a story like this. This happened to me, This happened to my aunt, this happened to my mother, and you know, will you follow up? Will you write about this man? Will you write about this man? And I sort of it was sort of heartbreaking to have to write back to all of these people and be like, look, I'm sorry, I've kind of done my romance scammer story
and now I'm not covering that field anymore. And some of those stories I like passed on to other reporters that I that I knew that. I was just so struck by how much any stories like this must be out there and that aren't being told.
I've read Rachel's piece. It's really good. You should go find it. It's called The Perfect Man Who Wasn't. It's really sensitively and thoughtfully written, and I get a real sense of these women from reading it. But alas the Internet is the Internet.
There was like the original harm of being lied to install infirm by this man, and then this kind of secondary harm of like the victim blameing.
That's coming up after the break.
So your piece came out in twenty eighteen.
And you spoke about how the women in subsequent stuff that's come out about their story, we have experienced kind of lots of victim blaming from the public who are reading it.
Do you think there's been a shift in.
The way the public react to those kind of stories now?
I like to think so. As a person who's like spent a lot of time reading consuming true crime and looking at the way people talk about true crime on the Internet, it's like really shocking to me, how no matter what, if you believe that it was the victim's fault, then that's a way of thinking, like, oh, this would never happen to me because I wouldn't make the mistakes
that they did. So I you know, I'm not that hopeful about I mean, I do think that on some level the discussion of romance scams, like as people have become more aware of them and as more people's lives have been touched by them, there is a better understanding of how pervasive this is and how it could really happen to anyone. But you know, victim blaming in general and specifically when it's a situation that involves women and relationships,
those bad ord narratives still persist. And that's why it's important to do podcasts like this, is to remind.
People over and over again, you know, I mean, that's what I was gonna ask, because of course, like we, as the people putting these stories out, are responsible for the information that we give, and there's a lot that we can do to paint a picture of a person
that the audience is going to run with. I mean, I absolutely have experience of putting shows out and telling stories where I think I've been really kind of ethical and I feel like pleased with the way that I've portrayed someone, and I've really thought it through and tried not to add to these awful stereotypes, and then still obviously people are gonna say what they say on the internet and you can't escape that.
I think it's also like letting survivors be fully human, not making what happened to them the only thing in their life, you know, like letting them be in the stories that we're telling full complex people, even flawed people. You know. I think that sometimes one potential risk of centering the victims or the survivors is there can be an incentive or like a feeling that we need to make the survivors into heroes or angels or as like
a way to head off those internet commenters. But it's like, in a way, I think that does harm to the cause of you know, telling full complete stories about full complete people, Like we all make mistakes, victims and survivors should be allowed to like express their full humanity in the story.
Yeah, because it's really tempting, I think, especially in romance scam stories. And I mean it's also sometimes inescapable because it is just true. But it's really tempting to talk about how small everybody is because you want to be like, no, they're so small, like therefore it could happen to all of us. But then also it's like it would also be a terrible thing if they were right, like objectively, not that smart.
Right exactly exactly. It's like, it's not terrible that it happened to a smart person, it's terrible that it happened to anybody. Stories that kind of portray victims as like, you know, pure almost like non human angels does do harm for like other survivors, other victims, because you know, you look at a story like that and you're like, wow, I'm not that perfect, like maybe I did deserve what happened to me, And it's like, no, no, no, that's
not true. It's like we're all just humans kind of trying to get through life not harming other people and not being harmed. Like you don't have to be an angel, a person who's never made a mistake, a fully virtuous person to you know, deserve our sympathy.
I think according to the Justice Department, only about fifteen percent of fraud victims actually report the crime to law enforcement, and that's because of shame and guilt, embarrassment kind of belief about what they've gone through. Why do you think it's so difficult for people to report these crimes.
Through reporting, the story became clear to me that some of that is justified because of law enforcement's response. You know, when law enforcement is dismissive, then why would you tell this to a cop if the cop is just gonna blame you and not do anything about it. So, to a certain extent, the shame is internal, but it's also like coming from the people who are supposed to be helping too.
Do you think there are things that we can do to kind of fairly portray survivors without adding to the stigma.
This is something that is a lot better than it used to be, as centering survivors in the stories and not fixating on the perpetrator, you know, making it all about him. Even if the story is like he's so bad, he's so bad, the subtext of that is like, but he's also kind of special and brilliant, and he's the
one we're paying attention to. So I think that has gotten a lot better, and not just for romance scams, but you know, these kind of mass shoot and like all of this stuff about you know, not repeating the perpetrator's name, just not making them kind of accidentally into heroes or anti heroes, just not making them the center of the story.
I've tried my best over the years to make sure the girlfriends doesn't center a perpetrator like Derek Aldred. But I also couldn't ignore him altogether, and neither could Rachel.
A lot of these reflections about not centering the perpetrator were things that I learned through the process of writing and reporting this story.
You actually meet Derek Aldred mm h more after the break.
When I went to go meet him, I was still really in that kind of traditional true crime mode of like, well, you got to meet the bad guy and try to get him to tell you all of his secrets, Like that's that's what makes for an exciting, thrilling story.
Back in twenty seventeen, Derek was real keen to talk to Rachel about her pace.
I think I was just hoping to get a sense of who he was, his background, how did he explain, what he did, what made him tick, you know, all of those questions that you have as a journalist trying to get inside somebody's head.
At that time, Derek was being held on ramond in Texas awaiting his sentencing hearing.
And so I made an appointment to go out there and see him. They wouldn't let us meet in person, although like I was at the place where he was incarcerated, was still like a video call. It was a very weird kind of setup to almost like talking on a payphone with this like grainy little video where I can see him in his prison uniform. He says everything that you would want a source to say, right, like, there's more to this story. I'm really happy to talk to you.
I'll tell you all about it. He said he was going to like give me the password to his email. He was like, Oh, there's all of these like files. You could go into my email and you can see the emails between me and these women. And I was like, wow, that'll be so amazing, Like what a great thing to have. Then I could quote, you know, like how he's seducing them, and see all this behind the scenes and figure out the timing, and I got really excited, and you know, that all fell apart. Later.
Of course, when Rachel says it could happen to you, she really does mean it, because in a way it happened to her.
Of Course he didn't do that. Of course that never happened.
All the exonerating detail Derek promised never quite materialized.
He's like in his jail uniform as a fraudster, and he's telling me this stuff, and I'm like, oh, amazing, Yes, I just really brought it home that you can kind of intellectually know like, oh, this could happen to anybody. These tricks of manipulation, they work on us, you know, on a human level, and we're all humans. But then to just really like experience it, well, okay, humbling, humbling.
I can empathize with that.
I mean I did a show once with a very prolific organized criminal and there was a point where I suddenly realized I was being worked.
You know, well, they're good at what they do, Like that's that's why, you know, that's why I good at it.
And I fell for it.
And then suddenly I was like, you know, in a weird industrial estate about to be you know, off, and I was like, no, this is I should have seen this.
I think I'm going to go home. Now.
Have your thoughts on the story changed. Do you think between when you wrote it and now?
It's funny? I like, continue to read and watch and listen to these stories when they come out. I find them really heartbreaking, but I find them really compelling. We're all just so vulnerable to this because we do all want connection and lah. Then it's I understand why the scammers, you know, target the heart, because we're all very vulnerable there.
But it's it's just really terrible what it does, the sinister way that this kind of crime undermines people's sense of self, trust in themselves, trust in the world, and their understanding of reality. I think about that a lot. You know, when there's a murder, the harm is very very clear. You know, somebody who was alive is no longer alive. It's easy to understand the harm, and this kind of crime, just the psychological effect of it is more subtle. And that's what's really stuck with me.
It's one of the most kind of dirty and excusable.
Crimes, isn't it.
Yeah, dirty, I think is the right word for it.
I mean other people, yourself included.
Everyone is really intrigued by romance scams. This story in particular. Why do you think people keep coming back?
I think they tie into the vulnerability that we all feel when we open ourselves up to the prospect of love. I think as more and more dating happens through these apps and through these online mechanisms. The people that were meeting aren't people who are being introduced to us by somebody that we know. There aren't these kind of social ties, and every time you go on a date with a stranger, there's like some level of exposure and trying to figure out how much do you trust, how much do you
open up, how much do you believe? Or are you going to be super suspicious and weird in that way. So I think it's like the more extreme version of what so many of us are going through, like on a weekly basis. It's such a deeply intimate crime. This is what really broke my heart. It's like the parts of these women that wanted to trust somebody and believe what they were saying and you know, think the best of someone, which is like those are all like really
beautiful qualities that we all have. Hopefully we get to move through the world and when we meet somebody and they tell us who they are, we aren't suspicious and trying to pick it apart and asking to look at their passport. I mean, that's no way to live. But this crime kind of takes those beautiful parts of us and you turn against yourself. The shame is that I should have known better. The shame is that I'm a fool.
But that's really so heartbreaking to me, because there's nothing foolish about wanting to trust people and believe people, and like wanting to fall in love. You know, it's deeply vulnerable but also deeply relatable. What I don't want people to take away from these stories is like, don't trust anyone. The answer is not, you need to build a castle around yourself and never open up to anybody ever. Again. It's like, no, you need to find the people who
do have your back. Answer is not trust no one. I don't want to live in that word. And I think that's why it's so wonderful and so lovely that these women were able to trust one another.
Coming up on the next bonus episode of The Girlfriends Trust Me Babe.
So if you are that friend, step up and help that person get the support that they need.
You worried that your friends dating a con artist, maybe a scammer, a bit of a liar.
Next episode is for.
You when we care for people and we have to tell them hard things.
The Girlfriends Trust Me Babe is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from novel Visit Novel dot Audio. The series is hosted by me Annisinfield and this episode was produced by Valeria Rocker and Leona Hamid.
Our editor is Joe Wheeler.
Production management from Sharie Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolfe. Fact checking by Dania Suleman, Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander. The Girlfriend's theme was composed by Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein and performed by Daniel Kempson with vocals by Louisa Gerstein. Music supervision from Daniel Kempson and Anna Sinfield. The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemcol. Story development by Susie Baker and Olivia Smart.
Novel's director of development is Selena Metta. Max O'Brien is the executive producer for Novel. Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etoor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantor. Special thanks to Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, Julie Sansulo, Ann Langston, Carolyn sher Levin, Katie Gillis, Kelly Hunt, Rachel Munroe, tom Old Dag I'm tad Festno.