Talking Dateline: Simply Diabolical

And it's been a very long time. I'm a very close friend who has been working with me for several years.

“We are a family member and my friend was the one who said, "Look, there are some portal.”

"Go for a walk, then I'll look for it and that was the point." So, what I could do now is, of course, the famous "Node" and "Combin", which is also in a hotel, in the street street hostel, there are the last weeks in the... "For over the years, we can have the chance to find the kids to buy."

"Starts of your own toys, in just a few minutes, go for a walk, go for a walk, go for a walk, go for a walk, go for a walk, go for a walk."

This is a time-to-time show from "Go for a walk" to me.

“I'm like, "Wow, I'm not a 7-valve to step today."”

"Start today, meets you where you are." "Download the start today, wellness app now on your Avalor Android device." "Terms apply, see app for details." "Oh, they're on welcome to Talking Date Line." "I'm Keith Morrison, I'm here with Dennis Murphy, and producer Michelle Madigan."

"Today, we'll talk about Dennis' episode called "Simply Diabolical." "It's about a young woman named Michelle Hadley, not to be confused with Michelle Madigan." "And it was a cyber stalking saga involving her ex-fiance." "If you haven't seen the episode yet, you can stream it now on Peacock or listen wherever you get your podcasts, then come right back here." "And later we have two extra clips to play for you from the material that we assemble."

"And as always, we'll answer some of your questions on social media."

"So, let's talk Date Line." "Normally, we would do a story, follow a murder case as it went through the courts." "But this was not like that." "The whiplash here, Keith, is the prime victim becomes the prime suspect by the end of the show."

“"It is so complicated, Michelle. I was worried all along that we were going to throw the viewers because you have to take them by the hand."”

"This is complicated. Listen to what's going on. But you're right Keith, it's not a conventional date line, you aren't." "How did you find the story and how would you describe what it was all about?" "I think I found the story because a press release went out and they said there was going to be a court hearing and a press conference about a woman who had been recently ex-honorated." "And it was in Orange County, which is my home turf, and I wasn't sure what it was about, but I said I'm going. I want to figure this out."

"So I remember standing outside the courthouse and watching Michelle step down, you know, walk out the courthouse steps and just this smile and this." "And I just remember listening to her and being like, I've got to get an interview with her." " Michelle, I remember I would remember about Michelle Hadley in our story is that she was self-described. She talks about herself as being this goody two shoes, kidded minds, all of us, you know, keep your hands at ten and two when you're driving across the green, not in between."

"And she was also bitten by all of the Walt Disney Princess stories, and she believed that if she was a good girl, someday her prince would come literally." She thought that she would be rewarded for her good behavior. She thinks she meets her prince charming, but it turns out this guy has Walt's been from a different fairy tale altogether and he is the big bad wolf. And he takes her off on just a nightmare journey of cyber stalking and vengeance and with the end result that she ended up facing potentially a life in prison because of this character that she meets on a date.

"What that must have been like for her is just hard to imagine. But to be in jail, awaiting trial on a very serious charge for something you didn't do, it's somebody else's is calling you. I mean, my goodness." "We've all been in the county jails and prisons doing stories, and for me the heart is when we go in with our crew and you go through the first set of gates and they close the door and you hear the thump." "And then they open up the next set of gates and you're inside." "What can you tell me about the early relationship that Ian developed with Michelle?"

Things move pretty quickly because my recollection is within just weeks they were talking about moving in together and in fact did. And maybe the worst thing that happened to Michelle Hadley was that she agreed to buy a condo with his new boyfriend who she barely knew.

This condo, they didn't know what to do with it. He didn't want to leave. He was there with all his stuff. Not only with all his stuff, but pretty soon he was in there with a new female partner. He was there with the woman called Angela.

“And you know, I think if I look back, Michelle and I think if they hadn't agreed to buy that condo together, maybe this might have had a different outcome.”

"Really that was one of the way that..."

"And there were counter-suits and such and it was just a mess." "Yeah." I was wondering is that watch, was that was the condo, the motivation for the whole thing? I mean, they could have let it go. It could have just moved on with their lives. But that unresolved condo issue existed between them. Was it that or was it issued could have gone away? But people who were following this, some of the investigators said the issue of control wasn't negotiable.

I suppose you would see his motivation, the former boyfriend, the U.S. Marshall. I want to keep my stuff here. I want the condo, my girlfriend and I are very comfortable here. So what I've got to do is get rid of Michelle Hadley. I think yes, that condo was behind all of that. I would put a lot of weight on that. Michelle, I don't know. You might have another opinion.

“No, I agree. I mean, I think Ian didn't want to leave. I think he wanted to stay in the condo, and the only way he could do that was if Michelle was behind bars or scared of him or wouldn't just sign over to him.”

I mean, we don't really know. We made attempts to reach out to Ian several times when we were doing the reporting on the story back in 2018 before he was ever facing any charges.

So, and he never responded to us. So it's hard to know exactly why his motivation was. But I think what my understanding is it had to, we suspect it was the condo.

So a couple of questions before we move on to farther into this thing. Did she send those first emails claiming to be this biblical character or this evil woman Lilith? Yes, she sent the first couple emails to Ian as part of the dispute over the condo. And as you learn later, the prosecutor's theory, the case Ian or Angela or both, look at those fire and brimstone emails and say, this is something we can work with. Let's create a whole portfolio of fire and brimstone. Let this woman be threatening you and then we'll have our stuff in our condo and our life and we're done with her.

“We'll make her look like your psycho, ex-girlfriend and then we'll be rid of her latte don will have the condo. Who was the driving force was the girlfriend or was it Ian?”

Well, it all happened behind closed doors to probably never know the answer to that. I would dearly like to have been a fly in the law for some of these moments.

What could turn the corner to this rape fantasy and what was that all about? So Keith and the in the darkest reaches of the internet, there are these, let's call them bulletin boards where people can post messages including kinky things like you would think illegal acts. If you're a stranger that would like me to come sexually assault you, let's get together. Give me a shout, respond to this message. Well, somebody picked up on that and actually responded to this message. It was posted there saying,

I'll be walking the dog at 8 o'clock next week, come, come find me and we'll have a sexual assault fantasy together. Now, Angela said that that ad was placed by Michelle in order to six somebody on a crazy guy. And that's not what happened because later on we learned that in fact it was Angela and the Marshall that were creating these commons on the bulletin boards to come rape me. One guy showed up and didn't follow through allegedly, but then then somebody else did show up and as Angela tells it, he cornered her in the garage of their condo put his hands around her neck, told her dreadful things and was about to rape her when he got chased away.

She got away by the skin of her teeth. She then called the police and said, I was just assaulted and that became the reason why the police could then go arrest Michelle. Did you happen to know, by the way, whether anybody was able to vet that is actually having happened? I don't think they believe it ever happened. I don't think there was any surveillance footage in the garage or in the alleyway to support it actually happened. But this was an escalation from the mischief of saying, Lilith, you're going to burn in hell, all those kind of emails. That was not enough to prompt a criminal kind of response.

This was, now they were able to go to Michelle's parents' house where Michelle was living and the rest are in charge with attempted rape essentially. When we come back, we'll plan extra clip from Dennis's interview with Angela's former best friend about her experience with Angela's deceit. We'll also share another clip from Dennis's interview with Michelle, happily, herself.

I get together with country music superstar Luke Combs, who are special Sunday Sit Down live in Nashville. It was a great night with our viewers in the room as Luke and I talked through his extraordinary rise from college bars to sold out stadiums. You can get our conversation for free wherever you download your podcasts.

“There's another player here, I think it's pretty important, Michelle. And I've always been impressed by Michelle's father, who is a guy with a small business and he doesn't have an investigative work and is under his belt.”

And he determines that the question, this is, of course, to camp a little bit, daughter would be killed, any of these kinds of accusations. But they think that if we can find out the story told by these emails, what's the providence of them? Where are they coming from? Where is the machine? What's the IP address of this thing? Then we'll know more about where the mischiefs of all of this lies. And the Anaheim police were, they said they could do nothing really for them.

They had people on it and they were checking out with the, you know, the usual carriers and it takes a long time and it gets search warrants. Meanwhile, Darrell Dad is working by himself and he comes up with IP addresses and they were able to track down and say, his daughter was not here at this time when a message was sent. And they eventually track it back, in the end of it, the payoff of this thing, Keith is amazing. All of these fire and rimstone messages are coming from where Angela's own cell phone.

I was puzzled to know why the Anaheim police didn't look up those IP addresses themselves to determine where the emails were sent from.

“I asked her Dad, did you have to be a Caltech or MIT graduate? They were waiting for search warrants to be responded to, you know, from Google and different places.”

And they thought, and they thought Michelle Hadley was good for it, I think.

And it always seems to, based on what I'm talking about.

Who else, but this woman who told us she uses is Baroque kind of style, who else would be doing this? Meanwhile, Angela was lying about, let me get this straight, she was lying about her job, she wasn't a lawyer. Yep, she was lying about being pregnant, she wasn't. And she was lying about having cancer. What was that all about?

And that was especially, this was especially malicious, Keith, because she pulled in all of her friends and Angela had a circle of friends in the Anaheim area. And they were all in sympathy, whether poor Angela has come down with cervical cancer, and she's going to chemo therapy several sessions a week, she's losing her hair, she's now wearing a scarf, and one friend even cut her own hair in solidarity with her. Just to say, we're all on the same team, we're pulling for you, and she wore her was the hashtag that she used.

And the friend got suspicious, so it was a friend named Mary, who said, "Look, I know you're losing your hair, but I'm seeing quite a bit there." Under the scarf, what's going on? And this friend Mary went to talk to her live-in boyfriend, or you know to sing anything strange.

They started to put clues together, and Mary said, she tracked her down to the place where she was getting chemotherapy, and they never heard of her.

They didn't know her as a patient at all. So the friends got together, and they said, "We need to deal with Angela, we need to bring her in and have a formal intervention with her." We have an extra clip from that interview you did with Mary, actually. She talked about the day of the intervention, so let's have a listen. When you say intervention, I think I have an idea of a tell me.

There were... What's the goal of the evening here? The goal was to clear the air, give her a chance to come clean, and admit that she didn't have cancer, that she wasn't an attorney, and that she was no longer welcome to live in that home anymore. So all of her stuff was packed, and it was in her car. She was at brunch with a friend, and they actually...

The friend and Angela thought that Jason was preparing a surprise for her that he was going to propose. So it was kind of very much the opposite of that. So the agenda was... Angela, why are you a pathological liar? And why are you deceiving your friends this way?

Yes.

Well, to tidy this up, Angela was done basically by the end of this thing.

And the police came to her, and they charged her with several charges involving this harassment of Michelle Hadley.

“And she was done, and she accepted up a plea, and she went away for a sentence of, I believe, five years, was it Michelle?”

Yeah. So she's out of the way, but then there's still a whole question of Ian. What does Ian know about this thing? And that's a question to the Department of Justice really takes on.

He had a tougher time of it than Angela, because he went to trial on a series of charges, committing cyber stalking, perjury obstruction of justice. Jury trial, jury fan of guilty on all charges, and he went away for 10 years. So that was the end of Angela in the U.S. martial. But the question becomes what happens for poor Michelle Madigan. I mean, in Madigan, Michelle, you are only good things can happen for Michelle Madigan.

For Michelle Hadley, I mean, here she had been, I knew this was going to happen. In the county jail, she's wearing a monitoring device. In the court of public opinion, and who knows an estimation of her friends. She was guilty as charged. She was this awful, awful person.

How do you get your name and reputation back? Right. Well, she was able to sue. She was a civil case.

She went to the, she sued the city of Anaheim for damages, and was rewarded short of $2 million.

“But is that enough to make up for what she's been through?”

You know, it may be a wonder about a couple of things. The, the switcheru here. For one thing, the investigation, I mean, it had to have been embarrassing for the D.A. And for the police department, when they had just, you know, they were, they were conned as much as Michelle. Yeah.

In a way. But also the DOJ, and giving a job to somebody as a U.S. martial. And then discovering that this kind of personality exist in the background. I guess you can escape detection for that sort of thing, but it's concerning to somebody. Great.

Do you find that leads me to end at kind of the, the bigger issue that's in front of all of us. Now, what can you see and what can you believe? Right. My phone is full of things that I can't believe with my own two eyes. I know they're made up.

I know there's AI slot. Where's this text from? What's the provenance of anything these days? Where is truth and the story that Michelle Madigan and I did was almost 10 years ago now. Think of everything that's happened in terms of the mistrust of media and the mistrust of information.

“And how do you untangle that for future people that's stumbled into the situation that poor Michelle did?”

How do you find out the truth? I mean, I just was before deepfakes or things that we heard about, you know, that could have been another layer. I mean, they just kept ramping up the abuse. So the alleged abuse and until it got Michelle arrested. I mean, those emails weren't enough to get arrested.

They kept going. And there's so many tools that is very scary out there to be able to, to, to, to trust where these emails and where these, these ideas come from. So maybe we should say Michelle hadly was in the end innocent of all of these charges. Did you have anything to do with it? Nothing to do with the emails or anything else. She was a total victim of this thing and a colossal victim. We'd like to leave you also with this bit of extra interview that you did with Michelle Dennis.

About the entire experience, particularly the negative media coverage she received, she talked about that in your interview. And I'd like to take another listen to a clip from that. What happened to you here? I was viciously attacked by a malicious person and had a whole life torn out from underneath me.

And I've experienced things that girls like me never experience.

I mean, never, you know, nice girls who are raised in shelter in environments. You know, we don't go to jail, you know, how many people had framed for a crime in the air.

“You know, what are the odds of something like this?”

You were framed. I was framed. Yeah. I was framed for a crime. And it feels like this stuff of movies. You know, the whole time I'm living it, I'm thinking, this isn't real.

This is like something you would see in a movie. This doesn't happen in real life. And, and it happened. And it was easy for them to do.

I had basically been tried in the court of public opinion before I even went to trial.

Yeah, the pants like a girl. Yeah. And everyone was portraying me in that way. And I believe they were even interviewed as saying they were 100% convinced and had plenty of evidence to support that I hadn't done this crime. And I'm reading this thing in what evidence.

Because you're thinking if I didn't do it, how can there be so much evidence? And of course, then ended up turning out there was tons of evidence that supported that Angela had done it because she had. I mean, that's that that gives a pretty clear view of where she was if you years ago when you did that interview with her dentist.

Let's take it a while. And do you ever get back? Hey, good question. Yeah, I mean, the reporting now is she she liked she wants to be an advocate for for victims of domestic abuse. I just admired her having the courage to to find her voice.

“I mean, and to also find trust again, I mean, I think if there's anything her experience would have would have challenged her is the ability to ever trust anyone.”

And you know, let alone a journalist to sit down and talk to and so the the opportunity for to talk with her and for dentist to get to interview her was was a privilege. You know, and at that time, I mean, she was in graduate school and she was going to start businesses. I mean, she saw a big road ahead and this was part of her process of reclaiming her voice. It really says it all. The happy button up thought, of course, to all of this is that Michelle and on and had a baby girl live her own she has another chapter of her life and she's grateful that the authorities were able to bring this thing to a resolution.

She wasn't happy going through it, of course, but she she sees some rainbows where there were only storm clouds. Um, well, when we come back, that's answer some of your questions from social media. And so now some of your questions for social from social media about this episode. Heather McNear and Nepper on Facebook says, uh, this is crazy and why didn't the police or DA check the IP address is before making an arrest. Good question.

They'll say the danger was there, you know, Angela was in danger and that they would check those later. I mean, I think that that's they acted on Angela's words and and and Ian's too. And they were waiting on the search warrant and the information from all the providers and they didn't have it. And, uh, yeah, it's protecting one woman who thinks that she's a she's a fear of fear of her life from this. I guess that would be the first cause.

“The first thing you must do is make sure that no harm comes to a person who is apparently in danger.”

Reselda and Steve Raina on Facebook asked, what was the deal with the high amount of bond I've seen people charged with murder.

We have a lesser amount. You have a lot of money in over a million.

They didn't want her on devices. They wanted her away from her. And they'd had a poor experience with her from their point of view from the authorities point of view. They took her in and they gave her a kind of a warning and they said, look, you've got to cut this stuff out. And then as soon as they pulled away from her house, there was more of it from their point of view, she was back at it sending threatening emails.

So this is a person who they thought was a cycle crazy and who kept on coming, kept on coming and wouldn't take good advice to stand out. I'm a Bonnie on Facebook wonders if she got her condo back. I guess referring to Michelle. No. She never did.

She never got her money back. Did she Michelle?

I don't believe so. I was trying to figure that out because she did sue Angela and Ian.

“And you know, I think eventually Ian did sell the condo. But by that point, I don't know if there was any money left for Michelle as part of the settlement.”

But there is a report that she had a separate settlement. So it's possible Ian had to pay her some money. But she never, she never got the condo back. And I don't think they got much of her money back. Tracy rails on Facebook says Dennis did a good job on this report. Well, thank you very much. And I say thank you that Michelle was there all the way through this and really really guiding it.

A producer Michelle. Adam Delagan on X says darn you, date line NBC. You've got me hooked again. And I've got work to do. Why did I turn on the TV for good reason? Just as we planned. Don't watch alone.

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