Kaitlyn's Baby | Episode 3: Fifty doulas

Crime is impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the mistred flags, can change everything.

On the final hours, we examined the moments before a disappearance and the questions that never got answered.

Listen to and follow the final hours wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday. A BBC World Service and CBC podcast production. This episode contains strong language and references to baby loss and sexual behavior.

“It that conversation with Shana when she calls you to tell you what happened, what did she say and how did that go?”

And no, she was really shook up. I think we were both just starting, and I'm like, "Oh my God. We'll lay God." Terry Murphy lives just north of Toronto in a big college setting. Fields, horses, barns. She has five kids and she's been a dula for decades. So when it comes to birthing, there's no actually hasn't seen.

But mentoring Shana, who had Caitlin Braun as her first client, that really threw her.

I think I had more resources because I wasn't there doing what she did to start really going after it. And then Shana did. I mean, she's really got to be doubting herself. And, you know, really shook up that she didn't see things. Which Shana didn't see was that Caitlin was faking her pregnancy. Faking her labor.

And not until Caitlin finally gets an ultrasound, does the truth come out. So we're like, pretty freaked out about all of that. While Shana is still in shock, still unsure what has happened, Terry's instinct is to get to the bottom of this. She wanted answers, and the more she dug, the bigger the story got. And I said, "You really need to pick up the phone and call me. I need to speak with you."

For Terry, there was only one person who really knew what was going on. And that was Caitlin. And she just said that she was really sorry. She couldn't stop crying. She just kept saying, "I don't know why I do it." For CBC and the BBC World Service, I'm Sarah Trelevin. And this is the Con. Caitlin's Baby. Episode 3. 50 Duelas.

I'm thinking this woman is in a psychodicate. Terry says her call with Caitlin was short, and it didn't offer a lot of answers. She just kept saying, "I don't know why I do it, but that she's going preserathy." And like I said, "You're causing trauma to these people. You've got to stop doing this." Caitlin promises Terry she'll stop. And Terry is hopeful, but she knows that Caitlin probably can't do it alone.

She'll need the people who love her. So her first thought is to find Caitlin's mom.

“I'm a mom, and I really was feeling for her mom. You know?”

With a bit of slew thing, Terry finds her. I've messaged her mother and said, "I really need to speak to you. I'm really concerned about your daughter. Please contact me." Months go by. And then finally, Terry hears back from Caitlin's mom. She says that Caitlin admitted everything that she was scared. She received a call from the police about possible charges, and she is finally real at hitting the scope of what she has done.

They said that she will not be charged if she receives the help and that there are no more complaints. Caitlin's mom tells Terry that she thinks this is finally sunk in. That Caitlin finally understands that her actions are hurting other people. And she tells Terry that Caitlin is seeing a psychiatrist.

“I think that is final sunk in in this time that she is affecting other people.”

But Terry's not sure about that response. To her, it kind of lacks urgency. It doesn't seem like this is going to solve the immediate problem. There's no way for her to know that Caitlin will stop calling Dolas. So Terry keeps looking for other people in Caitlin's life. First I go on Facebook and I see her best friend. I saw her best friend had a little baby.

And I said, "Don't want to free too out. We'll have some concerns for your best friend." And I get on the phone when we tell her that her friend has just appeared to be pregnant and taken it through a long, four-day journey to not be pregnant.

And she's like, "Well, I just supported her through a stillbirth in June.

And she had a little girl." And I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is unresolved trauma from this actual stillbirth." She had in June. So Sean and I start, you know, you're feeling a lot of compassion and pity and all this poor thing, you know, she actually had a stillbirth.

Caitlin's best friend tells Terry that there was a dula present for the stillbirth in June. So Terry reaches out to that dula, hoping to clarify what happened. If you supported her for four days, she was at home, bursting with her, and she was shaking and sweating. And she said, "It didn't look good."

The story is a familiar one. She was supporting a stillbirth, a 20-week stillbirth through a rate. They go to the hospital for an ultrasound. They get taken in by ambulance. So during the ultrasound, she goes into the room.

Goes for the ultrasound, comes out with the check-in with X's.

“You need to tell your team what's happening.”

And she goes, "See, I want to have to go to the bathroom. Go through the bathroom, just appears."

This dula never sees Caitlin again, and for Terry, the landscape is changing quickly.

This is starting to feel less like unprocessed trauma and more like another con. Caitlin wasn't just lying to strangers. She was lying to her best friend. I've actually talked to this friend, and she is still very much confused and upset about what happened. Until Terry connected with her, she was still under the impression that Caitlin had delivered a stillborn baby.

What is now you read on this situation? What do you think is going on here? That she has a fetish. She's manipulating. [Music] Terry and Shana agreed that they need to warn other dulas.

They started posting dula groups on social media and put the word out through the community. Here's Shana. So we created the group chat in November. And every week or every few days, we would find another victim and add them to the group chat. So it was kind of surreal because the group chat would be quiet for a few days.

And then all of a sudden my phone would start vibrating, and I knew what it was. What it was was dula after dula, finding out about Caitlin and realizing that they too had been duped. They had seen questions over and over. This is Amy, the dula who had been homesick but stuck on the phone with Caitlin for ten days. She also joined the group chat.

“How long has she been doing this? Why aren't the police involved? Why why why?”

But also, there were even people who finished their communication with Caitlin still believed that there really was a baby. Really believed that there was a birth and didn't know it was fake. And then I had to tell them that it was fake. That they had, you know, put this kind of weird but not harmful situation in a box and they're brain up in a way in their memory. And I had to bust it open.

One of those people was a dula named Randy. She was from a different Canadian city, thousands of miles away in Calgary. Like Amy, Randy worked with Caitlin over text for several days in a row. There was a lot of messages. I know at some point their friends joined and so I would be having dialogue with one friend. After several hours of labor, things started to take a turn.

One of Caitlin's friends texted Randy, telling her that the doctors were panicked and things weren't looking good. So at this point in time, friend is freaking out. They are catastrophicly going to worst case scenario. As you would, like when you see your friend essentially bleeding out, you're going to freak out. And so they're going, whoa, what if there's his direct to me, my client had wanted more babies. How, how do they go about that? How are they going to, like, it's not just like this loss.

“Now there's another loss. What happens if they're not able to stop the bleeding?”

What happens if they die? Like, they said to, like, Oregon failure was happening. And so when that happens, like, I know I'm like, okay, so my client's essentially dead.

And I'm never lost a client before.

Randy believed that Caitlin was in a coma.

Like, I end up driving to my friend's house well on the phone with one of my friends because like, I'm hysterically crying at this point.

“This interaction, the loss of her client, had a lasting impact on Randy.”

So much so that she got a tattoo in Caitlin's honor. It's on her left arm below the elbow. It reads surrender with a little blue butterfly. But then Randy saw the social media posts. You get hit with so many feelings and so many emotions and once, and the dominoes started falling. Because it's like, oh, thank God, like, they're okay, they're alive. But also what the fuck? And what the hell does happen?

It's become clear not only was Caitlin obviously lying about the pregnancy, she clearly had not fallen into a coma either. It had to be Caitlin herself sending those texts from different cell phone numbers.

Shawna remembers that at first, the dulas who joined the chat group were mostly Canadian, but soon it ballooned.

We found somebody who was in Florida, I think.

“At one point, we found somebody in the States. I think it was in the Southern States. I can't remember exactly where, but it was the week before me.”

While talking to another dulas, Shawna says Caitlin turned on her camera and pointed it at her vagina. Like, call the dulas on FaceTime or whatever. Set the phone up, went and sat down and gave herself a service check. As more and more of these stories piled up, things began to feel like they were spiraling out of control. The scope of this thing was enormous. The number of dulas in the Caitlin group chat hit more than 50.

50. And those were just the ones who approached the group. How many other dulas had Caitlin tricked? How much damage had she caused? A lot of the dulas didn't charge Caitlin for helping to deliver a stillborn, but some did charge for their time.

“And often Caitlin would just disappear and not pay them.”

So the dulas were upset about the money she owed some of them, and the emotional toll she took on all of them. But they were now also worried about how far she might go. We were listening to these stories about how she got into labor and deliver units with dulas, and then she would be gone walking around the hospital for an hour to where no one knew where she was. I was also very scared that she was going to find a dulas who either was pregnant, or brought their infant along with them.

And I was concerned that she was going to find a new mom working as a dulas. Like I was really scared she was going to steal a baby. The last straw was when one of the dulas in the group chat, so she found an ad Caitlin posted, advertising her services as a nanny. I call the police.

I'm David Ridgen, host of the award-winning podcast, someone knows something. Each season I investigated different unsolved case, from a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight, to two teenagers killed by the KKK. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous intelligent gem, and Esquire named the series one of the best true crime podcasts of 2021.

Find someone knows something wherever you get your podcasts. We're Sarah Turning and Cortina Cole, crime is impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the mistred flags, can change everything.

On the final hours, we examined the moments before a disappearance and the questions that never got answered.

Listen to and follow the final hours wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday. I sit in my car shaking for hours because all you can do is leave a message with the switchboard, and they say someone will get back to you. When Amy finally gets a call back, she says the detective tells her something she really doesn't expect.

And he makes it clear to me that he knows who Caitlin is.

I don't know how long ago, but previously that she had actually lied to him and said she was pregnant.

“At that time, he obviously can't tell me a whole lot.”

She has privacy rights, but in his very like roundabout police officer way,

made it clear to me that we were not the first that he knew who she was,

that this has been going on. The detective offers to go to Caitlin's apartment to check on her. We've confirmed the brand for police did do a wellness check on Caitlin. He calls me back and he confirms she's in her living room and she's fine. She was surprised when he showed up.

Amy says she was told that Caitlin was at home and that she was fine. Maybe she's gearing up for some more fake contractions. But despite all that, Amy says the police don't believe any laws have been broken. We can't really help you. This isn't really fraud. There was no money involved.

And he told me to start spreading the word.

So very specifically in that conversation, he asked me if there was some kind of certifying bodies, some kind of college that we could go to that could help us spread the word that there was somebody out there who's speaking pregnancies. There is no college or certifying body. It's not like being a nurse.

Duelas aren't a regulated profession. So there's no single entity that can send an email blast out to let them know that there's a predator on the loose. I asked very specifically if sharing her name or information could get us in trouble and he said, "No, that if this was something that you really went through,

then it is not slander." Hey, it's been a long time since I've come on and shared anything. This is Amy Silva. She's another Duela in London, Ontario who had a brief experience with Caitlyn. Very recently, through weeks ago today, I supported somebody through what I was told.

It was a still birth. I hit somebody who reached out. I made the TikTok because I wanted to protect other Duelas.

It was never about naming Caitlyn or shaming Caitlyn.

“Yeah, it was always like, what can we do moving forward?”

We had all of us, we had those conversations very early on about, "Okay, this is a situation that we never want to happen again. We don't want any other Duelas to go through this. What are some safety measures that we could put in place? What could we have done to prevent this?"

And honestly, there's not a lot that you can't do. Amy's video went viral. And she inspired some other Duelas to make their own, including Shana. I feel like a little bit better today, so I'm going to try to do a full story time, and hopefully shed some light on some questions that a lot of people have.

This is going to be in a lot of parts just so you're aware. I'll link in comments and stuff. I was sitting in my car and I said, "If you're a Duela, please watch this." And I said, "There's a birth fetishist running out of grant for Ontario." And I got a DM.

But I also accidentally used the hashtag "Dogs of TikTok." I meant to say, "Duelas of TikTok." And I, like, typo, I guess. I don't even know how that worked. And I was like, "Oh, oops.

I had 24 followers. I was not expecting anything to happen with this."

“But I think it was because I used dogs of TikTok.”

I got on the wrong for you page. And so then people were hearing this and being like, "Wait, what?" The next red flag is that she did not want to change her shorts after her water broke. And I thought that that was really gross. Now I think that she was just really lazy and thought I was stupid, which I guess I was.

These posts had big, tens of thousands of views, hundreds of comments. Here's Amy Silva again. What I got from my video was a lot of people reaching out to me that had been impacted by Keylin. I had a multiple duels from out of province, out of the country. I had people that she'd grown up with messaging me.

Message me. I had a woman who owns a funeral home in the UK who sent my keylin money for a funeral. Message me.

“What were you learning about her from what they were telling you?”

I had a lot of people that she grew up with. Friends from university. My family members reached out.

They were all saying she's always done this.

She's accused me of XYZ. She's always been unstable or I'm not shocked by this. It was a lot of that. It's not shocked. And in the midst of all this, the duels sharing their trauma and anger

trying to warn people while absorbing all of the other awful Caitlin Braun stories coming from friends and family members. Something else happens. Someone online with Caitlin's name and picture starts liking the comments under these videos.

We haven't been able to verify whether this was in fact Keylin.

“But to the duels at the time, they believed it was her.”

And that she was mocking them. While this is all blowing up online, Amy Perry is still frustrated that she can't get police interested in this case.

But finally, after two months of waiting,

she's connected to a victim service this worker. And she just sat there the whole time going, "Oh my God! Oh my God! This is so traumatic! Oh my God!

Bless this woman. All I needed in that moment was validation that this was real. And she gave me that validation. She's witnessed homers with somebody in her family. She knew what to do.

She knew the kind of intimate type of support that we give. And more than anything without allowed was the space for me

to get more into the details that I couldn't bring up

in a 10-minute conversation to just try and give the bullet points to the police officer to even say this is something that's happening. In her role as a victim services worker, she's not interested in the crime. She was interested in the trauma.

And so she listened to my trauma. And I, to this day wonder what she did that all of a sudden within a couple weeks, Frankfurt Police was calling me and asking to do a video interview. Soon, other Duelas are asked to come in for interviews as well.

But Amy is still struggling. I'm in Frankfurt and I know where she lives. And so I drive past her house. So I pull into the parking lot, and I sit there for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and I stare at her house.

Thinking about knocking on her door and punching her in the face.

“I mean really, that's what I'm picturing.”

And obviously I don't do it. She's unsafe. I'm not going to put myself in that position. But what I then learned three days later is that there was a Duelin that house while I was staring at it.

And she was there for five days. All of the simmering starts to feel like it's hitting a boiling point. And then we wake up one March morning, and our group Duela Chat is going bananas. And she's been arrested.

We find out that she's been arrested. And we don't hear from anybody. We have no idea what's going on. Caitlyn's story is now being feverishly covered by local and soon national and international media.

A brand-fared woman is being charged for using Duela services while falsely claiming to be pregnant and having still births. The woman faked pregnancies and still births to receive treatment. Some Duelas say they're really... 24-year-old Caitlyn Braun is facing charges ranging from criminal harassment, fraud, and sexual assault.

She was arrested by brand-fared police on Monday. She is like 13 charges, and one of them is sexual assault and the rest are like false pretence and harassment, and things like that. And then that encourages other Duelas to come forward. The brand-fared police tell reporters that they're receiving a flood

of calls and emails from potential victims. In an email to our team, they describe this case as an exceptionally unique investigation.

but there's a collective sigh of relief that Caitlyn's in jail.

Stopped. At least for now. But there are still so many unanswered questions. The main ones, who is Caitlyn Braun?

And why would she do this?

I wish that I knew that, honestly. It's one part of me feels like, you know, she's sick, and she has some sort of like disease or illness or something.

“And that's why that happened because a normal person just wouldn't do that.”

That's next time, on the Con, Caitlyn's Baby.

We made numerous attempts to contact Caitlyn Braun, outlining the allegations made through the series, and inviting her to respond to what has been said. She made it clear to me that she didn't want to be involved with the podcast. The invitation remains open to Caitlyn,

“should she change her mind and wish to respond.”

None of the sexual allegations against her were proven in court. [MUSIC] This is a CBC and BBC World Service production. The show is written, researched, and produced by me, Sarah Trelevin. It was also written and produced by Kathleen Goldhardt.

Extra production support from Andrew Friesen and Alexis Green.

“Sound design and scoring by Mitchell Stewart.”

Emily Cornell is our digital coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Veronica Simmons. The fact checker is Emily Mathew. Our executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Conia Springer is our senior manager,

and RF Naurani is the director of CBC podcast. For the BBC World Service, Cat Collins is the senior producer, and John Manel is the podcast commissioning editor. [MUSIC]