Talking Dateline: Simply Diabolical

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1:05Hello there, and welcome to Talking Dateline. I'm Keith Morrison. I'm here with Dennis Murphy and producer Michelle Madigan. Today, we'll talk about Dennis's 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-fiancée. 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.

1:45So let's talk Dateline. 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 that the prime victim becomes the prime suspect by the end of the show. It is so complicated. And Michelle, I was worried all along that we were going to throw the viewers because you have to take them by the hand and say, this is complicated. Listen to what's going on. But you're right, Keith, it's not a conventional dateline yarn. 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 exonerated.

2:29And 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, walk out the courthouse steps and just this smile. And I just remember listening to her and being like, I've got to get an interview with her. Michelle, I remember, what I remember about Michelle Hadley in our story is that she was self-described. She talks about herself as being this goody two-shoes, a kid that minds all this, you know, keeps your hands at 10 and 2 when you're driving, cross at the green, not in between.

3:09And 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 waltzed in 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 ends 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.

3:46But to be in jail awaiting trial on a very serious charge for something you didn't do and somebody else is conning you, I mean, my goodness. What a feeling. We've all been in and out of the county jails and prisons doing stories. And for me, the horror 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 moved pretty quickly because my recollection is within just weeks, they were talking about moving in together and in fact did.

4:25And maybe the worst thing that happened to Michelle Hadley was that she agreed to buy a condo with this new boyfriend who she barely knew. And that became the source of all the trouble, I think, from then on, because she paid the entire down payment on this thing. Well, they unwound as a couple, and the mortgage kept in place, and they had this thing between them, 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.

5:01And, 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. There was all the legal problems and there were counter suits and such and it was just a mess. Yeah. I was wondering as I watched, 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? The condo issue could have gone away. But people who were following this, some of the investigators said the issue of control wasn't negotiable.

5:36I suppose you would see his motivation, the former boyfriend, the U.S. Marshal. 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 would just sign over to him. I mean, we don't really know.

6:09We 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. And he never responded to us. So it's hard to know exactly what his motivation was. But I think what my understanding is, it had to have been, 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, 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 of the case, Ian or Angela or both look at those fire and brimstone emails and say, hmm, this is something we can work with.

7:01Let's create a whole portfolio of fire and brimstone. Let this woman be threatening you, and then we'll have our stuff and 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, la-ti-da, and we'll have the condo. Who was the driving force? Was it the girlfriend or was it Ian? Well, it all happened behind closed doors. You probably never know the answer to that. I would dearly like to have been a fly on the wall for some of these moments. What turned the corner to this rape fantasy, and what was that all about? So, Keith, in the dankest 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.

7:43If 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 that was posted there saying, come, I'll be walking the dog at 8 o 'clock next week. 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 sick somebody on her, a crazy guy. And that's not what happened, because later on we learned that, in fact, it was Angela and the marshal that were creating these come-ons on the bulletin boards to come rape me.

8:22One guy showed up and didn't follow through, allegedly. But 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. Do you happen to know, by the way, whether anybody was able to vet that as 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.

9:03But 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 arrest her and charge her with this attempted rape, essentially. When we come back, we'll play an extra clip from Dennis' interview with Angela's former best friend about her experience with Angela's deceit. We'll also share another clip from Dennis' interview with Michelle Hadley herself.

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11:10There's another player here who I think is pretty important to Michelle, and I've always been impressed by Michelle's father, who is a guy with a small business, and he doesn't have any investigative work under his belt. And he determines that the question— they, of course, can't believe that their daughter would be guilty of any of these kinds of accusations. But they think that if we can find out the story told by these emails, What's the provenance 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.

11:46And the Anaheim police rather said they could do nothing really for them. They had people on it and they were checking out with the usual carriers and it takes a long time and it gets search warrants. Meanwhile, dear old 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 brimstone messages are coming from where? Angela's own cell phone. I was puzzled to know why the Anahan police didn't look up those IP addresses themselves to determine where the emails were sent from.

12:27I asked her dad, do you have to be a Caltech or MIT graduate to be able to know this stuff? And they said, no, this is 15-year-old kind of computer savvy. Yeah. Yeah, they were waiting for search warrants to be responded to, you know, from Google and different places. And they thought, Michelle, that Michelle Hadley was good for it, I think. And it almost seemed to, based on what I saw that you put on television. Who else but this woman who told us she uses this 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.

13:01She wasn't a lawyer. She was lying about being pregnant. She wasn't. And she was lying about having cancer. What was that all about and how was that exposed? 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 with her. Poor Angela has come down with cervical cancer. And she's going to chemotherapy 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.

13:39Angie Warrior was the hashtag that she used. Sure. And the friend got suspicious. 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. Are you noticing 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'd 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.

14:17We 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, but tell me. 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.

15:00So 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. My, my, my. 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 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 this whole question of Ian. What does Ian know about this thing?

15:39And that's a question that the Department of Justice really takes on. And he becomes the subject of an investigation, and they look at him, and they start to see the same kinds of things with the digital forensic examination that should have been done more closely by the Anaheim police. He had a tougher time of it than Angela because he got a – Sure. He went to trial on a series of charges, committing cyber-stalking, perjury, obstruction of justice, jury trial, jury found him guilty on all charges, and he went away for 10 years. So that was the end of Angela and the U.S. Marshal. But the question becomes, what happens for poor Michelle Madigan?

16:17I mean, only good things can happen for Michelle Madigan. For Michelle Hadley, I mean, here she had been 80-some days in the county jail. She's wearing a monitoring device. In the court of public opinion, and who knows, in 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, right. Well, she was able to sue. There was a civil case. 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 made me wonder about a couple of things, the switcheroo here.

17:01For one thing, the investigation, I mean, it had to have been embarrassing for the DA and for the police department when they were conned as much as Michelle was in a way. But also the DOJ and giving a job to somebody as a U.S. Marshal and then discovering that this kind of personality exists in the background. I guess you can escape detection for that sort of thing, but it's concerning to some degree, do you find? That leads me to kind of the bigger issue that's in front of all of us now of 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.

17:45I know they're made up. I know there's AI slop. Where is 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 stumble into the situation that poor Michelle did? How do you find out the truth? I mean, yeah, this was before deep fakes or things that we heard about. You know, that could have been another layer. I mean, they just kept ramping up the abuse, you know, the alleged abuse.

18:22And until it got Michelle arrested, I mean, those emails weren't enough to get her arrested. They kept going. And there's so many tools. It is very scary out there to be able to trust where these emails and where these ideas come from. So maybe we should say Michelle Hadley was, in the end, innocent of all of these charges. She certainly was. Had nothing 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.

19:05She 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 my 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 sheltered environments, is, you know, we don't go to jail, you know. How many people are framed for a crime in a year? 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 the stuff of movies.

19:55You 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 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. You were the bad psycho 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 thinking, what evidence? Because you're thinking, if I didn't do it, how can there be so much evidence?

20:33And, of course, it ended up turning out. There was tons of evidence that supported that Angela had done it because she had. I mean, that gives a pretty clear view of where she was a few years ago when you did that interview with her, Dennis, and the road she had to follow to get back to any kind of a normal life. Must have taken a while. And do you ever get back? Good question. Yeah, I mean, the reporting now is she wants to be an advocate for victims of domestic abuse. I just admired her having the courage to find her voice. I mean, and to also find trust again. I mean, I think if there's anything her experience would have challenged her is the ability to ever trust anyone, you know, let alone a journalist to sit down and talk to.

21:21And so the opportunity to talk with her and for Dennis to get to interview her was a privilege. 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. That really says it all. The happy button-up thought, of course, to all of this is that Michelle went on and had a baby girl of 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 sees some rainbows where there were only storm clouds.

22:03Well, when we come back, let's answer some of your questions from social media.

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23:39And so now some of your questions from social media about this episode. Heather McNair Knepper on Facebook says, this is crazy and why didn't the police or DA check the IP addresses before making an arrest? Good question. They'll say the danger was there. You know, Angela was in danger and they would check those later. I mean, I think that they acted on Angela's words and Ian's too. And they were waiting on the search warrants and the information from all the providers, and they didn't have it. And, yeah, it's protecting one woman who thinks that she's a fear of her life from this way. I guess that would be the first cause.

24:24The first thing you must do is make sure that no harm comes to a person who is apparently in danger. Griselda and Steve Rayna on Facebook asked, what was the deal with the high amount of bond? I've seen people charged with murder who have a lesser amount. It was a lot of money. Over a million. They didn't want her on devices. They wanted her away from her computer and email. And they'd had a poor experience with her. From their point of view, from the authority's point of view, they took her in and they gave her 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.

25:03She was back at it sending threatening emails. So this is a person who they thought was a psycho crazy and who kept on coming, kept on coming, kept on coming and wouldn't take good advice to stand down. Emma Bonney on Facebook wonders if she got her condo back, I guess referring to Michelle. No. She never did. No. 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 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 reports that she had a separate settlement.