Broken Harts, Episode 3: Full Transcript

Justine Harman: What can you really tell about someone from a picture? Can you determine their ethnic background? Whether they're introverted or extroverted? Can you tell if they're genuinely happy, or just playing the part? What if you zoom in or out? Can you infer things like wealth or religion from the furniture or personal objects in the background? What about a tight shot of a presidential hopeful on the campaign trail? What kind of crowd would you want assembled around you to communicate that you're the "other guy," the progressive, antiestablishment choice? And who could say those things for you simply by being at your side?

Bernie Sanders: Now you see, this little bird doesn't know it. I think there may be some symbolism here. I know it doesn't look like it, but that bird is really a dove asking us for world peace! No more wars!

Liz Egan: That's Bernie Sanders at a 2016 rally in Portland, Oregon. You may remember this moment. He's going on about the merits of public education, when a tiny finch lands on his podium, in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. It's a moment straight out of the show Portlandia. Irony and serendipity all wrapped into one. Sanders takes one look at the bird and raises his fists like a magician who just conjured a rabbit from a hat. It was a whole thing. The Sanders campaign started selling "Birdie Sanders" merch. Of the more than 11,000 attendees, who is stationed directly behind Sanders? Jen, Sarah, Markis, Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah, and Sierra Hart. There they are on a Friday morning in March, jumping up and down in matching royal blue Bernie T-shirts.

Mark Levitt: I saw them, and they're right in the direct, head-on.

Justine Harman: This is Mark Levitt. He worked as Bernie's director of scheduling and advance work during his 2016 presidential campaign. He even helped create and popularize Sanders' "A Future to Believe In" branding efforts. He remembers the bird moment well.

Mark Levitt: I mean, geez, best-laid plans, right? We…there's no way of planning for that sort of thing. That was actually a level of serendipity that in my entire time working in scheduling in advance, I don't think I'd ever encountered. It was said half-jokingly at the time, but there was some sense in which he had sort of performed a miracle or whatever. This is what people were saying online.

Liz Egan: And this wasn't the first time the Hart tribe had gotten near the senator. Earlier that same week Jen roused her family at 4:30 in the morning to attend a rally in Vancouver, Washington. She wrote on Facebook that she had the kids stand for four hours in the rain, to ensure that they wouldn't miss out on this opportunity. She even made the blue shirts herself. Family friend Nusheen Bakhtiar says members of the Sanders' campaign approached the family and invited them to attend the Portland rally. Here's Lauren, talking to Nusheen about that day.

Lauren Smiley: They went to the Washington rally, and there it was Bernie's campaign people that sort of gave them tickets to come to the Oregon one?

Nusheen Bakhtiar: Yeah, and they asked them, and they put them…they wanted them to sit right behind them.

Justine Harman: That video of Bernie Sanders "putting a bird on it" with the Hart family squarely in the shot? It's been viewed over 2.3 million times on YouTube.

Mark Levitt: Part of the reason that you want to craft that shot behind the candidate very carefully is because—and this happened with Obama on a handful of occasions—the people in that shot functionally share it with the candidate.

Justine Harman: From Glamour, and HowStuffWorks, this is Broken Harts. I'm Justine Harman.

Liz Egan: And I'm Liz Egan.

Justine Harman: Crazy things like this, moments of infamy, seemingly random or unsolicited brushes with fame, like that viral photo of Devonte crying and hugging the cop, they were nothing new to the Hart family. Yet despite the relentless fascination with the outside world, friends like Ian Sperling marveled at Jen's ability to protect her children from prying eyes. Our field reporter, Lauren, chatted with Ian over the phone back in May.

Lauren Smiley: Ian Sperling is a dad who often met up with the Harts at shows around Portland. Jen would tell him that the kids were "developmentally delayed" from their terrible lives before they were adopted, and Ian bought it. So that was why the kids acted a little differently. Maybe that's why Devonte smiled all the time and seemed to act a little younger than his age. Or why Markis and Jeremiah would look listless, and suddenly snap into smiles and personality when he greeted them. Jen also explained why the kids were so thin. They had a vegetarian, organic diet. She always had an answer for everything.

Ian Sperling: I mean, when I say that Jen was good, she was good. And she made parenting look unbelievably easy and awesome, and there was no red flags. Zero. Like the way she respected Devonte's privacy when he took the picture with the cop, and the way she would talk to us about that stuff in private. It's like, we looked up to her. Like, "Wow, she's the best parent in the world, we're horrible" kind of thing.

Liz Egan: Jen often wrote about the importance of protecting her kids' privacy. Once, when a Facebook follower asked if she'd ever considered a reality-TV show, she said, "No. We've had multiple offers in this area," she wrote. "No amount of money would ever be worth the trials and tribulations that would surely come from media/producers manipulating our lives on a TV show." Ian remembers hearing about the offers.

Ian Sperling: She was extremely stressed, doesn't know what to do with getting offers from Good Morning America or the Today show, specifically, and a few others to take him on there. And she declined to do that. Now that plays into what we're learning now, because obviously we learn now that there was some abuse charges in Minnesota, or "fleeing" to Oregon, for lack of a better term. So there's probably more of a reason why she didn't want to go on national TV. At the time we were thinking, Wow, phenomenal parenting. Nice work. You're not exploiting your children? Perfect. That just adds more to the legacy, you know?

Justine Harman: Liz and I have talked about this part of the story a lot. How could one family, one seemingly interested in maintaining a low profile and living off the grid, consistently find itself in the news? How often, really, do people become famous, like virally famous, by accident? Mark Levitt says, from his experience, not that often.

Mark Levitt: With respect to getting back and behind Bernie at the Birdie rally, I would say that if they had seen the process of the rally that they had been to a few days earlier, that would have given them a hint that most people otherwise don't have as to how to do it. So most people, when they arrive at these rallies, this is their first rally or their only rally or whatever. It's not that common to have people go to these rallies twice. In part because they are pretty onerous affairs. You wait for a long time for the candidate and that sort of thing. So you don't get a whole tone of repeat customers. But if these were repeat customers, then they could have very easily seen how the selection process goes for getting people in that shot, in the head-on shot.

Liz Egan: So be honest, what does a photo of two moms and six black kids say to you? Depending on how you were raised, your background and your life experiences, it could mean any number of things. For Zippy Lomax, who first encountered the Hart Tribe back in 2013, the family was the perfect visual symbol for the kind of transformational, inclusive music festivals she attended and often photographed.

Zippy Lomax: And they were just very unique, you know? And I know I'm not the only person who—it was just of a natural term, that would kind of come out when you would see them showing up at places: "Oh, look, there's the Hart Tribe." Beloved is just one of many, many, that have this very similar kind of goal, I guess, of experimental community, different ways of coming together and being supportive rather than competitive.

Justine Harman: As a photographer, Zippy observed how these festivals could serve as a form of emotional release. Attendees often dressed up in costumes with hundreds of people standing on a lawn, rocking and swaying to the music. Footage from the events looks more like an emotionally raw group therapy than raucous jam sessions.

Liz Egan: In the video posted to Jen's YouTube page, Devonte and Jeremiah are at the 2012 Project Earth festival in Minnesota. The boys, both under 10 at the time, have flowers around their necks. Devonte is wearing his "Free hugs" sign. They're both dancing. At around the 45-second mark, you hear Jen's voice: "You going to give Nahko a hug?" Jeremiah runs up to Jen's favorite musician, Nahko Bear, who is dancing shirtless in the crowd. The two embrace for a few seconds, while Abigail, Sierra, and Hannah dance nearby with Sarah. It's one of the rare moments you get a glimpse behind the curtain. Some might see it as proof that Jen coerced the kids into performing for the camera. But if anything seemed off when the family was in public, onlookers like Ian Sperling didn't notice.

Ian Sperling: In our eyes these were superhuman people. Like, they're living the perfect life, they're perfect people, they have perfect kids.

Justine Harman: Zippy noticed their infallibility too. She started a friendship with Jen, one mostly maintained over Facebook messenger, and frequently took pictures of the family.

Zippy Lomax: All of these events are opportunities for people to kind of reinvent themselves and experiment with what it would be like to be, to show up in a different kind of way. So it's hard to say. Because people are maybe not showing up at those events in the same kind of…wearing the same persona, or even the same kind of clothes that they would wear in just everyday life.

Liz Egan: Between shows the festival crowd kept tabs on one another on Facebook, where Jen racked up the likes. Her feed was full of well-staged family photos and long-form captions.

Justine Harman: A post from January 29, 2016, shows silhouettes of three of the Hart children at sunset. The location is Molalla River State Park in Clackamas County, Oregon. It reads: "Him: Sitting in the mud watching the sunset: Do you ever think society over complicates life? There's so much business, technology obsession, and worrying about crossing things off a to-do list while forgetting what it's like to be."

Liz Egan: "Her: Be what?" "Him: Alive." This zest for life and Jen's seemingly endless awe for her children is something friends of the Harts loved about her. In fact, she is often described as the more gregarious and social of the two women.

Zippy Lomax: Jen and I were closer. She was also an amazing photographer, so we had another point of connection there and mutual respect, I guess, for each other's craft. We were friends on Facebook and we interacted in that way. I think that in this age of social media, it's interesting because we feel like we're more engaged with people than maybe we actually are. I was very much engaged with commenting and interacting with Jen and all the amazing photos she was posting about the kids. Definitely kind of aware of what was happening in their lives.

Liz Egan: The last time Zippy saw the Hart family in person was at that same Bernie Sanders rally in Portland where the bird landed on the podium. She was there once again to take pictures. Zippy read us a Facebook message Jen sent after that memorable day.

Zippy Lomax: She was telling me how she was watching me instead of Bernie Sanders. "Watching you work your magic behind the lens was so special. Seeing you just made that much more magical." She saw me capture that bird moment. "Caught a glimpse of you capturing the beyond amazing bird moment. I love you." Then she just said it made her heart—"this moment genuinely made my heart explode in the best possible way."

Liz Egan: This is how Jen Hart spoke. On her Facebook page, a feed of countless posts that span from 2007, a year before she and Sarah adopted their second set of biological siblings, up until March 22, 2018, four days before the crash. She was effusive and passionate about everything. From her children to her wife to the many animals the family rescued and rehabilitated. In a post from June 26, 2013, she wrote in what reads like something from a children's book of a red robin and a baby blackbird she discovered in her yard. "The young blackbird hopped onto my knee and proceeded to look me in the eye and go back and forth between me and nuzzling the baby robin. It was beyond clear that he was trying to communicate a message. I lightly stroked the back of the robin's neck and checked for injuries. This has been my deeply connected purpose for as long as I can remember. Take care of all beings in need." Like so many of her posts, it feels just a little too good to be true. Along with the posts is an image of Jen wearing a gray graphic tee and cuffed jeans, several beaded bracelets lining her wrist, clutching a small bird between her palms. She added an inspirational quote from an obscure science fiction author named Lloyd Biggle, Jr. "Life is life's greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own." It was a kind of slightly mythological story Ian Sperling knew well.

Ian Sperling: I think she was a master Facebook poster. I've never seen anyone articulate so well with photos. My wife said something that made sense after everything is done. She says, "There's not even paint on the paintbrush." That was like a Facebook picture and you're like, "Whoa, what?" So it was staged, like a staged photo maybe. Because they're sitting in front of a canvas, they're painting, "Look at what the kids are doing today," and you look on the paintbrush and there's no paint on it. Not a bad idea as a mom or whatever, you're like, "Oh, shoot, we just did that. We didn't get any pictures. Hey, you guys, let's grab a picture real quick," what have you. But at the same time, in hindsight, that's probably a little bit of the case. It was almost too good to be true.

Liz Egan: Ian tells one story about how the Hart children befriended a homeless man and his version has almost the same hyperbolic language Jen used in an April 2013 post.

Ian Sperling: There was a gentleman who was—and if I told you this already, I apologize—she took her kids down to the Clackamas River one night and they were playing around. It was a hot, sunny summer day and they're playing around there and swimming. Devonte and two of the other kids walked down the way to what looked like a homeless man. Jen, the way she told it was, "I didn't know what to do. If I should let my kids talk to this homeless person who looked extremely disheveled and a bit suspect." But she's taught her kids to not be afraid of strangers. Proceed with caution but to spread love in this world. They went down, talked to this guy, blah, blah, blah. Then she saw them hugging this guy, OK? The kids walked back. She's like, "What was that all about?" They're like, "Oh, we just wanted to brighten this guy's day." Of course, beautiful kids. This is an exaggeration of how they would be because I watched it plenty. Then the guy walks down to Jen, he goes, "Are these your kids, I assume?" She said, "Yeah, yeah." He says, "Well, I got to tell you, they just changed my whole life." She goes, "Oh, how so?" He goes, "That hug I got from them, I don't get that from anybody. See the problem is I have face cancer and half of my face is gone, so I look really scary. It's terminal." He goes, "I don't have any help. I look like a homeless person." He goes, "I'm not. I have a home. I have money. I just look scary and I'm just completely depressed about the end of my life. Your kids just took all of that aside, saw me for who I am inside and gave me a huge hug." He goes, "That meant the world to me. I can die a peaceful person." Something along those lines. This is Jen telling us this story. Now do you take it as grain of salt or what? But I've watched the kids do this to people, so it didn't surprise us one bit, you know?

Liz Egan: The last time Ian saw the Harts was in November 2017, four months before the crash, at a Nahko and Medicine for the People concert in Portland. In a quiet moment Sperling told Sarah that she seemed worn down. She said, "I'm just so tired." He hugged her, said he was sorry she had to put in so many hours at work to support the family of eight, and Sarah answered, "Thanks. I don't hear that very often."

Ian Sperling: I think she was definitely a fangirl. Following these bands like Nahko, Trevor Hall, Xavier Rudd, some of these bands and getting to know them. This was her backstage pass was these kids. The look on Sarah's face every time was "Cool, I'm just hanging along. I got to work in a few hours." That was it with Sarah constantly.

Liz Egan: That night at the Nahko concert last November, Ian noticed that Sarah took most of the kids home after sound check while Devonte stayed on with Jen through the concert. This was the only time he noticed anything remotely strained, anything other than synchronicity in the relationship.

__Ian Sperling:__It wasn't even like they were fighting so much. It was just Sarah was tired, she wanted to go home, she took the kids. Jen and Devonte stayed, danced the night away, and then left. So that was it. We were just like, "Oh, cool. They're normal."

Liz Egan: To say that Jen was the fangirl while Sarah was the adult with the job would be an oversimplification. But Sarah did work a lot. She was an assistant manager at the Kohl's in Hazel Dell, Washington, where she put in long hours, sometimes six days a week. Her colleague, Cheryl Hart, the one who requested a welfare check the same day they were found dead, remembers Sarah as super professional on the sales floor but relaxed and chatty in the back office.

Cheryl Hart: One thing about Sarah is she was most definitely a talker. It was always a bit hard if you got caught up in a conversation with her because she will just rattle on sometimes.

Liz Egan: And Sarah would often talk about her home life with Jen and the kids.

Cheryl Hart: I mean, she would definitely talk about her family. One thing I would notice, though, is that she would never mention the kids' names. She would always just say "the kids" or "the girls" or "the boys." I mean, when she first came on with us, she let everybody know right off the bat that her family was the family with the hug heard around the world, basically. The hug had gone viral. I didn't know anything about it. I actually had to look it up and I was just like, "Oh, OK. Well, that was pretty cool." She said that it wasn't cool. It had caused a lot of stress in her family, and it had really changed her wife and not for the good. That Jen had become really closed in and really depressed, and it had just changed her immensely.

Liz Egan: But Cheryl, a mother of two herself, understood the pressures of comanaging a household as a new mom, especially with so many kids.

Cheryl Hart: She would talk about how the kids would stress her out. I have two kids myself, so, I mean, obviously, two kids versus six kids, it's different. There would be times where we—parents get times where it's like my two girls, I'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. My kids are driving me insane." She would say the same thing, like, "Oh, yeah, when I get home, I have to take over and deal with the kids because Jen's had them all day. When I get home, I got to deal with them."

Justine Harman: Tensions plagued the family, according to newly released emails made public in October 2018. In the months following the adoption of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Sierra, their days appear to be a chaotic jumble of post office runs, paperwork, and dentist appointments. Six dentist appointments. Sarah wrote to Jen in April 2009, "I will take my lunch hour from one to two to help out with the kids during that time waiting there. Sorry I made such a mess of everything." That same spring Sarah tried to get pregnant with donated sperm and later suffered a miscarriage. Jen wrote in July 2009 to an administrator at the agency that facilitated the adoptions, "I don't know what else to say really. Now we just take it one day at a time." True to form, if there was anything stressing the family, overwhelming schedules, infertility or mental health issues, even racist stalkers, you would never know it from Jen's Facebook. But back in June of 2017, Jen told family friend Nusheen Bakhtiar that someone had left upsetting, racist notes in their mailbox.

Lauren Smiley: The first time Nusheen Bakhtiar encountered the Hart family was at an event Nusheen put on called Portland for the Philippines in 2013. It was a concert series for charity hosted at Nusheen's dad's place, a Mediterranean restaurant called Blue Olive. She noticed that all of the Hart kids were sitting at a table and had incredible posture. Nusheen had Jen in her phone as "J-E double-N" because she says Jen dropped F-bombs all the time. So Jen was her favorite four-letter word.

Nusheen Bakhtiar: The first show was at my dad's place. It was all ages. Jen and Sarah both came, and they brought all six of their children. At first they were sitting at a table right in front of the stage, and they were just eating food, and they were super polite, and they were all sitting really with just the best posture that I had ever seen kids have. And then to see all the kids have that great posture, I was like, "Holy crap." So that's actually I think what I commented on and how I started talking to Jen and Sarah. Then, yeah, I was like, "Oh my God, what is up with your kids? How are they so well behaved?" And she was like, "Oh, you don't know. That's just because there's not a dance floor." That's how it happened. So we moved the tables. We moved their table, they were done eating, and we made a dance floor, and that was my first connection with the children. We spent the rest of the night dancing and having fun. All those pictures, a lot of those pictures are literally from the first night. We're all holding each other, and there was just this really great connection. I've always thought that that's because…I think other people tell me it's because I'm a person of color, but I always forget that I'm a person of color. People who are young, who are like that, who are POCs, need other POCs to look up to. But I always forget. I didn't even know what POC meant until somebody applied for a job last year, and they're like, "Hey, seeing as you're a POC and I'm a POC, I think we could get along," and I was like, "What? That's not how that works. We're all just humans."

Liz Egan: Nusheen remembers the good times they had and the collective effervescence she experienced when the family was all together. She even talks about Jen and Sarah like they're still alive.

Nusheen Bakhtiar: Jen loves Sarah to an insane degree and she always has. She says the most beautiful things about her. Have you seen Jen's Facebook?

Liz Egan: In fact, even though Jen would text Nusheen about her growing anxiety about being stalked, harassed, and threatened on social media, about the Trump election or the never-ending racist, bigoted feedback from that photo of Devonte at the rally, she was convinced the family was adjusting well to life in Washington.

Nusheen Bakhtiar: The last year of my friendship with Jen was pretty much me reaching out. We talked, she confided in me, but me reaching out, asking her to come around, asking her if I can come up there, her sending me photos and videos of upgrades of the house. They were happy. They actually were really, really happy, I thought.

Liz Egan: When it comes down to it, isn't that the weirdest part of social media? Aren't we all guilty of looking at a picture of a smiling person and just taking it at face value? Who among us hasn't looked at someone we don't know all that well and thought, Damn, those people are pretty perfect? You may remember a similar story. Madison Holleran, the UPenn track star who jumped off a parking garage in 2015 and whose sunny Instagram feed didn't portray her own struggle with mental illness. Much like what happened there, Nusheen believes these social media platforms come with deadly side effects.

Nusheen Bakhtiar: I think if it were not for social media, that they'd still be alive. Absolutely, 1,000 percent. I just feel like because of that second persona, you know what I mean? I feel like if that second persona wasn't there and she didn't dedicate so much time to focusing only on the good and only being comfortable and only being vulnerable when it came to the good and not just learning to be vulnerable-vulnerable, then she could have actually sought help and her experiences in this life would have been more real and meaningful. I don't think social media's a real or meaningful thing. I think it can bring about real and meaningful change, but I also think that when we're lying to ourselves and then we are posting that lie about ourselves that we want to believe, and then we're getting this fake feedback of acceptance and all this type of stuff, then we're literally causing harm.

Liz Egan: We were crushed by this idea, so we invited Dr. Amy Cirbus, a psychologist for the online therapy site Talkspace, to discuss the psychological effects of social media. She says the medium can trick a viewer into thinking they have more information than they actually do.

Amy Cirbus: That sort of two-dimensional or even one-dimensional flat perception of what's going out there or going on with somebody's life, and so you might…that sort of lack of compassion or even curiosity, because you already know. It's like a full, complete picture out there. If they are then revealing that this is what's going on, we might not really be invested to reach out or to care or to connect because those pictures tell a different story. One of the things that really stuck out to me is that when their "friends" that they saw and interacted with were interviewed, they kind of were like, "Maybe we didn't know them as well." I think that begs the question, what were their interactions like? Were they not sustained and why weren't they sustained? Would they rely on social media as opposed to picking up the phone or continuing a more in-depth relationship? But we become lazy and we kind of rely, like, "Oh, I'll just catch up with them because I'll see these posts on Facebook," as opposed to a real conversation. Those are that sort of question and bigger concept of relationships and how we sustain them and the meaningfulness of relationships that really stuck out that that really wasn't present for them.

Liz Egan: Zippy refers to the process of looking at pictures and only seeing what we want to see as confirmation bias. You might remember that term from Psych 101. Here's Zippy.

Zippy Lomax: We had our own confirmation bias that we were looking at them through this lens of compassionate understanding or who we thought we knew them to be and of love and care. And, of course, can you blame us for not being so quick to believe that these people we loved and cared about were capable of something like this? We were looking at them with a lot more willingness to imagine that this was a horrible accident, and so the details looked very different to all of us.

Liz Egan: Ultimately, the inability to suss out the truth about who her friends really were and the inability to see past her own confirmation bias is why Zippy got off Facebook.

Zippy Lomax: So much of my engagement with Jen, in particular, was via Facebook, so I only saw what was represented there. But it basically corroborated what I had experienced when I witnessed them in person. There was nothing about the way that Jen was presenting their life that seemed at all at odds with my understanding of who they were.

Liz Egan: Zippy's in a different place now than she was when she knew the Harts. She's gotten to a point where she can picture Jen doing something like this.

Zippy Lomax: I'm imagining Jen having a moment of just feeling like she had kind of dug herself into some hole that she would never be able to get out of. I mean, I just feel like I can see her having a moment of desperation, and imagining Sarah maybe sleeping, maybe other kids being asleep too, and her driving and her just like, "This is the only answer. They're never going to leave us alone and the only answer or the only way I can protect them or. The only answer is this awful thing. I'm going to drive off a cliff."

Liz Egan: No matter what happened in the moments leading up to that crash back in March, Zippy thinks at the core of this tragedy is Jen, a woman who had reached her breaking point.

Zippy Lomax: I feel like one of the things that has been totally—there has been no acknowledgement here of, this was somebody who was desperate enough to kill herself and to take the lives of all the people she cared about in the same breath. What I want to know is what led to that? What happened to Jen?

Liz Egan: Next time, on Broken Harts…

Speaker 2: You say specifically cured meat, it was like was he going to run away?

Speaker 3: What was the reason why you're checking on him?

Speaker 4: Concerns that the children aren't being fed.

Speaker 3: Let's see here.

Speaker 4: I've been to the home to knock on the door just this morning and I can get no response. Different cars have been moving in and out I notice, so I feel like someone's there.

Speaker 5: I saw Jennifer scolding him. She went inside and left him standing out in the rain.

Speaker 6: Wow. They knocked that rock wall down.

Speaker 7: That's when we said, "They're running. They're gone."

Speaker 8: And it was just like, "Oh God, I totally bought into it." I was just like, "Oh, God." You know? Just kill me.

Speaker 9: So I finally got the OK to call it in, then I made the call. Then here I sit today.

Liz Egan: Broken Harts is a joint production between Glamour and HowStuffWorks, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Harts is cohosted and cowritten by Justine Harman and Elisabeth Egan, and edited by Wendy Naugle. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter, Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor-in-chief, Julie Shen and Deanna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pendola, Pat Singer, and Luke Zaleski are our research team. Jason Hoch is executive producer, on behalf of HowStuffWorks, along with producers Julian Weller, Ben Kuebrich, and Josh Thane. Special thanks to Jenn Lance. Have questions for us about this podcast? Reach us on Twitter @GlamourMag. For access to exclusive photos, and videos, and documents about the case, visit glamour.com/brokenharts. If you like what you heard, leave us a review.

Photo: Johnny Huu Nguyen

To view a transcript of episode two, click here.