Nevada Man Met Her Online — She Drugged Him, Pushed Him Over The Border In A Wheelchair To His Death
The FBI [music] says she also targeted younger men and women.
She did not have one type.
She had one goal.
The age of the person was a tool, not a rule.
Older men simply made the easiest targets because they often had savings and they were often lonely.
>> [music] >> And loneliness is a door.
Third, the meeting.
She did not rush.
Police say she would meet a man in person, often somewhere ordinary, a restaurant, lunch, a normal date in a normal place.
In at least one case, investigators say the lunches went on for 2 months before anything happened.
>> [music] >> 2 months, 60 days of being charming, 60 days of building trust.
A man does not hand a stranger his life.
He hands it to someone he believes he knows.
[music] So, she made him believe he knew her.
She was patient.
The patience was part of the weapon.
Fourth, the drug.
This is the turn.
Police say that at some point during a meal, she would slip the man medication and other substances, prescription sedatives.
Investigators say the man would not know.
>> [music] >> He would just feel wrong, tired, heavy, confused.
The FBI used the word lethargic.
He would not understand that he had been poisoned.
He would think he was simply unwell, and while he was in that fog, while he could not think straight, >> [music] >> while he could not say no, the next steps would already be moving.
Fifth, the money.
This is the part the whole thing was built for.
Police say that once a man was incapacitated, she went straight for everything he had.
She took cars, she got into bank accounts, and withdrew cash.
She got into brokerage accounts, the kind that holds stocks and investments.
She used the men’s credit cards.
She bought luxury goods.
She bought gold, and she did not stop at the cash that was easy to grab.
>> [music] >> The FBI says she even tried to reach into social security and retirement accounts, the slow money, the money meant to last a man the rest of his life.
She tried to take that, too.
There is one number that shows how far this went.
Police say that from one victim, she sold more than $3 million in Apple stock.
Not 3,000, $3.
3 million in shares sold off while the man who owned them, investigators say, was in no condition to stop her.
That is >> [music] >> one man, one account.
The rest of the scheme, across all the victims, ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
And officials say the true number could be higher >> [music] >> because they do not believe they have found everyone.
Sixth, the cover.
When a credit card company got nervous, she had an answer.
Police describe one case where her purchases on a man’s American Express card >> [music] >> started to get declined.
The card company wanted the card holder to confirm the spending.
So, investigators [music] say she had the man, while he was drugged, speak to American Express himself and approve the charges.
The fraud filter caught her, and she fed the man’s own voice into the machine to switch it off.
The safety net worked.
She used the victim to cut it.
And seventh, the disposal.
>> [music] >> When a man had been emptied, when there was nothing left to take, the danger to her was no longer the money.
It was the man himself.
A living victim can call the police.
A living victim can talk.
The FBI says some of these men did not stay alive.
Three of the four men named in the charges are dead.
One of them, police say, she moved across an international border in a wheelchair.
One was found dead on his bathroom floor.
There is a third death and a disappearance on top of that.
She is only charged in one of the deaths, but the pattern, the FBI says, >> [music] >> is a pattern of men who met her and then did not survive her.
That is the method, in plain words.
App, meeting, drug, money, cover, and then [music] nothing.
A routine, a line of steps that does not change much from one man to the next.
When something does not change from one victim to the next, it stops looking like a crime of passion.
It starts looking like a process, like a machine.
You put a lonely man in one end, you take his life out the other.
The men did not know they were standing on an assembly line.
Each of them thought he was the only one.
Each of them thought this was love, or at least the start of it.
None of them knew that the same woman had done the same thing to someone else and would do it again to someone after.
Let us meet one of them.
The first man we will follow met her the way they all did, online.
He was older.
He was by every account looking for the simplest thing a person can look for, someone to talk to, someone to share a meal with.
He was not looking for trouble.
He had no reason to expect it.
He had a phone and an account on a dating service and a quiet life.
And one day a woman with long brown hair >> [music] >> and a warm message came into that quiet life and seemed glad to know him.
Police say the contact began the way it always began.
A profile, a photo, a few kind words.
>> [music] >> She presented herself as a woman who valued honesty above everything.
A woman tired of the fakes on these apps.
A woman who just wanted something real.
For a lonely man, this is the most disarming thing in the world.
He is not on guard against a person who hates dishonesty.
He lets that person in.
They moved from messages to meeting.
Investigators say she liked to meet in restaurants, lunch, daylight, public.
There is nothing frightening about lunch.
A man who would refuse to go to a stranger’s apartment will happily sit across a table in a busy restaurant at noon.
It feels safe.
It is supposed to feel safe.
That feeling was the bait and she did [music] not push.
This is the detail that should chill anyone who has ever used a dating app.
In at least one [music] case, police say the meetings went on for about 2 months.
Lunch after lunch, date after [music] date.
She was building something.
To the man, she was building a relationship.
To her, the FBI says, she [music] was building access.
Trust is a key.
The longer she spent making him trust her, the more doors that key would open later.
[music] 2 months of being lovely is a small price for a man’s entire savings.
During those weeks, she would have learned things.
>> [music] >> Where he banked, what he owned, whether he had children, and whether those children lived nearby, >> [music] >> and whether they checked on him.
Whether anyone would notice quickly if he went quiet.
A scammer who is paying attention learns a man’s whole life across a series of friendly lunches, and the man never realizes he is being studied.
He thinks he is being loved.
He volunteers the details himself.
He is proud to have [music] someone to tell.
Then came the day, the lunch was not just lunch.
Police say that on one particular day, the meal was [music] drugged.
The man ate or drank the way he always did, but this time something had been added.
He began to feel the change come over him, heavy, slow, his thoughts thickening.
The FBI’s word was unconscious.
Whatever she gave him, >> [music] >> investigators say, it was enough to take him down completely.
One moment a man having lunch with a woman he believed cared about him, the next a body in a chair unable [music] to defend himself, unable to call anyone, unable to know what was being done in his name.
And then it was done in his name.
Police say that while he was incapacitated, [music] she went into his finances.
This is the man investigators say whose Apple stock was sold, more than 3 million dollars in shares while he could not see, could not understand, could not object.
His investments were liquidated and the value pulled out.
His bank accounts were accessed, money moved.
A man’s entire financial life built over decades opened up like a drawer because he could not keep his eyes open.
The horror of it is in how quiet it is.
There is no struggle.
There is no scream.
There is a man slumped and dim and a woman beside him, calm, working through his accounts the way you might work through a to-do list.
No drama, just transactions.
The list is the horror.
What happened to this particular man is something we will come back to because his story does not end at that table.
But here, at the start of the method, he is the example.
He shows the shape.
The patience first, >> [music] >> then the trust, then the drug, then the emptying.
And the man through all of it, believing right up to the last clear moment that he had finally found someone who was not fake, who did not want gente falsa, who just wanted something real.
He had wanted something real.
What he got was a process.
>> [music] >> And when she had taken what she could take from him, the FBI says, the woman with the long brown hair did not stop.
She did not retire on what she had.
She went back to the app.
She opened the messages again.
She found another lonely man with a quiet life and a full account.
And she sent in a few kind words, and then she looked for the next one.
The second man was older, too.
Police say he met her the same [music] way.
Online.
A dating service.
A profile that promised honesty.
The same [music] opening move run again against a different man who had no idea the move had ever been run before.
By now, you can feel the repetition starting.
>> [music] >> That is the point.
That is the thing investigators kept returning to.
It was not the cruelty of any single act that frightened them.
It was the sameness.
The way each man’s story rhymed with the last.
One, a different name, a different face, a different city sometimes, but the same steps in the same order.
The FBI special agent in charge in Las Vegas, a man named Spencer Evans, put it in plain language at a press conference.
He said this was technically a romance scam, but he said, [music] “This was a romance scam on steroids.
” He said they had not seen one like this in recent history, not one this sinister.
The second man met her, >> [music] >> and he trusted her.
And that trust followed the same path.
Police say she got close.
She made herself necessary, or at least welcome.
She learned what he had, and then at some point the meal turned.
>> [music] >> The drug went in.
The man went down.
And the accounts opened.
But with this man, the pattern showed its colder edge, because investigators say not every man who went down came back up.
This [music] is where the careful language matters.
Three of the four men named in the federal charges are dead.
The government is only charging Aurora Phelps in connection with one of those deaths.
That is a specific legal fact, >> [music] >> and it has to stay specific.
It does not mean the other men died of natural causes.
It does not mean she had nothing to do with them.
It means that of the deaths, prosecutors built a death charge around one of them.
The others remain part of the larger picture investigators describe.
A picture of men who crossed paths with this woman and did not survive the crossing.
One of the men named in the charges was found dead on his bathroom floor.
That is the detail in the record.
A man alone on the floor of his own bathroom.
No witnesses [music] in the report.
No struggle described.
Just a body found where the body should not be in the home of a man who had recently let a stranger into his life.
The plainness of it is the weight of it.
People do collapse in bathrooms.
People do die alone at home.
>> [music] >> That is exactly what makes it so hard and so frightening.
If you wanted to end a man and have it look like nothing, you would want it to look like this.
A quiet death.
A floor.
An old man’s heart simply stopping.
We cannot [music] say, and the charges do not say, exactly how each of these men died.
What the FBI says is that they all came through the same door.
The same woman.
The same app.
The same lunches.
The same trust.
And the same draining of everything they had.
Whatever the cause of death written on each certificate, the road that led there was, investigators allege, the same road walked by the same hand on the same kind of victim.
With this second man, as with the first, the money tells the story even when nothing else can.
Police describe cards taken, >> [music] >> cards used, cash withdrawn, gold purchased.
The man’s resources flowing out of his control and into hers.
And, >> [music] >> the FBI says, into the hands of her family members as well.
Because this was not a woman acting [music] entirely alone, for entirely her own enjoyment.
Prosecutors say part of the purpose was to benefit herself and her family.
There were other people in her life who lived in part [music] on the money taken from drugged men.
Think about what that means about the scale of it.
A single con run once can fund a single person for a while.
A machine run over and over can fund a household.
Investigators described a scheme that ran for years and supported a way of life.
Luxury goods, gold, which holds value and crosses borders and does not leave the same trail as a wire transfer.
This was not desperation.
The FBI did not describe a woman stealing to survive.
They described a woman who, they allege, methodically targeted men, drugged them, and lived off the proceeds.
And the second man, like the first, did not see any of it.
He saw a relationship.
He saw lunches.
He saw perhaps a future.
He had no way to know that he was the second of a series.
>> [music] >> That the warmth he was being shown had been shown to another man before him.
And would be shown to another man after.
He was not a person to the machine.
He was a step in the process.
When his accounts had been worked through, >> [music] >> when his cards had been used and his cash withdrawn, and whatever could be taken had been taken, the danger shifted.
The way it [music] always shifted.
The man knew her.
The man could talk.
And then the man, like the first man named in those charges, was dead.
Found, in his case, on his own bathroom floor.
The FBI says >> [music] >> she did not pause.
She did not show any sign, investigators allege, of fear >> [music] >> or remorse or hesitation that would have made her stop.
She had a profile and an app and a method that worked.
There were more lonely men online than she could ever meet.
The supply was endless.
The only limit on the machine was how many men she could process at once.
So, she opened the app again.
She found another quiet life.
She sent another warm message to another man who hated fakes and wanted something real.
And then, she looked for the next one.
Now, we come to the man in the middle, the one who lived.
Of all the people in this story, he is the one who can tell you what it is like inside the machine because he is the one who came out the other side breathing.
He went all the way in.
Police say he went deeper than almost anyone, and he came back.
Barely, but he came back.
He was an older man like the others.
He met her the way the others did, online.
The same kind of profile, the same promise of honesty, the same warm beginning, and then the same long, patient courtship.
Police say the meetings, in [music] his case, stretched across about 2 months.
Lunch after lunch.
2 months of a woman being kind to a man who, by every sign, simply wanted kindness.
For 2 months, nothing went wrong.
That is what makes his story so hard to hear.
For 2 months, this was, >> [music] >> from the inside, a good thing.
A man in the later part of his life had found companionship.
He had someone to look forward to.
He had a reason to put on a clean shirt >> [music] >> and go out at noon.
If you had asked him during those weeks whether his life had improved, he would have said [music] yes.
He had no warning.
There was no warning to have.
The whole design of the thing >> [music] >> was that the danger arrived only after the trust was complete.
Then came the lunch that was different.
[music] Police say the food or the drink was drugged.
He ate the way he had eaten with her dozens of times, >> [music] >> and this time the world went out from under him.
He felt it come on, perhaps, the heaviness, the blur, and then he was gone.
Unconscious, investigators say he stayed unconscious for 5 days.
5 days.
>> [music] >> Sit with that.
Not 5 minutes, not 5 hours.
5 days gone from himself while the FBI says his accounts were emptied around his sleeping body.
This is the man investigators believe whose Apple stock was sold.
More than $3 million in shares liquidated while he lay unconscious unable to know that the savings of his entire were being carried out the door.
His bank accounts [music] accessed, money moved.
A man’s whole future spent while he slept.
A sleep he did not choose.
And it was not a single drugging.
Police say the sedation went on.
The FBI described it as prescription sedatives given over the course of about a week.
So, this was not one bad meal.
This was a man kept under, dosed and dosed again, held in a chemical sleep across roughly 7 days, slipping from drugged into something deeper.
He fell into a coma.
The plain word the investigators used was coma.
A man in a coma is not asleep.
A man in a coma is on the edge of not coming back at all.
He went over that edge and then, against the odds, he came back from it.
He woke up.
Police say he awoke from the coma.
A man who had been kept under for about a week, who had been in a coma, opened his eyes again into a world where his Apple stock was gone.
His accounts were drained and the woman who had been so kind to him at all those lunches had used his sleeping days to take everything he owned.
He is the survivor.
He is, in the cold accounting of this case, the lucky one.
Think about what it means that this is what luck looks like here.
The lucky one [music] is the man who was drugged for a week, fell into a coma, nearly died, and lost more than $3 million.
He is fortunate only by comparison compared to the man in the wheelchair found dead in a Mexico City hotel.
Compared to the man found dead on his bathroom floor.
Compared to the third death and the disappearance.
Against that, waking up at all is good fortune.
That is the scale this story works on.
His survival is also why we know as much as we do.
A dead man cannot describe the lunches.
A dead man cannot tell investigators how patient she was, how long the courtship ran, how normal it all felt right up until it didn’t.
A living victim can.
The survivor is, in a sense, [music] the witness the others could not be.
His body recorded what was done to it.
He came back to tell, even if only in part, what the inside of the machine was like.
And his case shows something important about how this worked.
The drugging was not a quick knockout for a quick robbery.
It was sustained.
A week of sedation is not the act of someone who panics and grabs a wallet.
It is the act of someone managing a situation over days.
[music] Keeping a man under long enough to work through accounts that take time to access.
Long enough to sell stock, which is not instant.
Long enough to move money in amounts that do not clear in a single afternoon.
The length of his sedation is a measure of the patience of the crime.
She was not in a hurry.
She kept him asleep as long as the work required.
It is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to lose in the size of the numbers, that this was a human being.
Not a victim number.
Not a line in an indictment.
A man who had wanted company in his last years and instead [music] spent five days unconscious and a week sedated while a stranger carried his life away piece by piece.
He woke into ruin.
Whatever years he had left, he would live them knowing what had been done to him and knowing that he had welcomed it, had looked forward [music] to it, had thought it was the good thing that finally happened to him late in life.
The survivor lived, but living [music] did not stop the machine.
The FBI says that whatever happened with him, she went on.
There were more men.
There was the man in the wheelchair still to come in the timeline of this case who would meet her in late 2022 and not survive the year.
The survivor’s near death did not break the pattern.
It was just one cycle of the machine that for once did not end in a body.
Because when she was done with one man, whatever state she left him in, >> [music] >> alive or dead, awake or comatose, the FBI says she did the same thing she always did.
She went back to the app and she looked for the next one.
Now, follow the money because the money is where the machine is easiest to see.
People can be hard to read.
Trust is invisible, but money leaves a trail.
Transactions have timestamps, sales have records, and across all of these men, investi- [music] -gators say the trail tells one continuous story.
Start with the cars.
Police say she took her victim’s cars.
A car is a strange thing to steal in a scheme like this because a car is traceable and a car is hard to hide.
But a car is also valuable.
And a car is something a drugged man cannot stop you from driving away.
The FBI lists vehicles among the things she took once a victim was incapacitated.
A man goes under and his car is no longer his.
Then the bank accounts.
This is the obvious one.
Police say she accessed her victim’s bank accounts and withdrew cash.
Cash is clean.
Cash does not have a name on it once it leaves the machine.
A man unconscious for 5 days cannot notice that his balance is falling.
By the time he wakes, if he wakes, [music] the money is already gone and already spent.
Then, the brokerage accounts.
This is where the $3.
3 million lives.
A brokerage account is not just spending money.
It is the serious money.
It is the money a man invested and meant to keep.
Police say she got into a victim’s brokerage account and sold more than $3 million in Apple stock.
That is not a careless theft.
That is someone who understood that the biggest money was not in the checking account, it was in the investments.
So, she went there, she sold the shares, and she took the proceeds.
While the man who owned them lay drugged, then the credit cards.
Police say she used the men’s credit cards to make a variety of purchases.
And here we get the detail about American Express.
When one man’s card started getting declined, the fraud system did exactly what it is built to do.
It flagged unusual spending and demanded that the cardholder confirm it.
This should have been the moment it all stopped.
A drugged man cannot confirm a purchase.
The system had caught her.
But investigators say she got around it by having the man himself in his drugged state [music] speak to American Express and authorize the charges.
She turned the victim into the tool that defeated his own protection.
>> [music] >> The one safeguard that nearly worked was disarmed using the very person it was meant to protect.
>> [music] >> Then the luxury goods.
Police say she spent the stolen money on luxury retail items.
This is part of why officials describe the purpose of the scheme as benefiting herself and her family.
The money did not just vanish into accounts, it turned into things.
Expensive things.
A way of living.
The FBI described luxury goods bought with money taken from drugged men.
Then the gold.
This one is worth pausing on because it is the most telling purchase of all.
Police say she bought gold.
Gold is not a casual luxury.
Gold is a way to store value that does not depend on any bank.
Gold holds its worth.
Gold can be moved across a border.
Gold can be sold for cash anywhere in the world without explaining where it came from.
A person who turns stolen money into gold is a person thinking about the future, about flight, [music] about a day when the bank accounts might be frozen and the cards might be cancelled and you would need value you could carry in your hand.
Buying gold is the behavior of someone who knows, on some [music] level, that the day of reckoning is coming and who wants to be ready to disappear with the wealth intact.
And then, the part that may be the coldest of all, police say she even attempted to access her victims’ social security and retirement accounts.
Stop and think about what kind of accounts those are.
Social Security is the floor under an old person’s life.
It is the money the government sends so that the elderly do not starve.
[music] Retirement accounts are the savings a person spent a working lifetime building so that they could stop working without fear.
These are not luxury funds.
These are survival funds.
These are the money of last resort for people in their final decades.
And investigators say >> [music] >> she reached for them.
She tried to take not just a man’s spending money and not just his investments, but the very money meant to keep him alive in old age.
She tried to take the floor out from under men who had nothing left to fall back on.
Now, lay all of these together across all the victims and the trail becomes a map.
Cars taken from one man, cash pulled from a third’s brokerage account, cards used here, gold bought there, retirement accounts probed everywhere.
The total, officials say, runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and that is before you count the 3.
3 million in stock and before you count the victims investigators believe they have not yet identified.
The [music] acting United States Attorney for Nevada and the FBI laid out a financial pattern that did not look like a series of separate crimes.
It looked like one ongoing business.
The product was money.
The raw material was lonely men.
And the financial trail is also what makes the case probable.
Feelings cannot be subpoenaed, but a stock sale can be.
A wire transfer can be.
A gold purchase can be.
When the FBI says she did this [music] again and again, the money is a large part of how they know.
The same kinds of transactions, draining the same kinds of accounts, in the same windows of time when the same kinds of men had gone suddenly and [music] inexplicably quiet.
The money does not get drugged.
The money remembers.
The indictment that came out of all this is [music] 21 counts long.
Seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of mail fraud, six counts of bank fraud, three counts of identity theft, one count of kidnapping, and one count of kidnapping [music] resulting in death.
Read that list slowly because it is the money trail translated into law.
Wire fraud and mail fraud and bank fraud are the financial machine itself, counted up.
Identity theft is how she got into the accounts.
And then, [music] at the end, the two counts that are about a body, not a balance.
Kidnapping and kidnapping resulting in death.
The money charges and the death charges sit in the same indictment because prosecutors allege they were the same scheme.
The money was the reason.
The death was the cleanup.
If she is convicted on all of it, the charges can carry a sentence of up to life in prison.
But she has not been convicted.
She has not yet been tried.
The trail of money is, at this stage, what the government says it found.
It will have to be proven in a courtroom.
The accounts, though, are already empty.
Whatever a jury eventually decides, the men whose stock was sold and whose cash was withdrawn and whose retirement funds were reached for did not get any of it back from the moment it left.
Following the money tells you what was taken.
It does [music] not quite tell you what it was like to be on the outside watching it happen and not understanding why your father had gone silent.
For that, you have to listen to the families.
Imagine being the son of one of these men or the daughter.
You live somewhere else, maybe in another state.
Your father is in his later years living alone the way a lot of older parents do.
You talk on the phone every week, maybe.
He is independent.
He is fine.
And then one week he does not answer.
You do not panic [music] at first.
Older people miss calls.
Phones run out of charge.
He might be napping.
He might be out.
You leave a message.
You wait.
You call again that evening.
Nothing.
You call the next day.
Nothing.
And slowly a feeling you do not want to name begins to grow in your chest.
This is the part of the story that the indictment [music] does not capture and the money trail cannot show.
The dread on the outside.
The relatives who could not reach their fathers.
Police and reporting around this case make clear that families were affected, that there were people connected to these men who tried to find them and could not, who eventually learned the truth in the worst possible way.
Some of these men died alone far from anyone who loved them.
Someone, somewhere was the person who finally found out.
Think about the daughter or son of the man in the wheelchair.
Their father met a woman online.
Maybe they knew about her.
Maybe he had mentioned on one of those weekly calls that he had met someone.
Maybe he sounded happy.
Maybe they were glad for him.
A lonely widower in his later years finally with a little company.
And then [music] he stopped calling.
And then they learned that he had been taken across an international border into Mexico, into a city hundreds of miles south, and that he had died in a hotel room there.
A father who had never had any reason to be in Mexico City, dead in a Mexico City hotel.
How do you even begin to understand that? How do you explain to the rest of the family how he ended up there? For the family of the man found on his bathroom floor, the dread takes [music] a different shape.
Maybe there was a welfare check.
Maybe a relative called the police and asked someone to go to the house because dad was not answering and it had been too long.
And someone went and knocked and got no answer and went in and found him.
The phone call that follows that discovery is one of the worst phone calls a person can receive.
Your father is gone.
And he was gone for some time before anyone knew.
And here is the cruelty layered on top of the grief.
At first, a family in this situation has no reason to suspect a crime at all.
An older man dies at home.
An older man’s heart gives out.
An older man who had recently seemed happy, who had mentioned a new friend, simply passes the way older people pass.
There is sadness, but there is not, at first, suspicion.
The genius of the alleged method is that it produces deaths that look natural.
A drugged man who dies looks to a grieving family with no reason to doubt like a man who died.
The families would have buried their fathers believing it was the ordinary tragedy of age.
A Some of them may have grieved for a long time before any investigator told them that what happened was not natural at all.
That is its own particular horror.
To grieve a death as natural, to make your peace with it, to tell yourself he was old and it was his time, and then years later to be told that no, it was not his time, that a stranger your father trusted is suspected of having drugged him and emptied his accounts and let him die.
To have to grieve all over again, this time with rage in it.
The families did not just lose their fathers.
Some of them lost their fathers twice, once to [music] death and once again to the truth, the family of the survivor.
The man who lived, the dread had a different ending, but a similar middle.
Picture trying to reach a father who, unknown to you, >> [music] >> has been unconscious for 5 days.
You call, nothing.
You call again, nothing.
The silence stretches into territory that is not normal even for a man who misses calls.
And when you finally find out what is happening, you learn that he is not dead, but in a coma, >> [music] >> drugged.
His life savings being carried away while he cannot wake.
The relief of finding him alive must have been tangled up with horror at the state he was in and fury at how he got there.
The FBI, in the end, became the channel for a lot of this family pain.
When the bureau went public with the case, it asked other possible victims and their families to come forward.
It set up a way for people to report.
And it said something that every family in this story would understand in their bones.
Officials warned that there may be other people out there who fell victim to her scams and whose trust in her, in the words investigators used, may have cost them their life.
That sentence is aimed straight at families who do not yet know.
Somewhere, the FBI was saying, >> [music] >> there may be sons and daughters who think their father died of natural causes who have not connected that death to a woman he met online, who have no idea that they belong to this story at all.
That is the dread from the outside, made permanent.
It is not just the families who already know, it is the unknown number of families who do not.
Every relative of an older man who died suddenly in those years, who had recently met someone, who had recently seemed happy, who lived in the wrong place at the wrong time, >> [music] >> is now a person who might, on hearing this case, feel a cold hand close around their heart.
Was it her? Could it have been her? The FBI cannot tell most of them.
It can only ask them to come forward and wonder.
The families who could not reach their fathers became in the end the reason the rest of us know this happened.
Their dread, their searching, their refusal to accept silence fed into the investigation that built the case, but it could not bring the fathers [music] back.
By the time the dread turned into knowledge, for too many of them it was already a body in a hotel on a floor, alone.
And while the families searched and grieved, the woman [music] they would come to learn about was not standing still.
She was moving.
She was getting ready to be somewhere the families and the law would have a much harder time reaching her.
She went to Mexico.
This was not a panicked flight at the last second.
Remember the gold.
Remember the second citizenship.
Remember the house in Guadalajara.
Police describe a woman who [music] was, in a sense, partly already gone.
She held citizenship in both the United States and Mexico.
She kept a residence south of the border.
She bought gold, the most portable store of wealth there is.
A person set up that way is a person who can vanish on short notice with their money intact.
>> [music] >> The exit was built into the plan from the beginning.
And the border itself was part of the method, not [music] just the escape.
Look again at the man in the wheelchair.
The crime did not just happen to end with a body in Mexico City by chance.
Police say she actively moved him across the border while he was drugged.
[music] The international line was a tool.
On one side was the country with his bank, his family, his doctors, the authorities who might ask questions.
On the other side was the country where she had a home, where she had standing as a citizen, where the American police could not simply walk in.
Pushing a drugged man across that line was not only how he died, it was how she put distance, a whole national border, between the crime and the people who might investigate [music] it.
So, when the scheme finally drew enough attention, when the FBI’s 2-year investigation began closing in, going to Mexico was not a desperate leap.
It was the home she already had.
The FBI’s special agent in charge said she had been on the bureau’s radar for at least a couple of years.
A couple of years is a long time to know about someone and not yet have them in custody.
Part of why is exactly this.
She could sit in Guadalajara, in a country where she was a citizen, while American prosecutors built [music] a case in Nevada.
The border that helped her commit the crimes also slowed the response to them.
But it did not stop the response.
The FBI did not work alone.
Investigators worked with Mexican authorities, and in September of 2023, Mexican police arrested her.
After years of being out of reach, on the other side of the line, she was finally in custody.
Not in the United [music] States, in Mexico.
Arrested by Mexican officials in the country she had treated as her safe ground.
That arrest [music] did not close the case.
It opened a new and slow chapter, because being arrested in Mexico [music] is not the same as facing the charges in the United States.
The charges against her [music] are American charges.
The indictment came from a grand jury in Nevada.
The victims, [music] the ones naming the charges, include men from Nevada.
The crimes, prosecutors say, were directed from Las Vegas.
For her to answer for them, she has to be brought to the United States.
And bringing a person from one country to another to face charges has a name.
Extradition.
So, she sits in custody in Mexico while the two governments work through extradition.
United States prosecutors have said they are working on bringing her back to Nevada to face the charges.
But extradition is not fast, and it is not guaranteed to be simple, especially when the person in question is a citizen of the country holding her.
Her dual citizenship, the same thing that made the border useful to her, now sits in the middle of the legal process to retrieve her.
As of the time this case became public, she remained in Mexico awaiting extradition, not yet returned, not yet tried.
Picture the strange suspended state of it.
The indictment is unsealed, the charges are public.
The FBI has held a press conference and called it a romance scam on steroids.
Her photographs are out, including the screenshot from her dating profile, the one under the name [ __ ] >> [music] >> with the long brown hair, and the words about not wanting fake people.
The whole machine has been laid out in public, and the woman accused of running it >> [music] >> is in a cell in Mexico on the far side of a border waiting to find out whether and when she will be sent north to answer for any of it.
It is worth being precise here, because precision is the only fair thing in a case like this.
She has been charged.
She has not been convicted.
She has not stood trial.
An indictment is an accusation, >> [music] >> the government’s version of events, tested by nothing yet but a grand jury.
Everything investigators have said >> [music] >> is what they allege.
She is entitled to a defense and to the presumption of innocence and to her day in court, >> [music] >> whenever extradition finally delivers it.
The cold recitation of the method, the victims, the money, the deaths is the cold recitation of the charges.
>> [music] >> It is what the FBI and the prosecutors say happened.
It will have to be proven, but the charges are not small and they are not vague.
21 counts, wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and the two counts that carry the weight of a life, kidnapping and kidnapping resulting in death.
If a jury one day agrees with the government on all of it, she could spend the rest of her life in prison.
That is the stake waiting at the end of the extradition.
That is what sits on the other side of the border she crossed so many times.
For now, she waits.
The families wait.
The survivor, the man who came out of the coma, >> [music] >> waits.
The investigators who spent two years on this wait.
And the unknown victims, the ones the FBI believes are out there but has not yet identified, do not even know they are waiting because they do not yet know they are part of this at all.
That last group is where this [music] has to end.
Not with a verdict because there is no verdict.
Not with a resolution because there is no resolution.
It ends where it is most uncomfortable to leave it.
Open.
11 possible victims.
Four in the charges.
That gap between 11 and four is the whole shape of the fear.
The case the government has built, the 21 counts, the named men, the wheelchair, the bathroom floor, the coma, the 3.
3 million in stock.
All of that rests on four people.
But the FBI does not believe there were only four.
Investigators have counted 11 possible victims and they have said plainly that they think there may be more.
The Bureau went public specifically to ask other victims to come forward.
It said there may be additional victims, men and women, in the United States and in Mexico.
It said some of these people may not even know they were victims.
And it said the worst part out loud, that for some of them their trust in her may have cost them their life.
Read that gap again.
11 possible victims.
Four in the charges.
Three of those four dead.
Charged in one death, linked in the reporting to three deaths and a disappearance.
And beyond all of that, a category the FBI cannot put a number on.
The ones not yet found.
That is the final chill of this story, and it is the reason the style of it has been so flat, so plain, so much like a list.
Because the horror here was never one death.
One death is a tragedy.
And tragedies have edges.
You can hold a tragedy.
This is not one death.
>> [music] >> This is the same act done over and over with the patience of a routine and the indifference of a process.
App, lunch, drug, money, gone.
App, lunch, drug, money, [music] gone.
The terror is in the repetition.
The terror is in how easily it scaled.
One lonely man is a victim.
A line of lonely men is a machine.
And the machine did not need much.
Go back to the beginning.
She did not need a weapon.
She did not need force.
She did not need anything that would show up on a security camera as a crime.
She needed a phone to find them.
She needed a smile to keep them.
And she needed a pill to take them.
A phone, a smile, and a pill.
With those three things, police say she emptied bank accounts, sold off a man’s life savings in stock, bought gold, reached for the retirement money of the old, moved a drugged man across an international border in a wheelchair, and left at least one body in a hotel room and another on a bathroom floor.
No gun, no knife, a phone, >> [music] >> a smile, and a pill.
And the apps are still there.
The lonely men are still there.
The method she is accused of using did not depend on anything rare.
>> [music] >> It depended on things that exist by the millions.
Lonely people, dating profiles, trust given to a warm voice.
The conditions that made this possible have not gone anywhere.
That is partly why the FBI spoke so bluntly when it went public.
The agent in charge said the simplest, oldest warning there is about meeting people online.
That the problem with dating online is you just don’t know who is on the other end.
Be cautious, he said.
Try to learn as much real information about the person as you can.
>> [music] >> It is plain advice.
It is the advice you would give a friend.
And in this case, it is advice that for at least three men came too late.
So, the count stays open.
Somewhere, perhaps, there is a son who still believes his father died of a bad heart.
Somewhere there is a daughter who has made her peace with a death she has no reason to question.
Somewhere there may be a man or a woman in the United States or in Mexico who lost money to a kind new friend years ago >> [music] >> and never connected it to a face on the news.
The FBI thinks they are out there.
The investigators believe the number is higher than four, higher than the 11 they have counted, higher than anyone yet knows.
[music] And until those people come forward or until they are found, the true size of this will not be known.
She is in a cell in Mexico waiting for extradition.
She has not been convicted of anything.
[music] The court process has not begun in earnest.
The story, in the legal sense, is unfinished.
[music] But the part that will not finish, the part that has no closing number, is the count of the people she met.
Because the case the government can prove is built on four, and the people who trusted her may be many more than that.
She had a phone, a smile, and a pill.
And the FBI does not believe she only used them four times.
That [music] is where it has to end.
Not with how many she is charged with, with how many are still out there.
