Agent Matt Sluss

We believed that she had transferred a lot of the stuff to him, a lot of the property. So I wanted to go interview him, and we were going to subpoena him to the grand jury. Because loyalty does go a long way, but when you're sitting in front of a grand jury or in court, and that willingness to lie for someone suddenly starts dissipating pretty quickly.

And so I was literally going to fly to Miami, fly from there to Antigua, and take a boat to Montserrat and interview the guy.

So I drive over there, and then eventually we got it, and that's it. And so an arrest warrant is issued, but she actually surrendered herself.

These shark eyes. Those cold, dark eyes.

She wasn't accustomed to anyone saying no to her.

And they start telling me this story about this Terry Lee Hoffman. And I'm listening to it and I'm going, well, this is interesting. She wanted to avoid those lawsuits, and so allegedly she filed bankruptcy to do that. So I look at that and I go, all right, well, she's getting a lot of insurance policies and been left a lot of stuff in wills.

She's probably got a lot of cash or other things or jewelry and so on. What happened to all those assets?

That's an old tried and true method. It is legal for law enforcement to dig through your trash if you've left it out by the side of the road. And because it's considered abandoned property by the courts.

They had already picked up on the fact that the families of the people who had died were already looking through her trash. So I think what they were probably doing is should burn it or have a follower take it off somewhere.

One of the issues is, and I think this probably happened before, I would definitely think somebody in this situation would do this. They'd take a lot of that and they would hock a lot of it, sell it just for cash, convert it, and then literally maybe even give a shoebox of money to a follower and say, keep this in your closet kind of thing.

There's a saying we have, and it probably applies in a lot of areas in the South and Midwest, it's called poor-mouthing. People always talk about how bad they got it. They don't want to seem ostentatious or whatever. And Hoffman seemed to poor-mouth a lot when this was going on.

Like I said, she had a very vigorous defense.

her followers would write her checks gladly to pay for her defense. So it could have come from there, but a lot of it had to come from somewhere else. I saw all these people who had died and there were life insurance policies and wills and so on, but they were spread out over enough time

that she would have had the opportunity to hide that money, to convert it into cash or gold or whatever you wanted to. You try to convert it into something, and that's what I believe probably happened.

And there were a lot of dead ends. Because one of the things that happened, as I recall, she kept going back and amending her bankruptcy schedules. Because normally, once you file, you file, and that's it. The bankruptcy moves forward.

And the problem is when you try to rush into cases, there's only so much you can do. I was actually set to, I had it approved and everything. I was going to travel to the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. Hoffman had a, it was her boyfriend or fiance at the time or something like that, that was in med school down there.

As Agent Matt Sluss told me, This was not just a, I'm stealing your money case. Often, in a fraud case, pain is only inflicted by, oh, I've lost my life savings. In this case, it was that plus I thought I was going to be able to adopt a baby or now I've been coerced out of my baby.

Tara then even solicited funds from the adoptive parents to help cover funeral costs.

She's taking adoptive parents to the point that they're remodeling their houses to create nurseries. And people are raising money through church fundraisers. They're cashing out their retirement funds. You have birth mothers that are being coerced, pressured into giving up their babies or dealing with the loss of their children. You have adoptive parents that do have kids.

And, you know, these kids are expecting to be a big brother or a big sister. And now you have to explain to them, you know, why that's not going to happen. You know, Tara would bring people to the point of traveling across the country to Detroit, Michigan, to complete my family. And then that doesn't happen.

So they could give us contracts. They could show us exactly how much and when they paid.

In most fraud schemes, you've made the lie, you've taken the money. The communications are often done. In this particular situation, you have a whole pregnancy now where you have somebody on the hook for fraud early on that you have to continue to lie, continue to make misrepresentations, and continued to make something very sensitive feel very real for months.

At the end of those, you know, six to eight months, now Tara has a problem because there's no baby. And she has to lie to them again and in order to end or fail that adoption match.

And then over the next months, as Tara typically would do, she would provide updates about the pregnancy, making the adoption situation feel as real as she could. In this particular situation, Tara failed the match by telling the adoptive parents that Roshanda, the birth mother, had been shot and killed, and the baby died in utero.

And I went into our conference room and I took that big rollout paper that's three, four feet wide and tore off like a 10-foot section and put it across the conference table.

And then just literally started drawing, hand-drawing, handwriting a roadmap of every name, who's connected to who, about the parents' names, birth parents' names, match date, how much money was paid, did the match succeed, was it failed, a quick note on how did it fail if it did.

It was early October of 2018. There was an individual who was intimately connected with Tara Lee's adoption business that brought information to our FBI Detroit field office.

Okay, what is the exact violation here?

It was a Friday afternoon, and I had returned from a meeting with a prosecutor in a different case.