KallMeKris

Heather had been particularly eager to see the pantry,

And she had a pantry project of her own at home and wanted to see Erin's layout.

But according to Ian, Erin had been very reluctant about the visit to the pantry.

And then there was the plating.

Heather and Gail had both volunteered to help serve and Erin had turned them away.

And she plated every dish herself, but let them take it out after she was done.

and the plates became evidence in their own right.

Because the four guests had been served on large gray plates and Erin had carried her own plate separately to the table and hers was a different color.

It was like an orange tan color.

And Heather actually made note of it in the car on the way to the hospital, that that was kind of odd.

So as the investigation widened, the woman behind those clues began to come into focus.

And almost nothing about her matched what the Patterson family had thought they knew.

Investigators recovered private Facebook messages she'd sent to a circle of online friends.

And the childhood she had presented as quietly middle-class, she had described very differently in those messages, saying, quote, unquote, she had written.

And quote, it was like being brought up in a Russian orphanage where they don't touch babies, unquote.

And she described her father as a man who, quote, wanted to be warm and loving to us, but mom wouldn't let him because it would spoil us so he did as he was told.

And she would shout at him if he did the wrong thing, so he became very meek and compliant.

And my sister and I would hide in our room most of the time so we couldn't do anything wrong, unquote.

And a neighbor who had known Heather Scudder for years described her differently, saying, quote, a lovely woman as was her husband, unquote.

So there's those two portraits, the public one and the private one.