Monique LaBorde
speaker
121 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 9 Apr
Monique LaBorde’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Funds the show. Yes. And... The show is free. That's the trade-off with ads. The show is free. But if you love the show and you don't want to hear ads, you can subscribe to iHeart True Crime Plus. Sorry, I have to do a plug. Good job, Mel. You're doing my job for me. Thank you. I love podcasts. I listen constantly to podcasts.
And with iHeart True Crime Plus, you also get dozens of other great true crime shows.
So much gratitude for that. Okay. I want to move on to questions about specific episodes. Okay. And I'm going to do a little recap of each episode because I know it's been a few months since listeners have heard some of these stories. So our first question is about the Tora episode. Tora was episode number eight. She was a history professor.
She met a student named Aaron in her class, an adult student. He was a veteran. He told her that he had had his foot blown off in an explosion while he was serving in in Afghanistan, and that he wore a prosthetic. But his death began the process of her learning that the amputation was a lie, that he actually had both of his feet.
So a listener wrote in to us and said, how could anyone live with a person and have a sexual relationship with them for three years and never see their foot?
Yeah. I mean, there are the practical elements. Like, he not only wore a sock, but he also wore a hard plastic brace underneath the sock. So when he walked, it sounded like... a prosthetic. And I mean, he always used a different shower that he said was easier for him to get into. So there are logistics of how he actually pulled off the deception.
But then there's, I think, a deeper level, too, that's more important to understand than the logistics of how he covered this up, is that he said it was an injury from a traumatic experience, an explosion that killed one of his friends in the war, which didn't happen. And there is a larger pattern about how these people who are manipulating others often work differently.
There's this research psychologist, Dr. Jennifer Fried, who we talk a lot about. Yeah. And her work is foundational to understanding betrayal trauma. She coined the term betrayal trauma. She also coined this acronym DARVO, D-A-R-V-O, which is a manipulation technique. And it stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. It's super powerful and effective.
We see this tactic all the time in the world. But in a case like Tora, Aaron was claiming that he had this very sympathetic and very traumatic victim narrative of how he lost his foot. And so oftentimes people who are doing Darvo are basically flipping the script of who the victim is. And their victim narrative is compelling and is powerful and emotional. Right.
And it's the kind of thing that no sympathetic, reasonable person would say otherwise. I don't believe you that you had a injury in the war. Like you don't want to push someone on that. And the victim narratives can be so effective. I mean, we saw it also with Tammy McCrary in that episode where her husband was a fake doctor. He had said that he had two children.
And the reason that Tammy could never talk to his parents is that his children and his parents all died in a car accident. Right. That's not the kind of story you are going to force someone you love to go into details about. You know, it's a very effective manipulation tool. Yeah. Okay. Our next question about a specific episode is about Danielle's story.
Danielle, just as a reminder for listeners, she was married to a man named Chad. Yeah. They had a big family. Chad was a financial advisor. She did all the homeschooling and all the labor in the house. And he did basically the money making. But over time, he's behaving strangely. Weird things are happening.
And one night when she wakes up in the middle of the night, he's not there and the car is gone. But, you know, when she tries to press him on it, he just gets mad at her. Then years pass and nothing big happens. You know, things are a little weird. And he's pulling away from her and sleeping oftentimes in his office in the basement.
And then one night she wakes up to the FBI and the state police having raided her house because it turns out Chad has kidnapped two of their family friends, an elderly couple that they actually went to church with. And he had put them in a dungeon that he had built himself. He's not actually a financial advisor.
He was planning on having them go into a bank and wire him a check for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. And thankfully, the FBI was called in very quickly. And then they found the couple alive. So a listener wrote to us and said, Chad leaves his home regularly at night, even on vacation. But why? To go where? To do what?
Is there no other info on this disturbing habit other than that it happened?
No, she doesn't. Like she doesn't know where he actually was that night. And even if she were to ask him after the fact, you know, call him in jail, which she does not communicate with him. But like even if she were to ask him, I don't think she believes she would get an honest answer. Right.
But, you know, I think this question of how did someone not know comes up a lot in our inbox and in our reviews. And we often hear about these scenarios where something happens, like I wake up in the night and my partner's not here and it's off, but they don't know how off it really is. And it's important to remember that in these episodes, we're hearing stories. The whole story told at once.
We're hearing all the red flags strung together in a row. It's true. But of course, this was happening, you know, there were years. Years, exactly. Years that were totally fine. And they took family vacations and nothing went wrong.
Yeah, I think default to truth is really important. And I think people want to believe that they are good at detecting liars because it makes... Makes you feel safe. Yes, makes you feel safe. That feeling of, I would have known... is a self-soothing feeling of it couldn't happen to me because I can tell. And I can tell when I hear this story. But we're producing this story.
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