Peter McDonald
speaker
265 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Peter McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sarah Woodward told me that they would have arrested her earlier, but they thought she was pregnant. But Wiggins' pregnancy was a hoax. She was indicted on three counts of wire fraud and Tara Lee on six more, bringing her total to 24 counts. Here's Sarah Woodward.
What's typical in a white collar crime case with wire fraud?
FBI agent Matt Sluss, who has a background in accounting, determined the amount of money Tara Lee made from adoptions from 2016 through 2018 was more than $2 million. Many of those adoptions were fraudulent. But Woodward felt she could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that about half a million came through wire fraud.
And it wasn't the first time Tara Lee had committed a crime. In 2005, she wrote over $22,000 in bad checks, including to two jewelry stores, and was arrested. She also tried to buy a snowmobile with a bad check.
Woodward sent the plea agreement to Tara Lee's defense attorney. It required Tara Lee to plead guilty to two charges of wire fraud and acknowledge the evidence against her in the other charges. Tara Lee accepted the deal. The next step would be sentencing. And that's where this white-collar crime prosecution came with a twist.
Sarah Woodward wanted to give the families and birth parents who were victims of Tara Lee's scam an opportunity to face her in court. And if they wanted, give what's called a victim impact statement. The judge, Bernard Freedman, scheduled Tara Lee's sentencing for the end of February 2020.
Families, including Teresa and Mike Matheny, Nick Granath, Courtney Edmond, and dozens of others traveled back to Detroit. The night before sentencing, a snowstorm descended. Schools throughout the city were closed, but the court stayed open. The next morning, Adam Bells Thomas got in his truck and drove through it to the federal courthouse downtown. His husband Kyle was with him.
The defense was going to present the letter Adam wrote in support of Tara Lee as a reason for her to receive a light sentence. But that letter wasn't what Adam believed anymore. And Woodward wanted the court to know it. She'd asked Adam to speak first.
When Adam and Kyle arrived at the courthouse, Woodward directed them into a separate building where dozens of couples and birth parents were waiting.
Matt is FBI agent Matt Sluss. Tammy Granath stayed home with her daughter May, but Nick was there. Teresa and Mike had met Courtney the night before, when they picked her up from the airport. What's the mood in this room when you all meet for the first time?
When it was time, Sarah Woodward led them outside. Here's Teresa Matheny.
And then they brought in Tara Lee.
After opening statements, Adam stepped out of the jury box and stood in front of Tara Lynn.
Ask anyone who was at Tara Lee's sentencing that day, and there's one moment they will all remember. One of the victims, Amber Morey, spoke about her failed match with a birth mother named Stacey. Amber had flown from Arizona to Michigan for the birth of Stacy's baby. Except Stacy never showed up at the hospital. Tara Lee couldn't find her. She disappeared. The baby was gone.
Years had passed, but Amber couldn't let it go. She still had the crib, still had the toys. In court, she looked at Tara Lee and asked the question that haunted her. Did Stacy even exist? Tara Lee said, in my heart, she did. Teresa told me she cried a lot in court that day, but all the emotion was building to one moment, Tara Lee's sentence. There are no federal laws governing adoption.
Maybe there should be, because all the court had to work with were wire fraud laws. When Sarah Woodward got up to speak, she told the court that Tara Lee's fraud was so unimaginable, there were simply no laws to account for it.
The last person to address the court was Tara Lee. Her mother, husband, and children watched from the gallery. Tara Lee cried as she spoke and acknowledged what she'd done. She said, because of me, people's dreams of becoming parents were crushed. She said she'd spent the last 18 months in jail trying to make sense of where she went wrong.
What she didn't say is that she spent the time thinking about the people she'd harmed, the families whose dreams she'd crushed. Instead, she confessed to having a shopping addiction. I shopped to fill a void, she said. I shopped to deal with all of the phone calls and all the texts and all the pressure coming from all sides. I asked Sarah Woodward if she thought Tara Lee's statement was heartfelt.
She said no. Those were crocodile tears. She called it a performance. I read what Tara Lee said that day, and her words are almost all about herself. How she felt. How she had gone astray. How she'd lost her family. Her consequences. Judge Friedman seized on this immediately. He said, I listened to you with remorse, but everything was about you.
Then he said of this case, you knew what you were doing exactly and you picked your victims and you preyed upon their vulnerability. Judge Friedman called it the worst case he'd ever seen. He compared it with a recent case where he'd given someone life in prison and said, I wish I could flip you with the other person because you deserve life.
Showing 21–40 of 265 · page 2 of 14
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