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
Many of the couples Tara Lee had defrauded signed on to watch the raid in real time.
Courtney Edmond watched from her kitchen in Colorado Springs. She'd been through two failed adoptions with Tara Lee and had slept in the house that was being raided. Teresa Matheny, who'd driven from Atlanta to Detroit in a panic to save her adoption, watched too.
While Courtney watched, she was holding a baby she'd just adopted from another agency.
That's Heather Catallo, an investigative reporter for WXYZ Channel 7, a popular TV news station in Detroit. Heather didn't know who owned the house and why the FBI was there. She just knew that whoever lived there was being investigated for fraud. And she wanted to find out why.
The FBI hauled out box after box from Tara Lee's home, but they were most interested in one small item. A sophisticated criminal who needs to communicate with their victims or associates might use a burner phone, text in code, use a pseudonym, and delete everything. Tara Lee's fraud depended on communication, and she'd saved everything.
Every text change she'd monitored, every sketchy or fictitious update she'd sent to anxious adoptive parents, every credit card payment she received on an app was visible on her iPhone. When Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Woodward read through it, she saw the individual strands in Tara Lee's web of fraud.
She also saw how Tara Lee used her personality to bamboozle people.
Tara Lee had invented a lot of stories, lies rather, to make her fraud work because her con took so long. Here's Matt Sluss.
One of the ways Tara Lee made fake pregnancies feel real was by sending out ultrasound images purported to be of the baby the couple was adopting. The ultrasound image she sent to Tammy and Nick Granath of Sabrina's baby is an example. It wasn't actually an image of Sabrina's baby, because Sabrina didn't exist. Tara Lee found these images online, and she'd repurposed them for different families.
Matt Sluss traced them to a website selling ultrasound images for pranks. But these images were the middle, not the end, of her lie.
Her most common lie was that the birth mother changed her mind and was going to keep the baby. It's believable because it happens. If it was a closed adoption, Tara Lee just told the lie, like she lied to the Graniths about Sabrina.
But if it was an open adoption and the baby wasn't real, or if she diverted a baby to another family in a double or triple match, Tara Lee might impersonate the birth mother in fake texts, saying she was keeping the baby. Tara Lee would send the devastated couple a screenshot of the fake texts as proof the match failed, and then she'd commiserate with them.
In other situations, she'd say the birth mother miscarried. She even paid a woman to pretend to be pregnant. I think the real reason Tara Lee wanted to limit communication between the birth mothers and adoptive parents was that when it came time to lie, she had to control the narrative. All of Tara Lee's lies were egregious, but some were extreme.
Remember when she told the Grannis that she couldn't come to Chicago to have dinner with them because a birth mother named Rashonda and her baby had been murdered in Detroit? Tara Lee matched Roshanda with a couple in Georgia, who paid her about $15,000. She also sent them details about Roshanda and photos.
And Tara Lee took it a step further.
Agent Sluss tracked down the real person in Tara Lee's photo. Her name wasn't Rashonda. She wasn't pregnant. She had never been shot. Tara Lee just found her photo online and invented the rest. This opportunity was completely fake. If a match failed, Tara Lee often tried to roll the couple into another one.
I think she developed a sense of how much money each client had, how far she could push them. She knew where they lived, the kind of house they had, the way they reacted when she matched them and asked them for $14,000. She profiled them. While the FBI was figuring out what Tara Lee did, who she did it to, and how, the question of why she did it permeated everything.
The answer is complicated and, in a way, unknowable. But inside the drawers of Tara Lee's house and on her credit card statements, the FBI found many ways Tara Lee had benefited. While some of her birth mothers lived in squalid conditions with their children, keeping food in the snow, sleeping on the floor, Tara Lee spent $30,000 to renovate her kitchen. She leased a boat. She flew first class.
She bought a Rolex. She had countless velvet baggies of David Yerman jewelry. She had sunglasses and reading glasses from Prada, Valentino, and Tiffany's. She had more jewelry than anyone could find occasions to wear. Some were unopened, the tags still on them. The FBI took photos of all of it. After the raid, the cat was out of the bag. But the FBI hadn't made anything public.
So reporters like Heather Catallo were scrambling to figure out what Tara Lee was being accused of. Meanwhile, couples in the Facebook group were anxiously waiting for Tara Lee to be charged. But there was one Detroit couple Tara Lee had worked with, Adam and Kyle Bells-Thomas, who refused to join the Facebook group because they were convinced that Tara Lee was completely innocent.
Showing 81–100 of 265 · page 5 of 14
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