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
Yeah, no intentions at all. But the adoption paperwork couldn't be signed for three days, and they needed sleep. The Mathinis went back to their rental house and crashed. In the morning, they rushed back to the hospital. Baby S was still in the NICU, and Tara Lee was still sitting right next to Stephanie in her recovery room.
Later that morning, the lawyers, Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado, surreptitiously arrived. They messaged the Mathinis to meet them on another floor where they could talk in secret. When they were all out of Tara Lee's earshot, the lawyers said the FBI's investigation was very serious, and this might be Tara Lee's last adoption.
They gave the Mathienes the phone number for FBI Special Agent Matt Sluss.
He had his first conversation with the FBI. Last summer, I reached out to the FBI to ask if they'd speak with me about their investigation into Tara Lee. They don't always talk to reporters, but this case was very important to them. Special Agent Matt Sluss is thin, with a neat beard, and talks in a thoughtful and precise way.
In 2018, he was a newish agent working white-collar crime, and he said when he got this case, he knew nothing about how adoption works.
They wouldn't tell me who tipped them off, though. They don't want to discourage people from reporting crimes to the FBI. Regardless, someone told them that Tara Lee was taking money for an adoption that was designed to fail. The FBI had never come across a case like it. The first person to review it was Supervisory Special Agent Mark Krieg.
As Agent Krieg chewed it over in the office, Agent Sless came in.
They didn't know if this was a federal crime or a state crime, or if it was a crime at all, but it seemed like it should be. And if you're curious about the timeline of this meeting, it happened about a week before the Mathienes got to Detroit. Agent Krieg called the U.S. Attorney's Office and asked to talk with Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Woodward.
Wire fraud. You've probably heard of it, but might not know what it means. It's the use of physical or electronic communication systems, like email or text, to commit fraud. The name is kind of outdated. It dates back to when we used wired telephones. Wire fraud is a federal offense, which is why the FBI got involved.
Sarah Woodward and Agent Matt Sluss would need to show that Tara Lee used her cell phone or email to defraud people. AUSA's Sarah Woodward was sitting at her L-shaped desk on a high floor of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit when we talked. She was surrounded by case files.
Woodward told me that this case was so novel that she had to come up with new terminology just to describe the alleged fraud. terms like fabricated match and double match. That first week on the case, agents Sluss and Krieg interviewed about a dozen people connected with Tara Lee's adoption business.
These people were the tip of the iceberg because each interview introduced the FBI to new names and allegations. The scope of the case beneath the surface was way bigger than they initially thought. By Friday, Matt Sluss felt compelled to visually piece it together.
Courtney and Curtis Edmond, two failed matches. Tammy and Nick Granath, one failed match, one fabricated match, one success. On October 26th, Agent Sluss added, Mike and Teresa Matheny, success. 20 blocks away, Mike hung up with Matt Sluss and found Teresa in the hospital and told her what had just happened. He now had no doubts that this investigation was real.
and it was time to turn the tables on Tara Lee. He and Teresa walked the echoey halls talking in hushed tones when they saw two familiar faces coming toward them. It was Stephanie and her partner.
They paid Stephanie's back rent and three months of advance rent. They paid her overdue electric bill and bought a few months of credit. They paid her car insurance and had her driver's license reinstated. They put new tires on her car. They bought her food, clothes, and shoes. And they felt bad that Stephanie had been taken advantage of. She'd been promised support for her pregnancy.
Instead, she struggled for months. She collapsed in her car. She was alone during the delivery. The truth was, even after what they'd done for her, Stephanie was going to keep living paycheck to paycheck. Her son was going to grow up with a middle-class family. It was going to be hard, no matter what. Tara Lee had made it so much harder.
A few days later, Tanya Corrado returned to the hospital in secret so the Mathinis could sign the adoption consent forms. In her last adoption, Tara Lee was going to be cut out.
The Matheny stayed in Detroit for almost two months. Every day, they visited their son in the NICU, rocked him, read to him, fed him. He doubled his weight. In early December, he was released from the hospital. They could go home.
The only thing that wouldn't fit in the car were the golf clubs. Mike put them on the roof. It was sleeting and snowing as they dressed their son in the monogrammed sailor outfit they'd bought for him back in Brunswick, Georgia.
Teresa squeezed into the backseat next to her son. At a stoplight, Mike aimed his camera at the rearview mirror and snapped a family picture they'd never forget. Teresa and Mike are smiling as if it's the first mile of a spring break road trip.
Showing 161–180 of 265 · page 9 of 14
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