VA Investigator

So we got the paperwork signed, figure out how we're going to approach the house. We all pile into our cars and we drive down to Rhode Island.

So we get there and, you know, it's snowing and everyone like surrounds the house. Everyone's got their tactical plate carrier vests on. Everyone's all dressed up for the occasion. And we form, you know, a stack of agents to go up and knock on the door.

So requirement of a normal search warrant is that you knock, you announce, you know, police search warrant, and then you give a reasonable amount of time. for somebody inside to answer the door. So knocking on the door, loudly announcing nobody's coming.

And I said, like, hey, we are at your house. It's the police. Are you in the house? We need you to come to the door. And she says, no, I went out.

Oh, she ducked surveillance. And it wasn't that she was trying to avoid surveillance. I think she was trying to avoid the news, but it had the side effect of avoiding the surveillance. I said, all right, you said you're 15 minutes away. You've got exactly 15 minutes to come back. And if you don't come back, then at that point, we're going to have to force our way into your house.

The whole street was blocked off. There was a dozen cars. There's agents everywhere. Evidence bags, evidence tapes.

So she pulled up, maybe bewildered is the word I would use, just because there's all these people milling about the FBI. People are wearing their plate carriers that say FBI and big letters on them.

Maybe like if you've ever seen somebody immediately like after a car accident where they're still trying to process exactly what just happened kind of thing because it was a big turnout.

I had just said, hey, why are we here today? And she had started to tell me about who she borrowed the Marine Corps uniform from that she had worn. And then I think at that point, it really sank in what was happening because there's agents coming in and out of the house. And then she said she stopped her story about the uniform. She just said, I'm not I'm not going to talk to you.

There were VFW donation bins in the basement, like the five-gallon buckets that they put out when you're going to the grocery store or something. There was no money in them.

I used to work in counterintelligence investigations, and she had what, in my opinion, I would call a backstopped identity. Explain what you mean by that. Anyone who was ever in the military or worked for the government knows the Green Record Book. It's a notebook. It's ruled paper inside. It's like this 1950s seafoam green. The military's probably used them since World War II.

She had one of those. And she wrote a very detailed fake war diary.

She had said, what would happen to me if I tried to take your gun from you right now to the agents that were kind of standing there, like watching her. And they're like, well, like, why would you do that? And so at that point we were concerned. So we had the local police respond out and said, look, she's saying things that I think could be construed as self-harm.

The chief of VA police in Rhode Island called me and said, hey, you know, I think we might have a problem with an employee.

So our concern is that we don't know the extent of it yet. Like, we don't know all the evidence that there is. which opens the avenue for her to potentially destroy evidence or cover her tracks a little bit or try to talk to witnesses and get them to not cooperate.

There's this rare procedure called In the medical notes, it's got a date on it. The Providence VA only did that procedure to one person on that day.