Chapter 1: What prompted Karen Palmer to leave California with her family?
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We really left overnight. You know, I had a job. I was working for a semiconductor firm just outside Santa Cruz, and I just one day didn't go to work.
This is Karen Palmer. That's not the name she was born with. She changed it in 1989 after she and her new husband and two daughters went on the run. Her children, Amy and Aaron, were three and seven. What did you tell your daughters about what was happening?
You know, the little one, she was so little, she didn't understand anything. Erin was enough older that she knew what was happening around her on some level. And we told her, we're going to go live somewhere where we're safe. Erin never told a soul. I think, you know, somewhere inside her, she knew that it was important, and she wanted to help.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. For almost a year, Karen's ex-husband Gil had been threatening and stalking them. It started when Karen left him. They've been married for eight years. Karen met Gil when she was 17. He owned the office supply company where she worked as a secretary.
Gil was talkative. You know, it's like he could gab a million miles an hour and he had tons of friends and he had this successful business. He was very charismatic and he would tell these stories. incredible stories about having grown up in New York and having been in the army and starting the business and he was a good storyteller and that interested me.
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Chapter 2: What were the circumstances surrounding Karen's marriage to Gil?
Karen and Gil dated for seven years. They broke up a few times. Once Karen caught Gil cheating on her. But then they would always get back together. They got married in 1980. They had two children. Gil was often out late with people who Karen didn't know. He'd come home drunk a lot. Once he came home with a bruised chest because he'd crashed their car.
Another time, the police showed up at their house looking for Gil. Karen didn't know why.
He was doing things that I wasn't aware of. He was selling stolen merchandise. And I did know that he had multiple forms of identification. He had several driver's licenses in different names. And I was just kind of flabbergasted at it. But he would pull that out at parties, like a party trick, that he had been able to do this. And I thought it was just a party trick.
Once Gil locked himself in the bathroom, Karen thought he was doing drugs. When he opened the door, he showed her a gun. He held it up to his head and then pointed it at her stomach. She was pregnant at the time, with their second daughter. He said it wasn't loaded, but when she hit the gun out of his hand, it went off in the sink.
She thought about leaving, but she says at the time, she still loved Gil. They'd been together for about a decade, and she couldn't imagine a life without him.
You know, you have the frog being put into water, and then the water boils. That's the standard metaphor that people use. I think of the things that went on between us as I wasn't physically abused in the way where I was, you know, beaten. The abuse was more, I guess what they call now, coercive control, though there were physical elements to it.
You know, he could be bullying and looming and shoving and, you know, doing that kind of stuff. And I didn't know anyone who was a victim of domestic violence, and so it never occurred to me, and I didn't think of myself that way.
In 1988, Karen and Gil were living just north of San Francisco. They went down to Los Angeles for business a lot. Sometimes they took the kids. They stayed at their friend Vinny's house. Vinny had worked for Gil at the office supply company. Karen and Vinny stayed up late talking with each other.
At some point, it became clear to both of us that we were unhappy in our marriages. And we just kind of looked at each other and thought, oh... You know, we had very strong feelings for each other. And it was just kind of, it was a surprise. And it was certainly not a convenient surprise. It was very dangerous and awful to have realized this.
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Chapter 3: How did Gil's behavior change after their marriage?
But one day, Karen came home and realized he had gone through her things. He had cut up photos from their wedding, and he had burned some of Karen's old family photographs. She says she found a bullet on top of the stove. Karen decided she had to move out of their apartment.
I rented a place for me and the girls in Santa Cruz, which was 90 miles south of where we were living in Marin, because my attorney told me that I could go 90 miles without having to petition the court. And I thought, well, I'll go far enough that he can see the girls, but he has to call me to set up a time. Like, I have to know what he's doing. He can't just show up on my doorstep.
And that turned out to be, he could definitely show up on my doorstep. The distance didn't make any difference to him.
Gil asked to meet her for lunch. Karen agreed. She thought he wanted to talk about their daughters. But when she got there, he threatened to take away the kids if Karen stayed with Vinny. Later, Karen found rotten meat in her front yard. Another time, she found her tires slashed. She suspected Gil.
I mean, he got very, very scary very fast. he told me at some point that he was going to cut my head off and put it in the refrigerator for our daughters to find. Did you report him to the police? You know, I was, for a long time, I was really afraid to report him to the police because he was the kind of person that It would make everything for me and the girls worse if I reported him.
You know, he would be like, oh, you think you're going to get, you know, some kind of protective order? I don't believe in protective orders.
There were no anti-stalking laws in California at the time. The state wouldn't have any until 1990, the first in the country. Once, Gil showed up at Karen's job. He said he wanted to tell her co-workers that she was a cheat and a liar. When Karen walked him outside, he headbutted her. Karen told her lawyer about it, but her lawyer said it didn't sound like her injuries were that bad.
Karen found out that Gil had had a meeting with her lawyer, and he said Gil seemed like a nice guy. Once, Vinny found dynamite on his truck. He called the sheriff's department. Gil had been calling and leaving death threats on his answering machine. Vinny had even filed reports with the police. But the officers said they couldn't do anything. They didn't have proof it was Gil.
For a long time, Karen hadn't wanted to tell her mother what was happening. But she finally did.
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Chapter 4: What led to Karen's decision to go into hiding?
They went to the beach. You know, she made her milkshakes every night. My daughter was really happy to be with her grandmother. When it came time for her to come home again, my mother was supposed to take her to the airport and put her on a plane. And just before they were due to leave, Gil showed up.
Gil told Karen's mother that he was in town visiting family. He was going to be flying back to San Francisco that day. He said he could fly home with Aaron. Karen's mother called her.
And I was flabbergasted that he even knew she was there. And that he was able to just show up on mom's doorstep. So my mother, you know, I was on the phone with her and she was running this past me and I was extremely unhappy. But my mother said, I'll see her onto the plane. You know, what can happen? She'll be on the plane with him. They'll get off the plane. There she is.
Everything will be fine. You know, you'll be in San Francisco International Airport. So I agreed to that.
But they got to the airport late, so Karen's mother let Aaron and Gil go inside without her.
And they went inside, and this was in the days before there were security lines, and you could just go up to the gate and purchase a ticket. So Gil took Aaron, instead of going to the gate that was the flight up to San Francisco, he took her to a gate that was going to New York. And she made kind of a stink. You know, she's like, well, no, we're not going to New York. We're going home to mommy.
And so he wound up buying a ticket for her flight, her original flight up to San Francisco. So he got on the plane with her. And she told me later that he was mad at her and wouldn't talk to her on the plane.
When the plane landed in San Francisco, it was after midnight. Karen was waiting with her three-year-old daughter, Amy. She saw Gil and Aaron coming out of the gate.
I had Amy in my arms, and she wants to get down, and she's complaining. And he stuck his arms out. And just as a reflex, I gave Amy to him to hold. So... We start walking towards baggage claim and I see him. He's ahead of me by, you know, a fair amount of distance, but I can see him.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Karen face while trying to protect her children?
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When Karen Palmer couldn't find her ex-husband Gil and her daughter Amy, she called the airport police.
Their response was, what is your custody arrangement? And the custody had not been settled yet. And so they said, well, he has as much right to her as you do, and we can't really do anything.
Karen and Aaron stayed at the airport for hours, until morning. The police had put out an alert for Gil, but they didn't find anything. The next day, Karen and Vinny started calling around airports and bus stations, looking for Gil and Amy. They called Gil's old jobs and his friends and family, including his first wife Rita.
She and I, there was not a lot of, no love lost between us. And yet, she called me every single day that Amy was gone. She told me, make sure that Aaron sleeps with you because he'll come in the window and take her too.
Karen's lawyer had asked for an emergency custody hearing, but it had been scheduled for a week later. Until then, they couldn't file kidnapping charges. But her lawyer had learned that there was a warrant out for Gil's arrest for not appearing in court for drunk driving. The police in San Francisco said if they found Gil, they could arrest him for that.
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Chapter 6: How did Karen and Vinny prepare for their new life on the run?
Vinny picked a new last name and started going by John Vincent. His real name had been Vincent John. He told everyone just to call him Vinny. Karen made them new birth certificates. She decided it would be easiest to make them both from New York, where Vinny was actually born.
His New York State certificate was basically just a photostat where the top half of it was, you know, white typewriter type on a black background. And the bottom was, you know, the signatures and that sort of thing. So it was not impossible to duplicate it.
She copied pieces of the birth certificate at different copy shops around town so no one would realize what she was doing. She took all the pieces home, cut them out, and glued them together onto a new sheet of paper. She painted over the edges of each piece of cut paper with black ink. When she made copies, it all looked like one piece.
Vinnie's book about changing your identity had information about how to get an embossing stamp for any state. They got one with the New York state seal and stamped their fake birth certificates. Karen kept Amy and Aaron's first names, but changed their last names to Palmer. I would be so worried about new names and how am I going to get the kids enrolled in school.
I mean, were you nervous about how this was going to work?
Oh, God, yes. It was terrible. It was terrible. But the reason it worked out is because... It was a different world then. You know, states were very cut off from each other in terms of their documents and their records. So it was not all computerized. You couldn't connect somebody just by their social security number and track them all around the country.
When they first got to Boulder, they'd made a deal with a real estate agent to live in a condo for free if they repainted it. For the first week, they didn't go outside much. It rained for days, and they were too nervous to be seen. Karen got a TV from Goodwill for Aaron and Amy to watch, while she and Vinny painted.
They stayed in the condo for a few months, but that fall, the real estate agent called and said that the condo had sold. They would need to move out. but he said there was a house for sale that they might like. He took them to see it. Vinny loved it. Karen was worried about how they would buy it.
They still didn't even have bank accounts, so they couldn't get a loan, and they didn't want to use their real names for a credit check. They decided they had to tell the real estate agent that they were in hiding. He offered to talk with the owner... And then they had a phone call with her. She wanted to know why they could only pay in cash. She asked if they were drug dealers.
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Chapter 7: What was the process of changing their identities like?
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Karen kept expecting to hear something from Gil, like a summons to appear in court to negotiate custody for Aaron and Amy.
At the time that we left, they had given me sole custody because of the kidnapping, but with the caveat that he can petition the court and try to get his parental rights restored and normal visitation and all the things that divorced families deal with. And as far as I know, he never did any of it.
After four years, she and Vinny decided it was safe to tell their families where they were. They went to visit Vinny's parents in Florida. They'd both been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Karen and Vinny hadn't been able to be around for their surgeries while they were in hiding. Did you ever say to Vinny, I'm so sorry I got you into this? Or do you think he knew what he was signing up for?
He knew Gil.
I think he... He knew what he was in for, and we were so bonded to each other. It's like we had a version of a wartime romance, you know, where like the bombs were going off all around us. And so we felt so connected to each other and so connected to the girls and so devoted to the idea of making a safe place for all of us.
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Chapter 8: How did Karen cope with the aftermath of her past relationship?
I felt very guilty and... I wondered if it was necessary to disappear. And the thing I landed on was that all I could go on was how he was, what he did. And so I don't regret it. I feel sad, but I don't regret it.
In 2009, Karen and Vinny started trying to merge their real identities with the fake ones they'd made 20 years earlier. How hard a process is that? It seems very complicated.
Oh, my God, it was not fun. It took years to straighten it out. We knew that the big issue was Social Security and the IRS. And we initially tried to hire a lawyer to straighten this stuff out for us. People wouldn't pursue it for us. So Vinny and I finally decided that we were just going to have to take care of this ourselves.
And we would have to come clean and throw ourselves on their mercy, basically.
They went to the IRS first. An agent listened to Karen explain what had happened with Gil. The agent told them the first thing they'd need to do was get their Social Security numbers corrected.
At Social Security, we got this other woman, and I had laid out our documents, our original birth certificates and the phony ones, and she kind of swept everything up and said, I can refer you for criminal prosecution for fraud, and I might do that.
For a while, they didn't hear anything. And then they got news from the Social Security office.
And it was okay in the end, but it was nerve-wracking. And I think she decided not to try to seek criminal charges because... We didn't do anything to defraud anybody. You know, that's sort of the criteria. Like, did you do it to get out of paying taxes? Did you do it to swindle somebody in some kind of a business deal? Did you do it to skip out on your credit card debt?
We had always gone way in the other direction. Like, when we filed our taxes, we didn't take the deductions we were entitled to because we were afraid of drawing attention to ourselves. So it wasn't like we owed money anywhere. And I think they finally looked at us and said, okay, we're going to let this go.
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