Secret Meetings | Trained to Kill
episodePreviously titled “Secret Meetings” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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Trigger warning, the following episode contains references to harassment, stalking, and physical violence. Listen with care. In August 2009, an anonymous man called the Skagit County Sheriff's Office 911 hotline.
There's a crime that's going to take place in the morning.
It involved a dangerous drug dealer.
There's going to be a van transporting some drugs from the Anacortes area to I-5 and then to Seattle.
The dispatcher then asked the caller for the person's name.
And do you know the names? His last name is Stover, S-T-O-V-E-R.
Stover, as in Mark Stover, the dog trainer to the stars who had moved to Anacortes, Washington.
Okay, and is somebody there with you, or why are you whispering? Yeah, it's something that's very delicate. I have to not be found out about this. He's very dangerous, perpetually carries a gun.
It's a little tough to hear, but he's warning them that Mark carries a gun. He said, this is very dangerous.
I wish you guys would do something before it kills me.
He says, I wish you guys would do something before he kills somebody.
He refused.
This is Lee Herron. She's a private investigator Mark hired after the incident. Lee said when Mark refused to cooperate, the officers wouldn't let him leave.
A search warrant was obtained, a canine was brought to the scene, and there was a positive hit. The dog detected some drugs. The police found a small metallic box on the undercarriage of Mark's vehicle, which contained a couple of marijuana cigarettes and some very low-grade cocaine cigarettes.
Mark told the deputies the box had been planted. They let him go, but from then on, Mark watched his back.
It was such a deliberate act. It said, we're setting you up. We want you to go to jail. I think Mark had a very real fear of what Linda was capable of doing to him.
I'm Peter Van Sant. From 48 Hours, this is Trained to Kill. The dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard. Episode 3, Secret Meetings. At the time Mark Stover was pulled over by police, Linda Updike said she had moved on from her ex-husband.
I just wanted to go on with my life with Michael, and I wanted Mark to go on with his life.
Michael was Michael Oakes, a security expert. We spoke back in 2010.
I remember at that time thinking, this can't be real, because no woman alone could go through this amount of harassment.
Michael said they met at a Starbucks and quickly connected over their love of books. By the fall of 2008, Michael said their business relationship turned romantic.
I said to her, I think we have a connection that could go beyond friendship, and is that something that you're open to? And I think she, as you may know, she's almost six feet tall, and I'm five foot six. She's never had children. I have four children. So it was an unlikely romance. But she said, you know, I have gone through a lot of things in my life, and I'm open to considering that.
Linda was impressed by how dedicated Michael was to his family. After getting a divorce from his first wife, Michael took full custody of their kids. He even treated the kids of his second wife as his own.
Everything he did took into account of his children. He worked at home so he could be there for them. He was a full-time single parent. He drove them to school every morning. He made sure he had Friday night movies time with them or game evenings. The family was a priority to him.
Michael described himself as a self-taught security specialist skilled in firearms.
I ended up training with a lot of the alphabet soup of government agencies and SWAT teams and so on, and it's what we call force-on-force training. I owned a small company in Seattle here, and I managed to get some training equipment and figure out how to use it.
People have said that you are a gun enthusiast. Is that true?
Yes, I am a gun enthusiast. I've taught all my kids from the earliest age that I felt they were safe, gun safety, and I have shot competitively for some years.
You've been described as Linda Updike's bodyguard as well as boyfriend.
Right. Is that accurate? I don't believe it's accurate. Let's put it that way. She never paid me to be a bodyguard. I did a little bit of research, and I did an analysis of sort of her home security situation and the steps she was taking, looked into the people that she was working with, and made some suggestions on that front.
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