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this episode contains adult content please use discretion well I was 13 and it was just a few days
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before my ninth grade year began and I went out to check the mail and there was a large manila envelope addressed to me
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and of course it's always exciting to get mail but when I opened it up it was page
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after page of black and white photocopied extremely graphic pornography this is Sarah garone the pages were
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images that appeared to have been cut out and arranged on New pieces of paper and then photocopied a stack of them an
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inch thick I hardly even knew what I was looking at and I think for that reason it was extra horrifying just not even
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knowing what what on Earth this was and the minute I pulled it out you know you just have this gut reaction of horror
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and I just remember I was trembling shaking I started to cry this was 1996 in Chandler Arizona
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Sarah says she grew up in a very sheltered environment her mother and stepfather were very active in their
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local Evangelical Church on the day she received the package she remembers immediately taking it inside
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to show them and I said look at this someone sent me this why would someone send me this there was no return address
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on the envelope no other markings no note just pages and pages of these pictures
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what did your parents think I mean what do you remember them saying about who did this or
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I think we all just were in shock from it and and racking our brains about who would do this and why
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um I think they sort of interrogated me are there any creepy boys at school or anybody who might have a crush on you or
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anyone you might have slided in some way you just kind of go through all of those
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questions in your head when you're trying to make sense of an incident like this because I think in my mind it could
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have only come from of course someone that I knew and most of the people I knew were at my school so anytime anyone
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expressed interest in me in a sort of romantic way I would add them to my list and kind of
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consider well could could they have done something like this was this them we decided to call the police the police
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came took it made a report and nothing ever happened every time Sarah went to get the mail
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she worried about what might be in it but no more letters came weeks passed and then months nothing
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and then one year later something else arrived I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
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[Music] oh this time there was just a single business-sized envelope with my name on
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an actual printed label this time no return address then I opened this one and this time it
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was color photographs Each of which took up the entire page and I would say it was two or three eight by eleven sheets
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again of very graphic pornography and this time there was a little extra there for me which was a message scrawled in
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red some kind of red ink it looked like it could have been paint or even lipstick and this time it was addressed
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to me personally and it said dear Sarah I love you I want you I need you and it was signed with the name of a boy
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at my school who I had a crush on what did you do I recall again just shaking like a leaf
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it's crying um epically freaking out just a mess that this had happened again did you confront the boy no no I did not
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didn't want I did not want to talk to him about it at all Sarah says she didn't believe it was
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actually from this boy it was too similar to the package she'd gotten a year before before she'd even met this
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person he was a foreign exchange student who wasn't even in the country when she got
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the first package what scared her most was that as far as she remembers she'd never even told
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anyone that she had a crush on him the only place that I had expressed that was in my diary
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and I knew that it couldn't have actually been this boy who had sent it to me so someone had to have either read my
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journal or been a very good guesser and put his name on this I think I would have just been I so
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flipped out yes and I think probably even worse because A year had gone by thinking maybe it's over and then
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thinking oh no it wasn't yeah exactly and this time that personal aspect and that personal violation to know
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it's very possible that someone read my diary but then I would think of yeah those
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sort of creepy boys at school and think oh maybe somehow like it's so far-fetched but you think that they come
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in my house or I would think of my male friends who had you know come over for parties or to hang out and think oh we
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were all out of the pool did somebody slip into my bedroom and and flip through my diary
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and then things went really quiet for a number of years and you start to think maybe that was just a weird incident
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from high school maybe it's over I moved I went to college in Chicago and I never really heard much for about
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I would say five years and then things began to happen again I was I was dating seriously and I had
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just actually gotten engaged when the level of harassment really ratcheted up what happened
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first my email was hacked and initially you think oh I just maybe I forgot my password that's funny or
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maybe they ran some update on this website and I have to have a new password my old password's not working
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anymore and so you know that seemed kind of harmless at first but then a lot of strange things began to happen with and
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from my email I would suddenly get subscribed to things that I knew I hadn't signed
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myself up for things especially with the sexual connotation after I got engaged you know and when
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you're young and in love you're this was before the age of text and so we were sending each other these really intimate
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emails and then a friend came to me and said did you mean to send me that email that very intimate email that was
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addressed to your fiancee she realized someone was logging in copying her emails and then sending them
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to new people from her email address and then even a very good friend of mine who
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I didn't go to school with at that time she had emailed me a really painful story of experiencing a sexual assault
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and then she began to receive anonymous messages about the details she had shared with me in that email
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Sarah felt horrible but didn't know what to do she kept changing her password her fiance at the time now husband was
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studying computer science and he started tracing the IP addresses for the emails
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that appeared to have been sent by Sarah they came from Chandler Arizona where she was from
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Sarah graduated and moved home to Arizona she and her fiance got married and rented an apartment in Tempe
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she got a job working as a secretary at Arizona State University and then one day I came home from work and there was
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an anonymous package on my doorstep by 2005 Sarah Caron had been intermittently harassed for almost 10
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years whoever was doing this to her seemed to find her wherever she lived she and her husband had been in their
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apartment for about nine months when the anonymous package showed up on her doorstep and inside was a dildo
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and someone had printed off just in large caps letters my husband's name and taped
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it to this thing which is almost comical but at the time really scary she realized that her front door was
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unlocked she knew she hadn't left it like that she called her husband but he was 30 minutes away so she called her
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stepfather whose office was right around the corner I was terrified that someone
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was lurking in my apartment you know the person who'd been perpetrating this harassment against me all these years I
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thought oh here it is he's finally gonna have his say in person so I waited outside
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until my Dad pulled up and I said please look behind all the shower curtains and
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in all the closets and behind all the doors and make sure there's no one hiding in my apartment
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and he did and he stayed with me and we made a police report together so when the cops show up are you
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recounting not just the story of this package but the fact that you've been internet stocked and you received
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packages in the past and definitely I will say I found it difficult to really hold out much hope though because
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in the past nothing had ever come of it before and so when I made this report even though this seemed more invasive
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and more intense than some of the previous incidents I just still wasn't convinced that
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anything would ever come of it and that this would just go on and on what happens next
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it was probably a week later that I got a phone call and a detective introduced himself and
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that floored me I just like I said I never thought any you know police action would ever happen on this
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he introduced himself we talked a little bit about what had been going on and he
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said do you know someone named Gary Hardy [Music] and I said yeah that's my stepdad
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and we knew at that point if it was him this time it had to have been him all along
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and it turns out my stepdad secretary that morning as part of her job she had been opening his business mail
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and she had also been pretty horrified to discover a dildo in a box addressed to him at his office
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and so she had closed it up surreptitiously acted like she never saw it and put it in his office
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when I called him and asked him to come to my Aid he told his secretary exactly what had
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happened and exactly why I had called and exactly what this object was that had arrived on my doorstep
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and it did not take her long to put the pieces together that he was not coming to save the day he was
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coming to see my reaction and so she went down to the Tempe Police Department which was right down the street and she
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made a report I had his secretary called you and said beef no she didn't and that's surprising because
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she was a friend of the family in fact she and my mom were very close but I think she just felt it was her
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duty to make that police report and let things play out from there going through all the things in in your
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mind times in high school growing up and oh yeah yeah and that was really revolting to think of how I had trusted
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him even trusted him with the raw emotion of my reactions because I was giving him
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exactly what he I believe wanted from this what other things did you start thinking
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about that were weird with him yeah that you hadn't really thought about before yeah
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well I think when I was a kid and he and my mom were first married I felt pretty
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copacetic about him being my dad but then as years went on and as I became a teenager I just would get kind of a
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yucky feeling about him sometimes so if it was just me and him alone in the house I recall that Monday nights my mom
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had a recurring event and it would be just him and me in the house and I just would want to go to my room
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or go to bed early I just I had a sort of a strange sense of not wanting to be alone with him
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and then I also realized something that had never crossed my mind as being strange but in
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retrospect really seemed strange was that in my bedroom which was on the ground floor of our house I had these
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rolling blinds and part just a little kind of corner a little square of the blinds had been missing for a long time
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and we had a cat so my mom always said oh you know cats get playful and Cat probably went behind there and just
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knocked out these this section of blinds but there would be times when Gary would
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go to take out the trash on that side of the house and I could swear that I hurt
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his footsteps and then I would hear them stop and he I knew he hadn't come in the house yet
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and so my suspicion is that I was being watched by him at those times Sarah's mother and stepfather divided
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their time between Arizona and Illinois they had two homes Gary Hardy was a financial advisor and
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had clients in both States so by the time the investigation had determined that Gary was the one behind
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the harassment my parents were in Illinois and so we needed to find a way to get
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him and them back to Phoenix and by this time I wanted nothing to do with him I never wanted to speak to him
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see his face any contact so my husband and my brother actually jointly got on the phone and they asked both my Mom and
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Gary to get on the phone and they said the police have figured out who's been doing this to Sarah and we're not at
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Liberty to say anything about it but they need you to come home to be a part of the investigation
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foreign calls and says I have to know is it Gary Sarah's mother met Gary Hardy in 1991.
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they were married six months later here's Sarah's mother Sherry how did you and Gary meet
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we met at church we were attending the same large church we were in a music and drama Ministry
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together and then we really got to know each other better when we were in the same weekly small group that met in the
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home of mutual friends and what was he like he was witty and funny very intelligent you know I mean he's a smart
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guy um good professional people really liked him and uh you know people were just kind of
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drawn to him Gary Hardy was very active in his Church's men's group for husbands and
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fathers he had a son from a previous marriage he worked a lot and Sarah says he was successful his clients liked him
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he had no criminal record when Sarah told her mother that it was Gary who'd been harassing her Sherry
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knew that the most important thing was to be calm and to get Gary on a plane back to the police in Arizona
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so she had to pretend that she didn't know and that everything was normal for a whole week
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yeah so she spent the next week pretending like everything was fine I had to go home and smile
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I had to listen to him tell me he loved me I had to sleep in the same bed with this man who sexually stalked my
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daughter that was awful and my mom started experiencing some strange things with him as well
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so she would say be out on a walk and suddenly his car would come pulling up beside her
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and she hadn't told him where she was going and he would just sort of say oh hi just just checking in
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or she went to her aunt's house hadn't told him where she was going and the phone rang over there and it was him
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checking to see where she was what she was up to and that was not normal behavior for him so he started watching
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her oh definitely and then she newly alerted to this whole situation began kind of going through
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the home with new eyes and found a lot of really incriminating stuff around the house she found in his
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he had like a briefcase that she looked through one day when he was out and she found 40 credit cards with her own name
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on them that she had never taken out herself and then she went down in their basement
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and kind of Hidden Away in a corner of the basement were all sorts of high-end gadgets and golf clubs and purchases
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that she had never heard about the night before their flight was supposed to leave for Arizona Gary began
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to behave even more strangely he said he felt very sick Sherry later recounted to investigators
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that Gary had gotten on the floor he was shaking he said something was quote possessing him
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then he stopped and he he sat up and he said well I guess I might as well tell you
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this because I think you know anyway and I said I do you're right I might be in a position to help you
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I will not help unless you tell me the entire truth Gary confessed to harassing Sarah
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starting when she was 13 years old Sherry remember staying very calm and asking him okay what else
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and Gary kept confessing he said that he had been unfaithful to her every day of
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their marriage most often with prostitutes talked to her the other night and I don't I don't know how she did this
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but she said well I think maybe for records it would be best if you could write all this down and and sign it and
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she even got him to do that so she had a signed confession that he was the perpetrator behind all
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of these incidents for all these years this must have been so horrible for your mother
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it really was yeah I think just about the psychological impact of that week on her and I'm amazed that
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she got through it as well as she did Sherry thinks that Gary believed that she would stick with him no matter what
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when he went to bed that night Sherry remember staying awake in a chair in the living room and the next morning they
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went to the airport when they landed in Phoenix they went directly to the Tempe Police Department
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where Gary turned himself in Gary Hardy was charged with aggravated harassment and Criminal Trespass both
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felonies it was later discovered that he had been breaking into Sarah's apartment and
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taking things including her journals and then it emerged that he'd been stealing money from his clients which
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brought a whole new set of charges he was a financial planner and what he had been doing was
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instructing his clients to write checks that went to an account that was really his personal account
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in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars Sherry had been under the impression
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that she and her husband were extremely wealthy she says she didn't realize they were
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broke until she tried to pay her divorce attorney [Music] I wonder as a mother the guilt you must you must feel yeah
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absolutely absolutely how could I have married this person how could I have been so stupid and so naive
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has this changed your relationship with Sarah unfortunately yes it it changed it she
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was angry with me she was angry and she said I'm I'm sorry but I am when I said Sarah you have every right to be angry
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at me you have every right to be angry at me how could she not be angry at me now
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so today Sarah lives in Mesa not far from where she grew up she's a freelance writer mainly focusing on health
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she and her husband have been married for 15 years now and have three kids do your kids know about this I mean
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they're young yeah they know that Grandma was married to a bad man and that's they know that he was a
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criminal they don't know exactly what he did to me and I'm not quite ready to tell them yet
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have you met with other victims who've had similar experiences never I've never met anyone who's had an
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experience like this and in fact that's at the time what made it feel really isolating
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so if anything listening to Crime shows watching crime shows is kind of my way of
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of resonating with other people who've been through anything similar do you like cram chips oh I love crime
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shows I love my husband says my Netflix queue looks like I'm a Serial Mom hi I don't
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know your own crime show why do you worry I don't know that's a good question I'm
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I'm maybe I'm more messed up than I think I am maybe because my life has so largely
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gone back to normal and very safe and I feel very secure and great Community great neighborhood friends all these
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things but it's like maybe I still resonate on some level with that kernel of being the
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victim of a crime and wanting to see Justice Done for anybody that that perpetrates crime
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on someone else do you like to see how the story ends oh yeah I want to see the bad guy get put away
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[Music] Gary Hardy is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence at Iman State Prison in Arizona
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[Music] criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me nydia Wilson is our senior producer
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audiomix by Johnny Vince Evans special thanks to Susanna Roberson Brandon Tenney and Jeremy Umali
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Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at
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thisiscriminal.com where on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of
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North Carolina public radio wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best
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podcasts around I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] radiotopia from PRX