The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (2023) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[Michael sighs, inhales]
[exhales]
You wanna give me a word?
You want, you want,
you wanna have me
give you one word
that describes Natalia to me?
Enigma.
She won't tell us
the truth in who she is.
We are living with
a con artist sociopath.
[female reporter] Now a story
making headlines
around the world.
Is this a child
or a grown woman?
[male reporter] The Barnetts
believe the adoption
was a scam all along.
They claim they were tricked
into adopting an adult.
She's evil.
I promise you,
within five years,
someone's dead.
[Kristine] What is it?
[Kristine] Why?
She threatened
to stab my sons,
drag their bodies outside
and bury them under the deck.
She tried to poison
and kill my wife.
Bye-bye!
She said, "I pulled a knife
on my parents. Big deal."
It's like a serial killer
or something.
It's how casually
they put attempted murder
into a conversation.
She was gonna kill everybody.
You've adopted a kid and now
they're trying to kill you.
I mean, it's the stuff
of a horror movie, right?
If you watch the Orphan,
it's just like the Orphan.
[woman speaking]
She was an adult.
You could tell
by looking at her.
[woman] Natalia was a victim.
The Barnetts
are the predators.
They just literally
left her to the wolves.
I don't know that there's
100% one villain here.
Kristine basically said that
Natalia destroyed their lives.
Irregardless of her age,
she was left
feeling abandoned
and neglected, alone.
[woman 1] Natalia was a child.
I know that for sure
because I'm a little person.
[woman 2] I think
Kristine Barnett
is a sorry excuse
for a mother.
[woman crying]
When I found out
what happened to her,
that was what
broke my heart the most.
There were a lot of secrets
in that house.
[crying]
[man] His minimum sentence
is three to 16 years.
[crying]
It doesn't smell right.
There's something wrong.
It smells like [bleep].
Do you know the difference
between the truth and a lie?
-I didn't at the time, no.
-Oh, you didn't know.
I was just listening to what
Kristine told me to tell them.
[woman 1] You just don't know
the true Barnetts.
[woman 2] There was
domestic violence.
[Michael grunting]
[woman 1] They'll do anything
to get what they want.
[woman 3] There were all these
pieces to a puzzle
that we couldn't
quite put together.
You're saying you lie
-because she told you to lie.
-Yes.
Michael and Kristine
not only lied
to get her into their family,
but they also lied
to get rid of her.
This is one of the most
twisted cases ever.
[man] I know
he's not the kinda guy
that could do well
if he had to go to prison.
You got a seatbelt? Buckle up.
[woman] I don't think
anyone will ever get
the complete truth.
[Kathy] So much of this
is a mystery.
[man 1] I still don't have
concrete answers.
[man 2] Somebody's not
telling the truth.
[Michael] It is a web of lies.
[man] I'm not sure you can
trust anybody in this case.
We were all [bleep] abused!
[shouts] We were all abused!
[crying] I'm so scared.
[inhales] This will
never stop.
[theme music playing]
[Michael] I hope I don't
overstate this
and make it seem a little bit
too Normal Rockwell,
American, uh, life,
but life was fantastic.
It really was.
This was summer 2010.
Life's great.
We'd been married
for about 15 years.
We have three sons,
Jacob, Wesley and Ethan.
Financially,
we're doing great.
We've got a literal
brand new McMansion,
5,000-square-foot home
in a prestigious town
and a driveway
loaded with cars in it.
There's a Lamborghini in
my driveway, for God's sakes.
We have 13 TVs.
We've got 14 couches.
There was hundreds
of thousands of dollars
in the bank account.
More importantly, we were
a very tight-knit family.
It really was
the pinnacle of life.
[Kathy] Michael
loved Kristine dearly.
When the flowers came
for their anniversary,
it was a dozen roses for
every year they were married.
So, for their
10th anniversary,
10 dozen roses.
[Michael] Kristine and I,
we could do anything together.
And when we realized
our oldest son Jacob
has Asperger's, or autism,
we fought those fights.
We were downright amazing
at the things
we could accomplish.
I'm Jacob Barnett
here with an introduction
to scientific notation.
I figured that,
since I was teaching it
to my two brothers,
Wesley and Ethan,
I would be able
to post it onto YouTube.
Okay, so I'm going to
finish this integral.
D by DX.
[Michelle] Their oldest son
is a genius
and was moving
through schooling
faster than I move
through a pair of shoes.
I did not come here
to frighten you all
with quantum mechanics.
[audience chuckling]
Not yet. [chuckles]
[Michelle] We would get
a message from Michael saying,
"Hey, did you see the paper?
Jake's on the front page,"
to, "Kristine's
writing a book.
It's been picked up
by a publisher."
[clock ticking]
cubed, divided by
[reporter] He has
a full scholarship
at the joint Indiana
University-Purdue campus.
For Jake, fun is reciting
from memory
the infinite series of numbers
known as pi.
3.1415926535897932384626433
Jacob's one of
the smartest people
I've ever heard of.
They're travelling the world.
[man] Jacob, when he was 15,
got an award from the Vatican.
This was where
the Barnett's lived.
The garage was, um,
where Kristine Barnett
had her daycare.
They were all
special-needs kids.
[Angelo] The Barnett family
opened up a foundation
a place where parents
and kids with autism
could go be with other parents
and kids with autism
and feel normal.
[Michelle] We were
proud of them
and they just seemed
so happy together.
The Barnetts had
the picture-perfect life
it seemed.
So, we went from early 2010
were blessed with many things.
By the time 2014 came around,
I have 37 cents
in my bank account,
I have no wife,
I have no children,
I have no home,
I have no job.
My possessions,
at that moment,
was my car
and a backpack of clothing.
If Natalia
never entered our lives,
I never get divorced.
[Kristine] They, they're
They interviewed me
three times
with a detective
in a bulletproof vest.
[Michael] What? What are they
gonna charge you with?
[Michael] Kristine, listen--
[Michael sighs]
I'm Kristine
Kristine, listen.
Listen to my voice.
I'm done
[Michael sighs]
We had no idea
what we were dealing with.
And tensions were
so incredibly high.
It was a very rough time,
especially for the children.
[pinball machine cranking]
[Jacob] I'm Jake Barnett.
Since I've last
been seen publicly,
in some ways,
I think I've regressed.
I'm, uh, in my dad's
basement right now.
It's in Indiana.
Usually, I say Natalia's
my adopted sister,
so then, uh,
I guess I would say,
"I'm Jacob. I'm Natalia's
adopted brother,"
but that particular, um,
way of introducing myself
is kind of irrelevant
because I haven't seen Natalia
in, like, a decade.
I find the situation
incredibly confusing.
It's like I wanna know
what happened
and I wanna know
the actual, like, truth
and everyone's motives,
but at the same time, um,
I don't wanna remember that
and I don't want to, um,
have to revisit, um,
a lot of trauma
from my childhood.
It's, uh, difficult for me
to piece together
what happened
with adopting Natalia.
Before Natalia, we had been
married for about 15 years.
It's easily the best
moment in time
that our marriage ever had.
We were so happy
and comfortable
that we had gotten
to the point that, you know,
we started
talking about, "Maybe,
maybe there's room here
for somebody else."
We were gonna adopt
a little girl out of Haiti
named Gilberta,
and right before that April,
uh, the earthquake hit Haiti,
and suddenly
our hopes were dashed
because Haiti shut down all
adoptions out of the country.
So we were ready to adopt,
but we missed our window.
And then we get this
phone call out of nowhere
from this adoption agency
in Florida
called Adoption
by Shepherd Care.
They say, "Hey, we know you.
We've seen your home study.
We know that
you have a charity
for special-needs children,
you've been doing that
for a decade.
We think you'd be perfect
for this little girl
that's gonna be coming to us.
She's a little person.
She has dwarfism.
Now, here's the problem.
You got 24 hours to decide,
and if you don't
come get her on Monday,
she's going
directly to foster care."
Kristine and I almost took it
as a sign from above.
[engine roars]
Now we're jumped on a plane,
flying to Florida.
It's exciting.
[Jacob] When I found out
I was gonna have a sister,
I was really excited.
We had some white T-shirts
that we painted on saying,
"Welcome home, Natalia."
[Michael] We pull up
in the town,
and, you know, I'll be honest,
I was a little taken aback by
the adoption agency location.
It was in
a rundown strip mall,
maybe on
the wrong side of tracks,
little house that's been
converted into offices.
It didn't look like
an adoption agency at all.
First thing
I'm saying to my wife is,
"Check the address.
This just doesn't look right.
We're gonna get a child here?"
Uh, so we start coming in
and they sit us
into a little room
no bigger than
the size of this room
we're in right now,
and they tell us,
"Just wait here."
Natalia's coming soon."
And you've gotta understand,
with it being
a closed adoption,
the adoption agency
was not willing
to share any details of her
before we came down.
They gave us
two pictures of her.
They gave us
a Ukrainian-language
birth certificate.
Birth certificate
supported six.
Uh, September, 4th, 2003.
We were all
excited about that.
My youngest son was six.
He was also born
in the summer of 2003.
We thought this was
gonna be a situation
where they're going to grow
and develop and be twins.
We're in there for about
an hour by ourselves.
We sign paperwork
pretty quick.
"Sign here, sign here,
sign here."
We hear the front door open.
[door opens]
[Michael]
"That's gotta be her."
We start peeking
through the keyhole.
There's a little
itty-bitty keyhole.
It's a solid door.
And we're looking
and we're looking.
[Jacob] Like,
"Oh, can I see her?"
I was really excited
for her to come home.
About 20, 30 minutes go by,
and we can see the door open
and we can see
the other family leave.
She was adopted before.
This was her family that
adopted her the first time.
Natalia's left behind.
They had flown in,
dropped her off, flew out.
We never spoke to them
and we are just thinking,
"How dare these other people
give up on her?"
And we'd been worried
for the last couple of days,
worried sick
that our new daughter's
not gonna like us.
And the next thing you know,
the door opens,
Natalia's right there,
she comes running in,
she's got this big smile
on her face,
she's happy as can be,
and she's shouting,
"Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy,
Mommy, Daddy!"
We're overcome
with joy and emotion.
Oh, my gosh.
That day in and of itself,
without context,
is one of the five
greatest days of my life.
[Jacob] She was very small.
She had long,
curly brown hair.
She had brown eyes
and pronounced cheeks
that really stood out
when she smiled.
I remember the way that
her hands are jointed
as not the same as ours
because of her dwarfism.
Like, her fingers, like,
sort of bent in
a bit like this.
But I was overjoyed
the day that I met her.
The fun times I can remember
with Natalia
are pretty much
from that first week
where we were in Florida.
We went with Natalia
to Disney World.
We were all excited
to have her in the family
and Natalia seemed happy
to join our family.
[Rachel]
If I was a little girl
needing to be adopted
and they came for me,
heck yeah, jackpot.
[Michael] So, we get to
the hotel that night,
and Kristine's going to give
our brand-new daughter a bath
and I hear a shout
from the bathroom.
This was a,
"I'm not playing around.
Come here right now,
Michael," shout.
I get up, I go flying
to the bathroom,
and the color's almost
gone from her face.
It's almost like
she's seen a ghost.
She's, she's truly frightened
and she just doesn't know
what she's seeing
and what's going on.
She says,
"Michael, Michael, look.
Look down."
And Natalia
had full pubic hair.
And I don't know
what to think.
"Is that possible?
Is that even possible?"
"Who the [bleep]
is this person?"
"Can a 6-year-old
have full pubic hair?
I don't know."
Google's telling us,
"Well, earliest possible time,
lowest common
denominator, eight."
So we just go, "Okay, look,
our mission,
we were going to show
love and compassion
to somebody that
never had it before.
That doesn't
make a difference."
[Kathy] I'm Kathy Barnett.
I'm Michael Barnett's mother.
I found out
that Natalia was coming.
I was so excited
to treat this child special.
When they brought her home,
they had a very large party
to welcome her.
She was dressed up in a dress.
She had beautiful,
curly, dark hair.
And Michael
was euphoric that day.
He was almost
as euphoric as the day
Jacob was born
and Michael came out of
the delivery room.
He was a happy man.
You want that?
There you go. Go sit and chew.
Go show him.
My name's Kimberly Franklin.
I am Michael Barnett's
little sister.
When I first met Natalia,
I was, you know,
totally prepared.
I knew that she was
a little person.
And what really
struck me, though,
was that she almost
looked like one of us.
She had the dark hair.
She really looked like
she could've been
my brother's daughter.
[Rachel] My name's Rachel
and I live two doors down
from the Barnetts,
where they used to live.
Nosy neighbor, that's me.
I like to know what's going on
in the neighborhood.
We were friends
with Michael and Kristine
and our kids played together.
Everybody knew
who Natalia was.
I have goosebumps
just thinking about
when they walked in with her.
It was amazing.
It was so uplifting
to know that this little girl
needed a home
and they opened theirs
up to her.
-[Kristine] Hi, Natalia.
-[Natalia] Hi!
And Kristine was smiling,
you know, ear-to-ear.
They were so excited.
They have three boys,
and they got a girl.
[Jacob] I was looking forward
to seeing how
she'd react to the park
we had across the street.
[children laughing, screaming]
[Rachel sighs]
Here's their yearbook.
So, there's Ethan
and there's Grace.
Natalia came
to our house a lot
to play with my daughter Grace
because they were both six.
First grade.
Here's Natalia.
It's crazy.
She's so cute in that picture.
She looks like
a sweet little girl.
[Michael] Once we got back
to Indiana,
at first, there was
a lot of acceptance
of the situation with Natalia
and the pubic hair.
All that mattered was
there's a little girl
[Michael] that needs love
and needs a home.
But, uh, eventually,
we had a lot of
escalation going on
in the first few months
that we had her.
There was a day
I came home from work.
Kristine's got a pair
of Natalia's underwear.
Kristine asked Natalia
to tell me what's going on.
[Kristine] Okay.
And I can remember
her physicalness at the time.
Her hands were just
out in front of her like this.
She said, "Well"
[clicks tongue]
"I have a period"
[clicks tongue]
"and I've been hiding it."
And I
I just don't know
what's going on right now.
[woman on phone]
Kris found some socks
that she had used
in her underwear
and threw them out the window.
Kris was just mortified.
She said, "This isn't normal.
What have I gotten
myself into?"
And so I said,
"You need to start finding out
how old she is."
I heard she had pubic hair
when they first got her
and that they found, like,
period underwear
hidden in her room.
So that would be
the thing that,
as, you know, not a doctor,
as a layman,
I'd be like, "Yeah, that's
definitely not a 6-year-old."
-[Kristine] Stand up.
-Okay.
[Michael] After we'd first
gotten Natalia
and we started
taking her to doctors,
within two months
of getting her,
Natalia needed foot surgery
because of her condition.
Natalia has
a very rare form of dwarfism,
spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia.
There's only about
3,400 people like that
on this planet,
-we were explained by doctors.
-[woman] Mmm-hmm.
It just so happened,
miraculously,
that a doctor knew
another 6-year-old girl with
spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia
living in Indiana.
We were stunned.
We're gonna have her meet
and interact
with somebody just like her.
How great is that?
The other girl comes in
and, for lack of
a better term,
Natalia is gigantic
compared to this other girl.
Their cranial structures
are different.
Natalia, she's got
the full forehead of an adult,
she's got the fine cheekbones
of an adult.
The other girl, her head
is not developed at all.
There's no way anybody
could look at this picture
and say, "Those two
are the same age."
So, when Natalia sees
this person
that should be close to
the mirror image of her
and realizes we see it,
suddenly, she fills
her cheeks with air,
blows them out a little bit
so the definition in
her cheekbones disappears,
so that starts to happen.
We literally see
her head change.
It's almost like,
"You got me."
[Elva] My name is Elva Reyes.
My daughter's name is Therese.
Uh, she has
diastrophic dysplasia,
the same as Natalia.
I was hoping, you know,
that, uh,
a long friendship, you know,
where they can grow up and,
you know, she has somebody
to be able
to talk about things.
That mean it's not, you know,
something that
she has to feel like
she's the only one
in the world.
Uh, but, later on,
when we met for the playday,
immediately, Natalia looks
Physically, was really
well developed.
My first impression was like,
"Your face doesn't
look like a little kid."
Can't really say an adult,
but at least a teenager.
And I say, "Huh, so"
Yes, but And she was
very vocal, talking,
you know, like,
she can carry
a conversation very well,
like, didn't have no issue.
I was like,
"Wow, they teach her
very good English."
[laughs] A very smart kid
for a 6-year-old.
[keyboard playing]
[Therese] I am Therese
and I am 14 years old.
I was six years old
when I met Natalia.
It's pretty rare
to see someone
who has a disability like me
and I wanted to be friends.
-[producer] I have
a picture of you guys.
-Mmm-hmm.
Sure.
Definitely, I don't think she
looked the same age as me.
I definitely had that
baby look to my face and,
as she kinda gave me, like,
an older kinda face
look to it,
but, yeah.
I think she
definitely looks like
she's at least 18, 20-ish.
It definitely looks weird
to think that
I was playing with,
actually, an adult,
not a kid my age
that I would feel
comfortable with.
If she faked her age,
I feel like that's weird
to think that
I was around someone
who did that.
[Michael] She's not six.
We had no idea
what we were dealing with.
To them,
it would've looked like
they brought their little girl
to a playdate with a grownup.
And they never
reached back out again.
[Jacob] Natalia told us
very little about her time
growing up in the Ukraine,
her time in the orphanage.
I don't recall her having
any belongings
from the orphanage.
Like, uh, I don't recall her
having any Ukrainian toys.
She didn't seem to know
very much about Ukraine.
Like, uh, at one point, early,
we asked her, like,
"Oh, what's it like
in Ukraine?"
And she said, "Oh,
it's always summer there."
And I'm like
[European folk music playing]
"Hmm, okay, uh"
[Jake chuckling]
I forget the part that
you guys never hear.
Yeah. Heard.
[Michael] We adopted Natalia
because we wanted
to help somebody
who was in danger
of never being loved.
But every time we ever
spoke to Natalia about,
"Hey, tell us
about the orphanage,
tell us about
people you've known,"
nothing.
So we had asked her about
the Ukrainian language before.
As a matter of fact,
at the rec center
where we had our sports league
for the autistic kids,
one of the neighboring tenants
happens to know somebody
who was born and raised
in the Ukraine.
We thought, "How wonderful
would it be
for you to hear
your native language,
your native tongue
for the first time
in a couple of years?"
The woman from the Ukraine
comes in
and just immediately starts
speaking Ukrainian.
I swear on all things holy,
Natalia's never heard a word
of Ukrainian in her life.
But you were there
until almost five
and we've got you at six.
There was like a set of things
that didn't add up.
We starter
Started early in the morning.
Natalia had no accent.
Were going close.
[Jacob] She didn't know
the Cyrillic alphabet.
She knew no Ukrainian.
[Michael] Ukrainian lady
starts speaking Ukrainian
to Natalia.
Not a word.
I think she knew,
if she spoke immediately,
that we'd put
two and two together
and hear there's no accent.
She doesn't know this.
Didn't speak a word
for four days.
It's almost like
the jig is up,
the little playful
kid face goes away
and now we've got
We don't know who she is.
We don't know
where she's really from.
For all I know, she had been
living in the Ukraine
for 20 years
and found a way out.
For all I know,
she's an American citizen
that somehow
got this to happen.
I truly, truly don't know.
The dynamic between Natalia
and the rest of the family
seemed to shift.
Pretty early,
there was a lack of trust.
Uh
So that, you know, compounded.
Natalia did have
behavioral issues which
Certainly, the adoption
process, um,
it must be traumatic.
I mean, abandonment issues
are a thing
and Natalia was abandoned
multiple times.
She was with
another family in America
before she came with us.
[Michael] Natalia was with us
four months,
and that's when we start
to witness her dark side.
We had a 2007 Jeep Commander.
It has three rows of seats.
But Natalia always tried
to sit next to my youngest,
the smallest,
my 6-year-old, Ethan.
And she would do
whatever she could
to upset him.
She would purposely wait
until she was next to him
in the car
and then she would do her best
to urinate on him.
She would defecate in the car
and put her hand into it
and try to smear it on Ethan.
Yeah, it was
a frequent occurrence
for Natalia to soil surfaces
that she wasn't supposed to.
That was the life
my 6-year-old son had.
To get into the car
was like going through
the haunted house.
And, you know, another thing,
if we went someplace in public
and she made eye contact
with somebody
we'd climb into the car,
she would get into the car,
she'd get in her seat,
she'd close the door.
As soon as I would start
to get into my seat
and the car
would get into gear,
doors open
and she's throwing herself
out of the vehicle
so people around her can see.
The idea, "Look, a poor,
helpless little girl."
And she was trying to get back
to poor,
helpless little girl status.
She was doing
as many things as possible
to cause hurt of harm
or mental distress
to the entire family.
She's been with us
for about five or six months
at this point,
and at this time,
my boys are six, nine and 11.
Natalia would find things
that were important to them,
like a Hot Wheel car,
she'd hide them,
she'd wait to be
crossing the street,
she would throw 'em
into the street
and make sure the boys saw it.
She was baiting my kids
to run into traffic
so they'd get run over.
[horn blares]
I can't put into words
the everyday abject horror
that we had to go through
and live with.
[Jacob] And there certainly
was, like, a lot of fear.
Like, "What if Natalia
actually harms one of us?"
[Michael]
Couple of weeks after that,
I came home from work.
She had been taking knives
out of the kitchen
and hiding them in her room
under her bed.
I go upstairs.
Kristine has the knife.
It was a big butcher knife.
[Jacob] Natalia was hoarding
knives in her room
and had, like,
intentions to attack us.
[Michael] I asked Natalia,
"Natalia,
did you have this
under your bed?"
"Yes."
"What were you
gonna do with it?"
"I'm going to kill you
in your sleep."
[birds tweeting]
[dog barking]
[Rachel] Michael and Kristine
weren't very vocal
about this stuff at first
with Natalia
until it got overwhelming,
and that's when Kristine
came and told me
and sat down on my front porch
with Wesley and Ethan
and shared what was going on.
Kristine was crying.
She was very upset,
saying that Natalia wasn't
who they thought she was.
And I said,
"Well, what do you mean?"
And she said
[inhales]
"Knives."
She had knives in her room.
The boys were like,
"Yeah. Yeah.
This is really
happening. Yeah.
This is Natalia's
really doing that,"
This is the time when
I backed away from them
because I was just
in so much shock
from hearing this story.
I went to Grace and said,
"You know what?
We need to find some new
friends to play with,"
'cause I didn't wanna have
anything to do with
that little girl.
I didn't wanna have
anything to do with her.
She wasn't welcome
in our house.
I didn't want her to try
killing my daughter or me.
[birds tweeting]
[Kimberly] Michael really
only told me
by the time they'd
gone through all these things
that he was afraid.
Whether that meant he was
afraid of what
she would do or could do,
or any of that,
I knew that there was fear.
[Michael] Absolutely,
we reached out
to the adoption agency
as we were noticing
all of these issues
and irregularities.
They were unhelpful.
I was lost.
I was getting no help
from anybody anywhere.
So we went through
a few therapists,
trying to find guidance,
trying to figure out
the right diagnosis.
[Kristine] Go inside.
[Michael] It was really
the third or fourth
therapist we got to
that seemed to understand
what we were telling them
and seemed to have
Natalia's number.
She pulled Kristine
and I aside and said,
"You're all in
extreme danger."
At that point in time,
we already knew that.
We had been living that.
So we were not stunned
at the danger,
but we were stunned
at the diagnosis.
We were expecting
a severe mental disorder
that was out of her control.
We were
expecting schizophrenia.
We were expecting something.
We were expecting her to say,
"She hears voices.
She's hearing commands
telling her to do this stuff."
So she tells us,
"She's a sociopath.
She does things that you and I
would consider crazy.
But it's a plan.
She knows what she's doing.
She's in control of doing it.
It's not a diagnosis
where she's out of control
and she can really be helped.
She's a sociopath."
That was the first moment from
a clinician that we heard,
"You can't help here."
You're 12 years old
and you're
You know,
just down the hallway is,
is someone
who's living with you
who actively wants
to harm you. That's very,
That's a very scary feeling.
And I definitely didn't
feel safe around Natalia.
I just was scared.
[Michael] There was one night,
about two o'clock
in the morning,
we hear a noise.
Kristine nudges me
and wakes me up.
And I jump up,
I go looking for the noise,
can't find it here,
I can't find it there,
I go down the hall
to Natalia's room,
open the door.
It's dark.
She's standing dead-center
in the middle of the room
with a blank look on her face.
"Natalia, what are you doing?"
"I'm waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For you to go to sleep."
It was absolutely shocking
to hear that an adopted child
was threatening
the lives of her siblings
and her parents.
I mean, it was really
disturbing to hear.
[Michael] One night,
asleep in bed,
everything's fine,
I hear a little noise,
I open my eyes,
and Natalia's standing
at the foot of the bed
with a knife in her hand.
What's going on?
How much danger
are we really in here?
Was I about to die?
What Kristine about to die?
Were my kids about to die?
I open my eyes,
and Natalia's standing
at the foot of the bed
with a knife in her hand.
No idea what she's thinking.
No idea what's
going through her head.
I'm frozen.
"Natalia, what are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"Why are you in here?"
"I don't know."
There's just this blank look.
There's no emotion.
[stutters] There's no feeling
going through her.
It's just this blankness.
"I don't know
what I'm doing here."
"Natalia, put that down
right now."
And she did.
"Natalia, go to your room
right now."
And she did.
But, obviously,
I sat outside her door
for the rest of the night
to make sure
she didn't come out,
she didn't emerge,
something didn't happen.
[birds tweeting]
[Rachel] Knowing that,
that somebody like Natalia
was living two doors down
from me
and has, supposedly,
tried to kill her family,
thinking that there's a killer
in my neighborhood
is mind-blowing,
just mind-blowing.
You think you know everybody.
You've lived here for so long.
You don't know everybody.
You don't know anybody.
You don't know anything.
[Rachel sighs]
But it's scary.
It's very scary.
[Michael] So, we start
going through lots of therapy.
The cat was so heavy,
I couldn't even lift it.
[Michael] You start going
through plausible deniability.
You start to try
to convince yourself
she wasn't meaning to harm us.
This might seem strange.
We never, ever
said, "Let's take her back."
We thought
we could help things.
We thought
we could improve things.
[children chattering]
[bell rings]
We wake up one morning and
Natalia is suddenly in happy,
"I wanna be part of
the family" mode again.
And she asks Kristine,
"Is there anything
I can do to help?
You're doing the dishes.
Can I help do the dishes?"
So Kristine says, "Sure.
I'd really appreciate that.
Thank you, Natalia."
So Natalia gets on a stool
and starts rinsing
the dishes off in the sink.
Kristine goes to the other
room for a moment
and she's got a coffee cup
sitting on the counter.
Kristine comes back in.
Kristine screams.
I come racing downstairs.
I see a bottle of Pledge.
I see Kristine's coffee cup,
and Kristine tried to drink it
and instantly tasted Pledge.
Cleaning supplies
had been poured into
Kristine's coffee cup.
Kristine is screaming at her,
"Natalia, why did you
do this?"
And she just says,
plain old, straight out,
"I'm trying to kill you.
I'm trying to poison you."
Yeah, I certainly have that,
uh, instinct now, like, uh,
I can't really
share a drink with someone
unless I've, you know,
seen the surface of it
the entire time.
Well, it's probably
rooted in this fear
that Natalia's coming to,
like, poison us.
I guess I haven't really
figured out a way
to reconcile it,
if I'm being honest.
I'm still working through it.
I think I might need a minute.
I'm sorry.
[Kristine] Natalia,
what are you doing?
[Kristine] What is it?
[Kristine] Why?
[Kristine] Like what thoughts?
[Kristine] What happens
when you have them?