#8 - Katrina Phelan On December the 1st of 2021,
a teacher at Abraham Lincoln High School, in Iowa, was taken into police custody on
suspicion of making violent threats. 37-year-old Katrina Phelan was suspected to have written
a series of anonymous notes in which she’d made reference to an imminent act of gun violence on
school property. Each of the handwritten papers had either been found by the teacher herself or
inside of her classroom at the high school. When local police were made aware of the situation,
they issued an arrest warrant, prompting Phelan’s subsequent surrender. Upon interviewing the
teacher, investigators determined that her threats of mass violence weren’t legitimate, and that
she’d written the fake notes to incite panic among school officials. In at least one of the letters,
Phelan pretended to be a student and claimed an intention of violently lashing out after being
relentlessly bullied. The teacher’s arrest came only one day after the Oxford High School shooting
in Michigan. She ultimately confessed to forging the threatening notes as a way of expressing her
concern that such an attack might unfold in her own classroom. In the wake of the incident, Phelan
was terminated from her position at the high school and detained at the Pottawattamie County
Jail while awaiting her case’s legal proceedings. #7 - Kane Mitchell
For a period of roughly 8 months, in 2019, Kane Mitchell lived with his girlfriend,
Lucci Smith, and her son, Teddy, in the English town of St. Neots. At about 3 pm, on November
the 1st, emergency services were called to their residence after Teddy had gone into cardiac arrest
and become unresponsive. He was taken to a local hospital and kept on life support for 10 days.
Teddy was found to have sustained several critical injuries to which he succumbed on November the
11th. As Cambridgeshire investigators would eventually learn, the victim’s health problems
had been caused by Mitchell himself. Weeks prior to Teddy’s hospitalization, the couple’s neighbors
had alerted local authorities, expressing concerns on how he was being treated, particularly by
Mitchell. Even though the latter had been directly responsible for Teddy’s injuries,
he was captured on video pretending to be a caring father at the hospital, crying over the victim
while saying, “Come on, baby, daddy is here”. Shortly after his questionable display of emotion,
Mitchell was arrested. Following a four-week trial at the Royal Court of Cambridge, he was convicted
of murder and jailed for a minimum of 18 years. #6 - Solomon Shlomo Azari
A man was accused of racking up a $42,000 tab at a Florida hotel, over the course of 2 months
in the summer of 2019, by falsely claiming to be a relative of Canadian tennis player Eugenie
Bouchard. According to subsequent reports, Solomon Shlomo Azari pretended to be her brother, Will,
at the 1 Hotel South Beach in Miami, where the Bouchard family reportedly
resided. Azari proceeded to charge a series of exorbitant expenses to the player’s running tab,
eating at the hotel's Habitat restaurant and drinking at its rooftop bar using her account.
The hotel ultimately caught on to Azari’s deception and launched an official investigation
into the matter after a member of Bouchard’s team disputed a $29,000 bill, on July the 30th of 2019.
When investigators showed Bouchard a photograph of Azari, she revealed that she’d never met him and
hadn’t authorized any of the charges he’d made to the account. He was taken into the custody
of Miami police and charged with scheme to defraud, identity fraud, and grand theft.
#5 - Casey Smitherman
On January the 9th of 2019, Casey Smitherman, the superintendent of Indiana’s Elwood Community
Schools, used her own insurance to pay for a 15-year-old student’s medical treatment.
Court records indicated that the student hadn’t shown up to school on the day in question because
he was suffering from a sore throat. In the past, Smitherman had reportedly bought the teen clothes
and even helped him clean his house. She’d chosen not to contact the Department of Child Services
about his situation, however, because she feared he would subsequently be placed in foster care.
When the student failed to arrive at school, Smitherman went to his house to pick him up
and take him to a local clinic, where she pretended that he was her son so that she
could use her insurance to pay for the visit. She later took the student to a CVS in order
to fill a prescription for Amoxicillin, which Smitherman also completed with the name of her
actual son. The teenager reportedly tore the label off the bottle of medication because “he knew it
was wrong” for him to possess a prescription under someone else’s name. The following week,
the police were tipped off about what Smitherman had done for the student, and she was consequently
arrested on charges of official misconduct, insurance fraud, insurance application fraud,
and identity deception. In the wake of the incident, Smitherman’s teaching license
was suspended for 90 days and she was forced to resign from her position as the school district’s
superintendent. #4 - Rutledge Deas
In November of 2019, Louisiana man Rutledge Deas was arrested at his New Orleans residence
on suspicion of pretending to be a mentally impaired teenager so that female caretakers
would look after him. Deas reportedly created a profile on the online app UrbanSitter,
which he used to hire a college-aged woman to take care of his fake 18-year-old brother “Cory”. When
the help worker arrived at his home, 29-year-old Deas allegedly posed as Cory and pretended to be
disabled. Deas’ fraudulent behavior continued for about a year, during which his hired caregiver
would regularly change his soiled diapers and treat him like an infant. The 20-year-old victim
eventually grew suspicious of the situation after examining Deas’ profile on a payment service app.
She realized that Deas, the individual who’d been paying for her services, was actually the person
she knew as “Cory”, at which point she contacted the authorities. Deas was taken into custody on
several charges, one of which was possession of a schedule II controlled dangerous substance,
as the police had found crystal methamphetamine inside his home. In December of 2020, Deas
pleaded guilty to his charges and was consequently sentenced to 5 years of probation and 400 hours
of community service. #3 - Trent Freeman
In the fall of 2021, a deputy of the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office, in Florida,
was arrested for stealing $3,700 in paid sick time by pretending to be hospitalized with COVID-19.
As revealed by subsequent reports, 38-year-old Trent Freeman had forged multiple doctors’
signatures, over the course of about 2 months. She’d done so to maintain the deception that
she’d contracted a critical case of the virus and therefore couldn’t be present at work. Although
her falsified medical documents indicated that she was comatose in the hospital, Freeman had
actually begun working full-time in the private sector while also recouping sick time payments
from her law enforcement employers. Her fraud was first detected on October the 5th of 2021,
when the sheriff’s office opened an investigation into the legitimacy of her medical filings.
Shortly thereafter, she was fired from her position and taken into the custody of her
former colleagues on forgery and fraud charges. Today's topic was requested by Philly Jawn Lolo,
if you have any other topics you'd like to learn about, subscribe and let us know in
the comment section below. #2 - Donald Cline
Former fertility specialist and gynecologist Donald Cline fathered dozens of his patients’
children, without their consent, throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Indiana resident Jacoba Ballard,
aged 33, joined an online forum for adoptees and donor-conceived children, in 2014, while trying
to find out whether she had any half-siblings. She quickly connected with 3 other individuals whose
mothers had been treated by Cline prior to their pregnancies. Upon taking genetic ancestry tests,
Ballard and the others learned that they were, indeed, half-siblings. The discovery was
followed by the revelation that they also shared 4 additional half-siblings with the same biological
father. Ballard subsequently cross-matched her DNA with public databases and, during the course of
her research, continually came across the surname “Cline” among her distant relatives. It was then
that she began to suspect that the fertility specialist had used his own reproductive fluid
in his past patients’ attempts to artificially get pregnant. Ballard and her half-siblings confronted
Cline about their suspicions during a reunion organized by the doctor’s son. Cline allegedly
confessed to carrying out the elaborate deception, which ultimately resulted in his DNA being used
to conceive more than 50 children across the state of Indiana. In addition to having his
medical license revoked, the retired doctor also faced two felony counts of obstruction of justice
as well as a fine of $500. Cline’s widespread fertility fraud became the basis of a Netflix
documentary titled Our Father, which premiered on the streaming platform in May of 2022.
#1 - Timothy Gatchell Flagler College student Amy Blount
and a group of her friends went to St. George’s Tavern in St. Augustine, Florida, on a night in
November of 1990. At about 2 am, Blount went for a walk out to the coastline with a young man named
Shawn Nolan. They reportedly got into a fight at some point and then decided to return to their
respective homes separately. The following morning, Blount’s roommate discovered that
she hadn’t come back to their apartment and she was subsequently reported missing to the police.
Investigators’ initial efforts to locate Blount proved fruitless and, after about 10 days, they
offered a $10,000 reward for any information about her disappearance. This led to an influx of tips,
including one from a local man named Timothy Gatchell, who told detectives that he’d seen
Blount in the downtown area on the night she’d gone missing. Gatchell claimed to have witnessed
the young woman get into an older-model car and drive away with at least 2 people. A few weeks
later, a dog-walker came upon human remains buried under a pile of logs and rocks in a deserted area
on the outskirts of St. Augustine. An autopsy subsequently confirmed that the body was indeed
that of Blount, who’d been beaten before being stabbed a total of 5 times. Investigators then
learned that one of their previous witnesses, Gatchell, was a tenant in a mobile home on
the plot of land where Blount’s body had been found. When questioned further by the police,
Gatchell eventually confessed to giving her a ride home on the night. They’d reportedly gotten into
an argument, which culminated with the man taking out a knife and fatally stabbing Blount. In the
wake of the murder, Gatchell had pretended to be a witness, giving the police a false testimony
in an attempt to deviate them from identifying him as a suspect. He was ultimately convicted
of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Thanks for watching! Would you rather pretend to be deaf for an entire year
or never be able to remember anyone’s name? Let us know in the comments section below!