[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?