Hello, anybody that is watching.
Hi.
[theme music playing]
[Michael Barnett] Early on with Natalia,
she was doing as many things as possible
to cause hurt or harm
or mental distress to the entire family.
I've got my adopted daughter
trying to poison and kill my wife.
We have had her standing over my bed with a knife.
She's clearly dangerous.
At this point, what do we do?
We... we take her to the stress center.
She's seen by a psychiatric doctor.
And so, at this point in time,
we had already begun asking
mental health professionals for help,
trying to find guidance,
trying to figure out the right medication.
And all we're told at every turn is,
"Nothing you can do about this.
She is this.
This doesn't go away. This doesn't change.
And she can't stay at the stress center.
She's... she's yours.
Take her home."
But they did say,
"You can't let Natalia have
free roam of the house anymore.
You need to put a latch on the outside of her door.
And anytime she needs food,
bath, bathroom, whatever is needed,
you need to escort her through the house.
You cannot let her freely roam your home anymore."
At this point,
we haven't done anything as a family for a long time.
We can't go eat dinner together.
We can't go to the grocery store together.
We are always on guard for things.
We don't do anything.
So, it's my son's birthday.
Ethan, my youngest son, loved cows.
So for his birthday,
we find a place in Indianapolis
that lets you milk your own cow.
And it's called Traders Point Creamery.
We get inside and they say,
"We have some release forms for you to sign."
Out there where the cows are is an electric fence.
And you have to say,
you know there's an electric fence there,
and if you touch it and you get harmed,
that you're not going to hold us liable.
When they say that to us,
Natalia's eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.
"Really?
There's a scary fence out there
and, uh, I have to sign this?"
Happily signs away.
It's another quarter mile from that building
to where the fence starts.
Everything's fine.
The moment we get within ten feet of the fence,
Natalia suddenly can't walk again.
Before we went on a walk on the trail,
like, uh, my mom and Natalia sort of stayed back.
[Michael] So Kristine decides
you're not going to ruin Ethan's birthday.
Michael, you take the boys.
You go on ahead.
I will stay back here and I'll handle this.
Myself, my three sons, we keep going.
We keep going. We keep going.
We get about 40, 50 yards down and I start hearing screaming.
[woman screaming]
I turn and look.
Natalia and Kristine
are in a physical altercation.
[woman screams]
It looks like Natalia's trying to pull Kristine.
Now you might think,
"Hey, she's a little person. How strong can she be?"
She uses her arms a lot.
Push herself up on things.
She goes up the stairs using her arms.
She's got guns that Schwarzenegger would be impressed with.
She's very strong.
My wife is frail.
She's got a degenerative disease called lupus.
She's weak.
I start to go back. Kristine says, "No, go."
Okay.
She wants my son to have his birthday. We go.
And me and the boys double time it.
We get a little bit farther down...
and we hear the sirens.
[siren wailing]
The second I heard the sirens,
I thought Kristine was dead.
I think she's dead.
And the police have arrived,
um, ambulances have arrived.
And we can see Kristine is there.
Kristine's very angry, very upset.
Natalia's over with the EMTs,
and Natalia had been trying
to pull Kristine into the electric fence.
She'd been screaming out loud.
How am I with language in this interview?
Am I allowed to use words?
"You [bleep] bitch, I'm going to kill you.
I'm going to kill you, you bitch.
You're going to die."
Kristine's screaming at them,
"She needs to be arrested. She tried to kill me.
She needs to be arrested. She tried to kill me."
We wanted charges.
We wanted her arrested.
She, admittedly,
to their face when they came to the 911 call said,
"I'm trying to kill her."
They made the distinction that their visual told them,
"Hey, that's a little girl.
She's not really trying to kill anybody. She's sick.
We're going to take her to the hospital instead."
But they stated we're not going to press charges.
She's going to get a mental health evaluation.
[Jacob] I think she was already in the ambulance
by the time I had come back.
I was like, "Oh, well, I guess,
Natalia's mental health is clearly off.
I guess it's good that she goes to the hospital."
I felt a sense of relief,
like, uh, it can be a little safer.
[Michael] Kristine and I said,
"She has to go to a hospital long-term and get help."
We didn't know how long.
She can't come home until she's better.
When Natalia was in the state mental hospital,
she was under 24/7 observation and care
of 90 doctors, nurses,
orderlies, therapists, et cetera.
While she's there, she admits openly and freely that,
"Yeah, I'm trying to kill her.
And by the way,
I'm going to tell you, doctors, and I'm going to write this in my journal.
I'm going to kill the boys, too.
And here's specifically what I'm going to do to them.
I am going to stab them with a knife while they sleep.
I'm going to drag their bodies out of the house,
and I'm going to put them underneath the deck out back."
Natalia drew this picture immediately after being
admitted to Larue Carter State Hospital.
It says, "bye," as in goodbye.
[nurse speaking]
[orderly speaking]
[woman speaking]
[Michael] After a couple weeks,
we get a phone call from them.
"You got to come get her."
Why?
Well, they tried to be really delicate with it.
"Natalia was propositioning the men."
What are you talking about?
[Michael] Natalia was at Larue Carter.
We had been trying to get her to inpatient treatment.
We had been begging people to help us.
We had been told by everybody,
"You need help desperately.
Your family's in danger.
She needs inpatient treatment."
"Great.
We are at an inpatient facility.
That's fantastic.
Can you help us?" "No."
They said, "Mr. Barnett,
the state mental hospital, the adult wing,
most of the men there,
they're not particularly good with children.
And they're not particularly good with girls.
[nurse speaking]
[woman speaking]
[Michael] So, after a month,
they need her out of there because
bad things are about to happen with all the men in the unit.
"Take her home."
"She's going to kill us." "Can't help you."
The danger we've been in
isn't going anywhere anytime soon,
and it can't be controlled.
[Beth Karas] I'm Beth Karas.
I'm an attorney in New York.
I'm a former prosecutor.
What hooked me in this case was just the strange story.
She's had various diagnoses,
the last one being sociopath.
But in my opinion,
there are questions, a lot of questions with this case.
The fundamental rule in all investigations
is that you follow the facts wherever they may lead you.
There are some things that just don't sit right with me.
If she's actually threatening to kill them,
you got to go to the police.
Kristine and Michael don't call the police.
But the neighbor, who is very concerned,
does call the Department of Child Services,
who bring in the police in March of 2012.
They get a report of child neglect of Natalia.
[Michael] March comes.
Kristine and Natalia are having the
"who are you?" fight.
Kristine wants Natalia to write down
people she's lived with,
places she's been.
Tell us about people you've known.
And this night, Kristine decides
that the most effective way
to make you tell me who you really are
is you no longer have a bedroom or a bed.
You sleep outside.
Grab your blanket.
You're sleeping on the back deck.
Natalia's out there crying
finally, like, three hours into this.
Well, I tell Kristine, "I can't do this."
I get up, I let Natalia in, I get her back to her room.
One of the neighbors called CPS.
So CPS shows up on the door,
Child Protective Services,
with a detective from the local police department.
They come in, they've gotten this call,
and we're neglecting Natalia.
The detective for the Westfield Police Department,
within 10 minutes,
takes a look at the surroundings,
takes a look at the paperwork,
listens to us speak for a couple minutes,
and he immediately realizes
he's not here to protect Natalia.
He's here to protect my sons.
He knows instantly they're in grave danger.
Detective Klaus,
he conducts an investigation, he comes back and visits us.
He's got a picture of Natalia
from when she was naturalized here as a US citizen in 2008,
when she first got here from the Ukraine.
He's got her naturalization, uh, information,
basic vital statistics, stuff like that.
[Beth] Natalia admitted to Detective Klaus
that she was told
her new birthday at the orphanage in Ukraine,
that new birthday being 2003.
Another thing,
Detective Klaus showed her a picture of herself
from when she entered the country,
but she did not recognize herself in the picture.
He's not 100% convinced
the girl in the picture is even her.
Another interesting thing
he mentions to us is her height.
Four years ago, when she was naturalized,
she hasn't grown a centimeter.
I don't care what kind of dwarfism you have,
if you're a six-year-old, you still grow.
He informs us he believes
that her Ukrainian birth certificate is all bogus.
Here's this business card to an attorney.
You need to go to them immediately.
You need to correct her age.
What are you talking about?
Correct her age. That's...
You can't just take an eraser to her birth certificate.
I'd never heard of such a thing.
I never... It never even crossed my mind.
I just thought we have an adult
who's masquerading it as an eight-year-old,
and that's what it is.
So, he explains to me,
foreign-born children often have inaccurate birth records,
and sometimes it needs to be corrected.
This is our
legal recommendation from the police department.
We have it in writing from them.
So, the only way to protect the entire family,
I have to prove she's an adult
and that she definitely has
a fake Ukrainian birth certificate.
Kristine and I,
again, we reached out to the adoption agency.
When we asked them, "Can you help give us contact information
for her old family?
We have got to find out what's going on here,"
they said, "No, we can't."
The answer is always, "It is a closed adoption.
The other family does not want
to surrender any information to you."
It is not until
I got a phone call from the secretary of the adoption agency
a little bit later that day,
and she said, "I can't tell you where she's from,
but check her luggage closer.
Really inspect those backpacks."
So I go upstairs in the house,
get the backpacks out, start rummaging through it.
There was a little ID tag inside of her bag
when we adopted her
that had the original family's information on it.
What are their names?
Gary and Diane Ciccone.
[Beth] We know, according to records that
Natalia starts her early life in an orphanage in Ukraine.
But all the conflicts in this case,
boil down to Natalia's age.
Is she a child or is she an adult?
In 2020, a Ukrainian investigator
went to track down Natalia's biological mother,
Anna Gava,
and found Anna Gava's sister, Tatyana.
[dog barking]
[investigator speaking Ukrainian]
[Tatyana speaking Ukrainian]
[investigator speaking]
[Tatyana speaking]
[investigator speaking]
[Tatyana speaking]
[investigator speaking]
-[Tatyana speaking] -[Anna] Hello.
[Tatyana speaking]
-[investigator] Anna. -[Anna speaking Ukrainian]
[investigator speaking]
[Anna speaking]
[interviewer speaking]
[Anna speaking]
[bleep]
[Tatyana speaking]
[Anna speaking]
[bleep]
[investigator] Anna.
[line disconnects]
This woman, Anna Gava,
who is supposedly Natalia's biological mother,
just said she's been going through this saga
for 17 years.
Well, she said that in 2020.
Do the math.
That means
Natalia may really have been born in 2003,
which is what she has said all along.
And in 2008,
Gary and Diane Ciccone,
from New Hampshire adopted Natalia.
By 2009,
it's possible that they found her behavior
to be too hard to manage.
I don't know, but to Ciccones, it's clear
they wanted to unload her.
Closed adoption giving virtually
no information about her.
They made a mistake though.
They left their identifying information
on one of the luggage tags.
So, the Barnett's were able to track them down.
[Judith Irving] My name is Judith Irving,
and I'm from a little town in Indiana.
And, uh...
I-- I don't know what else to say.
Okay, can we start over?
I'm so sorry.
Oh, Natalia. [chuckles]
The first time I heard about Natalia,
um, I actually received an email
from Little People of America.
Little People of America is an organization
where people with dwarfism can meet
and come together once a year.
And we're there for each other,
we help support each other, we're friends with each other.
It's often where we meet our husbands,
or wives, or our best friend.
Little people of America told me that the Ciccones had adopted a little girl.
She has diastrophic dwarfism
and they're trying to find a home for her.
When I saw her picture, it was--
I instantly fell in love. [chuckles] I was like,
"Yeah, this little girl, Natalia,
she's meant to... She's meant to be my daughter."
I-- I heard that she loved to dance and sing
and be creative, and I was like... [gasps]
You know, she's just meant to be with me. [chuckles]
Dyan and her husband said that,
"Pay the legal fees and you can adopt
this little girl."
If I remember right,
she told me that
adoption costs from Ukraine
were around $25,000.
And I find it kinda crazy
that you would adopt a child
and spend $25,000 and only spend a year with that child?
So, I-- I find it odd.
I don't know if there was a financial scam or not.
My husband decided that
I don't think we can do this financially.
And I feel like if you're going to adopt,
both parents have to be totally into it.
But it broke my heart.
So... Sorry. [chuckles and sniffs] It just, uh...
When I wasn't able to adopt her,
I just wanted her to be happy.
[crying] And then when I found out
what happened to her,
I was like, "She wasn't happy."
And that was what broke my heart the most
is that she wasn't happy.
[in normal voice] In my heart, Natalia is the daughter I never had.
Once we-- we told them that we couldn't adopt Natalia,
they moved on really quickly to the next couple.
My name is Robyn Farris
and this is my husband, Dwayne Farris.
Back in 2009, we received an email
from the Little People of America
asking us if we might be interested
in a possible adoption of a little girl named Natalia.
And she hooked us up
with the, um, adoptive mom, Dyan Ciccone.
She had asked us if we would cover
her previous medical expenses.
So right then and there, we started to get concerned.
We thought it was some kind of weird scam
where, you know, she kinda came across
as a used car salesman of sorts trying to "sell" Natalia to us.
So we said, "Heck, no, we're not gonna do that.
We're not gonna pay for anything that occurred in the past."
And I think she harped on it a little bit.
But then, eventually, she gave that up.
Another red flag that we were concerned about
is why Dyan adopted her
and so quickly wanted to basically get rid of her.
We were concerned about her mental health
coming from an orphanage in Ukraine.
So we did ask her if we could
please have Natalia evaluated,
um, for a psychological evaluation
to see where she stood on that.
And, um, Miss Dyan said no.
Why would someone, if they didn't have anything to hide,
why would they
refuse the psychological evaluation?
Yeah, definitely shady, weird.
-Um, definitely red flags. -Mmm-hmm.
But I was still interested.
-I still wanted to pursue. -Hmm.
[Dwayne] So we're driving to this lake house in New Hampshire,
where we were meeting Dyan and Natalia.
And it reminded me of Camp Crystal Lake.
It was kinda spooky.
[Robyn] He had some concerns because the driveway
was super steep and it was gravel.
And us, you know, having physical disabilities just like Natalia,
we were wondering, "Wow.
How does she get up and down the gravel driveway?"
'Cause when we first saw Natalia,
she didn't have shoes at all.
She has these slippery braces on her feet.
And if you're stepping on pebbles,
it could definitely hurt your feet.
So we were just really surprised
she didn't have any shoes because you could
fall down the driveway easily without the proper footing.
But we thought that she was really adorable.
She was about to turn six years old
and she definitely looked her stated age.
But we really had a feeling that
there was something bad going on.
We're both Christians and everybody, in our opinion,
has God given natural gifts
and one of his gifts is the gift of discernment.
You know, to the regular, um, average world,
it would just be more of a sixth sense or an intuition.
I have a really good lie detector... [chuckles] I guess.
But Dyan and Natalia,
I knew that they were lying.
-She was withdrawn and quiet. -Mmm-hmm.
And didn't engage.
[Robyn] Yeah, she would, like, look up first
to make sure her answers were appropriate
-for Dyan. -[Dwayne] And then you asked her
what the Ukrainian orphanage was like.
-Oh, yeah, yeah. -And she
gave an uncoached answer, it was obvious.
-[Robyn] Yeah, she said, "It sucked." -She said, "It sucked."
And then Dyan interrupted her
and seemed surprised that she said that
and said, "Oh, no, it wasn't that bad. You were fine."
It was almost like Dyan had to give her approval
-[Robyn] For her to... Yeah. -...to come out. [scoffs]
And then as soon as she said what she was coached to say,
she went back in.
I've never seen another person do that.
-Even in movies. -[Robyn] Yeah.
Even in The Exorcist.
It scared the [bleep] out of me.
I can feel evil when I come into her room.
I couldn't really put my finger on whether
it was the situation that was evil
or Natalia,
there was something wrong with her.
And I think that's the first time
I've ever completely trusted that intuition.
Right then is when I made the decision
that we-- this was not gonna happen.
As-- as hard as it was to make that decision
'cause I knew how it was going to affect you...
And when I told you, I was like, there's...
I can't put my finger on it
but there's something wrong.
When you called Dyan to tell her we weren't coming back,
then...
the story just got crazier.
'Cause she went
ballistic on the phone.
She was furious.
I could hear her through the phone yelling.
-And so I was like, "Okay." -[Robyn] Yeah.
We need to go, like, there was no telling what she was gonna do.
I mean, she went nuts.
[Judith] Kristine Barnett
tried to contact me on Facebook
not long after they adopted Natalia.
And I wouldn't-- wouldn't talk to her.
And I knew that things were not right.
I don't know if she's trying to get me on her side
or-- or what she's trying to do. I don't-- I don't know.
But it's...
I'm-- I'm not going to entertain
even saying hello to her.
The Barnetts claim that Natalia had threatened them.
So what if-- even if she did threaten you?
You're the parent.
I've-- I'm a teacher. I have 600 students.
Some of those are from really rough families.
You know, and I've been told,
"I'm gonna cut you up."
I've been told, "I'm gonna drink your blood."
Uh, I've been told all kinds of weird stuff. [chuckles]
But I'm not truly scared that that's gonna happen.
That child needs help.
So you get that child help.
So yeah, I find actually being scared of a child, um,
when you're a full-size grown adult,
a little ridiculous.
So I started posting on an adoption message board
asking about
if anybody had any experience of a Natalia.
What was it, like, a year later,
that Michael Barnett emailed me out of the blue
and said, "I think we adopted the little girl you were talking about."
And he started to... Said her name, Natalia,
-some other things. I was like, "Yep, that's her." -Yeah.
Kristine, his wife, wanted to talk to you.
Kristine and I kept in touch over Facebook Messenger
for several years.
It did seem like a lot of shady stuff going on.
Michael and Kristine Barnett, I mean,
they lied a lot.
They will do anything to get what they want.
They lie about Natalia being violent.
You just don't know the true Barnetts.
When Kristine started telling us all these crazy stories,
we thought, "Wait a minute."
I mean, she's tiny.
-[Robyn] Yeah. -[Dwayne] These stories don't make sense.
So we started figuring it out that
everything Kristine told us wasn't the truth.
[Robyn] Kristine was using me and Dwayne
because if she could get us on her side
believing, you know, that Natalia had issues,
then she would feel justified in maybe getting rid of her.
Michael and Kristine Barnett
not only lied to get her
into their family, but they also lied to get rid of her.
If they wanted to claim she's older than what she is,
I mean, I don't know where they came up with that.
That's just crazy.
Like, who thinks of that?
[Michael] Detective Clouse had told me,
"You need to correct her age.
This is our legal recommendation from the police department."
I am attaching a picture presumably
taken at entry into United States.
A home study report was prepared
about the Barnetts, early 2010,
by a licensed social worker.
One section that I found very troubling,
and it's the background information.
The worker asked Michael and Kristine
if they had ever had any domestic violence
or disturbances at home and they both said no.
The state took their word for it.
Th--they relied on the self-reporting.
They should have gone to the local police to see if their names
ever appeared because they would have found
domestic violence
in 2003,
years before this home study evaluation.
They're fighting.
Michael's got Kristine in a headlock.
And then he's pushed her.
These are situations that are pretty serious.
Scary, you know, to think of what could have been
and what all the evil, dark secrets
are that we don't even know that her coming to light.
[Beth] It really doesn't shock me that Michael and Kristine have
kept some of these family secrets secret.
This is not the public persona they want to have.
[Rachel] Every now and then,
Michael and Kristine would be in the front yard arguing
or fighting,
or... There was no-- I never saw anything physical.
It was just the yelling and the screaming.
I felt sorry for Michael
because she was degrading him
and calling him a loser and a jerk.
And I just was like, "God, that poor guy."
I've been fooled by thinking that they were the perfect family,
because I don't think they were the perfect family.
[Michael exhales]
[Beth] There were a number of allegations
that Michael and Kristine made about Natalia
acting out in a violent way.
Most of them happened within the home,
but the bottom line is every incident
was told from the Barnetts' perspective.
But the last one was different.
The Traders Point Creamery incident had witnesses.
I'm Chris.
I worked at Traders Point Creamery
as a herdsman from 2012 to 2015.
Uh, so I had gotten a call
that there was some crisis on the electric fence.
Officers were called and that we needed
to take them down to where, uh, the individual was.
So I was under the impression that
when we got down there, that there was going to be
uh, a little person who was,
um, distressed, um,
very emotional. When we get down there, um,
the caretaker seemed to be the one
who was the emotional one of the two.
And the little person seemed to be more calm
and rational about the whole situation.
There was no mention of, uh, the caretaker
being at risk or anything like that.
Natalia had been trying to pull Kristine
into the electric fence.
She'd been screaming out loud,
"[bleep] bitch, I'm gonna kill you.
I am going to kill you, you bitch. You're gonna die."
So, uh,
I was there with, uh, the officer.
I don't remember any of that being said.
I don't remember there being any threats
about being, "I'm going to [bleep] kill you,"
or anything like that.
I just felt like the situation had kinda been overblown
and it was not really that big of a deal.
Like, I have a fairly good memory
and I am positive I would remember that.
The biggest thing I remember is thinking that
if I had to deal with the adult caretaker,
that, uh, I would be really frustrated,
uh, just because it felt like
she seemed to be making the situation worse.
My name's Mark Hostetler
and at Traders Point, I was the farm manager.
I got a phone call from one of my employees
saying, "Hey, we've got an issue.
There's somebody on the walking trail. They're having a crisis.
What should we do? Can you turn the fence off?"
Or is it dangerous, was also the question.
And both the answers I should say were, uh,
"No, it's-- it's not dangerous."
And also, "No, I can't turn it off 'cause it's already off, I think."
That section of fence isn't even on today
because the cows are in a different part of the-- the farm.
And so my response was maybe a little callous.
[chuckles] But mostly because the threat was so hollow.
[Judith] I can't imagine
taking a child's threats,
like, so seriously.
Being truly scared. Now, you could take their threats serious,
but we're not even super strong.
We're diastrophics.
We have joint problems.
We have all kinds of issues that would make it
difficult for us to truly overcome someone.
We don't have the capability of truly hurting an adult.
You know, unless, you know, there was firearms involved.
[laughs]
But someone like me,
I couldn't damage an adult.
They could just hold me off.
If Michael's version of what happened
at Traders Point Creamery is not true,
that Natalia really did not try to push her
into an electric fence and "kill her,"
then it casts doubt on all the other allegations
of Natalia's acting out
that Michael and Kristine have reported.
I don't know though that anyone can get to the truth here
because there are so many stories
from everybody.
For example,
Michael's version of what happened here
is not necessarily reliable.
At the Traders Point incident, how did the police react?
I don't know.
My-- My sons and I were out in the forest.
We... When we saw the police lights had arrived,
we still had a good mile, mile and a half
of running through a forest
to get back on the path to get back up there.
So by the time all four of us get all the way back up there,
Natalia's already gone.
The officer with her is already gone.
I don't speak to the officers, I speak to my wife.
We keep going, we keep going.
We're about 40, 50 yards down, I start hearing screaming.
I turn to look.
Natalia and Kristine are in a physical altercation.
It looks like Natalia's trying to pull Kristine.
Look, I don't know what the truth is,
but this raises a question in my mind
of whether or not Michael and Kristine
kinda orchestrated
the Traders Point Creamery incident.
They wanted an outside incident
where there would be you know, some
potential witnesses maybe,
uh, and she would be taken away
for good this time.
[woman speaking]
[Natalia] Okay.
-Yes. -[woman] Okay.
Yes.
[woman speaking]
[woman] Mmm-hmm.
[woman speaking]
[Beth] The closer you look
into this case and dig,
the harder it is to know where the truth lies.
Maybe there's more than one villain in this story.