← This Is Actually Happening
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Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of this Is Actually Happening ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the Show Notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners. Most of our stories come to us from listeners or from news stories, but today's episode began with a Reddit rabbit hole. Ellen Westberg, our showrunner, came across our storyteller today, Rachel Waters, who has written extensively about the loss of her mother and the nightmare that followed. Rachel has chronicled much more of her life on Reddit, and I encourage you all to go read her full account. You can find her Reddit handle in the Show Notes. And now on to today's episode. What if you were accused of murdering your mother?
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This is a contact with the criminal legal system I have never even come close to having, and immediately my grief turns to terror. And this understanding that now I'm in the fight for my own life.
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From audible originals, I'm Witnesseldine. You're listening to this is actually happening episode 405. What if you were accused of murdering your mother?
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My parents met at Fort Gordon where they both worked and it was both of their second marriage. My father had three boys in his previous marriage and my mom was already in her 30s and she wanted a child more than anything. She had this high powered job at Fort Gordon and he was like chief of staff, a personnel manager out at Fort Gordon and he had had a vasectomy actually, and thought he was done with having kids. And then he met my mom and she wanted a child so bad he agreed to get a reversal and they began trying. They had bought this plot of land in rural Harlem, Georgia. It was out in the county, off a dirt road in the middle of swampland and pine barren, and I was born in 1983, in February, during the worst snowstorm that Georgia had seen in years. I was an RH negative baby, so I had really bad jaundice. I had to be put in the nicu. Everyone always told me stories growing up of how my mom used to stand right after surgery or belly stitched up from the cesarean, but she would stand and stare at me through the glass, just praying that I would come home and be safe. And that kind of sets the context for how deep that relationship was. My childhood was a weird mix of idyllic and really hard. It was idyllic in the sense that I grew up in this amazing wilderness, and I was an incredibly curious child. I wanted to know everything about everything. And having a father who was an outdoorsman and a mom who was super literary, she was also an artist, so she painted and she drew. So I grew up with a huge array of books, But I also had access to this amazing, magical outdoor realm where I could observe nature. And, you know, I was getting microscopes as a child so I could look at the pond water. My grandparents lived next door to me, and so rather than having babysitters, I had my amazing grandparents to raise me. My grandmother was a genealogist. She was one of the first women in the Navy during World War II. My grandfather flew the hump in World War II. He was between India and China. So I grew up on Stories of the World. They were very traditional Christian family. So I also grew up, you know, going to a Christian Montessori school and my grandmother reading me Bible stories. And it was very quickly realized early on that I was super precocious when it came to reading and memorization. And that was something that my family really latched onto as a point of pride. And I started traveling around the country doing speech contests for the Little Temperance League, because in first grade, I was reading at a ninth grade level. It always sounds a little grandiose to admit that, but I assure you I was super disabled in other ways. You know, I was the kid who was skipped ahead two grades, but because I was very socially behind, I was just much younger than my. My peers. And I was also behind in terms of coordination. I couldn't even tie my shoes till I was eight. You know, so I'm reading at a high school level, but I can't tie my own shoes. And I had no, like, sense of social rules or decorum. But I was a very sweet, affectionate kid. I always thought everyone was my friend. I went and hugged everybody. People thought I was Weird. I was just an oddball. And my father and my mom sort of saw me in two distinctly different ways. My mom absolutely loved and nurtured how literary I was. My father loved and nurtured how outdoorsy and curious I was. What they both really had an issue with was how defiant I was of authority, because I was always quite questioning it. The thing about a kid who is curious about everything and wants to understand everything is when you are told to do something, your response is, why? And then when they give you because I said so, that's not sufficient. So you demand an explanation. And it makes you a very difficult child. By most people's estimation, especially back in the 80s or 90s, when there wasn't a lot of awareness around autism spectrum disorders or what they would have called back then, Asperger's. But it wasn't really identified, especially not in girls that were highly verbal. And, you know, I didn't have any of those classic signs beyond a lot of the issues with coordination and inability to really read social cues. But the great thing was, my grandparents were incredibly accepting of me, too. They always explained things to me, so I was far more compliant with them because they kind of talked to me like a little adult. And early on, you know, I was gifted by my grandmother the full Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as the American Medical Association Family Medical Guide. Those two things fascinated me. One because it opened up the world and my curiosity, and the other because something very true about me from my earliest years was the sense of mortality always looming when you grow up in the country and you're exposed to a lot of life and death. My family were hunters. I used to hunt. I watched my cats and dogs live and die, sometimes killed in terrible ways by, you know, wild animals. I was really traumatized by injury, illness, loss, impermanence. I started looking to what was happening with my grandparents. My grandmother had diabetes. My grandfather had really severe heart disease. That's why I really got into medicine as a hobby. In my early teens, I began collecting clinical trial data on a variety of diseases that I knew struck people. Anything I could find, I collected it. That's continued to this day. If it impacted somebody I loved or knew, I wanted to learn as much about it as I could. I was able to relate to adults a lot better than I could other children. I felt like an alien species. But at a Christian Montessori school, the kids who end up at Montessori schools often are not the most neurotypical either. So I didn't have the worst time in the world fitting in there. What really got difficult was when I got switched over to public school in fifth grade. And that's kind of when childhood really became a living hell. Because that's right at puberty. That is when I'm supposed to be conscious of fashion, of pop culture. You're supposed to get this dawning awareness. I didn't have any of that. I was bullied pretty hard sometimes, even physically. At 11, I was five. Five, with, like, shoulders like a linebacker and, like, a square jaw and, like, a deeper voice. And kids were like, you're just like a dude. But I also. Estrogen kicked in, and I became kind of bodacious, too. I had braces and, like, headgear. It sucked. It was so horrible. But I think ultimately it just made me more defiant as a person again, I'm naturally bold. I'm naturally extroverted. So rather than shutting in and moving into myself, I just had the sort of like, well, fuck you attitude. Like, fine, I'll find my own friends. I'll still make my way, you know. But luckily, you know, that didn't have to last too long because I got my braces off when I was 13, finally started to figure out clothes and, like, how to mask enough. I was listening to, like, Nirvana. I was getting into some of the more alternative music. And then finally, you know, when I emerged in high school, I was suddenly the hot goth chick. That was also when a lot of things began to transform with my family dynamic at 11 was when my parents got divorced. You know, it was rough. I realized that my father. I think I realized it then that my father probably didn't want to have more kids and probably felt a bit pressured by my mom. I think that tension and resentment, especially him having an unusually defiant, difficult child. He grew up in the 30s, where discipline and obedience and girls being a certain way was very much expected. And so I was like his nightmare child. And I kind of. I paid for it. I had a lot of corporal punishment. I had a lot of, like, weird control elements placed on my life. So when the divorce came when I was 11, you're upset by the disruption to your routine, but you're also relieved because it took away a lot of the tension in the household, and it started a whole new set of tension because it was a nasty divorce. My mother and father went back and forth. My father would sue for custody. I had a really difficult time with my stepmother. Also at 11, there was a looming distance growing between me and the rest of my family, because the answer I found to A lot of the suffering I had witnessed in my life and endured emotionally was cracking open that Encyclopedia Britannica and reading the four pages on Buddhism. And my family, you know, being more evangelical, believed you should choose when you're baptized, when you are saved. And so 11 years old, I'm getting up on the time that we would expect me to make the choice to be baptized. And I have been a good Christian kid. I announced to my family, I don't think I'm going to get baptized. I think I'm a Buddhist, because I had read about in the encyclopedia, and it made the most sense to me, especially the parts that are about suffering and loss and impermanence and the acceptance of that. And it soothed me. It gave me answers that I had not found in the Bible. You know, my grandparents accepted it reluctantly. My mom really struggled, but her siblings, they were a little bit more distressed by that. And so to them, my soul was in jeopardy. And so I ended up starting the process of emancipation at 14, and I emancipated myself from my father in the courts at 15, so I would no longer have to visit him. You know, I. I come into high school and I'm the hot freak. I have, like, the Hollywood vampire fangs that really blend in with your teeth. And I would come to school looking like a movie character, and people were like, whoa, you're scary, but also really cool looking. I was dealing with my identity at the time, both in terms of my sexuality, in terms of how I was seen by society, how I was being treated by authority. College was what I saw as, like, my salvation, where there would be more people like me and I could study whatever I wanted and I could quench my boundless curiosity for the world. And so got a full ride scholarship on hope. And this was around the time my grandfather died when I was 17. And that left my grandmother, who had really advanced diabetes. And my mom and I were her primary caregivers. And so rather than going away to college, I opted to stay and go to Augusta University so I could stay close to home and be there for my grandmother. And so I also became accustomed to being a caregiver very early on, too. This, to me, was an enormous privilege. I'm very family oriented and care oriented, and I looked at it as a way of paying back all of the caregiving she gave me as a child. And my grandmother was also just one of the most interesting people I'd ever known. And so it was not a sacrifice at all. You know, I'd gone through a lot of deaths of people. I had gone through a lot of illness myself, actually, sort of the. The fun trifecta of, like, autism is there's a lot of autoimmunity and a lot of issues that come with it with the autonomic nervous system. I was diagnosed with POTS and autonomic neuropathy as a teenager, started having seizures when I was in my late teens, and they were very dramatic and intense. I had met my ex husband around the time that I was 16. He was 25, and that was sort of me getting more and more independent. So that would eventually come to be a marriage. I was with him from 16 to 30. It was a very tumultuous marriage. We had immense, immense tension, and it sort of dissolved into sort of a toxic soup in its final years. But my mom, really generously, after my grandparents died, bought their home, and she gave me and my ex husband my childhood home. So I ended up getting a free home in Georgia. At that point, I graduated college. I had a degree in journalism and a minor in anthropology, and there were not a lot of journalism jobs. I was a columnist for a while for an alternative weekly there in Augusta. And however, I could transfer those skills to be an investigator and work out on Fort Gordon and do background and spin investigations for the US Office of Personnel Management. So I became an investigator and used those interview and writing skills to do investigations. So I had a job there that was pretty successful, and I had a home. And so I ended up entrenched, unfortunately, because of this home in this rural area. And we kind of made the best of it. We started our own goth night there. We're like the goth couple extraordinaire who starts this goth night. I was also starting to become pretty prominent as a model, and that got me out of Georgia a lot because I could travel and do photo shoots, whether New York or LA or Germany. I was, you know, I did magazine covers, album covers, book covers. I was on a Clyde Barker cover. And I started to gain a bit of fame, not just as a model, but also writing on the side while I'm an investigator. I'm writing for Gothic Beauty magazine and I'm writing for Coyle House, and I'm getting known more as a writer. So I'm starting to amass a fan base of people who follow both my writing and my modeling and being kind of a scene queen in the Georgia scene. That also started to instill this restlessness business. Our marriage is getting more and more rocky. I started to get the impression, like, there's maybe something more out there for me. And so I asked my ex husband, can we consider moving to New York and having a fresh start? And so he agreed to it A few years later, at 29. We moved to Brooklyn in 2012. And when I moved here, I. I suddenly found a people and a culture and an environment where I felt like I fully fit in. For the first time in my life, I was able to get back in the communications field and nonprofit. There was a lot more job opportunities. I started dreaming of, oh, I can go to grad school here. And so when our marriage fell apart 11 months in, he left, I stayed. And suddenly I had this new lease on life. And I had the opportunity to do a ton of self work and really evaluate who do I want to be as an adult before deciding who do I want to be with. And part of that was also just having some fun. So I did. 126 Tinder dates in six months. Interestingly enough, the very first person I met on Tinder is now my husband. And the very last person I met on Tinder is now my husband. I enrolled in grad school. I went to the new school, got a master's degree in international affairs, focusing on human rights and governance. At the time, I started working at the UN as well, doing some consulting work. And my first job out of grad school, 2017, with the election, I really wanted to work on behalf of more vulnerable communities. And so I went to work for the DOE Fund, which helped reintegrate formerly homeless and incarcerated men back into society. And at the same time, I was also a peacemaker with the Red Hook Community Justice Center. So I was getting a really good understanding, not just of my community, but of how the criminal legal system works in this country. Went on to work for gender and reproductive advocacy, disability rights advocacy. At this time, the two wonderful men that I have met on Tinder, our relationships are growing and blossoming. And the relationship with my mom, even though I was no longer living right next door to her, we stayed very, very close. She would come to New York twice a year. We would go to Georgia twice a year at least, talking and texting every day on the phone. And she knew that New York made me happy, and she ultimately accepted that. And I was finally finding a lot of success in my career where I realized I could sort of pay back to her all the amazing things she did for me as a child. I can take mom to all these places in Europe that she's always dreamed of going. I can, you know, really give back to her the life that I think, you know, she always sort of dreamed of. But over the course of the summer, things started to get weird. My daily conversations and text messages with my mom became increasingly muddled. Her perfect grammar and spelling started to fall apart, and that was odd to me. But it was also terrifying because a couple of years prior we had taken a 23andme and it came up positive for the APOE4 gene, which which is the Alzheimer's risk gene. I had heard stories of her grandmother on her father's side having senile dementia, and when I saw those odd speech blips, I knew that I needed to get down to Georgia as soon as I possibly could and get her either in a clinical trial or on a drug, Aricept or Memantine, to hopefully slow the progression before she went too far.
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I'm Raza Jafre and in the new season of the Spy who we tell The Story of Dr. A. Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used to them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, the fix it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons weapons. Follow the Spy who Now Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also listen to the full season of the Spy who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early and ad free on Audible.
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I'm Leon Nayfak, best known as the host and co creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco and Think Twice Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions and vicious onstage fights. But before the Jerry Springer show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's life struggle to reconcile his TV Persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them. Or don't listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app.
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So we rushed down in late August of 2020. And when we arrived in Georgia, my mom looked like she had aged 20 years and 8 months. She had lost a significant chunk of body weight and was on the way to frailty. Her spinal column had collapsed, so she had the hunched kyphotic posture that we see with severe osteoporosis. She took a cognitive assessment, and she was determined to have mild cognitive impairment right on the border of what you would classify as the cutoff for Alzheimer's. So she was right there, and we got her on reclass, which helps build bone mass. And I started trying to get the family on board, her, her siblings, saying, hey, this is the storm that is coming. I really need your help, especially your sister, who just lived a few doors down. We have got to all be in lockstep because we've got to prevent this before it gets bad. And not one of them believed me. They were like, rachel, you're being, you know, hysterical and exaggerating and hyperbolic like you always were as a child. Because I've always been. Had a very extra personality, right? So I was not taken seriously. I was also viewed with suspicion, like, oh, are you trying to have her declared incompetent so you can seize your inheritance early? Like, you know, you're her only child. You're going to get everything anyway. Like, what are you doing? This is where I started to see suspicion of me that I didn't even know existed. That that distance that was fomented when I was young was actually more like a full blown suspicion of me and my motives and. And who I was as a human being. And that was when a lot of despair set in as I realized, wow, I, oh, my God, I'm. I'm kind of on my own. Not that they wouldn't be there for her socially or take her to appointments or things like that, but when it came to, like, having them on the same page as me or being in agreement about the medications, My aunt told me early in if I got her on any of those medications, she would basically no longer participate in my mom's career. She believed that the side effects would all happen to my mom, like suicidality or brain bleed. And basically, if I got my mom on them, it would be tantamount to trying to kill her. And I could not afford to have my aunt not participate in my mom's care. I never could have imagined that just because I was like this weird goth kid that moved to New York and came out as a Buddhist, that they would just see me as someone who was Genuinely, like, malevolent. So I had to make the gutting decision as someone who is a big believer in medicine and who also knows that people with the APOE4 gene actually tend to be the best responders to the Alzheimer's interventions we have available today. So that was a, torturous, but B, created a huge amount of conflict. So I lost all family support. And basically it was, rachel, if you want to do this, then you need to move down here full time. Now, mind you, I have $100,000 in student debt. I have no social networks left down there and no job prospects there. And my family is like, if you want to do this with your mom, you need to give up your entire life, your relationship. And my husband could not leave here because he was a faculty member at nyu. But unfortunately, it meant I had to rely on them still if I was not going to live there. So I had to cave to those demands. And it continued to get worse. It was excruciating. It was so confusing and gutting to me because I'm also trying to protect my mom from the knowledge that this tension is growing. And then, in addition to Alzheimer's, In July of 2022, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. And we finally had an answer for why her bone deterioration had accelerated so quickly. Because multiple myeloma creates bone lesions. It's a type of cancer that is a blood cancer. It's a hematologic malignancy, and it presents with bone lesions, typically even in the early stages that basically just deteriorate the bone. And so it was probably the reason she had this accelerated breakdown. I was there every four to six weeks initially. And then after my mom's cancer diagnosis, when her decline really accelerated, I was down constantly. And then hiring in home caregivers. I also, at this point, realized that perhaps my plans to keep her in the home were becoming untenable. At that point, they were no longer in denial, and now it was a focus of blame. Rachel, this is your fault. You know, either because you didn't move down or because you didn't get her in with the doctor we wanted her to. Or also, you know, I'm looking now at putting my childhood home that she'd given me on the market because care cost, which meant, yeah, I did have to sell the home that otherwise would have been my inheritance to afford the $14,000 a month it took to care for her. Imagine you're watching the slow zombification of the person you love most in the world. Like, you'll see the Glimmers of who they were and are, while they become something unrecognizable, both terrified and terrifying in its unfamiliarity. And so you are eternally in this uncanny valley of limbo and heartache, where you are clawing to hold on to every last piece of who they are, while having to reconcile in your own mind that they are disappearing before your eyes and. And that the brain is literally being eaten. I guess what's fortunate for me is the core of who my mom was never changed. My mom remained someone who was, on her good days and good moments, even toward the very end, still my mom, like, affectionate and loving and trying to read her favorite books. And even though she couldn't really read anymore, but because she had this really severe inability to realize what was wrong with her, I think the most torturous thing was she would wake up every day and not know why she was in so much pain. She would forget she had cancer. She would forget she was dying. And then she would get excited and hopeful, like, this doctor is going to make me better, and you're going to make me better, and I'll feel better in six months. And she would make this list of all the things she wanted to do. She would. Sometimes I'd sit there and see her making lists and be like, what are you doing, Mom? She's like, oh, these are the things I'm gonna do when I get fixed. And that was the hardest. It was hell. And so the hardest part was less losing her in the sense of, like, her memories and personality change. Because, yes, she was much more angry and irate because she was in pain. It was mostly like watching someone have cancer and be dying of cancer, but never being able to come to terms with their own mortality. A lot of ways it felt like she had become my child. Sometimes she would cry and look at me and say, why? Why am I living in hell? She's like, I always used to really like my life, and I don't think I've been a bad person. So sometimes I wonder why I'm in hell. And that stuff made me, like, feel like I was dying. One of the ways I deal with this trauma is by making it into a story. I'm telling this story online, too, as it's happening. I basically ended up using my Facebook as my live journal. And that was like, the purge for a lot of the pain. And I understood the value of that purge valve because so many other people were going through caregiving battles, too. And a lot of them reached out to me, and they Were like, thank you for documenting this because it makes me feel less alone. That enabled me to process and cope as well as the job I got. You know, I actually moved out of the nonprofit field early in my mom's illness. I took a hiatus of about eight months from work to focus on really getting my ducks in a row. And so that was when I transitioned into so science and medical copywriter. And I landed a job sort of translating new innovations in genetic medicine especially, and small molecule drugs that would change the lives of people like me and my mom eventually. So at the very least, I was able to finally channel this lifelong hobby into something that was meaningful and uplifting while enduring the hardship of caregiving. And so that was a big bright spot. The other big bright spots throughout this agony that I'm going through with my family and my mom is my community in New York, amazing friends and chosen family. And I think that in terms of finding that resilience really boils down to how bitter are you or aren't you about the misfortune that happens in your life? And as hurt and angry as I was about the situation with my family, I wasn't bitter because that was only going to ever eat at me. I just knew I had to get through it as best I could and grieve what I could not change and just make the best decisions I could for my mom, which was to continue to keep her close to her family and not let her know that there was any rift. And so she continues to decline at this incredibly accelerated rate after December of 2022. We have got to move her into memory care. I was like, I am going to splurge on her at the end of life and do everything I can to make sure she has the very finest and that hopefully I can improve her quality of life just a bit as she's nearing the end of it. My mom in memory care. Very soon after she moves in, I run up against a lot of issues with memory care because my mom, as her pain continues to advance, her behaviors also get much worse. And so again, my medical knowledge starts to come into conflict with some of the demands from the facility, like wanting to put her on antipsychotics and me knowing with the clinical research antipsychotics are not appropriate, typically for dementia patients, especially those with pain, and that acting out is usually a response to pain. So it becomes like a battle between, like, well, is it antipsychotics or pain management that she needs? And this becomes like a three way conversation between me and hospice and the memory care facility and they are getting increasingly concerned and I understand, like for their staff because she did attack their staff in her anger and pain, she would threaten to kill them, threaten to kill herself. They sent her to geriatric psych twice, which was super traumatic for her. You can imagine the tension. Right. So I find myself having a lot of very tense conversations. She's very advanced dementia now at this point. And again, my aunt is kind of like involved with this a bit because she again is like, well, Rachel's never really listened to professionals or authority and she's talking to folks there in her daily visits. And I, I think that sort of doesn't help with the tension. But I stay the course to advocate for my mom as best as I can. In the last six months of her life, I spent a total of three and a half months of it straight in Georgia. So I had last seen her at the end of June and I get a call that she's had a fall. And at that point I do sign off for her to go to the ER after that fall. My friend who is a hospice nurse came by to check on her and was like a. She told me that she had found my mom lying in her own urine and had not been changed for hours. And she ended up having to change her. She also found two large ulcers on her backside that were starting to emerge. I need to get back down here. A day and a half later I get a call from hospice that my mom has been found doubled over non responsive and has been declared actively dying. And I am told you need to get down here immediately. We think she has maybe just hours to days to live, you know, actively dying. It's an irreversible process. On July 10, the day after I was called, late in the evening, we get in. My mom is non responsive. She appears to be essentially paralyzed. Her eyes wouldn't really close. Her advance directive stated no life sustaining measures. So no fluids or anything like that, but comfort care only. Which would mean medications to ease suffering when someone goes into home hospice. In this country, as millions of Americans will people when they go into home hospice, their family caregivers are typically set up with everything from adult diapers to hospital beds, to toilet razors, to oxygen machines, everything someone would need to die comfortably at home. And this also includes something called a comfort care kit. Sometimes this is given directly by hospice to family caregivers or it's prescribed. It's prescribed in the patient's name, but it's expected that family will give it and they're Deputized to give it. And this comfort care kit contains morphine, a benzodiazepine for anxiety, such as lorazepam, suppositories for constipation or other things that could cause discomfort at end of life. Basically anything you would need if your loved one starts to really suffer as they near the end of their life or they start actively dying. And at this point, you're instructed on how to use these things, but there's no set requirement, and this standard varies across the board. There's no law for how it specifically needs to be done. My husband and I, we set up a bed in her room because we knew that she would die at any moment. I knew that now was the most important moment of my life as a caregiver, as a daughter, was to see her out of the world as she had seen me into it. When we got down there, I asked, hey, do we have morphine that we can get her? Because I noticed that when she's turned, she's in a lot of pain, and her breathing would start to become very raspy and very distressed. And I started documenting this too, because I was also getting concerned about, like, well, how long was she there? How was she found, who found her? And I'm asking for records. Didn't get any at that time, but I'm asking the hospice for morphine, and it was not being prescribed at the facility. And so I asked, you know, is there a comfort care kit or anything on hand for her? And they said no. And I was like, oh, my God. So my husband hears this too, and we're like, well, worst case scenario, we do have the one at the house, at least. My husband had run to get the comfort care kit from the house. If our prescription didn't come through in time, we knew we would have it on hand. After three days of no food, no fluids, and very minimal responsiveness, it is clear that my mom is past the point of no return. I knew that she was close, and I knew it was important to be close to her, even though she smelled like death. You can smell like the acid of the ketones in their breath as the organs are breaking down. And I still would hold her and kiss her face and sing her songs and play her music and talk to her because. Because I believed and still believe in the research that that mind and hearing is one of the last things to go. And I wanted her to know that I was there and loving her and telling her that she was going to see her parents again soon. So I went to bed. And then I was awakened at about 4:30 in the morning by the sound of teeth smashing together. And that was agonal breathing. It's because the intercostal muscles around the ribs are no longer working to expand and contract lungs. So there's a clashing of teeth as they try and get air in. It's air hunger. And that is exactly the indication that morphine is for. And so I run into the hallway and I am desperate, and I am like, please tell me there is morphine here that's on call. And there's still none. And one of the aides says, well, we don't have morphine, but she sure needs it. And I realized, well, now is the time we actually have to use the comfort kit because I can't let my mom die like this, starving for air. We got the comfort kit. We called Hospice for instructions. We got, you know, the dose. So I also let everybody at the memory care know, like, hey, hospice has authorized us for this dose. Like, we're, you know, we're going to administer it, so you guys don't have to worry about. Didn't really make any difference. She died 37 minutes later anyway. And it didn't change the breathing when she died. The moment she died, there was so much agony that sort of came out of me. I feel like I probably sounded like an animal, just this one cry. But I was also, you know, so relieved that she wasn't in hell anymore. After she died, hospice came in. They dressed her, they bathed her. We were heading back to her house, just kind of processing, like, well, where does life go from here? And then on the way home in the car, not 10 minutes after we left the memory care, I get a call from the funeral home. And they said, there's been a problem. We can't pick up her body because it's been taken to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab. And I realized then, if someone thinks there's foul play, I assume that there's just been a misunderstanding about the comfort care kit, you know, that it will be very quickly and easily resolved. But I'm still terrified, right? Because this is a contact with the criminal legal system I have never even come close to having. And immediately my grief turns to terror. And this understanding that now I'm in the fight for my own life. I immediately start Googling murder defense attorneys to just get some advice and input and tell them what happened and start trying to prepare myself for what to expect. I get the first attorney I could find on the line, this man by the name of robert hommler. I tell him the story, and I said, I'm afraid that maybe someone has either accused me of murder or manslaughter or something. I don't know. And he said, I think you're probably right, given what you've told me. And there are a few possible charges. There is. In the state of georgia, you have manslaughter. You also have felony murder and malice murder. So I start googling these terms to try and understand them as he's talking to me. And he said, regardless of what they would ultimately go with, if they go with anything, you need to be prepared for investigators to show up at any minute when you get back to your mom's house, and we will go from there. Sure enough, investigators show up. We have five cop cars in the yard and two plainclothes officers knocking at the door. And they're asking to speak to me, and they want my cell phone. And I said, listen, you can talk to my attorney. This is his number, and you can get a search warrant. The investigator says to me, you know how this looks, right? And I said, yeah, it looks like I know my rights. I was not the grieving, crying daughter. I'm fighting for my own life. I am scared right now. And when I'm scared, I am just flat. That's a very autistic thing, is the only way I can process and act sort of methodically and keep all my ducks in the row. I need to be very careful. I knew enough about the criminal legal system, Both as a peacemaker and working with people who've been incarcerated before, that you do not talk to the police. These are not people who have good context for your life or what's going on. And anything that you say or express can and will be used against you. And so you need to be very thoughtful and very methodical, and flat is good. In this case, I was confident that my attorney would tell them what was up and that that would clear up the misunderstanding. Right? Because I'm still thinking, like, there's an abundance of evidence that I haven't done anything wrong, that my mom just died after days of no food and fluids having been found and me called down. He does indeed tell them. And so when they come back with the search warrant, they not only request my phone, but also the e kit with the morphine. And I'm like, okay, cool. They're gonna see that she has a prescription. They're gonna know what e kits are for. I'm thinking at this point that there are active legal protections for the use of E and comfort kits for people. So I'm like, okay, this is gonna be cleared up. Thank God. So I'm feeling a little bit of relief when I hand these things over. But it was still bone chilling and terrifying to read the copy of the search warrant that said, rachel Waters, homicide. There's that little peace that embeds in your mind of, oh, God, I am not safe until this is resolved. Little did I know at the time, investigators had already contacted my family, which explained that was why they stopped talking to me very soon after my mom died. I was still reaching out, texting them, trying to collectively grieve with them, because they were the last repositories of memories of my mom. I was trying to make amends for all the disagreements we had. I was writing long apologies about not understanding their perspective. I was, you know, continuing to send Christmas gifts and Christmas cards like I did every year, but no response. And then I found myself blocked on Facebook and social media. And when I would go down to do work on my mom's house after she died, I would pick up sympathy cards from her mail, and none of them even mentioned me. It was as though I didn't exist. It was all from extended family members and family friends, and it was all addressed to my aunt and uncle, but not to me. Even though these people knew me and knew I was her only child and that I was very close to her, it was as though I had been erased. That was gutting. I was now not only having to grieve the death of my mom, but the loss of my entire family that I had known all my life simultaneously. Now, while I'm a suspect, I am waiting for my mom's toxicology to be complete. And the assumption is that as soon as her toxicology is complete, because the amount of morphine she got was so small, we're fully expecting that. That that will close it. Right. I actually have been calling medical examiners in other states and telling them about my case. I also wanted to make sure there was no way I had accidentally hastened her death or caused more suffering. And they were like, no, there's no way in hell. And so I was getting more reassured talking to them, talking to attorneys, that nothing was ultimately going to come of it, that now it was just a waiting game. You can't move forward with an estate or with life insurance or anything if you don't have a death certificate with a cause of death. So I'm stuck in limbo legally, while I'm a suspect. I also can't look into my legal concerns about her care at end of life either, because I'm a suspect, right? But what I can do is I can send demand letters via attorney to get her medical records, which I did. And this was the first sign that something was maybe scary coming my way. Because when I looked through the records, I saw that the hospice nurse had charted when I was really aggressively requesting morphine, had charted that I asked if, quote, euthanasia was possible. I never asked that. I asked for morphine. And that alarmed me. However, I had also recorded that conversation that I had with the nurse because I had a feeling that I would need to start documenting this stuff as I was requesting medications because I was concerned about her care. And I was like, okay, so she's talking about this conversation. This is the day it's charted. I'm just requesting morphine. Like, was there a misunderstanding that. Like, because I know that sometimes laypeople think that morphine is basically a suicide drug. I'm like, maybe she thinks that that's why I was asking. Like, I'm trying to give, like, the benefit of the doubt. I was very confused, though. It concerned me because I knew that it was likely to have made it into an investigation somehow. And I'm like, oh, God, somebody might think that there's a motive. But the medical record also stated that my mom was actively dying and I was called down. So that was the reassuring part. That's when I started looking for precedent. Has anyone ever been charged with murder or manslaughter after a person was declared actively dying and it turned out, no, they hadn't been. The one attorney I spoke to who consulted me right after he said, I don't know, Rachel, you know, you're in a really tough on crime county. They want to look tough on crime. They will look really hard for evidence. And, you know, if there's a way to charge you, they might find one. So I wouldn't be surprised. But he's like, you know, you're getting a year out. The further you get out from it, the less likely you are to be charged, because toxicology is back by now, they're probably just dragging their feet. Well, we go on another year, hear nothing. Okay, so we're now at 19 months from her death. 19 months a suspect. 19 months with no answers. I have questions about how my mom died, too. Like, did she have a stroke? Like, what happened? So after I knew that I was a suspect, aside from the emotional turmoil of losing my family and my mom simultaneously and really losing the ability to engage in that sort of collective grief that we rely on with people who also knew our loved one and knew them well, especially when they have Alzheimer's, was another type of turmoil, which was the idea that anyone could ever think that I wanted to kill or get rid of my mom. That was torturous for me. I didn't know if whoever had implicated me what they had alleged. I just knew that one of the most painful things was this almost sense of all of the love and care and duty that I felt toward my mom was so easily erased or overlooked. It almost feels like a type of gaslighting where you know how much you love your mom. But I had a family who had abandoned me, and then somebody somewhere alleging or implicating me in her death, which made me feel very isolated and alone. And so it made the grieving process very narrowly constrained to just me and my two partners and the friends who had seen us. I felt this sort of weight of bearing a loss very invisibly. The day before I throw my 42nd birthday party in February of 2025, Friday night, I made a post about my mom on Instagram about the last birthday gift she'd ever given me, which was teaching me how to paint. And someone posted an anonymous comment on my Instagram, and it said, shame on you. Why have you been indicted for murdering your mother? This is why your family disowned you. And then they posted the indictment number that it was in Columbia County Judge Barry Fleming and. And that I, Rachel Waters, had been charged with two counts of murder in the state of Georgia, felony murder and malice murder. I had seen enough indictments in my time as an investigator to know what they looked like, and it looked legit. I could not process it as real, though, because nothing like this existed anywhere in legal precedent. Felony murder and malice murder. Malice murder is murder committed with an abandoned and malignant heart. It's usually premeditated. Both are subject to the death penalty if the state so decides to pursue it. So I took a screenshot of it. I sent it to the attorney who had consulted me. Is this real? Am I about to be arrested? And he just texted back one word. Yes, you can expect them to pick you up at any time, basically. Wow, they really threw the book at you with these two counts of murder. We got on the phone, he was on vacation with his family, and he said, rachel, if this were me, the one person I would have in the country to defend me would be Brian Steele. Like, the famous celebrity attorney Brian Steele that, like, I couldn't even Dream of a affording. And like, no. Like, what are you talking about? There's no way he's gonna take my case. Like, and I couldn't afford him if I. I wanted to. And he said, no, Rachel, he will take your case. I have him on the phone immediately. All that terror and all that panic. I start to feel a glimmer of hope as I get on the phone with him and his wife as he's driving down the Atlanta highway. And he's like, listen, we're gonna make a plan to churn you yourself in. And we are going to fight for you to get bond. We are in this together. We will see this through to the end. It was like this deus ex machina again. Incredibly good. Incredibly bad luck. Incredibly bad luck. Now being the first person in U.S. history to be charged with murder after a person's been declared actively dying. The incredibly good luck to get probably one of the top three criminal defense attorneys in the entire country suddenly on my case. And I ain't a millionaire. He wasn't free. But I will tell you, I had just enough from all that life savings, all the remnants of the home sale. I had just enough. And so immediately we jump into action. And now, you know, at least I'm no longer in suspense. Like, this is now the opportunity to see what their evidence is and to be able to present mine. I knew that as much time terror came with it, there was also an opportunity. Within a couple of days, there were headlines across the country, some of them saying, I injected my mom with a lethal dose of morphine, calling me a murderer. While many, many people were coming out on social media in support of me because they thought I did it, but thought it was a mercy killing. There were also people, public figures in Augusta, Georgia, calling for my death. It was a whole new world of terror. And at this point, my new job that I have, my dream job, I lost it. My boss really, he believed in me, wanted me to keep my job, but I guess they decide the optics or whatever were too bad, so they let me go. I was also seeing, like, the. Just the bizarre, like. Like the allegations that I'd stolen morphine. And I'm like, where did this stuff come from? Like, what? You know, it was extremely surreal. And then on Reddit, those very forums that I have been posting anonymously for support, someone posts my news story. When someone is charged with a serious crime, like murder is. Well, they must have had enough evidence to show that they probably did it. But of course, now that you have been charged, you can't say anything. You cannot defend yourself in the public. You have to be very careful what your friends who have knowledge of the case say to defend you, because it's important that they don't give away information for your defense that could be later suppressed. As I had a lot of witnesses to my mom's decline and even to her death, it was just very surreal. And turning myself in was perhaps the most surreal experience of all. I had only ever been in jails before as an investigator, which is a law enforcement position. I had never been inside. And that was a transformative experience emotionally, psychologically. I was only in there for 12 hours. But I will tell you what, I was not the same person coming out as I was going in. So I'm dropped off at the jail at, like, five in the morning. It's the day of my bond hearing. You know, the attorney, as I spoke to, thought I would just be in holding. So I dressed all nice for court and everything, got my hair done, put on my makeup. No. When you turn yourself into jail, they don't know if you're going to be there for years, so you go ahead and get processed just like everybody else. So I am already, like, mentally caught off guard by the fact that, oh, no, I do have to go through the strip search. The spraying, the disinfectant on my crotch, in my hair, the bend over and spread them, and the being showered and then put in an orange jumpsuit, no bra, you know, just slides. And then here's your mug shot with wet hair and your makeup running from the shower. And now you're gonna go into the cell and just realizing, like, this cold, brutal system that you have suddenly entered into, like, the stripping away these layers of your individuality and your humanity is so complete in such a short amount of time. And then you get in there and you start talking to people, and you find out that many of them have been there for years because they couldn't afford bond because they were still awaiting a public defender. And there's just this pervasive hopelessness that you feel. A lot of them just had a life of incredibly bad luck. And it really brought into stark relief the privilege that I had in this situation, despite what an outlier I was. And that was really driven home. When the time came for my bond hearing that afternoon. I was seated in a room. When the camera came on, I saw dozens of people of friends and former professors and people who traveled from other states all pouring into the courtroom. And they were all there to stand and vouch for Me and vouch that I was not a threat to society, that I had deep ties to my community. And just seeing those dozens of people pour in from what had been a previously, like, empty courtroom, from the person who gone before me, I started to feel really emotional. And again, that gratitude started to seep in of I'm in this horrific situation, but look how many people are willing to put it all on the line for me. And then I see my attorney and the judge and the district attorney. And when the hearing began, it was already kind of unusual in that she started off by saying, I don't think that this was malice. That was odd, you know, and she said if she did it, it was more likely to be out of mercy. And normally the state doesn't say if, you know, because the state is the one charging you. They are alleging you did. Then she cites having spoken to my aunt and uncle, and while they did not exactly have a vigorous defense of me, my uncle did say, you know, my mom was dying and in terrible pain and. And really talked a lot about the agony my mom was in. And it seemed like that was new information to the DA and then, you know, my attorney is going through this line of people who are willing to put up their money or put up whatever it takes for me to make bond. And he keeps calling more people, and she stops him, and she approaches the bench like, this isn't necessary, and I see her say something to the judge. And so then the judge announces $200,000 bond, and I'm able to go home. And I realize then, now I am finally in a position that all these other people who are sitting in these cells behind me on the other side of this wall, could only dream of being it. That I have just made an astronomical bond for incredibly heavy charges. And now because of all of my years of education, understanding of the criminal legal system, and my collecting of evidence, I have a ton of evidence on bond. I now know I am in a position to get that evidence to my attorney, because if you are not released on bond, you don't have access to your laptop, your phone. It's so hard to build a case, you know, if you can't access your own evidence. And so that's when I really began to feel hope that maybe we could avert a trial entirely if I was able to sufficiently demonstrate evidence of my innocence. But first, we had to get their discovery and see what their evidence was. I was very eager to see discovery. And luckily, the DA in my case, Natalie Payne, turns over discovery very quickly. And Going through it, I realized, A, there wasn't a lot there, but B, it was sort of confusing why some of it was included because a lot of it's like, well, if they had just interviewed this person or just had this piece of evidence, they would have known that, you know, this is not an indication of guilt. And I was also, you know, really confused by no mention that I could see of her comfort kit prescription or morphine prescription. I didn't see any of the medical records from hospice in there, but I knew I had them that showed that she was actively dying and showed, you know, she had multiple myeloma. But I also saw her autopsy report. For the first time in almost two years, I had an answer for how she died. And one of the things I did was run it through ChatGPT, the full autopsy report, and asked for a full analysis. And it was, oh, this is multi organ failure, clear cut. She had full liver necrosis, she had kidney failure, she had 70% blockage in her arteries. She had brainstem atrophy, she had pneumonia in both her lungs. She had about everything wrong with her that, that you would expect. She was 80 pounds and multiple myeloma lesions throughout her brain as well as her bones. And I saw the morphine amount, and I had known or researched a bit about postmortem morphine redistribution too, and it wasn't high from the studies that I had seen. And so it sort of surprised me to see it listed as the cause of death. I knew that cause of death context matters a lot for medical examiners in terms of the condition of the person as they were dying. And one of the first thoughts I had was, I have so much more context than I'm seeing in this discovery. I was like, I've got recordings of these conversations. I have witnesses who were there who were never interviewed, including my friend who was a hospice nurse. You know, people who can attest to her condition. I have video and photo evidence and I have medical records. There was no indication in the discovery that anyone was aware of that. I had been called down from New York because she was dying. I couldn't find evidence of that. And so we realized that there was a chance that if we were to offer this additional context, as in all of my evidence, they might take it into consideration. He then sent all of my evidence to the GBI medical examiner and he called my attorney and told him that he was going to change the cause of death. It was no longer ruled a homicide for morphine toxicity, but he ruled it as an undetermined Then we sent all of that evidence, not just the revised cause of death, to the da and it didn't take her more than just a couple of days before she said, please, I'm dropping all charges. That is rare for a DA to do. And then suddenly it was like, poof, congratulations. Good luck with the rest of your life. It's so surreal that suddenly you're fighting for your life and then just like that, after everything's been annihilated, it's like, okay, well, good luck. I remember when I was talking to a local attorney and he said, rachel, you know, I don't think that there is a jury alive who would find you guilty of murder. However, what you really want to avoid is being charged. Because if you end up charged with this and you're cleared, nobody's going to be popping bottles of champagne at the end. Your life as you know it will have been over. And he was right. It's very hard for me to articulate the devastation because I'm one of those people who's always picking myself back up. I'm very lucky. I'm not genetically prone to depression. I'm not very woe is me. So I'm sort of flat when I talk about it. But I think that's partly the trauma of it because when I consider what I lost, it's sort of beyond all reckoning. In addition to my mom, in addition to my family, in addition to the ability to grieve was my entire life savings, my husband's life savings, my reputation was just obliterated. It didn't matter if a record is restricted or not. When there are headlines everywhere and your career, when you were in a public facing position as a writer and you're representing major clients, as I was in my case, no one wants to touch you. All your plans for what you were going to do with your life and your career have been changed to reorient around not only the pursuit of justice for what happened to you and your mom, but also for me at least, an overwhelming drive to make sure it never happens to another person again. Because I knew very early in that if I didn't have every single bit, not only a privilege that I have financially, criminal history wise, ethnically, education wise, if I hadn't collected all that evidence, if I hadn't gotten tipped off to being indicted and able to turn myself in, if everything hadn't gone right, I could well be sitting in jail today awaiting trial and unable to have gotten any of that evidence to the medical examiner or the DA and so I knew that if it happened to me, it would happen again to someone else. This is how laws come into being. We have a terrible precedent that exposes a gap, and then that gap is closed. So I started thinking of what I would want that law to look like. And obviously I knew it was going to be Marsha's law. I had been speaking to a ton of hospice professionals, a lot of hospice nurses. And one of the things I learned in addition to searching for laws that might protect family caregivers, is that a lot of this operates on the trust system. You know, when you have these myriad companies, not all of them require or mandate super detailed documentation of the Comfort Care Kit or the training that they give families. Most of them are not recording that the family members have been deputized, at least recording it in a way that the family member also has a copy of that. Because one of the things that I think might have made a difference in my case is if I had just had a contact share sheet that was signed by a hospice professional saying the caregiver, the daughter in this case and or, you know, naming other caregivers, has been deputized and trained on the administration of these medications, which are controlled substances for their loved one. If that had been handed over with the Comfort Care Kit. It's a lot harder to allege unauthorized or illegal use if you see clearly the family member has been deputized and healthcare professionals have signed off on it. And that's one really simple way to add a layer of protection. And so right now, that hope is what is really keeping me going, because it's a real gap and there's a real solution. And I am fully aware of how daunting that is. But I have hope that maybe, just maybe, maybe there is a narrow path to getting Marsha's law passed so that we can protect the millions of caregivers that are vulnerable in the future to charges like these. Hearing my story is important because people need to know that it a can happen and what they can do to protect themselves. And that's another project of mine that I'm working on, is consulting with other experts to document some ways that people can navigate the criminal legal system to if they have been wrongly charged or are suspected of a crime. Because a lot of people don't really know how to navigate that system. And there's not a lot of information out there for people. A lot of it you just kind of have to learn on the fly. And it's easy to make mistakes at the end of the day, as devastating as this has been for me, I'm glad it happened to me and not someone else. I can live with scrutiny around who I am, my life, my lifestyle, my looks, my mistakes. I can live with all of that scrutiny. I cannot live with this happening to another person. I don't care if it's 10, 15, 20 years down the line, me hearing about and thinking, oh, if I had ever gotten that law passed, that that probably wouldn't have happened. I couldn't live with that. I don't know how I would handle it if I were totally on my own and didn't have a strong community and didn't have people who loved me so much. I am nothing without my community. I am nothing without my people. Like, that was the balm to so much of my suffering. That was what gave me an accurate reflection of who I was, what my relationship with my mom was, who held my hand and got me through all of this. And what amazed me was the kindness and empathy and generosity that even strangers should showed me. And I was so overwhelmed with gratitude to find that people are so much more rich and complicated than that, and often so much more thoughtful and considered. And a lot of this experience also restored my faith in humanity. I have been devastated financially, reputationally, emotionally. But I am so far from broken in terms of my hope and my gratitude and my faith in other people. You know, the person I was before. I was very ambitious in my career, climbing more into the science, medical copywriting, and moving into this corporate world and not ever looking back at sort of the social justice advocacy that I previously done because I didn't have have the spoons for it after this happened, it sort of pushed me right back onto that path. And emotionally and socially, there's really no going back. I have come to appreciate that maybe my life path is less one of passion and more one of duty to my fellow man. I realize that I can still carry on my mom's legacy and instill the. The principles and values that she instilled in me. I can carry those on by advocating for other caregivers and making this law happen. I will also say it has softened me quite a bit in terms of political division, because you talk to a lot of people on every side of the aisle, every socioeconomic background, every political background. And fundamentally, we are all human beings who are dealing with life, death and suffering. And we all want the same thing at the end for those that we love and for ourselves when we die, to die peacefully and with minimal suffering and in the comfort of our families without fear of persecution. And I realized that it would be irresponsible of me to not have that empathy and understanding for everyone. I think that it's very much opened my eyes to the flaws that we have in this country, especially with how the criminal legal system works, but also to the potential. That's the paradoxical empowerment of, you know, being charged with a terrible crime is that now, at the very least, you have a story that people will listen to. And when people listen, people start to care. And when people start to care, they start to take action. That's where that sense of duty really comes in, of leveraging that to make something happen for the greater good.
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Today's episode featured Rachel Waters. Her story was recently featured in the Guardian. That article can be found online and a link is in the Show Notes. If you'd like to reach out to Rachel, her email address, socials and other links are also in the Show Notes from Audible Originals. You are listening to this Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the Episode Notes you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Wit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. We'd also like to thank Head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louis and Chief Content Officer Rachel Gyazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates LLC the opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram Actually Happening on the show's website thisisactually happening.com you can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art, hoodies and more. That's thisisactually happening dot com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Follow this Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of this is actually happening ad free by joining Audible.