Carol Vaughan (2:18)

Superu. The first thing Ann did was get on the walkie talkie and she said help. Help. John has killed himself. The Red Cross arrived first. One of them is to this day become a really good Friend of mine, his name is Carlos. Carlos described coming up the elevator and thinking, what are we getting into? I've never seen a house like this, furniture like this, electronics like this. These people have got to be dealing drugs. It's got to be cartel. There's no other way that this would be anything but that. Tension is building. He arrives into the room, approaches the bed where John is, has a big flashlight. And Carlos said that the minute he looked at him, he knew he was dead. And he immediately felt that it wasn't suicide.

Julian Morgans (3:11)

Hey, I'm Julian Morgans and you're listening what it was like. The show that asks people who have lived through big dramatic events what it was like. Hello. Welcome back. I gotta say, I'm pretty excited to bring you today's episode. Today's story is a just a classic case of money, madness, a big steamy romance, and then ultimately a mysterious death. It's about John and Anne Bender. And John was a maths genius who made millions on Wall street in the 1990s. And Anne was a beautiful, glamorous woman who came from money. And they met at a party. And in 2000, they moved from the US to Costa Rica to start a new life. And they built this huge house and they began living in increasing isolation and according to many, increasing instability. And then in 2010, John was found dead with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. Anne was charged with his murder, and not once, not twice, but three times. And the reason for that is that Costa Rica has no double jeopardy law. Yet each time, she was ultimately acquitted. So the question has always remained open. Was this a suicide or was it murder? Now, one of the reasons that we've never covered this story before is, is that, as I said, it all unfolds in Costa Rica and most of the witnesses only speak Spanish. But luckily there's an American born journalist who became just obsessed with this case, as I have, and her name is Carol Vaughan. She's our guest today. And she's a former theater performer who moved to Costa Rica for a change of life where she got a job working as a reporter for the Costa Rica Star. And she actually covered Ann Bender's trial day after day. And eventually she. She decided to write a book about the case called Crazy Jungle Love. And because of her theater background, I gotta say, she, she tells the story with a nice bit of drama. She's gonna walk us through what happened and why this case has haunted her for years. And for our subscribers. Yes, we're looking out for you too. We're actually talking with the butler who worked for John and Ann for years and years. And it's a great little insight into their world from someone who was actually there. So stick around for that one. All right, let's do it. Here is Carol Vaughan. Hey, Carol. Welcome to the show.

Carol Vaughan (5:42)

Thank you very much. Julian. Good to see you.

Julian Morgans (5:45)

It's such a nice thing to see you. It's such a nice thing when all the technology just works and we. We can communicate.

Carol Vaughan (5:51)

Agreed.

Julian Morgans (5:53)

So do you remember the very first time you heard the names John and Ann Bender?

Carol Vaughan (5:58)

The first time was when I was assigned by the star to go to the first trial. And I had no idea. I had not heard this story. I arrived in Costa Rica in 2012, and this was about 2014 that I started working on this. And as a drama in theater person, I thought, oh, my God, I've got to be here every single day. This is. It's like soap opera. Very dramatic. And so pretty much from. From day one, I knew I had to pursue it as a journalist. It was felt locally as though Ann absolutely had killed her husband. She wanted the money, and she didn't want him anymore, and so she killed him. And I think that reaction, woman to woman, thinking, you know, there's more to this story than that. Why would she possibly killed him? She had everything already.

Julian Morgans (6:53)

Can you set up their backgrounds for me? Who were they?

Carol Vaughan (6:56)

Yes, he was a Wall street hedge fund manager. He was just on the edge of becoming a billionaire and suffered a stroke and decided that was it, that career was over. He had already married Ann Bender, and the two of them decided they were going to chuck all their American everything and move to Costa Rica, where they had visited several times and open a nature reserve. And they were going to discover new animals, discover new plants. And probably number one in John's mind is Ann suffered from Lyme disease, and he was convinced he could find a cure for her here in Costa Rica. The two of them suffered from bipolar disorder. And as many people I've been told who suffer from that, they. They refuse medication often, or they go off their meds because they don't like that. They. Bipolar people get really high, and then they get abysmally depressed. And who wants to be down low like that? So to not ever have that high didn't appeal to them. It didn't take their meds. So they came to Costa Rica with a dream, and they were passionately in love. I never doubted that for a moment. I thought I was writing a love story. More than anything. I thought I was going to be the next Shakespeare, no question. And then it gradually dawned on me that they, you know, they. Their problems were serious. They couldn't manage to blend in with the community. People ended up hating them. People ended up hunting them, either kit trying to kidnap them or kill them. Their life was just. Was God awful.

Julian Morgans (8:36)

Why was there so much friction between them and the local community?

Carol Vaughan (8:40)

They had bought up probably 50 different properties around where they wanted to establish their reserve. They were paying great money. He arrived with $600 million. Imagine people were driving up to their mailbox and just jamming the deeds to their property into the mailbox. And he bought almost all of it. Created this huge thing. The people, I think, felt that they had sold too quickly, that they probably should have negotiated and gotten a little bit more money. That was clue number one. And number two, they thought that this nature reserve and these rich people were going to employ them all because they were going to need a lot of employees to manage all this. And the Benders never came through with that. I don't know what they promised or not, but. So that was two. And then the third reason was a lot of these locals were farmers. And to access their farmland, they had to pass through the Bender property. And the Benders put an end to that and said, no, no one's passing through here. So they couldn't get to their farms. So they'd sold their property for cheap. They didn't get jobs and they couldn't get to their farms. Not a good situation.

Julian Morgans (9:48)

No. Terrible, terrible. Can you tell me about Ann? You know, where did she come from? What did she look like? What was her personality?

Carol Vaughan (9:56)

She had. She was born in Brazil originally. She was the daughter of very high powered international banker. Came from a really good family. Her, her college degree was in visual arts. She got her first job out of college and it didn't really work for her. And she started to. Her bipolar disorder began to escalate. So she moved to Virginia, which is where she met John Bender. I have a really clear image of the first time I saw her. Immediately I thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn. Very delicate, very graceful. She moved like a ballerina. I mean, just even walking across the floor and having a seat and standing up again, I thought, you know, as a performing artist myself, I thought, wow, she's spectacular. She should be a movie star. She was married to this big lunk of a guy, worked out, was very physically fit, but not graceful, clumsy, a little goofy. They didn't meet up in my mind as a logical pair to begin With.

Julian Morgans (11:05)

Do you know anything about their relationship? I mean, what. What was the spark that drew them together?

Carol Vaughan (11:11)

They met over a punch bowl at a party, and John was serving her punch, and he noticed that her hands were shaking, and she noticed his hands were shaking, and they met eyes and they said, you know, what's up? And he said, well, I have bipolar disorder. And she said, I have bipolar disorder. So three weeks later, they were living together. Wow.

Julian Morgans (11:34)

So they bonded over mental illness and

Carol Vaughan (11:36)

developing this dream of getting out of the United States and moving someplace where they could be more free, less bothered by money, and could really do something good for humanity and Mother Nature.

Julian Morgans (11:52)

Hmm. I'm interested in the house. You know, can you. Can you walk me through their arrival? And. And they. They start to build this house.

Carol Vaughan (11:59)

Well, they arrived and they lived in a hotel in Perez Leon and then in a small house in Pere Celadon, which they hated because the neighbors were too close. They heard the dogs barking, all the typical gringo gripes they had, and they expressed them, which you just don't do. Costa Ricans are very polite, and they don't like confrontation, and they don't like you telling them that their neighborhood sucks. So they lasted about two years in that environment. All the while they were building this incredible house. Listen to this. It was four stories. It was round, and it had no walls and no windows. So it looks a little like a flying saucer. Or less polite. It looks like a parking garage. And the top floor was their bedroom. The whole top floor, which was parking lot size, was their bedroom. Then the next floor was their chef kitchen, which is the fanciest one I've ever even heard of. The next one was sort of the hangout place where they had their computers and he had his exercise equipment. And then the bottom floor was where they parked there they had matching quads and storage. So this house allowed every animal that felt like walking around to come on in. And the. The cleaning people and the guards had to be dodging these animals because John didn't permit anyone to hurt them. So they would arrive to work in the morning, and he would. John would say, well, there's a terciopelo, which is one of the most poisonous snakes in the world over there. And over there, there's a fingernail yellow snake, and be careful of that. And. And that's how they function. That's how they. That's how they control their household. And they never had people over. They never had guests, they never had parties, nothing. Just the two of them. Wow.

Julian Morgans (13:52)

Wow.

Carol Vaughan (13:53)

Pretty strange.

Julian Morgans (13:54)

And I understand that Anne owned a giant collection of lamps. Can you tell me about that?

Carol Vaughan (13:59)

Yes. They had accumulated 550 Tiffany lamps, if you can imagine the cost of that. And those lamps circled their bedroom with a switch to dim or a switch to turn all the way off. And someone not. I once asked John, why do you have all these lamps? And he said, well, Ann really likes sparkly things. And so we bought her some lamps. She not only likes sparkly lamps, she also likes sparkly jewels. They had millions of dollars of jewels strewn about their living space. Some of them set in settings, some of them up in little bags, some of them just rolling around on the floor because Anne liked her sparkly things, and that's how they lived.

Julian Morgans (14:46)

Just back to the lamps for a moment. Do you know if they had any other lighting source or was there was the lighting primarily from these lamps on that floor?

Carol Vaughan (14:54)

That's all there was on their bedroom floor. Wow. The other floors had regular electricity.

Julian Morgans (15:02)

I've seen photos of the interior of the house and the illumination from these lamps. I mean, it's kind of beautiful, but it's. It's a little eerie.

Carol Vaughan (15:10)

I would find it very eerie.

Julian Morgans (15:11)

Yeah. Yeah. Especially if the house is just sort of like an elaborate tent, and it's just wide open to Julian.

Carol Vaughan (15:17)

You can't imagine how dark the jungle is. It's so dark. I mean, you can't see your hand in front of your face.

Julian Morgans (15:24)

Yeah.

Carol Vaughan (15:25)

And that's how they lived.

Julian Morgans (15:26)

Yeah. Okay.

Carol Vaughan (15:27)

Bizarre.

Julian Morgans (15:28)

Okay, so do you know if they were happy when they first arrived?

Carol Vaughan (15:33)

I think they were very happy. They were thrilled that John's health was improving. Fresh water, fresh air, the food is good. No stress. I mean, you can imagine being a Wall street hedge fund guy. That's got to be the worst stress you can possibly imagine. So both of them relaxed. They were in love. It was the beginning of their marriage. They were planning the house. They were planning their future. They were real planners. I think right up until the end, they had all kinds of things they wanted to do. They were. They were living their life. So I think they were very happy. Very, very happy when they first arrived.

Julian Morgans (16:11)

Okay, so take me through the years. The clock is ticking over through the 2000s. And can you tell me about how their relationship evolves, their. Their. Their tenure in this house? Ev.

Carol Vaughan (16:23)

I think they were tootling along quite well until about the year 2015, maybe, when they were coming up the Quebradas road, which is the road that I live on, to visit a neighbor of mine who sells seeds, and they Wanted seeds to plant in their garden and in. And they had these incredible orchids. And as they were tootling up the road they were stopped by four men. And John was forced out of the car at gunpoint. Down onto the ground and they were shooting at his feet. And thought it was a kidnapping. But John thought it was an assassination attempt. I think it was an assassination attempt. I think that he had a business partner in the United States who claimed that he. That John owed him 90 million. And I think the guy was gonna collect. As a result of that, they became very paranoid. Hired a whole team of security guards that walked the premises with AK17s. Everything was on camera, everything was taped. They really contracted in on themselves in. In panic. They took a vacation to New Zealand where they thought maybe they should move, go someplace else. They were borderline preppers, people who are preparing for the end of the world. And New Zealand has a strong prepper community. So they stayed with them for a while. Eventually they came back to the United States. Meanwhile, John never learned good Spanish. And Spanish was. Was perfect. They found an attorney who was just some goofy guy in an office on the street kind of thing, but spoke perfect English. And they hired him and they gave him power of attorney for their whole property, for their whole savings, for everything. Because they were scared that the same guy who had come after them at the seed place was going to come after them again and they'd lose everything. So this flunky had power of attorney for everything for them. And unbeknownst to them, started to rip them off slowly but surely. Instead of transferring all of those properties that they had joined to make theirs, he started transferring into his name. So by the time the incident of. Of John's death, Ann came out of the hospital where she had to go because she was falling apart and discovered that she owned nothing. Her credit cards had been taken away and her passport had been taken away. So rough and not touristic note. It's something that's happened to a lot of Americans. Here you come. You trust. The person who speaks English is the person you should not trust. You don't ask any of the other Americans, you know about this guy or who else should we look at? Or they didn't do any of that. No due diligence. And they paid the price because the guy took everything and moved to Nicaragua. Costa Rica at the time didn't extradite, so they never got anything back.

Julian Morgans (19:29)

Not damn. Would you describe Costa Rica as a pretty corrupt place?

Carol Vaughan (19:35)

Yes. I think it's more so now than when they first came.

Julian Morgans (19:38)

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And tell me about Anne's health. What was happening for her at this time?

Carol Vaughan (19:43)

She had Lyme disease and bipolar disorder. So her Lyme disease was not caught in Costa Rica. We have almost no Lyme disease. It happened in Virginia, where she and John had been living on a. On a ranch or on a farm. She was taking medication for it. She was seeing a doctor in the United States. So she would go home for medical treatment and come back. She would go home and get new clothes and come back. Very funny. She had all these wonderful clothes, and yet she never went out. They were working very hard on their plans for the reserve. They had invited in scientists outside their house to help discover new things. They, in fact, found some gorgeous orchids that were new to. To science. They had animals galore in the house. Both of them were crazy about animals. They had their own hawk. They had their own hagwarundi, which is a cat like thing. They had a sloth, all of that, just no problems with him on the sofa kind of thing. These animals were everywhere. They wanted to be in the house.

Julian Morgans (20:54)

It sounds like pandemonium in this house. I gotta say. It doesn't appeal to me.

Carol Vaughan (20:57)

I. I think it probably was. Plus, Julian, it was very echoey because they didn't have carpets. They had this gorgeous black floor. Granite maybe.

Julian Morgans (21:07)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (21:08)

I'm not sure.

Julian Morgans (21:08)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (21:09)

And then no walls, but then a ceiling and so everything kind of. And then it must have been experience.

Julian Morgans (21:19)

You paint an evocative picture.

Carol Vaughan (21:21)

John's booming voice yelling at everyone, oh,

Julian Morgans (21:24)

great, what a mix. I can't imagine what a cacophony it was. Okay, so. So take me up to the last year of his life. What was happening?

Carol Vaughan (21:33)

I think they both realized that their mental problems were escalating. Fortunately, usually when John was manic, she was depressed. And the reverse, if she was manic, he was depressed. So they would kind of even each other out. I spoke with her psychiatrist, and he said their condition was called something called folie a deux, which is where one person escalates the other. And so they were egging each other on to horrible extremes of mental problems. At night, they would play games online. And then she reported that John would rehearse how he was going to kill himself. He would put all of his drugs out in front and say, I'm going to take this one, and then I'm going to take that one and I'm going to take that one. And then after that, he kind of calmed down. So Ann let him do that. Rehearsal every couple nights. And he had told his family and hers that he had lost a lot of money in his investments. He felt he had let Ann down because he had never found her a cure for anything. And he felt like a failure as a person. So he was in a really low spot at the time of his death. And I think she was very frustrated that she was unable to. To help. He had been injecting Ann with river water from a. Not very clean water that passed through their property. And after John's death, she admitted herself to the hospital and SEMA in San Jose. And they found 36 injection sites, some of them infected, and she was down to about £70. So I think she was just moments away from death herself. One of the two of them was. Was bound to die, was just a train wreck. What.

Julian Morgans (23:27)

What was up with the injections? Where did he get this idea from?

Carol Vaughan (23:31)

I have no idea. I think he. He was trying everything and he wasn't right in his mind. I mean, with that kind of money, I'd find the best expert in Lyme disease, and I'd bring him to me and say, fix her or help her or soothe her.

Julian Morgans (23:46)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this sounds to me like some sort of crackpot alternative medicine. Do you know if they were interested in that type of community?

Carol Vaughan (23:56)

They were very much. And interestingly enough, they had a waterfall in their property, which is the longest waterfall in Costa Rica, called diamante waterfall. And they both felt that that had huge power for them. River water and waterfalls have negative ions which are very, very good for you, make you feel good.

Julian Morgans (24:18)

Okay. Theoretically, as long as you're not battling lyme disease at the same time.

Carol Vaughan (24:23)

Yeah.

Julian Morgans (24:24)

Okay, so this all sounds like a bit of a powder keg. Can you walk me through how it came to a head?

Carol Vaughan (24:30)

Yeah. Again, I wasn't there. I was at all the trials. And you have to imagine that Ann was sitting in the courtroom, she claims. And her. Her statement on this has never changed one iota. This is exactly what she said happened. She went to bed early. John would carry her up from the lower level kitchen area up and put her to bed. She had gone to bed first. She was asleep, but not soundly asleep. She was, like, drifting off. She heard a voice which she thought was his. He climbed into bed, and she didn't hear what he said. And he repeated himself and he said. She said, now you're going to know what it's like to wake up next to your dead husband. And she freaked. And she. She looked up and she saw him she says with a gun to his head, and she could see the red dot. She lifted up onto her knees, and she grabbed his hands that held the gun. There was a tussle, the gun went off, and he died instantly. The problem is he was ambidextrous, but he always shot with his right hand, and the gunshot entered here and never came out the bullet. So for him to have shot himself like that seems very unlikely. 1, 2. Experts in suicide say almost never someone suicides next to their partner. That just almost never happens. Three, if you're gonna suicide, you do it here or here.

Julian Morgans (26:08)

So just for anyone who's listening and not watching, you'd shoot yourself in the front of the face. But the bullet. We're saying that the bullet went through the back of his head.

Carol Vaughan (26:18)

Back, left occipital.

Julian Morgans (26:19)

Okay. And never came out of his forehead. It's lodged in his brain.

Carol Vaughan (26:23)

It never came out.

Julian Morgans (26:24)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (26:25)

Just scrambled his brain. And he was dead almost instantly, which is a blessing.

Julian Morgans (26:28)

Yeah.

Narrator/Advertiser (26:28)

Right.

Julian Morgans (26:29)

Okay. How was his body found?

Carol Vaughan (26:32)

He was lying on his side, curled. And the prosecutor found it very odd that after this tussle, he would be curled up in a fetal position. And he looked very calm and peaceful. And he had gone to bed with his earplugs in his headphones.

Julian Morgans (26:52)

Yeah.

Carol Vaughan (26:52)

And they found that odd, too. Why would you go to bed to kill yourself and still have your earbuds in?

Julian Morgans (26:58)

Yeah. Yeah. Or if we're to believe Anne's testimony that he'd somehow gotten up in the middle of the night with a gun, it's weird that he's still listening to his AirPods or whatever.

Carol Vaughan (27:08)

Well, he came to bed with a gun that she. She acknowledges.

Julian Morgans (27:13)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (27:13)

There was intention there because he didn't usually bring his gun to bed. They both had. They had matching Glocks, and they were both armed at all times and did shooting practice daily. They, you know, they were. They were waiting for something really bad to happen, and it did, but not like they thought,

Julian Morgans (27:34)

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Carol Vaughan (29:10)

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Carol Vaughan (30:23)

have to tell you, I was just looking on ebay where I go for all kinds of things I love. And there it was.

Julian Morgans (30:29)

Gram trading card.

Carol Vaughan (30:30)

One of the rarest.

Julian Morgans (30:31)

The last one I needed for my set.

Carol Vaughan (30:33)

Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it. And now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers?

Julian Morgans (30:42)

Ebay has all the parts that fit my car.

Carol Vaughan (30:44)

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Julian Morgans (30:58)

I mean, just off the bat, you wouldn't usually expect to see a suicide in the back of the head. That seems illogical to me.

Carol Vaughan (31:07)

What can I say?

Julian Morgans (31:08)

Yeah, well, just walk me through the next 24 hours, you know, what happened the next day. How was this? How was this? How was the body found?

Carol Vaughan (31:17)

Oh, well, there's. There's all kinds of stuff here. If I'm going to be at length here, please. The first thing Ann did was get on the walkie talkie and call for help. There was a head of security on duty that night. She called him and she said, help, Help. John has killed himself. Osvaldo Aguilar came running up to the house. Took him about 12 minutes. Had never been up in the elevator. The house had an elevator, an open elevator, and unlocked the elevator. He was able to come up, unlock the door to get into the living space. It's dark, right? There's nothing but these Tiffany lamps up there, so you can barely see where you're walking. Approaches the bed and sees that John's dead. So he calls his supervisor in San Jose and says, john is dead. He's been shot in the head. So that supervisor immediately gets in his car and comes barreling down. It's about three hours from San Jose to come and supervise the scene. Meanwhile, he said, you've got to call the police and you've got to call the ambulance, the Red Cross. So both of those calls were made. The Red Cross arrived first. The first. There was two guys that they sent. One of them is, to this day become a really good friend of mine. His name is Carlos. Carlos described coming up the elevator, which is very slow, and thinking, what are we getting into? This has got to be. I've never seen a house like this, furniture like this, electronics like this. These people have got to be dealing drugs. It's got to be cartel. There's no other way that this would be anything but that. These people don't have farmland, they don't have jobs. So he's building. Tension is building. He arrives into the room, approaches the bed where John is, has a big flashlight. And Carlos said that the minute he looked at him, he knew he was dead. And he immediately felt that it wasn't suicide. Looking at all the angles, looking at the up and down of it. Anne had blood spatter on her, blood on her hands, and was wiping it off with paper towels and putting it in the trash. So Carlos and his partner made their evaluation that the guy was dead, and they would make arrangements to take the body back to the morgue here in town. And then the cops arrived, and our equivalent of the FBI, which is called the Oihota. The Oihota came with a. A team of maybe four men who had never also seen anything like that before. They come walking up now, it's almost dawn, so they can see all the lamps. They see the jewels, like, rolling around on the floor. They were just stunned and didn't know what to make of it. So rather than start, whatever you do when you arrive at a crime, seize, tape it off or whatever, they start looking at the stuff and snapping photos of each other, holding the stuff, walking through the crime scene, kicking the bullet shell. I mean, it was a mess, an absolute mess. And I feel that we'll never know what really happened because the crime scene was so badly handled, mishandled. They never fingerprinted either John or Anne. They never fingerprinted the gun. And Americans who watch nothing but crime television all the time, I mean, we could have done a better job than that. They took Anne and John down to the police station, John on a gurney, and they did the interview with Anne, with him, her dead husband there lying next to her. Just not very respectful, in my opinion. John and Ann had passports, oddly, from Grenada, which everyone thought was strange, too. Why wouldn't they have American passports? They're Americans, but I think they had money tucked away probably here and there, and Grenada was one of them. Anne was falling apart from the police station. She called her psychiatrist and said, you've got to admit me to the hospital because I can't. I just can't. So next day, she was taken to the hospital where she spent three months trying to recuperate. She was emaciated. She looked like Auschwitz. So they. They put in a feeding tube and then they put in a port to her heart. They. They did real. Just emergency medicine on her to get her back even functioning. Her psychiatrist said when he saw her and he knew her well, she just had this blank look on her face. She was. He said she was gone. She was just gone. And it took several months before she kind of came back to. To reality.

Julian Morgans (36:12)

It sounds like this is the medical attention that she'd been needing for years.

Carol Vaughan (36:16)

I think so. I think so, yeah. And, you know, skipping ahead, I went to visit her once in jail And I was expecting to find someone who's just, you know, get me out of here kind of thing. And I found her calm and almost at peace. She was in a dormitory with 39 other women who really rallied behind her and took care of her. And she was having medical care and warmth from all these women. And I thought she looked better than I practically had ever seen her sleeping on the floor in a Costa Rican jail. I wouldn't be the least bit happy. And she was just totally at peace. I'll never get over that. Wow.

Julian Morgans (37:01)

What did you make of that?

Carol Vaughan (37:02)

I. Totally. Personal. No medical experience. Nothing. Nothing. I think she was glad she was out of underneath him. I think she saved her life. They never. Her lawyer never presented her case as self defense, which I would have, because I think he was slowly killing her. And I think that if. If there had not been that crescendo in a matter of months, she would have been dead. Between the dirty river water and weighing only 70 pounds and being screwed up mentally, I mean, her days were numbered. So I think she had found a safe spot where she could just give herself some grace.

Julian Morgans (37:45)

Yeah. So you imagining that it was just a very manipulative, claustrophobic relationship.

Carol Vaughan (37:51)

I'm 100% sure of that. Again, I'm. I'm close friends with. With Osvaldo, the Meyer Domer, who wouldn't tell you what he really thought had happened, but I know he saw her injured on many occasions, and I know.

Julian Morgans (38:06)

Wait, so he was violent, John was

Carol Vaughan (38:09)

violent, and they had violent sex? A lot of. A lot of it. And they filmed it?

Julian Morgans (38:14)

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell me. Tell me more about that.

Carol Vaughan (38:16)

I never saw the tapes, but I know people who did see the tapes, and I know that they were into S M. Okay.

Julian Morgans (38:24)

And this was after John's body was removed from the house and Anne had been arrested. I'm guessing that they found a collection of homemade pornography.

Carol Vaughan (38:35)

Yes.

Julian Morgans (38:36)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (38:37)

The OIHOTA came and removed everything from the house. All the jewels, all the furniture, all the exercise equipment, all the electronics, all the computers, all the cameras, everything. I mean, worth thousands and thousands of dollars. And they took the tapes and they took the sex toys, and I never laid eyes on any of that, but from people I know, that's. That's what happened. And I don't know what's happened to that. That paraphernalia. Wow. They took all the lamps, too. I would have liked a little lamp, but.

Julian Morgans (39:09)

Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of lamps to be distributed. 550 lamps. Where'd they all go well.

Carol Vaughan (39:15)

Osvaldo has one. The butler.

Julian Morgans (39:18)

Yeah.

Carol Vaughan (39:18)

That Anne gave to him, which was nice. The lamps were stored in the basement of the Banco de Costa Rica here. That has a holding room for. For things like that. Like, mostly it's drug busts when they confiscate everything and store it down there. By the time Anne finally got her some of her jewels back and almost none of her possessions back, all the lamps practically were broken. Just smashed to smithereens.

Julian Morgans (39:45)

Deliberately or just carelessly?

Carol Vaughan (39:48)

Don't know. No, no.

Julian Morgans (39:50)

I mean, it sounds like the house was just looted, basically.

Carol Vaughan (39:53)

I feel that way. I know of the first guys that came to evaluate the crime scene. Two of those people took early retirement at about 40 years old and now drive really nice cars and their wives have really nice jewelry. So, you know, make of that what you want, but.

Julian Morgans (40:13)

Right.

Carol Vaughan (40:13)

Stuff disappeared.

Julian Morgans (40:15)

Yeah, it sounds like they stole a lot of jewels and.

Carol Vaughan (40:18)

And then bad news. Lawyer came and completely took out the entire sculpture garden, which is worth millions. The artwork, which was with. Worth millions. Took it to Nicaragua.

Julian Morgans (40:30)

God. Despite all of this, Anne seemed pretty. I don't know, at peace in prison.

Carol Vaughan (40:37)

She was, you know, how do. I can't explain that to you, but she really. I Her. The lines in her face had smoothed out. She'd put on some weight. She still had a heart port and told me that it was very difficult for her to deal with that because you're only allowed to bathe once a week in. In jail. And her. Her cellmates would heat up water for her so that she could have a bucket of a clean, warm water so she could wash the heart port out. But it kept getting infected and she just seemed sort of to rise above the whole thing. She was. She was Audrey Hepburn in jail. It was. I. I can't explain to you what it was like. Yeah. Wow.

Julian Morgans (41:22)

Okay, so take me through the trials. Let's just do it chronological order. I mean, it sounds to me pretty suspicious. I think if I was a prosecutor and I saw a man with a bullet wound in the back of the head, I'd think, right, well, this looks like murder. Walk me through it.

Carol Vaughan (41:39)

Well, recognize Also, it was never 100 proven that it wasn't an outside person who had come in. And I'll tell you why. Their head of security that was in San Jose had all the codes and all the keys to that house. So who knows if he hired someone to come in and do that. Anne said she heard a voice, but who knows if it was really John. There was a forensic expert who did Testify at trial that he felt the gun had come from down low next to the bed and come up and killed him like that. Neighbors reported hearing and seeing two speeding cars leaving the crime scene about 20 minutes after the gunshots. None of that was ever explored. So there are three possibilities. He killed himself, she killed him, or there was a homicide by an outside party. So first trial found the insufficient evidence to convict her. She was released. She moved to San Jose. She fell in love with a new person. Could have been John's twin. Big beefcake guy. He was a bodybuilder. He taught bodybuilding and had his own gym. She was very happy. They had a dog together. Costa Rica called her back for a second trial. After that second trial, he, Anne, was found guilty on all counts first degree murder and sentenced to 22 years in jail. Immediately they took her off to jail and that's where I went to visit her. Her boyfriend was responsible for bringing food for all the women in her cell room. One of the reasons why they were so supportive of her, besides being gorgeous and would flirt with all of them, he would bring them treats. His name was Gregory Fisher. Mysteriously, after about a month and a half of her being in prison, he was found dead in his bed in San Jose. But her boyfriend, and it was assumed that it was an allergic reaction, but he had never suffered from allergies previously. So the press here went nuts. You know, she's a black widow, she's killing everybody.

Julian Morgans (44:02)

It was, it was good drama, great drama, great twist. But what do you make of it?

Carol Vaughan (44:08)

I think he, he died of natural causes.

Julian Morgans (44:10)

I think, yeah, it's just coincidence, but

Carol Vaughan (44:12)

it put her in a really bad spot because he was supporting her in jail.

Narrator/Advertiser (44:17)

Right.

Carol Vaughan (44:18)

Her lawyer realized that she was going to die in jail if they didn't do something. So he demanded to let her out and prepare for a third trial. And long story short, at the third trial, she was found not innocent, but again, insufficient evidence to be found guilty. At this point, Costa Rica had taken away her passport. I was working with the US Embassy as a volunteer in Pere Serenon to help Americans that get in trouble here because it happens all the time. We applied for an emergency passport just on the odd chance that she would be found innocent and be let go. And I just have this memory of I was sitting probably three rows behind her in court and I was convinced that it was going to be guilty again. And I would watch them take her out and I'd never see her again because she'd die in jail. But just on the Offside. I put the passport on the floor and with my foot slid it. And the person in front of me saw it and slid it. And Ann saw it and picked it up and put it in her bra. And she had her passport out of Dodge. And then they announced unanimous, not enough to convict. And the whole street had been blocked off. There was international press, I think, from every country in the world. It stopped. San Ysidro just. It was the most amazing thing we'd ever seen here. That case, that true crime case was voted number one true crime case in Central America by a various different organizations. It was huge.

Julian Morgans (45:55)

Wow. What year was this?

Carol Vaughan (45:59)

20. Either 15 or 16.

Julian Morgans (46:02)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (46:02)

I don't quite remember.

Julian Morgans (46:04)

Okay. And this marks the finish line for Anne.

Carol Vaughan (46:07)

Well, almost. She got. Her brother had come to to back her up in, in court. They went back to San Jose together. They went to the airport and she had been put on a no fly list by Costa Rica and they wouldn't let her leave. And she. I wasn't with her. But her brother said she lost it. Almost like he had never seen her lose it before. I mean, she saw the, the way out. And Costa Rica said no. And it took about two weeks to get that straightened out. She went back to the United States. Her grandmother was still alive to live with her grandmother. And she's slowly completely retreated from contact with anyone.

Julian Morgans (46:56)

Hey, we're going to take a quick ad break, but stick around because we'll be back with more what it was like.

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Carol Vaughan (48:09)

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Carol Vaughan (48:32)

I wrote the book about this whole ordeal. I very much wanted for her to see it because I know a whole lot of stuff that I would never tell about anyone. And I wanted her to know that I had never put any of that stuff in. The nasty stuff in. Yeah, but she wouldn't. She wouldn't deal with me.

Julian Morgans (48:49)

Yeah, Right. She's just turned her back on the whole thing.

Carol Vaughan (48:52)

Yeah. And, you know, who can blame her?

Julian Morgans (48:54)

Yeah, who can blame her? Exactly.

Carol Vaughan (48:55)

She had commented to someone that I know that what she would want in her heart is to have that property, which is called Boracayan, which is a name that she and John just made up because they thought it sounded kind of indigenous. It doesn't have any meaning at all. She had wanted Boracayan to. To become a retreat for people who suffer from bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.

Julian Morgans (49:22)

Okay.

Carol Vaughan (49:22)

Divide that building up into small rooms to house people recovering.

Julian Morgans (49:28)

Yeah. Right.

Carol Vaughan (49:28)

And it just stands empty in the

Julian Morgans (49:31)

jungle, Is that right? To this day. Is it. Is it sort of dilapidated and abandoned?

Carol Vaughan (49:38)

I've heard two different opinions on that. I talked. It's for sale. I'm sure you're interested. It's 26 million a steal. Absolutely. So there is a real estate agent, and I would guess the real estate agent is at least keeping the grass cut. Things don't do well unoccupied in the jungle. Mold and animals and blah, blah. There are screens that pull down that they would pull down at night. Metal screens to keep bats out. But apparently there have been very few takers on the sale. So the real estate agent has managed to sell off four or five chunks away from the house.

Julian Morgans (50:17)

Right.

Carol Vaughan (50:18)

I think it'll probably never sell. And if it did, if someone did want to buy it, the huge cluster of all those properties that were never legally transferred, it would be impossible to get title to it. It would be. You'd buy a nightmare and a half. Wouldn't be worth it.

Julian Morgans (50:36)

Yeah, seriously. Plus it's, you know, got this very dark energy over the top of it and has no interior walls and no.

Carol Vaughan (50:45)

No door on the bathroom that would. I wouldn't pay 26 million and not have a bathroom door. Thank you.

Julian Morgans (50:51)

Yeah. Seriously. It seems overpriced just a little. Yeah. Also, where is that 26 million gonna go? I'm assuming it's not gonna go to Anne.

Carol Vaughan (51:02)

Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I know that the horrible lawyer that moved to Nicaragua after 10 years could come back and not be charged with anything. So he is back. He's back practicing law again. So I don't know.

Julian Morgans (51:18)

Okay, so where does this story stand these days for you personally?

Carol Vaughan (51:26)

Well, you know, I keep thinking if there's closure, I'll get to closure eventually. But I don't, because it was sort of my graduate school of Costa Rica. Learning the language, learning the culture, meeting these people. The ambulance driver and I see each other every week for coffee. The butler and I see each other several times a week. Their veterinarian is my veterinarian. I mean, I'm still right in the belly of the beast with it. I'm haunted by the fact that for any expat moving to any foreign country, really, we all have just one foot on a banana peel. I've never had $600 million, but it went so badly for them. Imagine what it could do to someone who comes with $50,000 and wants to buy a nice little house. And they could have almost the exact same problems. About 60% of the Americans that moved to Costa Rica after two years move back because they can't take it. It's just too complicated to wheel and deal. Too corrupt.

Julian Morgans (52:36)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what is it about this story? Well, like, what's. What is the linchpin for you that just makes it so fascinating that the.

Carol Vaughan (52:46)

The layers of it. I started it as a love story, and I thought, I'm never going to have someone who loves me like this guy loved her. I mean, from the photos, you can tell it's just. Just incredibly loving. So I was attracted to the love story. And then at each level, I would get deeper into what it was like to manage all those people. Having a lawyer that betrays you, Having your. Having passport taken away from you, being ill and getting increasingly more sick, being isolated. And then your husband is getting crazier and crazier, and he's whipping on you and injecting you. I mean, her transformation, when I saw her in jail, each time I went deeper into the down the rabbit hole, I became more and more hooked, and it wasn't necessarily healthy. You know, didn't always wash my hair, and dog didn't go out as often as he should, and, you know, romances didn't work out so well and.

Julian Morgans (53:44)

Yeah, right. You put your life on pause.

Carol Vaughan (53:46)

I. I just became obsessed.

Julian Morgans (53:48)

Yeah.

Carol Vaughan (53:49)

And I learned tons. It was the first book I'd ever written, I, I got more confidence as an investigative reporter but it also, I have a place in my heart I can touch where I've, I feel for what happened to them and I feel what happened bad for what happened to Costa Rica because they lost a nature reserve, 37 people lost their jobs, hundreds of people lost their property. I mean it was just catastrophic.

Julian Morgans (54:19)

Yeah. And what about for John? You know, I'm assuming that he's got family that grieve him.

Carol Vaughan (54:25)

He does. He has a mother and a father and a younger brother. Interestingly, his younger brother also suffers from bipolar disorder but is so disabled by it he's never even been able to work. So he lives with the parents. I have spoken to his parents and they were very, they were unsurprised by what happened in that John died. They were non committal about how they thought it happened and they felt sort of, it was faded that, that they, they had talked to each other that it was going to happen at some point. They were prepared when it did happen, they felt quite prepared for it. They didn't come for the trial. They were supportive of her, of Anne, but they just, they felt it was karma. I think that's the right term.

Julian Morgans (55:19)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see that there is definitely there are elements of kind of comic logic about all of this and I, that, I mean just from your account it sounds to me like, like an is guilty of murder here. By the, by the picture that you're presenting, it sounds like she was in a God awful relationship and in the end shooting him was the only way out. But I, I don't think of her as a bad person. Through this story she sounds to me like a survivor. And so what have you learned from all of this?

Carol Vaughan (55:49)

Personally, I think I've learned that for me it was an incredible gift from the universe that I chose Costa Rica and then I stumbled upon this story and was able to make all the contacts, have good enough Spanish to be able to hear in court what was going on and understand it. But I, I don't feel that I have made peace with it because it was just so awful. I mean sitting in the court room with that floor to ceiling photo of a dead John out. You know, I'll never get over that. I don't know. Hi Ann. Will. But I'll never get over that.

Julian Morgans (56:24)

Yeah, I don't think anyone's really designed to be able to see things like that.

Carol Vaughan (56:28)

No.

Julian Morgans (56:30)

Well, Carol, thanks so much for coming on the show and thanks for telling me this story. It's been absolutely enthralling.

Carol Vaughan (56:36)

Bless your heart. Ciao.

Julian Morgans (56:38)

Hey, just a reminder, you should totally check out Carol's book, Crazy Jungle Love. It's her personal account of the Bender story. And, and there's just so many more details in that book that we could fit in today. And it's excellent. It's really well written, and it's available on Amazon and all of the usual other places. And we'll link it in the show notes as well. And just before you go, one last thing. We did manage to speak with someone who knew the Benders very well. It was their longtime butler, Osvaldo, and he worked for them for over a decade and he witnessed their relationship right up close. You know, he was at their house cleaning and buying all the groceries day after day after day, and he saw their mental decline. That interview appears on this week's subscriber only episode. And Carol's actually going to join us again. And she translates as as Valdo describes what life inside the Benders house was really like. You can find that on our subscriber feed. And if you're not a subscriber, you know what to do. And we'll see you next week on what It Was Like. What It Was like is produced by Rachel Tuffery. This episode was edited by Ellie Dickey, who also does our research. Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our theme music was produced by Jimmy Saunders. And this whole thing has been a super real production.

Carol Vaughan (58:08)

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