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Crime Story Episode 15: Skye Borgman

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to sexual assault. Please take care.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

SOUNDCLIP

SKYE BORGMAN: All the crime stories that I tackle, they're usually stories that are confusing to me. Like how could something like this happen? But more than that, it's the people who embody these stories, and it's all these shades of humanity from the very, very best in people to the very, very worst in people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Skye Borgman is fascinated by the human condition, by what drives people, the shades of grey that are always there in a crime if you look just close enough. So when the director read The Jan Broberg Story, a memoir about a young girl abducted not once but twice by a family friend and a member of their Mormon church, she knew this was a story that she wanted to tell. Skye's resulting documentary, Abducted in Plain Sight, is a shocking and raging watch that begs viewers to hold their judgement even when it's hard to do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Watching your doc, I have to admit, there were times when I think I might have screamed out loud, where I actually said to myself… there was a moment where I was like, is this real? What was your reaction when you started to unpack this story?

SKYE BORGMAN: I mean, it wasn't that different, I don't think, from your reaction. I think confusion was probably the first thing that sort of popped into my mind and my… When I was trying to figure out what this story was or what had really happened, I just couldn't figure out how somebody could be kidnapped twice. And so that's really what I started looking at, was how could something like this happen? And what were the events surrounding Jan's double kidnapping that led from one to the next? And that's really… I think that's really what drew me to the story is that it was completely confounding to me, and I just needed to know how something like this could happen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So to really understand the story, we have to understand that a big part of the Brobergs’ identity was wrapped up in their religion. They were members of the LDS church or the Latter-day Saints. Can you tell me more about that?

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. The Broberg family was kind of a typical LDS family that were raising three young daughters in the 70s. Jan is the oldest of this family. Her parents, Mary Ann and Bob Broberg, are really decent, good American people. And it's a small town, Pocatello, that they're raised in. They go to church on a regular basis, and they're good people. They're trusting people. And I think that's part of what laid the groundwork for something like this to happen, is that they are incredibly trusting, and that they trusted a man by the name of Berchtold to spend time with their daughter. And that's how this kidnapping, first kidnapping and second kidnapping of Jan eventually came to play.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So Bob, Robert Berchtold, who they called B, how did he become part of their family? Who was he to them?

SKYE BORGMAN: So B, we’ll call him B, it gets a little bit complicated because both… they're both named Bob, right? The dad is Bob, and then there's Bob Berchtold. So we call… they ended up calling him brother B a lot, but the Brobergs met Berchtold, B, at church, and he immediately ingratiated himself into their family. They came to find out that they were neighbours. They lived just kind of around the block from one another. And so there were a lot of things that these two men had in common. They were both businessmen. They both had children that were around the same ages. And so their families would get together and they would… the children would play together, and the mothers would get together and they would sort of spend time together doing various different things. So these two families became very quickly close.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So close, in fact, that looking at it now, you saw the long game he was playing. So what was he doing within the family? What could you look back now and say that was a red flag?

SKYE BORGMAN: I think it's pretty clear that he targeted this family. He met them in church and knew that this was a family, through, you know, a couple of first meetings, that were open to things and that were accepting of him. And so he saw and sort out a couple of weaknesses within this family, points that he could kind of start to dig into and start to sort of crack open. And I think with most people who are like this, there's a lot of shame and blame and denial that are huge and powerful emotions. And the more that he could sort of attack something in someone that would bring them shame, it brings on this denial. And I think he did that with both Bob and Mary Ann, but he has sexual interactions with both of them. And that starts to really drive a wedge into their marriage. And then especially the sexual interactions that he had with Bob Broberg, it makes this very religious man, this good husband, really start to question who he is and what his sexuality is and what his priorities are. And I think he really starts to collapse back. And more than anything, these two parents are really focussed on their own problems. And so they're looking at each other and they're looking at Bob Berchtold. And so what that ends up doing is they're completely turning away from Jan, and they're not looking at what problems are going on with their daughter at this time. And I think that was a very meticulous and very, very planned approach from Berchtold.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And we're going to get into the fact that his sights were always obviously Jan. But what I also found, when you look back at the movie, your documentary, is that he, B, brother B was very good at manipulating their naivete. And it seemed like that community was kind of perfect for somebody like him because of the way that like LDS, you know, they don't really talk about sex. They don't. Homosexuality isn't part of… like it's a very small and closed society. And I feel like he was very purposefully going after… like especially, like you said, with the dad and initiating the sexual activity that seemed to sort of take him quite by surprise. And I feel like it was a very planned and deliberate way, and he knew the response was going to be the shame.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. And this is in the 70s too, right? So I mean, look, I still think there are a lot of, a lot of issues today that people aren't open to talk about. And I think it can absolutely and continues to happen to this day. It's not just a function of what was going on in the 70s, but especially in that time, especially in this very… this small community, this sheltered community. I mean, I know that the FBI agent says we'd never even heard of a pedophile before. Now we've got those words. We know how to talk about this. We know that it exists, that older gentlemen can have feelings towards underage girls and boys. So we know that's something now. They didn't even know that then. So times have changed somewhat, but it absolutely is this, this very sheltered community. And it doesn't just happen to the LDS either. I mean, I think that's also something to really take into consideration here. And it wasn't something in my film especially, that I wanted to say it only happens in LDS communities. It doesn't. I mean, statistics are pretty, pretty broad in saying that it doesn't, but it is sheltered communities. It's places where people are a little bit naive, people who are trusting, people who haven't come across people who are manipulative before. It can happen in communities like that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And we'll get to Jan. But I really felt like your documentary did a lovely job giving us a sense of the 70s. It was great. I mean, a lot of the interviews were obviously now, but there was something about it that really, you got a feeling of what life was like then.

SKYE BORGMAN: It was important because I do think it was very much this, this day and age that this happened in. And to get a sense of the 70s and to get a sense of what their life was like in that time was important.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's get to Jan. Because like I said, and like you said in the doc, Jan was brother B’s focus 100%. It was October 1974 is the day that sort of everything really shifted in the household, and the parents could no longer not notice that there was something going on with Jan. So what happens that day?

SKYE BORGMAN: So this is the day that Berchtold kidnaps Jan and takes her away and has her in Mexico for the next few months. And there was always something leading up. There was an argument. I don't know if it's necessarily an argument between B and Mary Ann, where he wanted to take Jan horseback riding and she said no because Bob had said no. They were starting to get a little bit suspicious. Something didn't feel right to them, especially with Jan's dad, Bob Broberg. It was really feeling wrong that brother B was spending so much time at their house, spending so much time with their kids alone. And so he was really trying to separate. But again, this very faithful family wants to be generous and wants to have grace towards other people, and they're not really willing to sort of listen to their guts at this moment in time. But Berchtold ends up taking Jan. Picks her up even though the parents have said, no, we don't want you to do this. Takes her horseback riding and then drives away with her and spends the next five months in Mexico with her.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And a reminder, she's 12.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yes, yes, she's 12 and wants to… I mean, I think like many 12-year-olds, wants to be grown up, wants, you know, is the oldest of the sisters, of the Three sisters and really wants to be grown up, so is starting to also feel herself like she has big emotions for this man. She's not sure what they are, but she trusts him absolutely. She looks at him as a parent figure, and then she soon sort of over the next few years, starts to look at him as potentially a boyfriend. Like her feelings towards this man are incredibly complicated.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it's on this trip that he really does ramp up the sexual assaults. Correct? Like if I remember correctly, there wasn't a lot of it before he took her to Mexico.

SKYE BORGMAN: Right. Yeah. And this is the first time where Jan, she has varying degrees of remembering what exactly happened. And I think a lot of that, and she says that she's blocked it out. But she does have very specific memories of sexual assault happening on this trip to Mexico and not any memories of that happening before. I mean, I think really, before this, it had been sort of setting the stage and getting the family to a point where it opened the door to make it possible that Berchtold could indeed kidnap Jan and take her to Mexico and kind of live under his own rules and not have anybody looking over him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And building the trust he had with her.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. And he continues to build the trust with her once he's kidnapped her. And he becomes, I mean, it's the next part of a lot of what these people are doing, he's isolating her from people she knows, and then he's making her completely dependent on him. He's through… I mean, at this point, when she's in the motorhome as well, there are alien voices, what she calls alien voices, sort of speaking to her through an intercom kind of system, and they're giving her certain orders. They're telling her what she can and can't do. She's saying, you know, providing some sort of framework of how this world is that she exists upon, and taking from these religious ideas that Jan has been raised her entire life with this Virgin Mary and this baby Jesus that is born, and they're taking those religious ideas. And through this, what she calls an alien voice, is starting to believe that she could be a Maryesque type of person, that she could be… there could be an immaculate conception, that she could have a child that would save this planet. And that's Berchtold in the front room of the motorhome sending these messages back to her, but creating this world where it's just him and her. They're the only two that know what's going on. She can't talk about this to anyone else. He's completely isolated her and he's creating this world and he's making her incredibly special. She's the only one in this world that can do that. And so all of these things working together is just manipulation at its like strength, you know? It's the strongest thing that he can do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And within this mission that he's concocted, there's also threats to her family if it's not followed through.

SKYE BORGMAN: Absolutely. Yeah. And so she's feeling this, this commitment to him to achieve this objective of saving the planet. And she knows that if she ever starts to question that, her sisters will, one of them will be blinded, her father will be killed. I mean, all of these incredibly terrifying things could happen to all these members in her family. And so she really wants to go along with it. She wants to do what's right for the religious tones as well as to keep her family intact.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And just to be clear, and I don't need to go into details, but she thought it was immaculate conception. But he was sexually assaulting. He was raping her.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What happens back home? When do the police get involved? What do her parents know?

SKYE BORGMAN: So her parents know that Jan and B disappeared. They do end up contacting the authorities. It takes them a few days to contact the authorities. And it's another one of those instances where we sometimes want to believe in the best in people and we don't do what we're supposed to do. But they do. They end up calling the authorities the first night that Jan is missing, but they don't say that she's missing. They just ask about any car accidents that may have been, that may have happened in that time. No car accidents have happened. And so then it's a Thursday, and then they wait Friday, and they think, well, we'll just give it a little bit of time, and then it's the weekend and offices are closed. And there are all of these excuses kind of for not calling the cops, for hoping, you know, hoping above all hope that something will happen when finally the weekend goes by and they say, we finally got to call the authorities and tell them exactly what's happened. And so they end up contacting the authorities, both their local law enforcement and the FBI, and saying that their daughter has been kidnapped. And they kind of tell them that they know this man, that he kidnapped their daughter. They don't know where she is or where he is. And law enforcement does the… You know, they go out and they look for accidents. They look for all of the things that you kind of expect would happen and can't find anything.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But eventually, they are found. Correct?

SKYE BORGMAN: Eventually, they're found. Yes. They're tracked down. It's really through Berchtold’s brother. He's doing a little bit of communicating with Berchtold, Joe Berchtold, his brother, and he tells them where they are. And the authorities are able to sort of track them down in Mexico, use the Mexican law enforcement down there to find them and essentially rescue Jan and bring her back home.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: As a slight aside, that brother really did not like his brother, did he? I mean, that was… every time he came on the screen, I was like, holy crap, he does not like his brother.

SKYE BORGMAN: He doesn't like his brother, but he loves his brother. Like this is what's so hard, right? It's like he knows what his brother is and there is still a love for him. And there's it’s hard for him to just not love his brother, and it's hard for him to know what his brother did. So it's a really complicated thing for Joe as well.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Really, really. It really came across. He was one of the most compelling, and I know not necessarily the biggest and most interviewed, but really a compelling person to listen to. Do you think it was the love of his brother that made him participate? Like why do you think he even said yes to you? Maybe you know the answer.

SKYE BORGMAN: I know why he said yes to us. He wanted to give his brother a voice. He didn't want it to just be a film that was told from the Broberg side of it. He wanted to give some humanity to his brother. He wanted to talk about his brother and have his brother be a full and complete person.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So the FBI, through the Mexican police and the brother, do find them. They save Jan, she gets sent back home. What do they charge brother B with?

SKYE BORGMAN: It was tricky because in order to do that, like there was a lot of, there was a lot of manipulation happening sort of behind the scenes as well, a lot of his wife asking the Brobergs to drop the charges and so. And the Brobergs felt such guilt. They felt like a lot of this was their fault. And so they're not as forthcoming with law enforcement as they could have been, and they're not as… they're not helping the case much. And then what ends up happening is, and this is where it's hard to sort of understand how people do things that they do sometimes, but this is when Berchtold essentially seduces Jan's mom. So he seduced the dad before this all happened, which caused a lot of diverted days away from Jan, and then he manages to divert the gaze yet again when he seduces Mary Ann. And Mary Ann I think falls in love with him to a certain degree and is again looking away from Jan and sort of coming up with reasons why Berchtold took Jan to Mexico and is sort of normalizing the whole thing. And that's essentially paving the way yet again for Berchtold to take Jan a second time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But before he does this, and I think this is the part that I really, I fully believe what was going on, but to your point, about not understanding how parents can do this. Brother B goes to therapy. Is this right? Or pretends to go to therapy and tells them that he needs to spend time alone with Jan, even sleeping in her bed to help him get better.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. And it's interesting because he did go to therapy. We found records of therapy that happened and we found these tapes. And so there is record of some therapy happening. So that's true. That's absolutely true. What the therapist told him, we don't necessarily know. What we do know is that he came back and told the Brobergs that his therapist had told him that he needed to spend time alone with Jan in her bed. And it's another one of those moments where it's hard to accept that. And thinking about the Brobergs and when I asked them about it, they were very much this it's a doctor. It's a doctor, this man of stature, this man who knows more than they do. And if this doctor says it, then it must be true. They never really thought about contacting the doctor themselves or asking another doctor or getting another opinion, and they trusted that B would not lie to them. So there are a lot of moments here where things could have gone a separate way and where the parents could have done something to sort of corroborate this story or find out that it wasn't exactly true, but that never happened.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And not to excuse brother B at all, but at that point, Jan was so wrapped up in him, and I guess you could use the term brainwashed however you want to use it, that she was saying to her parents, this is what I want.

SKYE BORGMAN: She was saying to her parents, this is what I want. And she's saying to her parents, I love him. And so she is absolutely in this partnership with Berchtold. She is being incredibly difficult for her parents to handle. I mean, she's throwing fits. She is acting out. She's saying that she loves this man. She's getting older. In the LDS religion at the time, young girls are marrying men, and this is something that's more common then maybe than it is now. I mean, we hear about these fundamentalist groups where these young girls are marrying multiple wives to one husband. The Brobergs were not part of that. They were not fundamentalist Mormons, but they were very religious, and it was not that uncommon for 16, 17, 18-year-old girls to be marrying men who were older than them. So Jan's, you know, she's 12. This is too young. But as she is getting to 13 and 14 and she's getting even more committed to being in love with Berchtold, you know, her parents are starting to listen to her.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Eventually, he takes her again, as you've alluded to. So what happens this time? Where does he take her? How does that work?

SKYE BORGMAN: So the second time that Berchtold takes Jan, he brings her to California, and he enrolls her in a school in Pasadena. And she stays there, and he will come and go and visit her. And I really feel like at this moment in time, it's so that he can have access to Jan, keep her somewhat isolated, although not exclusively with him, and he can be coming back and forth from Pocatello to California so he can be spending time with her, but still making his whereabouts known when he's in Pocatello saying, I don't have her. I don't know where she is. So he's again deflecting this law enforcement sort of looking at him. And she stays in the school for some time before they're eventually caught again. And they return to Pocatello, and he's arrested this time. He wasn't arrested before or he wasn't… at least there were no charges brought to him before. But this is where the charges really, really start to come in.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he goes to prison finally or what happens to him then?

SKYE BORGMAN: He ends up going. He spends a little bit of time in jail. Not very much time at all. The time that he spends is considered time served. They were never really able… because of the sexual affairs that Berchtold had had with both Bob and Mary Ann Broberg, they were never able to get a really solid case because the Brobergs weren't forthcoming with a lot of information. It came as a surprise to prosecutors. It came as a surprise to law enforcement. So he spends a little bit of time. But within a year, he's out.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how does Jan extricate herself from him?

SKYE BORGMAN: It takes a while. I mean, it takes a while for her to understand what's going on. Years. I mean, years and years and years. She was an actress. She loves acting. She was able to do a lot of self-therapy through acting. She was able to take on these different roles as different people. Her parents took her to therapy. Parents never did therapy on their own. I don't think they thought of themselves as needing to have therapy, but they definitely thought that Jan needed to have therapy. So she goes into therapy, which she says doesn't do her a lot of good. But eventually, she's sort of growing older. She's talking to a therapist, she's talking to her family and she's realizing. And she's away from Berchtold. They're not in contact anymore, so she's slowly starting to realize that what he did to her was not right. She goes off to college with her sisters eventually, and there's still contact. He's still calling her. He's still trying to get back into her life. But eventually, she cuts off all contact with him and does some work, joined some groups, is talking to people and is figuring out that what he did was not right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how does Jan think about her parents now that she's sort of through this and has a realization? Like she has written a book, which is how you found out about this story. So she's well aware of the fact that he was a pedophile and that she was groomed and the family was groomed. But is there any residual anger to her parents? Because they are, whether they were naive or not, at fault.

SKYE BORGMAN: Absolutely. And there really isn't. And it's interesting because I think with Jan, she and her mother wrote the book together. And it was a very therapeutic and cathartic situation for the two of them as well because there were… they’d never really talked about it before they started putting this book together. And there were two different perspectives coming in to write the book. There was Jan Being Gone, which was Mary Ann’s perspective, and what was happening with Jan, which was her perspective. And so they started to put these two stories together and to figure out how things had happened and what the different perspectives were. And as Jan and Mary Ann were working on writing that book over the course of years, and Jan doing some therapy and joining groups, she really had a very good sense that her parents… she felt that her parents were not at all to blame, that they were just as targeted as she was. And so there really, really, really was no anger towards her parents. I asked her about it multiple times and she said, there was a moment when there was. Like how could they have let this happen to me? But she said it was very short lived and that she knew very really pretty quickly that they were just as targeted. And she really does not harbour any ill feelings for them at all.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Incredible and I guess healthy. Lucky. Who knows? Yeah.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. It's how she copes, you know? And I think she… I think she knew that or felt that that anger towards her parents may not be a healthy way forward for her, and that she needed to approach them with love and with grace and with acceptance and to help them understand what had happened to them. And it's definitely the way that Jan approached her healing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: From what I understand, her father told his story for the first time in your documentary. Is that correct?

SKYE BORGMAN: It is. And he had shared little moments of it. And there had been… law enforcement did finally find out about it, although it was a very he said, he said sort of thing because Berchtold had been telling them the whole time that Bob Broberg was gay and was trying to sort of smear his name that way. So there were mentions of it, and there were mentions of what had happened with the two of them. But he'd never gone into detail, especially with family members, about what had happened in the car on that day and potentially on other days. And I think it was very… I think Bob Broberg, when he was telling us that story, I don't know that he intended to sort of tell us, but it was something that he told us afterwards that it made him feel a lot lighter. And I think it's something that he'd been carrying around with him, this story and this weight of the story for 50 years. And I think it felt really good for him to tell us.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And do you know how Jan and or her mother reacted to hearing that story for the first time?

SKYE BORGMAN: I know that Mary Ann and Bob, the night after Bob's interview, they talked about it that night. And Mary Ann felt like she could ask him questions about what had happened, where she'd never really felt that she could do that before. And they both… look, both Jan and Mary Ann knew that something had happened, that something sexual had happened, that there were rumours of Bob Broberg being gay and that people were talking about that and that Berchtold was really pushing that narrative forward. So they knew the circumstances around the event. They didn't know what the event was. They didn't know the extremes of it. And so I think that that had opened up a door for all of them to talk about it a little bit more.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The other part that I found astonishing is closer to the end of your doc. So Jan writes her book with her mother. It's out. And Bob Berchtold went after them and denied it.

SKYE BORGMAN: He did, yeah. He felt that they were smearing his name and that this book about all of the events was a personal attack on him. There were a lot of emails shared between the Brobergs and the Berchtolds asking, Berchtold asking them to not publish the book, to not do anything with the book, to not have it out there, to not have the story out there, and that it was a slander to his person. And the Brobergs just kept telling their story and they kept… they published the book. They self-published it. They'd go on speaking events where Jan would talk about what happened to her, and Mary Ann would go with her, and they'd have the book there to either sell or give away to people that needed it. And at one of these, at one of these events where Jan was speaking publicly in front of a large group of people, Berchtold shows up to this event with a gun and is threatening them and sort of runs over somebody there, I mean, nudges them with his van and is arrested. And that's essentially how our story between Jan and Berchtold sort of comes to an end.

SOUNDCLIP

JAN BROBERG: Mr. Berchtold has remained a threat and a danger to my family.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That was incredibly powerful, that scene in the courtroom.

SOUNDCLIP

JAN BROBERG: My goal, Mr. Berchtold, is to educate the public about predators like you. That is my goal.

BOB BERCHTOLD: Oh, I see.

JAN BROBERG: I hope you do see. I cannot believe that you can look me in the eye. You have no soul.

BOB BERCHTOLD: Jan, I'm sorry I treated you that way. And I'd like to apologize for the hurt that I have given you.

JAN BROBERG: If you want to apologize, then you should stand up, tell the truth and serve your time in jail, Mr. Berchtold.

SKYE BORGMAN: It was incredibly powerful. And I… it's funny because it's Jan has found her voice fully at this moment in time. She's an adult woman. She has been living with this, has been dealing with this in one way or another for many, many years, making steps forward, making steps backward, you know, but is on this incredible journey. And to have the opportunity to have the circumstance where you're in a courtroom sitting just a few feet away from somebody who's been such a massive person in your life in such a negative way. And she took that opportunity and she let him know how she felt, which was it's incredibly powerful and brave. I mean, I think it's incredibly brave thing. And I think the Brobergs were incredibly brave to do the documentary and to tell their story, because they have gotten a lot of negative feelings towards them like they should have known more, that they were stupid. And to be able to tell their story I think was incredibly brave.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I think that's so true. I did a podcast once about a group of women who got conned, and one of the biggest fears was always that they were going to be called stupid. And I had that fear for them. But after their stories got told, I think what it does is it lets people in on the truth of human relationships where it's very hard to step out and say, this person is doing something wrong, because you still worry about destroying their lives or I mean, you can't help but be a human being.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. And honestly, I think that Bob and Mary Ann were okay with it. Whatever happens, they're like, this is our story. We lived it. We've gotten over it. It was really Jan and her sisters that were so worried about their parents and Bob and Mary Ann and the backlash. And Bob Broberg ended up passing away a few in the November before the film came out on Netflix. And so that was when a lot of the… a lot of the backlash happened when the film was released. And I remember talking to Mary Ann afterwards and she's like, it just doesn't matter. I don't read it. It doesn't matter. But all of the daughters were, I don't know, it was hard for them to see their parents being kind of, I don't know, talked about in such a negative way.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Of course, I understand.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Brother B, he also is gone. What does he… what happens?

SKYE BORGMAN: So after this, after he brings this gun to this speaking engagement and threatens Jan, he is arrested. And at this point, he's crossed state line. So they're taking him back to Nevada where he lived, and he's driving his truck and he's got a police escort. They don't have him in the back of a police car or anything like that. And they're driving back home to Nevada, and he takes off and leaves them and drives away and loses his police that have been accompanying him. And he goes to a campground and he takes some pills and he drinks some alcohol and he commits suicide.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So he ends it in a somewhat cowardly way as well.

SKYE BORGMAN: Yeah. And look, he was also, I know in the emails that he sent back and forth to the Brobergs, he was a committed LDS person himself and was worried how he was going to look in the LDS community if this story came out. And I know that he had been excommunicated at times before then allowed back into the church. But I think that it was really too much to have it after all these years, to have this his story out there and to be sort of exposed in front of, in front of his community. So he decided to end it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So this isn't your first documentary about abuse. What is it about these stories that you feel like are worth telling? What do you get out of them? What do you hope to be able to give people from doing this work?

SKYE BORGMAN: I think with all the crime stories that I do, that I tackle, it's they’re usually stories that are confusing to me. Like how could something like this happen? And so a lot of it is very selfish in trying to sort of figure out how something like this can happen. But more than that, it's the people who embody these stories and it's all these shades of humanity from the very, very best in people to the very, very worst in people. and to be able to look at those shades of humanity. Ultimately, I hope that in watching the stories that I do, that people think about things in a deeper way or in a different way, that they may bring certain judgements into a certain story and have their minds changed a little bit, or at least be opened up to something else sort of happening, or to not judge quite so quickly, especially with a film like Abducted in Plain Sight. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I think that these stories have an incredible ability to educate and educate through something that's entertaining. And we know, at least we suspect, I think, that people watch these kinds of stories to learn something, especially women, to protect themselves, to find sort of different tools to be able to protect themselves more. And so hopefully, you know, these stories that I tell give people another little tool to put in their toolbox of protection.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, Skye, thank you for joining me. Thank you for your work, and it was really nice to talk to you.

SKYE BORGMAN: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 15

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