BetrayalShe lost her husband to a brutal crime, only to realize she never really had him at all.
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That evening, one of the strangest things happened. I looked in the mirror and I said out loud, He's not coming home. And I thought, my god, am I being dramatic? And I dismissed it.
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. This is our last Betrayal Weekly episode for a little while. We'll be back in May with a whole new season of Betrayal. It'll be one story told over multiple weeks, and after that we have more Betrayal Weekly episodes coming. Right now, we're actively working on news stories, so if you have a story you'd like to share on the podcast, write to us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. In the meantime, we have some spectacular bonus content, including updates on cases you've heard on betrail Weekly. We're also interviewing experts and getting their opinions on the stories you've heard. We can't wait for you to hear what we have coming up now. Onto this week's episode. This is Jancanty's story. She grew up in Detroit in the nineteen fifties and sixties. It was an era of social change, a time when protests erupted across the country and people demanded equality. It all informed the woman Jan became.
I loved growing up in Detroit. It was a very historical time. I was very active in the women's movement. Even as a teenager. I was in demonstrations. I wanted to make a difference and I did not want to grow up and be a housewife and have kids. But I lacked role models for how to do that because everybody that I knew that was a woman stayed home and had kids.
Jan didn't know what possibilities were out there for her. She loves learning, but she didn't love school.
Hated high school with a big passion. Hated it capital h I thought it was a complete waste of time. I just saw it as babysitting. It turned me off to school, and I said I was never going to set foot in the classroom again.
If she could have dropped out of high school, she would have, so college wasn't part of her plan. She didn't even know how to apply.
So I just went from one crap job to another, didn't like any of them, got really bored. So I kind of started out really floundering, not knowing what I wanted to do.
Looking for a little direction, she gave school one last try. She started taking classes at her local community college, and sure enough.
I loved it, so different than high school.
It was at community college that she took her first psychology course. It was a turning point. Working in psychology would mean helping others. Plus she found it interesting to me.
There's nothing more basic than thought. They can take away your family, your health, so on, but they can't take away your thought. And that intrigued me. It still does.
As she began her studies, she was eager to start a life on her own, so she moved downtown and rented the cheapest place she could find.
My apartment cost me eighty dollars a month. It had rats, It had about six locks on the door. It had no kitchen. It was a hot plate, a bathroom, and a bedroom. I remember putting my mattress on the floor away from the window so the gunshots outside wouldn't bear through the window because there was always gunfire at night. But it was home to me, and it was proof that I was on my way.
Still as cheap as it was, if she was going to continue to live there. She needed a job. A friend told her about a psychologist who was hiring. He needed help typing up a manuscript. This was right up Jan's alley, so she applied, and soon she got a call asking for an interview. When she pulled up to the office building.
I noticed you had to pay for parking. I did not have two dollars and fifty cents on me to pay, so I thought, I'm going to have to ask for a loan from my future employer.
She went inside and immediately felt like a fish out of water.
It was staggering. It had marble and bronze and three feet long chandeliers in the corridor, and arches and paintings and you name it, very very very elegant. And so I remember walking through the doors and instantly I felt out of place. I'm like, I don't belong here. This is fancy. I don't have any money, I'm a phony. I was so nervous, and I had on my best clothes, which I bought used and I remember watching people how they got to the elevator and how they used the button, so I would know how to do it.
But as she got off the elevator, her nerves faded when.
I got off on floor eight. He must have heard the elevator going. He stuck his head out, way way down at the end of the hall. He said, oh, I'm down here.
The psychologist's name was Alan Canty. Jan had been expecting a man who matched the building, someone intimidating, formal, classy. Alan was anything but he.
Had a golf shirt on. His pants were too short for his shoes. He was bashful, and he was very welcoming, laughed easily.
The two of them hit it off. Twenty minutes into the interview, Alan offered her the job, but before she left, she had a favor to ask.
On my way out, I said, oh, by the way, can you deduct two dollars and fifty cents out of my paycheck?
Jan explained that she wasn't able to pay the exit fee for the parking lot. Alan just smiled.
He pulled out of his pocket a roll of cash and peeled it off and seemed more than happy to give it to me.
In the beginning, Jan and Allan's relationship was strictly professional. After all, he was eighteen years older than her, well educated, he came from a wealthy family to Jan Alan was elite and accomplished. He was someone to look up to.
My impression of him was one of respect. Given his station in life, I knew I could learn a lot from him him in terms of the field of psychology.
Before long, he started treating her to lunch and.
I would talk about classes and what I was learning.
He wanted to give her advice to be a mentor.
He was the first person to ever express belief in my goals, the idea that of course you can go to college. Of course you can graduate. Of course you can do that. I had never had anybody tell me that in my life. It really made a big impression on me, and I was so pleased that he saw potential in me that nobody else acknowledged or validated.
He encouraged her to transfer to a four year university and get her bachelor's degree, and he helped her pay for college by promoting her to receptionist.
It gave me a raise, and I was so grateful for that because I was really barely paying my own tuition, and one term I had to sell my car to make tuition. And I had started to walk to glass in those neighborhoods, which was a challenge to get home before dark.
In the winter, Alan started giving her rides home at the end of the day. He liked looking out for her, and she liked being cared for. After a few months, Alan asked her out on a date. It didn't really come as a surprise. Jan knew they had chemistry. For their first date, Alan drove her somewhere she'd never been before.
It looked like a Rundown neighborhood, and it looked dangerous.
As Alan pulled up to a house, Jan thought for a split second that she might have made a terrible mistake.
The windows were boarded up and the grass was overgrown. The only sign was a little tiny yellow and green sign that said lelli'es that's it.
But as they drove around back.
The aroma coming from the kit was beyond description, and they had a man with a violin in the parking lot.
It was a fancy restaurant, one of the nicest she'd ever been to, and it was hidden, almost like a speakeasy. When they stepped inside, the place was decorated with real oil paintings, chandeliers, candles, and even roaming musicians. Jan was wowed, and.
We talked and talked and talked until we realized we were taking up too much time. Like the waiter was kind of like, come on, I have a change over in the table.
They were enjoying each other's company. Alan wasn't a standout when it came to his looks or his charm. He was shy, awkward even, but Jan thought a real connection with him.
I liked how he treated me with respect, and he always helped me with my coat and opened my car door and never interrupted me, and was always eager to hear about my day. And he'd ask follow up questions, you know, like what did you think of that class? And what'd you think of that book? And tell me more about your parents? Or why do you like that singer? Or whatever it might be.
Their attraction was rooted in conversation. Jan had never had a relationship like this before.
I felt very lucky because a lot of my friends were floundering, you know. Their idea of a date would be to go to McDonald's and ride up and down Woodbert Avenue, and I was like, I'd rather go to the museums. I'd rather have an intellectual discussion.
And with Alan, she could here was someone on her level They were spending all day together at work and then going on dates at night. Pretty soon Jan could picture a real future with him. They'd been dating about six months, and one morning over breakfast.
He's very bashful, and I decided, you know, he's never going to ask me, so I better ask him. So I had a paper calendar in my pocket and I pulled it out, put it on the table, and I said, I think it's about time that we get married. What do you think? And he goes, okay. And I took my calendar out and it took a pen and I stabbed a date. It was a year calendar, and it landed on a Saturday in September, and I go, there's their date.
They couldn't wait to be married just a year into dating. They had a tiny, no frills ceremony.
By the time we got married, I was finishing my bachelor's and he encouraged me to go for my master's degree.
When Jan doubted herself, he.
Gave me the confidence to go into my master's program. And in the era too, women did not go to graduate school at all.
In the early eighties, she started her master's in psychology at the University of Michigan.
I loved it so much I did not even want to go home after class was over. I loved everything about it. I loved the old, old libraries. Oh, it was breathtaking.
During this time, Alan wanted to move into a bigger home in a more affluent neighborhood.
He wanted to have us have our own house together. And I said, I have nothing to bring to the table. Nothing. I mean, you could put everything I had in my trunk.
And that's exactly what she did. Jan packed up her pillow, clock, radio, and a suitcase of clothes, and she moved in with Alan and.
We moved into the sixth bedroom, six bathroom house.
The new home he'd bought for them was a Tudor revival mansion and one of the most exclusive suburbs of Detroit.
It was like a public building, it was so big.
When Jane agreed to move in with him, she only asked for one thing.
I said, what's important to me is if I can take one of the bedrooms and turn it into a dissertation room. He got me an electric typewriter with a little exchange ball so he could change the fons, and he got me there. He got me a bookshelf and a lamp, and he bought me a coffee mug that he found someplace where. On the inside, if you look at it down at the bottom, there's somebody looks like they're mountain climbing up the side of the cup on the inside. And he called it a struggle cup, and he goes, when you get discouraged, look in your struggle cup and remind yourself a day at a time, you're going to do it. You're going to finish. You have what it dates.
In a little over a year, Alan helped transform Jan's life. Before she'd met him, she was broke, living in a Rundown apartment, searching for direction. Now she was on the path towards becoming a psychologist, and she had a beautiful home in a wealthy neighborhood. At the time, she was grateful, but looking back now she sees it all a little differently.
He liked rescuing damsels in distress, which I did not understand at the time. That's his pattern.
Once they got married, Alan and Jan were both busier than ever. He had a heavy caseload and would often work late into the night at his practice. Meanwhile, Jan was charging ahead with her master's in psychology, which eventually turned into a PhD and then a post doc.
Oh my god, the hours you put in, I mean, seventy hour workweeks were not unheard of. And he was very considered about me coming home and going right up to my room and just working on my dissertation.
Alan wasn't exactly the romantic type, but life with him was steady easy.
I felt special, I felt lucky. I felt like I had gotten the jackpot. We had a routine. We'd either have breakfast together or go out to eat. He liked to order the newspaper and read it at night. We would have dinner at a prompt time because he often worked in the evenings and his home office and I would be doing homework. It was comfortable.
Becoming a psychologist was Jan's sole focus.
We got to the point when I was finishing my doctor and he said, you know, we really ought to furnish the living room. We've been in this house for years, and I go, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Like I never noticed it.
Alan took care of her.
He took care of the bills, income taxes, et cetera, et cetera. He managed one hundred percent of it, and I was fine with that. I was just glad not to have one more thing on my plate. So we never argued over money. I never worried about it.
They stuck to the same old routine as the years ticked by. Then in nineteen eighty four, ten years into their marriage, Jan noticed a change in Allan. It started in November, when she traveled to Arizona to be with her parents. She'd come down with mono, so she went to recover where it was warmer.
That coincidentally happened to fall on his fiftieth birthday. That night, I remember it's his birthday, and I felt like crap, and I had such a raging, raw, sore throat, but I set my alarm and got up and called him at eleven o'clock and thang, a'm happy birthday, and he started tearing up. I thought it was because he was worried about me and my health.
She stayed in Arizona for three weeks. When Jan got better and returned to Michigan, Alan seemed disturbed. He was panicked. She'd never seen him like this before, and he continued to spiral downward for months, and by May of nineteen eighty five, they decided to admit him to a psychiatric hospital for a few weeks of intensive mental health care.
And he kept saying to me at the hospital when I was in the process of getting him hospitalized, you're pure snow here, a snow here as snow.
What did that mean? The phrase didn't make any sense to Jan. Throughout Alan's stay in the psych hospital.
He kept repeating words saying things like pure snow. I'm so bad, birthday, dawn money, pure as snow. I'm so bad, I need to stand tall. And I just thought, this is just craziness speaking.
He was having a psychotic break. Eventually, he was released from the hospital and he seemed much better, but Jan couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't quite right, and that feeling only grew as spring turned to summer. One day, Jan was gardening out back and.
I went back there to trim the lilac bush. And this is after days of rain, and I noticed three dry cigarette butts on the ground in the mud near our kitchen window. And that set off a big red flag because they were dry, which meant they were recent.
It was a small detail, but one that didn't sit right with her. Neither she or Alan smoked, and they didn't have a gardener or a housekeeper, so that meant someone had been standing outside her kitchen window smoking. Jane imagined a stranger just lurking in her backyard, watching her through the window. She checked every room in the house, in the basement, all around the perimeter. No one was there. Alan was at work, so she left him a message at his office, but he never returned her call.
He came home from work and I was livid that he had never called me, and he was patronizing and he said, well, what do we need to do? Do we need to get you a dog? Would that make you feel better? I said, what would make me feel better is if you return my phone call. Something is a myths? Can't you feel it? You don't find cigarette butts out there? Something is a myth? And he just started laughing, like, oh, you're so cute. Oh that infuriated me. You don't dismis somebody's got genuine reasons to be worried.
Was someone casing the house and planning to rob them? Her mind went to dark places.
My way of handling stress is to do tasks, to get busy and so after this incident, I decided to catalog every single thing in our house, how many towels did we own, where was our insurance policies? And put it in a photo album, so that if somebody was going to rob us, because that's what I thought was happening, I could say to the insurance company, this is what we have. Here's proof of our belongings. Then one day I went to go write a thank you note to somebody, and I reached up in the closet shelf above my head to pull out where I thought was where we put the thank you notes and realized that photo album had been missing. And I knew for sure that's where it should be because I was the only one that dealt with it.
She confronted Alan about it, and.
He goes, what is with you? I took it to work. I was bragging about you. You don't get it. I thought it was a great idea, And he went out to his car and he got it and brought it back in to show me, and it smelled like cigarettes.
Alan explained that he wanted to show his colleagues this album. He didn't understand Jan's concern. Even with this explanation, she still felt uneasy, especially when.
We started having hang up calls in the middle of the night. A couple of the first ones, I grabbed the phone, and it was always the same man. He had a southern draw, he sounded like he was drunk, and he was always asking for some person.
JAN didn't know who he was asking for. But every few days this man would call back in the middle of the night, and every time.
I said it was a wrong number and I hung up.
But nothing was more unsettling than what happened one evening in the beginning of July.
I was driving long Fox Canal on a stormy, foggy night, and this car was following me, speeding up and then backing off, speeding up and then backing off, And I'm like, what the heck? And we turned the corner onto my side street, and I knew that very very well, and I knew that there was a dip in the road where it turned, And so when I got close by, I turned off my lights and sped up as fast as I dare do it, drive and turn left into my driveway and left onto the grass behind the hedge, just sat there, and sure enough I watched them come by. They stopped at every driveway on our side street, and Eva stopped at my driveway, but they didn't see me, and they drove on.
If one of these things had happened, sure she could have chalked it up to paranoia. But the cigarettes, the photo album, the hang up calls, being followed. Something was off and Alan wasn't taking it seriously.
Al blew it off. You don't know that they were following you. Yeah, they were following me. He was always belittling me when it came to issues of safety because he wasn't bothered by any of that.
Then, on July thirteenth, nineteen eighty five, Alan didn't come home for dinner at his usual time.
It was a very stormy day. We lost power. It was hail, rain, wind, So I wasn't totally shocked when he didn't arrive promptly, although that was his pattern because of the weather, and I figured the roads were probably impassable. But by eleven o'clock that night, I got concerned. And this is before cell phone, so there was no way to check where he was. And one of the strangest things happened that evening. My anxiety was escalating and I was pacing I walked into his home off and he had a bathroom attached to it, and I looked in the mirror and I said out loud, he's dead. He's not coming home. And as soon as I said those words, I'm like, what the heck? It was like my voice but not my thoughts, and I thought, my god, am I being dramatic? This is stress speaking. Of course, he's going to be home. And I dismissed it.
Jan woke up the next morning without Alan in bed beside her. He had still not returned. She called friends and family and coworkers of his No one had seen him, so after twenty four hours, she reported him missing.
But nothing came of it that day or the next day, or the next day or the next day.
With each day she grew more and more pain. He could have been in a car accident or a carjacking. He could have been mugged or kidnapped. After all, it was Detroit in the eighties.
Crime in Detroit was at an all time high at that point in history. The statistics were at that time that a car was stolen every thirteen seconds. You heard sirens day and night. We were working in an area that was high crime so it would not be unthinkable that he was a victim of a crime.
Jan needed support. Her parents flew in from Arizona to be with her, but they weren't the only ones at her door.
On about this third day of him being gone, the media descended and they never let up at all. They were intrusive, they were relentless. They made it a living hell for me. Nonetheless, we had to get the word out, so they did. It was on the news every time I turned around.
Jan waited. A week went by, then eight days, and nine days, and then.
The tenth day. I got a phone call early on a Sunday morning from a detective marlus Landero's. She asked me to meet her down at the police headquarters.
The detective was outside the building waiting for her. When she arrived, they went up in the elevator.
We got off on floor five, which was homicide, and I was called into the office of the Inspector, Gil Hill. It was very short meeting. He said, we have reason to believe your husband's been murdered, but we don't have his body yet, and I suggest you go home and check your finances because we've been told that he's been handing out a lot of cash down on cast Quarder, which is the red light district of Detroit.
Jan Canty's husband Alan had been missing for over a week when she got called into the Detroit police station. The investigators suspected that Allan had been murdered, but they didn't have his body. They'd been investigating his disappearance and found something surprising. Allan was well known in Detroit's Red lay district. He was often there spending money on sex workers. Jan knew her husband to be a bookish, bashful man, a psychologist who's spent his free time reading.
He's got the wrong guy. No, this can't be uh huh. He doesn't know my husband. My husband is somebody who reads the newspaper every day. He's always home, but at a certain time when he says he's going to be home. He's not a ladies man. He doesn't to kill, he doesn't do drugs, he doesn't gamble. He's got the wrong guy. There's got to be another explanation, and the fact that he didn't have a body lent itself to my argument that they had the wrong guy.
Jan was incredulous, but with no other leads, she took the detective's advice to take a look at Alan's finances.
Everywhere I look, we were in the red, I mean IRS, house payments, office payments. There was no savings account, there was no life insurance policy, there was nothing. It turns out, when I totaled it up in nineteen eighty five dollars, I was thirty thousand dollars in debt and I had no income to speak of because I had just finished my training.
A few days later, as she was still making sense of the finances, she got another call from the police. They had more intel.
And they said he's been keeping company with John Carl fry Senor and Don Maurice Benz on Casper Street. And they looked at me to see my reaction, and I'm like, okay, Like it might as well have been Greek. I don't know them. That was the first I'd heard of them.
Then the police revealed.
We have found his body and we need you to identify him.
The detective explained to Jan that they would need to go to the Morgue.
On the way over there. In her very professional and caring way, she did her darnedest to prepare me to see him in an altered state. Because he had been buried in a bog for ten days in three different places.
His body had been dismembered.
Some of his body parts were left done the freeway. I didn't have to identify those. What I had to identify was his head. My dad said, you can't do this by yourself. I'm going to go with you. And I said, Dad, this isn't your problem, this is my problem. But I could not stand. I could literally not stand. It felt like my legs were made out of silly buddy.
The detective held her up on one side as her dad held her up on the other. The experience was incredibly traumatic. Jan can't even remember who was in the room.
I do remember Detective Landero's telling me all you have to do is say yes or no. That's it, and we're out of here. And when they put his head in a table, I couldn't speak and I closed my eyes and she was very patient, and then she asked me yes or no. He didn't have his glasses on, but his hair looked the same, and his eyelashes and his eyebrows looked the same. When I said yes, I was sure it was him.
The detective snuck Jan out the back. Camera crews were waiting for her out front. The story had become national news. On the way home from the morgue, Jen laid down in the back of the police car. Jan could no longer deny the reality her husband was dead and he was murdered by people she'd never heard of. And who were these people? Well, they were still at large.
There was an APB for their whereabouts, and they started having their faces plastered in the news.
Jan didn't want to look at the TV, but her dad insisted.
He said, I want you to know their faces. I don't think they're on their way to our house, but you're out and about in the community. I want you to be able to identify them if you ever see them, and your first obligation is to call nine to one one then me in that order. So that's the first I knew of their faces and connected them with their name.
Their names were John Carl Frei Senior, and don Marie Spence. As Jan watched the news, she found out for the first time who these people were. Jawn was a sex worker and John was her boyfriend. The media ran with the story of a wealthy psychologist being sucked into a dark love triangle, But could that be true? Jan still couldn't fathom it.
And I'm still like, hell, that doesn't make sense. I just couldn't wrap my head out. It was so unlike him.
The man she knew was quiet, intellectual, earnest, someone who'd get wrapped up in a world like this was a different Alan Canty entirely. Jan barely had the basic facts of the case. She didn't even know how Alan met these people and what their relationship really was. But she didn't have the time to look for answers.
I had so many more urgent, immediate things on my plate. I was worried about the irs selling my house, if I had AIDS, I was going through AIDS testing. I had no time to wonder and think about what did he do, what did he say? Where did he go? That was a low priority. I was worried about my own safety.
After all, she had been followed. The fear and stress were taking a massive toll on her.
I wasn't sleeping. I into permanent menopause. I was physically sick. I lost a lot of my hair, I lost a lot of weight.
Alan had led a double life one She still didn't have a clear picture of she was deeply betrayed, but she was also grieving.
I was very defensive, irrationally angry, like I would get angry at going into the grocery store that they didn't make loaves of bread for one person. I was looking for things to get angry about. Somebody opened the door for me. I'm like, what do they think I'm weak? They got to open the door for me. I didn't maybe say anything to him, but internally I was very angry all the time.
With Alan dead, there was nowhere for her anger to go. He couldn't answer for what he'd done. And to make matters worse, Alan had kept financial secrets big ones.
I got handed a bill for thirty seven thousand dollars field for back rent. He'd taken out personal loans, he'd forged my name. I was so broke. I didn't know how I was going to get through the winter. I turned down the heat so much that I had frozen pipes. I started eating less. I can serve my trips to the store. I walked when I could. I sold off everything I could, his car, parts, jewelry, furniture, books. One night I was by myself as usual, and it was a peaceful night. I was sitting by the fire at my house. The room was empty. There wasn't a stick of furniture in there, because I'd sold it all, and I remember thinking, somehow, some way, I'm going to make this a positive thing. I don't know how, I don't know when, but I do know why, because if I don't, it'll trumble me.
It took two years for Jan to get on steady ground after Alan was murdered, and during that time she was still unaware of who her husband really was and what he had truly done. Then, in nineteen eighty seven, Jan got approached by a reporter. He was writing a book about Alan's case. At first, Jan tried to shut the book down. She didn't need anyone showing up on her doorstep again digging up old wounds.
I didn't want to speak with him. I didn't want anything to do with it. And I went to my attorney about it, and he goes, you can't stop it. He's writing it based on public records, and in fact, there's a reason you should cooperate with them. And I go, what's that? And he said, you're going to learn things that you need to know. He's going to have the time. He's going to have the answers, and if you don't get the answers, you'll always wonder. So I'd suggest you meet with him.
So she did, and through the reporter's findings, the other Alan Canty finally revealed himself. Here's what she learned.
She bought our marriage. He had women on the side, and every single one of them was in need financially. He had offered to put up some in their own apartments. He had offered to pay the tuition of others. He paid the medical bills of some and even visited them in the hospital. There was never a time when he was the person I thought.
He was all those late nights that he was working. It was really with these women. It was like he had a pathological desire to save women in need. So when his mother gave Alan five hundred dollars for his fiftieth birthday.
He took that money and spent it on Dawn. That's the first time he met her.
This was when Jan was sick with mono and resting at her parents' place in air Arizona. Jan thought back to that birthday call when Alan started to cry. Originally, she thought it was out of concern for her health.
I think instead it was a little pang of guilt, but was short lived.
The guilt apparently subsided, and Alan continued to spend time in the red light district where he met Don. There he wasn't the sheepish guy Jan had known. Even smaller details didn't square up with what she knew about him. For one thing, she discovered.
He was a very good pool player, and he would challenge people playing pool, which I can't even picture him in a bar let alone playing pool.
The other Alan spent his nights with Don at bars, and the reporter told Jan something that changed her understanding of the whole dynamic. Before Alan died, he'd been hanging out with Don and John for nine months, so that time Alan wasn't paying Don for sex.
They stopped having sex. They only had sex the first two months.
So what was the point of their relationship? Could it be drugs? The reporter turned to Jan for an answer, and in her gut she knew it was an addiction of a different kind, an addiction to being needed.
So this was like a guarantee, you know, if I'm going to surround myself with people who need me financially, I have a guarantee of an audience. I have a guarantee of a partner. They're not going to leave me.
He liked having a captive audience.
He will go over there and read the paper and bring them breakfast, and they'd sit and listen with boredom to his stories.
Of course, Don and John got something out of this relationship too. They were in it for money. Jan was able to figure out just how much Allan had given them.
It was one hundred and fifty grand.
In today's money, that's nearly four hundred and forty thousand dollars.
And that doesn't include the cars he bought them, the rent he paid, the meals he paid for.
He also bought them heroin.
He would take them on drug runs for them, and I think that was his making sure they were going to be dependent upon him.
This was Alan's m He got people to need him. But this time Alan was mixed up with some very dangerous people.
I mean even among other criminals. John was feared, that's how vicious he was.
Remember those phone calls Jan got in the middle of the night, the ones from the man with the Southern accent that was John Fry. Alan had lied and said he was a widower. So when John called the house and heard Allan's wife on the line, he was surprised. Then he got an idea he could use that information to extort Alan, to threaten his wife in exchange for more and more money, and they drained him dry.
When he ran out of money, they lost patience with him, They had no interest in him and decided, at least John decided the best thing to do was just to kill him and get him out of their hair.
Near the end, Alan started to see the writing on the wall.
He was running out of money to give them. He realized that John had been calling our house and hanging up. Things were coming to a head, and I think he'd decompensated.
That led to Alan's psychotic break, or what Jan had thought was a psychotic break. She remembered that phrase Alan kept repeating when he was in the hospital.
You're purest snow, purest snow, snow. And I think in his mind at that point in time, he was seeing Don and me as very different people.
To Alan, Jan and Don were total opposites. Jan was the woman he transformed into something good and clean and pure. Don brought out his dark side. But when Jan learned more about Don's backstory. It resonated with her.
Don came from an abusive household, and she did not have a good self esteem. I mean, she quit school a month before she graduated high school and she was nominated val Victorian. Instead, she threw all that away, left the suburbs to go downtown and met up with John, and their life took a turn for the worst.
After that, Jan learned of at least four other women he supported financially. Jan herself had been that young woman with a lot of potential and no direction to go in. When she met Alan, her life changed too.
In a way that was the old me. I mean, I had nothing when I met him, and he was saying I'll pay your tuition, just like he said it to them.
And now, for the first time she saw their relationship through his eyes.
It explained to me his attraction to me. You know that I was a project. I was a challenged to be fixed, to be provided for. I was a good prop someone he could perform for with his knowledge and his money, and I sat and ate it all up. I was a willing participant.
It's a strange feeling, especially considering that Alan helped her achieve so many dreams.
I will always be grateful for what he gave me. I don't mean just financially, but the encouragement. He was instrumental in getting me on my path, and I don't think I would have done it without him.
The very things she loved about Alan were the ones that destroyed him and destroyed her life. John Fry was eventually convicted of murder and the mutilation of a body. He served the rest of his life in prison. John served ten months plus three years probation for her role in the crime. As for jan she wanted to get out of Detroit.
Once I left Detroit, I paid off the bills and got away from the media and got away from the police. I felt like I could start to reinvent my life.
She's lived many lives since that time. She's taught in practiced psychology, traveled the world, gotten remarried. Still, she couldn't leave what happened with Alan behind completely. She continued to think about the man he'd been as both a victim and a perpetrator.
What that did was end up in conflicted grief. You have dueling emotions. There's a part of you that's like the typical grief. Feel those loss and sadness and missing in person, but the other side of it is relief.
Dealing with this complicated grief and trauma made it hard for Jan to connect with people who could possibly understand what she'd gone through, but eventually she found community and other homicide survivors.
Homicide survivor is someone who is grieving over the homicide of a loved one. It's somebody who's left with the aftermath of murder. And the reason we don't know of that term is I don't think it's projected much in true crime. The focus is on the perpetrator and the deed a little bit on the victim, and we're in the background, and nobody cares. They think if we get the perpetrator convicted, that that's the end of the story. Kind of like, oh if you only knew.
Knowing people who shared even parts of her own experience give her a deep sense of belonging.
Now I hold that as near and dear to my heart. The people I have met, the stories I have heard, it's so healing. It was like the missing piece.
Supporting and advocating for homicide survivors has become Jan's mission. In life. We end all of our episodes with the same question, why do you want to tell your story?
If you think about most movies dealing with homicide, the family of the victim is either never shown or they're grieving in the corner wringing their hands. That's the end of them. There's not any curiosity about it. And the fact of the matter is anybody listening could be a part of our club. Homicide cuts across all racial lines, age, economic, geographic, you name it. Nobody is immune. And if anything's going to change, we have to put our story out there. Somebody Scott to do it.
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart podcast. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning. This episode was written and produced by Kitlyn Golden and Monique le Board, with additional production by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Mercury and Caitlyn Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchech. Audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio, additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
