BetrayalDonielle’s idyllic midwestern life descends into chaos when the FBI raid her house, searching for her husband and two of their family friends.
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One of my children saw his dad dressed all in black, and he said that it seemed like his dad was mad at him because he yelled at him to go back to bed. And the night before that, he had actually told my oldest child to rap a sledgehammer that we had that had a really bright yellow handle in black electric tape and find a black raincoat for him to wear.
And she was like, okay, Dad, I'm Anderrea gunning. And this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. One night in twenty seventeen, Danielle Oliver Chauve was awoken by the FBI in state police. They were pointing guns at her, demanding to know where her husband was. That night, she learned the man she had spent twenty years with was hiding some very big secrets. This is don Yelle's first time telling her story. She's been reluctant to share what she went through because, as you'll hear in part two, her husband has other victims. She wants to be respectful of their experience and suffering. But this episode isn't about her husband's crimes. It's about the twenty year marriage Donyelle built with him, the ways he deceived and violated her, and the shocking betrayal that ended it all. It's also the story of being totally in the dark about your partner's double life.
I used to watch Lifetime shows and I used to be that person saying, oh, she had to know something. So I totally understand why people say things like that. But until you were actually walking in those shoes and living with a person who can be completely double faced, living a completely separate life, all I know is the life that he had with me and our kids. That's all I saw. He was able to do everything else completely separate.
Danielle grew up in a happy, tight knit family in California.
Family is very important to me. We were just over in my parents, all of my siblings, and we all just get along really well. There's hardly ever any arguments within our family, and when there is, it's results within the day.
Growing up, Danielle's parents were her role models. They had a respectful and happy marriage. It was an environment that nurtured her easygoing and trusting nature.
I had a really good childhood and so I didn't grow up with a lot of strife or bad things happening in my childhood where that trust was broken down.
She was raised with a strong sense of faith. That's still one of her core values.
I know some religions can be like really strict, you can do this, you can't do this. I wouldn't even say that mine is a religion. It's a relationship with christ.
Donielle is one of those rare people who loved high school. She was popular and she had a long time high school boyfriend named Billy.
When we were teenagers. Everybody thought for sure that we were just going to be together forever, you know, we were the thing.
Right before their senior year of high school, Billy proposed to her and she said yes.
But then I actually had to move to Hawaii because my dad was working for a military and we moved there.
She ended up spending her senior year in Hawaii. Then she got accepted to college in Illinois. She was ready to start a new life there without her high school boyfriend. Giving up her first love was hard, but she wanted to prioritize her independence. Danielle thrived in college. She loved her major, which was art, and she also loved going to Bible study on campus. That's where she met Chad.
He was raising his hand and answering the questions like right away, and he was answering the way I would have answered those questions, right in line with the way I believed.
So I was attracted to that immediately. She knew Chad was special the.
First time I met him. I said to my parents when I got back that I was going to marry him. So it was pretty much love at first sight.
She felt comfortable around Chad. It was easy, like they'd known each other for years.
We actually met at my parents' house and watched a couple movies and I made amazagna and he changed my oil in my car. That was her first date.
From the start, Donielle was serious about Chad.
When i'm dating someone that I'm deciding whether or not this person is the person I want to marry. So I was looking for specific things that I wanted in a husband when I was dating him.
And Chad checked all the boxes.
There was lots of things. He grew up in a Christian home, He had a good relationship with his parents. He was business minded, like he was able to support me.
Everything about him felt right. He was pursuing a degree in finance, he had dreams of starting his own business, and like her, he also wanted a big family. But most of all, she just loved being around him.
I had fun with him, you know, we would laugh about lots of things. I was just attracted to the way I felt around him.
While they were dating, he went above and beyond to woo her.
Something about Chad, you have to know he likes to do everything big. It always has to be the best and the grandest and the most showy.
It's not who she is, but Chad said she deserved the best, and it was flattering. After about two years of dating, he made a particularly grand gesture. He bought her an expensive dress, rented a limousine, and took them to a dinner theater.
And during that intermission he excused himself. I thought he was going to use the restroom, but he actually turns out had set up beforehand with the theater that he would go on stage and asked me to marry him from the stage. And then he got down on his knee. And yeah, it was quite the show.
She said. Yes, he brought her out of her comfort zone and it felt like a fairy tale.
I was one hundred percent this is the one I had to spend the rest of my life with.
Chad was involved in every step of the wedding planning, which Donielle loved, and he also wanted to go to pre marriage counseling to discuss their expectations.
We discussed who would be the breadwinner in the home, you know, what would be the different roles of both husband and wife, as far as who did what in the household. It was thoroughly discussed how our marriage would go before we got married, I mean, as far as you can. We did know that I wanted to be a stay at home mom, so that was talked about.
Danielle had been managing her own money in her early twenties, and although she was good at it, it was a relief to be marrying someone who had expertise in finance. It made her feel safe, and so they agreed that while she would manage the household, Chad would manage the money.
And I had full trust in Chad to be able to do that too, because of his business degree. He was really good at money, and so he went to school for it. I didn't have any you know, worries about him taking over the finances for the family.
She was happy with this arrangement. She's a do it yourself kind of person. It's an attitude that's well suited to raising kids and the household.
My dishwasher broke down several years ago, and I wasn't about to pay somebody because I'm going to figure out how to fix it. I laid all the flooring in the house that I'm in right now. I don't know how to do that, but I looked it up, just went on YouTube and figured it out. So I'm that type of person.
After they got married, the couple decided to move to Chad's hometown in Illinois. To call it a small town is an understatement. The entire population could fit in one high school football stadium.
Well, the town we live in, Erie is only nineteen hundred.
It's small, small, but perfectly suited to the life that they were building, a life that centered around family and community. Plus, Chad had grown up there, so he knew nearly everyone in town, and everyone seemed to adore him. In fact, he'd been the high school valedictorian. Once they moved back to Erie, the couple also joined Chad's church, the church he grew up in.
We were really involved with that church, and his parents went to that church too, and we led a Sunday school together. As a couple, their.
Life was falling into place. A happy marriage, a strong foundation based on shared values, a community that supported them, and a church they felt welcomed by. And Chad was making progress in his career. He began the certification process to become a financial advisor. He wanted to start his own firm.
He did it all online. I went through classes online and got his certificate online and all that.
She was proud of him, and for the time being, she kept working too.
I also worked for the post office for a little bit, but that was not part of our marriage plan. I didn't want to be a working mom. I wanted to be a stay at home mom. Pretty much as soon as we got married, we started trying.
But conceiving their first baby didn't happen as quickly as Danielle hoped. The months turned into a year, and during that year, Chad made a shocking confession.
He came home from work and sat me down and said, I need to tell you something really important and just said, I had an accounter with a guy in the bathroom, and I think we need to go see somebody and talk to like a counselor about it. And so I was just like, what is going on? It just blindsided me, Like what just happened.
She asked him point blank if he was gay. He said no, he wasn't. She wanted more details about what actually happened, who it was with, and what they did.
But he never really gave a straight answer. It was just we need to go talk to somebody, like a counselor about it.
Donielle was shaken and confused about her husband's confession to a one time playing but at the same time, Chad was doing everything he could to make it right. He confessed to it immediately, he wanted to get help, and most importantly, he was coming to her with sincere remorse.
He was crying, I was crying. He was saying sorry.
Chad wanted to get help quickly, and so the next day they did.
We actually went to the pastor and asked for advice about who we should see as a marriage counselor for us. We were given a name of a Christian counselor.
They had multiple sessions with the counselor, some sessions together as a couple and some separately. During a one on one meeting, the counselor gave Danielle some advice.
He advised me, you should really think carefully about this marriage. You know, you actually have a right to end this marriage if he is being unfaithful to you.
The counselor said he'd seen a situation like this before, and he wanted Danielle to know that divorce was an option.
I understood that. I knew that that's something that it's perfectly fine for me to file for a divorce, but I didn't want to. I wanted to make this marriage work. I didn't even want the word divorce to come up in our marriage. Like when I made a commitment in our marriage at the wedding ceremony, My promise was a promise. I didn't take my vows lightly in sickness and in health, or Richard for poorer. I was going to walk through it with him. I wanted to help him resolve whatever it was that he was going through because I loved him and I wanted our marriage to work.
This one infidelity it felt small and manageable, especially compared to the years they'd spend together getting to know each other, studying the Bible together and building a life. She really trusted Chad.
I felt like I could trust him even though he had done whatever he had done. I believed him one hundred percent.
They got a workbook on overcoming infidelity and even did the homework together, and they decided to lean on their faith to help them rebuild their relationship. Church became an even bigger part of their lives.
He was an elder in the church. We jointly were leaders for kids Christian camps. We were very involved in our faith.
Their marriage began looking up, especially when a year later they welcomed their first baby, a baby girl.
She was an amazing first child, super easy baby, smiling all the time, happy, alert. It was a great, great first mom experience.
Donielle was on top of the world, so filled with love for her first daughter and her young family. It confirmed to her that she really did want to be a stay at home mom. She just felt whole.
People that we would meet walking through a mall always stop and say, oh, you have the cutest baby. She's the cutest thing I've ever seen, and your family is so cute.
The difficulties she and Chad faced in the first year of marriage started to feel like they were in the rear view mirror.
At that point, I felt totally in love with him and close to him. I felt like I had the perfect life.
That baby would be the first of six.
I knew that you could get pregnant even when you were still nursing, and before you had your first cycle after pregnancy. I didn't think it was going to happen to me, but it did.
Soon. Donielle's life became consumed by full time childcare. As their kids got older, she started homeschooling them, and she loved every minute of it.
I wouldn't have it any other way. And a lot of people are like, wow, sixth kids, that's a lot, but you know, each one of them is unique and has their own personality. Each of them is just amazing. I love it. I absolutely love it.
With a growing family came more financial demands, but luckily Chad's business was taking off. They even had the ability to upgrade their house.
He had been starting to look at this property that he really wanted. It was a huge house, way bigger than we needed. Enormous, huge living room, huge family, a huge dining room, huge huge master bedroom. You know basement that looked like a bowling alley, and so he started looking at it and dreaming about it and eventually decided that he was going to try to purchase it.
Danielle didn't think it was the most practical choice, but the house made him happy. After they moved in, he tried to tell her how to run the house, but she stood her ground. She trusted him to handle the finances, so when it came to the housework, he needed to trust her.
He wanted me to do things a certain way, like do laundry on a certain day, do the dishes on a certain day, or you know, do dusting on a certain day. And I was like, no, I will do it when it needs to be done. When I see that it needs doing, I'll do it, you know.
And there were a lot of things that needed dusting. Chad was a collector. It was a quirk that Danielle accepted.
Precious moments, figurines, and he was very much in a Hallmark fan, so he had millions of Hallmark ornaments, tons of DVDs. I mean we had two huge walls full of DVDs.
They loved watching movies as a family, and after the kids went to bed, the couple would watch their favorite TV.
Shows, Dexter and Breaking Bad.
Every summer, Danielle, Chad and their six kids would take family road trips.
Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, we had all the tourist places in the United States. We had a lot of really fun times as family.
On these trips, they'd stay in huge rental homes. Chad always wanted the best of the best for the family, and.
They were very nice, very nice rented houses. Some of them. I was like, okay, guys, don't touch anything, you know, like expensive paintings on the walls and glass decorations.
One summer, about fifteen years into their marriage, the family was on one of their regular road trips, and on this trip, their rental home was in a remote area.
I woke up around between the morning, I know, it was the middle of the night. All the kids were asleep, and I got up to go to the bathroom or something and turned over and he was not in bed with me. I looked around the house to see if he was just up somewhere. He was not there. I went out into the garage area. The car was gone, so I started being like, where did he go? There was no note as far as he left somewhere. He didn't leave a message on my phone. He was just gone.
It was the early two thousands, so she didn't have a smartphone to look at his location. She started to worry that something terrible happened.
So I started calling around to the hospital around the area and is there any child skipper admitted into this hospital? No, ma'am, thank you, call the next hospital.
Around three am, the phone rang. It was Chad.
And he said he was at law and I was like, okay, why are you at Walmart? I just thought I would pick up some stuff. But you know, you can kind of tell when somebody's calling from the middle of a store. You can hear the hum of everything. There was no shopping cart sounds, no like cashier beeping and stuff. There was none of that. It did not sound like he was in a shopping area. I hung up the phone and just was like, how what is happening? I don't understand. Says he's are in Walmart, but it's hours away. That doesn't make any sense. And I just sat in confusion, shaking until he got home.
When Chad got back, he tried to explain it away and.
He apologized and said I'm sorry I didn't tell you where I was going. You know, everything's fine, You're good, the kids are good, I'm back, We're safe. He blew it over.
Whenever they got in a disagreement. This is what he'd tell her.
His favorite phrase was, don't make a mountain out of a mole hill. You know, you just get really emotional about things. It's okay, you know, calm down. Always made me feel like.
I was crazy abandoning the family in a rental house in the middle of the night with no good explanation. It just didn't sit right with her, so Donielle called her mom.
She was like, oh, wow, yeah, that is really weird. I'm glad you're okay. You know, I'm glad it all worked out, but that is really weird.
Donielle was the full time caretaker for six children under fifteen. She didn't have the energy to fight with her husband.
I didn't confront him. That's one of my personality quirks is I don't like confrontation. I would rather just not talk about it than have a huge argument about something, which is not healthy. I think it's much healthier to communicate and work it out. But at that point, I just didn't want to deal with it.
Plus, whenever she did question him, it always ended up coming back on her.
On the rare occasions when I would ask questions, I would be shut down and told I was crazy or that is totally not how it went. You have blown this out of proportion and you don't remember the actual fact that actually happened. This is how it actually happened.
When Donielle woke up on a family vacation to find her husband missing, he said he was picking up something for work at a Walmart in the middle of the night. She didn't quite buy the story, but she knew Chad was busier than ever growing his financial advising firm. Around the same time, he decided to start making passive income by buying rental properties in town. It started with one small house, then two, then an apartment building in their hometown. He was so busy that he often worked from home at nights. He renovated their basement to become his home office. He even put in a king sized bed.
I didn't understand why you would need a bed in your office, but he insisted on having it, and his reasons were that if he needed a nap, he could just hop in the bed and take a quick nap and then get back to work.
It bothered her him staying up late like this and sleeping in his office. It also bothered her that he locked the door. He said it was a security measure because he had important financial documents in there.
And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, well, how do you work at night? If you are a financial advisor, you can't meet with clients at night. So it was just it was very confusing to me, and I do remember one time just crying my eyes out to him, saying, I really want you to sleep with me. You know, at night, I just feel closer to when we're sleeping together. I feel like we're more like roommates.
He started coming to bed with her until she fell asleep, then he would slip out and go back to work. She would only realize it when she woke up and found him gone.
One night, I actually got up out of bed and was knocking on his basement door, and I heard no answer, And so I actually got in the car and was driving around and thinking maybe I would see his car somewhere. I never did, but I got to that point where I was like starting to look to see if I could find anything.
She never found any proof that her husband was cheating or having an affair. She didn't have the energy to start a fight with him. He insisted on sleeping in the basement. Eventually she became resigned to the fact she couldn't change his mind.
At that point in our marriage, I felt very distant from him. I felt like there was a wall up and we never would discuss anything. If I ever wanted to talk about anything, it was always I'm too tired, or can we talk about this tomorrow, or let's talk about this this weekend. But nothing ever got talked about.
In this period where Chad was sleeping in the basement office and they were bickering, Danielle knew that their marriage needed to improve, so she saw it help for herself.
I actually went and saw a counselor a couple times on my own because I felt like me having these issues with our marriage was kind of my fault. I felt like there was something wrong with me not feeling close to him. But I wanted our marriage to be a really good marriage, and I didn't feel that it was a good marriage.
She even suggested they try counseling again as a couple but this time Chad resisted.
He refused to go to more than one or two sessions with me. He felt like it was useless or he didn't want to tell somebody else our problems.
With each passing month, Chad spent more and more time out of the house renovating the rental properties, and some nights tenants would call with emergencies.
There would be nights where he would say, Oh, I got to go there's a sewage leak. I have to go really quick and fix the sewage leak.
Despite their rocky few years, she still trusted him. She had to.
You can't have a marriage without trust. It doesn't work. You know, if one of the partners say I'm going to go do this outside the home, you have to trust that they're actually doing what they're saying they're doing. Like if I say I'm going to go shopping, he has to trust that I'm actually shopping. If he says I'm going to go to, you know, fix the sewage system in his apartments, I have to trust that he's actually doing that. Otherwise there's no relationships.
Plus, the rental properties added financial security to their lives. She believed that at the end of the day. He was working so hard in order to provide for the family. She often overheard him practicing conversations he needed to have for work.
He had this weird quirk where if he was going to have a conversation with somebody, he would write down the conversation that he was going to have and then memorize it. And then I would often see him like pacing and doing weird things with his hands and with his mouth. I think he was like rehearsing in his mind how the conversation would go and what he would say in response to their responses.
There was one big meeting in particular Chad was preparing for. It was with an older couple that went to their church, a couple that taught Sunday school. They had known Chad for nearly his whole life, and they were wealthy. Chad set up a meeting with them to pitch his financial advising services.
He was trying really hard to get them to be one of his clients.
In the end, they decided not to use him. He was dejected. He'd been counting on their business. After that meeting didn't go as planned, he started talking about selling his financial advising business and instead getting into the storage industry.
There's a little plot of land that would be perfect for storage units. So he had said that, you know, we're going to buy this land over here and I'm going to start building storage units, and so we need to set up this LLC.
He wanted Danielle to sign paperwork to help set up the business.
If we have he as a president, then it's better for taxes because you're a woman.
He asked her to go to the bank with him that day to get it set up, and there out in public, she noticed that her husband looked disheveled.
He was not bathed. I was surprised that he went to the bank in the state that he was in. I just thought, well, he must be so tired. He's trying to sell his financial business, and he's trying to get these storage units ready, and he's not getting much sleep, so he just must be really stressed out.
Later that day, one of Donille's kids came to her. He said that last night he'd seen something strange in the driveway of their house.
One of my children said that he got up and saw his dad dressed all in black, and he said that it seemed like Chad was mad at him because he yelled at him to go back to bed.
This was alarming because another one of her kids had confessed something bizarre.
The night before that he had actually told my oldest child to wrap a sledgehammer that we had that had a really bright yellow handle in black electric tape and find a black raincoat for him, and she was like, okay, Dad.
Immediately, she tried to get in touch with Chad, but he wasn't answering his phone. After they went to the bank, he'd left the house to work on a rental property.
There were several rental places that he owned that he was either renovating or was currently renting. I texted him asking if he could call me as soon as possible. I was starting to feel like, Okay, what's going on. I hope he's okay. I hope he's not in an accident. He called shortly after and explained that he had accidentally fallen asleep at the rental and that he was still feeling a little disoriented, but reassured me that he was fine.
If it sounds like Danielle is reading off of a piece of paper, it's because she is. She's reading from a written statement documenting this day.
Nothing is as it seems, absolutely nothing. This is my living nightmare and what I can remember that has happened in the last few days. At four to twenty two pm, I texted him asking if he was okay. No response. I texted again at five six pm and his response was yep you. I told him I was just wondering what happened, and he texted what do you mean? And then around five point thirty he called and said he was sorry he didn't see my text and that he must have been in the basement and hadn't gotten it right away.
That night, Chad didn't come home for dinner. At the time, she assumed he'd fallen asleep at the rental property again, but she couldn't leave her six small children to go check on him, so around eleven pm, after putting the kids to bed, she went to sleep herself.
Next thing I heard was banging and branking glass and then yelling state police, state police, hands in the air. I came out in my bedroom with no glasses on, hands in the air, wondering if they were actually police because I can't see very vaconly see about a foot in front of me without it being blurry In my mind, I was thinking, well, either I'm being robbed and they're posing as state police, or something's happening and I have no idea why there's state police in my house with a gun pointed at me.
It was becoming very clear, very quickly, this was actually the state police and the FBI. There wasn't a mistake. They were looking for Chad, and they were incredibly serious.
They asked if anyone else was in the house, and I said, yes, just me and the kids, assuming Chad was at the rental. My whole mouth got super dry. I could not hardly even talk. I asked them if I could go back into the bedroom to get some water. I kept water by my bed, and they're like, no, you can't go anywhere. You have to stay right here. I wasn't even allowed to wake up my kids. They actually went boke up all of my kids. They were asking if there was hiding places in the house, and it threw me for a loop because I'm like, I mean, my kids hide in little places when they play hide and seek.
Then the police asked her about the elderly couple that went to their church, the ones Chad wanted as clients.
Why are you asking me questions about them and where is my husband.
On the next episode of Betrayal.
He walled it off with cement blocks and soundproofing. The only entry and exit to that room was through a steel trap door with a walk on the outside in a closet hidden under I think it was a dresser or something. You would only know it was there if you knew it was there.
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. 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 and partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Mercury and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchech. Audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio, additional editing support from Nico Aruka. 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
