Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Shame: The Murder of Brenda Powell
105 Plays1 year ago
A daughter leading a double life murders her mother rather than face the truth of what she has done. She has failed at college and when her parents find out, she picks murder as her problem solver. Did her shame turn her from an accomplished young adult to a convicted killer?
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Hearth, Home, and Homicide'
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello, I'm Bridget. And I'm Caroline. You are listening to Hearth, Home, and Homicide, a family production about family murders. My daughter Caroline and I narrate each story and son and brother Andy is our producer. As Caroline and I talk about each family member, we are not only keen on watching justice unfold for the killer, whatever that may look like, but we're especially
00:00:52
Speaker
keeping sensitivity for victims and their family on the top of our mind. So our podcasts do include violence and trauma. Listener discretion is advised.
Mother's Day Reflections on Family
00:01:06
Speaker
So Caroline, we're still in May. I hope you had a great Mother's Day. You've got a lot to feel great about in what a good mother you are.
00:01:18
Speaker
Well, thank you. I learned from the best. Yeah. Well, we all we all are, you know, interested in having a family and then we get really super anxious about seeing them fly the nest so that we can go to whatever tropical island we've been wanting to go to. And then later we want to do it all over again. That's been my experience. But luckily I have grandchildren and you may have grandchildren someday and you'll see what I mean.
00:01:47
Speaker
Yes. That's one thing I'll say about motherhood that I enjoy the most. It's like pleasant surprises all over the place, but currently I love how much they love you because I love you so much. You're a brilliant Nana. You were a great mom.
00:02:07
Speaker
And they're not the same person, so I remind my kids of it all the time. Oh yeah, no, that wasn't my experience with her. Yeah, my mother is not this person. This person that you know is like, you know, something happened and other features of her personality came out.
00:02:26
Speaker
That's right. I love it because I did have a great mom. You are a great mom. It's fun. It's the most compelling task there is on earth, in my opinion, to raise a child and to be part of a family.
Brenda Powell's Murder and Family Dynamics
00:02:44
Speaker
Today's episode is called Shame, the Murder of Brenda Powell.
00:02:53
Speaker
It's an interesting case and we always look for cases that offer sort of a different angle into why someone would murder a member of their family. And it's just so aberrant in terms of human behavior to murder your family. And yet there is an endless supply of cases. So we look for cases that are interesting to us and that we can really get into
00:03:22
Speaker
especially the victims and the family members after the murder. Every family murder is tragic, we know, and namely because it is an inconceivable crime that leaves a residue of horrible suffering and irreconcilable pain for the family of the victim and the killer at the same time, meaning the remaining family probably still loves the killer at some level, and it's just so complicated.
00:03:52
Speaker
So confusing. Can there ever be a peace in that family after the killer is convicted and the truth is full out? In today's case, that suffering of the remaining family is really in full focus. It raises an interesting question. The courts seek justice for the family of the murder victim. But what if the family is begging for their murderous family member to be treated with exceeding
00:04:21
Speaker
excessive leniency and compassion. And what about the community for which the courts are also seeking justice? There is the keeping community safe and seeking community justice. So it's very complicated. And we're starting our story today with the murder victim who was only 50 years old, a wonderful woman named Brenda Powell, who was adored by patients and parents
00:04:50
Speaker
at Akron, Ohio Children's Hospital. Brenda worked there as a child life specialist for kids with cancer and bone diseases. And I just have to stop right there and say, is there anything worse or harder?
00:05:07
Speaker
No, it's the one thing in this life that I think is like the mistake made by whatever creator you subscribe to in all seriousness. I just don't understand it. Like why? That's not right. For a lot of scholars, it's an argument against a god. Yeah. Oh, I could totally. It's just not right on any level of anything. No, it's impossible for humanity to comprehend a killing
00:05:38
Speaker
in that family and especially more than that is a child that becomes seriously, possibly fatally ill. How can that happen? So here today we've got this victim who is walking alongside both the child
00:06:05
Speaker
with cancer and blood disease and or blood disease and or the family at all times. So I'll give you a hint of what she, Brenda Powell at 50 years old, she was adored by patients and parents at Akron Children's Hospital where she worked as a child life specialist with these kids.
00:06:33
Speaker
And she loved those kids like they were her kids, said Vanessa Evans, whose son was a patient at the hospital. And she told her story, Vanessa Evans did, she told her story to the US son. And a lot of our data today comes from articles they wrote about our victim today. Vanessa's son CJ was diagnosed with a stage four brain tumor when he was 12 years old.
00:07:02
Speaker
Yeah, see, not right. No. And then after a long journey with cancer, he succumbed to his illness at age 22. So a 10 year battle, a 10 year battle. Your whole life. That's a lifetime of battling cancer. That's not right. I don't know. Anyway, I don't want to get off on that. It's the worst thing. Well, but it's important to understand that Brenda Powell was with her son.
00:07:31
Speaker
from start to finish and to quote Vanessa, she was in that room with me when my son took his last breath. So that's the kind of person Brenda was. Brenda's story gained national attention as her daughter stood trial for the past, in the article that I was reading for the past 12 days,
00:07:59
Speaker
of her mother's death. So in other words, the trial that they had for the killer, her daughter took a couple of weeks to get through. And in that couple of weeks, Brenda's story came to the fore. Her daughter, Sydney, 23, at the time of the
00:08:22
Speaker
murder trial. She was charged with murder after she allegedly stabbed her mother 23 times in March of 2020. That's actually not the full horror of it. At first she banged her mother over the head with a cast iron skillet and then levied 30 stab wounds to her neck and head
00:08:52
Speaker
until she was fully dead. Vanessa, this mother who was letting the world know what Brenda was like, Vanessa along with others at the hospital who had gotten close to Brenda were absolutely grief stricken when she died. Not only for the loss that she felt, but for future patients that would never meet Brenda.
Impact of Brenda's Loss on the Community
00:09:15
Speaker
She was only 50. She had another 20 years, maybe 30.
00:09:21
Speaker
that she could have continued being that rock and that sympathizer and that loving hand holder of everybody who was dealing with this. And to quote Vanessa again, just to see one case of what Brenda did, she said, I know how much she did for us and for all those other families that I know that
00:09:48
Speaker
There's a loss to all the people going through this now and to the people that are going to go through it in the future that they don't have her. You know, there are only a few children's hospitals in the United States like this hospital. There's one in Seattle near where we live where people from Alaska, people from Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming come.
00:10:17
Speaker
to Seattle. And so I'm imagining that in Akron, same thing. It's a regional place where hope for the child is given in the form of medical care and also life skills, dealing with this. Vanessa also was a witness to what happened
00:10:44
Speaker
in this case legally, because she recalled that Brenda got a phone call at work when they were together. And it was her husband, Stephen Powell, telling her to come home on the day that she died. It was her husband who called her because he had just left the house and he was there with Sydney at the house. Laura, a child psychologist who worked closely with Brenda at the hospital,
00:11:14
Speaker
was the one to tell Vanessa about Brenda's death. Now that says a lot about the hospital wide shock and horror about losing Brenda Powell. So, you know, I just really wanted to highlight our victim here. She was a cut above. I certainly look up to her for what she contributed to people in their darkest hour.
Sydney's Background and Academic Decline
00:11:40
Speaker
Well, anyone working on the front lines of life or death, meaning, you know, you're bringing in life, you're taking it out, you're performing surgeries. I mean, it's all right up on the line, you know, that, that mystical line. And so the, the people that do that, that's like Brenda, I mean, cause I'm sure like every profession there's people in it that aren't great at it, but, but when we see those who are
00:12:05
Speaker
My God, what a salvation to have you where you are. So it sounds to me like Brenda didn't just have one family. She also had this hospital family and all of these kids and all of the things. There are a lot of professions like that, but the ones that cross the lines in the life and you know, you're working the front line every day between life and death. Like, yeah, those are serious angels for me. Yeah, it's quite the human being who can
00:12:34
Speaker
be hopeful. And when a child is critically ill or they've received some kind of terminal death sentence, I mean, to fight that and to help them get the most out of each day. And in Vanessa's case with her son,
00:13:04
Speaker
to fight it for 10 years and to be there when he took his last breath.
00:13:09
Speaker
That's family. Oh, big time. Those nurses are trying to give these children childhoods in the midst of something adults would never want to do. I would never want to, you know, I've seen people battle cancer from the sidelines and it looks scary as all get out. And so to do that to children, yeah, that's not right. Like I get all my blood boils about it.
00:13:34
Speaker
They are to be children. So anyway, Stephen King, he in a book I read about from him, Stephen King on writing was the book I was reading. And he got gets a lot of questions about where his fears and anxieties come from, because he attributes all of his horror stories to just being this cathartic way of dealing with
00:14:02
Speaker
fear and anxiety and in a creative way. And so he's been asked many times, what is your greatest fear? And he oftentimes will say that it's the arbitrariness of life that you can be at the top of your happiness and fulfillment and you can walk out and to get your mail and be hit by a Mac truck. And he also talks about how horrible it is
00:14:30
Speaker
when a child dies and he's often let a child go on living in his novel, then decided they had to die for literary reasons and then put them back in. And, you know, so it's a very tender subject. So Brenda, I wish I had gotten to meet her. I have met people like her and I have just such a high value placed on people like her.
00:15:00
Speaker
So now we're going to have to talk about the killer, Sidney Powell. Now, Sidney was the only daughter of Steven and Brenda. She did have a brother. She attended private Catholic schools throughout her life. She, I mean, from grammar school on into a private college. She was a stand out student in high school.
00:15:28
Speaker
She had gained, I think it was called a presidential scholarship to attend a private Catholic college an hour away from her home, University of Mountain Union. Now, I mean, she was such a standout and her mother was very, very, very, very close to her. There are a lot of pictures of her and her mother together.
00:15:56
Speaker
All reports were just, just loved each other so much. The family was very close. This family was just very positive. Stephen as well as Brenda. A very positive and very active family. Active in their community. Active in sports. Just very focus driven people.
00:16:21
Speaker
And Brenda was an honor student and had a 3.8 grade point average. And she was the captain of her high school soccer team. Now, you know, I'm a klutz. I'm not physical in my expression that much. And I didn't do well in school when it came to PE and things like being on a team.
00:16:51
Speaker
So now when I see my grandchildren who are very active in team sports and so forth and so on, and one of them would make the captain of their team, I actually know what it takes from the parent side and from the child side to become that high level in a high school of a team like soccer. So my hat is off to you. Sydney, you are obviously happy.
00:17:21
Speaker
in your life at this stage. She had earned a partial academic scholarship to the University of Mountain Union where she began taking classes in the fall and right after high school graduation. And now when I say partial, it paid about 25 or 30%, something like that, of her entire expenses.
00:17:48
Speaker
So between that and her parents and maybe any little jobs she may have had along the way, she probably was doing very well.
00:17:57
Speaker
Well, in 2019, 2020, that would have been, what, a cool 250,000 for a regular American college education? No, I'm just kidding. Public college, you might be more in private college. I think, well, when I was going to college in the arts, it was about 50,000 was the expectation, I think, for a four-year degree from a general university, you know, it's no Harvard.
00:18:21
Speaker
But it was, if I remember from my FAFSA correctly, that was the expectation. Right, right. So anyway, back to Sydney, our killer today, her roommates would later say that her mental state began deteriorating.
00:18:45
Speaker
the next fall. So this would be the fall, the beginning of her sophomore year. She started sleeping 16 hours a day. She was placed on academic probation. And then she was dismissed by the end of the fall semester. So right around Christmas time, you know, January. She was dismissed somewhere in there.
Sydney's Double Life and Struggles
00:19:11
Speaker
She sounds like she was maybe, I mean, I'm just, I'm projecting. I'm going to project myself onto her that maybe she got to college and realized I don't really like this academic stuff. I did that several times before I wound up liking it. That just was me trying to find the subject that I wanted to graduate in. And I had no problem after that.
00:19:39
Speaker
And now she loved the social part, and the way that I know that is she was a member of a sorority. And this conflict between I like my sorority sisters, I like being in a sorority, I like being a, you know, a model college student the way that sophomore sorority sisters, you know, are.
00:20:08
Speaker
But I don't actually want to go to class. So this really may be created a conflict. And I know that I have been depressed in my life. And sometimes it has been around internal conflicts that I could not even identify. But my first treatment of myself was always some kind of self-induced stuff like ice cream, followed by sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.
00:20:38
Speaker
I would really been early and I would I would make up for it by sleeping in late. So well, and I can relate to this because in my so I did here in the state of Washington. It used to be I know it's not like this anymore. Thanks you, Deb. But it used to be a transfer option. So local community colleges are obviously cheap. So discount education, if we're serious about education, it's all the same. But
00:21:04
Speaker
you could go to a community college for a fraction of the cost for the first two years, get your associates, and what's called a direct transfer option. So this would guarantee these incoming juniors is what they would be really, a placement within that university at that level, meaning you could just then transfer your AA over, get your last two years at the university to get your bachelor's, and boom, Bob's your uncle, you got that discount degree.
00:21:30
Speaker
So that really actually helps a lot of people. That's what helped me. And I was such a serious student, but by the time I transferred to the university, I don't know if it was a burnout thing. I don't know if it was just like a celebratory. I don't know if it was the proximity to living on my own and further from my parents. I don't know what it was, but that first semester,
00:21:55
Speaker
Ooh, buddy, I undid all of the previous three years worth of academic work, boom, in just a short quarter or half a semester. My GPA dropped exponentially, my grades were awful. I then spent the remainder of my time at that university clawing my way back out of that hole, back to barely what I was when I entered. So I get it, it happens. You do have fun. College parties are way more fun than the high school parties were.
00:22:24
Speaker
you don't have the people around you at least i didn't but in a sorority i would think you would who are.
00:22:32
Speaker
continuing to motivate you academically. Hey, man, we need to be in good standing on our blah, blah, blah, so you got to get good grades here. That would have been a part of their day-to-day in Greek life. But for me, it was just me and my friends, and they didn't care if I got my degree or not. But it's a real thing. It happens to everybody. Burnout is a real thing. And so sometimes, for me, I know you said sleep and ice cream. Mine is TV and retail therapy.
00:23:00
Speaker
It can get pretty damaging pretty fast. It can. And, you know, I don't think you were alone because I mean, let's let's go back a few years. And I hate to bring this up, but I'm going to that a privileged boy grew to be a privileged man and went to Ivy League schools and wound up on the Supreme Court of the United States named Kavanaugh.
00:23:30
Speaker
But, you know, if you listen to some of the witnesses of what he was really all about in college, it was the sex, drugs and alcohol and maybe not drugs, but certainly just the hard partying and the entitlement to just be a free agent because look at who I am and look at where I am. And it worked for him.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, he got into, he still knew the right people and he got into the Supreme Court and the same thing happened with Clarence Thomas, you know, that he was doing the same thing and it all came back to haunt him, but that's okay. Well, it's all right. So Caroline, you're in a good company. Yeah. I think that Brenda,
00:24:26
Speaker
daughter, Brenda and her husband, Stephen, had a positive, forward-looking family unit. And high school, where you go to school during the day and then you come home and you study and there's a lot of support for that. And, you know, you've got all of that going on. And then when you go to college, even if it was just an hour away,
00:24:56
Speaker
And even if it was another parochial private school, you have so much freedom. And she probably was a very nice, good, helpful sorority sister, but she just was lousy at doing the academic thing. And to her, that had to be something she couldn't face, so she slept and slept and slept.
00:25:26
Speaker
So that's my theory of what might be going on there. You and I talked earlier, we don't have any evidence that she was a drinker or self-medicating with drugs. Maybe her diet was on M&Ms like mine was when I got stressed out. I don't know. But sleeping is a really good indicator for depression. We kind of know that, or reclusivity maybe, just this idea that you're withdrawing, which is a symptom of depression.
00:25:56
Speaker
I agree. So Brenda was hibernating and she was skipping classes until she was suspended. But despite this, Cindy remained on campus. She did not tell her sorority sisters. She did not tell her parents. She didn't tell her friends. She didn't say anything to anybody about she had been dismissed from this college. Her roommates say that she was having
00:26:25
Speaker
kind of blackouts where she wouldn't remember what happened 90 minutes ago. Well, number one, neither can I. Number two, she had a lot of internal churning and a lot of blind spots being built up with these mental bricks of hers to protect her from the truth. She had all that going on. So I think blackout
00:26:53
Speaker
might not be what she had. I think that fragmented was what was going on with her. She was fragmented and she might not be able to carry a train of thought for a long period of time. Have you ever read a book page and then you have to go back and read it again because you absolutely did not actually read it? You read it.
00:27:19
Speaker
But your brain was elsewhere. I went off into the hinterlands. Welcome to my reading experience. I think it's very common. You're reading to relax. Well you're not relaxed. Now reading helps you relax.
00:27:31
Speaker
But part of the relaxation comes from having to go back and reread the page. So it's just that. So it's funny to me. That's a funny phenomenon because you're right. You're right. You keep reading, but your brain is gone. God, wasn't that a great sentence? Doesn't it make you think of that? And suddenly you are off in some other planet, make a to-do list and you're like, I just wanted to read. Right.
00:27:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So I don't I don't consider that a blackout. I consider that a fragmented mind. They say that she never drank. She never took drugs prior to these episodes. So, you know, obviously something was was going on and we know what it was. She was living a double life. She was living a double life. Yeah. And that's my view that
00:28:25
Speaker
to have this horrible thing happen, this painful thing happen, this embarrassing thing happen, or shameful thing happen, and tuck it away and pretend like it didn't happen, that is going to bifurcate every aspect of your life. You're going to have the show of who you want to be
00:28:55
Speaker
being put on for people who are witnessing your life, but then there was your real life going on, which you would not face. So that is, I think, what is brewing here.
Family Confrontation and Tragic Breakdown
00:29:10
Speaker
And then in February of 2020, campus officials finally told Sydney, you have to leave this campus. You actually have to leave the campus. So awkward. We're going to shut
00:29:25
Speaker
down your access card, you're not going to be able to get into your room in the sorority house. In fact, you're not even going to be able to get through the front door. So you need to go pack and you need to get out. So she, excuse me, Sydney,
00:29:49
Speaker
All right, Sydney. Sydney, if you thought you were having blackouts before, now it's going to be very, very difficult for you to know how to function. You've got to go get your stuff from the sorority. And she wound up telling her sorority systems that she just needed some time alone to think things through.
00:30:08
Speaker
No way. She didn't tell them that she had been expelled. There must be some kind of a connection between the campus administration and the sorority organizations. Their organizations must file with the university. I mean, I don't know how it works. I just know how America works and capitalism and we like paperwork. Well, she said she was leaving college, but she didn't tell them that she had been put on academic presate
00:30:38
Speaker
of probation and required to leave. I think that they would know the sorority has a stake in the academic performance of its members because it has a lot more value. Oh, yeah, you're right. So I feel like somebody at that house knew and maybe everything was awkward. Well, maybe that's what they mean by blackouts. Yeah. Remember that happening? Yeah. She wouldn't remember what happened 90 minutes ago is what they said about the blackouts.
00:31:08
Speaker
And I'm thinking, no, we're talking months here. Yeah. That's a whole life she's trying to fake. Yeah. Yeah. She, now remember her house where she grew up in Akron. It's, it's an hour away, but Sydney spent a week in hotels, making her way back to Akron. No, she was not.
00:31:35
Speaker
She was not making her way back to Akron. Making her way back to Akron would look like gas up your car, go to the restroom and drive an hour, get out of the car and go into the house and tell your parents that you have something to tell them they need to sit down. Her phone records and her credit card receipts show that she stayed in various hotels.
00:32:02
Speaker
So to me, when I read that, I'm thinking, Jesus, this girl did not even want the hotelier to know what was really going on. So she had to go hop, skip and jump around to different hotels. I would do that. Well, she had some credit card and phone records. And, you know, again, you know, this college is an hour away. She could have been there in an hour to go home, but she took a week now during that week.
00:32:33
Speaker
Again, she was still leading the double life. She's letting the hotel people know that she only needs a night of rest. And then she goes somewhere else and says, I only need a night of rest. And I mean, yeah. That's so weird to me anyway. I don't, I mean, maybe that's normal. I don't know. Well, it's going to get, I mean, it is strange, but it's stranger still. On the morning of March 3rd, Sydney went to her family's
00:33:01
Speaker
Scudder drive home, much to the surprise of her father who was home when she got home. Now, so her father's there because he doesn't have to be at work until like 11. What does he do? I'm sorry if I've missed that. I think he was also working at a social service type job, but I could be wrong about that. I focus mostly on Brenda.
00:33:27
Speaker
I got kind of my fill of him at court and he was obviously stricken, grief-stricken man, a sweet person, positive thinker. He was not nervous in the court. He was what I would call shattered and interesting in being helpful to both sides. He was really just helpful.
00:33:54
Speaker
That, that's where I believe he made his living in some sort of social community. Maybe he was, you know, the president of the white, the, the, the, the director of the local YMCA or something like that. He was working in community service somewhere. So anyway, he's home. She walks through the door and, um, of course she knows he's probably going to be home depending on what time it is.
00:34:24
Speaker
but she may not be in that way or something. Maybe she did think she was timing it, right? Maybe she did. Yeah. And maybe his hours had changed something. But anyway, she walked in the door and there he was. Now she obviously had to tell him why she's home. And, um, I don't know what she said to him, but it was enough to know that she was not in college anymore. Okay. Um,
00:34:52
Speaker
And the last thing he said to her before he got in the car and went to work and also called, uh, Brenda at work to say, I need you to come home. Yeah. You know, um, I'm home here with Sydney, but I've got to go to work. So I need you to come home. And, um, I wonder what she did say to him and I wonder. Yeah.
00:35:17
Speaker
I just wonder because I know that she's an adult, she's moved out into the sorority home, she's got her scholarship, all the things, but your parents are still a little involved in that, depending on that scholarship and how the paperwork worked.
00:35:31
Speaker
You know what I'm saying? A lot of times you need co-signers, co-bars. I'm just curious what the sorority may have been notified about, what the parents may have received a notice about inadvertently even, because maybe it was in her name and they didn't open it. I just know that we
00:35:52
Speaker
that in these circumstances, there are protocols in place that generate emails or letters and they turn off key card access and they do it in error. You know, we have all these protocols for off-boarding and onboarding. It's the same in a university for students. But they may also have some privacy issues with her being 0 for 18. It's clear to me that neither parent until the morning of March 3rd, when she showed up, they did not know that she had been
00:36:24
Speaker
She had lost her booty. Well, she was out. They kicked her out, basically. In high school, we would call it expelled. In school, it's called academic probation.
00:36:35
Speaker
So we want your money, but you can't come here. But we're working on getting you to just to cut you off. Yeah. So the stay for father told Sydney before he, you know, went to work that she was going to be okay. Sydney, you're going to be fine. You're going to be okay. Yes. And then he went to work and then, you know, this was after he asked Brenda to come home.
The Murder and Trial of Sydney
00:37:00
Speaker
So when Brenda arrived, uh, she,
00:37:04
Speaker
received a call from Mount Union trying to figure out the facts of what was happening. So, um, or she, she was the one, I think, who placed that call. But anyway, there was a telephone call that happened during this time when she came home, saw Sydney. Um, and, uh, what she did was
00:37:35
Speaker
She got on the phone and there were two administrators on the phone trying to explain to her that Sydney was not in the sorority anymore, that Sydney was not matriculating in the college anymore because Sydney had failed to even show up for classes and had failed any classes that she did show up for.
00:38:05
Speaker
And I think I read somewhere that there were four classes. She was taking three of them were like, is there really a Sydney? And four of them were. And the last one, the fourth one was she might have showed up for that class sometime. Maybe it was later in the day. I don't know. But but she just failed. So she was on academic probation. She explained all this. And I think the way that I want to kind of showcase
00:38:34
Speaker
how the murder happened because the murder happened while Brenda was on the phone with the Mount Union officials. So we have the ear witnesses here to the murder. And I often think about those two people who were on the phone with Brenda when the murder began and they heard
00:39:01
Speaker
what was happening. And I think how would you ever recover from that? I mean, I I've been on the phone with a girlfriend of mine who got into a fender bender. She's fine. Everyone's fine. But that was it's jarring because you know, if the phone call gets disconnected or something, do I call back?
00:39:22
Speaker
What did I hear? Do I call 911? Did they just drop the, you know, it's just, you're right. There's a panic and a sense of helplessness and a sense of like, I'm failing. I'm doing something wrong here. I'm not responding appropriately. Like, ah, you know. It's a sheer panic and also horror when you find out what was happening and what you are an ear witness to. And then you got to go through the legal system. And then you, I mean, you know, when you,
00:39:52
Speaker
take in new information, the brain, and you try to incorporate it in your life. It's going to take many times of putting it back into your head before your long-term memory will say, okay, okay, okay, okay. I'll store this for you. Got it. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things about these crimes is that, you know,
00:40:19
Speaker
the adjudication of the guilt or innocence and the sentencing and the waiting for the trial and the trial itself and all of these things, there is no way this is not going to be in your long-term memory. And you're going to be triggered for the rest of your life.
00:40:37
Speaker
Well, I want to say that that's part and parcel of the importance of the judicial system. Not that it's a perfect system or that it executes itself consistently or well. No pun intended.
00:40:52
Speaker
That's the goal, and it's a good goal, and we don't beat it every time. But the rituals with which we are going through under the due process system that we've got in place, they're so important to the processing of these traumatic things that you're right, will never leave the brain. They're not going anywhere.
00:41:12
Speaker
So because of that, let's walk through a couple of things that will help you accept that reality and know that the scales were still balanced to the best of our ability. Well, these two people are probably still in in therapy because here's what happened. So we're going to talk about Sydney's murder trial. The jury learned that after failing three of her four classes in the fall semester, Sydney had to leave the school in December 2019.
00:41:41
Speaker
School officials Michelle Gaffney and John Frazier testified in court. So now remember, she doesn't walk in the door at her house until March 3rd. So she was living this double life, this sleeping life before she got ousted, and then this double life of pretending that she hadn't been ousted.
00:42:06
Speaker
for three months. And we're sure there's no drug use here. I mean, it just like a crisis issue, but maybe I'm not sure I could find no none. Nothing. There was nothing about any of that. Yeah. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I feel like it would. So it's so they're testifying in court. Michelle and John Frazier both are testifying. But just imagine they're
00:42:36
Speaker
They're in an office and they're on a speakerphone with the mother, Brenda, of Powell, of Sydney, the kick-out person, the person who's been ousted from their sorority and ousted from their matriculating in their college. She's on academic probation. They're sitting there talking to her, trying to explain to Brenda
00:43:05
Speaker
academic probation, what it means, what it doesn't mean, what's next, all of that. And so, Sydney had been suspended, but she continued to live in the dorm and carry out as
00:43:24
Speaker
carry on as if everything was still going on. She was still enrolled. Boy, I gotta go study for a test. She was living in a magical way of thinking that if she doesn't admit her setback and make a decision about her future and reflect maybe on what really happened here, what can I take from it to grow and to be my more authentic self? Okay, no, no, no, no, no, none of that. That's not what she was doing.
00:43:53
Speaker
She didn't tell her parents. She didn't tell her friends. She didn't tell anyone. She lied and led a double life. The school finally called her in and told her to move out of her dorm, her sorority house or wherever she is, and they're canceling everything. And
00:44:14
Speaker
At court, they told that story, and then they said, you could tell by a lot of the messages on Sydney's phone that she had not told her family, and this is the police saying this, that her mom wasn't aware of this. That was the Akron police. His name was Lieutenant David Whitten. And he took the stand to just say,
00:44:43
Speaker
We started this murder investigation and to try to find out what happened in her phone helped us tell the tale.
00:44:51
Speaker
that she was living a double life. That might not have been his verbiage. That's my verbiage, but that's what she was doing. But clearly from her phone content, it was everyone else presumes she's at school, going to class, doing the college life thing. Right. Oh, I'll have to call you back. Here's the text. I'll have to text you back. I'm in my stupid algebra class or something like that.
00:45:16
Speaker
Wow. Baking that hard, huh? I just, I don't know, I just feel uncomfortable lying like that, but I don't know, that's me. You know, and now that we talk about it, I wonder if these sorority sisters thought that she had this mental problem that she was, she was somehow out of it and was sleeping 16 hours a day. That might have been their impression during this three month period where she's pretending to be
00:45:43
Speaker
in class, but she doesn't really have to go to class. So she's just sleeping through class. But then again, I know that the sleeping through class is what caused her to fail. Right. Yep. So, but yeah, apparently part of her new life was just don't show up for my life. I'll sleep two, two thirds of the time and then one third of the time I'll go
00:46:07
Speaker
maybe eating gas at my car. Yeah. And then like when people talk to me about it, I'll just act as if, I mean, that's a lot to carry around, compartmentalizing wise. That's why I think that's what they mean when they say, you know, she had blackouts. No, she didn't have a blackout. She had a double life and she couldn't keep track. Her brain is just going, we need to sleep some more. This is too complicated. I don't actually know what's happening anymore. You're saying this, but we're doing this.
00:46:37
Speaker
So okay, here are the additional facts that came out at court. On the morning of the murder, Sydney and her father were at home and her father had been notified that Sydney was suspended and not at school at all. So apparently he got a call maybe even prior to her showing up that day. I don't know. But anyway, Steven had to go to work at some point. So he called his wife at the hospital. She arrived home.
00:47:03
Speaker
a little afternoon. So Brenda then received a call from the college admissions office. And while on the phone with Brenda to discuss Sydney's suspension, the college administrators, Michelle Gaffney and John Frazier were both on the phone with Brenda. And during this discussion, they heard repeated thuds and then screaming. So Brenda's not talking to her, to them anymore. They're going, hello, hello.
00:47:32
Speaker
and you hear another thud and then screaming. School officials just decided there is something bad happening here and going down here. They had her address. They know where she lives. They had the phone number. They know the names of everybody in this family. They called the police and told them, you need to get over there. Something's happening. And police found Brenda's wounded body. She wasn't dead yet.
00:48:03
Speaker
but she did die of her injuries at the hospital. Sydney was charged with her mother's murder and she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. She had been found by the police. When they arrived, she'd been found on the front lawn laying down and digging in the dirt and asphalt with her fingernails and acting catatonic.
00:48:31
Speaker
Was her mental state truly insanity or was she malingering, otherwise known as faking it in order to manipulate others and get away with it? So the court is going to be asked to figure that out. The jury is going to be asked to figure that out. Is she insane? Can't tell right from wrong. Catatonic, psychotic, you know, whatever.
00:49:00
Speaker
Or is she a malingerer? Is she trying to manipulate the situation and get away with murder? So police say that Sydney beat her mother over the head with an iron skillet and then cut and stabbed her mother after the two of them got into an argument. Then she broke a back window in the house to make it look like an intruder was afoot who came and murdered her mother.
00:49:29
Speaker
Once the jury had heard all the evidence, for example, what I just said about the bashing in the window, Sidney Powell was found guilty of murdering her mother. They dismissed the idea that she was in a psychotic break state. People don't break out back windows of their family home after the murder to make it appear an intruder came in and killed their mother if they're psychotic.
00:49:59
Speaker
Right.
Sentencing and Pleas for Leniency
00:50:00
Speaker
Psychotic people kind of I mean, even people who are delusional. What if she was delusional? Well, delusional people think that something is right when every bit of evidence that you can see, hear, touch, feel and know says that it is not right. That's a delusion. Right. Delusional people do not snap out of their delusion. Part of their delusion is that the reality is
00:50:30
Speaker
you know, all of these other facts, what politicians call alternative facts. You know what election I was thinking of. I mean, who done it? Alternative facts. Yeah. And that's still going on. Still a problem. But anyway, back to the murder. We don't just snap out of your delusion and suddenly realize you're going to have to cover your tracks.
00:51:00
Speaker
You, the police arrive and you tell them your truth. Yes. This monster. Look at this monster. I had to kill it. I had to kill it. So anyway, that's not what, that's not what Sidney did. And you know, it's really, okay. I'm sorry that I'm making it funny, but I'm making it funny because it's so absurd.
00:51:27
Speaker
And it is observed to me that a smart person like Sidney Powell, with loving parents like Brenda and Stephen, that she would think that a jury of 12 citizens, adult citizens,
00:51:54
Speaker
residents, you know, these people are going to believe that she moved in and out of a delusion or in and out of a psychotic event or in and out of schizophrenia. Her trial lawyer, you know, her defense lawyers, you know, brought three witnesses in to say, oh, it must be schizophrenia. And, you know, I just think that's an insult because most schizophrenic people
00:52:23
Speaker
Are they're the least likely to be violent You know, I mean I mean they're violent but at the same time they're like you're saying they're they're moving through life though in a very consistent way It's not a wishy-wash about what's happening. It's it's a matter of uh treatment and addressing things but that wasn't something sydney ever did so even if it were true she didn't
00:52:50
Speaker
That's not something she got on a pattern for and she didn't seek medical attention for it. She didn't tell anybody about it. I just don't, you know, I, I don't buy that at all. And I agree with you. I think it's an insult to people who do actually struggle with these, um, are they mental health issues or diseases? Well, you know, a personality disorder is not legally insane. A, a, uh, clinical condition like, uh,
00:53:19
Speaker
bipolar or schizophrenia. You know, there are cases of schizophrenics, you know, being so psychotic and so delusional that they do murder. But most schizophrenics, most people who are bipolar, most people with mental illness that may very well be a legal defense, didn't know right from wrong.
00:53:45
Speaker
let alone day from night, reality from fantasy, they usually are homeless. And they're just trying to find food in a cardboard box. Well, they also have a consistent story, right? It's not a break and they didn't know what they did. And it's not a really... Right, and they have medicines now that can... But anyway, without going down the rabbit hole of that, it's insulting for someone.
00:54:14
Speaker
to stage a murder scene, go lay on the asphalt and dig in it and act like you're a catatonic, insane person. Only, whoops, I forgot to break. Let me go back to the back window and break it in so it looks like somebody else did murder. It's just wrong. And for that, the sentence that the judge handed down was life without possibility of parole for 15 years.
00:54:43
Speaker
Another way to put that is a life, 15 years to life, but minimum, you're going to be paying 85% of that 15-year toll before you can come forward for a parole to review whether or not you're going to be released. A local newspaper wrote that the following, and I thought it was a little poetic,
00:55:10
Speaker
A grieving family in Ohio is pleading with a judge to reconsider the life sentence handed down to Sidney Powell on September 28, 2023. That's when the sentence was handed down after the 23-year-old was convicted of killing her mother. Her father, still the newspaper article, her father, Stephen Powell, said in a September letter to the Summit County Court of Common Pleas
00:55:39
Speaker
that declared life sentence isn't what his wife, Brenda Powell, would have wanted for their daughter. Despite the violent circumstances surrounding her death, he said, and I quote, through our 24 years of marriage that we all know was cut short in March of 2020, to this day, I can confirm with 100% degree of certainty that this is not
00:56:08
Speaker
what people are saying. This is not justice for Brenda Powell. Stephen Powell wrote in a letter imploring Ohio Judge Kelly McLaughlin to consider a lenient sentence for his daughter, adding that, I believe that since there can never be true justice in this case, Sydney's mental health should be our main priority. And other members of the Powell family
00:56:38
Speaker
echoed Stephen Powell's sentiment in character letters in support of his daughter, as did multiple community members who knew the family, and a doctor who worked alongside Brenda Powell, who was a child life specialist at Akron Children's Hospital. So, you know, a lot of people came to the court and said, please, this is not justice. This is not justice.
00:57:05
Speaker
If I could tell Sydney Powell what I hope she realizes someday and maybe jail, pardon me, prison will offer her programs that will enable her to reflect and to really take ownership for this period of her life and her mistakes. If I could tell her one thing, Caroline, this is what I would say. Sydney, you vastly underrated your parents. You underrated their capacity for coping with disappointment.
00:57:34
Speaker
and even just an unexpected event. Both of your parents seem to me to be able to deal quite well with the vicissitudes of life. I hope you learn to cope with life without taking life away from others ever again. So when I think about it and I think about what I would say to her,
00:58:02
Speaker
What do I think was going on in this case? And Caroline, you and I talked about it a little bit, and I think that it's not important to me whether I'm right or wrong about it. We'll never know, but when I look at the totality of this case, I see Sidney Powell facing shame and self loathing for the first time in her life when she was suspended from college where she was on an academic scholarship.
00:58:31
Speaker
I don't doubt for a minute that her teachers, her parents, her community let her know how proud they were of her a lot. And I wonder if she just could not face the disappointment that her parents were feeling or she perceived that they would feel.
Exploring Shame and Family Dynamics
00:58:49
Speaker
I wonder if Sydney had never engendered disappointment in her parents until this event and she couldn't deal with it and she tried to destroy it.
00:58:59
Speaker
almost like using her mother as a surrogate to just destroy this shame thing that I, you know, she didn't probably even have a name for it. Well, yeah, I mean, she didn't tell anybody. That's how you know it was a source of shame because you're not, you didn't even have one confidant.
00:59:16
Speaker
There's always somebody in people's lives where the truths are revealed a little bit differently. I feel like, I know we're all from the epidemic of loneliness, but there's still people who we're willing to share things with, who we won't share those things with the majority of other people in our life, maybe our family included.
00:59:36
Speaker
for you to tell nobody that that means you're carrying it all. So if it's not something pleasant to carry, my God, it's eating you from the inside out. I definitely believe that. So I don't I mean, well, yeah, she was a split person, a fragmented person. That's not she knew, though, the difference between right and wrong. The only people who get the insanity defense are supposed to be people who do not know right from wrong.
01:00:04
Speaker
They don't run from the law. They don't think they've done anything wrong. Right. They would tell you exactly the motions they went through every time because for them those motions made the most sense. Why wouldn't they make sense to everyone else? I feel so strongly about this idea that she was encountering the intense emotion of shame. I actually did some research on shame.
01:00:32
Speaker
And I want to share it with our listeners because it is my hypothesis is that this is what drove her to murder her mother, that she had to vanquish the shame she was feeling so intensely and for the first time in her life. So I went to my handy dandy stores all the time. I want to find out what does Scientific American have to say about it. I love that magazine and I love
01:01:01
Speaker
the insights that I have gleaned over the years about what was going on in my brain where that produced some stellar mistakes. So there is an article that came out in 2019 called the scientific underpinnings of impacts of shame. And I'm going to quote some excerpts in that article, but it's a really good article. And I would say, you know, look it up.
01:01:28
Speaker
the scientific underpinnings and impacts of shame. And it's the impacts that I was kind of interested in. People often speak of shame and guilt as if they were the same, but they are not. Like shame, guilt occurs when we transgress moral, ethical, or religious norms, and we criticize ourselves for it. The difference is that when we feel shame,
01:01:56
Speaker
We view ourselves in a negative light. I did something terrible. Ridding oneself of guilt is often easier than overcoming shame, in part because our society offers many ways to expiate guilt-inducing offenses, including apologizing, paying fines, serving jail time,
01:02:24
Speaker
certain religious rituals, such as confession, may also help us deal with guilt. But shame has a real staying power. You know, guilt, you can kind of boil it until it's evaporated. But shame has real staying power in a human being. It is much easier to apologize for a transgression than it is to accept one's self.
01:02:53
Speaker
Oh, ouch. Ouch with the truth bomb. Boom. So I think it is possible that maybe Sydney could not deal with the shame she felt at having failed for the first time in her life. She couldn't say what most of us say when something like this happens. I'm sorry. I feel horrible. How can I make this up to you? Or maybe I need help. Yeah.
01:03:19
Speaker
No, Sydney perhaps felt entitled to destroy that which was causing her shame. I mean, she might not have been able or capable of owning her own mistakes. And I'm going to keep coming back to that cover up.
01:03:36
Speaker
Yes, she murdered her mother. This is the piece you behaved in certain ways that recognized that you were aware of your guilt, but unwilling to mitigate the guilt. So the shame of that and the shame of everything else up to that point. I mean, yeah, I'm with you. That's the lynch key here that that causes you to deserve a punishment for the guilt. The guilt has been handed to her.
01:04:04
Speaker
A solution to your guilt. Your guilt is going to cost you this. And her guilt is going to cost her whatever amount of time she's going to have to do in prison and whatever rules she's going to have to follow there and so forth and so on. Her guilt is not her problem. That's been handled by society.
01:04:33
Speaker
It's her shame. And I just really think that if her father does not come around and her, you know, community doesn't come around and say, yeah, you're guilty of murder, you're going to be punished and you should be ashamed and you're going to have to live with that.
01:04:54
Speaker
You're going to have to own it, you're going to have to face it, and you're going to have to live with it. You've done a shameful act for which you need to atone in whatever personal way that looks like for you, but also in the community ways that we have established blindly for a very specific reason we did it blindly, because we know we love people. There are people we love more than other people, so we can't do it different. So I'm with you. I'm a little bit.
01:05:22
Speaker
feeling shame myself because of how shocked I am that these community members are willing to, I mean, this is what we talk about when we talk about privilege. She did it wrong. She's a great person and she did it wrong. There's a punishment we've identified for her. Boom, done. Bob's your uncle. Like that's how I see it. And I get that people love her and they don't want her to suffer like that. But she did a thing that requires her now to suffer this way. So as the community, why aren't you going in there to help her
01:05:49
Speaker
deal with what got her there, right? I mean, that's the better thing is like, can we move her to a facility where we can come and visit her? Or can we, you know what I'm saying? Like, don't visit her. I mean, you know, I really, I just know that Brenda is dead. Sydney, Sydney may never be free. Sydney may be free someday. I don't know. Steven is trying to hold his family together and trying to get
01:06:16
Speaker
the courts to release his daughter to his mother-in-law's hundred acre farm under house arrest. I'm not kidding, Caroline. This is where he's at right now. Now, you know, this all happened last September, you know, the sentencing.
01:06:31
Speaker
I'm thinking she was imprisoned less than six months ago, so they're still going through it. Well, yeah, because the pandemic was like March 2020. So I always, that's kind of where my brain goes now with these dates. So yeah, I mean, I'm surprised that she got an outcome in 2023. That seems pretty quick considering how it was delayed probably because of the pandemic.
01:06:53
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, I can say and a lot of psychological testing. I mean, whenever you're the defense and you're saying by reason of insanity, she's innocent, that's going to trigger both court appointed and, you know, defense attorney appointed finding people who will agree with me. Right. And the court is only interested in, is she or isn't she insane? Right. And the people that they sent said, no, no. Look at these after events. Look at some of the way that she handled her
01:07:23
Speaker
self. She knew what she was doing. So anyway, this hundred acre farm. So Brenda's mother lives on a farm and it's a hundred acres. That's big to me. I mean, that's big in Ohio. I mean, hello. That's just, yeah, I want to be sent to Hawaii. I want to be sent to Ohio to a farm.
01:07:50
Speaker
you know, and be able to be on, you know, kind of a house arrest, like not being able to shop. Okay. Can I have a horse and a pig, please? I mean, I'm sorry, but that's where the dad is out. He's still fighting to get that back. And Brenda's mother wants it.
01:08:07
Speaker
Brenda's mother. This is where I feel like this is obviously a family that is full of love. I mean, my God is ready to come to the aid of each other. But you've done something that the social contract, we agreed. And so now it's up to a higher court, right? It's not just the family meeting anymore. We got to bring it up to the room.
01:08:32
Speaker
What if I meet her in a store and I say something she doesn't like? It's part of a social contract that I could have a safety in being a general moron out in the world, and I'm not going to get murdered. Her entire family is so hurt and crushed, not by guilt or shame, Caroline, but by grief and loss. And grief and loss, that is a dark and corrosive set of emotions that sometimes cannot be healed.
01:09:02
Speaker
And I wish for them just as much victim as other families of a family murder, the living witnesses, the victims. I wish that over time, not only will Sydney get the help she needs, accepting what she did, feeling the guilt of that and living with that guilt and that shame.
Reflections on Healing and Rehabilitation
01:09:32
Speaker
and that the family can let her do that by accepting what society has decided should happen to her and focus on her rehabilitation and focus on, you know,
01:09:53
Speaker
the future that she will have. Right. And I don't think it's wrong to change facilities. It can't be your house, though, friend. There's again, we've agreed as a society that there's a minimum protocol and policy instead of standards that
01:10:08
Speaker
a quote unquote jail or halfway house or prison. These things all operate under protocols we've established on some sort of a state. Yeah. Well, I mean, even if she gets out in 15 years, she's still going to be on two more years of probation. Right. And so she will have to live in a quasi form of arrest during that period of time. But what I'm hoping for is that as young as she is, she'll be 33 or 35
01:10:38
Speaker
going on 40. She might, if she will let it in, she might learn and gain some skills in prison that will enable her thought process to not split like this again. And she just decided that pretending that she was still the person who didn't get suspended would work.
01:11:09
Speaker
And she now needs to realize that that led her to a horrible place rather than argue with her mother, walk out of the house, rather than curl up the bowl and cry. That's my goal. Yes, all of the above. She murdered her mother in a vicious way using two weapons
01:11:36
Speaker
To me, you know, okay, the skillet isn't working, I'll go find a knife. To me, that's just one more level of you and you alone killed your mother. Plus it was a moment in which you are making another decision, which means it's a moment to make another decision to stop doing this thing that is wrong. And then like- She was committed to killing her mother. That's at a certain point she did. And then she determined that it was wrong and she should pretend like she didn't do it.
01:12:05
Speaker
And when that kind of seemed like the rationale behind that hit her in a way that thought she thought that's not going to work, she went out and went with the insanity. It's just you can't do that and say that you're insane. No, you can, but it never works. And I would say this, that you and I may someday get tired of
01:12:29
Speaker
podcasting about family murders and we might start podcasting about stories of rehabilitation and maybe she'll be one of our subjects. I mean, I'm going to be hopeful. Yeah, no, that's a good that's a good silver lining to add on mom. Yeah, I'm going to be hopeful. And with that, we're going to thank our listeners and we're going to end our broadcast today.
Episode Conclusion and Farewell
01:12:49
Speaker
Today's episode is research written and narrated by Bridget and Caroline, produced by Andy.
01:12:56
Speaker
Our research is solely based on public domain documents, including legal documents, articles, and books on the subject. Episodes are aired every other week. If you like us, please subscribe and give us a five star rating so our listeners can find us. Apparently, this murder caused a little blur in my vision. Anyway, thank you.
01:13:25
Speaker
We appreciate you. And one more thing, don't forget to live and let live. So goodbye, Caroline. Bye bye.