My Teacher Was The FBI's Most Wanted Child Molester

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The following episode contains discussions which may be triggering to some listeners and may include graphic references to topics such as sexual abuse, self-harm violence, eating disorders, and more. Discretion is advised.

INTRO 0:14
"I survived a plane crash. I accidentally killed my mother. I can't stop cheating on my husband. I am sexually attracted to clowns. I like dressing up as a baby. My wife doesn't know I'm gay. I'm attracted to violent criminals. I can't stop eating toilet paper. I was an alcoholic by the age of 10. If anyone ever found out, I'd probably go to jail.  I just couldn't stop myself. I can't help it. It only happens when I sleep. I used to drink with my father. I looked down and my leg was scorching and on fire. I slept with her brother. I have no regrets..."

[Priest] 0:44
Welcome back to Strange Lives. I'm your host, Priest Porferio. Here with my favorite gal pal and co-host, Deniece Michele.

[Deniece] 0:51
Hey Priest. I’m looking forward to an interesting conversation, as usual. What's on the agenda for today?

[Priest] 0:59
Well, have you ever had a weird teacher in school? One of those teachers that's a little too friendly with some students?

[Deniece] 1:05
I remember being in 9th grade geometry class, and there was a teacher, and his mom always dropped him off at school when he lived with his mom. Maybe late 20’s, early 30’s. This is what I remember. And there was a rumor going around that he put gerbils up his butt.

[Priest] 1:26
I think we all had one of those teachers.

[Deniece] 1:27
Yeah, I think everybody at some point, urban legend sort of may have picked up a little bit there, but I don't know how much it was true. I never thought he was weird, but when rumors started circulating, true or not, it can sort of taint that lens that you look through.

[Priest] 1:48
Well, our guest today had a teacher that it turned out to be the FBI's most wanted child molester.

[Deniece] 1:56
The guy that wrote us is a child molester?

[Priest] 1:58
No, he had a teacher that turned out to be the child molester.

[Deniece] 2:03
Wow, okay. So he had a teacher who ended up being on the FBI's Most Wanted list? This should be interesting. I'm anxious to hear about this.

[Priest] 2:14
Let me go ahead and bring him in. We've got Christian with us today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you experienced in high school.

[Guest] 2:21
Thanks for having me. In 2014, my 9th grade ancient world history teacher was the FBI's most wanted child molester for, like, a career of something like 40, 50 years.

[Deniece] 2:36
Woah.

[Guest] 2:38
Yeah, I guess a little bit of a background of it. In 2014. I was living in Nicaragua. My mother is an ambassador for the United Nations. And so for most of my life, I had to move around to different countries because of my mother's job. What we would do for my schooling and education and all that is that they would enroll me in an American school. They speak English. It's kind of like the same classes that you would expect to have in an American class or something like that. And so I went to a school called the American Nicaraguan School. And so while I was there, we had this ancient world history teacher named Mr. Vahey, full name being William James Vahey. And he was a great teacher. Honest to God, he was one of the best teachers I think I've had in high school, throughout my school time. Right? He was a very engaging teacher. He was one of those teachers that would go and let you like watch movies you really learned in his class. And he was great, and everyone at this school loved him. He was renowned around this entire school for just being such a great teacher, which is kind of, I think, a little bit funny, at least with the juxtaposition that, yes, he was the FBI's most wanted child molester.

[Guest] 3:57
So what happened was, obviously it was a great time had by all at first when we didn't know, and it was right around December, right before our winter break. We get called in to an assembly meeting at the school, and we're told that our teacher that everyone loved had died, and everyone was sad. Everyone was like, this is crazy. He's one of the better teachers there. And out of nowhere, this kind of news dropped. And I mean, I know some people expected it. He was an older guy. Maybe he passed away from natural causes and all that. That was that, right? So it's a somber day, and then we go on our winter vacation, and when we come back, seriously, like the second coming of Christ, when we get back, he's there into class, teaching the class. Everyone was like, what in the world is going on?

[Priest] 4:56
Right, what?

[Guest] 4:57
Yeah, like, he just came back. He acted as if nothing happened. We walked into the class expecting there to be, like, a substitute to finish off the remainder of the year. He was there, didn't really mention it. He just said, yeah, the confusing stuff happened. And then three weeks later, he disappeared again. And at this point, it's like, all right, this is kind of getting ridiculous. What's going on here?

[Priest] 5:19
Obviously, he died a second time.

[Guest] 5:20
Yeah, he died a second time, but this time it was for sure because he wasn't there anymore. And so for the next couple weeks to next couple of months after his second disappearance, we started noticing a lot of FBI people and FBI jackets, CIA jackets going around the school and all that, and nothing was talked about it. No one knew. We had no official explanation of what happened. That's pretty much the official recount of it. At least what the school told us about. Didn't say anything. He just disappeared, and some people showed up in jackets.

[Priest] 5:59
How did you actually find out what the true story was?

[Guest] 6:02
So what actually happened throughout that whole time, there was a clever cover up by the school well, not very clever, actually fell through, and that's how most people know about it. But what actually happened was in Nicaragua, it's very common to have house staff having people like a maid, someone that cleans your house, stuff like that. And so one day, his maid, Mr. Vahey, his maid stole a flash drive, like one of those external hard drives. And it's not too uncommon to have things like that happen where you steal it to sell for a little bit, little knickknacks and things like that that you don't expect to double check.

[Deniece] 6:44
Yeah. Nobody's going to notice if something small is missing.

[Guest] 6:47
Exactly. The thing is, though, is that when she went to go wipe the hard drive, she found something like 900gb worth of photos of naked boys and things being done to the naked boys by this guy. And she was obviously appalled. She was like, the man I'm cleaning for is an evil person. And so she goes to the director of the school that he works at, the American Nicaraguan School. And is like, “Hey, you should not have this guy work. There's kids here. He should not be working here. This is horrible!” And the director of the school, Gloria Dahl, she kind of saw this as like, oh, we don't want bad press. It shows - how did we hire a child molester to be a teacher? Because obviously they weren't running background checks or anything like that. And so Mr. Vahey, I guess, discovered that his hard drive was gone, and he tried to kill himself, but he tried to kill himself via black recluse spider bite, of one of the most venomous spiders in the entire world.

[Priest] 7:59
That's probably the craziest way that I've ever heard somebody try to kill themselves.

[Guest] 8:03
Right. It's completely out of the blue, and it's definitely not something I would think of. Not the first thing.

[Deniece] 8:10
Yeah.

[Guest] 8:11
So what happened is that he attempted to kill himself by this spider bite. And so at this point, that's when we found out that he had died, The director of the school was assuming, well, he killed himself. Water under the bridge. No one needs to know what happened. Right? The problem is that he survived his first suicide attempt and was rushed to the hospital and recovered fairly well. And so the worst part is they brought him back because they didn't have someone to replace him. And they were like, we need to find some people to replace him, so we're just going to have him work until we find a suitable replacement because we don't have anyone to teach this full time class.

[Priest] 8:52
Right. They're thinking, let's just keep this under lock and key. Let's kick this down the road, get him to work here a little bit longer so we can find a replacement.

[Guest] 9:02
Exactly. Yeah. So eventually, once it started getting bigger the school director actually was entirely trying to keep this under the bridge. Trying to hide it. So much so that she actually bought him a flight back to the United States and was like, “Hey, let's just get you out of here. Leave.”

[Priest] 9:19
Please get as far away from our school as possible.

[Guest] 9:22
But not trying to bring any attention, like negative press, to the school. Because that would bode horribly to her.

[Priest] 9:28
Right.

[Guest] 9:29
So he gets back to the United States and then he does successfully kill himself. He slits his wrist in a bathtub in Montana or Minnesota or something like that.

[Priest] 9:37
Wow.

[Guest] 9:39
But the thing is that once the FBI and the CIA started showing up at the school, we started piecing everything together until started getting picked up in news and stuff like that in BBC.

[Priest] 9:50
How do you think he got away with it for so long?

[Guest] 9:52
Apparently what he would do is that he pretty much dedicated his career to being a really good teacher so that students and even parents of the students would trust him. Schedule a trip with the students, usually unsupervised with no chaperones or something like that, and they would go to international competitions. And then especially, like, the Central American community, it's very common to be, all right, we live in Nicaragua. We're going to go compete against the team in El Salvador or something like that.

[Priest] 10:23
Yeah.

[Guest] 10:24
And so he would bring the kids there, then lace Oreo cookies with, like, Rohypnol, give them to all the students, and then do what he does.

[Priest] 10:35
Wow.

[Guest] 10:38
So if you look William James Vahey, you'll see his FBI Wanted poster. It has a bunch of photos of him on it. Throughout his 40 years of doing it, he was basically going from country to country doing the same thing. He was teaching in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, London, all these places doing the exact same. And I remember seeing something like he has over 900 counts of child molestation.

[Priest] 11:07
Wow. You didn't get any trips with him, did you?

[Guest] 11:10
No, but the scary thing was that I think it was about two weeks before he died for the first time, he was actually planning a trip for the students in Haiti. And I remember he was like, “Oh, you should go, Christian. It would be fun.” And I wasn't really big into extracurriculars, especially in my freshman year of high school, so I was like, “Yeah, I'm all right.” But, yeah, that was him.

[Priest] 11:37
Was there anything weird about him to start with? I know you said he was a great teacher and everything, but was there like, a weird side? I feel like we all go to school and we have that teacher that's just a little weird or a little too friendly with students.

[Guest] 11:50
Well, I would say the funny thing is that he would do things that you would raise an eyebrow looking at him. Things that he would do specifically: I remember this one time he was teaching us about mummification in ancient Egypt, and he got one of the kids to lay down flat on top of a couple of desks with his hand or fingers, fake performed a mummification on the kid, dragging his hand down the sternum and the chest and things like that in a completely non-sexual way. For some reason, in my head, I completely remember looking and being like, “Oh, this guy is no good. There's something weird. But maybe it's like because he's old.” I don't know, he does that. He doesn't have an idea of body language towards other people or something like that.

[Priest] 12:40
Yeah, I think a lot of times we all dismiss that like, “Oh, it's just an old guy. He's just very handy and touchy and things like that.”

[Deniece] 12:47
Or even like, “He's a hippie, free spirited, love everybody type of person.”

[Guest] 12:53
I would say that's exactly what it was like. I remember actually telling my parents, because at the time he was a great teacher, I was telling my parents, “Oh, he kind of reminds me of my grandfather sometimes.” There's that weird boundary. It's like, my grandfather will give me like a really long hug or something like that. And as an eight year old or whatever, you're like, I don't know what this is, but he's just old, right? Or a grandma's big wet kiss on the mouth or something like that…. No, especially not with this guy. Of course not. But yeah, he just did that. He had this aura that we would look at and be like, that's peculiar, but I guess I'm just going to brush it off.

[Priest] 13:44
I think that a lot of times as students, right, our teachers are authority figures, and we're always trying to fight against authority. So it seems to be these teachers that are more hands on with students and they're more free with students, and maybe they cross those boundaries. Those are the teachers that tend to be the cool teachers because they let you get away with stuff, but then you have situations like this where, yeah, he's the cool teacher, letting you get away with stuff because he's got all these ulterior motives.

[Guest] 14:12
Absolutely. I entirely agree with that. This guy dedicated his life to doing this. He was the FBI's number one most wanted child molester.

[Deniece] 14:24
You were 9th grade at the time. Do you think it made you more, I guess, careful of teachers, or did it change your perspective in any way that you can think of, or was it just like another day in Nicaragua?

[Guest] 14:40
Well, I think for me, I had many wild experiences growing up. I think at the time I was about 14 or 15 years old or something like however old you are in freshman year of high school. But I'd spent most of my life outside of the US. Pretty much every two to four years jumping from country to country. I experienced my fair share of crazy experiences, like armed insurgents, civil war, that kind of deal. And for me, at this point, I mean, I guess I could say I was disillusioned with it, but also I was in 9th grade. I had never dealt with a child molester before and there was no context to the Most Wanted to a Sex Offender. There's not really any context between them. So when I was in 9th grade, my immediate reaction was I processed it, but I don't know if I would say I became weary of other teachers. I guess I got a little bit more attentive to that handsiness just because that feels just wrong.

[Priest] 15:56
Was there anything that second time when he disappeared and then all of a sudden there's FBI agents and everything around the school? Did the school announce anything?

[Guest] 16:04
No, the school did nothing. It was as if we got back from winter vacation, went to his class, he was there, everyone's like, what? This is ridiculous. You're back alive? And he's like, “Yeah, I had heart complications or something.” And then when he disappeared that second time, it was as clear as, “Yeah, he's just not working with us anymore. He left. Alright, let's learn about the ancient Romans.” And you know, you're in 9th grade, you don't really think much about it.

[Deniece] 16:38
Yeah.

[Priest] 16:39
How long was it between when that happened and when the real story started coming out?

[Guest] 16:44
So the real story was drip fed. And I will tell you my entire time there. In fact, I ended up leaving around my 10th grade to move to New York City. But my friends who continued and graduated their entire time there, the school had never publicly said anything about it. I remember Facebook groups, like a bunch of classmates and things like that sending like, “Oh my God, guys, look what I found. It’s the FBI Most Wanted with Mr. Vahey on it.” And everyone's like, this is crazy. And of course we show it to our parents and then the parents are going to obviously be a little bit more confused. And a lot of the parents whose kids went to the school came from high places, a lot of diplomats, so they were able to piece a lot of things together.

[Priest] 17:29
I don't know why, but his name sounds familiar to me. I wonder if I saw it on another show or something like that.

[Guest] 17:36
Well, his pseudonym was known as the Oreo Guy because he would…

[Priest] 17:45
Do you have any idea how they found out it was the Oreo cookies that he was lacing?

[Guest] 17:48
It's a good question. I don't think I have the perfect answer.

[Priest] 17:53
I wonder if it was just people piecing the stories together and realizing, “Oh yeah, he would always give everybody these Oreo cookies on these trips.”

[Guest] 18:02
I think that's probably what it was. Police have been searching for answers. There was like this, I guess, fall out from the whole thing where the police were raiding his homes across the world, finding extra information and things like that. So for all I know, he could have had photos or videos of him doing it. I'm sure other students have come forward and been like, “Yeah, he fed us Oreos, could not have been what it was?”

[Deniece] 18:29
Yeah. They may have even found the drugs in his home.

[Guest] 18:35
Yeah. They probably pieced a lot of things together.

[Priest] 18:38
Everything about this guy was just the most extreme between lacing Oreos and trying to kill yourself with spiders.

[Guest] 18:45
Yeah. Brown recluse. Then the Second Coming, he comes back and as if nothing happened.

[Deniece] 18:51
Yeah, like “Psyche!”

[Guest] 18:53
I remember the day they announced, because they did announce his first death. I like how I have to specify the number of deaths, but his first attempt when they brought everyone into the main pavilion, and they're like, “Yeah, unfortunately, Mr. Vahey passed away.” And I remember how somber it was. Like, everyone there. There were students crying. I remember they said, “If you want to say something about Mr. Vahey, go ahead and say it.” And you had a bunch of these students being, like, wiping tears away from their face.

[Deniece] 19:24
Wow.

[Guest] 19:27
“He was such a kind, caring teacher. I never cared about the subject. He made me want to become a historian” and things like that. And like, just the juxtaposition of two, three months later, having that come to Jesus moment and be like, wow, okay. He was an absolutely evil person.

[Priest] 19:50
Wow.

[Guest] 19:51
It's still kind of a tough topic, because a lot of the places that he taught obviously caught wind of this. Nicaragua was his end game. He ended there. But he's been teaching for 40 something years all around the world, and none of the students know because they don't remember it. For them, they went to sleep and they woke up, and that's it.

[Priest] 20:17
That was one of my questions, whether there was ever any students that came out and said that they remembered anything or they felt that he was a little too overly friendly.

[Guest] 20:27
Students nowadays are coming out and being like, “Wait, I had a history teacher. Wait, it's Mr. Vahey!” And there's been this kind of issue where a lot of these international schools, these are private international establishments that cater to diplomats and people in the United Nations and embassies, and they don't want to show that they were able to hire someone like this.

[Priest] 20:55
Right.

[Guest] 20:56
The fact that there's this complete cover up is too negative of press for them, especially for people in these higher places of coming into a country. And this is where you send your kid.

[Priest] 21:09
Yeah. They want to sweep it under the run as much as possible.

[Guest] 21:12
Exactly. I remember something about he taught in Indonesia. This was maybe about a year after the whole or a deal happened, maybe two. And there were some students from Indonesia who came out, like, following up with the story and saying, “Oh, yeah, he was our teacher.” But at the end of the day, the real sad part is that no one knows what happened. No one knows if you were one of the boys that he photographed or he was one of the kids that he molested or something like that. For most people, it's just a memory of a pretty decent teacher, and there isn't much follow up. These schools aren't going around and trying to hold themselves accountable for it and letting people know, “Hey, you might have been molested.” But for me, it was just the fact that it was this first town account of being next to an evil person without knowing. Like, if you were in a room with Adolf Hitler and you just didn't know. It's carried on with your day as if it was a regular day and.

[Deniece] 22:14
They're still breathing the same air as us.

[Guest] 22:18
Exactly.

[Deniece] 22:19
Yeah, I can see that.

[Priest] 22:21
It's like being so close to evil and just having no idea how close you were until afterwards.

[Guest] 22:27
I had this conversation, actually, with my girlfriend recently. We were watching something - there’s a show about, like a hitman or something, and I remember asking her, “How many hitmen? Or how many murderers have you think you just casually walked by?”

[Priest] 22:43
Right.

[Guest] 22:45
And you just never know. You would never know. At least in my head, I having a teacher, someone that authority figure that's supposed to help you guide yourself through life, was this prolific child molester, and we just didn't know until maybe a year and eight months later or something like that.

[Priest] 23:03
You didn't know until his second or third debt?

[Guest] 22:06
Yes. To this day, I've never got an official answer for the situation. But I know his face. You Google him. His face is all over the place. There's news articles and everything like that.

[Priest] 23:20
Yeah, I'm actually looking up right now. There's so much information. It's weird to be looking at the guy that we're talking about knowing that this is your teacher.

[Guest] 23:29
Yeah, it's weird because if I see his mug shot image, I see his you know, he's about to wheel in the television to go watch a documentary about Greece or something like that.

[Priest] 23:43
There is nothing in his teachings themselves that actually stood out or that was weird? Or it was like, “Why are you teaching us about this?”

[Guest] 23:52
That's the thing. It was as if he was very elusive. There was nothing that you would… maybe one day or two, you would pick something out and be like, “That was kind of odd.” But kind of like what I was saying earlier, they're just oddities. Everyone has odd teachers that aren't child molesters.

And so they say, Hindsight is 2020. And I completely agree with that because looking back yeah, he was kind of handsy with the students. I remember we were learning about I think it was ancient Greece, and he used to talk actually, looking back at this now, this is kind of ridiculous, but I remember him talking about how the philosophers would have sex with their students, and it was kind of just this normal behavior and all that. And, I mean, it is true. It's kind of what they used to do back in ancient Greece. But obviously, looking back. Now, how could someone not be like, ding, ding, ding, this is your guy?

I guess. I don't necessarily know. I think he just maybe he liked talking about it, or maybe he was just genuinely teaching us a fact about ancient Greece.

[Priest] 25:07
Did he genuinely seem to be interested in teaching and interested in these subjects, or do you think this is solely just his way of getting in there and having access to children and just students?

[Guest] 25:18
I would say both. It's definitely both. He did this as a career. He was definitely into teaching history. He was a great history teacher. He obviously cared. I think whenever he would teach, he was very passionate about it. But also he had it down to a science. I mean, he's been doing this since 1970 or 1960-something. So he had it down with science. And he was arrested when he was younger or something like that, and he was able to flee the country. And that's how he's been kind of bouncing around different countries without anyone knowing.

[Priest] 25:57
Yeah, I was just googling a little bit. And that's what it was saying, is that he started off, I think, the very first time that he had molested somebody. He was a Boy Scout, coach.

[Guest] 26:07
Yeah, that's right.

[Priest] 26:08
So he had always had access to these children and just kind of stuck in that career, whether it was Boy Scout coach or teaching and things like that.

[Guest] 26:18
Yeah, he's been in the industry. I just don't know if it's a convenience it's an area where kids are or if it's a passion that he had and it just happened to line up with his evils, I guess.

[Priest] 26:33
Right. I was reading that he stabbed himself.

[Guest] 26:38
Yeah. He cut his wrists or something like that. In Montana? Minnesota? I'm not sure exactly where.

[Priest] 26:44
It does say that he committed suicide at home in Minnesota by stabbing himself in the chest.

[Guest] 26:51
Wow. I heard slit wrists, but there was never a clear answer.

[Priest] 26:57
Yeah. So after going through something like this, where does that leave you?

[Guest] 27:02
I think the big thing in my head really comes down to the fact that if I had to take two things out of this, I would say it's just weird how you can feel like you know someone, but in reality they can be living a completely different life. I mean, this guy had a wife, he had two children, none of which were aware of this. None of these people working the schools were aware of this. None of the students were aware of this. It literally took someone stealing something from him and having to steal the one thing that would incriminate him for his whole thing he does to fall apart. So I think that's how you can have such a perfect system for doing your evils, and it's held by a thread. I think that's probably a big thing that just anyone around you could be like that. And then I would also say that it's honestly the responsibility and the response of the schools that kind of discuss me working with the pedophile in order to evade bad press.

[Priest] 28:09
The fact that they didn't immediately just fire him and get him out of the schools and they let him come back until they could find somebody else, that's the worst.

[Guest] 28:19
I think the fact that when he first died, they brought him back because they very well knew he was a child molester, but they still brought him back because they didn't have someone to teach the class. Sickening. Honestly, if you're face to face with an evil person and then you look at the situation at hand, you're like, “By the time we find another teacher, we need to have these students to be learning or something. Let's get him in there.”

[Deniece] 28:47
As a parent, I would be outraged if my kid was in the school. I would much rather my kid be without some history lessons and have this guy in jail.

[Guest] 28:57
Exactly. And that's the thing, is that all these schools, it's not just my school. It was the other ones all around the world who had him as a teacher. They can't really own up to the fact that he did all this because parents would be absolutely devastated by just having him there. It talks volumes about the process of hiring. No background checks, no nothing. We're done. It's like, “Oh, you speak English and you're American and you teach history. Well, welcome. Come on board here!”

[Priest] 29:28
Right.

[Guest] 29:30
And the fact that especially our school is sending, buying him tickets to fly out and bringing him back in after knowing very well what he did, it's something else. That's all I can say.

[Deniece] 29:43
Yeah. Just aiding him and getting out.

[Priest] 29:47
At least he's gone.

[Deniece] 29:48
Yeah. “Here, put it on the credit card on your way out!” It just doesn't seem like it's enough.

[Guest] 29:53
I think another thing is, too, is that these are international communities, international schools. They're not necessarily tied to working with the same parameters that they do here in the US. I know a big part of it was that the director of the school, maybe this was to save her own self or whatever, self preservation, but she did say something about how she consulted with the board of directors of the school who put her in touch with lawyers and then lawyers, of course. These are Nicaraguan lawyers studying Nicaraguan law. And there are no extradition laws in Nicaragua for the United States. Nicaragua is historically not a close friend of the United States. And it's also bad publicity for Nicaragua itself. One of the biggest schools there that most every ambassador's kids will go to one of the schools. It looks really bad.

[Priest] 30:52
I'm sure she was doing everything in her power to sweep it under the rug and get him out as quickly as possible. Knowing that once this came out, if it came out, if it came out, it would be such a huge scandal.

[Guest] 31:03
I mean, she did end up resigning, but still, it feels like there's a complicit nature in it.

[Priest] 31:10
Exactly.

[Guest] 31:11
She treated her resignation as if it was like, “All right, everybody, I've done this enough, I'm going to retire.” But it was totally because of this. But they just don't they didn't want to admit it at all. All it took was someone else doing a wrong to get the worst wrong in trouble.

[Deniece] 31:33
Yeah, that's true. That’s a good thing.

[Guest] 31:36
If his housekeeper didn't steal, I mean, who knows what happened?

[Deniece] 31:44
Yeah, I was thinking that too. What was the end game? If he hadn't got caught.

[Priest] 31:49
Or even had she felt bad about stealing and didn't want to incriminate herself and then just threw it away?

[Guest] 31:55
I think that's a great point. How many people in that position would just not know what to do and then just try to be like, I'm out of my element here.

[Priest] 32:05
Right.

[Guest] 32:06
For all she knows, we don't even know if he's a dangerous person, violent or something.

[Priest] 32:11
Exactly.

[Deniece] 32:12
Yeah. And think about… I've spent some time in the Dominican Republic, and I know that the maids and the people that clean the house, that may be their only source of income. And so she could have very well been like, you know what, I can't risk losing this job.

[Guest] 32:29
No, that's a huge thing too. It's positions of power and authority and being able to exploit people below you. I mean, there's something to be said that he was an authority figure, like a teacher, and students tend to listen to their teachers, and then you have the whole dynamic of an American person living abroad in predominantly developing nations, taking advantage of people there too.

[Deniece] 32:56
I noticed the time that I spent in the Dominican Republic, I spent time away from the touristy parts. So inside of what I would call the real world of some people that live in the area, anybody that was there that was white essentially has money, and they can essentially do anything they wanted.

[Guest] 33:18
It that's 100% true. When I was younger. I used to live in Mozambique. It's considered one of the, I think it's the second or third poorest country in all of Africa. And I remember before we went there… now, a lot of things happened in Mozambique that probably would be interesting stories for this podcast, but I remember we had a seminar before going there. I think I was like nine or ten years old when I went there, and I think my parents had to coach me on like, all right, what's going to happen? And the United Nations had given me kind of some prep presentation or something like that to explain me what it's like there. And on a section about security and safety and things like that, it literally said, people here are too poor to commit crimes, so you obviously will stand out. But it makes more sense to have you come in, spend money, and then leave than rob you or do something like that. And that kind of position of power exists everywhere in these communities that exist.

[Priest] 34:29
Yeah. Unfortunately, that does seem to happen in many poor countries and things like that. People go there just to take advantage of that class system.

[Guest] 34:38
Absolutely, it’s disgusting on many different parts. It's a shame because when you have people who are in a position where these people coming in are their livelihoods, you have people who can run really astray like, my 9th grade world history teacher.

[Priest] 34:57
I feel like we all have stories from high school where it's like, there's that one big scandal in high school, but this is like the biggest scandal.

[Guest] 35:06
It's honestly messed up for me, but it was always my one up high school story.

[Deniece] 35:10
Oh, yeah, I'm sure that would win every time.

[Guest] 45:12
I've had friends be like, “Oh, yeah, in my school, they had the music teacher, had sex with a student” and I'm like “Oh…”

[Deniece] 35:21
Yeah, hold my beer! Sorry, it’s not funny but…

[Guest] 35:27
It's really is not. No, but it's not funny. It's just incomprehensible. You have to have a little bit of uh… there really is no way to comprehend that situation. And for me, I guess my means of handling it is a little bit more of a sunnier disposition or outlook on it, but it's just an awful story.

[Deniece] 35:52
But the flip side is, Christian, I think you've got a good story from it. The one thing that I'm grateful that you didn't run into any issues and you weren't caught up in anything, and you sound like a fun guy. You just sound easygoing, and there's a charisma about you that comes across just in your voice.

[Guest] 36:13
Thank you.

[Deniece] 36:15
It sounds like you've been successful and you're well adjusted, and that makes me happy.

[Guest] 36:19
Well, I'd say I'd honestly chop it up to when you're moving around a lot, you're being thrust into environments that are always changing, and you learn to let live, I guess, to let go, let live. Just, you know, things are going to come your way. We have a saying in my family, and it was like, “Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.” So living life is learning how to dance in the rain, and it's kind of embracing the world around you, whether it rains, snows, or sunny or beautiful, just kind of go through it.

[Priest] 35:56
Yeah, I love that. It's such a great attitude about life in general.

[Guest] 37:02
Yeah. And I guess that's how I've felt about this. It's an absolutely terrible story, right? It's not really anything, nothing… The only good part about it is that I guess he's dead. But you have to look forward. You have to move past it. And I would say maybe make changes to the way these schools will operate.

[Priest] 37:26
I would hope that after this that they completely made changes with the way they operate and the people they hired and started running background checks.

[Guest] 37:34
I hope so too. But at least the way it looks like right now, it seems priorities are: make money, and don't let this - like this is admission.

[Priest] 37:47
Right? Make money and sweep it under the rug.

[Guest] 37:50
Exactly. If there was some sort of systemic change to the way that these schools operate, obviously you have the whole thing about the power dynamic of people coming for work reasons in these countries, priority there being let's make money from them. But until something systemic like that changes, something really foundational changes to the way that works, I don't really know how that'll operate.

[Priest] 38:17
Well, I want to thank you for coming on our show today and sharing this crazy, incredible story.

[Guest] 38:23
Thank you for having me. It was very fun. And it's nice to talk about something that I don't necessarily talk for an hour.

[Deniece] 38:34
Now, I got some reading. It'll give me some good reading information tonight. I want to find out about this scumbag.

[Priest] 38:40
I did a quick Google search and there's so much out there to read up on this. So if anybody wants to read up on it, just Google his name and you'll have a ton of information to read.

[Guest] 38:50
If you Google his name, I think the biggest thing you can look up is I think it's like the FBI seeking information. It's just seeing that is the guttural, “Oh, this is a big deal!” And I wouldn't be surprised if there's others like him.

[Priest] 39:07
Unfortunately, it's exactly what you said earlier. How many people do we walk past in our lifetimes that are child molesters and serial killers and things like that? It's a very crazy thought.

[Guest] 39:18
Absolutely.

[Priest] 39:20
Again, thank you so much for being on our show today and sharing your story.

[Deniece] 39:24
Yeah, thank you, Christian.

[Guest] 39:25
Thank you so much.

FINAL THOUGHTS / MUSIC

[Priest] 39:36
What a crazy story. We all have stories from high school. But this is kind of the biggest, most bizarre story. And the fact that it spans so many different countries.

[Deniece] 39:47
Yeah, there's so many from back in the 70's until the 2000’s, the number of countries, the number of artifacts that he's taken, and just the sheer number of unknown victims that we may never, ever know.

[Priest] 40:04
Yeah, just a quick Google search showed there were hundreds and hundreds of people that reached out to the FBI after this came out, after his death.

[Deniece] 40:13
In some way, it may almost be better that they don't remember.

[Priest] 40:17
Yeah, exactly. That's a horrible thing to go through, but it's probably the best thing that you don't know and you don't remember. If I had been one of those things, I don't think I'd want to remember. I wouldn't want to know if something actually happened.

[Deniece] 40:29
Yeah, especially if I know that there is no recourse. It's not like there's a fund. I don't know. I haven't done any investigation, but I'm assuming there's no fund set up for victims where they can get some sort of compensation.

[Priest] 40:45
Yeah, because he's dead. They would have to sue the schools. And I'm sure they have. I'm sure they have. It's a lot of information to research if you want to learn more about this.

[Deniece] 40:55
But then the lawyers can come back and say, “Well, how are you going to prove it?” It's just such a bad place for everybody involved.

[Priest] 41:02
Absolutely.

[Deniece] 41:03
But I am glad that Christian was an observer.

[Priest] 41:07
Yeah. I'm happy that he was able to share this story, but he didn't have to deal with it personally and that he was just able to observe it from the outside and then share that with us today.

[Deniece] 41:16
I just feel for the victims, especially from a person who you trust and person of authority and that whole thing. But I guess that's more for another show. I guess.

[Priest] 41:29
Ultimately, I think a lot of this comes down to the maid who, yes, she did steal from her employer, but when she found out what she had, she was able to still go to authorities about that and not think twice about her getting in trouble for stealing in the first place.

[Deniece] 41:46
Yeah, or losing her job.

[Priest] 41:49
Has she made a different decision? She could still be teaching somewhere right now in the world. Well, that's it for today, everybody. Watch out for your teachers.

[Deniece] 41:47
Yeah. Check out your Boy Scout leaders, y’ all.

OUTRO 42:01
Thank you for listening to another episode of Strange Lives, a Reynolds Omnimedia production. If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and rate us on Apple, Spotify and anywhere podcasts are found. To be a guest on our show, visit us online at: http://strangelives.com. Follow us on social media at: thestrangelives and join us at: http://patreon.com/strangelives for behind the scenes, exclusive content, and ongoing discussions about this episode and more. Be sure to tune in next week for another strange episode.