Speaker 1: Pushkin previously on Deep Cover.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any question but that had he
Speaker 2: not been caught on this one, he would have robbed
Speaker 2: another bank, and another one after that, and another one
Speaker 2: after that until he did get caught. But he never
Speaker 2: thought he would get caught.
Speaker 3: We had a disagreement on strategy, and when you come
Speaker 3: an in pass on a disagreement agreement in strategy, you
Speaker 3: should be afforded the opportunity to change counsel.
Speaker 4: And my life is on the line, not theirs.
Speaker 5: I was pretty distraught realizing that this could be a
Speaker 5: couple decades, and I started thinking about everything that was
Speaker 5: going to happen in my life, that he was going
Speaker 5: to miss me and my sister. Our relationship ended up
Speaker 5: being strained because of my drug use and partying, and
Speaker 5: she ended up going to live with her boyfriend and
Speaker 5: I ended up being in this house with no electric
Speaker 5: and no water.
Speaker 1: Not long after his state trial, Keith Giamonco was back
Speaker 1: in the courthouse to learn exactly how much time he
Speaker 1: would serve. The judge set the total at twenty years.
Speaker 3: On that particular day when that sentence was handed down,
Speaker 3: I was relieved that that portion of it was over,
Speaker 3: and I still had this air of confidence in the
Speaker 3: appellate system that I would get some relief.
Speaker 1: This is Keith the optimist talking, still believing that there
Speaker 1: had to be a way out, that maybe his sentence
Speaker 1: or even his state conviction could be overturned. He had
Speaker 1: his arguments. He turned himself into a jailhouse lawyer, drafting
Speaker 1: appeal after appeal on his own. It was a long process,
Speaker 1: but in the end none of it really went anywhere.
Speaker 1: From his prison cell, the days began to blur and
Speaker 1: life on the outside continued without him. He got updates
Speaker 1: from his daughters. They were now in their early twenties.
Speaker 1: Elise was thriving, double majoring in psychology and Russian studying
Speaker 1: abroad in Moscow. Even Marissa was having a much harder time,
Speaker 1: struggling with addiction and at times homelessness, and Keith was
Speaker 1: stuck on the other end of it, writing letters and
Speaker 1: passing time between calls.
Speaker 3: There was some anger and discontent expressed about the way
Speaker 3: that there life was going in certain periods and certain
Speaker 3: issues that all people have in their lives, and they
Speaker 3: need their parents to be there, and the issue, of
Speaker 3: course is me not being there for these things. And
Speaker 3: are we going to talk through this? Are we just
Speaker 3: going to separate?
Speaker 1: Once upon a time, Marissa and Elise thought they knew
Speaker 1: their father, Then they learned that he'd been living a
Speaker 1: double life, and in some ways, ever since then, they've
Speaker 1: been trying to make sense of what he did and
Speaker 1: why he did it.
Speaker 5: I would say, dad making those decisions to rob the banks,
Speaker 5: you know, and knowing that Mom was not in a
Speaker 5: good place mentally with her addiction, it is a feeling
Speaker 5: of disappointment in my father for not taking.
Speaker 6: The higher road.
Speaker 1: Marissa says the hardest part is thinking about how many
Speaker 1: times he repeated the same bad decision making process, ignoring
Speaker 1: the risks, just.
Speaker 5: Like as you're doing it. It's like, how can you
Speaker 5: not hows you're robbing the bank as you're handing the
Speaker 5: note over to the teller, and you know it wasn't
Speaker 5: just one bank. So at one point, are you, like,
Speaker 5: you know, really thinking about those dire consequences. And what
Speaker 5: disappoints me is that I believe he saw those dire
Speaker 5: consequences and chose to act again.
Speaker 1: He claims he was engaged in some sort of thinking
Speaker 1: where I think his words were manifesting success like some
Speaker 1: sort of magical thinking or something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, I honestly, I don't
Speaker 5: know where his head was, like where like if he
Speaker 5: was even in any type of reality or if it
Speaker 5: was all just like like a game. Like I don't
Speaker 5: I really don't know what was going through his head
Speaker 5: at the time. And I still wonder to this day,
Speaker 5: you know, like why would you keep going?
Speaker 1: Both Marissa and Elise have had a lot of time
Speaker 1: to think, so too has Keith. And they all knew
Speaker 1: that someday Keith would be released and walk back into
Speaker 1: their lives. And then what would Keith have arrived at
Speaker 1: some deeper understanding of himself and his actions? And as
Speaker 1: for his daughters, what would it mean to have Keith
Speaker 1: back in their lives? How do you understand, forgive and
Speaker 1: love a parent whose strategy for protecting you was once
Speaker 1: the very thing that near destroyed you. I'm Jay Calburn
Speaker 1: and this is Deep Cover The Family Man our season finale.
Speaker 1: The release, Keith was facing almost two decades in prison,
Speaker 1: and he worried about what would happen in his absence,
Speaker 1: especially with Marissa. He told me that he wished he
Speaker 1: could have been there to save her from hitting rock bottom.
Speaker 1: But the truth was that Keith didn't exactly know what
Speaker 1: the bottom looked like for Marissa, and neither did I
Speaker 1: until she showed me what part of Saint Louis is called.
Speaker 5: Oh, this is North City, Saint Louis North Side. This
Speaker 5: is a part of Saint Louis that is mostly abandoned warehouses.
Speaker 5: A lot of it is burned out or tornado damage
Speaker 5: or like just places you can tell that nobody's been
Speaker 5: for a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's definitely got a kind of zombie feel. This
Speaker 1: is where their mom lived for many years after she
Speaker 1: moved out.
Speaker 5: So the house is this great one? This one, yeah,
Speaker 5: you can pull up.
Speaker 1: Starting when she was nineteen years old, Marissa would end
Speaker 1: up staying here off and on for years. She referred
Speaker 1: to this place as the trap.
Speaker 5: House guy here. Actually, the first thing she asked me
Speaker 5: was do I have any money for drugs? And then
Speaker 5: I just went into the living room and sat by myself.
Speaker 5: It's like, if you didn't have something that she wanted,
Speaker 5: then she didn't really want anything to do with me.
Speaker 5: Like I almost felt like I was a burden just
Speaker 5: sitting there unless I had money or drugs to give her.
Speaker 1: Marissa says it wasn't long before she just fell into
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the house, doing heroine with her mother regularly.
Speaker 5: The drug use became my personality because it was like,
Speaker 5: this is what we do, this is who we are
Speaker 5: on this block, you know, And once you get into
Speaker 5: that mindset, it's just hard to break from it. I
Speaker 5: might have to smoke a cigarette outside.
Speaker 1: Sitting outside the trap house, Marissa recalled all kinds of memories,
Speaker 1: some of them pretty dark. She told me that it
Speaker 1: wasn't cheap to support her drug habit back then, and
Speaker 1: she was broke. So one day her mother tells her.
Speaker 5: If you want to fix your money problem, I have
Speaker 5: a solution for you. If you want to make easy money,
Speaker 5: then you have to sleep with these guys. She is like,
Speaker 5: it's the easiest way to make money quickly.
Speaker 1: This was apparently how her mother was getting.
Speaker 5: By Now, I realized, like I could have walked away,
Speaker 5: you know, but I didn't know that at the time.
Speaker 5: As a teenager and being sick on those drugs, it
Speaker 5: changes what you will and will not do, and I
Speaker 5: went down a very dark path because of it.
Speaker 1: Seeing this house and hearing Marissa talk about the life
Speaker 1: that she fell into here made me let me think
Speaker 1: again about Keith and his choices, and it raised the
Speaker 1: question that I've been grappling with since the very beginning.
Speaker 1: Why why would Keith do what he did, take such
Speaker 1: a risk jeopardize the welfare of his kids, especially when
Speaker 1: he knew that their safety net wasn't really a safety
Speaker 1: net at all, but was more like a trap. Marissa
Speaker 1: remembers just how bad it got with her mom.
Speaker 5: She just she retreated into a hole so deep and
Speaker 5: just became like this creature that I know that I
Speaker 5: didn't want to become because it was so dark and
Speaker 5: so far away from any feeling that was white, you know.
Speaker 5: So I was determined to not become like my mother.
Speaker 1: And that determination it paid off. In twenty fourteen, when
Speaker 1: Marissa was twenty four years old, she went clean, stopped
Speaker 1: using drugs entirely. She tried to convince her mother to
Speaker 1: do the same.
Speaker 5: I held her face in my hands in that trap
Speaker 5: house and I said, honey, if I can do it,
Speaker 5: you can do it too.
Speaker 6: I love you, mom.
Speaker 1: And what did she say to that?
Speaker 5: She said, I know, and then she got up and
Speaker 5: walked away.
Speaker 1: But after having that conversation they talked again, and Marissa
Speaker 1: says that even to this day, she can picture this
Speaker 1: moment like it's still playing out right in front of her.
Speaker 5: It was in a darker room, there was a lamp on,
Speaker 5: and she was sitting on the bed with that lamp
Speaker 5: shutting on her face, and I was standing above her,
Speaker 5: and she looked up at me and she said, Marissa,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry. She said everything that I've put you through.
Speaker 5: She said, I didn't mean to do this to my
Speaker 5: own daughter. She's like, I should have never used with you.
Speaker 5: I should have never given you a needle. And I
Speaker 5: looked in her eyes and for one of the only
Speaker 5: times in my life, I said, this woman feels guilty.
Speaker 5: I could feel the guilt and I said, I love you, Mom.
Speaker 5: It's gotta be okay. I forgive you. I forgive you.
Speaker 6: Mom.
Speaker 1: During this time, Elise was away at college and studying abroad.
Speaker 1: Still she did her best to stay in touch with
Speaker 1: her mother. Periodically she came back to the Trap House
Speaker 1: to visit to check in on her mother. She and
Speaker 1: her mom still had a few things in common, like
Speaker 1: they both loved the band Maroon five, and there were
Speaker 1: a few moments when it looked like Becky might turn
Speaker 1: her life around, but really these were just flickers of hope,
Speaker 1: brief pauses in what was a steady, slow decline.
Speaker 5: January tenth, twenty sixteen, I went and visited my mom
Speaker 5: for the last time.
Speaker 1: Becky was in the hospital and gravely ill after having
Speaker 1: a stroke. Elise went to see.
Speaker 5: Her and they had her hooked up to oxygen and
Speaker 5: she couldn't breathe on her own or you know, eat
Speaker 5: her on her own. She was hooked up to all
Speaker 5: sorts of machines. The doctors told us that she didn't
Speaker 5: have any brain activity. It's very quiet in the hospital.
Speaker 5: And I sat with her and held her hand which
Speaker 5: still had nail polish on them. I don't know who
Speaker 5: she got to do that for her, And I always
Speaker 5: sang her Sunday morning by maroon five Sunday morning, rain
Speaker 5: is falling. I'm saying that to her for the last time,
Speaker 5: and I said goodbye to her.
Speaker 1: At Lice told me one other thing that I really
Speaker 1: wasn't expecting to hear. She said that even after all
Speaker 1: these years, her mother still had feelings for Keith.
Speaker 5: I used to find like love letters, half written love
Speaker 5: letters to my dad and her purse years later that
Speaker 5: she just never said to my dad in person. That
Speaker 5: would just be like, I love you, I loved our life,
Speaker 5: and there's no silver lining. It is just a straight
Speaker 5: tragedy with that.
Speaker 1: After their mom passed, Marissa and Elise went to a
Speaker 1: Maroon five concert. They sat way up in the nosebleeds,
Speaker 1: and when the band played Sunday Morning, they shouted out
Speaker 1: the words together in a raw, full throated goodbye to
Speaker 1: Becky Giamanco. As kids, we hold our parents up on
Speaker 1: a pedestal because they seem larger than life, like characters
Speaker 1: in a fable, and then as we grow up, we
Speaker 1: begin the process of reimagining them, not simply as parents,
Speaker 1: but as human beings, ordinary flawed mortals who are doing
Speaker 1: their best or trying to anyhow, in a lot of
Speaker 1: messy and difficult situations. For Release and Marissa, this process
Speaker 1: was complicated by the time the asked they'd come to
Speaker 1: see her and accept her for who she was. But
Speaker 1: with their dad, it was hard for that relationship to
Speaker 1: evolve because he was in prison. He was there but
Speaker 1: not there, and so a very important part of their
Speaker 1: life remained suspended, hanging in the air, unresolved. Keith started
Speaker 1: his incarceration with two years at the Saint Louis County Jail.
Speaker 1: This is where he got his first taste of life
Speaker 1: as an inmate.
Speaker 4: It was a a.
Speaker 3: Dosa reality to be in a place where there was
Speaker 3: a lot of fear. You could cut the tension in
Speaker 3: the air. It's a good place to learn to keep
Speaker 3: to yourself.
Speaker 1: Keith learned how to get by, how to keep his
Speaker 1: head down, not invite trouble. As he put it, prison
Speaker 1: is something to be endured. And then in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: after he had been incarcerated about four years, Keith met someone,
Speaker 1: someone who helped him figure out some things that he'd
Speaker 1: been struggling with pretty much his entire life. At the time.
Speaker 1: Keith was in a maximum security state prison a few
Speaker 1: hours from Saint Louis, and he started working as a
Speaker 1: teaching assistant in a classroom with a woman named Caroline.
Speaker 1: Caroline was a former high school English teacher who lost
Speaker 1: her job in the Great Recession. Now she worked in
Speaker 1: the prison. As the weeks in month went by, Keith
Speaker 1: started to open up to Caroline. He talked about how
Speaker 1: he'd spent so long pretending to be someone he wasn't
Speaker 1: pretending that he had more than he actually did. But
Speaker 1: here in prison, he couldn't hide the realities of his
Speaker 1: situation or what he'd done, nor did he want to.
Speaker 1: And the crazy part for Keith, at least, was that
Speaker 1: Caroline still seemed to accept him exactly as he was.
Speaker 1: They became close friends, and eventually Keith realized that he
Speaker 1: had feelings for her, romantic feelings. When he confessed them
Speaker 1: to Caroline, she says, it came as a surprise.
Speaker 7: My head was spinning. This was absolutely nothing that I
Speaker 7: had ever envisioned in life, and I didn't want to
Speaker 7: be involved with anybody, let alone say oh yeah, hey,
Speaker 7: a maximum security inmate. You sound like my guy, but
Speaker 7: I knew he was, and because he's more than an inmate,
Speaker 7: he's Keith.
Speaker 1: Caroline told him that she shared his feelings, and for
Speaker 1: Keith this was a revelation.
Speaker 3: She certainly didn't want me for what I had, because
Speaker 3: I had nothing except for me, which is probably the
Speaker 3: greatest compliment anybody could ever have.
Speaker 7: I think that's one of the lessons that Keith really
Speaker 7: needed to learn as a human being, because he had
Speaker 7: gone for so long thinking that he needed to have
Speaker 7: things to seem valuable to other people, and he lost
Speaker 7: everything going to prison and found out that, hey, people
Speaker 7: still love him even though he can't provide something for them.
Speaker 1: From that point on, Keith and Caroline saw themselves as
Speaker 1: a couple, though they're both quick to say there was
Speaker 1: never any physical intimacy while Keith was incarcerated, just an
Speaker 1: understanding that they had found each other and that she
Speaker 1: would wait for him, even though his release date was
Speaker 1: still more than a decade away. Alice remembers when, on
Speaker 1: one of her visits to prison, her father first told
Speaker 1: her about Caroline.
Speaker 5: He explained that he was in love with her and
Speaker 5: told me a little about that story, and I actually
Speaker 5: thought it was so sweet. I'm pretty sure I cried,
Speaker 5: and I was just so happy for him. And I
Speaker 5: also was relieved too, because I felt like I had
Speaker 5: been such an emotional, mental, and economical support for my
Speaker 5: dad that now I had this other player in the
Speaker 5: game that could take some of that burning off of me,
Speaker 5: because this is someone who's choosing to be with my
Speaker 5: father out of love, not out of obligation.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, about five years after they first met,
Speaker 1: Keith and Caroline decided to get married. They arranged to
Speaker 1: have a ceremony in the prison visiting room.
Speaker 7: Even we had thought it can be icky getting married
Speaker 7: in prison, because that's not exactly your choice venue. And
Speaker 7: you know, when we got in there, it was like
Speaker 7: nothing else mattered.
Speaker 1: The guests included just Marissa and Elise and the pastor
Speaker 1: from Caroline's church.
Speaker 4: It was like nobody else was there except for the pasture,
Speaker 4: her I and the girls.
Speaker 1: Caroline told me that Marissa and Elise got into the
Speaker 1: spirit of things and even spontaneously started singing going to
Speaker 1: the chapel. There was no wedding cake, but still these
Speaker 1: two people had found one another and made this commitment,
Speaker 1: even though Keith would still be locked away for years.
Speaker 1: I have to imagine this scene. It must have been
Speaker 1: bittersweet for Keith's daughters to see their father so happy,
Speaker 1: to see him so settled into himself at last. But
Speaker 1: the unspoken question was why did the cost of this
Speaker 1: moment need to be so high? Why did there need
Speaker 1: to be such heartbreak and destruction before Keith Giamanco could
Speaker 1: at last find this kind of happiness. Keith's release date
Speaker 1: was set for September of twenty twenty five. He ended
Speaker 1: up serving seventeen years of his twenty year sentence and
Speaker 1: was released on parole. He was sixty one years old.
Speaker 1: Marissa couldn't be there for the actual day of Keith's release.
Speaker 1: She planned to visit him a short while later, but
Speaker 1: Elise was determined to be there for the big day.
Speaker 5: People are like, how are you preparing? I I've been
Speaker 5: preparing seventeen years for this, probably over prepared in some way.
Speaker 5: Just ready, you know, I've been ready since the day
Speaker 5: he went in.
Speaker 1: Alise lives in California now, where she's the director of
Speaker 1: a boys and girls club, and she decided to take
Speaker 1: some time off of work, hop in her car and
Speaker 1: drive all the way to Missouri for his release. She
Speaker 1: cruised across the west through Wyoming and Nebraska, blasting Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan and Taylor Swift.
Speaker 5: I was ecstatic, running on adrenaline the entire time I was.
Speaker 5: I was driving music, blasten top of my ears, ready
Speaker 5: to go. I booked really nice places for myself because
Speaker 5: I knew that my life was about to change again
Speaker 5: and I was celebrating. I was already celebrating on the road.
Speaker 5: I was joyous, overwhelmed with joy and screaming like we're
Speaker 5: almost there, almost there, Like I did this, We did it.
Speaker 1: Elise planned to meet Caroline the night before so they
Speaker 1: could spend a little time together.
Speaker 5: Caroline and I spent that evening chit chatting about our
Speaker 5: future plans, and I was like, aren't you so excited
Speaker 5: to be with your husband and just to hang out
Speaker 5: with your husband? And she was jazzing me up too, like, hey,
Speaker 5: your father's getting out, Like, look at this moment for
Speaker 5: our family, Like this is the moment we've been waiting for.
Speaker 1: The next morning, they went to the prison together. Caroline drove,
Speaker 1: Elise was in the passenger's seat.
Speaker 5: I couldn't wait to get out. I jumped out while
Speaker 5: the car was still kind of moving. When I saw
Speaker 5: him standing outside the prison, I was like, am I dreaming?
Speaker 5: You know? Am I dreaming? Seeing him standing here.
Speaker 1: Caroline remembers this moment.
Speaker 7: Too, When we pulled up to the front door, the
Speaker 7: car hadn't even stopped rolling yet, and Eli's just boiled
Speaker 7: out of the car and went running to him and
Speaker 7: gave him a great big hug, and they were crying,
Speaker 7: and I had tears, and it was just so sweet
Speaker 7: to see them reunited.
Speaker 5: And I just said, we did it, Dad, we did it,
Speaker 5: and we broke down in each other's arms, and then
Speaker 5: Caroline came and hugged my dad, and then we all
Speaker 5: hugged each other and we got in the car and
Speaker 5: got out of there as quick as we could, off
Speaker 5: of the prison property.
Speaker 4: Well, getting out was of course, it was a wonderful,
Speaker 4: for lack of a better term.
Speaker 3: Experience to get out, and with Caroline and Elise meeting me,
Speaker 3: it was just, you know, it was a jubilation and elation.
Speaker 3: The feeling was.
Speaker 1: That same day, Keith, Caroline, and Elise drove to a
Speaker 1: cemetery in Eminence, Missouri, because that's where some of Keith's
Speaker 1: family members were buried and he wanted to pay his respects.
Speaker 1: And then they all went swimming at Keith's favorite swimming hole.
Speaker 3: It might be hard for people to imagine, especially people
Speaker 3: who liked to swim, not being immersed in water for
Speaker 3: seventeen years. I mean, there's nothing, there's no bathtubs in prison,
Speaker 3: and there's no swimming pools. So that was an interesting
Speaker 3: experience and it was something that I had said for
Speaker 3: years was the first thing I wanted to do was
Speaker 3: go swimming.
Speaker 1: This swimming hole. It's where Keith taught his daughters how
Speaker 1: to swim. The area is lined with these cliffs that
Speaker 1: you can jump from, so Keith and Elise climb the
Speaker 1: cliffs together.
Speaker 5: It was my first experience post release of him being
Speaker 5: physically there to encourage me and to help me physically
Speaker 5: get up this cliff, because he went before me and
Speaker 5: he reached back and helped me up with his hand.
Speaker 5: And it felt like I had had my father back
Speaker 5: and then I had this level of support pack and
Speaker 5: it was such a freeing thing for me, and it
Speaker 5: just felt like a full circle moment. Here we are
Speaker 5: back at the swimming hole, back where I learned to swim,
Speaker 5: back where we had so many memories, and it just
Speaker 5: felt so relieving to continue the story of us together.
Speaker 1: As you might remember, when I first met Marissa, we
Speaker 1: jumped right in a car and set off on a
Speaker 1: road trip through the geography of her family's past. It
Speaker 1: ended in a quiet place. We pulled over at the
Speaker 1: edge of a lake in rural Missouri. Was December, cold
Speaker 1: but clear, with the kind of winter light that sharpens everything,
Speaker 1: the water, the trees, even the air. We stayed in
Speaker 1: the car, engine off just sitting there looking out at
Speaker 1: the lake. Marissa has now been cleaned for eleven years,
Speaker 1: and she has slowly been building a new life for herself.
Speaker 1: It's been a long road. She met a nice guy
Speaker 1: who treats her well. She went to therapy, got a
Speaker 1: diagnosis that she has borderline personality disorder, started taking medications.
Speaker 1: She wanted to make sure that I mentioned this. It's
Speaker 1: part of who she is and what she's overcome.
Speaker 5: I still go to therapy to this day. And just
Speaker 5: finding that out and getting a diagnosis and knowing that
Speaker 5: your brain is different as the first step and forgiving
Speaker 5: yourself and realizing like, hey, maybe I'm not in a
Speaker 5: world that was built for me, but we're not alone.
Speaker 5: And that's what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: Marissa says that despite everything her father did and the
Speaker 1: impact that it had on her life and all of
Speaker 1: their lives, she still wants to be there for him.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I love him. I'm like, if anything was wrong,
Speaker 5: I'd drop what I was doing and be right there.
Speaker 5: You know, that's my dad. I hope that I can
Speaker 5: do for him what he didn't do for me. I
Speaker 5: hope I can take care of him.
Speaker 1: As we continued to sit there and stare out at
Speaker 1: the lake, marveling at the beauty of this perfect winter day.
Speaker 1: I asked Marissa if she ever thought she'd get to
Speaker 1: this point in her life with the trauma of the
Speaker 1: past behind her.
Speaker 5: No, I didn't expect to make it to where I
Speaker 5: am now, Like I honestly thought I was going to
Speaker 5: die in addiction when I was at my worst points.
Speaker 5: So I'm just grateful to be able to experience the
Speaker 5: rest of my life the way that it's supposed to be.
Speaker 5: So there's a reason why I'm still here. I just
Speaker 5: might not have found it yet.
Speaker 1: As for a lease, she told me that she's fully
Speaker 1: forgiven her father for what he did. That she'd let
Speaker 1: it go not because it didn't matter, but because she
Speaker 1: prefers to focus on what's in front of her now
Speaker 1: and what's still possible between them. She said that holding
Speaker 1: on to anger, even for a few minutes, feels like
Speaker 1: a waste of the time that she has left with him.
Speaker 1: At least told me that years ago, in the wake
Speaker 1: of her dad's arrest, she kept thinking about the reasons
Speaker 1: behind his actions, why he'd done it. She says, at
Speaker 1: the time, she got stuck in an endless loop of wondering.
Speaker 1: I asked whether that loop was still running in her
Speaker 1: head or if it had finally stopped.
Speaker 5: The old I get the why just doesn't matter as much,
Speaker 5: partially because I think that that's my dad's burden to carry,
Speaker 5: and that's my dad's question to actually ask, because really,
Speaker 5: the the why is moot. It happened, Things happen, and
Speaker 5: I think I'm sometimes looking for again reasons where things
Speaker 5: were unreasonable, since where things were senseless.
Speaker 1: I very much appreciated what Elise was saying that in
Speaker 1: order to find some contentment in the present and in
Speaker 1: order to love her father, she had to stop trying
Speaker 1: to make sense of it.
Speaker 6: All.
Speaker 1: This, she can clue you did, and perhaps rightly so
Speaker 1: was Keith's burden. And this made me wonder and all
Speaker 1: the time that Keith's had to think about what he's done,
Speaker 1: everything he'd set in motion when he walked into that
Speaker 1: first bank back in two thousand and seven, had he
Speaker 1: finally figured out why he allowed himself to make the
Speaker 1: choices he'd made. Right after Keith was released from prison,
Speaker 1: he moved in with Caroline to the cabin where she
Speaker 1: lives in the Ozarks, to that remote spot where I
Speaker 1: first met him. Keith and Caroline had been married for
Speaker 1: eight years, but they'd never spent a single night together.
Speaker 1: Now they finally had a chance to begin their life
Speaker 1: as a couple. The transition hasn't been entirely easy. Where
Speaker 1: they live is very rem Caroline works as a high
Speaker 1: school English teacher more than an hour away. She leaves
Speaker 1: in the morning and comes back late in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: so most days it's just Keith. He does his best
Speaker 1: to keep the house up, feed the goats, look after
Speaker 1: the dogs, do the laundry, and have dinner waiting for
Speaker 1: Caroline when she returns. There's a lot of time for
Speaker 1: Keith to reflect on the past.
Speaker 3: I have had people forgive me, but first I had
Speaker 3: to forgive myself for what I've done. I'm sorry for
Speaker 3: what I did to many people along that path, But
Speaker 3: the fact of the matter is is if you can't
Speaker 3: put that behind you, you're never going to be able
Speaker 3: to live a free life.
Speaker 1: When you look back on your decision to rob the banks, now,
Speaker 1: does it seem delusional to you?
Speaker 3: I get why I made the decion decisions, but yet
Speaker 3: I think the result that I expected might have been
Speaker 3: somewhat delusional. I get why I did it, but I'm
Speaker 3: not going to sit here and say that I would
Speaker 3: do it it's the same way again, because I wouldn't.
Speaker 3: You know, obviously there would be a huge issue there
Speaker 3: if I said that I would, I'd do it all
Speaker 3: over again.
Speaker 4: No, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: Keith says there are so many things that he do
Speaker 1: differently now, including simply asking for help. He says he
Speaker 1: didn't do this before out of the misguided notion that
Speaker 1: he needed to be this provider for his daughters. At
Speaker 1: one point, I was in good financial position, but I
Speaker 1: wanted to keep that appearance. And that is a lie.
Speaker 1: It's a lie to the people around me. So that's
Speaker 1: the part of me that at that time was really ugly.
Speaker 1: Many people have expressed to me, including my own children,
Speaker 1: that look, none of those things were as important as
Speaker 1: having you at home, and we missed you at home,
Speaker 1: and we appreciate the fact that you wanted all those
Speaker 1: things for us and yourself, but we would or rather
Speaker 1: had you, And that really hits home. Early on, I
Speaker 1: thought of Keith as this sphinx, as if beneath his
Speaker 1: composed exterior he was guarding the secrets of his own intentions.
Speaker 1: He was a man who often spoke in these Midwestern niceties,
Speaker 1: these Keith isms designed to keep people at an arm's length,
Speaker 1: And it kept on having this feeling like there was
Speaker 1: some distance, some mysterious invisible space between Keith and the world,
Speaker 1: and I felt that if somehow I could just enter
Speaker 1: that space, i'd finally understand who Keith really was. But
Speaker 1: now I see him differently. I see Keith as a
Speaker 1: man who perhaps is a mystery to himself, because sometimes
Speaker 1: we prefer not to walk down the creaky steps into
Speaker 1: the dank basement of our subconscious for fear of what
Speaker 1: we will or won't find, and so we just locked
Speaker 1: the basement door and hope for the best. In reporting
Speaker 1: this story, I kept coming back to the fact that
Speaker 1: I myself am a dad of two boys who are
Speaker 1: now almost exactly the same age as Keith's kids were
Speaker 1: back when he robbed those banks, and in some very
Speaker 1: small way, I get what Keith did, because being a
Speaker 1: parent is kind of a performance. When they're young, you
Speaker 1: act like you have the answers. When they get older
Speaker 1: and start to see the dangers in the world, you
Speaker 1: tell them it's going to be okay, even when you're
Speaker 1: not so sure, and then when they move out, you
Speaker 1: fight back the tears and just pretend you're fine. When
Speaker 1: I think about Keith, it feels like that instinct to
Speaker 1: pretend it just grew and grew and grew until it
Speaker 1: swallowed everything. As parents, we pretend for all kinds of reasons,
Speaker 1: noble and ignoble alike. We pretend out of pride. We
Speaker 1: pretend because we love our kids, and though it's hard
Speaker 1: to admit, we pretend because we want them to love
Speaker 1: us and believe in us, even when they really shouldn't.
Speaker 1: For those of you who'd like to read more about
Speaker 1: Keith's story, he and his wife Caroline have written a
Speaker 1: memoir called Banknotes Revisited, The Updated True Story of the
Speaker 1: Bony Hat Bandit. You can find a link in our
Speaker 1: show description. Deep Cover the Family Man is produced by
Speaker 1: Isaac Carter and Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our show is edited
Speaker 1: by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Sound
Speaker 1: design by Jake Gorsky. Original scoring in our theme were
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Gara. Our show art was designed by
Speaker 1: Sean Carney. Fact checking by Anica Robbins. Our story consultant
Speaker 1: was James Foreman Junior. Special thanks to Daphney Chen Sonya Gerwit,
Speaker 1: Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jake Flanagan, Corinn Gilliard Fisher, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Lucy Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Jordan McMillan, Alexandra garrettne Kalalah, Jason McQuaid, Alyssa Chen, Alex Meyer, Tompkins,
Speaker 1: Matt Brown, Hillarysites, Michael Charlotte Simms, Travis Dunlap, Kasha Sebastian,
Speaker 1: Lucian Milo and Gus I'm Jake Calburn. Hear episodes of
Speaker 1: Deep Cover The Family Man early and ad free by
Speaker 1: subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks,
Speaker 1: and exclusive binges of other true crime podcasts throughout the year.