S2: Bonus Ep 6 – Divided Justice: Family Court vs. Criminal Court

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona.

And I'm, Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.

We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001,. police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode. Before escaping into the wilderness, police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me.

Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice?

Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

This could be the craziest podcast pairing ever. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Super Bowl champ Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch are politicking.

What does politicking even mean? There's bridge and gaps with no politics.

Joined by their friend and agent Doug Hendrickson, it's going to be a wild ride.

We can change the world podcast by podcast.

Listen to politicking with Gavin Newsom, Marshawn Lynch, and Doug Hendrickson on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search politicking and start listening.

In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them except one. A woman known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events.

I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is a Betrayal Bonus episode. We know a lot of you have been wondering about Ashley, where she is now, and how her divorce is going. Well, we sat down with her to find out.

Yeah, it's like a different lifetime for me.

So much has happened, but today I really want to focus on the major updates in your life, and that is the topic of divorce. Tell me a little bit about what's going on.

We've been in mediation for a little over two years now because of how I was represented. in the very beginning. There were some things put into the divorce, but that put me at a really big disadvantage now, this late in the game.

Wait, so, just as a point of clarity, you've gone through two attorneys for this. So the first one, you weren't aligned.

No, no. We looked around and I found a new attorney, Laura. She's been fabulous in her team. But what it looks like to me, as long as Jason is fulfilling what the criminal court said he had to fulfill, and he's meeting all of those expectations and requirements to be rehabilitated and to be able to integrate into society, then the family law recognizes that. as him no longer being a threat.

So, on the criminal side, he has stipulations of his probation.

I don't get to know all of that because of HIPAA privacy laws. Even as far as his like psychosexual evaluation, I don't get to see that.

Which is court-mandated therapy.

Yes, court-mandated therapy that he will graduate in August of this year. Wow. Yeah, and so what they're wanting is just to go by like regular family court, like every other weekend, half holidays, things like that. Like even sleepovers.

I imagine not really having insight on how the process is with therapy. You're really in the dark. It's a big leap of faith to ask somebody to take.

I don't have a choice. And to me, it seems reckless that any court would allow this, but he has rights as a father and there's nothing I can do about it. Our court system is putting a 10-year-old in the position of possibly being a victim. How terrible is that?

How are you emotionally dealing with all of this?

It pisses me off. It makes me angry. Like I've said over and over and over to anyone that will listen, is, you know, I didn't get the chance to protect Avea. I didn't know I needed to. I know I need to protect my youngest daughter.

Do you ever imagine having to have a conversation like that with your kid about their own father?

No, I mean, she loves her father. He's so much fun and they do all these really great things together. for her to see that and then to hear, like you need to be aware. You need to put your guard up.

I can't believe you have to carry that and I can't believe a 10-year-old has to carry that responsibility.

Yeah, and I think her being so young now, that's why it's so important to have some type of guardian ad litem there to make sure that she's represented appropriately.

I don't think a lot of people know this, but what is a guardian ad litem, and why did you decide to work with one?

What I was struggling with in the beginning, when I first hired my new lawyer, was I want to do what's best for my youngest daughter. So the guardian ad litem essentially comes in and acts as a lawyer for my daughter. He looks at the facts, takes an account what's safe for her, what's best for her mental health. He'll put in a suggestion and say I recommended this. Do I feel like that was a good idea at this point?

I'm really sorry that you're navigating that. What's going on with the house? What's going on with the financial aspect of everything?

Early on in the divorce, there were things that were drafted and agreed to that I just didn't know. Things like you pay your legal fees, I pay my legal fees. The resource that I was using for my divorce was a free service. At that time. that seems like a no-brainer, because my legal fees are nothing.

So how is this coming to play in the divorce if you're on the deed and it's your home now?

Because it's still marital asset. Okay. It doesn't matter whether it's debt or income. Those are shared things. And so he wants me to sell my home.

He's all this support. to get his life back together and on track. You've had to pick up yourself by your own bootstraps. Right. Since everything went down.

Right. And don't get me wrong. My family has been wonderful. I'm supposed to be established. It's not what I was supposed to be doing.

If he was truly sorry and remorseful for what he's done to you, Avea, your family, what do you think that would look like?

What he could do if he cared about our well-being, he would just walk away.

Anything that comes your way, I know you can handle. Will you make sure to give me an update when your divorce is finalized, so we can tell the audience?

Absolutely. Hopefully, we're cheering. You can have a glass of champagne where you're at and I'll have one where I'm at.

I'll send you a bottle of oof.

Done. Okay.

Okay.

I really hope we can send her an entire case of champagne soon. And as soon as there are updates, we'll keep you guys posted. In the meantime, we'll get an update from Ashley's attorney, Laura, next.

I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona.

And I'm, Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.

We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001,. police say I killed my family.

First mom, then the kids.

And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb.

This is the Beverly Hills of the valley.

Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew.

All I could think of is him to sniper me out of some tree.

But not me.

Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave.

They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed.

Searching for Robert Fisher.

One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house.

The hunt.

Family annihilation.

Today.

And a disappearing act.

Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Idlewild, California, five women disappeared in the span of just a few months. Eventually, I found out what happened to the women. All except one. A woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia. Her friends and family ran through endless theories.

This could be the craziest podcast pairing ever. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Super Bowl champ, Marshawn V. Smode Lynch, are politickin'.

What does politickin' even mean? There's bridge and gaps with no politics.

Joined by their friend and agent, Doug Hendrickson, it's going to be a wild ride.

We can change the world. podcast by podcast. You talk to your phone.

Listen to Politickin' with Gavin Newsom, Marshawn Lynch, and Doug Hendrickson on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Politickin' and start listening.

I always have to be reminded that family court and criminal court operate separately. So Ashley and I wanted to sit down with her attorney, Laura, and understand how those two separate systems are impacting Ashley and her divorce. Specifically, when it comes to custody.

Hi, Laura. Hi. So glad to have you. I wanted to introduce you to Andrea.

Hi, Laura. It's so nice to meet you.

Hi, Andrea. Nice to meet you, too.

So, just to give you a little backstory, Andrea is the gal who did the podcast with me and been like a huge part of just my overall journey through Jason's criminal case and even with my divorce. So I wanted to get you guys introduced so we could have a conversation about how our divorce is going.

Yeah, Laura, when Ashley first wrote in, I think the subject line was my future ex-husband, and that was two years ago. And you're still working through the divorce. But I just wanted to ask you questions about where you guys are now and what you're currently working to negotiate for Ashley's behalf.

Sure. No problem.

What are the things that you guys have to navigate in terms of custody and financials? Just give me a little bit of a background of all the things that you guys have to take into consideration and why family court is different than criminal court and why they're kind of treated separately.

So the way it works in Utah is similar to most states where there are separate court systems for criminal cases than civil cases. So family law, divorce cases, custody, adoption, they fall under the category of civil law, which means that they're heard by a district court. Now, that same court can hear criminal cases, but they're entirely different cases. They don't get linked together. And then they are just different systems.

What are some of the hurdles that you guys have faced in this divorce?

Ashley started this divorce off with a different law firm. So by the time we came on the case, there already were a lot of things in motion. There were already a lot of things that we couldn't go back and fix and change. So it's always an uphill battle where certain things have already been decided. It's also been a really difficult case because I think Jason and his attorney were making representations to Ashley and to our firm that Jason was agreeing to certain things.

What else are you guys pushing for in the divorce?

The other area that I think is the biggest area of contention is whether or not he's going to at some point be allowed unsupervised visits. He's been pretty insistent that he thinks that should happen relatively soon and that he's not a risk. And now is using a not surprising tactic of saying that this was like a one-off thing that's never going to happen again because of some interaction, of some medication he was on at the time. Which is relatively common in cases that we're dealing with. There tends to be blame oftentimes placed on something else or someone else.

You guys are going to trial, but you may not have to go to a full blown trial. What's the difference?

There's all sorts of issues that have to get resolved to get a divorce. So like custody and parent time and dividing retirement accounts and dividing house equity. In this case, some of those things we either have agreements on or we're pretty close to agreements on. So if we can avoid trial, that's always ideal, because trials are really expensive and just really, in a sense, they cause victims or individuals to relive trauma. In my view, you know, after doing family law for 20 years, trials almost always make it more difficult for people to move on with their lives, just because it's so conflictual and doesn't really allow for healing to occur.

Do you feel like you guys are close to coming to a middle ground to avoid trial?

I would give it 90% odds that we agree without going to trial. In terms of the timing, who knows when that's going to happen? My guess would be at some point during the summer.

I don't know if personally you've dealt with cases that are similar to mine in nature. as far as, like, you know, his criminal case really doesn't have any say in like what happens financially in a divorce. Is that usually pretty common?

Yeah, I think there is a lot of surprise that people have. They just kind of assume that courts are about creating fairness and about creating sort of equal situations. And, to be clear, courts do have a lot of discretion, so they can award things differently than 50-50.. But the majority of the time, it's just equal, regardless of the reasons for the divorce or who was at fault or who had criminal charges. Like it just really doesn't impact the money part of it.

Well, I appreciate it. I said this to you. And one of your colleagues not too long ago, but I told you that you guys should wear capes because you guys are superheroes to me.

I'll be patiently waiting to see how everything gets resolved. So, Laura, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thank you both of you. And thanks to you guys for being so supportive of Ashley and helping to have her story be heard. I think it's so important. So thanks, everybody.

It's complicated. And thankfully, Ashley now has someone truly fighting for her. I wanted to thank all of you, our Betrayal listeners, as we prepare to launch another season of Betrayal. And, in addition, we have big updates for the Betrayal community. First, we're thrilled to announce what's coming your way in Season 3 of Betrayal.

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona.

And I'm, Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.

We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001,.

Police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode.

Before escaping into the wilderness.

Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere.

Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues.

I'm going to call the police and have you removed.

Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Robert Fisher.

Do you recognize my voice?

Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

This could be the craziest podcast pairing ever. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Super Bowl champ, Marshawn Beastmode Lynch, are politicking.

What does politicking even mean? There's bridge and gaps. With no politics.

Joined by their friend and agent, Doug Hendrickson, it's going to be a wild ride.

We can change the world, podcast by podcast.

Listen to Politicking with Gavin Newsom, Marshawn Lynch, and Doug Hendrickson on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search politicking and start listening.

In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them, except one. A woman known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends.