On May twenty seventh, twenty fourteen, Anne Bender was in court awaiting a verdict for the second time.

She'd been re tried for murder, which is allowable under Costa Rican law.

The trial had lasted seven days.

Anne was shaking.

The judge, Adolpho Calderon began.

An absol He told the court that John Bender could not have shot himself because he had a wound at the back of the head.

The judge said other evidence that the crime scene also made suicide impossible.

The blood, the bullets, the position of the body.

It all pointed to only one conclusion.

Anne had argued during the court case that John suffered from bipolar disorder and that he'd attempted to take his own life before the judges weren't convinced by her defense.

Finally, Judge Calderon announced the verdict without a doubt.

He said, the court agrees that the death of John Felix Bender was homicide.

Ann had murdered him.

She was guilty.

The sentence was twenty two years in prison.

From Exactly Right Media and iHeart podcasts produced by Blanchard House, This is Helen Heaven, I'm Becky Milligan.

Chapter seven, A second chance and was led away by gods.

In total shock, she fainted.

Do you remember her reaction?

Stunned?

Author Carol Vaughan witnessed the verdict.

I think she and her legal team neither one thought that that was going to happen.

I think her legal team had done a very good job of defending her.

And do you remember her walking out or what happened.

I remember they tried to get her out as quickly as possible through a side door, which you're not supposed to use, things like a fire door, but she could barely walk.

She was overcome.

It was awful, and we were all looking at each other just in total disbelief.

She was immediately remanded to a psychiatric hospital, where she was held under guard and put on suicide watch.

When she was over the shop and considered well enough, she was moved to the prison.

And I didn't know how awful it was where they were sending her and what they were doing to her, and how you'll equipped she was for it.

Had I known, I would have been flopping out also, because it's just being in jail as a woman in Central America is just no day at the beach.

The verdict horrified Anne's family and everyone who'd supported and believed in her.

What worried the most was that Anne might not survive being in prison.

The stress of the trial and the verdict had weakened her.

She was frail and very thin.

Ken Anne's brother, was her spokesman throughout the trial and outside the court.

Speaking in perfect Spanish, he told reporters.

Nois.

My sister is not a killer.

The second trial was a fallacy, a dark day for Poisseladon very ugly.

Friends and family had to move fast and make a lot of noise about what they believed was an appalling miscarriage of justice.

They created a gofund me page and started a petition Free and Bender on the popular change dot org platform to mobilize supporters.

An actor reads what one of her friends wrote on their page.

We family and close friends are doing everything in our power to end this nightmare.

An innocent woman is dying, and we can make this write we can.

Her lawyers also sprang into action, preparing an appeal.

Anne had one other person fighting her corner, a man named Greg Fischer.

Anne met Greg in San Jose, where she'd been living around the time of her first trial.

Originally from New New York.

Greg had lived in Florida, Arizona, and then Costa Rica.

Just like John had been, Greg was into bodybuilding and fitness and liked to ride motorbikes.

He was handsome and, according to friends, kind and compassionate.

It was a second chance for Anne.

They lived together in an apartment in a smart suburb of San Jose and even got a puppy.

But then came the second trial, and just over a year after they'd started their relationship, Anne was found guilty and started her twenty two year prison sentence.

All hopes of that new life were taken away.

Greg now dedicated all his time to fight for her release and visit her in prison.

An actor reads his Twitter bio at the time.

Working every day to help save Ann Bender from the terrible injustice doneder her by the people she trusted the most.

He and s Amavan's friends and family contributed as much as they could to her campaign.

Greg was always thinking of new ways to raise money to help Han's calls.

They also took to social media and tweeted everyone from The New York Times to Fox News, hoping a journalist or campaigners or politicians would pick up her story, and someone did pick up the story.

But closer to home.

I'm at a cabin on the outskirts of pere Zeladon, in the shadow of those beautiful mountains.

It's owned by Carol Vaughan.

She lives here with her dog, Garbo.

You'll have heard from Carol throughout the series.

She's dressed in her Hallmark Loud Hawaiian shirt and red lipstick.

In her younger days, back in America, she was a tap dancer.

I was an avid tap dancer.

I don't tap any anymore because of my age, but had a tap dance studio, taught it, continued to perform it in nightclubs both in New York and in Washington, DC.

And I feel like in my heart I'll always be a tap dancer.

Carol even danced with Mickey Rooney, a Hollywood star in the forties and fifties.

She gave up the love of her life, I e tap and moved to Costa Rica in twenty twelve, where she could have retired relaxing on her rocking chair on the verandah, taking it nice and easy, but she isn't a type to do that.

Instead, she dived right into a new career as an investigative reporter for a local newspaper, The Tico Times.

Before we can sit down to chat, we're off for a walk with her dog, Garbo, and she starts to tell me how one story took over her entire life and still dominates it.

It's so embarrassing.

I became possessed and obsessed with the story of the Benders.

It's raining you, guys.

We're going to cross and go down just a bit, and he should poop.

Okay, and shallah, we'll wait for the poop.

Back in the cabin, we start from the beginning how she became possessed and obsessed with the Benders.

One day, her editor gave her a new assignment covering an Bender's murder trials, starting with the second, the one in which she was convicted.

Carol had no idea what she was about to get into.

My Spanish was pretty good, but I wasn't great.

And in court you have to be quick, and you have to pay attention, and you have to understand legal things that I didn't understand.

So when he first said this is your assignment, that I want you to go do this, it's like, well, you know, I'll try it.

But I can't promise that it's going to be great.

First day trial, I thought, oh, I'm going to do this because this is to the reaction of the people in the courtroom and the looks on people's faces.

And there are three judges in all court cases here, criminal court cases, and they would fight with each other and say nasty things to each other and things that would never happen in American court.

So the drama was so intense.

I realized that it wasn't just a writing assignment.

It was also my telenovela, my soap opera of the day.

Did you know about the case already?

I mean, did people talk about it?

Was it just a big thing here?

Everyone talked about it.

It was in all the local papers, on all the local radio and TV.

And was now in the only all women's gennel in Costa Rica.

Originally a convent, it was now a fortress with.

Gun turrets, guys walking around with guns.

She was in an ambito with twenty women.

That's a prison dorrmitory.

There weren't enough mattresses for everyone, so they would share mattresses or some people would just have to sleep directly on the floor.

You have to wear your own clothes, but you're not allowed to replace your clothes.

So people are in like Robinson Crusoe, torn outfits.

Their women there who are pregnant.

They're women there who have their own children with them.

Let's just stop here for a moment.

Imagine what it must have been like for this privileged woman, an American used to the comfort of Buracaeyanne in the middle of the jungle, protected by armed guards, surrounded by staff, beautiful jewels, tiffany lamps, watching the sunset every evening over their own private jungle.

Now she was in jail, convicted of murder.

The contrast couldn't have been more extreme.

The food is inedible.

I mean, they'd be maggots crawling out of the of the rice.

I don't know how she survived.

I really don't.

And you went to visit her in prison.

Can you recall the conversation you had.

While she was in this dormitory with twenty people.

I think they let me go with her outside.

I was not allowed to tape, but I was allowed to take notes.

She in general always wore black, and she wore skirts all the way down to the floor usually, and then long sleeves because there's no climate control.

In jail, right, Well did she tell you?

Well?

I was very concerned with how she was if she was being treated well as well.

As a journalist, Carol was working as a volunteer for the American embassy.

In fact, her father had been a diplomat in Latin America.

I said, you know, we'll get your soap, We'll get you toilet paper, because there's no toilet paper in jail.

Let us know what you want, we will get it to you.

So that was the most of the conversation was are you taking care of your health?

She had a heartport and she couldn't keep it clean because she was only allowed to bathe once a week.

What is a hart court.

It was something that would allow them to inject medicine right into her heart because her heart was not strong.

Gosh.

So she was really seriously, oh yeah, off, that sounds quite frightening for her if she can't actually, you know, keep it clean.

So all of that stuff about just human human How are you holding up?

It's a question lots of people were asking how was she surviving day in day out, especially as she was so frail.

The answer Carol got to her question surprised her.

She confessed to me that she was actually well accompanied, that she felt very comfortable with the women that she was living with, and that they were taking very good care of her, and she felt kind of good about that.

It's amazing, isn't it?

To go from a sort of house she was living in on top of a hill, a mansion, yes.

With just one other person, and now she's thrown into a dirt bin with twenty and she's okay, how does that happen?

Luckily, Anne had won the sympathy of the other inmates.

They seemed to pity her.

The women rallied around her, recognizing she was a wounded birdie.

They saw her as a wounded bird.

They brought her clothing to wear, Their families brought her food from home.

And Anne suffered a lot from the cold, so they would heat water forward to pour in her pail so that she could get a little comfort there, and then they would take her out to the back so she could sit in the sun and try to regroup.

They were very sweet to her.

What was it about her do you think that made people sympathize?

I think she reads as a wounded, wounded person.

She was very sympathetic always to wounded animals where they lived, and I think it was because she was one.

She just got bury with the broken wing.

It was hard for anyone to survive in there, let alone an American who was used to a certain lifestyle.

But those women rallied around her, cared for her, helped her survive, and there was.

Greg Ann's boyfriend would bring her food and then enough food to share among the other prisoners so that they would take better care of her.

Carol also helped her.

After the health issues of how are you, what can we do for you?

The embassies looking after you.

We will visit you.

Here's a number to call if you get in trouble.

Telephoning in jail as a huge problem because there's only one phone and you're allowed two minutes on one kind of thing.

Carol felt like she and Anne were connected.

Their fate had brought them together.

Because here I am.

I'm a single American woman here in Costrica with not very much knowledge to the country or the language or anything.

And I felt that a kindred spirit.

She was a female.

She was wrongly accused, I thought, and it wasn't one hundred percent sure she was getting good legal help.

Carol was also fascinated by Anne's story, and she had an article to write, one which would eventually become a book titled Crazy Jungle Love.

So she had to ask the harder, more probing questions.

I said, well, Anne, you you know what happened.

I didn't want to say did you kill him?

Just you know what happened?

And she told me what she's told everyone, that she was awakened by his voice, and that John always came to bed with a gun.

And she roused herself after she heard him say something she thinks it was, You'll now know what it's like to wake up next to your dead husband.

And she saw that he had a gun pointed at his head, and she tried to grow and the gun went off and he died instantly.

He was shot in the back of the right occipital and it never came out.

The occipital is a particular part at the back of the head.

What do you do make of that explanation?

I think that's what she thinks happened.

Though it was twenty fourteen, four years after John's death and with prison time ahead, AND's story didn't change, but what had changed was public opinion.

During the first trial, she'd won over many Costa Ricans.

They were sympathetic.

After she was convicted, that changed.

What did people think about her in Costa Rica?

I think I've never asked someone that.

Who has told me, especially a man who has told me Anne's innocent.

I've never ever heard anyone say Anne was innocent.

They say she was a black widow.

She was just gunning for him until he dies so she could have all those jewels and property to herself.

They were both crooked, but she took him out.

She wasn't a well liked person.

I mean, neither of them were well liked, frankly, but here the blame went to her.

There people convinced she kills them.

I mean, that's not even a question.

The story became bigger than Anna and Joan.

It had a knock on effect on all Americans who had come to Costa Rica to settle.

All expats were now on trial.

Americans are so self entitled.

They think they own the world.

They think everything revolves around them.

They think they can come into this developing country and just do whatever they want and no one's gonna put a stop to them.

And you watch, We're going to put a stop to them.

Someone else who was on the trial each day was Kevin Serrano, a cameraman for a Costa Rican TV news station.

He was more used to recording sports events, but now he'd been put on the trial of the century.

It's the la mauria bonando being only externo.

When a foreigner from any country comes to live in Pusto Rica, people would normally think this is good because they might bring investment or aid and development to the communities or whatever.

So at first the opinion was these are good and nice people who came to support the community.

But when all this starts to come out, people thought, hmm, maybe none of this was what they made it out to be.

And unlike any other trial in Costa Rican history, the public could read and watch every twist and turn of the story.

It became a soap opera and everyone was talking about it.

In most trials, it's requested not to be pressed or media present.

Understand, Anne's defense did not want the media in the courtroom, but since this was a case of public interest, all media could be at the trial.

The speculation could be as fantastic as it was cruel.

There was miles and miles of newsprint discussing every theory under the sun, including one which suggested Anne may not have pulled the trigger but paid for the hit on John.

So this was all swirling around while Anne's lawyers fought her conviction.

Then, unbelievably, another tragedy was to strike Anne.

Six months into her sentence, she got some news.

Greg, her partner who'd been dedicated to the campaign for her release, died.

It was November sixteenth, twenty fourteen.

It's easy and tempting to assume Greg's death must be connected to everything else, but Greg died from an asthma attack.

It was totally random and awful.

Nevertheless, speculation and conspiracy theories once again flourished.

Anne was devastated, grieving again, this time for her boyfriend Greg, wondering if she would ever get out of prison.

But then there was a major development.

It was nine months into her sentence.

Anne was in her cell.

It was a regular day inside as far as she was concerned, until a guard appeared out of the blue.

He told her that her case had been thrown out, there was going to be a third trial, and she was to be released immediately.

She was free to go.

Her lawyers had been working round the clock to secure a retrial, and they had succeeded.

A judge had reviewed the case and made the decision.

She said this to reporters.

An actor is speaking Anne's words.

They just told me to get my stuff together and I left the prison.

I'm really grateful that the appellate court made the right to time.

Even though the prospect of a further trial must have been terrible.

It was another chance to prove her innocence and get out of the country.

Carol again had a ringside seat.

Then there was a third trial, which was longer than the first two and better attended than the first two.

It was war to war people, I mean, you couldn't get into the courtroom.

Anne was now not only fighting for her freedom, but her life.

She knew what prison was like and probably knew that if she went back she might not survive the terrible conditions.

Shortly before the trial, the defense team, including Anne's family, moved to a local hotel in Perizelodon Hotel zimmer.

My name is Santiago.

I'm from Costa Rica.

We live in Sanny Sidro.

That's Santiago, the laid back manager of Hotel Zimma.

And next to him is his wife Anna.

We're sitting outside in the shade of a large tree.

We have to stop our interview at times because the parrots are so loud.

This is where Anne and her entourage stayed.

It's tucked away in the back streets of the town, but also within walking distance of the court.

I asked them to describe the moment that Anne Bender arrived at their hotel.

Everybody wants to meet her or see her, you know, the first time, and we were waiting for her, that she was coming and she was dying.

She said, hello, how are you?

She says the whole thing, but she was kind of tired.

Along with Anne came her own personal protection.

She got two guys, armed guys in the main entrance.

Yeah, well you don't see their arms like undercover, but they have big guns.

And was supported by her family.

Her father, mother.

And her brother Kevin.

Even doctor Lozano, her psychiatrist, who we heard in an earlier chapter, stayed at the hotel preparing to give evidence.

It was quite a spectacle for this quiet town taken over by the international media.

Santiago took me to the streets to show me where it all happened.

At the time.

Roads were closed in order to cope with the huge level of interest in the trial.

This is the courthouse.

Reporters were from that corner to here.

Reporters all the way along and in.

That in that I walked too, from there to there all the still like yes, just sitting there wait waiting for and there were cameras.

That one over there was closed because it was a lot of people, so it.

Was it was like a really big moment for the whole town.

And there were guards all over the court over there.

Yeah, the Howard patrol were there stopping the cars to go this way and the other way too.

That must have been.

That's quite a spectacle, isn't it.

And how long did that go on for?

That was maybe maybe one week.

Every day were they were waiting and waiting waiting for results from from the tork.

It's crazy, isn't it.

The couple really felt for their guest.

She looks devastated every day, you know, she was so sad.

She was every day dressed in black.

She was using the.

Crashes, using crutches to walk because she was physically weak.

Santiago and Anna told us that Anne would come back from the trial to the hotel and cry.

There was a bubble of sadness around her, but they felt helpless.

How could they make her feel better?

They couldn't.

The only relief for Anne would be her freedom.

We were looking to set up the shelter to live a calm and peaceful life here.

It's May twenty fourteen inside the court and testified again, this time in painstaking detail, explaining how John was suicidal.

She started with his physical health problems, the stroke that encouraged them to change their pace of life in two thousand and told her story in her own words.

An actor reads her testimony.

It just highlighted b us that moving here to stop hustling too hard was the best thing to do.

John had never had a physical problem before.

He could work twenty two hours a day, but that summer he was at a breaking point, and then he really learned that it was best to continue with the plan we'd decided.

So we were looking to set up the shelter to live a calm and peaceful life in San Jose.

She continued to detail their ever worsening health problems, including her limes disease.

So they were about five or six years when we were trying to understand what was happening to me physically, and in early two thousand and nine.

My disease was quite advanced.

John got some type of chicken pox and he was having trouble with terrible sores.

We lost some animals from the shelter and it really affected my husband.

Then there were those gemstones, which many suggested were a tax dodge.

She explained them away as secure investments during a period of financial uncertainty.

So John decided, with the advice of this man, to invest in gyms, and this was something a lot of people were doing then, so there was an economic recession at the time.

And she told the court about John's previous suicide attempts.

I saw him when he tried to commit suicide twice, you know, I'm aware of two times.

I saw that he tried to electrocute himself.

That was at the end of two thousand and eight, and then in two thousand and nine, at the end of November, he tried to jump down the elevator.

That's the elevator at the house, which wasn't enclosed, just a platform that went up and down.

We were dealing with so many things at the same time.

My symptoms were getting worse, and we're getting information from the trustee that there were problems with the money.

John decided on the advice of the trustee to invest in gems and jewels, and so he thought that because the trustee said that that we were having cash flow problems, and John was really blaming himself for all of it.

He felt that, and we talked about this every single day.

He felt that it was his fault.

John felt like a complete failure, not only when it came to investments, but also he was trying to look for a way to help me with my illness.

She explained, how have mental health declined to.

You know, my type of bipolarity manifests in a more typical way, So there are times sometimes years where I might not have a single episode at all.

And John and I were able to find that over the years, I could do certain things to stay in a good state of mind, like if I slept well and ate well.

But John is manifested in what's called rapid cycling.

He was talking about suicide every single day.

Carol Voo listened to all this with great sadness.

Well, I feel he died way too young, and he had so much more to live for and he was doing such great work on the reserve.

He felt he was gonna find a cure for a len disease from which she suffered.

He was very much into natural medicine and thought the cure for Anne, both her mental problems and her physical problems, was right there on the nature reserve.

It was just a matter of time until he found it.

And what do you think in the end affected him so deep?

People, what happened to him.

I'm only guessing.

I'm never I never met him.

Carol has her own view on what happened, as we heard in the last episode, but she doesn't deny that John was in a very dark place.

From what I read about his problems, he just couldn't.

He couldn't hack it.

He couldn't.

It's so hard living in a foreign country, really, and he just couldn't, couldn't keep it up.

He was I was going into our financial tailspin.

Apparently he was losing money.

His investments weren't working out, and he just couldn't cop And I feel very bad for him because it could be any of us.

I mean, I don't have huge investments, but the little ones I've have, if I had problems that'd be be curtains.

But the trial wasn't just about whether John had been depressed.

That was never disputed.

It was about that crime scene.

Remember we told you about those who believe Anne is guilty always look at two pieces of evidence, the ear plugs and the wound will This trial was the first time the weaknesses in that evidence were properly scrutinized.

After getting out of prison, facing money problems and connected with a team from CBS, A news crew who had hired a married forensic duo, Selma and Richard eicklem Boom.

In a glitzy broadcast, the forensic pair looked at the I'm seen and then demonstrated that there could be another explanation to how John had died based on the forensics.

They argued that if Anne had pulled John's arm back, almost like a bow and arrow, the gun could have gone off at the back of his head and crucially on the right hand side.

It's all very US television crime show, but actually it gave Anne access to experts who ended up testifying at her third trial.

They said the police messed up, that their investigation was sloppy, and the ear plugs they could be explained a million ways he could have put them in to soften the noise of the jungle, or never intended to actually go through with pulling the trigger.

Doctor Lozano, the psychiatrist, testified this time too, arguing Anne wouldn't have been able to carry out a murder.

Anne's third trial would last for a week.

Would all these testimonies be enough?

Would Anne get the verdict she longed for.

Her ninety seven year old grandmother was among the family praying that she would be freed.

As the judges retired for the third time, she waited.

One problem facing Anne was that her passport had been seized.

If she was freed, she wouldn't be able to leave.

This is where Carol stepped into help.

But I knew that she didn't have a passport, and you know, get out of ghostreat go without a passport.

So talk to the embassy, and the embassy said, relax, We're going to get her a replacement passport.

On the last hour of the last day of the trial, someone was deployed to ensure that Anne received her passport and secretly gave it to her.

Anne kept touching her pocket to check it was there.

It was her ticket to freedom.

Then the judges walked in Dan walk free or return to prison for twenty two years.

We recognize we were getting to the end of the third trial and no one had any idea whether she was going to be found guilty or innocent, no idea whatsoever.

You've been listening to Helen Heaven from Exactly Right Media and iHeart podcasts produced by Blanchard House, hosted, written and produced by me Becky Milligan.

The producer and co writer is Poppy Damon.

Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell, and Toby Mattamol.

The sound recordistant head of Sound and Music is Daniel Lloyd Evans.

The lead sound designer is Vulcan Kiseltook.

The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for Exactly Right Media.

The executive producers are Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producer Lillie Ladderwig and associate producer Jay Elias.

The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye.

The executive producer and Head of Content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Griselle.

Listen to Helen Heaven on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.