Hey, it's Anna giving you a heads up on what to expect in this episode.

There's going to be a lot about domestic abuse, with some examples of pretty extreme violence.

We'll talk heavily about addiction, and there's also brief references to sexual assault and suicide.

So make sure you take care, but don't worry.

It's not all bad.

You'll get the chance to learn more about Kelly, who she was, the life she led, and you'll hear about the moments of light that shine through the darkness.

If you feel impacted by some of the themes in this show, you can reach out to No More.

There are a domestic violence charity with a lot of great resources to help you or your loved ones.

You can search No More dot org and we've also put a link to their website in the episode description.

Oh and as usual, there's some bad language.

I see all of the Jeddy Bows.

Pause.

Brady and Jonathan told them all about it.

They were getting so much attention they were, and I was like, all right, I'll bring all of you, okay.

Kelly and Ronnie Hannatt have I think thirty stuff toys and counting.

They're all over the apartment they share I still.

Love stuffed animals and the fact that I was not able to have them for so long.

When I came out, I got so many of them.

So now I have like a whole family of stuffed animals.

I love them.

Kelly stuffed animal passion is lifelong.

But once she comes out of prison, it goes through the roof to Ronnie.

It starts to seem like every time she leaves the house, she returns with a new toy, and the apartment is overflowing.

So he offers Kelly a deal.

She can only bring home a new stuffed toy if it's a different type of animal to the ones they already have.

He's hoping that it will slow Kelly down as she tries to find increasingly obscure animals.

But the thing about Kelly is she's resourceful.

So the collection continues to grow, and now the menagerie of toys with their big personalities has taken over.

While I'm here, I'm getting to know a few.

There's Ivan the Rhino and.

He toxic This.

Hello.

I just want to tell everybody that I call Kelly Cookie because I like milk and cookies.

Alan the Bear, Hi, Yeah, Hi, Kelly, Hey doing.

Sherman the lamb.

Yeah, man, my job is called the watcher.

So when Rynnie and Kelly don't feel well, I watched them.

We can't forget about his honor.

Brady.

Of course, she's every form judge.

But he said he's going to go back to the stand and let all the prisoners out soon.

The last one that I will introduce.

You to Luna, a formally incarcerated stuffed animal that was knitted by a woman Kelly was inside with.

Luna's a sea turtle and a mother of two.

The cube part too, is she has a pouch.

These the eggs that she carries.

I did not see that coming.

As I'm becoming acquainted with Kelly's fluffy friends, my mind can't help but drift to the night of the murder, when Kelly and her boyfriend Tommy Donovan were arrested in a story of park.

She says.

The police records show stuffed animals were found at the scene of the crime, including a big blue duck and a dog with wings.

If you're wondering how something as innocent and childlike as a stuffed animal could end up in a situation so dark, You're not alone.

In the last episode, I told you that this series is about learning how Kelly ended up where she is today, and now we're going to start figuring that out.

I'm going to take you right back to the beginning, way before the night of the murder, and together we'll see if we can trace the path through Kelly's life that led her to a Storia park in July twenty ten, and that landed her in prison for almost twelve years after that.

I'm Annisonfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer.

Yes.

Good, Episode two, The Good, the Bad, and the Kelly.

As a kid that was very, very shy.

I hated to shy away from everybody.

When I was in an elevator.

Anytime anyone came in that my mom knew she would have to say say hi, Kelly, and I hid behind her leg.

Strangers, Oh gosh, they were just so scary for me.

When Kelly's little and shy, there's nobody that quite gets her like her big brother Ronnie.

The two of them were born four years apart, four years and one day to be exact, their birthdays at the day after each other.

I would say I was so close to Ronnie at the early years that my mother didn't even understand what I was saying.

They would be like, Ronnie, come over here.

We don't know what she's saying.

But I didn't know it was going to turn into such a friendship like we have now.

The moment Kelly and Ronnie really became the double act that they are today came after a stupid argument.

Their mom takes the two bickering five and nine year olds and tells them to stand face each other, and she.

Said, brother and sister, look at each other.

Take a good look.

When you guys get older, all that you're.

Going to have is one another.

You cannot fight with each other.

You are to protect one another, never go against one another.

You always take their side.

And it's something that resonated with us forever.

Really, we took it serious.

Like now, it's like prophetic because it's true.

Back in nineteen eighty six, a young Ronnie has no concept of how presient his mom's words will become.

He's just focusing on being a good big brother.

He spends hours coaching Kelly about football and softball so she can play in the streets with the big kids.

But one of the best things that Ronnie ever does for Kelly is introduce her to a true Eighties icon, Paula Abdul.

Oh my god, it changed my world.

I wanted to be her.

If there was some music video, I wanted to see it.

I copied all her moves pause, rewind, pause, rewind, pause, rewind until I had every single thing down pet.

Then I used to call the whole family in and I used to dance right next to the TV and put on shows for them, and they loved them.

That's when I realized that my love for music was different than other people's.

When the Hornet kids show an interest in something, their parents, Kathleen and Danny go above and beyond to support them, coaching that little league baseball teams, paying for gymnastics lessons.

One Christmas, they even bought their little pool or ap Dolphan a piano.

Our Christmases were beyond belief.

It looked like Macy's in there.

I mean the amount of toys that my brother and I used to get.

We were so spoiled.

It was crazy, but it was so much fun.

The Harnet family isn't just comfortable.

They're well off, a white collar family from queens, proud Irish Americans who made it good.

Kelly's dad is a hiring manager at MCI, which is a telecoms company.

Kelly and Ronnie say that at this point he's earning a six figure salary, which is a lot now, never mind back then.

For young Kelly, it feels like life is set.

When I was four, I went to Disney World and I remember my mother and father being happy and kissing in the pool, and I remember songs that were playing Everybody Want to Rule the World.

Yeah, I was playing when they were kissing.

There was, But their family life isn't a Disney movie.

Ronnie, being a few years older than Kelly, starts to notice that things aren't as they should be.

The main thing he notices is how much his dad is drinking.

He is, I guess what you call a functional alcoholic.

No, he wouldn't miss work, but the thing is when he went to work, he would drink at work too, and if he came home at eleven o'clock at night, that would be early.

Their dad being drunk and their mum giving him shit for it just became part of the family noise for a while.

But then Danny starts to disappear for days on end, coming home drunk to an angry and her wife who doesn't want her children to see their father in this state.

So even when Danny does turn up, Kathleen often tells him to leave.

Sometimes she even calls the place on him when he refuses.

Soon enough, Danny loses his job, and without that to ground him his spirals.

He gets new jobs, but he can't hold them down, and eventually he gives up on work entirely.

It's not long before they're evicted from their home, and the one after that and the one after that, they go from Christmases that look like Macy's to barely being able to make ends meet.

The only way that I was able to get through any of this was because of Ronnie, and like Ryannie would always joke about things at the most inappropriate times, And like if Ronnie had not been telling these chocks all along the way, like I think I would have been such a broken child.

In the middle of all of this dysfunction, Kathleen starts to think Danny might be having an affair.

She finds a business card in his wallet.

She took down the address.

You know, didn't say anything to my dad acted like nothing.

So she takes me to Manhattan.

On these steakouts.

We're waiting across the street and we would wait.

We did it a few days in a row, and then one day she was holding my hand.

She goes, there he is, and she dropped my hand.

She went running across the street.

My dad dropped the lady's hand and looked like he saw a ghost.

My mom, instead of going after him, first grabbed the lady and beat the hell out of the lady.

The lady started running and screaming Hella, and then my mother slept the hell out of my father and screaming like a truck driver at both of them.

I feel for Kelly.

This sounds like an incredibly traumatizing thing to witness, so I'm honestly struck by her little chuckle that laugh.

Otherwise you're cry thing, I guess, which is something Kelly does often.

But there's also times when the violence between her parents is no laughing matter.

The worst example of this happens one terrible night when Kelly is just seven years old.

After going a wall for two weeks, Danny comes home.

He's wasted and asking for money.

Kathleen tells him she's not giving him anything, and to get the hell out.

My dad came in and I saw a look in his eyes that I've never seen before.

He stood on the bed, grabbed the phone and wrapped the cord around my mother's neck and yanked her up on the bed.

I ran and I started biting his arm as hard as I could.

It was blood everywhere, but he wasn't stopping, so I started more more.

It's like an animal.

I had already screamed to Ronnie, to cold nine and one.

My mother was turning colors.

And at some point when I bit again, he like twitched and like looked at me and like I could see my father again and he saw that his daughter was biting him.

And then he looked down and he saw that he had a cord around my mother's neck, and he let it go.

And my mother was like, but I wouldn't let go of his arm, and he was like, Kelly, Kelly, it's okay, you could let it go now.

He didn't even say I'm sorry.

I will never forget that.

I thought he was going to kill her to this day.

That was the worst day of my life.

After the horrific phone called incident, Kelly's parents somehow manage to patch things up, but like before, it never lasts.

Kelly's dad moves in and out, over and over again.

At one point, they split for a few years.

Kathleen even has a protection order put on Danny for a time, and while all of this is going on, money is becoming tighter and tighter.

One night, Kelly, Ronnie, and Kathleen become homeless, sleeping rough at a McDonald's.

Danny isn't with them at the time.

When Kelly is thirteen, the family get into an apartment.

It's the one she and Ronnie still live in today.

With that stability, Danny comes back into the picture.

Ronnie feels a lot of resentment towards their dad.

He's seventeen now and the scales have long since fallen from his eyes.

Kelly still looks at him through the eyes of a child.

And it's here in this new flat, this new chance, that Kelly starts to form a real relationship with him.

He helps her with her mass homework, takes her to the movies every Sunday, but he's still a bad husband.

I feel that my mother deserved a lot better than what he gave her.

So if I could look back and change anything.

I would have had it that he never came back into her life and that she met a very successful man who was great to her, because that's what she deserved.

But unfortunately that's not what happened.

The relationship and their family struggles.

It's changed Kathleen, and not just mentally.

Years of grueling physical work have also taken that toll on her.

She ends up with spinal stenosis, which they said it was severe deterioration of her spine.

What it was showing was that her spine was collapsing.

Kathleen has to go in for serious surgery to help save her spine.

They put four rods sixteen scowls in occasion her back.

They gave her last rites.

They didn't think she was going to make it.

The surgery is a success in that it doesn't kill Kathleen, but the back pain she's in is still excruciating, and with that comes an overwhelming depression.

Both keep her in bed for weeks at a time.

Kelly tries to take care of her mum, but she's still just a teenager who's trying to cope with some really heavy shit going on at home.

I believe I was seventeen years old.

When my mom got sick, she was being given all sorts of pain medications, in fact, so many different ones that she was taking one and there were three others that she didn't feel the need to take and didn't like the way they made her feel, so being that she wasn't getting out of the bed.

She was just handing them to me.

Can you throw this out?

Throw this out along with everything else.

Walking out of her mom's room, Kelly looks at the pills in her hand.

I said, I wonder if these will help me stop feeling and they did.

I still felt, but I didn't feel as gloom and doom and depressed as I normally felt a little bit happier and a little bit like more motivated or like I could handle things.

It was potent, and that's what I was looking for.

I would say.

Within two weeks, I was physically addicted to painkillers.

Eventually, I came playing with my mother and I told her I was hoped that didn't go over so well.

However, she was supportive and she told me to go to rehab.

I completed the twenty eight day program.

I came back home and I started taking her pills.

Again.

Like her dad, Kelly is able to function with her addiction for a time.

She even attends Saint John's University studying communications.

Ronnie and her are working too.

Both of them are trying to keep a roof over their heads.

Now their mom's essentially bedbound.

Kathleen's also becoming increasingly controlling and angry at her injury and oppressions start to consume her.

It seems like she takes a lot of her frustrations out on her kids.

It's a lot of weight on young shoulders, too much.

So every weekend to blow ofsome steam, Kelly and Ronnie go clubbing.

They spend all night dancing in hot, sweaty clubs to the best house and techno that late nineties and early two thousands New York has to offer.

We used to dance alongside each other or across from each other, and people used to scream brother and sister, brother and sis, sir, and it was just the happiest time in my life.

Now, I've been to a few clubs in my time, all of varying degrees of corners, but I have never heard anything like this.

But maybe I'm just not heading to the right places, the ones that go mad for some sibling duo dancing, but these moments are just tracks of light in a dark room.

Around this time, Kelly is drugged and sexually assaulted at a party.

She also goes through her first major breakup.

She spirals into a heavy depression and ends up in psychiatric treatment.

Once her mental health improves and at the behest of her mum, Kelly decides to tackle her other major problem at nineteen, She joins a methodone program, but all that really does is replace one addiction with another.

The program works by increasing the methadone dosage each time you show signs of withdrawal, which is how in just a matter of months, Kelly climbs from a forty milligram dose to a whopping one hundred and seventy.

Around the same time as all of this is going on, Kelly meets a series of boyfriends, a lot of them in rehab or methadone clinics, and each one more deadbeat than the last one will call Steve.

During their relationship, he throws Kelly down the stairs and cracks her ribs.

I guess they called Ronnie during it, because Ronnie came there with a baseball bat and with my mother also in a cab.

And when they got there, Ronnie told me, he goes, Kelly, you kick the living shit out of that guy.

I said, well, he broke my rib.

He goes Jesus Christ.

He said, I didn't need a baseball bat.

You should.

You know what you did to him?

I remember his shirt.

I ripped his shirt except for the bottom, and I think I knocked one of his teeth out.

It's shocking, isn't it to hear someone accused of murder so candidly talk about violence.

It's something I'm still getting used to.

It's not what you'd expect from someone who describes themselves as a victim.

But there are times when fighting back is the only way to survive.

I've never been in a fight in my life, but also I've not been raised around fighters.

Kelly laughs while telling a story that would make me cry.

And how lucky am I to still be shocked by the violence of it all.

Back to the shitty boyfriends.

There's one we'll call Joe.

Kelly meets him in rehab and she says he's the son of a mob boss.

The father rented him an apartment in Riverdale.

The Bronx, which is a beautiful neighborhood, and he asked me if I wanted to move in with him, clearly way too fairs, But I don't want to come home.

I was always trying to escape, so I said, hell, yeah, I do.

And while in rehab, you know, we kissed once.

We knew we liked one another, but we had to sneak a kiss in the launchy room.

But Kelly, being a good Catholic girl who was taught that sex before marriage is a sin, doesn't want to move too fast.

They explained, and moved in with you because it's rough at home.

So can you please treat me as if we are just dating right now.

And he's seem okay with that, and he was for months, which I was so grateful for.

During this time, Kelly keeps spiraling and falling off the wagon.

She attempts suicide, but is found in time and taken to a hospital.

Only her dad comes to see her.

Not long after.

Kelly says she comes home to find Joe smoking crack.

Even though they say a job is a drug is a job.

I will be honest with you if he had disclosed the fact that he was in there for a crack.

There's no way I would have moved in with him, she says.

Joe then tries to assault her.

He got my shirt off and I grabbed my cellphone and then he took a knife and I ran to the bathroom.

I locked myself in.

It was like a nightmare, literally, because the knife was slowly coming through the door.

Don't ask me why.

I call Ronnie, Poor Ronnie.

He's in a story.

I'm in the Bronx.

He's like, oh my god, call nine one one, you know.

Unfortunately for Kelly, the police an't much help to her anyway.

He told me in the past that because of his father, because of how powerful he is, he said that he had almost the whole precinct paid off.

And I was like, this kid is so exaggerating whatever.

He just wants me to think that's cool, and I don't.

And when the guy he's got there the officers, I heard, Hey, what's up?

And then I heard him slapping five with two of them, and I felt my heart sink.

I hear whisper.

I opened the door.

When they knocked on the door, they put me in handcuffs.

Immediately, what the hell it?

Where's a justice?

Then she meets someone who she thinks is finally going to give her the fairytale romance she's been waiting for.

It's late spring twenty ten.

Kelly and some other people from the methadone program are hanging out in Union Square Park at their usual spot near fourteenth Street, when she notices there's a new face in the crowd.

There is nothing that made me think that he was on methodone, because he was very clean shaven, very handsome, and I was instantly attracted to him.

She hears he's got quite the reputation.

Everyone knew him as pissed Off Christoph because he was always pissed off at someone.

Right away, I was like, okay, yeah, nice, anyway, what's your real name?

And he told me Tommy.

I said, okay, well I'll be calling you Tommy and he's like, no, don't call me that in front of people.

Oh we got games going.

I said, okay, so I have to call you Christoph when we're around people.

But then we all know that the combination of clean cut, good looks and a bad boy edge is powerful.

So it's no surprise that Kelly falls for Tommy Fast.

I'm very much emotionally distraught person, just looking and desperate for love.

I thought he was like my hero, my nine names, shining armor.

He could protect me and he provided me with what I thought was love.

The early dates play out like a montage in a nineties rom com.

We would go out to dinner, we wanted to see the Statue of Liberty.

We would take tours of Manhattan as if we were sightseers.

So I had so much fonn with him.

He was so spontaneous, which was so cool.

It was just like, I'll see you at this time and then we'll figure it out.

And I love that about him, So spontaneous and so exciting.

Tommy isn't like the other guys, Kelly stated.

He's cool, fun, incredibly sweet to her, but he can also keep up with her intellectually.

He often tells Kelly to meet him in the bookshop Bonds and Noble.

He was by far the smartest guy I have ever dated.

His intelligence made me full head over heels in life.

For him, there's nothing more attractive than an intelligent man.

But during their romantic bookshop dates, Kelly starts to notice that there's one section Tommy seems particularly interested in, in.

The true crime section.

I was like, what is this fascination?

He bought them all the time, and then he was ripping pages out of the books and like cutting things out, and that was getting a little creepy.

Kelly rationalizes her weird feeling away.

Tommy's a smart guy.

Maybe this is just some intellectual exercise.

Plus, who doesn't like a bit of true crime right anyway, Compared to her past boyfriends, Tommy still seems like an night and shining armor.

But back at the park, Kelly starts to see, yes, another side to Tommy, one that she can't explain away.

I've seen him assault people as if it was a sport.

He thought it was funny that he knew how to choke people out and then they would come back to like a few seconds.

I was like, but what if they don't.

There's always a fine line between like being a genius and also being crazy.

Sometimes you could be crazy in a quirky way.

Sometimes you could be a flat out cycle path And unfortunately, in this case, that's what it was.

It's early summer in twenty ten and Tommy is standing in Kelly's courtyard.

The building wraps around him, windows glinting in the sunlight.

He's screaming for Kelly.

Neighbors start appearing in the windows, wondering what Kelly's new shithead boyfriend is doing this time.

One day they got into a fight and I told my mom I was going out there to help her.

This is Laurie, Kelly's childhood friend and neighbor.

You know, I yelled, Kelly, is she okay?

But Kelly just waves Lorie off.

We called the police.

We tried to get her to stay in the house.

Many times he was over here throwing rocks at the windows and stuff like that.

This is Eileen, Laurie's mom and the matriarch of the apartment block.

He always had this call stare, and he always looked argue with anybody like.

People say good morning to him and he would just say he he had to jump right in.

My brother one time was getting out of the car and my brother's know Kelly from growing up too, Hi, Kelly Hawaii.

He started arguing with my brother and my brother said, what are you doing?

I'm saying, kid, what's wrong with you?

It was like Kelly was his POSSESSI.

Kelly and Tommy have barely been together for two months, but already he's managed to scare, threaten, and offend everyone in her life, all while his grip on Kelly becomes tighter and tighter.

Tommy also threatens a friend of Lorrie's with a knife he's hidden under a trash can near Kelly's apartment, just because she was gay.

Another time, I was on a bus a city boss and Kelly happened to be on the bus and he started like pulling her hair and really choking on then he tore it to the floor.

I told the bus driver stopped this bus.

Me and him started arguing.

He says, you're not taking her anywhere, and he was dragging and I said, Kelly, what the hell, this is not right.

I mean, he had her on the floor, and you know, I called the police and and by the time the police came, he was gone.

So I spoke to Kelly's mother.

I said, listen, something's going to be done.

But he was dangerous because the man always carried a knife.

He always said something.

She said, There's nothing you can do.

He didn't want Kelly go home anymore.

But I don't think it was the point that Kelly was staying with him.

I think she was afraid to walk away from him.

One day, Tommy asked Kelly whether she'd care if her mom went missing.

Now I'm scared to death.

I have to stay with him.

It's not just me anymore now, it's my whole family.

Because if he's talking about getting rid of my mother, what about my brother?

He knows that I love my brother so much because I had tried to leave him a couple of times, but he was stuck me.

Now I was stuck with him because I had to keep my family safe.

By this point, Kelly knows how dangerous it can be to stand up to Tommy.

He's huge, built like a brick shit house, and he's much much stronger than she is.

He's already her her more times than she can count, threatened to kill her and her family.

He's dangerous to be around, but even more dangerous to leave.

Kelly, like so many women who've been in her same situation, becomes increasingly isolated, cut off from her family and friends, which is exactly where Tommy wants her.

He even tells Kelly that they can't go near the methadone program.

He's been fighting with people who hang out in the park next to the program, and he doesn't want to show his face so neither can she.

For three days, he stops her from getting the medicine she needs to properly function.

I said, well, I'm going because I can't.

I'm going to be sick, and he said no, not no, not no, not like we had a big fight, like I was trying to get on the train, he was pushing me around.

Kelly doesn't go to the clinic because, as she told me, she knew she wasn't going to make it there.

I've not really been able to figure out if she meant back casually like that was a losing argument or fatalistically.

I imagine it's both.

In any case, Tommy gets his way as usual.

Like when she was with him, she wouldn't really want to interact with us, which I found funny because we always had a pack.

No man or nobody can come into your life and take away of friendship.

But she was never somebody that wanted people to be concerned about her.

Kelly was always just independent and wanted to do things her way, and that's why she started living in the park.

This is the Kelly Hannett that walked into a Storia park that night in July twenty ten, A woman who witnessed extreme violence and dysfunction at home as a child, who then experienced it herself over and over again in increasing intensity throughout each one of her romantic relationships.

A woman who had experienced sexual abuse as a teenager, who then attempted to take her own life multiple times, who fell deeper and deeper into a year's long addiction as she tried to medicate through all the pain, who was held back from her methadone dose by the most violent of all her partners.

A woman who then watched that same partner choke another man to death right in front of her.

This is why Kelly calls herself a victim, and I do too.

It seems so painfully obvious to me that Kelly's volatile childhood set her on a path where she would come crashing into Tommy, who undoubtedly was then extremely controlling, coercive, and violently abusive towards her.

So we know what brought Kelly to the point of the murder.

But now it's time for the next question, how does she end up in prison?

For it to answer that, we need to go back to a story a park.

It's around four am on July seventh, Angel Vargas is dead and police are quickly arriving on the scene.

First they focus on Tommy.

There was a fifteen of them that jumped on him, and I felt such a sigh of relief, and I just waited there like on a curb, waiting, waiting, waiting.

But then they turned to Kelly.

They put me a haircuffs and I was confused, but then I said, well, this is probably prolocore.

The police put Kelly into a car and then they read her her Miranda rights, and that's when she realizes she's not being taken in as a witness.

She's a suspect.

This bat This is very bit.

Next time, on the girlfriend's Joe House lawyer, the police build their case against Kelly.

She's like, Kelly, you got arrested for murder.

Disgusting pigs.

I have absolutely no respect for them.

I didn't even fucking commit this crime.

Who's the victim?

I think everybody's the victim.

You have to think of the domestic violence aspect and not the truth finding aspect.

The domestic violence aspect of the matter is that I was afraid of Tommy.

No, I'm not gonna worry about going to kick someone.

I adopted what.

They stated, so they leave me the fuck alone.

The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.

For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio.

The show is hosted by me Annisonfield and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jako Taivich and Michael Jinno.

Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield.

Production management from Sie Houston and Joe Savage.

Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by me alis Infield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander.

Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.

Story development by Willard Foxton.

Creative director of Novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for Novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.

Thanks also to Kerry Lieberman and the whole team at WME