‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Episode 11 Recap: Love Is in the Air
Arezou is a writer for Collider. She has a wide-ranging knowledge of movies and TV, which means she almost certainly will start quoting something mid-conversation.
Arezou is passionate about Star Wars, particularly Obi-Wan Kenobi, Fennec Shand, and the Sequel Trilogy. Her TV interests are wide-ranging, with recent favorites including Bridgerton, the live-action One Piece, and Vikings: Valhalla.
On the movie side, Arezou loves a good romantic comedy, from classics like French Kiss and The Holiday to more recent ones like The Lost City (yes, it counts) and the Turkish-language Love Tactics, as well as every single one of those Hallmark holiday movies.
She is also an avid champion of Iranians working in the film and television industry. Arezou loves getting the opportunity to conduct interviews for Collider, including with Andy Samberg, Ming-Na Wen, Succession‘s Arian Moayed, and Ewan McGregor (her first ever interview for the site!).
While she has always wanted to work as a full-time writer, Arezou’s educational background is a little more wide-reaching. She has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto in English Literature and Cinema Studies (with some Classics thrown in “for fun”), and a Master’s degree from the University of Geneva in Specialized Translation. She is fluent in French and Farsi, and conversational in Spanish. She is also a graduate of the Second City Training Center sketch writing program, and holds a certificate in Producing from UCLA.
In addition to her Collider pursuits, she is also the Managing Editor of The Geeky Waffle, and co-hosts podcasts on their network. Arezou is also a member of the Writers Guild of Canada, contributes to Star Wars Insider, and writes novels when she can.
Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 11.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air and up on the screen this week on Elsbeth. The Valentine’s-themed Season 2 Episode 11, “Tiny Town,” plays with the concept of two screens connecting two cities via 24/7 livestream, much like the Portal installation last summer that connected New York and Dublin. Despite the murder that the NYPD are tasked with solving, the episode is far more lighthearted than things have been recently, with Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) striking up a friendly working relationship-turned-something more with Angus (Ioan Gruffudd), a charming Scottish musician she meets via the livestream art installation. There’s a lot to swoon over with this one, so let’s dive in!
‘Elsbeth’ Heads to Scotland — Sort of — in Season 2 Episode 11
The episode begins not in New York, but in Tattersall, Scotland, which has a view of the Big Apple via the Iris, a 24/7 livestream installation that connects the two. As the New Yorkers peer in curiously, they’re watched by Angus (Gruffudd), a musician who spends his days at The Iris, seeking inspiration, and writing and playing his music — not that they can hear him. Angus and Fiona, the owner of the pub next to the installation are both fascinated with a budding couple on the other end of the screen, who are meeting today for the third time, and who eventually leave together. Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and love is all around!
Or maybe not, as Angus returns another day to find the young woman waiting all alone, a heart-shaped box of candies in hand, and according to Fiona, she’s been there a while. She’s not alone for long, though, as she’s joined by a man who isn’t her sweetheart but is someone she knows, and the two of them get into an argument, and eventually, she trips. Fiona returns with Angus’s drink, and spills it on his notebook, distracting him just long enough to miss crucial key seconds of the New York feed, as by the time he and Fiona turn back around, they see the young woman stumbling back to her seat, looking disoriented, and choking. Angus tries to get the people on the screen to turn around and help her, but none of them understand his hand signals — though how, I have no idea — and the woman dies.
In New York, Elsbeth (Preston) and Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) arrive on the scene. Elsbeth’s first takeaway is that the victim looks sad, but that’s not much to go on, so the two of them join Detective Edwards (Michaela Diamond) as she questions the barista from the coffee stand next to the New York Iris. The barista didn’t see anything of note, telling them that the victim was just waiting for her coffee, and one of the officers tells Edwards that there were no witnesses either. At a dead end for now, Elsbeth spots The Iris, now sitting there covered up. Blanke tells her that the exhibit connects New York with a seaside Scottish town to connect a big city with a small town to foster connection, and does so via a 24-hour livestream. When Elsbeth confirms that the tarp only went up on the screen once the police arrived, she realizes that there may not have been witnesses in New York, but there might have been in Scotland.
Elsbeth Has a Budding Romance in Season 2 Episode 11
She and Blanke take down the tarp, and find Angus on the other side. Elsbeth motions to the crime scene and asks if Angus saw anything, and he confirms that he did. She tries asking a few more questions using gestures, and he tries to answer in kind, but they both quickly realize that a phone call is probably the better move. Angus calls Elsbeth, and she asks him if he saw who did this to the victim. He says he saw a man confront her and take the Valentine she was holding, but adds that he doesn’t think the man killed her, as she went back to her table and then started choking. Elsbeth tells him that they’ll need to take a full statement from him, and he says he’ll be around for another hour. Despite this conversation ostensibly being about a murder investigation, that doesn’t mean they aren’t both getting their flirt on, in the cutest, sweetest way possible. Blanke then calls her back over as they’ve found the victim’s work ID: her name is Hayley Ritter, and she works at Elle Même Cosmetics.
Elsbeth, Blanke, and Edwards head around the corner to Hayley’s workplace, and try to scan the badge, but it’s no longer active. While they try to figure that out, Elsbeth goes poking around the lobby, and finds a perfume counter. The associate there gives her a sample to try, and tells Elsbeth that all their fragrances are made in house in their private lab. Just as Elsbeth accidentally sprays herself in the eye, the head of security, Mr. Thorwald (Alfredo Narciso), arrives to take them up to his office. He tells them that they deactivated her card that morning after she failed a randomized drug test, which is company policy, and compulsory for anyone working in R&D. Thorwald offers to send them not only the results of the drug test, but Hayley’s employee file as well.
Back at the precinct, Cameron (Sullivan Jones), from the Medical Examiner’s office arrives to give them his report in person — I suspect Blanke’s presence has something to do with the need to do this face to face, though we quickly learn that Cameron actually moved into Blanke’s basement apartment. In short, Hayley died of a fentanyl overdose. Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) wants to pass the case off to Narcotics, but Elsbeth tells them what Angus told her about Hayley’s confrontation with the jealous man, and suggests there may be more to it than an overdose. Both Wagner and Edwards maintain that it’s probably still just an overdose, but Wagner tells them to get a statement from Angus regardless, so they can give that and the report to Narcotics the next day. They all file out of Wagner’s office, but Elsbeth returns quickly, having left her bags and coat behind. She catches Wagner hanging up his phone in frustration. His wedding anniversary, it turns out, is on February 14 — which sounded really romantic when he and Claudia (Gloria Reuben) first set the date — and therefore, he understandably has trouble securing any kind of special reservation for that night. He wants to go all out this year, with flowers, a fancy date, and a “big surprise” he has planned, which Elsbeth is in on.
Speaking of big surprises, Elsbeth tells Wagner she heard that Merton’s case — the one she served on the jury for — was reopened by Captain Kearnshaw (Jen Colella). Wagner isn’t as surprised as she is, and Elsbeth realizes he had something to do with it, though he denies it as much as he’s able. Elsbeth heads out then to take Angus’s statement, and if she dresses up her fuzzy pink coat and hat with an equally pink scarf… well, it could be because it’s cold, or because Angus told her he likes the color. Who’s to say?
At the Iris, Angus tells Elsbeth that he saw Hayley meeting with a young man romantically for coffee a few times, but guesses they must have met online since they didn’t seem to know each other the first time, and adds he was the one she was waiting for on the day she died. He agrees to describe the man she fought with to a sketch artist as well, and with that, they’ve got the work stuff out of the way, and move into a more personal chat. Elsbeth asks about Angus’s music, and he tells her that he finds New York inspiring, though he’s never actually been. The two of them match each other’s geek so perfectly, but the sweet moment ends when Elsbeth gets a call telling her they’ve found Hayley’s boyfriend, as he was listed as her emergency contact.
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Elsbeth Investigates a Suspicious Overdose in Season 2 Episode 11
The man at the station, however, isn’t the man Hayley was meeting for coffee. He actually looks more like the man she fought with…but the police don’t know that yet. Charles (Alex Hurt) tells them they’d been together for years, but were currently in counseling. He adds that he was with her while she was in rehab, and doesn’t believe she overdosed on fentanyl, as he knows what she’s like when she relapses, and insists she was still sober. Elsbeth starts asking if Charles had followed Hayley that morning, and if he was jealous of her meeting with another man. Charles doesn’t follow, as he insists things were good between them, and they were even going to start IVF to have a baby. The questioning isn’t really getting them anywhere, but Elsbeth asks Charles to stick around for one more thing that might help them, and has him follow them to The Iris. There, she calls Angus while they try to get Charles to face the screen to see if he looks familiar to Angus. Sure enough, Angus tells them that’s the man that fought with Hayley.
Now that they have eyewitness confirmation, Charles is formally taken in for questioning. He tells them he’d just found out she was cheating on him, and got upset. His proof that she was cheating? She turned off location sharing with him, and he found an encrypted messaging app on her phone. Blanke and Edwards are less than impressed with this explanation, and are equally unimpressed by his insistence that whoever she was meeting with was the real threat, as she said in the messages she was afraid someone wanted to kill her. Edwards still thinks the fentanyl played a part in Hayley’s death, maybe involuntary manslaughter after the altercation restricted blood flow to the brain. Blanke says she thinks they should find the man Hayley was meeting with anyway to get his side of the story, and Wagner tasks her and Elsbeth with it the next day.
With the case on hold until the next morning, Elsbeth goes home and decides to look up Angus’s music. Despite his insistence that it isn’t very good — artists, am I right — she’s utterly charmed by it, and listens while looking at pictures of Scotland. Despite the characters actively having a murder to solve this week, this episode really is a rom-com. Why else would I be smiling as goofily as the characters are, all while looking up the price of a flight to Scotland? The next morning, Elsbeth and Blanke take a sketch artist to talk to Angus and get an idea of what the man Hayley was meeting looks like. While he draws, Angus once again compliments Elsbeth’s coat, blue this time, inspired by Angus’s surroundings, and Blanke catches on at once, dragging the sketch artist away to give the two of them a moment alone.
They talk about his music, and about his band, who all live in Edinburgh. He also tells Elsbeth that he wants to come out and see New York someday, and if you’re keeping track, that’s twice now that he’s mentioned it. Elsbeth then excuses herself to go talk to the barista once again, to see if she recognizes the other man. I could personally watch these two talk about nothing all day, but that’s not the show we signed up for, so murder investigation it is. The barista does recognize the man, saying his name is George, and he used to come by every day. She doesn’t know much else about him, but tells them that someone else might know more, as he’s also looking for George. The man, it turns out, is George’s partner, and he says the last time he heard from him was a couple of days ago, when he rushed off the phone to go meet with a source. Who the source was, or why they were speaking, he can’t say, as George didn’t disclose whatever he was writing about until it was actually published as he took journalism very seriously. Edwards then calls Blanke to say that they found George…in the morgue.
A Whistleblower Is Murdered in ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Episode 11
At the precinct, Cameron tells them that they’re waiting on the full toxicology report, but as of right now, it looks like he, too, overdosed on fentanyl. Edwards says they spoke to his editor, who said he was writing an exposé and was almost ready to file the story, as soon as he had one last missing piece. The police believe that the two overdoses are connected, but Elsbeth remembers the box of chocolates Hayley had with her. Since she still had them after Charles left, but they were missing when the police got there, she suggests that Hayley was a whistleblower, delivering evidence in the chocolate box, and whoever killed her took it to protect themselves. Edwards thinks that’s too far a leap and suggests instead that Charles killed George, not realizing he was gay and the two of them weren’t cheating. Look, Edwards is a great detective when she wants to be, but that theory overlooks at least 3 key pieces of the puzzle. Angus calls Elsbeth again to see if the sketch helped, and she says that it did, though they found George dead, so that was less than ideal. He doesn’t stick around long on the phone, launching into a little investigation of his own. He asks Fiona if anyone else was around the screen when they were cleaning up the spilled drink, and she says the Murray sisters were, and might have seen something.
Meanwhile, Edwards and Blanke question Charles about George’s death, and he maintains he had nothing to do with it. This time, though, he actually has an alibi. On the morning George was killed, he and Hayley were at couples therapy, and had then gone to the fertility clinic for bloodwork. Elsbeth asks him to get them a copy of the bloodwork, and they compare the results to the drug test Hayley took at work, since the clinic would test for drugs in the system, among other things. The drug test her work gave her, administered on the Friday, showed she was positive for opiods, but the fertility clinic test, done on Saturday morning, showed Hayley was negative, meaning Elle Même faked the results. Elsbeth suggests they talk to George’s editor next to see what his exposé was on, and therefore to get an idea of what Hayley was whistleblowing.
Before they can, Angus calls again, asking Elsbeth to come to The Iris so the Murray sisters can share with her what they saw that morning. They tell Elsbeth that the man they saw with Hayley either sneezed or coughed — they can’t agree — in her face, then took the box of chocolates off the ground. They didn’t see his face, because he had a face mask on, but tell Elsbeth he was wearing a tartan scarf. What kind of tartan? They can’t agree, and it’s not like Elsbeth knows the difference anyway. She leaves The Iris and heads off to the Elle Même building, just as the man they’re discussing walks by the screen again. His back is to the camera, so they don’t see his face, but they do see the scarf, and Angus calls Elsbeth back to warn her, but by that point, her phone has died.
At the lobby perfume counter, she gets another sample from the associate, and asks her if the bottle is reusable. The associate is confused at the line of questioning, but Elsbeth doesn’t get the chance to explain as she’s met by Thorwald, who asks what she needs. She heads up to his office with him, and says that she needs to confirm that the date of the drug test is correct, as it’s blurry on the record she has. It’s a thin excuse, but he goes to get the original file, and Elsbeth pokes around his office while he’s gone, spotting his scarf which is clearly some kind of tartan, and finding a mask in his pocket to boot. She tries to call the precinct, but sees that her phone is dead. Thorwald returns and a panciked Elsbeth pretends to be on the phone with Wagner, but he catches her in her lie.
Elsbeth Has a Very Happy Valentine’s Day in Season 2 Episode 11
Thorwald is ready to kill Elsbeth too, to protect the company, just like he did Hayley and George, who were about to report that Elle Même’s concealer was causing health problems. He nearly sprays Elsbeth with fentanyl as well to trigger an overdose, but Wagner, Blanke, and Edwards arrive just in time, and Thorwald says he was paid by the CEOs to kill anyone who threatened to expose the company. As for how they even knew to find Elsbeth? Angus called the police switchboard to warn them of the danger. She hurries back to The Iris to thank him, but he’s not there, and his phone is going to voicemail. She sees Fiona on the other end of the screen, and even she doesn’t know where he is. Elsbeth heads back to his office to brood with Blanke, figuring Angus probably went to Edinburgh as he had some concerts coming up with his band. Blanke speculates he’ll call her later as it’s Valentine’s Day.
Elsbeth asks what Blanke’s Valentine’s plans are, and she says she doesn’t have any. She might think she doesn’t have plans, but she arrives home to Cameron giving her a Valentine’s cupcake he brought her from work. The only problem is that he works in the morgue, and the idea of a “morgue cupcake” grosses Blanke out. She does, however, suggest that the two of them head down to the bodega to get ice cream together, so that’s something. As for Wagner’s big plans, he meets Claudia up on a rooftop covered in twinkle lights to give her his big surprise: he’s taken five weeks of dance lessons so he can dance with his wife properly.
Meanwhile, Elsbeth heads down to the Iris, even though there’s no one to see on the screen. She hears Angus’s music start up, but it sounds a lot louder and closer than a speaker. Angus appears, coming out from behind the screen, playing his song for Elsbeth, and the two share a kiss. She asks him about the concerts in Edinburgh that he’s missing to be there, and he tells her he just told the band to go on without him, and that music isn’t his day job anyway — he’s actually a firefighter. Elsbeth might still only consistently be chased by firefighters, but at least this one comes with a guitar and a charming smile.
The first eleven episodes of Elsbeth Season 2 are out now. New episodes premiere on CBS on Thursdays, and stream next day on Paramount+.
The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle
The police said she lied about being raped. Then she hit record.
Rachel de Leon and Julia LurieMarch+April 2025 Issue
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Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.
“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”
Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.
Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.
“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.
Taylor said nothing.
Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”
An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience.
But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.
One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.
Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.”
Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
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Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.”
“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”
By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”
Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated.
Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.
“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”
“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said.
A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”
With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was.
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
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Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.
But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story.
The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault.
“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”
Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”
But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.
“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”
Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.
“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”
When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.”
For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF.
Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.
When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.
Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected.
But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts.
She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along.
It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.
Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”
Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.
Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.
But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records.
The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.”
By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church.
Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know.
Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.
Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.
Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.”
Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.”
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
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If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.
There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was.
Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone.
Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”
Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”
In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case.
“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.”
If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”
“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”
Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.
Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.
“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”
Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.
Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.
Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.
Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.
Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.
In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.
In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.
We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.
There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.
The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources.
Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.
