Worst Ex Ever

Evil is out there.

Evil walks among us.

I thought I was going to die, 100%.

I was begging her to leave him.

Like, "Please get away from this man. He's going to kill you."

We realized that we had a really evil monster on our hands.

In 2018, I was 26 years old

and living in my first apartment by myself,

with my two dogs and my two cats,

a couple of miles up the road from my parents.

So I was still close enough that I felt like I was safe,

but I was on my own, finally.

I've always loved working with animals.

When I was 19 years old, I started working at a zoo.

And they used to train tigers, work with venomous snakes.

And I wrestled alligators for two years.

Then I took a break from the dangerous stuff

and got into dog grooming.

My dating life was not… the best.

I have always been, like, a shy person, so I don't go out and meet people.

But then I did try online dating.

I scrolled past this guy whose name was Steven,

and he was 6'5" and had dimples

and super handsome.

And I was like, "Oh, this is obviously a catfish."

But I swiped on him, and he replied and messaged me back,

and we agreed to go out.

He met up with me, and he was really him.

He was a real person, 6'5", super handsome, nice teeth.

And I was like, "Holy crap, I found, like, the perfect man."

We hit it off, like, right away.

And at the end of the night, he asked me if he could kiss me.

And I was like, "What is this?"

"This is… This is like fairy-tale stuff."

So that's… that's where it all started, and we just were, like, inseparable.

Steven was a personal trainer.

He told me that he was from North Florida,

and he was adopted

and given to these two awesome people through their church.

They were nice, well-off people.

And he had told me that he had been in contact with his dad,

his biological dad.

And he seemed happy about that.

When my parents first met Steven, they did really like him.

They thought he was super sweet

and seemed to have a nice head on his shoulders.

And my animals really liked him, which was a huge deal for me.

Don't take the whole thing.

A couple of weeks into dating, he asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend.

And of course, I said yes.

At the time, Steven had been complaining about his roommate.

I trusted him and felt something for him,

so I let him move in with me pretty quickly,

like within the first month.

He didn't have a car. He would borrow my car a lot.

And I only lived a couple of miles from the park that he would go to.

So he would go and do personal training.

I believe it was, like, late September, early October

that we started officially dating.

I was super happy. I thought, "This is it. I'm going to marry this guy."

In 2018, Wade and I matched on Plenty of Fish

around the end of September, the beginning of October.

I was 26 years old, and I had just moved to Loxahatchee.

When I first saw Wade, I was like,

"Wow, he's really attractive, really good-looking, really tall."

And he had a nice voice.

He kept mentioning, "Let's go to the park."

So we met up, and we just sat there and talked.

There was a lot of joking, a lot of laughing,

just like we had known each other for a while.

Wade said that he was looking for a relationship,

and that his only flaw was that he didn't have a good woman in his life.

I was just like, "It's too good to be true."

Wade and I were dating at this point,

and we were on the phone all the time,

texting, calling,

sending pictures to each other back and forth.

But I worked a lot,

so Wade and I didn't really get to see each other in the beginning as much.

But I was just, like, over the moon ecstatic

that I had found someone.

Living with Steven was great.

You know, he would cook, and he took care of me a lot.

But the first big red flag that I had with him

was one day I came home from work

and I was looking for my laptop to edit some photos,

and I couldn't find it.

And I looked everywhere,

and Steven was like, "I don't know. I haven't seen it."

I couldn't find it anywhere.

And then finally, Steven admitted

that he pawned my laptop because he needed money.

I was just so mad that I called the police and I filed a police report.

The police did a search for all the pawn shops in the county.

They found my laptop literally two miles up the road,

and they went there and they verified that it was Steven that dropped it off.

That's when I found out his name was Wade,

because he used his ID to pawn it.

And I found out that Steven was his middle name.

So that was a big shock to me,

because, you know, this whole time, I thought his name was Steven.

And I asked him about why he was going by Steven,

why his dating profile said Steven.

I actually found that he had several Facebook profiles with that name as well.

And he just said that he needed, like, an escape,

because he had some exes and stuff that knew his real name,

and he didn't want them to find him.

He was very good at laying it on thick.

Like, when you have a 6'5" man crying to you that he's so sorry

and he just needed the money… your heart kind of breaks,

and you're like, "Okay, I… I understand."

"It's, like, a one-time thing. It's not gonna happen again." You know.

This was one of my first more serious relationships,

so I hadn't really figured out how a real relationship should work.

And we had only been together for a couple of months.

So, you know, when he apologized

and he said he wouldn't do it again, I believed him.

In November, on Wade's Instagram,

I saw a person named "Pinup Princess"

commenting all over his posts.

So I was, you know, asking him, "Who is this girl?"

"Why is she telling you to call her?"

And I found out that "Pinup Princess" was Kelly

and also the girl that was in his phone under K.

And he told me, "Oh, that's just my roommate."

And at that time, I was just like, "Okay." And I believed that.

I had a friend that had broken up with her boyfriend,

and she needed to move in with someone temporarily.

So I let her come crash with me.

One day, we were all sitting around talking about mastiffs.

And I was like, "I know this guy who breeds this rare breed of mastiff

called a Presa Canario, and they had some puppies."

I didn't know that he was taking that and running with it.

And my friend was only 18,

so I think that she got sucked into Wade's charisma.

I went to work,

and Wade and my friend, apparently they went to the kennel

and had stolen, I believe, three or four puppies

and brought them back to my house.

I got home from work, and I was like, "Why are there these dogs in my house?"

"There's going to be people looking for these dogs." I was freaking out.

Wade didn't care.

He said, "We need to sell these dogs."

So he and my friend took pictures of them in front of my couch

and posted them on Craigslist.

The man that owned the dogs recognized my house and called the police.

So I get a phone call from Wade, and he says,

"I need you to three-way the detective and tell him that it was you."

"And if you don't, I'm going to kill your dogs."

It was like totally out of left field. I was like, "Who are you?"

Like, "What is happening right now?"

I wasn't 100% sure if he would actually go through something like that,

but I was so afraid for my own animals that I didn't want to risk it.

And he was home alone with my dogs, and I was at work.

So I called the cops.

They told me to walk them through everything, how I stole the puppies,

what the place looked like, and I did.

They told me I needed to turn myself in the next day.

I confronted Wade when I got home.

Thankfully, he didn't do anything to my dogs.

And he was like, "I have a criminal record, and you don't."

"So it's better for you to be on probation, not me."

He said that he had just gone to jail for a couple of petty things,

like stealing and stuff like that.

This is the first time I heard he had a record.

I had no idea.

I thought he was a good boy from Tallahassee.

The next day, Wade and my friend dropped me off at the jail.

And I had to sit in a jail for 27 hours.

I grew up in Catholic school.

I am not a criminal.

So I was, like, sobbing the whole time.

When I got home, they were gone…

…and so was all of their stuff.

All of Wade's clothes,

all of her clothes,

my handgun.

I panicked.

I went to check my Ring footage,

and what I found was the night that they had dropped me off at the jail,

they went back home,