JOSH BAKER: Before we go any further, there are descriptions of violence and some upsetting moments involving children in this episode.
SAM SALLY: My story… Oh yeah, absolutely, it is very difficult to believe, it is very hard to believe.
LORI SALLY: I had a feeling that she was in some sort of trouble, and then she sent me the email telling me that they were in Raqqa with the kids and she didn’t know how much longer she could last.
MALE VOICE: What do you do if you hear a helicopter and American pigs come down to kidnap you and your mother?
MATTHEW: I’m gonna walk out and say, ‘Come save me, come save me! My name is Matthew. I’m American. Come save me, come save me!’
SAM: Whatever I’ve done, anything I’ve done is only with the intention of something good to happen. I’m not a bad person, I’m not a monster.
BAKER: I’m looking at a video of a young boy sitting on a motorbike. It's twice as big as him but he’s got a huge grin as he revs the engine.
SAM: Yay! Alright.
BAKER: That’s Sam cheering.
SAM: Rev it up matthew. Good job!
BAKER: The boy is her son, Matthew. It was filmed before they left the U.S. and ended up in the ISIS caliphate in Syria. Matthew looks happy, relaxed, like he’s living an ordinary life in a loving family.
I’m searching online, trying to find out anything I can about them. There are pictures of Sam — tall, blonde hair and tattoos. And photos of sports cars and motorbikes and even a helicopter ride.
In another video Matthew dances while watching a cartoon.
[Futurama music from home video]
BAKER: But there’s one in particular that stands out more than all the others. It’s filmed on a driveway in suburban Indiana — Matthew has been given a new bike, which has been painted to look like a dinosaur.
MOUSSA: Are you recording?
SAM: Yep.
MOUSSA: Alright! This is a special present for a little monster who lives in the bedroom, I mean in our house and he…
MATTHEW: Wow!
MOUSSA: Do you like it?
SAM: You better give Moussa a big hug!
MATTHEW: Thank you so much!
MOUSSA: You're welcome buddy, you’re my best friend.
BAKER: That male voice you can hear is the same voice I’d heard in a very different video. Of Matthew being forced to build a suicide bomb.
MOUSSA: Come. Take this fuse out. That’s American grenade. That’s a five second fuse.
BAKER: It’s Moussa — Matthew’s stepfather. The video had been emailed to Sam’s sister Lori, along with another, where Matthew is made to take apart a loaded gun.
MOUSSA: Without a single mistake, take apart this loaded AK… And put back together in less than a minute. Ready set go. Put it with force. Like a man.
BAKER: Watching these videos is like looking at two parallel lives: one comfortable, in America, with a young boy, laughing and joking with his stepdad.
The other, thousands of miles away, in the middle of a war zone. The same man apparently grooming the same boy, to carry out a terror attack.
I’m Josh Baker and from BBC Panorama and FRONTLINE PBS, this is “I’m Not A Monster” —
Episode 2: “Read between the lines”
NEWSREEL: Islamic State has no borders – it’s an ideology of hate that’s spreading throughout the world from its headquarters in the city of Raqqa in Syria… Brussels on alert tonight… Christmas market in Berlin… Horrific attacks in the streets of Paris and Istanbul… Public executions in Raqqa are commonplace… It’s clear life is a living hell and what’s more they are being bombed…
BAKER: Sam, Matthew and his little sister are in Raqqa — the city the Islamic state group calls its capital. They've been there for almost two years.
ARCHIVE: They execute captured prisoners, they kill children. They enslave, rape and force women into marriage… It has to be eradicated just off the face of the Earth. This is evil. This is evil…
BAKER: Sam’s put her sister Lori in touch with a man called Florian. She says he’s a people smuggler and he’s helped others escape ISIS. Lori’s talking to him on WhatsApp.
FLORIAN: Salaam-Alaikum. Forgive me for my English, my English is not good because I did not learn English in the school. I learned by myself, but inshallah it will get better inshallah.
LORI: I was so nervous, I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what was going to happen, or what to expect.
BAKER: So this man contacts you and then what happens?
LORI: He kept saying that he needed to be able to trust me to be able to know that what I was saying was true and that I wasn't going to contact anybody, like U.S. authorities and so on...
BAKER: She’s already alerted the authorities, but says she has no idea what they’re doing. If I’d have met Lori a couple of months earlier, I’d have found a mom who shared the custody of her kids with her ex, worked as an electrician and had a couple of dogs.
Now — she’s trying to negotiate with a man she thinks is a people smuggler to help her family escape from a terror group on the other side of the world.
LORI: I have to go into a bubble when I talk to Florian. Sometimes I’m driving down the road… I was at a doctor’s office one time talking to him, I was on a job interview talking to him. Sleeping, he’ll wake me up and in the middle of sleeping and I have to build a bubble around our conversation and still interact with the world outside because in this bubble it is just him and myself and the conversation outside cannot come into that. So when I’m, I’m sitting around a lot of other Americans at the dog park for example I tend to not interact with those people because they won’t understand, they want to ask me questions about my dog and here I have Florian asking me when I’m going to send money to save my niece and nephew so I try, I try to disconnect as much as I can from the outside world when we’re talking.
FLORIAN: Don’t worry inshallah all will be become good. And I will help her inshallah.
LORI: I figured that he had some sort of strategy, some sort of plan that he was going to discuss the plan with me and I was going to activate the plan over here, however I possibly could. After about a week of talking to Florian he finally started to unravel the plan. The plan was to get Sam across to the Turkish border and from there to Slovakia. That was the generalized plan.
FLORIAN: Sorry I have to go because I’m very tired, I’m very finished. I travelled and had many, many stress.
BAKER: His plan seems far fetched, and Lori starts to have her doubts about Florian.
So she asks him for some sort of proof that the family are still alive. And then she waits. And she waits. And days later, a picture arrives.
On her phone she shows me a dark grainy photo of Matthew. He’s holding a piece of paper, and I can just about make out a date — February 13th. And below it, in blue felt tip, he’s scrawled, ‘I love you Aunty Lori.’
Florian also sends a recording — of Sam.
SAM: Hi Lori, thank you for your help. Today is the 13th of February, 2017, I hope the picture for Matthew is ok for you. The situation is getting worse day by day and I hope you will be able to get things done fast. I love you and I’m, I’m so lucky to have you as a sister.
BAKER: At this point I don’t know how Sam ended up in Syria. If she chose to go there or if she was taken against her will by her husband Moussa — like she told Lori in the email — or if it’s more complicated than that. I actually don’t know much about Sam at all.
So in Elkhart, Indiana, I go for a drive around her old neighborhood, hoping I might learn something about the family.
LORI: It’s this pink house right here.
BAKER: Lori shows me Sam and Moussa’s old house. It’s a large wooden clad property with a porch, and a big fenced-in garden.
BAKER: How does it feel coming back to their house?
LORI: I’m sad and I’m angry and the two feelings interchange a lot, coming back to this house I just wish that I would see her smoking on the porch. You know I drive by the house all the time, all the time I drive by the house and I just hope that she’s going to be there.
BAKER: I say goodbye to Lori, and I head off to meet some of Sam’s old friends. When I ask about her, they say the kind of things you’d expect them to say.
CASSIE: She’s wonderful, hard to describe her in one word, she’s caring, thoughtful, loving, funny, she cracks jokes, she’s got a very dry sense of humor, sarcastic sense of humor, I love her. She’s great.
BAKER: Sam’s best friend Cassie tells me about a time they went to the beach together. Cassie says the weather was beautiful and it was a great day. But on the way home, she mentioned to Sam that she’d never gone over a hundred miles an hour in a car.
CASSIE: She’s like well we’re gonna change that and she went on the highway and she booked it.
BAKER: So did she like adrenaline rushes then?
CASSIE: Oh yeah, she loved it. She likes the adrenaline you know. She rode motorcycles, she loved doing that kind of stuff, so I felt safe with her. She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met.
BAKER: And it’s a similar story with another friend, Andria.
ANDRIA: Who is she? She’s an amazing dear incredible friend.
BAKER: Can you give me a sense of her as a person?
ANDRIA: Caring, loving, very giving. She was always worried about everybody else. She would do anything that she could to help anybody, even people she didn’t know.
BAKER: What’s she like as a mother?
ANDRIA: Amazing. She was always interacting with the kids, playing with them, they were very well cared for, just she was amazing with the kids.
BAKER: Do you think Sam would ever willingly choose to join ISIS?
ANDRIA: Absolutely not
BAKER: And why?
ANDRIA: Why would she put her children in that position? Why would she put her family and friends back home in a position like that? Why would she support something that would put other people at risk? That’s not Sam.
BAKER: But I mean some people will think she chose to go.
ANDRIA: There is no way she chose to go, no way she would put herself, especially her children in harm's way in that way at all. She loved those kids with everything that she was, her children were her life and there’s no way that she would ever do anything in any way that would put them in any kind of danger or put them at risk, absolutely not.
BAKER: Sam’s friends describe a good mum, a good person and a bit of a thrill seeker.
Certainly not an ISIS supporter and not somebody to put her children in danger. And to start with, it’s a similar story with Moussa Elhassani. He came to America from Morocco to study and eventually met Sam and moved in with her and Matthew, her son from a previous relationship. In 2012, Sam and Moussa got married — She a Christian, he a Muslim but neither particularly religious. The following year, they had a daughter.
[Baby laughing]
BAKER: Not far from the house where they all lived is a corner store. While I’m there someone comes in trying to sell an iPad, to which the guy behind the counter replies, “Nah man that’s too hot for me.” That’s Sonny, he knows Moussa.
SONNY: Last time I saw him he came in with a kid, I’m assuming it was Matthew I think. He came in bought, got some candy for him and got a pack of Marlboro Lights and he was always calm, and he'll leave like maybe $10, $15 extra just in case she comes in and she didn’t have no money.
BAKER: He’s referring to Sam.
SONNY: I’ve never seen him be anything but polite and just you know. Sometimes when it snowed outside — my sidewalk, the whole sidewalk be plowed, you know what I mean. And later on I’d see him and he’s like, ‘Oh I did your sidewalk.’ He had like a little bobcat, that plowed the snow and, I said, ‘Thank you, you want something to drink or something?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no I’ll get it later,’ whatever. Then he kept doing it for basically the whole winter.
BAKER: But Sonny says he does remember something odd. One day Moussa came by the store — he had something he wanted to show Sonny. He took him outside into a nearby alley, and opened the trunk of his car. And inside were a few gold bars. He even let Sonny hold one of them. But Moussa didn’t say where they’d come from or why he had them. Just that it was worth investing in gold. Sonny didn’t know what to make of it.
BAKER: Can you describe Moussa to me?
CASSIE: Um, he’s handsome.
BAKER: He’s handsome?
Sam’s friend Cassie used to work at Moussa’s family business — a shipping company that sent packages all over the world.
CASSIE: He’s very strong, um, nice guy he’s always treated me very well. If I needed anything, he said that I didn’t have to hesitate to ask. Um, he was always very sweet to me. He’d always ask, ‘Are you doing ok?’ And if there was something bothering me, you know, I could talk to him. I didn’t talk to him as much I did Sam, of course, you know, I’m a woman. And he was also more like you know, you need to talk to Sam about certain things – there’s just certain things he doesn’t want to know.
BAKER: Was he quite traditional?
CASSIE: I know he prayed sometimes. But he was, he seemed very relaxed with things, he was the head of the household and that’s I mean pretty much if he wanted to do something, he did it, you know. But he seemed very normal.
BAKER: Not exactly what I was expecting. According to some of the people who knew him before ISIS, Moussa — the guy who’d make his stepson build a suicide bomb — was good looking, considerate and ready to shovel snow at a moment’s notice.
But it seems there was another side to him.
CASSIE: I know she had made a sign for their front yard. Well she found out that he was cheating and she made sure the whole neighbourhood knew about it, that she posted a sign saying, ‘My husband would rather do cocaine and sleep with prostitutes than be with his family,’ which was huge, I mean…
BAKER: Other people confirm Moussa’s reputation for paying for sex and disappearing for days on cocaine binges. And it’s not uncommon for those who joined ISIS to have drug use or crime in their past. But there’s nothing about Moussa’s life in Indiana — or Sam’s — that hints at any kind of religious extremism. Or at least not that I can find.
I decide to dig a bit deeper into Sam’s past, hoping it will reveal something more.
RICK SALLY: Well Josh, this is our family home. Over here is the swing set where Samantha and Lori, that we built for them back in ‘92 when we lived up in Arkansas. Here’s one of our family animals taking a siesta.
BAKER: I’m in Oklahoma at Sam’s parents house, to meet her dad Rick.
RICK: There’s where I have my morning coffee. Come on in the house. Here’s my wife Lisa doing the morning dishes.
LISA SALLY: Hey.
BAKER: It takes a while to get used to Rick’s pace – slow, measured. Very different from Lori and Sam. Maybe that’s the impact of a solitary life spent driving trucks across the country.
He wears shirts with his name sewn onto the breast — Rick. He seems easy-going and friendly.
But before we sit down to talk, he has a request.
He hands me his vintage Eastern European rifle, complete with retractable bayonet, and points to a water bottle balanced on a tree. I guess he figures I’ve been to Iraq, I must know how to handle a gun.
[Gunshot]
BAKER: But I miss.
[Gunshot]
BAKER: Twice. Then we continue.
RICK: Walk on down this way. This is our laundry room. Here are some pictures, family pictures. And here’s a picture of Samantha and Lori when they were itty-bitty. They were beautiful little children. We had a lot of fun together, raised in a Christian home.
BAKER: Rick tells me he raised his daughters as Jehovah’s Witnesses. But they both turned their back on the religion when they left home.
RICK: Here’s a picture when they got a little older. That’s Samantha. No. You gotta look at that again, I gotta put my glasses on. Samantha is a very outgoing person, everybody loves her that meets her. In her younger days she used to sneak out of the house at night.
BAKER: Was she a bit of a rebel growing up then?
RICK: Yes she was.
BAKER: Did you often have problems then?
RICK: Uh, yeah, more with Sam than really with Lori. Sam has always been the one to be in trouble.
BAKER: What would you describe her? What’s she like?
RICK: Samantha is a very outgoing person, people like her but half the time you can’t tell what the truth is and what not the truth. So you have to read between the lines.
BAKER: When I’ve met the parents of other people who’ve ended up with ISIS, they normally defend their children and explain that they were manipulated or led astray. Hearing Rick question his daughter’s honesty so openly catches me off guard.
RICK: I’m sorry, she’s my daughter, I love her, but anybody to put their-self in that position and put their children in that position, I feel she went over there voluntarily. I feel sorry for the children. She done it to herself but we need — we need to go over and get her out, there’s no doubt, to try to get the children out.
BAKER: And that’s exactly what Lori is trying to do. Florian — Sam’s people smuggler — seems like her only chance to get the kids home.
LORI: He said that he wanted me to deliver some money to them in Syria so they could pay, they could pay bribes to the governments and get passports and pay traffickers to get them across the borders.
BAKER: Clearly Lori can’t go to Raqqa, but she says Florian has another way. He wants her to travel to Europe with $100,000.
LORI: He told me then I needed to actually fly to Germany and meet with someone and hand the money to that person. And that person would make a phone call to someone in Syria. Confirming that they had the money in hand before they could do something.
BAKER: Even if Lori could get hold of the money, she’s worried about what she’s getting herself into. So she’s also talking to the FBI.
FBI AGENT: Hello?
LORI: Sorry to call you at home. I kinda just wanted to see what your take was on everything this morning.
FBI AGENT: Yeah we’re working on some stuff.
BAKER: That’s one of their agents on the phone. Lori says she briefs the FBI on everything Florian says, and gives them permission to monitor her emails, texts and calls. Florian has no idea the FBI are listening in.
FBI AGENT: So what was your take on the messages he was sending you? I looked at all of them, that’s what I’ve been doing today.
LORI: They’re very strange.
BAKER: Florian starts asking Lori to send pictures of herself — and she feels like she has no choice. So Lori spends hours agonizing over which photo has the right sort of suggestive appeal to a sleazy guy, who says he’s a people smuggler.
LORI: The conversation went from – I need to be able to trust you to being very flirtatious. I felt very uncomfortable. I felt guilty. I was manipulating him to get what I wanted. I didn’t want to do it.
BAKER: But after a couple of weeks something dawns on her. The way Florian writes his messages and what he wants to talk about keeps changing. She begins to suspect that Florian isn’t just one person.
LORI: It definitely raises the stakes when there are multiple people involved. I realized I had to change my game plan a little bit, I couldn’t act the same witheach person, I had to feel out who I was talking to on a daily basis.
BAKER: They structure their messages differently. One even puts a full stop after every word. And just a few lines become enough for Lori to know which Florian she’s dealing with.
Florian 1 is the sleazy:
LORI: He wants pictures, he wants to know how life is like here, he wants to talk about more personal things like and what he does at night when he’s getting ready to go to sleep and so on.
BAKER: Florian 2 is all business.
LORI: He just wanted to talk about money — ‘Have you found the money? When are you going to get the money? When are we going to get this going? Why aren’t you doing it? You need to do it right now. Have you talked your parents? Have you talked to Matthew’s dad about this?’ Very, very demanding.
BAKER: And Florian 3:
LORI: The third person is a little softer but he’s kind of a mixture of both.
BAKER: She starts to doubt they are trying to help at all.
LORI: I thought it was a trap, I thought this could turn out really bad.
BAKER: Lori says the FBI asks if she would consider going to Germany to hand over the money. She decides it’s too dangerous. But the Florians are still messaging late into the night, so she can’t sleep. And one day she says they even call her mobile and one of her kids answers by accident.
As the stress continues to mount, Lori says the FBI takes over the conversation and pretends to be heri.
But the Florians still want pictures.
LORI: What’s up?
FBI AGENT: Hey so the reason for my call, things are going pretty well with Florian — I can’t give you too many details but he continually asks for photos of you Lori, so...
LORI: Ok.
FBI AGENT: So, if you have any additional ones you want to email over to me or if you want to take some in the next couple of days and send them over that would be much appreciated.
LORI: I guess I do have one question, any news on the kids?
FBI AGENT: No, not really. Unfortunately, I mean nothing really notable.
BAKER: Lori does as she's asked — she sends the photos, but gets very little information back.
I ask the FBI about all of this — but the Bureau says it can’t comment.
As far as Lori knows — the FBI’s conversation with the Florians stops.
What Lori thought was her best chance of getting Sam and the children back, has gone. Just like that.
And at a time when the situation in Raqqa is getting worse.
NEWSREEL: The capital of the caliphate under siege… IS has weaponized fear.
BAKER: Lori has no way of contacting Sam and the children.
NEWSREEL: Islamic State is hemmed in here, almost surrounded, and they’re fighting back…
BAKER: All she has to go on is what she hears on the news.
NEWSREEL: Snipers, booby traps, suicide bombs. There are tens of thousands of people still in Raqqa, hostages essentially. IS has been killing anyone caught trying to leave.
SAM: Hey Lori, I just want to say, keep making, uh, keep making your prayers for us.
BAKER: Sam manages to send Lori a couple of voice messages.
SAM: You don’t understand, here, instead of just leaving us be, all the time we hear the jets and bombs and it’s part of daily life here. You know, I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk to you next, it may be a while. Anyway here in just a minute I’m going to let the kids send a message, you’ll get that just after me. I hope you know that I love and I miss you so much.
MATTHEW: Hi Lo Lori — I miss you. And remember that day when you took me to the, the to the zoo? I miss you.
BAKER: That’s Matthew.
SAM: Say I love you
GIRL: I love you
SAM: Say How are you?
GIRL: How are you?
SAM: Say Can’t wait to see you.
GIRL: Can’t wait to see you.
SAM: Say, make me food.
GIRL: Make me food.
SAM: Say I am a poop head.
GIRL: I’m poop head.
BAKER: The little girl is Lori’s niece — it’s the first time she’s heard her voice. The crying baby is Lori’s nephew — Sam’s had two more children while living in the ISIS caliphate.
LORI: Any time you don’t hear from them for an amount of time, you think they’re dead, you think the worst every time. Life is so fluid over there. It just, it changes in an instant.
BAKER: Then in August 2017 — six months after Sam first emailed Lori…
NEWSREEL: ISIS releasing a new video reportedly using a ten-year-old American boy to deliver a dire warning to President Trump… In the video the boy speaks fluent English. Appearing to read off a script, the child saying he and his mother moved to Syria two years ago… ISIS has often exploited children in its propaganda, it’s even filmed them apparently carrying out executions but this is the first time the extremists have used a child they say is American.
END
You've been listening to 'I'm Not A Monster.’ New episodes will be available, every Monday on the free BBC Sounds app or wherever else you get your podcasts.
It’s written by me, Josh Baker, and Joe Kent and we produced it together with Max Green.
Emma Rippon is the podcast editor.
Zoe Gelber and Janet Staples are our production coordinators.
Lucie Sullivan is our production assistant.
Additional production by James Edwards and story supervision for FRONTLINE by Jay Allison.
The composer is Sam Slater and it was mixed by Tom Brignall.
The commissioning executive for BBC Sounds is Dylan Haskins and the commissioning editor is Jason Phipps.
We’ve made a film as well as a podcast and there’s a huge team behind it all. It’s a collaboration between BBC Panorama and FRONTLINE PBS. At BBC Panorama Rachel Jupp is editor and Karen Wightman is executive producer.
At FRONTLINE PBS Raney Aronson is executive producer, Andrew Metz is managing editor, Dan Edge is a senior producer, Sarah Childress and Lauren Ezell are senior editors.
And if you want to listen to more investigations, check out The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast.
