Aunt Saw Misery, Danger Tara Reile Caused Others

Tara Reile’s aunt witnessed not only how Tara made life miserable for her father, but how compulsive and dangerous her lies could be to others.

TRANSCRIPT:

I know Tara because Tara is my brother’s adopted daughter. So, I’m her aunt.

Tara has always been a handful. When she was a little kid, she was a handful even. When she was 12 years old, she stole her grandmother’s car and drove it 25 miles into the worst section of the city and left it there. And she did drugs when she was in middle school. She was just a wild child. She was, like, incorrigible.

So, she made life miserable for my brother who adopted her when she was a young child. He just wanted to do the best for her, and she never really was grateful for everything that he did for her. Even after he divorced her mom, he still took her under his wing and, you know, tried to do the best for her. But she was just incorrigible. And he would just break down and cry sometimes because he didn’t know what to do with her.

Tara had been hired to take care of a 75-year-old woman that had Alzheimer’s. And she was supposed to cook healthy meals for her, and get up in the morning at 8:30 and take her for a walk, and give her baths and keep the house clean.

Well, I got a call from the daughter of the woman who had hired Tara. And she was very upset because her mom was not being taken care of.

And so, the lady had bought $150 worth of healthy food for Tara to cook with. And when she went to check in on her mother, none of the healthy food had been used at all, and it was going to rot in the refrigerator. And all that was in there was leftover pizza and chicken wings. And that’s what the old woman was forced to exist on because she couldn’t cook for herself. Meanwhile, Tara was going out every night ‘til 2 o’clock in the morning with her friends, having burgers and tacos—so she wasn’t starving. But the poor woman, her health had deteriorated so much in the two weeks that Tara was supposed to be there working for her, that she had to go into the hospital.

And when she [Tara] was fired, she called me and asked if she could come and stay with me. She didn’t really want to go back home. She wanted to just get a job and get an apartment, and she had friends there and so forth. So I said, “Sure,” you know. I didn’t realize what a handful she was going to be.

I had asked her not to make any long distance calls, because this is 20 years ago. And at the time, long distance calls were really expensive. And she said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I have a phone card.” And I’m like, “Well, who’s paying the bill on the phone card?” And she said, well, a friend of hers at the ranch [boarding school] gave her the number to use whenever she wanted.

And so, I actually called the father of the girl who she said gave the card to her, and told him about this. And he had no knowledge of this at all, and he was very concerned. And so, I got Tara to agree that she would pay him back. And anyway, it turns out that the girl had only given it to Tara to make one quick call and that was it. She didn’t give it to a bunch of other kids. And Tara had just fabricated that.

And she said that she would make the money back and return the $500 to him that she owed from making all these phone calls. So, I told her that I would help her out, and she could mow our lawn, and I’d pay her to do that to get it started. Well, every ten minutes of her mowing the lawn she came in and she would be crying. She’s saying, “It’s too hot. I’m too tired. This is too much work.” And she just didn’t want to do it. And we didn’t have a big lawn. It was a small lawn and we mowed it every week, so it wasn’t like that big of a deal, really. But from listening to her, it sounded like she was being tortured. And I found a friend of mine that hired her to help clean out her garage. And she did it for two and a half hours, and at the end of that she said, “That’s it. I’m not working anymore to earn money back to pay this. It’s too hard. I don’t want to do this anymore.” And that was the end of that.

She was lying to me a lot. I would go to bed, and she would go to bed. And then I would wake up in the middle of the night and find out that she’s getting ready to go out at 2:30 in the morning, and have her boyfriend of the week pick her up and take her somewhere. And so we would get into these arguments. And it just wasn’t okay with me that she would sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go somewhere where I didn’t know she was going.

And apparently the boyfriend that Tara had met up with and started dating this week—which was her second boyfriend in the two weeks that she was there—he had stolen, like, 176 cars. He was, you know, had been in trouble with the law, and he hadn’t been to court yet. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted Tara hanging out with him. So anyway…anyway, Tara told me of some things that they had done, like gotten free food at McDonald’s and stuff like that. And I had talked the—I called the mother of the kid that she had been dating. And I wasn’t sure that they should be hanging out together because they were kind of a bad influence on each other, it seemed like. And Tara found out that I talked to her.

And she calls her mother, and she’s crying on the phone to her. And then another call comes in and it’s her boyfriend. And her—the call waiting came through—and her whole mood completely changed in an instant—just completely. She was not crying anymore. She’s, like, talking really nice to her boyfriend, “Blah, blah, blah.” And then, you know, she goes back to her mother and she’s crying and wailing again. It was just like, is this the same person? It was unreal.

I don’t trust Tara as far as I can throw her, basically. She’s a pathological liar. I’ve caught her in several lies myself. She’s really good at it. I don’t know anyone who can lie as good as Tara, and she’s very, very convincing.