Season 7 Coming April 25th
The Opportunist
PodcastOne
4.7 • 10.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2023
⏱️ 2 minutes
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Summary
In the summer of 1990, 15-year-old Michelle Sutton attended a wilderness therapy camp in Utah. A week later, she was dead. What happened to Michelle? This is what her mother, Cathy, wanted to know. But the search for answers would thrust Cathy into the national spotlight and call into question the founder and director of Summit Quest, Gayle Palmer. Was Michelle’s death a tragic accident or part of a more sinister pattern emerging in the rapidly growing troubled teen industry?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You may have seen their ads and magazines world in this program that say they could help trouble teenagers. |
| 0:05.0 | A girl from Pleasanton, named Michelle Sutton, was one of those kids, but something went wrong out on that trail deadly wrong. |
| 0:15.0 | In May of 1990, 15-year-old Michelle Sutton attended a wilderness therapy camp in Utah called Summit Quest. |
| 0:23.0 | It was advertised as a place to help struggling teens by connecting them with nature, but Michelle was only in the program for nine days. |
| 0:31.0 | And she went into camp and then Michelle died May night. |
| 0:34.0 | Michelle's sudden death left her mother Kathy Reeling. |
| 0:38.0 | She'd been perfectly healthy when she left just a week earlier. |
| 0:42.0 | What happened to her at Summit Quest? |
| 0:44.0 | The more Kathy dug for answers, the more she came to question the founder and director, Gail Palmer. |
| 0:51.0 | She used her motherly instincts and also she used my church affiliation to convince me that everything was on the up and up with her program. |
| 1:02.0 | Very few people were with Michelle when she died and Gail Palmer's explanation for what happened seemed to put the blame on to Michelle. |
| 1:11.0 | She had a death wish that she was doing drugs, that she probably had some serious ailment. |
| 1:18.0 | There's something really wrong here. What is going on? |
| 1:22.0 | She would step on Michelle, step over Michelle to get what she wanted, which was that program and the money. |
| 1:28.0 | That woman will stop at nothing. She did not want her program shut down. She did not want to lose out on making that $14,000 per child. |
| 1:37.0 | Kathy's search for justice for her daughter, Michelle, led her down a rabbit hole into the world of wilderness therapy programs for teens. |
| 1:45.0 | It was a relatively new, unregulated and very lucrative industry blossoming in Utah. |
| 1:51.0 | It was a total fraud. It was like we sent the kids there to be abused. It was just a scam. |
| 1:58.0 | There's people dying out in these programs, you know, and nobody cared that they were dying. |
| 2:03.0 | I remember just this sense of horror, of like, oh my god, I'm never going to get out of here. I'm going to be stuck in this place my whole life. |
| 2:13.0 | There is nobody going to come save me. |
| 2:15.0 | From Cast Media, this is the opportunist, season 7, Gail Palmer. |
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