Part VII: The Wife

Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver. If you're ready for honest conversations about what it takes to thrive in midlife and to maximize your health, your power, your purpose, then my new podcast UnPost is here for you. Join me and expert guests every week as we tackle what really matters in the second half of life. Make sure you never miss an episode by following UnPost with Dr. Mary Claire Haver on Amazon Music, just open the app, hit Follow and let's start living UnPost together. Jennifer Robertson was all alone, 7,000 miles from home. It was December 8th, 2018 and she was in Jaipur, India. Her husband Gerald Cotton had just died from complications of Crohn's disease, a week into their honeymoon. So Jen left the hospital. She spent the night alone in her hotel room, and in the morning she began the long trip home to Canada with Jerry's coffin. She chartered a plane and flew the casket to New Delhi. From there she took a 15 hour flight to Toronto and then finally another flight home to Halifax. On the way she sent an email to the staff of the orphanage that she and Jerry had donated money to help build. They planned to be there for the grand opening, but now she wouldn't make it. This is what she wrote, and as before, this isn't Jen's real voice. Jerry passed away, he was a really beautiful human being. I am heartbroken, but trying to stay strong for him. So at the age of 30, after being married for only a few months, Jen was a widow. Or at least, she was acting like one. I'm Aaron Lammer. Welcome to Exit Scan, a podcast about a mysterious death and a missing fortune. This is part seven, The Wife. A lot of people think Gerald Cotton is still alive. They think that after stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the customers of his Bitcoin exchange, Quadriga, Jerry went to India and faked his death. But so far, nobody has been able to prove it. There's only one person who really knows for sure what happened to Jerry. And that's his wife, Jen. And Jen says Jerry is dead. She says she was with him in the hospital when he passed away. She identified his body at the morgue, and she escorted his coffin home. And despite all the questions that have been raised about Jerry's death over the past two years, Jen hasn't changed her story. And maybe that's because she's telling the truth. Maybe Jerry really is dead. If so, you have to feel bad for Jen. Not only did she lose her husband on the worst honeymoon of all time, then she came home and found out he was Bitcoin's answer to Bernie Madoff. But on the other hand, if you believe that Jerry faked his death, you probably have to believe Jen was in on it. His wife was with him when he died. Have you found cases like this where the wife doesn't know? Well, first of all, I've done about 700 to 800 suspected fraudulent death investigations of which more than 90 percent were in fact frauds. And hundreds of those, the spouse was the co-conspirator. This is Steven Rambaum. He's that private investigator who catches deathfakers. Well, in this particular case, you have the classic situation where she was right there when he died. She knows whom she went into the hospital with. She spent the nights in the room with him. If he faked his death, the possibility of her not being an active and willing participant is minuscule. Over the last six episodes, we've learned a lot about Gerald Kott. And if someone asked me if he seemed like the kind of person who could fake his death, I'd have to answer emphatically yes. But what about Jen? Is she the kind of person who could help her husband fake his death and then stay quiet about it for the rest of her life? Jennifer Robertson is kind of a mystery. We don't know much about her. She hasn't spoken to any reporters since Jerry's death. And she declined our request to interview her for this podcast. But here's what we have been able to piece together. Jen was born in 1988 in Halifax. Her given name is Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Griffith. We don't know much about Jen's early life, but we do know that Jerry was not her first husband. She married another guy in 2012 in a destination wedding in the Dominican Republic, and she was 23 or 24. She took his last name, Forgeron, but changed it back to Griffith after the marriage ended. At some point she moved to Toronto. That's where she was living in November 2014 when she started dating Jerry. Jerry must have seemed like a catch. Jen had probably never heard of Bitcoin before, but she knew he was an entrepreneur running his own startup. He had a great apartment and a nice car. He loved to travel. He could even fly planes. They moved in together in 2016. Jerry bought the couple a house and a suburb of Halifax called Fall River, next door to Jen's mother and stepfather. His name is Thomas Beasley. When Jerry was running Quadriga from home, Mr. Beasley would come over, and the two would chat sometimes for whole afternoons. By all accounts, Jerry seemed like the perfect future has been in Sun and Law. But of course, we know now that Jerry was far from perfect. He was moving his customers' money off of his Bitcoin exchange and into his own pockets. That's how he bought the house that he and Jen lived in. But Jen says she had no idea that any of that was happening. In the sworn statement after his death, Jen said she had no involvement and no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes at Jerry's exchange. But whether she knew it or not, she may have helped Jerry move dirty money. But two years into their relationship, Jen changed her name from Griffith to Robertson. We don't know why she chose that name, but it matched the name of a real estate company that she and Jerry registered around the same time, Robertson Nova Property Management. Jerry used Robertson Nova to buy a dozen houses with money he stole from his customers. He made Jen the president of the company, and hired her stepdad as a handyman for the properties, but kept his own name off the paperwork. In the two years before Jerry's death, he and Jen lived large. Jerry once bragged that for one of Jen's birthdays, he gave her a bank account with a million dollars in it. The couple traveled constantly and took international vacations as often as twice a month, sometimes on private jets. In the bio of her Instagram account, which has since been deleted, Jen described herself as a "travel addict and globetrotter." She posted pictures for more than a dozen trips, sometimes with the hashtag "Luxury Travel." The caption on a photo taken by a hotel pool in Dubai, red, "Sippin's Singapore slings on my 28th." In 2018, Jerry and Jen were legally married in Canada, but they flew both of their families to Scotland for the wedding. They brought along a photographer who took dramatic shots of them in the Scottish Highlands. Jen had everything she could have ever wanted. Maybe she felt like giving something back because it was her who first reached out to Angel House, a charity that builds orphanages in India. She and Jerry donated $20,000 to have an orphanage built in a small village, which as far as I can tell was the first time Jerry ever gave to charity. They planned their honeymoon to coincide with the grand opening. But first, three days before they left, Jerry signed a will that made Jen the beneficiary of everything he owned. The houses, the cars, his yacht, his plane, and Quadriga. So the Bitcoin exchange Jerry had robbed, and it's soon to be furious customers were about to become Jen's problem. This is free range with Von Miller, the podcast where I step outside the lawns and I take you with me. Each week, we're talking everything from the biggest stories around the league to the biggest stories off the field. This isn't your average sports podcast. This is game meets culture, locker room meets living room, and no topic is off limits. So if you're in a good conversation that ruffles a few feathers, join me every Wednesday and follow free range with Von Miller everywhere you get your podcast. After Jerry died, or allegedly died, Jen didn't have much time to grieve. She had to keep his Bitcoin exchange running, and even though Jen barely understood what a Bitcoin exchange was, she knew she needed to find the passwords to Quadriga's cold storage wallets, which as far as she was aware, still contained 215 million dollars. So as soon as she got home from India, she led a search of her and Jerry's house. The search party included her mother and stepfather who lived next door, and there was also Jerry's family. They flew in as soon as they'd heard he died. Jerry's parents, Bruce and Cheryl Cotton, made it to Halifax a day before Jen, and spent the night in Jerry and Jen's fall river house. As did Jerry's brother and his wife. They were all there when Jen got home. And then there was Alexander Hayman, Quadriga's lead programmer who came all the way from the UK. He got on a plane immediately and arrived shortly after Jen. The group looked everywhere. The bedrooms, closets, the basement, the attic, Jerry's home office, and the pool house. They even cut open the furniture. He also gave Alex Jerry's laptops and phones, plus access to his two-factor authentication app to see if he could find anything. But Jerry was known to store his passwords using paper wallets. That's a fancy way to say he wrote down the private keys to his wallets on paper. Even talked about it in an interview. But the paper wallet is a great way to store your bitcoins. So the best way to do it is take your private key, print it off, store it offline in your safety deposit box, follow it to whatever. And then take the public key, which is your address, and use that to send money to it. So that way you can never have your bitcoin stolen unless someone breaks into the bank's deals, your safe box gets into your private key and so forth. What Jerry just said is that if you use a paper wallet, the only way someone can steal your crypto is if they physically break in to where you keep that paper with your private keys written on it and take it. And in Jerry's case, we know where he probably would have stored that paper. As I told you a couple of episodes ago, Jerry liked to keep his valuables locked in the safe and has attic. This safe in question, it was in the attic, that's what he mentions, it's a small safe. It's the kind of safe that you have in a hotel, you know, it's not like the big safe that we picture, you know, in the movies that sits on the floor and you know, it weighs about three tons. This is like a little safe. This is a little safe that you just have documents in, you know, it was bolted to the rafters that also. This is the anonymous quadriga customer turned detective who calls himself QCX int. He's the one who uncovered Jerry's teenage Ponzi schemes and he agreed to talk to us as long as we didn't reveal his identity. Where was this safe found after Jerry died? Well, for my understanding, this safe was found on the floor of the office and it had been taken down from the rafters that had been unbolted and it was on the floor of the office and from honest to any who's empty. Now here's where things get murky. We don't know who moved Jerry's safe from the attic to the office. We don't know who opened it and we don't know if there was anything inside it. But if there was, someone took it. It could have been Jerry himself, maybe he took whatever was inside to India with him. But maybe someone else robbed the safe. Because while officially everybody was searching the house for the password to the cold storage wallets, some members of the search party may have been looking for something else. It seems pretty clear that at least at some point that was the safe that he used for his own personal crypto reserves, you know, he's referred to as the nest egg. That's right. Jerry's nest egg. Remember when I told you about Jerry's personal cryptocurrency investments? He bought a large amount of Ethereum during the pre-sale when the price was 31 cents. Plus, Jerry probably also had some Bitcoin from back in the day. But like the private keys for quadrigas cold storage wallets, the nest egg was never found or never found that we know of. Well, that was an interesting thing is that his office was completely not what I expected. This is Chris McBrigham, he's the cyber security specialist we heard from back in episode one. Jenna hired him to find Jerry's missing passwords. So he interviewed a couple of the people involved with the search and visited the house himself a couple weeks later. What I learned was in our investigation was that someone had gone into the office and cleaned it up and tidied everything up, whereas when they left to go to India, the last that anybody had seen that office was the, you know, basically papers and everything screwed everywhere. His desk would pause up the papers and files and everything else. But when they returned home after a couple of days, I guess family members had gotten access to the office and they had cleaned his office up. What Chris just said was that when Jerry and Jen left on their honeymoon, Jerry's office had been a mess. His desk drawers were overflowing and there were papers everywhere. Jerry was a slop. But when Jen got home after Jerry's death, she found that the office had been cleaned up and a lot of stuff was gone, though not everything. You know, we found, I can't even count how many gambling cards, like casino cards from membership to casinos and from casinos all over the world, some of the most famous casinos in the world were there. According to Jen, the only ones who had been in the house in between were Jerry's family. His parents, his brother, and sister-in-law. It's hard to know exactly what to make of this. Maybe Jerry's parents raided his office and popped his safe while Jen was still on her way back from India. But Jerry's family isn't talking. They ignored our requests for interviews. So we don't know who cleaned out the office, moved the safe, or whether they found anything. Maybe we never well. Jerry's funeral was held on the morning of Friday, December 14th. It was mostly for family and close friends. But Jen also invited Quadriga's freelance contractors. And even though most of them had never met Jerry in person, four of them showed up. In addition to Alex Hannon, there were a couple of junior contractors, plus Aaron Matthews, the Quadriga customer service rep you might remember from a couple episodes ago. He leaked his chats with Jerry. He drove in from New Brunswick for the funeral. We spoke to one of the contractors who agreed to tell us what he remembered. He said Jerry's funeral was closed casket. Jen and her stepfather and Jerry's parents and his brother all gave eulogies, and there was a smaller burial ceremony, mostly for relatives. Under the circumstances, it was a pretty normal funeral. Later that day, something strange happened. The contractors, Alex and Aaron and the other two were hanging around their hotel when Jerry's parents suddenly showed up. The codons were upset, and the contractors asked why. From what I've been able to piece together, that a group went back to the four river house after the funeral, and that included Jerry's parents and Jennifer and some of her friends. And apparently there was a fight between Jennifer and Jerry's parents. Jerry's parents told the contractors that as a result of this altercation with Jen, she threw them out of her house. So they packed up their luggage, and they then departed for the nearest hotel, which is where they ran into some of the Quadriga employees, including Alex and that's how we kind of come to know, you know, this part of the story is because they overheard, you know, what was related to them at the hotel. According to our sources, Jen and the codons stopped speaking after that night. I called that number that showed up on my phone, and when the woman answered, she said, yes, my name is Jennifer Robertson. This is Denise Simbley. She manages a tiny airport outside of Halifax. It's where Jerry kept his airplane, although that isn't her main gig. I am a boarding radio host, or dual on a flight in Halifax. What kind of music do you play? Easier to say. Okay. Quad's door. Share. Out of the many, many people we asked, Denise is the only person who's ever spoken to Jen and would agree to talk about her on tape. But even she mostly dealt with Jared. At first glance, I knew he had a fancy plane. I knew he was into something to do with crypto currency. He told me that he was going away to India to start an orphanage, which I thought was quite impressive. But then that sort of, to me, that kind of fell into place with everything that in my little head I was thinking, all this guy's got money, he's giving back or how noble, you know. Denise wished him good luck, but then a couple of weeks later, there was a storm coming in, and she needed Jerry's permission to move his plane out of harm's way. So she called them, and Jen picked up. She told me right away, her name was Jennifer Robertson, and that's when, because their name wasn't caught, so I would have assumed there was no relation, just, you know. And I said, "Are you Jerry's assistant?" That's when she said, "No, she's a wife," and then I'm like, "Oh, has the orphanage going?" And she sort of hesitated, and she goes, "Can I tell you something if you promise me that you won't tell or share this information with anybody else, because of course." And she said that Jerry had passed away, that they weren't in India, you know, opening this orphanage, and they were on their honeymoon, and that he had passed away, she sounded very distraught. Well, then I'm, of course, like, I'm like, "Oh, my God, I thought it was going to cry." I didn't know what to say, you know, she sounded, you know, choked up, and I had to promise that I wasn't telling anybody. When she asked you not to tell anyone about Gerald Cotton's death, did she say, "Why?" No, she didn't. I think, I guess she probably qualified it a little bit by just, you know, I'm dealing with a lot. And I do remember her saying, "You know, he passed away, he left me with a bow. He left me with, you know, an airplane. I don't know anything about an airplane, like, "Can you help me sell it?" Denise agreed to help Jen sell Jerry's plane. But later, after the shock of the phone call wore off, she started to get suspicious. I thought somebody dead that I'm not supposed to tell anybody about, but if this is just a nasty divorce and she's selling a plane out from under of, I said, "I don't know if this guy, I honestly said I don't know if this guy owes money to people, so I don't know if he has wasted a scam artist and she's not really still married to him and she's going to sell the plane out from under him. Like, I have all these crazy cookie scenarios in my head. I watched you like daylight, I think." Did you really think he was dead? Honestly, I was really suspicious. I did not believe he was dead. There was a reason Jen didn't want people to know Jerry was dead right away. It was because Quadriga, which she was now in charge of, was still open for business, and still accepting new deposits. As I told you all the way back in episode one, Jen waited a whole month to make Jerry's death public. Now that sounds sketchy, and it was sketchy. But Jen said she was only following advice from Alex Hainan and Quadriga's lawyers. She said they wanted to keep Jerry's death as secret until they secured the customer's money to avoid a panic. But of course, there was no money to secure, and finding the passwords wouldn't have made any difference. The search had been a wild goose chase, so finally Jen announced Jerry's death. She shut down the exchange, and on the lawyer's advice applied for creditor protection, which is a kind of bankruptcy. It's a court order to prevent customers from suing. When those customers found out that Jerry had been dead for a month and their money was gone and they couldn't even sue, they got angry. And with no other outlet for their frustration, they focused on Jen. Some accused her of helping Jerry fake his death. Others called her a black widow and said she'd murdered Jerry to get her inheritance. She even sent her death threats. It got so bad that she deleted her social media and went into hiding. In an affidavit filed with a court, Codden's widow said she had received online threats in what she called "slandrous comments," including questions about the nature of her husband's death and whether he is really dead. A few months after Jerry's alleged death, we learned that Quadriga's money wasn't just missing, Jerry had stolen it. He used some of that money to buy houses, a plane, and a yacht. Basically, all the stuff he gave Jen in as well. So under mounting pressure, Jen reached a settlement with Quadriga's customers. She agreed to turn over everything Jerry left her, plus everything the couple owned in her name, or almost everything. She was allowed to keep the $90,000 in her personal checking account, her 2015 Jeep Cherokee, and her wedding ring. In the court filing, there was a statement from Jen. Again, this isn't really her voice. As a result of the monitor's investigation, I have agreed to return Quadriga's ex assets that I had previously thought were purchased with Jerry's legitimately earned profits, dividends, and salary. I was upset and disappointed with Jerry's activities when I first learned of them, and I continue to be as we conclude the settlement. This settlement will allow me to move on with the next chapter of my life. As part of the deal, all of Jerry and Jen's houses were put up for sale, to help pay back Quadriga customers. That included the house they lived in together, and Halifax. It was listed on a bunch of Canadian real estate websites, and it looks like a pretty average suburban home, with a pool in the backyard. In the photos, the house was completely empty, except for one corner of the basement, where Jen left behind a makeshift gym. There was a folded up treadmill, and on a nearby wall, someone had painted a motivational slogan. It said, "You don't get what you want. You get what you work for." In the next episode of "Exit Scam." As a former fugitive hunter, first of all, I want to establish whether he's a libra dad. "Exit Scam" is an original production of Treats Media. You can get next week's episode right now on the Odyssey app. It has AUDACY, it has all the podcasts and music and news and sports that matter to you. Download it for free today from the App Store or Google Play. "Exit Scam" was written and produced by me, Aaron Lammer, and Lane Brown, mixing and additional editing by Martin D. Fowler, Show Art and Art Direction by Mickey DuJay. The theme song is by Francis and the Lights, and scoring from this episode was by Mark Allen Piccolo, Ross C. Manini, Martin D. Fowler, Francis Starlight, and myself, with additional music from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Our executive producers are Max Linsky, Lane Brown, and myself for Treats Media. Additional sound editing and producing by James Nicholson, Additional Producing by Jacqueline Scurry, very special thanks to the person who did "Jens Voice" in this episode. She didn't want her name used. Special thanks to Jake Shryer and Garrett, Patty Greco, Jay Kang, Evan Ratliffe. Everyone at Cadence 13, thank you Lizzie Danahan, everyone at Odyssey, thank you JD Crowley, thanks to everyone at Pineapple Street Studios, and anyone I've forgotten, thank you. Next episode, coming next week.