FANCY hotels and a jet-set lifestyle might look like the dream, but for one family it was actually a life on the run from their dad’s criminal past.
Tyler Wetherall, now a 42-year-old Brooklyn-based author and journalist, didn’t even know her real name as a child.
Tyler Wetherall has opened up on her childhood, where she and her siblings spent years secretly on the run[/caption]
Pictured here at the age of 13, Tyler didn’t know her real name[/caption]
Photographed with her father, Tyler also counted arms dealers and exiled dictators as neighbours whilst on the run[/caption]
Tyler spent most of her childhood hiding from American authorities, in an attempt to flee from her New York-born father’s crimes.
Rather than face a significant prison sentence, Benjamin Glaser, an international drug smuggler wanted by the police in the era of President Ronald Reagan’s strict crackdown, took the family abroad from their home in California.
He resettled Tyler, her mother, sister and brother in fugitive enclaves.
Ben Glaser got involved with drug smuggling before his children were born and amassed a huge wealth as a result.
He vowed to give up the criminal lifestyle when he finally had a young family, but couldn’t resist the allure of big deals.
The criminal organisation Ben was wanted for his connections to had imported more than 100 tons of marijuana to the United States from Thailand in the 1970s and ’80s, and it was this massive smuggle that would eventually prove his wrongdoing.
Ben was wanted in the US on charges of “continuing criminal enterprise” – a drug trafficking law known as the “kingpin statute”.
As a result, Tyler lived a strange early childhood, growing up in communities of other “dubiously wealthy” families, all safe in their mutual secrecy.
The family fled to Italy, France and Portugal – just to name a few – before they returned to her model mother’s home in Britain, when Tyler was around four-years-old.
Whilst in the French commune of Mougins, Tyler’s family counted arms dealers and exiled dictators amongst their neighbours.
During much of this time, Tyler had no real idea why the family often went by different names, moved so frequently and had such an unconventional lifestyle.
It wasn’t until her father was taken into custody – after authorities tracked him down whilst she was on a trip to St Lucia for her 12th birthday – that the extent of the truth came out and Tyler was forced to confront the reality of her unique family situation.
Living a fugitive life
By the time Tyler was just 10-years-old, she and her siblings had lived in 13 houses in five countries on two continents as a result of their fugitive family life.
For Tyler’s 12th birthday, she and her sister, Caitlin, were a long way from their English home, whilst on a special trip to visit their father on the Caribbean island of St Lucia.
While there, Tyler’s dad was working as a hotel manager, and during this time, he was using a new name – instead of Ben, he was Paul – and Tyler knew not to question why.
Tyler has now revealed all on her childhood on the Mamamia’s No Filter podcast[/caption]
On the evening of her birthday, Tyler headed with Caitlin to their father’s office.
They had planned to meet him there before heading out for a special dinner in nearby Rodney Bay, she still remembers that she was set to have her first taste of lobster that day to mark her 12th birthday.
But as they arrived, they found him speaking on the phone, and Tyler recognised her mother’s panicked voice on the other end of the line.
Their father told them: “I need you to go back to your rooms and pack your bags.”
It emerged that the police had been to their mother’s home in England, had found the girls’ flight details and were on their way to St Lucia.
Subsequently, the lobster dinner was cancelled, her presents were left unopened and as Tyler and Caitlin hurriedly packed their bags – something they’d become quite accustomed to over the years – as they braced themselves to say goodbye.
Something unusual
Now, speaking to Mamamia’s No Filter podcast, Tyler recalled how her mother, desperate for some stability, made the brave decision to end her marriage to Ben and leave him with her children, shortly after the family settled in England.
Tyler revealed: “She did a really good job of making our childhood as normal as possible under the circumstances, which was very un-normal.”
We’d lived in 13 houses in five countries… I would tell people, and I could see that they found it odd
Tyler Wetherall
Following the divorce of her parents, Tyler and her siblings spent the next few years in relative stability.
They went to school and saw their father every other weekend, but by then, Tyler was old enough to notice they had something to hide.
She claimed she knew the name called out on roll call each morning didn’t match the one on her passport and recognised that some people called her father Martin, while others called him Ben.
She said: “I understood there was something unusual about our family.
“We’d lived in 13 houses in five countries… I would tell people, and I could see that they found it odd. And I liked that curiosity, that thing that made me different.”
It wasn’t until 1993, when Tyler was just nine-years-old, that she realised her father was in trouble with the law.
Tyler and Caitlin came home from school one afternoon to find police officers from Scotland Yard talking to their mother.
Some smuggling associates of Ben’s had been arrested and given up his name. While the police raided Ben’s London home, he had already fled.
Tyler said: “Mum was living under her real name by that point, and they turned up looking for him and to see if she had any information. After that, we started to notice them.”
From then on, Tyler often spotted officers waiting in a car outside her school, sometimes even following her home.
Tyler’s mother feared they had bugged their car, phone, and house.
Tyler said: “You know when you’re a kid, and you spend hours on the phone with your friends?
“All those conversations, in the back of my head, I’d be like, ‘Are they listening to this?’”
A week after the police visit, Tyler’s mother sat the girls down (their brother was away at boarding school) and explained why they were being watched.
She spoke in very vague terms, which partly, Tyler assumed, was to protect them and partly because of her fears about surveillance.
She said that their father had committed a crime before they were born and that he was in hiding, stressing that they mustn’t tell anyone, not even their close friends.
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Whether you’re looking for deep dives into a single case to a variety of stories, they’ll definitely leave you craving more.
Serial
Arguably the podcast that popularised true crime in the podcast world. It dives deep into the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, but maintains his innocence. The investigation is full of twists, and it will keep you questioning everything.
My Favorite Murder
Hosted by comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, this podcast blends true crime with humour. While they discuss cases, they also share their own personal stories, making it feel like a conversation with friends. It’s a great mix of macabre and lightheartedness.
Criminal
Hosted by Phoebe Judge, Criminal tells a variety of true crime stories from around the world. Each episode features a different case, whether it’s a historical crime or a more recent one. It’s great for listeners who like a bit of variety in their true crime fix.
Casefile
This Australian podcast dives deep into both solved and unsolved cases, with a focus on the details and investigation process. The anonymous narrator’s calm delivery makes it even more suspenseful. The thorough storytelling will keep you hooked from start to finish.
Monster: The Zodiac Killer
If you’re fascinated by the Zodiac Killer and the mystery surrounding his identity, this podcast is for you. It goes in-depth into the case, offering new theories and perspectives on the unsolved mystery.
Faced with keeping this huge secret, Tyler explained: “Everything you’ve believed to be true suddenly changes.
“Me and Dad were always incredibly close. He was a very loving dad.
“He was always very hands-on… And this secret that he had kept from me was very hurtful.”
Despite this, Tyler and her siblings continued to maintain contact with Ben via the odd visit, letters and phone calls – but never on their landline.
They would arrange to be at a particular payphone at a particular time, and he would call it. Then the next call would be at a different time and location, just in case.
They even took the occasional trip to see him and while it was “really exciting” going on these glamorous holidays, Tyler explained: “There was still a way that Dad had of making these trips feel kind of normal.
“I think my sister found them harder because she was more aware of the risks and also aware of how hard Mum found it to say goodbye to us, and how scared Mum was that if he were to be arrested while we were there, what would happen to us?”
Ben’s arrest
Despite one close call where the family had to flee his accommodation in the middle of the night, for the most part, Ben got away with it.
When Tyler initially told publishers about the idea for the book, she claimed it was about someone else’s family[/caption]
Through it all, Tyler and Caitlin still weren’t sure exactly what their father had done.
While their mother believed it was Ben’s place to tell them, he said nothing, as Tyler later put it: “We never asked the questions we knew he didn’t want to answer”.
She reflected: “For all those years that we were taking cars, planes, ferries around Europe to go visit him on the run, knowing that he was being pursued, knowing our phones were tapped, knowing we were being followed, we didn’t know what he had done, so we would speculate.
“And I was a kid, so I’m like, ‘do you think he robbed a bank?’”
But it wasn’t until after Ben’s eventual arrest that Tyler learnt the truth.
Instead of a fun-filled 12th birthday, the trip to St Lucia marked her father’s arrest.
Ben then spent five years and four months in a Californian prison, during which Tyler and Caitlin visited him every summer.
Tyler’s memoir
In the years since, Tyler worked to reconcile his actions as a drug smuggler with the “loving, good guy” she saw him as.
At the time, the warnings of her childhood were still echoing loudly in her ears two decades later[/caption]
Tyler beamed: “Whatever choices he made – right or wrong, criminal or not – his job was to be there for me.
“He’s my dad, and on that very simple daughter level, that was what I had to figure out. Could I forgive him for those choices and love him all the same?”
In the years since, Tyler spent time collaborating with her father on a memoir.
It started as his story, gleaned from more than 300,000 words Ben had inked out on a prison typewriter, as well as daily interviews Tyler conducted with him.
But as she pulled together the pieces, Tyler realised the only story she could tell with true honesty was her own, and so she published her memoir, No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run.
Tyler expressed: “We’ve had stories of male misadventures, often at the expense of the women and children in their lives.
“I felt quite strongly that we hadn’t had a story of what it was to be that collateral damage of a man’s decisions. And I really wanted to tell it from that perspective.”
Tyler’s dad was initially wounded by her choice, but he soon understood and writing her book has proved a healing process for both of them in many ways.
While she got to hear her father’s side of the story, as well as his regrets, she also got to bid farewell to a lifetime of secrecy.
I think knowing that he loved us enough that he wasn’t going to give us up, and he was willing to risk getting caught, opened up the pathway to forgive him
Tyler Wetherall
But it wasn’t easy and when Tyler initially told publishers about the idea for the book, she claimed it was about someone else’s family, as the warnings of her childhood were still echoing loudly in her ears two decades later.
She admitted: “It was so strong, that fear with me. And by the story being out in the open… what I came to understand is that Dad could have got away with it. He could have disappeared.
“A lot of the guys in his organisation left their wives and kids behind and went off and they never saw them again. They chose their freedom.”
Despite their past, Tyler, who now lives in the United States, and her father, who works as an investment adviser in Northern California, remain incredibly close and talk a few times a week.
Tyler shared: “I think knowing that he loved us enough that he wasn’t going to give us up, and he was willing to risk getting caught, opened up the pathway to forgive him.”
To find out more, you can purchase No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run by Tyler Wetherall here.
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