Fall 1993. Tyler Wetherall was almost 10 when she came home from school with her sister, Caitlin, 12, and saw two strangers talking to their mother.
“Right away we felt something was wrong,” Tyler Wetherall recalled to the New York Post, who was living in Bradford-on-Avon at the time.
The men were Scotland Yard detectives looking for their American father, who, unbeknownst to them, had been on the run for eight years.
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Tyler, who lived in the Bath area as a child, told it all in a book ‘No Way Home’ which describes a childhood like no other. Tyler thought she was a normal kid until Scotland Yard came knocking on her front door.
She didn’t know that her father Benjamin Glaser had been wanted by the authorities for drug trafficking and that’s why the family moved around so much.
Tyler Wetherall was born in 1983 in San Francisco to a British model mother and Benjamin Glaser, who was to be indicted as ‘king’ – part of a drug cartel, which among other crimes, smuggled 30 tons of thai marijuana. in the United States in the early 1980s.
In a Good Life Project podcast, Tyler describes how she did nothing wrong, despite moving to many countries and homes. When she was still a toddler, her family first left for Italy, while her father lost track of him. They then headed to London, where Glasser could start life under an assumed name before eventually moving to Portugal – where they didn’t believe there was an extradition with the United States.
They moved to Portugal, but then realized that the “king pins” could be redeemed in the United States. So they had to think again and went to France. Tyler’s mother was quick to insist that they return to her native UK and in 1987 the couple divorced.
While Tyler Wetherall, his mother and sister continued to live in Bradford on Avon, Glaser fled. Sometimes they spent weekends and holidays with him in London or in the French Alps.
Tyler said on the podcast: “Dad was living under a fake name in London and I don’t think anyone was really looking for him anymore. So we really started a normal existence there – we went to live with Mum in another house, number seven or something and dad found a place in London and we were going there on the weekends.”
She added: ‘We settled down to be English.
Bradford-on-Avon
However, everything changed with a knock at the door. Tyler said: “I was nine, we lived in the West Country, in Bradford-on-Avon. I remember it vividly, we came home from school and there were two people in our living room who seemed officials that I didn’t recognize and mum sent us to spend the night with friends.”
She saw them leave with her mother in the car. The mother told them a week later – “she was waiting for us in her room and told us that dad was wanted by the police and that he was on the run and that we might not see him for a while and that everything would be sorted.”
“She was stoic, she was trying really hard to make sure we realized – that we were aware of what was going on but shouldn’t be afraid.”
Over the next few years, the family had little contact with their father, either through letters and brief phone calls, but never enough for authorities to find him.
Tyler says things got “really bad” as authorities did everything they could to track their family, including tapping phone calls, surveillance, arresting their mother and taking possessions.
Still, Tyler said he “missed him terribly” during those years, but eventually started to get angry when he didn’t surrender.
In October 1995, Scotland Yard and the FBI received word that Tyler and his sister were visiting their father in Saint Lucia, where he worked as a hotel manager. Glaser slipped away again, but four months later returned to St. Lucia and was hacked by authorities.
Glaser was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, later reduced to five years and ten months. It was during long conversations while he was in jail that his father told Tyler why he did what he did.
“He kind of got carried away, the more he did it the more he got carried away with it… he really didn’t believe he would be caught,” Tyler said on the podcast.
Despite some anger toward her father growing up, she forgave him and still loves him dearly. Tyler said she felt “incredibly loved” by her family growing up, which is “why it turned out so well” in the end.
Tyler is now a journalist and author, living in the US and UK. You can here Tyler’s interview on the Good Life podcast here and buy his book here.
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Source: www.somersetlive.co.uk
This notice was published: 2022-06-03 23:00:00
