Adams’s house, but still didn’t get a chance to speak to Brenda privately. Renee wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Brenda moving back home with her manipulating mother. But having Brenda safe at her own home did free up her time to work on the case with Deek as the investigative team’s criminal profile expert. In just four days, the media’s portrayal of Brenda had degraded from innocent widow to vilified murderess. The press painted a conniving, greedy woman who launched a scheme to collect on her husband’s $50,000-dollar life insurance policy by burning down an elderly lady’s house and all her memories. They projected a heartless criminal capable of killing her husband who she knew was home at the time of the arson, kidnapping her baby and leaving it to be found by authorities. In an attempt to show a rising trend in killer mothers, the press dug up past cases where mothers had willfully harmed or murdered their children. Renee did not know this woman they depicted in the newspapers and on television.
