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Münchausen syndrome by proxy continues to gain ground even outside of the true crime fandom, with many notable stories emerging over the last few years. But what happens when a child is, in fact, actually ill, and their mother takes advantage of their illness for monetary gain?
A mother in Indiana is facing court charges for lying about the details of her daughter’s “terminal” illness and scoring a Make-A-Wish trip, among other benefits, out of it. Her deception is deeper than it seems though, and according to court documents, she was outright abusing her daughter.
The horrifying details
The world heard about Katherine Jackson in 2021 when she kickstarted a GoFundMe to raise money for her then-five-year-old daughter Olivia. According to the GoFundMe, Olivia suffered from two diseases, Pilarowski-Bjornsson Syndrome (PBS) and Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome (LGS), the latter of which caused the girl to have”80-90 seizures per day.”
PBS is a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes delayed development, while LGS is a severe epileptic syndrome. The GoFundMe raised a total of $1600, and that caught the attention of the Make-A-Wish foundation, which then decided to make Olivia’s dream of becoming Elsa from Frozen come true. Unfortunately, Olivia couldn’t get her Disney World trip due to COVID-19, so Make-A-Wish organized a parade by her house to cheer the girl up. Two years later, another foundation, Give Kids the World Village, decided to bring Olivia’s fairy tale to life, and a local news outlet, WANE 15, reported on it. The WANE story dove into Olivia’s past, detailing how she was the smallest baby ever born in Indiana at the time of her birth, and how she spent eight weeks in the NICU.
Speaking to WANE in 2022, Jackson said her daughter only had “months left with us.” But this turned out to be a blatant lie. Three weeks after WANE ran the story, Jackson took her daughter to the hospital where the staff noticed some distressing things. Olivia’s seizures didn’t seem normal, and coupled with the child’s irregular heart rate, they began to suspect child abuse.
Olivia was transported to Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis where doctors found out that Jackson hadn’t been refilling her daughter’s prescriptions. The doctors also confirmed that while PBS had no cure, it was a chronic illness, not a terminal one like Jackson had stated in the GoFundMe and to the organizations that helped Olivia.
The court charges and what comes next
After these hospital visits, Olivia and her sister were taken from their mother and put in foster care. Their foster parents told the police that the sisters weren’t enrolled in school when they took them in and weren’t even potty trained, despite being six and five years old. The police also spoke to a psychologist who had been treating both Olivia and her sister and had been told by Jackson that Olivia had less than a year to live.
Katherine Jackson is facing one count of fraud and two counts of neglect of a dependent, although no court date has been scheduled. One of the neglect counts is a Level 6 felony, alongside the fraud count, while the second neglect count is a Level 5.