Bad Teachers: Angela Comer

0:00 Hey everyone, and welcome back to Exposed Scandalous Files of the Elite. I am your host, Jim Chapman, and today I am bringing you another episode in the Bad Teacher series. Now we're gonna start off in Tompkinsville, Kentucky for this one, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about angela comer who in two thousand and six, at the age of twenty six years old, fled the state of Kentucky with her fourteen year old student she was having a sexual relationship with and escaped to Mexico. Really unbelievable story here, and I'm gonna start it off by telling you a little bit about Tompkinsville, Kentucky, where this incident took place. Now, Tompkinsville is a small town of a little over two thousand people. It's on the southern border of Kentucky, but it's in the center of the state on that southern edge, and it has a little bit of history with both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Now, it's definitely not the type of place where you would imagine something would occur like the story I'm about to tell you about.

1:13 So let's go back to two thousand and six, and I'm going to tell you about a math teacher by the name of Angela Comber. She taught at Monroe County Middle School. She was an eighth grade teacher. Now, Angela was twenty six years old, and she was very attractive, blond hair, five six, kind of statuesque female, certainly noticeable to any fourteen year old boy. So at the time of this incident, Comber had taught at Monroe County Middle School for about a year and a half, and prior to that, she had taught at what's known as Baron County Middle School. That was for about two years. So despite the fact that she was only twenty six years old, she had already had nearly four years of teaching experience.

2:05 She wasn't new at this, not that that necessarily would matter. And despite the fact that Comber was known as a creative and enthusiastic teacher, she did have some performance issues according to the school administration, which means that her students they were not scoring on a level expected on test, etc. Apparently, whatever her style of teaching, if you will, whatever that was, her students were not learning as she should and that was reflecting in their test scores and I would say that could have something to do with what was going on behind the scenes in Comer's personal life, which was just absolutely a mess. Just two years prior to the incident, now, in two thousand and four, Angela Comber filed petitions against her own parents, claimed that her father had bruised her arm and that her mother had abused her verbally, mentally, and physically. She also said at that time in two thousand and four, that her parents had threatened to take custody of her young son. So then, three months prior to the incident taking place that I am about to tell you about, Angela Comber filed for divorce of her husband, David, saying he was abusive. However, just a few days after filing, she rescinded that filing. She essentially changed her mind. Now,

3:39 right after rescinding those papers, she abruptly quit her teaching job at Monroe County Middle School. This was in November of two thousand and five. So interesting that when I researched this case, I had to refer to a lot of old newspaper articles. Usually when I I go back more than about five years to ten years, the articles that I can find online pretty tough to find. I have a subscription to a service that actually brings together all these old newspaper articles and sometimes you can dig up some really good information. That's what I had to do here in this case. A lot of these old newspaper articles were from Kentucky, where all this went down.

4:27 And one thing that stood out to me was that way back in two thousand and six, they didn't protect the victim's identity like they do today. I mean, this kid's first name and last name, fourteen year old kid, mind you, his name was everywhere when all of this came out in the media, which is very strange these days. Usually they'll use initials, they'll give an age, but there's no way that the media is going to report the name of a victim. A lot of people say that revictimizes the person. I think it also speaks to the fact that even back then, well I would say, especially back then when you were a guy and you were fourteen and your teacher was twenty six, like in this case, it didn't really look at you as a victim. It's just facts. It's why I do this series. So getting back to it, I'm not gonna use his full name I'll just use his first name, and his first name was Justin, And I'm going to tell you a little bit about Justin. Now, Justin in two thousand and five, and in two thousand and six, and even prior to that, he lived with his grandmother, who was his legal guardian.

5:43 And she was also no stranger to education herself. She had been a supervisor of education before her retirement, and even after retiring, she still worked as a substitute teacher. Now, in addition to that, she also took care of the grounds in dig gardening in a large apartment complex in the area, not because she had to, but because she wanted to. Now, Justin had lived with his grandmother for six years, since he was eight years old. This poor lady was sixty eight years old when all of this went down that she had to deal with sixty eight Now, apparently Justin he didn't have an easy early childhood. It was very unsettled. As a matter of fact, he stayed with several different relatives before settling in with his grandmother.

6:38 And it's kind of surprising to me because when I researched his family name, well, it was a very powerful name in the Monroe County area. His father, as a matter of fact, at one point was the most powerful attorney in that county. Justin's mother and father, however, they never got married. Apparently she got pregnant, she had Justin, and I don't know, maybe they weren't in love or whatever, but they never got married, and drug abuse plagued his father, that high powered attorney, so much so that in nineteen ninety seven, Justin's grandmother she files charges against Justin's dad, which, by the way, that's her own biological son. She said that he threatened to kill her, and she blamed drugs for her son's demise. Probably pretty good and accurate description, mayor of why he turned out the way he did and was threatening to kill his own mother. This was just shortly after her son had been accused by her of stealing a five thousand dollars boat from her. And that might not sound like much, but remember the timeframe.

7:54 That was way back in nineteen ninety seven. Five thousand dollars gives you a nice boat. Surely after that, Justin's dad life spiraled even more. He eventually lost his license in the state of Kentucky to even practice law. So let's get back to two thousand and five. And as I said, this grandmother she knew the education system. She also knew what would be considered appropriate and not so appropriate when it came to teachers and students. And it was in November of two thousand and five when she became really suspicious. So shortly after Angela had left her job at the school. Remember she got divorced, or she filed for divorce, then she rescinded that, and shortly after that she ended up leaving the teaching profession completely, just quit her job. So shortly after that, Justin's grandmother started hearing ramblings that Justin had had an affair with this teacher comer. Now, initially, Grandma she chalked this up to Justin lying to his friends because she was hearing a lot of this from other kids that went to school with Justin, and she's thinking, Eh, he's just trying to become more popular at school. As I said, this is a very pretty teacher, and so in her mind, he's just trying to be a big man on campus. And now that that teacher's not teaching there anymore, she can't

9:27 really defend herself to the other students. So that's what she chalked it up to. Jim, did you see what happened in Texas today? Wait before you tell me that, let me tell you what happened in New York. It cannot be as crazy as the case I told you about yesterday in Louisiana. You know what, we should do a podcast about it, and with that we did. Crime War Weekly covers the crime news headlines that have dominated the week. We cover trending crimes from all over the country and even spread wrinkle in a few globally. Crime War Weekly is available now wherever you listen to your podcasts. Simply by searching Crime Wire Weekly or clicking the link in the description of this podcast. She just couldn't believe the idea of this beautiful, married, twenty six year old teacher with a son of her own incidentally having any interest in her fourteen year old grandson. And these were other kids saying it, and they lie right, or he lied to them, whatever. But things would change when parents would start to notice. They would also hear kind of these ramblings going around that Justin is messing or did mess around with this teacher. And then they would go to basketball games and lo and behold, Angela would show up and she would bring food to Justin these basketball games. Now,

11:02 one thing I had not mentioned was the size of Justin. Now, he was only fourteen years old, but he certainly looked like a grand man. He was actually six foot two and two hundred pounds at fourteen years old. Now doesn't excuse anything that was done here, but it's important for context, and you'll see why ledter on. So at some point in November of two thousand and five, his grandmother, she has a conversation with one of Justin's more trusted friends, and that friend he tells the grandmother that he knows for a fact Justin's not lying about sleeping with this teacher.

11:46 She says, well, how do you know that for a fact, And he tells Justin's grandmother that one day he listened in on the telephone while Justin called Angelo to set up one of these hookups, if you will, and he asked her if she had taken her birth control. And that was totally in an effort to prove to his friend that what he was telling him was legit. All of this was set up by Justin. So the grandmother at this point, she starts digging in even deeper into her grandson's emails, et cetera. Now, this is two thousand and six. Texting wasn't a thing back then like it is now. I mean, back in two thousand and six, you had. It took like forty five minutes to text a sentence in two thousand and six, because you had to go through each individual key. And for example, if it was the number one on your telephone, on your on your cell phone back then your flip phone, if you will, it would have ABCD and you'd have to if you wanted that sentence or that word to start with D, you would have to hit the one button four nine and the D would pop up. Then you'd have to go to the next letter. It was horrible.

13:06 So there wasn't texting really back then like there is now. But there was emailing and a lot of it. And she goes through her son's emails and she discovers that Comer and her grandson had been having an affair. There was just these emails weren't that blatant, but they were enough to where you knew something was not right. She also discovered that they were accomplishing this in a unique way. So grandma. She had trouble sleeping. She suffered from insomnian She would take medicine, sleeping medicine to help her go to sleep. The problem was she would take it and she'd wake up two hours later and then you know, it was just a nightmare from there, trying to fall back asleep. Now, her grandson knew she had a pattern like this. He had memorized her pattern, so he would wait until she popped that pill and then he would tell his teacher, you can come on over to the house and they would actually have sex in the house while the grandmother was sleeping, and she would get out of the house before the grandmother woke up. So she has a conversation with Justin after discovering these emails, even though they weren't one hundred percent clear of what I just told you, that was the inference that you could draw.

14:30 She has that conversation and Justin tells her Luck, you're being ridiculous. You're building this up in your head. Me and Angela Comer were just friends, which she knew it was BS, but regardless, She tells him, you need to stay away from her from now on. And she tells him, I'm gonna be watching in my radars up and I'm gonna throw this bitch in jail basically if this can now. Two weeks after that, she also files charges against Angela because although she felt that she couldn't prove any sort of sexual relationship was going on with her grandson and Angela Comber, she felt like she could prove another law in Kentucky, and that law is known as unlawful transaction with a minor. And what that is in Layman's term, it basically means that Comer was causing Justin, who is a miner, to disobey his grandmother. She's coersing him into that, and that's a law, or was a law then in two thousand and six, So she files as charges. You get a coordinate, et cetera. So all of this, everything I've just told you thus far leads us to January six of two thousand and six and Justin's grandmother she confronts him again on this alleged of that he's having

16:01 with his teacher because another friend, one she really trusted, one of Justin's friend his father actually goes to the grandmother and he tells her that something is still going on with Justin and Angela Comber, his now at this time former teacher. So she has another conversation. Justin denies everything as you would expect, but she tells Justin, if I got to bolt these doors to this house when I go to sleep, I'll do it now. Interestingly enough, this conversation took place just a week before the courtdate for that unlawful transaction charge that I just told you about.

16:47 So the pressure's on, I'm sure with Angela Comber anyway, and the time is ticking. So Justin he kisses his grandmother on the head. He tells her he loves her. She goes to bed, and while she's asleep, he packs up his clothes. He packs up his iPod, which I didn't say iPad iPod. This is two thousand and six. iPads didn't exist, but iPods did. It was just basically like a think of it, like a cell phone that didn't make calls. All it did was download music. So he packs that up, and he also takes her purse. He actually steals her purse. Now in her purse was eight hundred dollars cash. He takes his pillows, he piles them under his blanket, sort of Ferris Bueller style. If you're from my time frame, you'll know what that means.

17:41 And he did that to make it appear as though he was sleeping, and he leaves the house. So the next morning, Grandma she wakes up and she needs to make a run to the post office. She gotta get some stamps whatever. Maybe she's meiling a package. She notices her perse is not where she left it. She's searching all over the house for this purse. Finally she can't find it anywhere else, says, she goes into Justin's room to look, and that's when she discovers Justin ain't there. So at this point she calls the Tompkinsville Police Department and they quickly figure out within just a very short period of time that not only is Justin missing, but Angela Comer is missing, along with Angela Comber's four year old son. And they have a really good idea that these people are no longer in the state of Kentucky, and they contact the FBI. So the FBI gets involved because there's a big suspicion they've crossed state lines. It becomes a federal crime, right and the first thing the FBI does is they search Justin's computer, which was left behind because it wasn't a laptop, it was a desktop computer.

19:05 You couldn't bring that thing with you. These were big bubble back monitors back in those days, and the computers weighed a thousand pounds, so you aren't taking that with you on any sort of trip or to make a quick getaway. So they search his computer and it's not long before what they find on it gives them a pretty good indication that Justin and his teacher were headed to It may already be in what was known as Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, which that's right across the border, y'all, from Laredo, Texas.

19:55 In the sultry heat of Louisiana, where the Bayous whisper secrets and the air heavy with the scent of magnolias, a darkness lurked beneath the surface. Dereck Todd Lee was a man whose charm masked a sinister reality. He was a monster. Lee, a seemingly ordinary man with a disarming smile, led a double life that would unravel in a series of murders in the capital city of Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas. As the first reports of disappearances and murders began to surface, South Louisiana was thrust into a nightmare, igniting a frantic search for answers. The true horror was just beginning, and the hunt for a serial killer eventually known by just three letters, would reveal not only the depths of Derek Todd Lee's depravity, but also the resilience of those most affected by his evil acts, the families and the survivors. This is DTL.

20:54 DTL can be found by Searching Unspeakable, a true crime podcast by Kelly Jennings wherever you listen to podcasts, Episode one dropping November three. So the plan for these two was to cross the border into Mexico and get married due to the lacks of marriage laws in the country, I guess you can. You know, in Mexico you can marry a fourteen year old when you're twenty six. They also had keep in mind Comber's four year old some with them. So the FBI they figure this out. They contact the Mexican authorities and they asked them, Hey, we need y'all to canvass the hotels all throughout the area and lo and behold they find them in a hotel.

21:44 Justin his teacher, Angela Comer, as well as Comber's four year old son. They're all taken into custody. They're actually brought to Texas and then they are transported back to Kentucky. Now, at the time, Comer is charged with felony custodial interference because police determined that Justin did indeed go willingly with her. Of course, they interviewed him and he he said, you know, she didn't force me to go, So no kidnapping charge was filed, and on January nineteenth of two thousand and six, Comer is formally indicted by the state of Kentucky. Now, when the indictment came out, the charges kind of changed.

22:30 She got indicted for two counts of third degree sadomy, four counts of unlawful transaction with a minor, and one count of custodial interference. So she goes to court and she enters a plea of not guilty, which everybody enters a not guilty plea in their initial court appearance. That's when bond is set, et cetera. And you got nothing to lose by entering a not guilty plea. At an arrayment, she gets a fifty thousand dollars cash bond, which she eventually does bond out of jail, and time passes, and a lot of time actually passes, and she eventually cuts a deal like they all do, right, she pleads guilty.

23:18 She does this on May tenth of two thousand and seven, a year and a half later, and she sentenced to ten years in jail after pleading guilty to just one count of sodomy and she got five years for that count. In one count of custudio interference which she gets an additional five years for. Now at the time when all that went down and she took that plea and got sentenced, Justin at that time was only sixteen, and this was a year and a half after all this went down. She did also admit to having sex with Justin several times in open court. Then a month later, Angela Comber comes out with this absolutely wild claim and she claims that she was kidnapped and she was forced to drive to Mexico with this fourteen year old teen y'all a gunpoint.

24:19 She said that the student was allegedly trying to get away from his horrible home life and was considering suicide, so he called her. He's depressed. He says, hey, I'm gonna kill myself, and she tells him, oh, well, I'm gonna pick you up and i'm gonna take you to the courthouse. She doesn't tell him that over the phone, she said, because she was worried about what would happen. So she inferred that she was gonna pick him up and they were gonna run off together, which is why he had all his ship packed. But really she was gonna bring him to the courthouse. So she shows up, He gets in the car, and that's when she tells him, look, we're gonna go to the courthouse. This is her story, right, But she said rather than do that, he reaches into her glove compartment. He knew that she carried a gun in her glove compartment, and so he pulls the gun out, points it at her, and tells her to drive. She said that she attempted to get away twice. She said once at a gas station and another time that she tried to get away. He allegedly busted a guitar over her head. This is her story. She also said she was going through a difficult time and she was drinking a lot, and that everything she did with this fourteen year old was totally out of character for her. Everybody that knew her and knew that this would never occur if she were in her right state of mind, et cetera.

25:48 She went on to say that she is pissed at herself for pleading guilty and that the only reason that she plagued guilty was she did it to avoid the stress of a public trial. And something that I did not tell you occurred between the time that she posted bail in the time that she took that plea, which totally blows all this you already know it's bullshit, but blows it all out of the water is even when this lady was out on bail, she was caught sending two nude pictures to this kid out on bail for this relationship with this kid, and she can't help herself.

26:35 She takes two new pictures and emails them to this kid. So decision making is on full display here, right. So she goes to jail and in twenty ten she petitions to be released, and fortunately that petition was denied. Though I'm a little bit surprised because if you think it's bad now with female teachers and students. Back in twenty ten, it was really bad when it came to them actually having to pay a price for their crime. But she does get denied, and from there what happened to her? The trail kind of runs cold a little bit. She was eventually released, I know that for a fact, and she's out now. And the way that I know that is she still has to register as a sex offender.

27:25 And it says that she was released. So did she serve her full term? I doubt it, but she probably served the majority of it. In her case, now her name's changed. She is now Angela Pointer Poynteer, So maybe she got remarried after she got out of jail. Who knows. I know that she no longer lives in the state of Kentucky. I think she lives in Florida. Not one hundred percent sure on that, but there you have it. Wild story. Now, Now what blew my mind about all this? This is a lady that essentially, as she kidnapped this kid, I mean, he's fourteen years old, she brings him and makes it all the way to Mexico with her own four year old kid in two and she did say in an interview at one point with the newspaper that you know, she feels horrible for this, and she hopes that her then four year old kid doesn't remember, you know, will block out the memory of all that. Doubt it, but a really wild scenario. I've never seen one where somebody actually got all the way out of the country one of these teachers with a kid that they were having a relationship with. But there you have it. Now.

28:49 I want to take a second to say, if you are a Patreon member, thank you so much. Look, the show would not exist without these Patreon members. I love you. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for supporting Exposed scandalous spiles of the Elite Bonus episode is heading your way very soon. I hope you check that out. And incidentally, this week dropped the first episode of DTL. You should have heard an advertisement for DTL during this episode. DTL is, of course a series that I produce. It is like no other unspeakable a true crime podcasts by Kelly Jennings.

29:34 Award winning podcast award winning host Kelly Jennings takes you through the absolutely horrific story of Derek Todd Lee, a serial killer from the state of Louisiana actually from my area. So check that out. I'll link it in the description of this podcast. And please consider leaving us a review if you have not yet done, and so I can't tell you how much that helps the show. You don't even have to put a whole sentence in there. You can just put great, and hopefully you want to leave five stars, especially if you're listening on Apple Podcasts. I don't know about the other podcast platforms, but I know Apple does it, and it really pushes us up that feed.

30:22 I would be forever in your debt if you consider doing that. And lastly, this is the first episode since Halloween, so I want to wish y'all all hopefully you had a fantastic and happy, safe Halloween. You know what I did on Halloween, just incidentally, I went and watched Halloween, the actual I think it was nineteen seventy six version, the very first Halloween. I hadn't seen that since I was a kid. I went and saw that on the big screen. One of the theaters here in my local area was actually showing it, and I had a ton of people in there. I forgot how good that very first Halloween was. That's what I did. But hopefully whatever you did, it was safe and you had a lot of fun. And until next time for exposed scandalous files of the elite, I'm your host, Jim Chapman, much love,