ELIZABETH NELSON:
In January 2021, I was a preschool teacher, working part-time, three days a week. That Thursday morning, I was getting ready to go to an appointment.

[Doorbell sound]

A man and a woman stood on my front porch. They pulled out badges and introduced themselves. FBI.

I was not shocked, I knew why they were there. I felt a moment of anger, realizing who had sent them, but that emotion faded quickly.

This was an opportunity. I was eager to talk to anyone who might listen. I knew something was wrong and I wanted people to know about it. Maybe the FBI could help. I had nothing to hide.

The FBI wanted to talk to me because in 2021, I wasn’t just a preschool teacher. I was also an elected member of my local City Council. I had just watched a majority of my colleagues give in to pressure, reversing a policy that city staff had recommended just six months earlier. I felt the same pressure, but did not give in to it. Years later, I learned that the person pressuring us was a twice-convicted felon.

[MUSIC]

This is the story of Heidi. She’s the reason the FBI wanted to talk to me. In the last forty years, Heidi has misappropriated money from individuals, banks, businesses, and governments that trusted her.

Heidi knew how to get what she wanted from elected leaders. This was not her first rodeo.

I’ve spent the last year visiting libraries and public archives in three states. I’ve talked to dozens of people who knew Heidi decades before I ever met her.

My name is Elizabeth Nelson. From 2018 to 2022, I served on Ann Arbor City Council. That experience taught me a lot. Mostly, I learned: people will say just about anything if they think you’ll believe it. This is HOLLOW HYPE.

I’ve always been interested in government. In college, I had a summer internship in Washington DC. writing up summaries of congressional hearings. To me, that work felt exciting and important. A few years after that, I graduated law school and passed the bar exam. I never practiced law but I used that education to advocate on issues I cared about.

[MUSIC “Hail to the Victors”]

My family moved to Ann Arbor in 2004.

For years, friends urged me to pay closer attention to what was going on in our city government. Several people suggested I run for City Council. I didn’t feel qualified. Ann Arbor is a place where Townies have lived here for generations, everyone in the family earning degrees at the U of M. I hadn’t lived here long enough. I hadn’t even gone to the U of M. I also figured that the people on City Council must have a lot of knowledge and experience, more than me. What did I know? Anyway, I was busy with other things.

In the spring of 2018, Ann Arbor City Council argued back and forth about a contract and potential litigation. Several Council members took turns repeating the same statement: this issue was simple and straightforward, the choice was obvious.

[2018 meeting recording]

COUNCIL MEMBER ZACH ACKERMAN:
We get to make that decision tonight. I think It’s as simple as that and I think the dollars and cents make sense

COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE GRAND:
This is… this couldn’t be more straightforward

COUNCIL MEMBER KIRK WESTPHAL:
I see only downsides to not controlling this property

ELIZABETH NELSON:
They were dismissive of colleagues who raised questions and concerns.

COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE GRAND:
In spite of efforts to make this sound convoluted or speculative, This is really straightforward.

COUNCIL MEMBER KIRK WESTPHAL:
To me, there is no downside to reacquiring this property

ELIZABETH NELSON:
A friend urged me to watch this meeting. Both the contract and related litigation were public records. I read those documents first, then I watched the Council meeting. What I heard from the Council Members did not match what I had just read. The issue was not simple or straightforward and there were definitely downsides.

I sent emails to the Council Members and asked them: had they read the legal complaint? had they looked at all the terms of the contract, the reasons for the litigation? One Council Member replied and suggested we have coffee.

[Background noise of coffeeshop]

At a local cafe, I asked him directly: Did he understand what was in the documents? His response startled me.

Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe you should talk to the city attorney. He explains all of this to us. It sounds like you should talk to him, he could explain it to you.

That answer convinced me to run for City Council.

I wasn’t any less qualified than anyone else. I had a law degree. I wasn’t intimidated by documents and I would take the time to read them, at least. I decided to run for office before I had any strong convictions about policy. One thing I did know: local leaders should understand the complexity of the issues they vote on. In short, they should at least read the documents.

In my campaign for City Council, I learned that most of our community knew very little about the local government.

Our educated city could access plenty of information about federal policy, but city policy was harder to find. Like a lot of places, our local newspaper covered a fraction of what it once did. Politics in Washington DC were more visible to us than politics at City Hall. Some residents held strong opinions but had few facts to support those opinions. I studied meeting minutes to try and figure out who was right. It wasn’t clear.

Far too many residents were persuaded by whatever message was repeated the most.

[Typing on a computer, sound effects of posting/sending messages]

Online, we were seeing the same toxic strategies that had proved so effective in national politics: distortions repeated with insults and snark. On local issues, social media was getting louder and more vicious, among folks who spread talking points instead of substance. Facts did not matter.

In 2018, I had big ideas about our local democracy and how to make it better. I would do my homework and ask questions. I would not pretend something was simple when it wasn’t. I would help more residents engage with the substance of policy, ahead of our meetings and before I voted on them. I would do everything I could to make my own record visible to everyone. People should know how I voted, that should be easy for everyone to track. Our political debates would be more serious and substantive if facts were more accessible and available for everyone to see. If my voting record was out in the open, no one would be able to distort or mischaracterize it, right?

I was very naive.

[MUSIC]

I had only served on City Council for a few months when I first met Heidi. She owned property in Ann Arbor, including several homes on the same street. She planned to combine the lots and build something new.

The site plan for her project, the Henry, would be voted on by City Council.

The Henry project was located in a small residential neighborhood just a few blocks south of the university campus. That neighborhood was a mix of student rentals, public housing, and only a few resident homeowners. The Henry would be about a ten minute walk from Michigan Stadium, the biggest football stadium in the world.

Heidi reached out and asked to meet with me to talk about it. I remember walking into a conference room and being handed a coffee before I sat down.

[Papers shuffling]

Heidi presented the plans for the Henry, a residential project, she said, for young urban professionals.

She rattled off all the wonderful things she had done to be a good neighbor. She had registered a neighborhood association with the city. Her project would host a car-sharing service, and it would be available to everyone in the neighborhood. This service was meant to address concerns about too many cars and not enough parking.

I told Heidi that I wasn’t actually concerned about cars or parking. The location of her project was so central, so accessible to shopping and campus, I expected that a lot of the residents could easily live there without a car. I was baffled by her claim that the Henry would be occupied by young urban professionals. The Henry had six bedroom units, which made sense as student housing. Some of the neighbors might not want more student housing, but it made sense in that location and I supported it. We needed more student housing.

Heidi emphasized that the Henry was not intended for students. She insisted that her market was young urban professionals. I remember joking with her that she should just admit that it was student housing. We needed housing for students and it made sense as student housing. She was adamant. Young urban professionals were her market.

[MUSIC]

Heidi attended middle school and high school in Ann Arbor. She was part of the graduating class of 1980. That class included John Harbaugh. My friend Will knew her.

WILL HATHAWAY:
I first met Heidi when she was Heidi Ditchendorf. She became close friends with my sister, I think in junior high school. So that's when I first became acquainted with Heidi.

We reconnected via Facebook. I think that's how a lot of people find people that they haven't been in touch with. Heidi reached out during the 2018 election period. I really just wasn't even aware of what had happened with her. It was sort of a surprise. I hadn't really reconnected with her since our high school days.

It started out small, like comments on conversations, threads on Facebook, and then her sort of explaining who she was because her name had changed from Heidi Ditchendorf to… I think she was… actually, I'm not even sure what she was going by then. I think it was maybe Heidi Mitchell in 2018. So she explained who she was, a little bit of context and said she would like to get together, like to reconnect.

She invited me to lunch. She was sort of like how I expected, because Heidi was always sort of an engaging person. She hoped to glean information from me. It wasn’t just that she wanted to reconnect, that she had a purpose to reconnecting. She asked me lots of questions and sought advice about, in particular, how to approach two members of City Council who represented the Fourth Ward. Elizabeth Nelson and Jack Eaton were the council members at that point. Heidi had this project that she was very excited about and she shared information with me and it did seem like a very interesting, different kind of project.

The project was called the Henry, I think because it was in that neighborhood around Henry Street. And the units called for I think maybe six people to be living together. It struck me as being sort of like co-housing apartments. The way that she described it was creating kind of an intentional sort of little community of young adults, young professionals. That was the sort of market that she was aiming for. People who were starting out in their careers couldn't necessarily afford a house, but didn't want to live in a student neighborhood necessarily.

I've seen developments fail because there was a dissonance between the developer's perspective and the local community. Heidi didn't seem like she had that disconnect. She seemed to be very attuned to the local community and she seemed to be, in the context of meeting with me, she seemed to be trying to be better attuned to sort of glean more information and tread carefully in approaching different officials in the city government.

She, like lots of developers, was trying to line up all of the players that were necessary to support her project, whatever it was that she was trying to do.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
When City council considered the Henry, i voted in support of it:

[2019 meeting recording]

COUNCIL MEMBER ELIZABETH NELSON:
I'm gonna support this project 'cause I think it's appropriate, it's near enough to downtown. Look, this is a legitimate car-free lifestyle. The 66 residents who move into this place are not going to need cars. Not all 66 of them. I'm hopeful about that and I just feel like this is a really good example of a mid-density development that's central to the city and is not going to be disruptive- I’m hopeful that it’ won’t be disruptive =- so I feel okay about supproting it

ELIZABETH NELSON:
The day after City Council approved it, Heidi told the local newspaper that the Henry project was available for either short term or long term rental. I knew what that meant. I had voted to approve 66 bedrooms of Airbnb just a few blocks from Michigan Stadium. No one was likely to live there year round, not students and definitely not young urban professionals

WILL HATHAWAY:
She said that—I remember that she and her partner had bought other properties in the neighborhood sort of near Yost Ice Arena, and that some of them were Airbnb rentals. But this was different. She made a distinction between those and this project called the Henry, which is much larger and new construction. It wasn't sort of taking an existing building and converting it into a different type of rental. This was intentional sort of creating a new model, I guess, for residential in Ann Arbor.

Hearing that it was the pivot occurred to Airbnb almost immediately after approval, it does seem a little bit like that maybe that was their idea all along. That's not how that's not how Heidi talked about it when I met with her. She wasn't talking about it as an Airbnb. She was talking about it as apartments, but with a different kind of living arrangement. That's why to me it sounded sort of like a kind of a modified co-housing.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
I eventually learned that Heidi hadn’t just lied to me and Will, she had lied to the City Planning commission. Before City Council considered the project, neighbors had spoken out at the planning commission, warning them that Heidi was converting long term housing into short term rentals, or Airbnb.

[2018 meeting recording]

PUBLIC COMMENTER:
So is this gonna be really 66 rentals
or is it gonna be a 66 room hotel?

COUNCIL MEMBER ZACH ACKERMAN:
We heard from one of the neighbors that currently there's a property being used for Airbnb, so I guess I put the question directly to the petitioner, if I could. If you could speak into the record.

HEIDI:
I'd love to actually talk about what the actual plan is, if that's appropriate. Please.So –

COUNCIL MEMBER ZACH ACKERMAN:
What's the intended market?

HEIDI:
It's not Airbnb.
So we're looking at people that possibly grad school, but so yes, students to that extent, but definitely not undergrads, and definitely not Airbnb.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
When I realized that Heidi had lied to the Planning commission, I was shocked. This meeting was recorded, it was on youtube. I talked to a City attorney about it. Was there anything we could do?

The City attorney looked at me like I was an idiot and he was blunt. “Don’t you know? Developers lie.”

In 2019, I knew very little about Heidi.. I just knew I didn’t trust her.

[MUSIC, commercial]
“And what the world should be…
Wherever there are investment opportunities, Merrill Lynch is there with the help you need to make the most of them. Because at Merrill Lynch, we believe your world should know no boundaries.
Should know no boundaries…”

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi’s first job after college was as a financial advisor in San Francisco. In 1983, Heidi played field hockey at the University of Michigan. Three years later, she was indicted for making unauthorized transfers from client accounts at Merrill Lynch.

In 1987, Heidi went to prison on federal charges of fraud.

After prison, Heidi moved to southern Ohio and reinvented herself. She convinced a local mayor to appoint her as the city’s development director. She announced a business and convinced City and County governments to invest in it. Members of Congress helped Heidi get millions in federal funds. A State Governor helped her get more money. Heidi’s business never delivered on its promises. Twenty years after her prison sentence in California, Heidi was indicted in federal court again. Twelve counts were eventually reduced to one: conspiracy to commit money laundering.

In 2011, Heidi negotiated a last minute plea agreement to avoid prison. Five years later, she reinvented herself again, in my town.

In Ann Arbor, elected leaders embraced Heidi as a community partner. City Council members hosted and attended parties at Heidi’s restaurant. Heidi travelled to conferences with City staff and bragged about their collaborations. A State legislator used her official letterhead, advocating for Heidi’s business plans. Local business associations gave her publicity as an expert, based on a resume largely invented. Heidi boasted that she worked with elected leaders “every day.” Heidi joined the most exclusive social clubs and casually referenced her friendships with local billionaires.

In March 2025, student journalists at the Michigan Daily wrote a story about Heidi. Their story included public records of her criminal history in California, Ohio, and West Virginia. They identified Heidi as one of the largest political donors to city leaders and outlined how she had influenced policy at City Hall.

WILL HATHAWAY:
When I read the Michigan Daily article last year, I was surprised. The description it gave of Heidi's career and the legal troubles that she'd encountered didn't line up with either my past experience of Heidi when she was younger or with the kind of enthusiastic, energetic local developer that I met over lunch.

So I was surprised. I was a little, I guess, alarmed, maybe. It made me want to go back and sort of reevaluate the communications that I had had with Heidi and… did I miss something?

The number of name changes that she had, for example, that just seemed sort of odd to me.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
In the last six months, I’ve shared the Michigan Daily article with people who knew Heidi thirty years ago.

[MUSIC]

LARRY MINCKS:
That's Heidi. That's how she moves. That's where she gravitates to is to, you know, public office, and sometimes it's easy to get easy money from them.
She's a con artist. I mean, that's all you can say, you know. And there are people that make their living just like that, and that's her.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi has spent almost four decades chasing political power and influence across multiple states. This is the story of how she did it. This is Hollow Hype