PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — In a popular Netflix true crime series, four women tell traumatic stories about their encounters with an Oregon man who fatally shot himself after a police standoff last year.
Titled “Dating the Devil,” the season two premiere of “Worst Ex Ever” focuses on 36-year-old Benjamin Obadiah Foster — and the women he is believed to have victimized over more than a decade.
The episode opens with an interview from Angie Milner, who contacted the Grants Pass Police Department after learning her friend Justine Siemens needed to go to the hospital in January 2023.
Siemens, who was 39 at the time, was hospitalized in critical condition. The 911 call spurred a week-long national manhunt for Foster who had a criminal history of abusing and torturing women.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for over 33 years and I've seen very few scenes as horrific and terrible as this one was,” Grants Pass Criminal Investigations Division Lieutenant Jeff Hattersley said in an on-camera interview.
Siemens spoke toward the end of the episode, noting she hadn’t seen any red flags in the two months that she had been dating the suspect. But when she searched his name after he asked for clean urine for a urinalysis test, she found previous reports involving Foster’s violent past in Las Vegas.
Siemens told her shared boss with Foster’s about his record, which she said prompted his firing from a local bar. She alleged that is what pushed the suspect to hold her captive for three days.
Two Las Vegas women told similar stories.
One woman, referred to as Amber, recalled meeting the suspect in 2012 when they both worked at a hotel day club. They moved in together the following year. Amber alleged Foster abused her once while they were in a relationship and twice after they had broken up.
Fellow Las Vegas woman Jaimee said she met Foster in September 2017, and housed him the next year after he lost his job. According to Jaimee, the suspect had attacked her multiple times by September 2019 and she still felt unsafe even after filing a restraining order against him.
She alleged Foster shaved her head and held her captive for two weeks before she was able to escape to a local hospital and report the case to authorities.
Jaimee chose not to face Foster in trial. The local district attorney then combined the suspect’s cases involving both Las Vegas women. He pleaded guilty to smaller domestic violence charges and was sentenced to a maximum of 30 months in prison — although he was given time-served credit for the almost two years he had already spent in custody.
Law enforcement notified the public of Foster’s previous charges when he was on the run in January 2023. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that month, while officers attempted to get him to surrender at Siemens’ residence.
“In my opinion, I think that the justice system here did a great disservice to Justine,” Amber said. “Ben was obviously getting increasingly more abusive and increasingly more dangerous. If they would have taken my story and Jaimee’s story more seriously, they could have prevented this from happening to her and they could’ve saved two lives.”
According to Netflix, the Las Vegas Police Department and Clark County District Attorney (in Nevada) declined to speak about Foster.
“Worst Ex Ever” is currently the third-most popular show on the streaming service.
