Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, and this week on Pushing Up Lilies, we’re unpacking a deeply unsettling story that shook a quiet New Hampshire community. On August 18, 2025, mother Emily Long allegedly committed a terrible crime after reportedly embezzling more than $660,000 from her employer, all while her husband was battling aggressive brain cancer. What drove her to make such desperate choices? How did the stress of caregiving push her to the edge? In this episode, I walk through the timeline leading up to that fateful decision, explore what we know about her motive, and discuss the emotional fallout of a family pushed too far. This case touches on grief, survival, and when the weight of responsibility becomes unbearable. Grab your headphones and let’s dig into this heartbreaking and complicated tale. * Listener discretion is advised.
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00:06
Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
00:24
Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey guys, we're back for another week Pushing Up Lilies. I'm excited to let you know that I was accepted as a creator for Like to Know. If you're familiar with the format, you can go on to the app.
00:45
It's a free shopping platform. It connects consumers with influencers and creators. And so I'll be sharing my favorite products, kind of a day in the life, things that I wear, things that I like, ways that I decorate, all kinds of cool things.
01:02
It kind of gives my followers another way to connect with me, which I love. And so I'll be sharing videos, also just photos of items that I have purchased and that I like so that I can share them with everyone.
01:18
I want to thank everyone who has bought tickets for the first annual Pushing Up Lilies murder mystery dinner that is close to selling out. So again, if you are interested, please, please, please go on eventbrite.com and purchase your tickets because I have a limited number and I can't add seats.
01:39
I'm really looking forward to that though, October 11th. And I would like to do it every year. We're just going to play it by ear, see how this one goes. And hopefully it will be a yearly event. We would have it probably a different place every year.
01:53
Of course, the thing would be different every year. Anyway, it hasn't been that bad at the medical examiner's office. this week. Thank you Denton. We've had some suicides though which is always so sad and we don't start seeing them heavily normally until October, November, December because of course they're pretty prevalent during the holidays.
02:16
A lot of people are depressed because of lack of money or lack of family or both. And so it's just a sad time of year for a lot of people. That's why I encourage you if you know someone who doesn't have family, maybe reach out to them this year, invite them over, invite them to be with your family so they're not alone.
02:38
I know that's hard sometimes because they're not always the people you want to be around but I just think there are a lot of people who are alone and a lot of people who need others. So anyway, again recording, sitting in my closet, drinking my Diet Dr.
02:53
Pepper. That's how I start the day. I didn't get my sonic drink this morning so I had to settle for a can. But I love Sonic Diet Dr. Peppers with extra vanilla. They're delicious. And if you haven't tried it, I highly encourage it because they're the absolute best.
03:08
Love, vanilla, Diet Dr. Pepper. So again, not busy at the medical examiner's office. Not crazy busy anyway. I don't want to say not busy because that's going to jinx us. We just have seen a big increase in the amount of suicides.
03:24
The podcast actually was one of the sponsors at the North Texas Overdose Awareness Day, which took place last Sunday on the square. While I want to use the word fun, it was a very somber event. And I'm going to post a video on my Pushing Up Lilies Facebook page, but they have kind of like a graveyard of all the different people and all ages, y'all, who died of overdose.
03:51
And many of these were accidental. They took one pill, and we've always heard the saying one pill can kill. They took one pill that was laced. And something that I found very interesting. At the event, there was a gentleman talking who had actually overdosed four times.
04:09
And he is not using drugs now, but he got up in front of all these people and spoke about his struggle and how he said he's not recovered. He will always be in recovery, which was very impressive, you know, to hear him say.
04:23
And then also they had told us that, I want to say it was milligrams, but that one packet of sugar is equivalent to 100 milligrams of fentanyl. You can die by taking two milligrams. So when you think about 100 milligrams being a pack of sugar, think how small two milligrams would be.
04:43
It's crazy to think how little that it would take to kill someone. So that was definitely eye-opening for me. I had no idea, I know about things before where there's fentanyl present. Of course, we always wear gloves, but I also carry Narcan in.
04:59
my bag because I may need to use it on a solo co-worker. I may need to use it on a police officer. I just feel like it's important to have it with you at all times. Can't get overly hot. Can't get overly cold.
05:12
I wouldn't leave it in the car. I think we talked about this last week. If you want a box reach out to me and I'll mail it to you. I have boxes of two and I just feel like everyone needs to carry it.
05:23
Still 90% effective after the expiration date. I just think it's very important. Heaven forbid any of us would have to use it but if we do it would be there. I want to talk to you this week about Emily Long.
05:38
So this is a story that has completely shaken a small New England town and the story has rippled across the country. Emily was a 34 year old mother, wife, and employee. She had a job at the time who seemed to be holding it all together.
05:56
Until in the morning of August 18th, when tragedy struck inside the family's home in Madbury, New Hampshire. Now police arrived to the scene to find Emily and her husband Ryan and two of their children dead from gunshot wounds.
06:13
The youngest child who was just a toddler was actually found alive. So as shocking as this tragedy was, what surfaced afterwards has kind of added layers of complexity, allegations of embezzlement, hidden financial problems, and a family already struggling with Ryan's devastating brain cancer diagnosis.
06:36
So today we're gonna peel back the layers of this case and we're gonna explore what happened in the long home and what Emily's employer discovered and then the questions that still remain. So Madbury, New Hampshire is a quiet town, fewer than 2,000 residents.
06:55
I grew up in a town of like, I don't know, 800 probably. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everybody's business and that's kind of something you have to understand when you move to a small town.
07:07
But it's the kind of a place where you always think something bad can never happen. It'll never happen here, we're in a small town, we're kind of immune to all that big city trauma. But in the morning of August 18, police responded to the long home and found a chilling scene.
07:26
Ryan Long, 48, was dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Two of their children, Parker, who was eight, and Ryan, who was six, were also shot and killed by single gunshot wounds to the head. Emily Long herself was also dead from what police later determined to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
07:50
Now the toddler survived. Neighbors reported shock so they were really surprised. They said the long seemed like a typical family. They never fought. There weren't any visible issues. But in the police investigation, they found that there was this facade of normalcy and it was beginning to crack.
08:13
Emily Long wasn't entirely silent about her struggles though. I don't know if many of you are on TikTok, but she was on TikTok, her bio read Brain Cancer Wife, and she documented life as a caregiver for her husband.
08:28
He'd recently been diagnosed with brain cancer. He had glioblastoma. It's an aggressive form of brain cancer. And usually the survival rate with glioblastoma is about 12 to 15 months. She was caring for her husband and had two young children.
08:45
And so it just sounds hard. Even not knowing the details, it sounds hard. And on camera, she admitted to being depressed. She admitted to being exhausted. She said that there was a lot of pressure with balancing motherhood and caretaking.
09:04
She talked a lot about how she felt hopeless. There were many nights that she didn't sleep, but the struggles were heavier behind closed doors. Ryan's diagnosis put a lot of financial strain on the family and emotional strain as well.
09:23
As you can imagine, just think if your spouse or anyone in your family was diagnosed with glioblastoma. The survival rate is low. It just puts a lot of stress on you financially. Obviously, could it work?
09:37
She was working, kind of writing a household, taking care of him, taking care of three children. Ryan, the neighbors, the friends, nobody knew that Emily was hiding another secret. So Ryan, when he was working, worked as a psychologist and he worked at a local middle school and was very well liked.
09:59
Emily worked for Wingets, which was a local chicken chain owned by a gentleman by the name of Derek Fisher. To many, it seemed like just a steady job. Then July of 2024, Fisher began to notice some strange things going on.
10:19
There was a string of handwritten checks being deposited directly into Emily's personal bank account. The company's accountant kind of started digging deeper and over $660,000 was gone from the bank account.
10:36
The embezzlement stretched all the way back to January of 2023. So this had been going on for quite some time. On June 18th, the nets this year, Fisher noticed a large number of checks were actually written out to Emily.
10:51
So she didn't even try to hide. She didn't even make it out to a fake person or anything. She actually made them out to her and deposited them directly into her account. He confronted her and asked her to provide bank statements.
11:04
And she did on August 5th. Again, this is a little over a month ago. Pages were missing. When Fisher asked the bank about it, they said that the documents had literally been manipulated. So she had made changes.
11:20
There were missing pages and all kinds of things. And we all know with AI and even with Photo Room and all different apps that there are now, you can retouch photos and make them say things that they didn't say.
11:35
So she was supposed to meet him on August 10th at the bank. And then she sent him a text that day saying that she was resigning. but that she would stay on and work remote. How nice of her. I'll work remotely even though I just sold $660,000 from you.
11:52
If you want me to stay on, like don't beg, I'm here. Really. Then she told him that he could terminate her. She gave him permission. You can terminate me if you're not happy with either of those options.
12:04
If me quitting isn't okay, or if me working remote is okay, you can fire me. He called the police after she said she couldn't meet him at the bank until later in the week. So obviously she was putting off the meeting.
12:18
She didn't want to be there. She knew she was going to be caught. She knew that she would probably be arrested as she should be, and she didn't want to go. So she avoided it at all costs. So he did call the police.
12:32
She had been taking cash deposits and writing checks to herself since January of 2023. So not only the checks, but also stealing cash that had been brought or paid to the company. Fisher said, and you know, you always wonder, why does one person have so much responsibility?
12:52
Why wasn't she being watched closer? Because his business had three locations. He's super busy. He thought he could trust her and things were running fine. And I mean, I get it, you know, as a business owner, it is super, super hard to find somebody that you can trust and will run a business.
13:10
The way you would run your business. I'm sure that he had no obvious issues and obvious problems until this was discovered. And that was like the straw that broke the camel's back. But this is a very catastrophic for a small business to lose $660,000.
13:30
So it's basically, Emily could not run this. Like it was going to catch up with her no matter what. What exactly happened the days before this murder suicide? Investigators are still actually trying to piece it together.
13:44
There's no single stressor that explains the tragedy. But there's a storm of factors that contributed. Ryan's terminal cancer diagnosis, I mean, we know how hard that can be on a family. Or we can only imagine, hopefully we never have to know.
14:02
But Emily's growing depression, which she made perfectly clear on TikTok publicly. The threat of criminal charges for embezzlement, because she knew she had taken the money. Even though no one in the public really knew yet, she knew she had.
14:18
And she knew that there was a threat of aftermath. And then, of course, the financial instability. Maybe she just used the $660,000. I don't know how much of it was gone or how much of it had been used.
14:31
But she was using it to help her family survive. I'm not justifying it. But she was using it to help her family survive, because her husband wasn't able to work. And there was a lot going on. a lot of that was probably gone.
14:45
I don't know how much was done but on social media again Emily hinted at her despair in her private life the walls were literally closing in. On August 18th those tensions reached their breaking point and Emily shot Ryan then Parker then little Ryan before turning the gun on herself.
15:06
Now police have not released details on the weapon used or how it was obtained we don't know if it was hers we don't know if it was his we don't know if it was stolen like we don't know. The surviving toddler was unharmed miraculously unharmed and was placed in protective care.
15:26
The community of Madbury held vigils mourning a family lost and a child left behind. For Derek Fisher the business owner who uncovered Emily's theft the revelations were bittersweet but after the murders and this is very this is amazing after the murders Fisher told reporters that he no longer cared about recovering the stolen money but he believed that everything that was left should go to the surviving child.
15:54
Now that is a real man right there. I don't know how much is left hopefully there's something but he showed an amazing amount of grace when he said that the rest of what was left could go to that child.
16:08
It was a rare moment of grace amid tragedy there was a lot of secrecy and a lot of despair going on. The Attorney General's office continues to investigate they stress that families like the longs they often face multiple overlapping crises a lot going on in their lives at one time depressed financial strain terminal illness and all these pressures don't operate in isolation like you can't be by yourself and try to take care of everything thing.
16:44
Neighbors, meanwhile, are left with all kinds of haunting questions. Could we have prevented this? Was Emily seeking help? Did we miss signs? I don't know how many close friends she had. I mean, she is sound like voiced a lot of her despair on the internet.
17:03
I'm sure she had a lot of people that were following her that voice concerns and showed empathy for her situation. But obviously, that's not enough. Again, she was very isolated trying to care for her family.
17:18
Again, not justifying this whatsoever. But people deal with distressing situations like this in so many different ways. And you never know how you're going to deal with it until it happens to you. The Long Family story isn't just about crime.
17:36
It's about hidden battles that families fight behind closed doors every day. and it's about the devastating weight that untreated depression and financial secrets and the ripple of illness can cause on a family and an individual.
17:58
While we might never fully know why Emily made the choices she made, what we do know is that three lives were lost, actually four, because she shot herself. A community is grieving, and one child is going to have to grow up with questions that may never be answered.
18:19
So tragedies like this do kind of remind us that silence can be deadly. So again, if you have a friend that you don't hear from, someone that you know might be struggling, or even that you think might be struggling because they normally call you, or they've been super quiet, or they normally post on Facebook and they haven't been, reach out to them.
18:38
The holidays again are coming up, so reach out to your friends that you know have no family. Let them know that you care because you could save their life. It might be all they need, and you could save other lives as well.
18:52
The three-year-old toddler that was spared, we all know he's going to have, he or she, I think I've read somewhere that it was a he, is going to have long-term repercussions. What he's been through is going to also increase that risk of challenges with trust and attachment and emotional regulation.
19:13
He's going to struggle probably with questions of identity, questions of belonging, where do I belong, my family left me, especially when he gets old enough to really understand the reality of what took place.
19:25
The impact is going to heavily depend on the support that this toddler receives. He could be resilient, but he's going to have to get the right care, and he's going to have to get therapy, and he's going to have to be nurtured because this tragedy is always going to be a part of it.
19:43
of his story. Emily mentioned in her last TikTok that her youngest son's age meant that he did not understand what was happening to their father and what was happening in their family and the struggles that they were going through like her other children did.
19:59
And so perhaps that's why she spared him. Perhaps she felt like he didn't fully understand what was going on and that he would be okay if she spared him. Not thinking that he is going to be left with emotional issues and challenges.
20:18
Now the GoFundMe account that was started for the toddler has raised about I guess last time I checked about $143,000. So I'm sure it has gone way up by now. I'm sure it has probably maxed out and gone over the expected amount.
20:39
That in addition to the money that Mr. Fisher left the toddler, which I'd be really really curious to know how much that was, that was actually left? How much that she had gone through? I mean did she choose to kill everybody because it was gone? Like, I don't know, it just kind of makes you wonder what pushed her over the edge? Because she had been going through this for a couple years, it makes you wonder what finally pushed her over the edge. Oh well, we know that… Fisher finally called her out here recently in August, and she probably knew at that point that she would be arrested. And if she's arrested there'd be no one to care for her kids and her family and felt like that that was the only answer. This story… just I mean, it devastates me. You know, we've seen similar situations many times, it's not due to illness and financial struggles, a lot of times it's just due to mental illness. I mean, I don't mean like cancer, but it's due to like mental illness or divorce in families. You know, if I can't have you, no one can. Or, you're not going to get married again and give my kids to someone else, so I'm going to kill you and the kids and then myself. We see it a lot, and it's terrible. It's a terrible situation and again, I mean, these people are suffering and don't have anyone to talk to. And something she was using, TikTok as her outlet, which is great, but I think if we all like kind of listen to what people are saying and kind of take it seriously when they sound desperate, when they sound like they're in despair, and they truly sound like they're struggling. Some people aren't just wanting attention, some people really, really do need help. Anyway, this is going to be kind of a short week for me, I'm off work today I'm back in the medical examiners office tomorrow. We shall see how the rest of the week goes. Then I'm in the med spa, Thursday through Saturday, and then this week I will be at a conference. So, I'll be going to Denver to the aesthetic management Partners conference, and it’s kind of exciting.
22:46
It's very high energy, which I love about it I have purchased products from this company and named by the owners of med spas who have purchased from them to come So anyway looking forward to that. So that's kind of what's going on again.
22:59
Don't forget to follow and Subscribe to my Youtube channel. I have not been active on that channel, but I plan to be soon So I'm trying to get followers its brains body bags and bedside manner my like to know is Lipstick and luminol and then don't forget to share let your friends know Don't forget you can go online and order the subscription box.
23:24
I have gotten some new subscriptions this week, which I'm super excited about Getting ready to curate a new box with new items that I think you're gonna love and then I do also have a booth Inside the McCart Street Mercantile in Chrome, Texas.
23:38
So there's a podcast booth in there some of the things on my Murder Merch store on the website are actually available there. So if you live in the area, I highly encourage you to go by there. There's a lot of cute items, many handmade that are great, great gifts.
23:54
So McCart Street, Mercantile, Chrome, Texas, and they also have a website. So you can order online if you want to check it out. Anyway, I hope you'll have an amazing week. I look forward to talking to you soon and take care.
24:06
Bye, y'all. Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies. If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast. This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
24:22
Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.