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The Neighbor Who Stole a Life: How Cheryl Vanished Inside Her Own Home · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of May eleventh, twenty nineteen, a road
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: grater operator named Nicole Thompson stopped her machine on Halcott
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Mill Road because something was wrong with a wallet. It
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: was propped open against a reflector post, contents fanned toward
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the lane, arranged so that oncoming headlights would catch it.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Every card, every bill, every insurance slip was gone. The
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: only thing left inside was a patient id from Millhaven's
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Surgical Associates photo window facing the road, bearing the name
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Linda Webb. That wallet was not waiting to be found.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: It was waiting to be read. Forty minutes later, a
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: silver Sedan sat nose down in a drainage culvert thirty
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: yards further along the same road.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Linda Webb was inside.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: She was thirty two years old, hypothermic, and wearing a
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: fresh abdominal dressing no more than four days old.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: When Deputy Curtis.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Farley reached her window and asked what had happened, she
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: answered him. She answered clearly, calmly, and in complete sentences.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Farley would later describe her voice as the sound of
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a person reciting lines they had been given. She did
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: not name Roger Owens, not that morning, not for three
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: more weeks. What makes this case unlike almost anything in
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: the record, is not what happened.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: On Halcott Mill Road.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: It is everything that happened before it. Three years of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: scheduled appointments, sequential procedures, carefully documented charts, and a woman
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: who entered a surgeon's office with a benign lump on
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: her forearm and emerged seventeen procedures later surgically and chemically fragile.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: The road was not where it started.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: According to the psychologist who later worked with Linda, Halcott
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Mill Road had been the intended ending before any of this.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Linda Webb was the kind of person who had routines,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: and she kept them. Every Thursday evening she went to
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Elroy's Diner on the south side of Milhaven, table seven,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: the same order, the same time, reliable enough that the server,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: a woman named bev Ostrotski, simply put it in when
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: she saw Linda's car in the lot. Linda had worked
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: as a billing coordinator in Garrison County long enough to
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: have furnished her apartment the same one four plus years
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: without once leaving a drawer empty. Her sister Diane described
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: her as methodical, steady, someone who called back and was
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: never late. In March of twenty sixteen, Linda noticed a
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: small lump on her left forearm. Her primary care physician
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: referred her to Milhaven's Surgical Associates. The referral was routine.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: The lump was benign, a lopoma, the most ordinary soft
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: tissue finding a surgeon sees. A standard consultation runs fifteen minutes.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Roger Owens kept Linda in that room for forty five.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Owens was fifty one that year, board certified, recently divorced,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: with no prior disciplinary record at Milhaven's Surgical Associates or
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: anywhere else in the public record. He noted what he
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: called unusual tissue density around the lopomas site and ordered
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: an ultrasound. He scheduled a follow up when pathology confirmed
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: the mass was benign. He did not leave the result
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: with the front desk. He called Linda himself. There is
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: nothing illegal in a surgeon calling a patient. There is
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: nothing irregular in ordering an ultrasound for an ambiguous presentation.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Each individual's step examined alone, looks like careful medicine. That
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: is precisely the problem. By spring of twenty seventeen, one
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: year after the first appointment, Linda had been seen by
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Owens every three.
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: To four weeks.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Five procedures had been completed. Her Thursday dinners at Elroy's
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: had stopped. Bev Ostrowsky noticed the empty chair, but assumed
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: a schedule change, the ordinary explanation for an ordinary absence.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: What Diane Webb noticed was harder to name. She met
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Owens once briefly and came away with a feeling she
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: could not immediately articulate. He had positioned himself, she said later,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: as the only person who held Linda's full medical picture.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Every question Diane tried to raise went back to him,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Every reassurance came from him. The picture, as he described it,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: was always just complicated enough to require another appointment. By
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: fall of twenty seventeen, Linda had begun to ask questions
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: of her own. She questioned one of the recommended procedures,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: not loudly, not dramatically, just asked whether it was necessary.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Owens documented the exchange in her chart. He described her
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: as emotionally unstable. That notation would follow her through sixteen
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: more entries. The billing records at Milhaven's surgical associates would
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: later tell their own story, But that story required a
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: subpoena to surface, and subpoenas require suspicion, and suspicion requires
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: someone to look. For nearly three years, no one looked.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Linda went to her appointments. The procedures continued, and on
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: a Thursday evening in May of twenty nineteen, instead of
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: driving to Elroy's.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: She drove to Halcott Mill Road.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: The question that would consume the investigation was not whether
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Roger Owens had done this. The question was how he
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: had done it and whether anyone else had survived it.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: The billing records arrived in response to a subpoena. Before
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: investigators could read them, they had to know what they
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: were looking for, And before they knew what they were
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: looking for, they had to believe that what happened on
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Halcotmel Road had not been an accident.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: That belief began with a wallet.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Deputy Curtis Farley had worked nineteen years in Garrison County.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: He had seen.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Wallets dropped, tossed, thrown from moving vehicles, shaken loose from
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: pockets in a panic. He had never seen one arranged.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: This wallet was open, propped upright against a reflector post,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: angled so the id window caught.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Head lights from the road.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: The cash was gone, the credit card was gone, the
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: insurance card was gone. Only one item remained, a patient
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: ID from Millhaven Surgical Associates bearing Linda Webb's photograph. Farley
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: noted the arrangement in his report. He used the word deliberate.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: He did not elaborate, because at that point there was
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: nothing to elaborate on. Forty minutes later, Linda was found
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: in a silver sedan at the bottom of a drainage
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: culvert thirty yards down the road. She was hypothermic. She
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: had a fresh abdominal dressing no more than four days old,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and when she spoke. Farley described what he heard as
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: something that troubled him more than her condition. He wrote
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: that her speech sounded like a person reciting lines they
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: had been given. She said her car broke down, a
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: stranger had stopped to help. She passed out from the
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: cold and residual anesthesia. No one was at fault. She
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: did not name Roger Owens. She would not name him
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: for three weeks. The car went to Frank Buell's garage.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: Buell was a.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Mechanic with thirty one years on similar model vehicles. The
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: alternator had failed. That by itself was not unusual. Alternators
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: fail on fifteen year old sedans with sixty three thousand miles.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: But the wiring told a different story. The insulation was
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: ubraided in a specific pattern, not cut abraided. Buell told investigators.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: The abrasion pattern suggested something had been threaded through the
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: engine compartment over a period of weeks to months, then removed.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: The failure had not happened on Halcott Mill Road. It
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: had been building for a long time before that night.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: The upbraided wiring closed one loop and opened a much
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: larger one. If the car was prepared to fail, not
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: crippled in a night, but worn down over weeks, then
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: the road was not a destination chosen on impulse, which
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: meant the text message it mattered. On the evening of
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: May seventh, twenty nineteen, Owens sent Linda a text He
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: asked her to drive to his home that night, citing
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: a scheduling conflict that prevented him from coming to her.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Records would show he had been calling her to his
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: home in that pattern for more than a year.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: She drove.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Cell tower data placed Owens's own phone on Halcott Mill
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Road at eleven forty seven. That same night, his calendar
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: showed no scheduling conflict. The text message was fabricated. The
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: conflict did not exist. Some one who held the exit
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: on Halcote Mill Road in his head already knew he
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: would not need to be elsewhere. Here is where the
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: billing records became the architecture of everything. The insurance subpoena
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: returned seventeen procedures across three years at Milhaven Surgical Associates.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: A consulting physician reviewed the sequential billing codes. Nine of
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the seventeen procedures were coded in combinations that were, in
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: that physician's word, implausible. Two panicoectomies eight months apart, a
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: hernia repair followed by a suture complication, follow up with
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: a gap so precise it looked engineered rather than discovered.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: The consulting physician said something that the investigators returned to repeatedly.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Real complications leave ragged records.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: These were too clean.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Linda had walked into Milhaven's Surgical Associates in March of
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen with a benign lipoma on her left forearm.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: She left that practice three years later, surgically and chemically fragile.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: Her body had been documented into dependency. Every chart entry
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: built on the last. Every procedure created the clinical predicate
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: for the next. That notation from fall of twenty seventeen,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: emotional instability, written by Owens, after Linda asked whether a
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: procedure was necessary, appeared again and again across sixteen subsequent entries.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: It was not a symptom he was tracking. It was
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a frame he was building. There is a particular moment
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: in this case that took investigators some time to name properly.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: It was not the wallet, It was not the ubraided wiring.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: It was the Thursday table. Bev Vestrowski had worked the
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: floor at Elroy's Diner for eleven years. She knew Linda
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Webb's order without being asked. She knew Linda's table, table seven,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: by the window, slightly away from the lunch rush. She
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: knew Linda came every Thursday, and she knew the exact
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: season the visits stopped. Of twenty seventeen. That was the
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: same season the fifth procedure was completed. When Bev was interviewed,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: she said she assumed a schedule change, a new shift
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: at work, a changed commute, any of the small ordinary
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: reasons of regular stops coming in.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: She had not thought to question it.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Neither had Diane Webb, Linda's sister, who noticed Linda becoming
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: harder to reach, but accepted the explanations Owens gave her
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: because all of the explanations came from Owens. He had
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: positioned himself, Diane said, as the only person holding Linda's
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: full medical picture. Every question Diane raised was redirected through him.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Every answer came back with a qualifier that made the
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: situation sound just complicated enough to require another appointment. Psychologist
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Theresa Graham had clinical name for that structure. Graham was
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: a coercive control specialist brought in during Linda's two day
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: in patients stay after discovery. By their fourth session together
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: on May twenty eighth of twenty nineteen, Graham had assembled
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: a timeline of her own. She told Deputy Farley on
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: June third, what happened on Halcott Mill Road had not
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: been the beginning of anything. It had been the intended ending.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: The mechanism, as Graham described it to investigators, was not
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: a sudden act. It was architectural. The first appointment, in
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: March of twenty sixteen ran forty five minutes a standard
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: appointment for a benign lopoma runs fifteen. Owens called Linda personally.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: With the pathology results.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: The results were benign, he called anyway, and at that
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: call's end he had scheduled a follow up. Each subsequent
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: step looked like medicine, and that, Graham said was precisely
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: the problem.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: A coercive system.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Built inside a legitimate framework does not look like coercion
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: at any single point of inspection. It only reveals itself
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: in aggregate, and only if someone assembles the whole picture.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Owens had made certain for three years that no one
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: else held the whole picture. That is what broke when
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: the insurance subpoena arrived. Walk the corp room backward to
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: October of twenty sixteen, eight months after the first appointment.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: The first of what would become seventeen procedures has just
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: been completed. There is nothing in the record to flag,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: nothing that does not have a clinical rationale attached to it.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: A physician with no prior disciplinary history, a patient who
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: trusts him, a billing code that insurance processed without question,
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: picture that moment as the foundation of one possible account.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: A surgeon who developed an attachment to a patient whose
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: judgment eroded across a series of increasingly unnecessary interventions, who
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: finally orchestrated a situation on Halcott Mill Road that was
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: meant to end her life and frame it as a roadside.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: Robbery gone wrong.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Step in this version is a step deeper into something
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: he could not undo. The abrasion on the wiring is
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: not a premeditated device, but the consequence of months of
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: contact with the car, visits to her apartment, access to
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: her vehicle over time. The wallet is staged in a
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: moment of panicked improvisation. That version survives exactly until you
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: look at the billing codes. Nine procedures out of seventeen
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: coded in implausible sequential combinations. A consulting physician told the
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: court this is not the record of a surgeon losing judgment.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: This is the record of a surgeon manufacturing a chart.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: The emotional instability notation appearing after the first question Linda asked,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: and then following her through sixteen more entries is not
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: a clinical observation. It is a foreclosure. It preemptively labels
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: as pathology any future resistance she might express, which means
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: the architecture was deliberate before the first procedure was finished.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And then there is the text message, not the existence
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: of it, the fabrication inside it, a scheduling conflict invented
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: on the night her car was primed to fail on
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: a road where his own cell tower placed him at
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: eleven forty seven. That is not erosion of judgment. That
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: is a script written in advance and sent to the
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: person who was supposed to disappear inside it. The strongest
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: argument against impulsive misconduct is the wiring on that silver sedan.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: Frank Buell was unambiguous. The abrasion pattern developed over weeks
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: to months. Someone with access to Linda's vehicle, a pattern
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: of visits, a pattern of trust. V had threaded something
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: through that engine compartment and removed it repeatedly over a
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: long enough period that the alternator's failure on Halcott Mill
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Road was not a malfunction.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It was a scheduled event.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Teresa Graham told investigators that coercive systems leave a specific signature.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: They do not isolate a person all at once. They
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: replaced the person's external connections one by one, substituting the
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: perpetrator's voice for every other voice, until the person has
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: no reference point outside the relationship. Linda's Thursday dinners ended
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: in spring of twenty seventeen. Her sister's questions were re
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: routed through Owen's. Her own doubts were documented as instability.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: What remained by May of twenty nineteen was a woman
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: who had entered a surgeon's office with a benign condition
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: and had been rebuilt over three years into a person
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: who could be driven to a rural road in the
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: dark and left in a culvert, and who, when she
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: was found, would recite the story she had been given.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: She said it almost worked. She did not elaborate on
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: what she meant by almost. She did not need to.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: The jury needed less than five hours. On the morning
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: after prosecutor Janet Cole read the fabricated scheduling conflict text
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: message allowed in open court, reading it once slowly without editorializing,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Roger Owens asked to speak with his attorney the next morning.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: He confessed not to a misunderstanding, not to poor professional judgment,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: to all of it. In March of twenty one, Owens
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: was convicted on every count, one count of attempted murder,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: two counts of felony assault causing bodily injury, and seventeen
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: counts of medical fraud, seventeen one for each procedure billed
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: against a body he had spent three years making dependent
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: on his decisions. The medical fraud counts carried their own
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: weight in court. A consulting physician who reviewed the billing
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: sequence described it with precise language. Real complications leave ragged records.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: These were too clean.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: Nine of seventeen procedures had been billed under diagnostically implausible
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: sequential codes. Two panicoectomies eight months apart, a hernia repaired
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: paired with an unlikely suture complication follow up. The prosecution
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: framed it as architecture. The jury agreed in under five hours.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Owens's defense had held for nine months. He claimed Linda
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: had developed an unhealthy attachment. He said her account reflected
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: the emotional instability he had carefully documented. He positioned those records,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: documents he had written during appointments he had extended in
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: a patient relationship he had cultivated as the evidence that
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: cleared him. The defense collapsed at the moment the text
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: message was read aloud. Because a scheduling conflict can be documented,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: and his calendar showed nothing there is something about the
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: collapse that matters beyond the verdict. Owens did not confess
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: when Linda survived. He did not confess when Deputy Curtis
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Farley noted the wallet arrangement. He did not confess when
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Frank Boole testified.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: About the ubraided wiring. He held through all of it.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: What broke him was a single text message, the one
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: he had sent himself inventing a reason to get Linda.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: On that road on that night.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: The lie he used to set the ending in motion
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: was the same lie that ended the defense. Three months
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: after conviction, Detective Art Pennington from an adjacent county contacted
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: the Garrison County District Attorney. Pennington had been sitting on
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: a case.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: From twenty thirteen.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: A woman named Francis Delgado had been found disoriented near
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: a rural highway. At the time, a physician had attributed
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: her condition to a medication interaction. Delgado survived, she never
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: explained why she had been on that road. Pennington's file
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: matched the method detail for detail, slow medically documented dependency
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: build up, an isolated rural road, personal property staged to
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: look like a stranger robbery. The physician of record in
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Delgado's case is not Roger owens that physician left the
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: state in twenty fourteen. The transcript does not connect the
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: two physicians as collaborators. What it confirms is the method
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: and the fact that in twenty thirteen it worked. The
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: case remains open. Linda Webb went back to Elroy's diner
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: in the late summer of twenty one, table seven Thursday,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: her usual order bev Ostrowski, the server who had noticed
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: the Thursdays going quiet in the spring of twenty seventeen,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: had held that table, not officially, not as a policy.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: She had just kept it available on Thursdays, the way
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: you hold space for someone you expect to come back.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: When this case is examined from the outside, from the
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: billing codes, the abraded wiring, the cell tower data, the
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: fabricated text, it looks like a sophisticated operational.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Plan, and it was.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: But Teresa Graham, the psychologist who worked with Linda beginning
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: in May of twenty nineteen, named something underneath the operation
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: that the evidence alone cannot fully capture. Graham told investigators
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: that coercive systems do not announce themselves. They replace a
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: person's external reference points one at a time, they substitute
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: one voice for every other voice until the person cannot
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: locate her own judgment. What Linda entered in March of
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen was a fifteen minute appointment for a benign lipoma.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: What she was inside by May of twenty nineteen was
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: a system someone else had designed, tended, and scheduled to end.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: The question that does not close with the conviction is
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: the one Pennington is still holding. If the method existed
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: before Owens used it, If Francis Delgado was found on
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: a rural highway in twenty thirteen, disoriented and unable to
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: explain her presence there by a physician who then left
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: the state, then what Owens did was not invented in Millhaven.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: It was applied there. That question belongs to an open file.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: It may not close soon. What is already closed? A
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: jury deliberated for less than five hours, a man who
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: held his defense for nine months confessed the morning after
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: one text message was read aloud, and a woman who
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: had been driven to a drainage culvert on Halcott Mill
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Road left hypothermic with a four day old abdominal dressing
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: and coached on what to say if she survived, that
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: woman went back to Table seven. She goes every Thursday.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia