Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Stole Her Name, Her House, Her Money - Then Confessed

Transcript

He Stole Her Name, Her House, Her Money - Then Confessed · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: On January fourteenth, twenty nineteen, a woman named Megan Morgan
0:09
Speaker 1: was walking her dog, Copper, along a trail east of Delwood,
0:12
Speaker 1: when he stopped and refused to move. Forty feet into
0:16
Speaker 1: the frozen underbrush. Half buried under a crust of ice,
0:20
Speaker 1: sat a fire resistant safe, no drag marks, no tire tracks.
0:26
Speaker 1: The ground had been frozen solid since January third. The
0:30
Speaker 1: safe weighed sixty one pounds empty, inside a marriage certificate,
0:35
Speaker 1: a deed of renunciation, bank statements showing ninety four thousand
0:40
Speaker 1: dollars in debt, and a woman's driver's license. The woman's
0:45
Speaker 1: name was Rebecca Meyer, and Rebecca Meyer was at that
0:49
Speaker 1: exact moment lying in a bed at Dellwood, extended care, sedated, isolated,
0:55
Speaker 1: and listed under a man named Stephen Stroud as her
0:59
Speaker 1: soul of emergency contact. What had been done to Rebecca
1:03
Speaker 1: was not sudden. It did not happen in a single
1:06
Speaker 1: violent moment. It happened over twenty two months, one carefully
1:10
Speaker 1: engineered decision at a time, and the man who engineered
1:14
Speaker 1: it had six days before that safe was found, driven
1:18
Speaker 1: away from Delwood without looking back. This is the story
1:21
Speaker 1: of how one person dismantled another person's reality, and how
1:25
Speaker 1: a sixty one pound box thrown into the dark became
1:29
Speaker 1: the thing that gave it all back. Rebecca Meyer was
1:33
Speaker 1: thirty one years old in the spring of twenty seventeen.
1:37
Speaker 1: She worked as account's coordinator at Vantage Press, a mid
1:40
Speaker 1: sized publishing services company in Delwood County. She was the
1:44
Speaker 1: kind of person who kept a color coded calendar, returned
1:48
Speaker 1: calls the same day, and remembered her coworker's birthdays without
1:51
Speaker 1: being prompted. She had bought her house on Callaway Street herself,
1:56
Speaker 1: that matters. The down payment came from a combination of
1:59
Speaker 1: an heritance and years of careful saving money that belonged
2:04
Speaker 1: entirely to her, accumulated entirely before she met Stephen Stroud.
2:09
Speaker 1: It was a small house, but it was hers in
2:11
Speaker 1: every legal and personal sense of that word. Her best
2:15
Speaker 1: friend was a woman named Cheryl Novak, and the two
2:19
Speaker 1: had been close since their early twenties. Cheryl would later
2:22
Speaker 1: describe Rebecca as someone who made everything look easy, organized, warm,
2:27
Speaker 1: reliable to the point where you almost forgot she was
2:31
Speaker 1: also carrying her own weight. Rebecca's mother, Ida, lived in Columbus.
2:37
Speaker 1: She came to visit a few times a year. By
2:39
Speaker 1: every account, Rebecca was grounded, independent and quietly content with
2:44
Speaker 1: the life she had built. There was one place that
2:47
Speaker 1: anchored her routine above everything else, a corner booth at
2:51
Speaker 1: a diner called Pattens. Every Thursday, without fail she sat
2:56
Speaker 1: in the same seat. The waitress, a woman named Diana Oqefort,
3:01
Speaker 1: had reserved that table for her for three years without
3:04
Speaker 1: being asked. That is the kind of regular Rebecca was.
3:08
Speaker 1: Diane noticed when Rebecca stopped coming. She would notice again
3:13
Speaker 1: later when Rebecca came back. In March of two thousand seventeen,
3:17
Speaker 1: a man named Stephen Stroud arrived at Vantage Press on
3:21
Speaker 1: a freelance consulting contract. The contract was scheduled to last
3:26
Speaker 1: eight weeks. He stayed for fourteen weeks. He was forty
3:29
Speaker 1: four years old, confident in a way that read as competence,
3:33
Speaker 1: and he had a particular skill that would only become
3:36
Speaker 1: clear much later. He was exceptionally good at becoming exactly
3:40
Speaker 1: what a room needed him to be. Rebecca and Stroud
3:44
Speaker 1: began a relationship sometime during those fourteen weeks. The speed
3:48
Speaker 1: of what followed was striking in hindsight, though it did
3:52
Speaker 1: not appear alarming. At the time. By August of two
3:55
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, five months after they met, he had proposed.
4:00
Speaker 1: By November they were married. Idemeyer met Stroud twice before
4:04
Speaker 1: the wedding. She would later say she found him charming
4:07
Speaker 1: in a way she could not fully articulate, which is
4:10
Speaker 1: not the same thing as trusting him. Cheryl Novak tried
4:13
Speaker 1: to say something before the wedding. She had concerns she
4:17
Speaker 1: could not precisely name, a feeling that things were moving
4:20
Speaker 1: too fast, that Rebecca seemed different in ways that were
4:24
Speaker 1: hard to pin down. Rebecca stopped that conversation before it
4:27
Speaker 1: could begin. That moment, small and easy to dismiss, would
4:32
Speaker 1: sit with Cheryl for a long time. What no one
4:35
Speaker 1: knew in November of two thousand seventeen was that Stephen
4:39
Speaker 1: Stroud had done something like this before. In Putnam County
4:43
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen, a woman whose name was Susan
4:46
Speaker 1: Lynde had experienced a pattern that investigators would later describe
4:51
Speaker 1: as methodologically identical. The man connected to that case matched
4:55
Speaker 1: Stroud's description. No charges were ever filed the statute of
5:00
Speaker 1: limitations had run out. Stroud was already a month into
5:03
Speaker 1: the marriage when he made his first financial pot off.
5:07
Speaker 1: December of twenty seventeen, Rebecca's direct deposit was quietly redirected
5:12
Speaker 1: to a joint account at a bank in Granville. Rebecca
5:15
Speaker 1: did not open that account, She did not choose that bank.
5:20
Speaker 1: She did not know it had happened. The money moved
5:23
Speaker 1: in silence for months from December of twenty seventeen onward.
5:27
Speaker 1: Every paycheck Rebecca earned advantage press landed in a joint
5:31
Speaker 1: account she had not chosen at a bank she had
5:34
Speaker 1: never visited. Stroud controlled that account. Rebecca could see the
5:38
Speaker 1: deposits on her paystubs. What she could not see was
5:42
Speaker 1: where the money went after it arrived. Between January and
5:46
Speaker 1: February of twenty eighteen, twenty two thousand dollars disappeared from
5:51
Speaker 1: her personal savings, not in one transfer, in pieces small
5:56
Speaker 1: enough and spread across enough days that the pattern only
6:00
Speaker 1: became visible to a forensic investigator looking backward from a spreadsheet.
6:05
Speaker 1: At the time, each transaction would have looked like a
6:08
Speaker 1: routine movement of shared household funds. That was the design.
6:13
Speaker 1: By February of twenty eighteen, Rebecca had an appointment with
6:17
Speaker 1: her primary care physician, doctor Holloway, Stroud had called the
6:21
Speaker 1: office twice before that appointment. He did not call to
6:24
Speaker 1: ask questions. He called to provide context, to describe a
6:29
Speaker 1: wife who was struggling with anxiety, who was having trouble
6:32
Speaker 1: managing daily tasks, who might benefit from medication to take
6:36
Speaker 1: the edge off. Doctor Holloway was not acting improperly when
6:40
Speaker 1: he listened. He had no reason to doubt what he
6:43
Speaker 1: was hearing. At the appointment, Rebecca received a prescription for
6:47
Speaker 1: an anxiolytic. Here is what the phone records would later show.
6:51
Speaker 1: Stroud made both calls from his personal cell the time
6:54
Speaker 1: Stamps placed them on weekday mornings, when Rebecca was at work.
6:59
Speaker 1: She did not know he had called. The prescription became
7:03
Speaker 1: part of the architecture. Stroud managed the dosage schedule. He
7:08
Speaker 1: was helpful that way, attentive organized, the kind of partner
7:12
Speaker 1: who kept track of things. By spring of twenty eighteen,
7:16
Speaker 1: Rebecca was sleeping twelve to fourteen hours a day. She
7:20
Speaker 1: described feeling foggy in ways she could not explain. When
7:24
Speaker 1: she raised it, the explanation was always the same. She
7:28
Speaker 1: was more anxious than she realized. The medication was doing
7:31
Speaker 1: its job, and perhaps she was misremembering things again. That
7:36
Speaker 1: phrase misremembering again appeared more than once. In September of
7:40
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, Stroud called doctor Holloway's office a third time.
7:46
Speaker 1: This call increased Rebecca's dosage. Rebecca did not make that call.
7:51
Speaker 1: She was not present for it. She learned of the
7:53
Speaker 1: new dosage when Stroud placed a different pill bottle on
7:56
Speaker 1: the counter three days later and told her the doctor
8:00
Speaker 1: had made an adjustment. Three days after that call, three
8:03
Speaker 1: days after the dosage doubled, Rebecca Meyer signed a quit
8:07
Speaker 1: claim deed relinquishing her ownership of the house on Callaway Street.
8:11
Speaker 1: Francis Gilkey was the notary on duty at the UPS
8:15
Speaker 1: store on the east side of Delwood that afternoon. She
8:18
Speaker 1: would later testify that Rebecca was quiet. She sat where
8:22
Speaker 1: Stroud directed her to sit. She signed where Stroud pointed
8:26
Speaker 1: Guilkey had no legal basis to refuse. A notary confirms
8:31
Speaker 1: identity and witness, she is not enpowered to assess comprehension.
8:35
Speaker 1: She notarized the document. Stroud walked out, holding the deed
8:39
Speaker 1: to a house he had not paid for, the house
8:41
Speaker 1: Rebecca had bought with her own inheritance before she ever
8:45
Speaker 1: met him. By December of twenty eighteen. The full picture
8:50
Speaker 1: looked like this, no personal savings, no equity in her home,
8:55
Speaker 1: approximately ninety four thousand dollars in debt, and a woman
8:58
Speaker 1: sleeping through most of her daylight hours, isolated from the
9:02
Speaker 1: people who knew her best. Cheryl Novak had tried calling
9:07
Speaker 1: Rebecca did not answer the way she used to. The
9:10
Speaker 1: Thursday table at Pattens sat empty. On January eighth, twenty nineteen,
9:16
Speaker 1: Stephen Stroud drove Rebecca Meyer to Delwood Extended Care. He
9:20
Speaker 1: presented himself at the front desk as her emergency contact
9:24
Speaker 1: and her primary decision maker. He cried in front of
9:28
Speaker 1: the staff. The staff remembered that he seemed devastated, concerned,
9:34
Speaker 1: a husband at his limit doing the difficult thing because
9:37
Speaker 1: he loved his wife and could no longer manage alone.
9:40
Speaker 1: He left her there and drove away. Six days later,
9:43
Speaker 1: on January fourteenth, Megan Morgan was walking her dog, Copper,
9:48
Speaker 1: along the path east of Delwood when Copper pulled hard
9:52
Speaker 1: off the trail and into the brush. Forty feet into
9:55
Speaker 1: the undergrowth on ground that had been frozen since January third,
10:00
Speaker 1: Meghan found a safe, not buried, not hidden by debris,
10:05
Speaker 1: just placed there in frozen earth in the dark tangle
10:09
Speaker 1: of winter brush off a public walking path. The safe
10:13
Speaker 1: weighed sixty one pounds empty. There were no drag marks
10:17
Speaker 1: in the frozen soil, no tire tracks at the trailhead,
10:21
Speaker 1: no indication of how something that heavy had traveled forty
10:24
Speaker 1: feet from dense, uneven terrain in the dark, because this
10:28
Speaker 1: was not a move made in daylight. What that safe
10:32
Speaker 1: held was the question that pulled everything else open inside
10:37
Speaker 1: a marriage certificate, a quit claim deed, bank statements, mapping
10:41
Speaker 1: ninety four thousand dollars in debt, and Rebecca Meyer's driver's license,
10:46
Speaker 1: everything Stroud needed to dismantle a life, everything he had
10:51
Speaker 1: failed to destroy. There is a detail in the forensic
10:54
Speaker 1: case report that lands differently once you know the full timeline.
10:58
Speaker 1: The safe's combination was Rebecca's birthday. Stroud had tried to
11:02
Speaker 1: open it. He could not. That is why it ended
11:05
Speaker 1: up in the brush instead of an incinerator, because the
11:08
Speaker 1: one thing he could not predict was that she would
11:11
Speaker 1: have chosen a number he did not know. Eight days
11:15
Speaker 1: after the safe was found, on January twenty second, law
11:19
Speaker 1: enforcement arrested Stephen Stroud at a motel in Zanesville, Ohio,
11:24
Speaker 1: in his possession two prepaid debit cards, a laptop, and
11:29
Speaker 1: a passport belonging to a woman who was not Rebecca Meyer.
11:33
Speaker 1: He had already built the next move. Consider what the
11:36
Speaker 1: evidence actually required a jury to believe if Stroud's version
11:40
Speaker 1: of events held. Picture the UPS store on a Tuesday
11:44
Speaker 1: afternoon in September, Francis Gilkey at her station, Rebecca Meyer
11:49
Speaker 1: across the counter, Stephen Stroud beside her. In Stroud's version,
11:53
Speaker 1: this is a consensual transaction, a wife choosing to transfer property,
11:58
Speaker 1: understanding the document in front of her, signing of her
12:01
Speaker 1: own free will walk. That version against what Guilkey observed.
12:06
Speaker 1: Rebecca did not ask questions, she did not read the document.
12:10
Speaker 1: She sat where she was placed and signed where she
12:12
Speaker 1: was shown. Gilkey had seen people sign things before. This
12:17
Speaker 1: did not look like a choice. It looked like someone
12:20
Speaker 1: following instructions in a room where the instructions were given
12:24
Speaker 1: by someone else. But that version already has a problem
12:29
Speaker 1: before you even reached the notary's testimony, the ip logs
12:33
Speaker 1: showed that the online account changes, the ones that redirected
12:37
Speaker 1: Rebecca's income, shifted her savings restructured. Her debt were made
12:42
Speaker 1: from Stroud's personal laptop, not from a shared device, his machine,
12:48
Speaker 1: his session, his time stamps. When those logs were set
12:52
Speaker 1: against Rebecca's work schedule, the picture clarified further. Nearly every
12:57
Speaker 1: significant financial change occurred during hours when she was at
13:01
Speaker 1: Vantage Press and he was, by his own account, working
13:05
Speaker 1: from home. Then there were the phone records, two calls
13:09
Speaker 1: to doctor Holloway's office before the February appointment, one call
13:13
Speaker 1: before the September dosage increase, all from Stroud's cell, all
13:18
Speaker 1: during business hours, none of them disclosed to Rebecca. The
13:23
Speaker 1: prosecution's case was not that doctor Holloway had done something wrong.
13:27
Speaker 1: He had not, and the record is unambiguous on that point.
13:31
Speaker 1: The case was that Stroud had used a trusted medical
13:35
Speaker 1: relationship as an instrument. He had spoken first, framed the
13:39
Speaker 1: narrative first, and left the physician with a portrait of
13:42
Speaker 1: a patient that served Stroud's purposes. And here is the
13:46
Speaker 1: thing that recontextualizes the entire first year of the marriage.
13:50
Speaker 1: The safe Throughout the nine months of pre trial motions,
13:54
Speaker 1: Stroud's position was that the financial moves were joint decisions
13:59
Speaker 1: that Rebecca had been a willing participant, that her current
14:02
Speaker 1: state was the result of genuine illness rather than manufactured dependency.
14:08
Speaker 1: That argument required the jury to believe that Rebecca had
14:11
Speaker 1: agreed to all of it. The account transfers, the deed,
14:16
Speaker 1: the debt, but Rebecca's birthday was the combination to that safe.
14:20
Speaker 1: Stroud knew her well enough to build a cage around
14:24
Speaker 1: her life, one document at a time, He did not
14:27
Speaker 1: know her well enough to open the box she had
14:30
Speaker 1: locked herself. He moved it forty feet into frozen brush
14:34
Speaker 1: rather than destroy it because he could not get inside
14:37
Speaker 1: it and everything he could not destroy, the marriage certificate,
14:41
Speaker 1: the deed, the statements, her license was still there when
14:45
Speaker 1: Copper pulled Megan Morgan off the path on a January morning.
14:49
Speaker 1: The jury did not have to reach a verdict. On
14:52
Speaker 1: the third day of testimony in October of twenty nineteen
14:55
Speaker 1: at the Dellwood County Common please Court, Stephen Stroud confessed
15:00
Speaker 1: not before, not during the nine months of pre trial motions,
15:04
Speaker 1: when his attorney argued that Rebecca had been a willing
15:08
Speaker 1: participant in every financial decision, not at arraignment, when he
15:12
Speaker 1: stood before the court in Zanesville and denied everything not
15:16
Speaker 1: through fourteen rounds of preliminary hearings. He held the position
15:20
Speaker 1: until Kenneth Patterson finished presenting the evidence, and then he
15:24
Speaker 1: let it go. The trigger was not a single piece
15:27
Speaker 1: of testimony. It was the convergence Patterson had laid out
15:31
Speaker 1: the phone records, two calls to doctor Holloway's office before
15:35
Speaker 1: the February two thousand eighteen appointment, one call before the
15:40
Speaker 1: September dosage increase, all from Stroud's personal cell, all during
15:45
Speaker 1: business hours, none disclosed to Rebecca. Then Francis Gilkey took
15:50
Speaker 1: the stand and described what she had witnessed at the
15:52
Speaker 1: UPS store on the east side of Dellwood in September
15:56
Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen. Rebecca Quiet quiet, signing where she
16:01
Speaker 1: was told. Then came the IP logs showing that the
16:04
Speaker 1: changes to the direct deposit and the account structure had
16:08
Speaker 1: been made from Stroud's personal laptop. Then the full forensic
16:11
Speaker 1: financial time line twenty two thousand dollars in personal savings
16:16
Speaker 1: gone between January and February of two thousand eighteen, ninety
16:20
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars in accumulated debt by December, and a
16:24
Speaker 1: deed that had transferred ownership of a house Rebecca bought
16:27
Speaker 1: with her own inheritance before she ever met Stephen Stroud.
16:31
Speaker 1: The jury never deliberated eight counts, four counts of financial
16:36
Speaker 1: exploitation of an adult, three counts of identity fraud, and
16:40
Speaker 1: one count of unlawful restraint. Fourteen years when the sentence
16:44
Speaker 1: came down at the Delwood County Common Police Court, Susan
16:48
Speaker 1: Lynde was in the gallery. She had driven from Putnam County.
16:52
Speaker 1: She had gone through an identical pattern in two thousand fifteen,
16:56
Speaker 1: the same methodical isolation, the same financial des dismantling, the
17:01
Speaker 1: same manufactured dispendency with a man whose description matched Stroud.
17:06
Speaker 1: No charges were ever filed in Putnam County. The statute
17:10
Speaker 1: of limitations had expired. Lynde sat in the gallery and
17:14
Speaker 1: cried when she heard the verdict. Detective Chris Fogerty of
17:17
Speaker 1: Putnam County contacted the Delwood County Prosecutor's office three months
17:22
Speaker 1: after the conviction. The methodology he described from the twenty
17:26
Speaker 1: fifteen case was, according to that contact, nearly indistinguishable. The
17:32
Speaker 1: house on Calloway Street was returned to Rebecca by court
17:35
Speaker 1: order as part of the criminal restitution. She had bought it.
17:39
Speaker 1: With her inheritance and her savings. Before Stroud ever walked
17:42
Speaker 1: through the door of Vantage Press. She got it back.
17:46
Speaker 1: The financial recovery, according to Patterson's own account of the case,
17:50
Speaker 1: remains incomplete. Rebecca Meyer was discharged from Delwood Extended Care
17:56
Speaker 1: in February of twenty nineteen, three weeks after Megan Morgan's
18:01
Speaker 1: dog pulled her off a frozen path toward a box
18:04
Speaker 1: that should not have been there. She went back to
18:07
Speaker 1: Vantage Press in the spring. Diane okafor the server at Patten's,
18:11
Speaker 1: had kept the corner table reserved every Thursday for three
18:15
Speaker 1: years without being asked. She did not stop when Rebecca
18:19
Speaker 1: was admitted to the facility. She did not stop when
18:22
Speaker 1: the case was still open. The table was there when
18:24
Speaker 1: Rebecca came back. Cheryl Novak, who had tried to say
18:28
Speaker 1: something before the wedding and had been shut down before
18:31
Speaker 1: she could finish her sentence, started going with her every Thursday.
18:35
Speaker 1: There is something in this case that stays with you
18:38
Speaker 1: long after the verdict. Not the confession. Confessions are in
18:42
Speaker 1: some sense an ending. What stays is the architecture of it.
18:47
Speaker 1: Stroud spent almost two years building a version of Rebecca
18:52
Speaker 1: that could not contradict him. Medically documented as unreliable, financially dependent,
18:58
Speaker 1: socially isolated, and legally stripped of her own property. He
19:02
Speaker 1: did it with phone calls and paperwork and a borrowed
19:05
Speaker 1: medical diagnosis, quietly inside the ordinary machinery of a marriage
19:11
Speaker 1: and a health care system and a notaries stamp. Francis
19:14
Speaker 1: Gilkey had no legal reason to stop the signing. Doctor
19:18
Speaker 1: Holloway had no reason to doubt the framing he was given.
19:21
Speaker 1: Every institution that touched Rebecca's life in that period was
19:25
Speaker 1: given a version of her that Stroud had written first.
19:28
Speaker 1: The safe held because Rebecca had locked it herself. The
19:32
Speaker 1: combination was her birthday. Stroud knew enough about her to
19:35
Speaker 1: systematically dismantle her life. He did not know that number.
19:39
Speaker 1: That detail is not a small thing. It is the
19:42
Speaker 1: entire story in a single object. Everything he had taken
19:46
Speaker 1: was documented inside a box he could not open, and
19:50
Speaker 1: when he carried it forty feet into frozen brush, rather
19:53
Speaker 1: than burning what he could not access, he left behind
19:57
Speaker 1: the only complete record of what he had done. The
20:00
Speaker 1: corner table at Patten's is reserved every Thursday. Rebecca Meyer
20:04
Speaker 1: is still at it. This show is made by Obo media,