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She Gave Her a Shoebox of Silence: The Sister Who Never Got Letters · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At four forty in the morning on February third, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a snowplow operator named Pamela Peterson was running
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: County Road seven when her blade caught something solid at
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: the base of the Elsin Creek culvert, not ice, not gravel,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: A shoe box sealed inside a plastic bag bound with
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: rubber bands wedged below the frost line. Inside were forty
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: one letters handwritten addressed to a woman named Emily Stuart
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: on Marrow Lane in Harwick. The return address on each
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: envelope read Dorothy Stuart for one eight East Kalnogel, Tucson.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Stewart had been dead for more than two years.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: The letters she wrote to her older sister, spanning nearly
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: a decade, had never arrived. Emily had spent those same
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: years believing Dorothy simply stopped speaking to her. She had
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: no reason to think otherwise. Someone had made certain that
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: what investigators would eventually uncover was not a missing person
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: case and not a single act of cruelty. It was
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: a systematic, years long project to dismantle one woman's understanding
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: of her own life, executed by someone Emily trusted. Completely.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Read those last three words again, because they carry the
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: full weight of what follows. Emily Stuart was sixty one
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: when the shoe box surfaced. She had lived on Morro
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Lane in Harwick in Ridgeline County for most of her
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: adult life. She taught fourth grade for over two decades,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the kind of teacher parents specifically requested, the kind students
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: remembered at graduation. She retired in two thousand fourteen. Her daughter, Monica,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: lived in Columbus. Her world was quiet, orderly, and brooded.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: She was also, by the time investigators met her in
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: early two thousand nineteen, a woman who had lost approximately
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: seventy one thousand dollars, most of her social connections, and
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: nine years of her relationship with her younger sister, all
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: without understanding how any of it had happened. Dorothy Stewart
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: was five years Emily's junior. In two thousand and two,
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Dorothy relocated to Tucson, settling at four one eight East Kaldonagon.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Distance made regular visits difficult, but the sisters had always written.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Beginning in two thousand and six, Dorothy wrote to Moro
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Lane consistently forty one letters between two thousand and six
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: and twenty fifteen. A span of nine years. The early
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: ones were ordinary correspondents, news of her neighbors, a new recipe,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: the temperature in November. Later letters grew more urgent. One
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: read in part, I know you probably haven't gotten any
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: of my other letters, but I'm trying again. She kept trying.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: She never stopped. Emily received none of them. Around two
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: thousand seven, Emily came to believe that Dorothy had simply
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: gone silent. No explanation, no argument she could point to,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: just the absence where a sister used to be. She
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: grieved that absence quietly, the way people grieve relationships that
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: end without a rupture, assuming she must have done something,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: assuming time would eventually explain it. It never did, because
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: the silence was not Dorothy's. By the time Dorothy's was
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Emily did not know her sister
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: was sick. By the time Dorothy died in October of
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, Emily had not spoken to her in years,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: their last known direct contact dated to two thousand and nine.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: She mourned alone, with no real understanding of what she
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: was mourning. What forensic advocate Kathleen Tate would later document
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: after reviewing the case in spring twenty nineteen was a
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: coercive control sequence that had been running inside Emily's life
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: since at least two thirds thousand and nine. Three distinct mechanisms,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: an altered address book, impersonated phone calls, and intercepted mail
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: had worked together to manufacture an estrangement that never existed.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: But none of that was visible yet in two thy eleven.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: What was visible on a stretch of Route nine one
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: August morning was a woman named Holly Novak, sitting in
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: a car, apparently distressed, apparently alone. Emily pulled over. That decision,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: made in a moment of ordinary human decency, is where
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: this story pivots, because Holly Novak was not a stranger
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: in distress. She was forty four years old, and Emily
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Stewart was not her first target. The life Holly presented
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: that morning, recent widow, relocated from Cincinnati, starting over, was
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: a construction. Every detail of it was chosen. The question
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: investigators would spend years answering was not whether Holly had
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: dine dismantled Emily's reality. The evidence would confirm that she had.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: The question was how completely she had planned it before
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Emily ever stopped her car Holly Novak had been doing
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: this before Emily Stewart ever existed in her life. The
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: record shows a woman named Lisa Harmon in Portsmouth in
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: two thousand four. Francis Gould was sixty seven years old,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: recently wide owed, and Lisa Harmon appeared in her life
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: the way Holly would later appear in Emily's, with warmth,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: with attentiveness, with the particular patience of someone who had
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: decided exactly how much time to invest. The arrangement lasted
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: roughly fourteen months. It ended when Frances noticed something wrong
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: in her bank statements. She did not report it. She
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: filed it somewhere private, the way people file humiliations they
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: cannot fully explain. Holly Novak moved on. By two thousand eight,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: she was living with a man named Bernard Colton. Colton
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: died in two thousand ten. A Honda Civic registered to
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: his address remained linked there until twenty twelve, a detail
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: investigators would later note without producing charges. What the record
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: does show is that by the summer of twenty eleven,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Holly Novak needed a new position, a new household, a
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: new person whose reality she could quietly enter and begin
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: to rearrange. She found root. Nine, she found a car
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: on the shoulder. She found Emily Stewart. The love bombing
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: phase lasted approximately two years. Holly learned to play Canista.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: She drove Emily to a cardiology appointment. One spring morning,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: she arranged for mulch to be delivered to the Marrow
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Lane garden, a gesture Emily described to her daughter Monica
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: as something a real friend would think to do. Monica
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: was in Columbus. Monica was increasingly, in Holly's telling of things,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: someone who didn't quite understand her mother's situation, someone who
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: who concern came with an edge of judgment. Emily heard
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: this enough times that it began to sound reasonable. The
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: card club followed. Holly had small observations about each member,
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: nothing cruel, just accurate enough to land. By twenty twelve,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Emily's social radius had contracted to a point where Holly
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: occupied most of it. That was when Holly proposed becoming
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Emily's bookkeeper. Emily's savings at that point stood at approximately
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: eighty four thousand dollars. Steuart Ames, her accountant, would later
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: testify a trial that the first unauthorized withdrawal he could
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: document occurred in the spring of twenty twelve. By August
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: of twenty thirteen, when Emily was hospitalized for cardiac arrhythmia,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the account had already lost ground in ways Emily could
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: not have tracked because Holly had prepared the documents, Emily signed,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: and Holly managed the records. Those documents produced from the
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: hospital bed. Emily agreed to let Holly handled the finances
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: more directly. Seventy one documented withdrawals followed over four years,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: the total loss seventy one thousand dollars, leaving the account
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: under nine thousand. But the money was only one mechanism,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the one that required more precision, was running simultaneously, and
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: it had started earlier. In the spring of two thousand
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: and nine, someone opened Emily's address book and changed a
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: single entry. Dorothy Stewart's address for one eighth East cal Nogel, Tucson,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: became four to eight one. The ZIP code was transposed.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: It was a small edit. It looked like a transcription error.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: It caused eleven of Dorothy's letters to be returned to
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Tucson undelivered or to disappear into a forwarding void. While
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Emily waited in Harwick for a response that never came.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Emily concluded that Dorothy had stopped writing. Dorothy in Tucson
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: concluded that Emily had stop responding. Neither conclusion was theirs
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: to reach. Both were manufactured. Dorothy kept writing anyway. Between
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: two thousand and six and two thousand fifteen, she produced
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: forty one letters. Some were cheerful, some were not. At
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: least one, according to what forensic advocate Kathleen Tate would
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: later read, contain the line I know you probably haven't
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: gotten any of my other letters, but I'm trying again.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Dorothy could not have known how precisely right she was.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Starting in twenty twelve, Holly introduced a second mechanism. She
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: began placing calls to Emily's landline from Dorothy's Tucson number,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: or from a prepaid phone that mimicked it. The calls
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: came when Emily was out. Holly reported the conversation's second
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: hand Dorothy had called. Dorothy had sounded strange, Dorothy seemed
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: to need money. Dorothy had said something about not wanting
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: to talk directly. For now, Emil had no way to
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: verify any of it. The call logs showed Dorothy's number.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Holly supplied the content By two thy fourteen, when Emily retired.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: She had not spoken to her sister, actually spoken to
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: her in years. What she believed she knew about Dorothy
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: came filtered through Holly entirely. In October of twenty sixteen,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Dorothy did something Holly had not anticipated. She gathered all
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: forty one letters, placed them in a shoe box, sealed it,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: addressed it to Morrow Lane, and sent it through the
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: mail in October of twenty sixteen. Perhaps she thought a
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: physical package would be harder to ignore. Perhaps she was
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: running out of time and knew it. Holly intercepted it
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: before Emily ever saw it. She drove the shoe box
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: to County Road seven, to the culvert at Elsin Creek,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: and she pushed it in below the frost line, sealed
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: in a plastic bag with rubber bands. The design was
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: cold spring melt would handle the rest. Dorothy Stewart died
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: of pancreatic cancer in October of twenty sixteen. She never
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: received a response. She never knew why the shoe box
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: did not dissolve. Pamela Peterson was running her plow east
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: on County Road seven at four forty in the morning
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: on February third, two thousand nineteen, when her blade caught
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: something solid at the mouth of the Elsin Creek culvert.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: She stopped. She climbed down. What she found in the
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: dark was a plastic bag sealed with rubber bands containing
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: a shoe box. Inside the shoe box forty one envelopes.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Inside the envelopes forty one letters, damp at the edges,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: still legible. The return address on each one was for
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: one eight East Calais nogaul Tucson. Detective Michael Brandt was
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: assigned the case. He drove to Morrow Lane. Emily Stewart,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: sixty one years old, opened the door and heard that
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: letters addressed to her had been found in a drainage
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: culvert two miles from her house, letters postmarked over a
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: period of nine years, all from a woman named Dorothy Stuart.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Emily told him Dorothy was her younger sister. She told
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: him Dorothy had stopped speaking to her years ago. She
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: told him she had no idea why. Brandt asked to
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: see her address book. There it was for eight one
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: the transposed zip. The entry looked like it had always
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: been there. It had the settled quality of a long
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: established fact. There is something particular about the moment a
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: person realizes that a memory they have been living inside
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: was constructed for them. Emily Stuart had spent about ten
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: years understanding her estrangement from Dorothy as something that had
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: simply happened, a wound without a clear cause, the kind
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: families sometimes sustain in under an hour. That understanding inverted.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: The wound had a cause. It had been designed. Kathleen Tate,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: the forensic advocate assigned from Bridgeline County Victim's Services, reviewed
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: the case in the weeks following the discovery. Her reconstruction
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: was methodical. The address book corruption explained the eleven returned letters.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: The phone records, calls logged from Dorothy's Tucson number to
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Emily's land line, always when Emily was out with Holly
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: present to report the content, documented the impersonation. The financial
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: records documented the depletion. But what Tate noted in her
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: assessment was not only the mechanisms, it was the sequence.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: The address book corruption came first in spring two thousand nine,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: more than two years before Holly met Emily on Route nine,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: which meant Holly had entered the house, found the address
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: book and altered it before Emily had any reason to
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: stop trusting her. Hally had been working on the estrangement
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: for the friendship was fully formed. Picture the address book
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: sitting open on Emily's kitchen counter in the spring of
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Picture Holly alone in that kitchen, Emily,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: perhaps in the garden, perhaps at the store. The entry
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: is there. Holly changes four to eight. She transposes two
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: digits in the zip. She closes the book. The obvious conclusion,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: the one that organizes everything around a single opportunist, is
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: that Holly acted impulsively, that she saw an opening and
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: took it. The financial exploitation fits that frame. An opportunist
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: manages money until the money runs out, But that version
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: collapses the moment you look at the address book edit.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Holly met Emily in August of twenty eleven. The address
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: book corruption was dated to spring of two thousand and nine.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: That is a gap of about two years and four months.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Holly did not alter that entry after gaining Emily's trust.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: She altered it while she was building the conditions that
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: would make Emily's trust necessary. Dorothy's silence had to be
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: established before Holly could position herself as Emily's primary human connection.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: The manufactured estrangement was not a side effect of the scheme.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: It was the foundation which reframes the moment on Route
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: nine entirely. The breakdown on the shoulder, the apparent distress,
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: the widow from Cincinnati, those were not an opportunity Holly
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: stumbled into. They were the entry point into a household
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: whose isolation had already been partially engineered. Holly knew Emily
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: had a sister who had, from Emily's point of view,
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: stopped writing. She knew Emily was carrying that quietly. She
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: knew what shape the vacancy had. The financial exploitation under
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: this reconstruction was not the scheme. It was the harvest.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: The scheme was the dismantling of every relationship that might
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: have noticed what was happening. Monica, the card club, Dorothy,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: above all Monica. Until Emily's understanding of her own life
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: depended entirely on what Holly told her, it was. Francis Gould,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: sixty seven in Portsmouth, had not reported what happened to
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: her in two thousand four, Six weeks after Holly's arrest
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: in April twenty nineteen, Francis saw Holly's photograph in a
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: news report she called Detective Brandt, she identified Holly as
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: Lisa Harmon the fourteen month sequence. Francis described the warmth,
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: the financial suggestions. The quiet erosion matched the architecture Kathleen
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: Tate had reconstructed in the Ridgeline County case with structural precision.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Holly Novak did not improvise. She had a method, She
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: had used it before, and she had refined it enough
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: that by the time she reached Emily Stuart, the part
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: that required direct manipulation the money was almost secondary to
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the part that required patients, making sure that there was
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: no one left who could tell Emily what she was losing.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: The trial lasted two days, the jury deliberated for two
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: days more. In November twenty twenty, Holly Novak was convicted
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: on all three counts, financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: criminal impersonation, and male interference. The judge sentenced her to
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: nine years. She appealed in twenty twenty two, denied. She
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: appealed again in twenty twenty three, denied, and then in
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: the spring of twenty twenty four, something happened that no
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: one had anticipated. Holly Novak sent Detective Michael Brandt an unsolicited,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: seven page written confession. She confirmed the address book alteration.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: She confirmed the prepaid phone calls impersonating Dorothy. She confirmed
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: that she had personally driven the shoe box to Elsin Creek,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Culvert on County Road seven, placed it in a plastic
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: back sealed with rubber bands, and set it below the
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: frost line, expecting the spring melt to destroy it. She
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: had planned for the water. She had not planned for
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Pamela Peterson. Emily Stewart asked Kathleen Tate to read the
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: confession on her behalf. Kathleen Tate, who had spent years
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: reconstructing what had been done to Emily, read all seven pages.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Her assessment was precise. There was no language in those
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: seven pages that she recognized as genuine regret. Whatever Holly
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Novak's reason for writing it, and no explanation has been established,
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: it was not remorse. Dorothy Stewart died in October twenty
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: sixteen of pancreatic cancer at four to one eighth East
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: kel Nogolk in Tucson. She died without knowing that Emily
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: had never stopped wanting to hear from her. She died
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: believing that her younger sister had simply stopped responding. She
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: had written forty one letters across nine years. She had
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: mailed a shoe box full of them to a woman
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: who never received a single one. That is the weight
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: at the center of this case. Not the money, though
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: seventy one thousand dollars was taken, not the impersonation, though
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: it was methodical and sustained. The weight is Dorothy writing
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: one more letter, trying one more time, and dying in
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: silence she did not deserve. Emily Stewart still lives on
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Morolane in Harwick. She has read thirty eight of the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: forty one letters. Three remain unread. She has chosen not
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: to open them, and she has not explained why that
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: choice belongs to her entirely. There is something in that
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: detail that resists easy interpretation. Perhaps those three letters hold
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: something she is not ready for. Perhaps leaving them sealed
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: is its own form of holding on. Perhaps the boundary
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: between knowing and not knowing is the last place she
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: has any control over what happened in her own home,
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: in her own life over nine years. She cannot reclaim.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Holy Novak altered two digits in an address book in
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: the spring of two thousand and nine. That was the mechanism,
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: but the act underneath the mechanism was this. She looked
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: at the relationship between two sisters and decided to use
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: it as a tool. She manufactured absence where there had
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: been presents. She let Emily carry a grief that was
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: entirely invented, the belief that Dorothy had gone silent, and
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: then she occupied the space that grief created. Coercive control
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: researchers used the phrase reality substitution. It describes the process
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: by which a target's understanding of their own life is
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: systematically replaced with aversion constructed by someone else. Emily Stewart
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: did not lose touch with reality. Her reality was edited
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: quietly and precisely, until the version she experienced bore almost
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: no resemblance to what was actually happening around her. Dorothy
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Stuart wrote the Truth forty one times from Tucson. The
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: letters arrived at a culvert on County Road seventh instead
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: of morro Lane, and then they waited in the cold
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: for two years and four months until a snowplow found them.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: Dorothy never got an answer, but the letters survived. That
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: matters not as resolution not as justice for what Dorothy lost,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: but as the specific, stubborn fact that her words outlasted
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the plan designed to erase them. Emily Stewart is sixty
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: one years old. She lives in the house where all
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: of this happened. She is reading her sister's letters in
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: the order Dorothy wrote them, one by one, taking as
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: long as she needs three remain. This show is made
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: by Obomedia