Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Kept My Phone Alive: The Quiet Science of Gaslighting

Transcript

He Kept My Phone Alive: The Quiet Science of Gaslighting · Why Humans Lie

0:03
Speaker 1: On the morning of May third, twenty twenty two, a
0:06
Speaker 1: contractor named Sharon Andrews lifted the lid of a septic
0:09
Speaker 1: tank at a rental property in Mercer Hollow. She was
0:13
Speaker 1: there to do a routine inspection. What she found inside
0:17
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with routine. A smartphone and a
0:20
Speaker 1: blue rubberized case sat sealed inside a gallon ziplock freezer bag,
0:25
Speaker 1: fully submerged. Attached to the case was a yellow luggage label.
0:29
Speaker 1: The name and phone number printed on it belonged to
0:32
Speaker 1: a twenty four year old man who lived eighteen miles
0:36
Speaker 1: away and had no idea his phone was missing. That
0:40
Speaker 1: label is the detail that unraveled everything. Michael Sharp's mother
0:44
Speaker 1: had made him promise after he lost a device at seventeen,
0:48
Speaker 1: to mark every piece of technology he owned. It was
0:51
Speaker 1: the kind of small, stubborn habit that embarrasses a teenager
0:55
Speaker 1: and means nothing for years until it means everything. The
1:00
Speaker 1: phone was not damaged, it was not water long. Someone
1:04
Speaker 1: had gone to considerable effort to keep it intact, sealed, protected, hidden.
1:09
Speaker 1: That effort, as investigators would later establish, was not accidental.
1:14
Speaker 1: The person who placed it there knew exactly whose phone
1:17
Speaker 1: it was, and that person had reasons to keep it
1:20
Speaker 1: preserved rather than destroyed. What Sharon Andrews's photograph, before she
1:25
Speaker 1: even touched the bag would become the first piece of
1:28
Speaker 1: physical evidence in a case about something that leaves almost
1:31
Speaker 1: no physical evidence at all, The slow, methodical dismantling of
1:36
Speaker 1: one person's grip on their own reality. There is something
1:39
Speaker 1: specific about this case that is difficult to set down
1:43
Speaker 1: once you have encountered it. Not the crime itself, but
1:46
Speaker 1: the mechanism, the patience of it. By the time investigators
1:50
Speaker 1: reconstructed what had happened to Michael Sharp, the picture that
1:53
Speaker 1: emerged was not of a con artist working fast. It
1:57
Speaker 1: was of someone working slowly, carefully, and from the inside out.
2:03
Speaker 1: The full architecture of what Dean Fisher built and what
2:06
Speaker 1: had cost Michael Sharp to trust his own instincts again,
2:10
Speaker 1: is what this episode examines. Dunbarton sits in Caldwell County,
2:15
Speaker 1: the kind of town where people recognize each other's cars
2:18
Speaker 1: before they recognize each other's faces. Michael Sharp had grown
2:22
Speaker 1: up here. At twenty four, he was still building the
2:26
Speaker 1: life that fit him. An accounting degree he had earned
2:30
Speaker 1: the previous spring, a part time job at a warehouse
2:34
Speaker 1: two evenings a week, and a Saturday bowling league he
2:37
Speaker 1: had been part of since he was ninety. That league
2:41
Speaker 1: mattered to him in a way that is easy to underestimate.
2:44
Speaker 1: He had joined it the year he started college, when
2:48
Speaker 1: everything else felt uncertain. His team mates Frank Odum, Stacy Perkins,
2:53
Speaker 1: Bryce Lunde had stayed constance through four years of deadlines
2:57
Speaker 1: and changes. Saturday was the one morning the week that
3:01
Speaker 1: belonged entirely to Michael. He drove to Ridgeline Lanes, bowled
3:05
Speaker 1: his frames, and for two hours nothing demanded anything from him.
3:10
Speaker 1: His father drove a fuel delivery truck. His mother worked
3:13
Speaker 1: the front desk at a veterinary clinic. His sister, Amy
3:17
Speaker 1: was a high school senior. They were close in the practical,
3:21
Speaker 1: low key way of families that do not need to
3:23
Speaker 1: perform closeness, showing up, checking in, knowing each other's schedules
3:28
Speaker 1: without being asked. Michael was precise by disposition. He tracked
3:32
Speaker 1: his finances in a spreadsheet he updated weekly. He labeled
3:36
Speaker 1: his devices. He kept a journal on his phone, not
3:39
Speaker 1: as therapy, but as a record, a way of organizing
3:43
Speaker 1: what he was thinking before he decided how to feel
3:45
Speaker 1: about it. The people who knew him described a young
3:48
Speaker 1: man who was careful with his observations and slow to
3:51
Speaker 1: reach conclusions, not anxious, careful. That distinction matters more than
3:56
Speaker 1: it might seem. In September of twenty twenty one, Michael
4:00
Speaker 1: matched with someone on a dating app. The profile belonged
4:03
Speaker 1: to a thirty one year old named Dean Fisher, who
4:07
Speaker 1: described himself as a traveling data analyst based loosely in
4:11
Speaker 1: the region. Fischer's messages were not overwhelming, That is the
4:15
Speaker 1: first thing worth noting. He did not flood Michael's inbox
4:19
Speaker 1: or accelerate too fast. He mirrored. He asked specific questions
4:23
Speaker 1: about what Michael had said three messages earlier, and reflected
4:27
Speaker 1: it back in slightly different language. He remembered small details,
4:32
Speaker 1: not in a way that felt studied, but in a
4:34
Speaker 1: way that felt like genuine attention. Michael later described it
4:38
Speaker 1: to investigators as feeling like someone had been reading his
4:41
Speaker 1: mind and writing it back to him. That is not
4:44
Speaker 1: a metaphor. According to records from Fischer's cooperation sessions after
4:48
Speaker 1: his arrest, Fisher had developed what counselor Curtis Richardson would
4:53
Speaker 1: later characterize as low volume, high specificity, mirroring a patient
4:58
Speaker 1: technique that requires the target to do most of the
5:01
Speaker 1: emotional work while the perpetrator provides carefully calibrated response. The
5:06
Speaker 1: effect is intimacy that feels earned. The target believes they
5:10
Speaker 1: are being understood, they are actually being mapped. What Michael
5:14
Speaker 1: did not know in September of two thousand twenty one,
5:18
Speaker 1: what he had no way of knowing, was that Fisher
5:21
Speaker 1: was running the same architecture simultaneously with at least two
5:25
Speaker 1: other men, Patrick Ives twenty seven, an electrician in Mercer Hollow,
5:31
Speaker 1: Greg Malone, thirty, whose confrontation with Fisher in January of
5:35
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two would quietly shift the entire operation's focus.
5:40
Speaker 1: Each relationship used a slightly different profile. Each man believed
5:44
Speaker 1: he had Dean Fischer's specific particular attention. None of them did,
5:49
Speaker 1: and by late October of twenty twenty one, Dean Fisher
5:53
Speaker 1: had done something none of them knew about either. He
5:55
Speaker 1: had spotted Michael's car in the parking lot at Ridgeline Lanes.
6:00
Speaker 1: He had noted the make, the model, and the cracked
6:03
Speaker 1: passenger window that Michael had been meaning to fix for months.
6:07
Speaker 1: He had started to think about Saturdays. The cracked passenger
6:10
Speaker 1: window was the key to everything. Michael Sharp had been
6:14
Speaker 1: meaning to fix it for months, A minor nuisance, the
6:17
Speaker 1: kind of thing that stays on it to do list
6:19
Speaker 1: through one season and into the next. He never got
6:22
Speaker 1: around to it, and Dean Fisher never needed him to.
6:25
Speaker 1: By November of twenty twenty one, Fisher was asking questions,
6:29
Speaker 1: not strange questions, reasonable ones. He wanted to know where
6:34
Speaker 1: Michael parked when he bowled. He asked about the Saturday schedule,
6:38
Speaker 1: what time Michael arrived, how long the league ran. Michael
6:43
Speaker 1: answered he had no reason not to. The man he
6:46
Speaker 1: had been talking to for two months had remembered every
6:49
Speaker 1: small thing he had ever mentioned. A question about parking
6:53
Speaker 1: felt like attentiveness. It was reconnaissance. Between November and December
6:58
Speaker 1: of twoenty twenty one, charges began appearing on Michael's secondary
7:03
Speaker 1: credit card. Small amounts two dollars here, three dollars and
7:08
Speaker 1: changed there. Nothing that would trigger an alert, nothing that
7:12
Speaker 1: would ruin a week end, the kind of charge a
7:14
Speaker 1: person might dismiss as a forgotten subscription or a rounding error.
7:18
Speaker 1: Michael noticed them. He changed his password. The charges stopped.
7:23
Speaker 1: He did not connect them to Dean. That is the
7:26
Speaker 1: first image to hold a handful of small numbers erased
7:30
Speaker 1: by a password change apparently solved. The thread looked closed.
7:35
Speaker 1: It was not closed. It had just gone quiet. January
7:39
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two brought a rupture Fisher had not
7:42
Speaker 1: planned for. Greg Malone, thirty confronted Fisher directly. The details
7:48
Speaker 1: of that confrontation are not fully in the public record,
7:51
Speaker 1: but the result is Fisher cut contact with Malone immediately.
7:56
Speaker 1: One relationship terminated. The operation did not contract, It concentrated.
8:01
Speaker 1: Michael Sharp became the primary focus. In February of twenty
8:06
Speaker 1: twenty two, Frank Odum received a text message. Frank was
8:10
Speaker 1: Michael's team mate at Ridgeline Lane's, some one Michael had
8:14
Speaker 1: bowled with for years. The text appeared to come from
8:18
Speaker 1: Michael's number. It was ordinary in content, the kind of
8:22
Speaker 1: message that would not raise an alarm on its own,
8:25
Speaker 1: but when Frank mentioned it to Michael later, Michael had
8:29
Speaker 1: no memory of sending it. He checked his phone. The
8:32
Speaker 1: message was not in his sent folder. It had never
8:35
Speaker 1: been sent from his phone. Fisher had cloned enough of
8:37
Speaker 1: Michael's sim architecture to test an outbound message not to
8:41
Speaker 1: use it yet to confirm the clone worked. Frank Odum's
8:45
Speaker 1: contact information was the test target. The text that arrived
8:49
Speaker 1: on Frank's phone was a proof of concept, a calibration.
8:53
Speaker 1: Michael did not know this. What he knew was that
8:56
Speaker 1: his phone had apparently done something he had not asked
9:00
Speaker 1: to do. He filed it in the same mental drawer
9:03
Speaker 1: as the credit card charges. Strange, probably explainable, not yet alarming.
9:09
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty two is where the architecture revealed
9:13
Speaker 1: itself most clearly, not to Michael, but in retrospect to
9:18
Speaker 1: everyone who came after. Michael brought three things to Dean
9:22
Speaker 1: Fisher in that conversation. He did not bring accusations. He
9:26
Speaker 1: brought anxieties. He described the parking questions as something that
9:30
Speaker 1: had been nagging at him. He mentioned the credit card charges.
9:34
Speaker 1: He mentioned the text Frank had received. He framed each
9:38
Speaker 1: one as a possible misunderstanding, a gap in his own memory,
9:42
Speaker 1: something he was probably overthinking. Fisher listened. Then Fischer did
9:47
Speaker 1: something specific. He acknowledged Michael's feelings. He validated the anxiety itself,
9:52
Speaker 1: while gently redirecting the conclusions. He reminded Michael that he
9:56
Speaker 1: had a history of second guessing himself, something Michael had
9:59
Speaker 1: told old Fisher months earlier, in a moment of genuine
10:03
Speaker 1: self disclosure, he suggested that the pattern Michael was seen
10:07
Speaker 1: might be anxiety constructing connections that were not there. Michael
10:11
Speaker 1: wrote in his journal that night. The entry was brief.
10:15
Speaker 1: It read maybe He's right and I'm making connections that
10:18
Speaker 1: aren't there. That sentence is the center of this case,
10:23
Speaker 1: not because it was wrong. Michael's connections were completely right,
10:27
Speaker 1: but because of what it required for Fisher to redirect
10:30
Speaker 1: Michael's accurate suspicion back to Michael's own unreliability. Fisher had
10:35
Speaker 1: to have been listening carefully for months. He had to
10:38
Speaker 1: have stored the self disclosure about anxiety. He had to
10:42
Speaker 1: have known exactly which internal lever to press. The gas
10:45
Speaker 1: lighting worked because the intimacy was real enough. The map
10:49
Speaker 1: Fisher had built of Michael's psychology was detailed enough to
10:53
Speaker 1: use against him. Stacy Perkins, another teammate at Ridgeline Lanes,
10:58
Speaker 1: later recalled Michael using the word interesting about Dean around
11:02
Speaker 1: this time. Not warm, not enthusiastic. Interesting, the word a
11:08
Speaker 1: person uses when something does not quite resolve, but they
11:11
Speaker 1: have decided to set it down anyway. Michael set it down.
11:15
Speaker 1: Fisher kept building picture Fisher's rental at fourteen Quail Hollow Court.
11:20
Speaker 1: On the evening of May one, twenty twenty two, Patrick
11:25
Speaker 1: Ives twenty seven, an electrician from Mercer Hollow, had driven
11:29
Speaker 1: past that address. He recognized Fisher's truck. He knocked on
11:33
Speaker 1: the door. A neighbor heard the argument. What Patrick Ives
11:37
Speaker 1: knew at that moment and what Fisher immediately understood is
11:41
Speaker 1: not fully documented, but the operational consequences Within hours of
11:46
Speaker 1: that confrontation, Fisher began destroying and concealing evidence he had
11:51
Speaker 1: forty eight hours before anything moved officially, he used them.
11:55
Speaker 1: The encrypted drive went into the kitchen cabinet. The printed
11:59
Speaker 1: recordards materials investigators would later describe as documentation of the
12:05
Speaker 1: identity infrastructure Fisher had been assembled, went inside the rear
12:10
Speaker 1: rain gutter of the property, and Michael's phone, the phone
12:14
Speaker 1: Fisher had been removing from the unlocked car through the
12:17
Speaker 1: cracked passenger window on Saturday afternoons, went into a gallon
12:22
Speaker 1: ziplock freezer bag and down into the septic tank. On
12:27
Speaker 1: May third, twenty twenty two, Sharon Andrews a contractor working
12:31
Speaker 1: at the property opened the tank lid. She saw the
12:35
Speaker 1: bag before she touched anything. She photographed it first. Inside
12:39
Speaker 1: the bag, visible through the plastic was a phone in
12:42
Speaker 1: a blue rubberized case with a yellow luggage label. The
12:46
Speaker 1: label had Michael Sharp's name on it. It had his
12:49
Speaker 1: phone number. Michael's mother had insisted he label every device
12:53
Speaker 1: since he lost one at seventeen. The label that was
12:57
Speaker 1: meant to return a lost phone to its owner had
13:00
Speaker 1: survived a septic tank in his ziplock bag and was
13:03
Speaker 1: now identifying evidence at a crime scene. Fisher was arrested
13:07
Speaker 1: on May ninth, twenty twenty two, charged in Caldwell County
13:10
Speaker 1: with identity fraud, unlawful access to a financial account, and
13:14
Speaker 1: criminal tampering. He cooperated fully. He told investigators where everything was,
13:20
Speaker 1: the encrypted drive, the printed records, the phone, and then
13:24
Speaker 1: in the recorded cooperation sessions that would later form the
13:27
Speaker 1: basis of civil claims by both Patrick Ives and Greg Malone,
13:32
Speaker 1: Fisher described the architecture of all three relationships, the mirroring,
13:38
Speaker 1: the tripled profiles, the Saturday window, the simclone test in February,
13:44
Speaker 1: everything Michael had noticed and been redirected away from had
13:49
Speaker 1: been real. The phone was processed in returned to Michael.
13:52
Speaker 1: His journal entry from March was still on it, the
13:55
Speaker 1: one that said, maybe He's right and I'm making connections
13:58
Speaker 1: that aren't there. He he could read it now knowing
14:01
Speaker 1: what those connections had actually been. Every one of them
14:06
Speaker 1: was correct, every one of them. Fisher had turned back
14:09
Speaker 1: on it. There is a question worth sitting with before
14:13
Speaker 1: moving forward. Fisher had been meticulous. The encrypted drive, the
14:18
Speaker 1: layered relationships, the patient mirroring the sim clone as a
14:22
Speaker 1: test before use. A person operating with that level of
14:26
Speaker 1: care does not make the kind of mistake that gets
14:29
Speaker 1: discovered because a contractor opens a tank lit on a
14:32
Speaker 1: Tuesday morning. The question is not whether Fisher's plan collapsed.
14:37
Speaker 1: It did. The question is what collapsed it and whether
14:41
Speaker 1: it was ever as complete as it appeared. Patrick Ives
14:45
Speaker 1: knocking on that door at Quail Hollow on May first
14:48
Speaker 1: was not part of any plan. He drove past, recognized
14:52
Speaker 1: the truck, and acted on instinct. That single unplanned decision
14:57
Speaker 1: compressed Fisher's timeline from months to forty eight hours. The
15:03
Speaker 1: encrypted drive, the printed records, the phone in the tank.
15:08
Speaker 1: Fisher had been building something. Patrick's knock meant he had
15:11
Speaker 1: to stop building and start hiding. And hiding it turned
15:15
Speaker 1: out was something Fisher was considerably worse at. The cooperation
15:20
Speaker 1: Fisher offered was thorough. He told investigators where everything was.
15:25
Speaker 1: The encrypted drive in the kitchen cabinet held Michael's credentials, usernames, passwords,
15:31
Speaker 1: account structures. The printed records inside the rear rain gutter
15:35
Speaker 1: detailed the relationship architecture across all three targets. And the
15:40
Speaker 1: phone recovered from the septic tank was still readable, still functional,
15:45
Speaker 1: still carrying everything Michael had written in it. The Caldwell
15:49
Speaker 1: County charges carried a potential sentence of up to eleven
15:52
Speaker 1: years stacked across the three counts. Fisher cooperated fully and
15:57
Speaker 1: the court weighed that he was sentenced to four years,
16:01
Speaker 1: parole eligibility at twenty eight months. There is something clarifying
16:06
Speaker 1: about that number. Fisher had spent roughly eight months building
16:09
Speaker 1: the infrastructure around Michael alone, the mirroring, the access, the
16:14
Speaker 1: simclone test, the credentials on an encrypted drive. Eight months
16:18
Speaker 1: of patience and precision. The sentence he received for it
16:22
Speaker 1: was four years. The arithmetic is uncomfortable, but it is
16:26
Speaker 1: the arithmetic the court produced then in August of twenty
16:31
Speaker 1: twenty two, something changed the scope of everything. Fisher's DNA
16:35
Speaker 1: booking sample, taken as routine upon arrest, was run against
16:40
Speaker 1: open case databases. It returned a match a fraud and
16:44
Speaker 1: harassment case from twenty nineteen filed in a neighboring state.
16:49
Speaker 1: Perpetrator previously unidentified for three years. The victim was a
16:53
Speaker 1: woman named Diane osgood What she had experienced two years
16:57
Speaker 1: of financial identity theft and coercive online communication bore a
17:02
Speaker 1: structural resemblance to what Fisher had begun constructing around Michael.
17:07
Speaker 1: The same patient architecture, the same layered access charges were
17:11
Speaker 1: filed in the neighboring jurisdiction that October. Fisher did not
17:15
Speaker 1: cooperate with those investigators. He had already used his cooperation
17:20
Speaker 1: card in Caldwell County. The agreement he had reached there
17:23
Speaker 1: did not extend across state lines, and he knew it.
17:26
Speaker 1: Diane Osgoode had spent three years not knowing who had
17:30
Speaker 1: done it. The answer had been sitting in an unrun
17:32
Speaker 1: DNA profile until a contractor found a phone in a
17:36
Speaker 1: septic tank eighteen miles from Dunbarton Gregnolone and Patrick Ives
17:41
Speaker 1: filed civil claims based on the recorded cooperation sessions. Those
17:45
Speaker 1: sessions contained Fisher's own account of how each relationship was structured,
17:50
Speaker 1: what he had said, what he had accessed, what he
17:53
Speaker 1: had planned. His words recorded became the foundation of claims
17:58
Speaker 1: by the men he had built those relationships around. Michael
18:01
Speaker 1: Sharp was not a party to that litigation. He worked
18:05
Speaker 1: with Councilor Curtis Richardson through the spring. In summer of
18:09
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, and in June of that year, the
18:13
Speaker 1: same month Fisher's cooperation sessions were still being processed by investigators.
18:18
Speaker 1: Michael returned to the Saturday bowling league at Ridgeline Lanes.
18:22
Speaker 1: Frank Odo was there, Stacy Perkins was there, Bryce Lund
18:27
Speaker 1: the lane he had been bowling on since he was nineteen.
18:30
Speaker 1: The phone sat in his pocket, His journal was still
18:33
Speaker 1: on it. There is something that resists easy categorization about
18:37
Speaker 1: what Fisher did to Michael. No physical threat was ever made,
18:42
Speaker 1: No large scale fraud was completed before the arrest. The
18:45
Speaker 1: infrastructure was still being assembled. What Fisher built across eight
18:49
Speaker 1: months was a scaffold designed to hold another person's identity
18:54
Speaker 1: in place long enough to use it, and the only
18:57
Speaker 1: reason that scaffold never bore full weight was a knock
19:00
Speaker 1: on a door that was never supposed to happen. Michael
19:04
Speaker 1: had noticed. That is the part that stays. He noticed
19:07
Speaker 1: the parking questions. He noticed the charges that stopped when
19:11
Speaker 1: he changed his password. He noticed the text that his
19:14
Speaker 1: phone had sent three times. He brought what he had
19:18
Speaker 1: seen to the person who had planted it three times.
19:22
Speaker 1: Dean Fisher took what Michael offered, his own perceptiveness, his
19:26
Speaker 1: own anxiety, his own careful noticing, and reflected it back
19:30
Speaker 1: as evidence that Michael was the problem. The March Journal
19:34
Speaker 1: entry said, maybe he's right, and I'm making connections that
19:37
Speaker 1: aren't there. Every connection was correct. Fisher had spent months
19:42
Speaker 1: ensuring Michael would not trust the accuracy of his own mind.
19:46
Speaker 1: That is the mechanism counselor Curtis Richardson identified, not the
19:50
Speaker 1: credential theft, not the sim clone, but the systematic dismantling
19:55
Speaker 1: of a person's confidence in their own perception. The financial
19:58
Speaker 1: infrastructure was the goal. The psychological work was what made
20:02
Speaker 1: the goal possible. Michael Sharp was twenty four years old
20:07
Speaker 1: when a contractor named Sharon Andrews opened a tank lid
20:11
Speaker 1: on a Tuesday morning and found his phone. He is
20:14
Speaker 1: the reason Diane Osgood finally has a name attached to
20:18
Speaker 1: three years of her life. He is the reason Patrick
20:21
Speaker 1: Ives and Greg Malone have a record. He is the
20:24
Speaker 1: reason the credentials Fisher assembled never became what Fisher intended
20:29
Speaker 1: them to become. He went back to bowling on Saturdays.
20:33
Speaker 1: He carried the journal with him. The entry was still there,
20:36
Speaker 1: and so was the proof that he had been right
20:39
Speaker 1: all along. This show is made by Oboe Media