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The Letters in the Marsh: How "Paul" Stole Alice's Heart and Identity · Fake Love Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At six in the morning on the 4th of March, 22,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a birdwatcher named Holly Burns walked the edge of Cutter's
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Marsh and found a plastic tote half sunken in the reeds.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: She almost stepped over it. The lid had held. Inside,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: completely dry, were two and a half years of letters.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: And taped to the outside of the container, facing up
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: toward the gray Indiana sky, was a laminated photograph with
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: a handwritten inscription, FOR ALICE. so she knows I am real.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: He needed her to believe he was real. That single
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: fact is the thread that pulls everything apart. The letters
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: began in the spring of 2019 and arrived for two
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: and a half years without stopping. Thin, airmail paper, always.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: A compass rose, drawn in the lower right corner of
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: the last page. Always. The man who signed them called
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: himself Paul Carlson. He said he was an engineer working
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: in East Africa he said. He was lonely that he
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: had found her address through a pen pal program that
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: he hoped she would write back. Alice Chambers wrote back.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Of course she wrote back. That is not a criticism.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: That is the whole point. Delmore, Indiana sits 40 miles
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: southeast of Indianapolis, small enough that the same faces appear
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: at the hardware store, the literacy program, and the town
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: hall meeting. Alice Chambers had lived there for 27 years
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: and having moved there in her mid-30s. She was 63
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: years old in 21, recently retired after a career as
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: an administrative coordinator, the kind of job that requires a
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: person to be organized, thorough, and trusted with details. She
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: had been all three things for decades. For 11 of
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: those years, she had volunteered with a local literacy program,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: sitting across from adults, learning to read for the first time.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: She showed up every week. She did not cancel. The
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: people who knew Alice described someone whose reliability was not
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: a habit, but a value. Something she had decided about
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: herself a long time ago. She had filled out the
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: penpal form in the spring of 2019. The program itself
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: was legitimate. A forum-based service connecting adults who wanted to
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: correspond with strangers around the world. Alice had done things
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: like this before. She was curious about people. She liked letters.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: She liked the slowness of them, the way they required
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: a person to think before they wrote. Within two weeks
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: of submitting the form, a letter arrived. The return address
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: was Louisville, Kentucky. The handwriting was neat. The man identified
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: himself as Paul Carlson, 44 years old, civil engineer, currently
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: stationed on a long-term infrastructure project somewhere along the East
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: African coast. He wrote about the heat, about the landscape,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: about missing ordinary American things. He wrote like someone who
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: had time to think. He asked Alice about Delmore, about
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: her work, about her work, about what she read. There
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: is something that bears saying clearly here. The letter was
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: not reckless. It did not ask for anything. It arrived
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: on paper, by mail, with a stamp. In 2019, that
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: still carried weight. Most scams lived on screens. This one
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: lived in an envelope. Alice wrote back. She described her neighborhood,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: the literacy program, the particular quality of Indiana light in
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: early autumn. She mentioned her friend Sherry. She wrote about books.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Paul Carlson wrote back within three weeks. Then again, then again.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: One letter every three weeks for two and a half years.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Each one on the same thin airmail paper. Each one
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: ending with the same small compass. rose in the lower
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: right corner of the last page. There was a consistency
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: to it that felt, Alice would later say, like proof
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: of something. Real people are consistent. Real people have habits.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: The compass rose, came to feel like a signature. Almost
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: a greeting. I am still here. I am still thinking
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: of you. What Alice did not know, and had no
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: reason to suspect, was that the compass rose was notation.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: It was a signal in a script. The man writing
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: those letters was not Paul Carlson. He was not an engineer.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: He had never been to East Africa. His name was
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Vincent Dre, 49 years old, from Columbus, Fonimus, in Sunstray,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: 49 years old, from Columbus, Ohio. He had a history,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: a civil lawsuit in Georgia in 2014 for fraudulent investment activity.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Charges that never crossed into criminal territory. He had learned
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: something from that. He had learned to stay just below
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: the line. Dre had cloned Alice's penpal form from a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: third-party forum. He had harvested her name, her address, and
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: enough biographical detail to know who he was writing to
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: before she ever read his first letter. He had opened
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: the mail forwarding account in Louisville, paid in cash, registered
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: under a different name. Every letter she received had passed
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: through that service before it reached her mailbox. She did
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: not know any of that. She knew Paul. She knew
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the compass rose. Sherry Hunt had known Alice for years.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Sherry was 58, a former bank manager, the kind of
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: friend who notices things. She and Alice had lunch in
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: September of 21, and at some point during the meal,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Alice mentioned Paul. She had been corresponding with him for
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: two and a half years by then. She showed Sherry
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: a photograph, a man in his mid-forties, outdoors, somewhere arid
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: and bright, looking directly at the camera with a kind
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: of easy confidence. Sherry looked at the photograph for a moment.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: That evening, she did a reverse image search. The reverse
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: image search took 11 seconds. The photograph Alice had carried
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: in her wallet for two and a half years, the
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: man with the easy confidence the arid landscape behind him,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: belonged here. to a civil engineer named Tom Brewer, 44
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: years old, Boise, Idaho. He had posted those images publicly
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: after a project trip to East Africa. He had no
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: idea anyone had taken them. Paul Carlson did not exist.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Sherry did not sleep that night. The next morning, she
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: called Alice, and that call lasted two hours. Alice listened.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: She asked Sherry to run the search again while they
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: were on the phone. Sherry did. Same result, same man,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: same name. That was not Paul. What Alice felt in
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: that moment was not described in the record. What is
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: known is that she did not hang up. She stayed
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: on the line, and by the end of the call,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: she had agreed to let Sherry go to the police.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Detective Marcus Webb was assigned to the case in late
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: September of 21. He was an investigator with the Delmore
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Police Department, and within the first week he had confirmed
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: two things. The Louisville mail forwarding account had been opened
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: in July of 20, paid in cash, registered for one year,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: and closed in July of 21, and the photograph of
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Tom Brewer had been pulled from a public social media profile.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Neither fact gave him a name. Neither fact gave him Dre.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: What he had was a pattern. Two and a half
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: years of letters. A pivot in July when the forwarding
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: account closed. A crisis narrative that appeared in the letters.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Almost exactly two weeks after that closure. A story about
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: a container of tools held at a customs warehouse in Chicago.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: A request for Alice's name and signature. Not money. Not yet.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Webb noted the timing. The account closes. The pressure begins.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: That sequence was not accidental. But here's the thing about
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: that sequence. It almost worked. Not on Alice. Alice had Sherry.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: It had worked before. In early October of 21, a
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: woman named Joanne Metz attended a small social gathering at
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Alice's house. Joanne was a casual acquaintance, someone Alice knew
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: from community events. She brought a guest, a man she
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: introduced as a friend passing through. Polite, unassuming. He used
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: the bathroom twice during the evening. The second time. investigators
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: later reconstructed, he passed the hook by the front door.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: A key ring hung there, the kind that accumulates loyalty
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: cards over years. A grocery chain, a pharmacy, a hardware store.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: He read the hardware store number. On the 14th of October, 21,
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: a charge appeared on Alice's account. A 30-gallon plastic tote
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: and a set of bungee cords Purchased at a hardware
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: store in Delmore under her loyalty card number, under her
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: loyalty card number, Alice did not recognize the purchase. She
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: had not been to that store. The tote was transparent.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: You could see everything inside it. At some point in
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: late October, Alice gathered the letters. Two and a half
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: years of them, still in their envelopes, organized the way
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: she had kept them to bring to Sherry. The tote
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: was the right size. It disappeared before she could deliver it.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Investigators believe Dre took it. The reconstruction puts him back
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: in Delmore during that window, though the record does not
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: place him at Alice's address with Stannis. What the record
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: does establish is this. He had bought the container using
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: her account. He knew its dimensions. He had a reason
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: to want those letters. Detective Webb arrested Vincent Dre on
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: the 18th of November, 21, at a motel in Indianapolis.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: The first search... The motel room and the vehicle turned
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: up a prepaid phone, three false identification documents, and a
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: small notebook written in a personal cipher that investigators could
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: not immediately read. Dre said nothing. He did not confess.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: The cipher stayed closed. The charges from that first search
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: were real, but they were not the whole picture. Webb
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: knew there was more. The cipher suggested organization. Three false
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: IDs suggested practice. A man does not develop a personal
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: notation system for a single scheme. There was a storage unit.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: It had been rented under a variant spelling of Dre's name.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: One letter transposed enough to create distance on paper, not
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: enough to survive a warrant. The unit was in the
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: southern suburbs of Indianapolis. Webb executed the second search. Eleven
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: days after the arrest, inside, a ream of thin airmail paper, blank,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: The same paper Alice had been receiving for two and
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: a half years. A three-page handwritten script with notes inside brackets.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Instructions for varying specific details depending on how a recipient responded.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: If she asked about the weather, use this. If she
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: mentioned money worries, pivot here. If she went quiet, send
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: the compass rose. The compass rose was in the script.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: It was a management tool. and fixed to the inside
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: wall of the storage unit, still in its laminate sleeve,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: the photograph of Tom Brewer. On the back, a handwritten line,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the same line that would later be found on the
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: tote in the marsh. For Alice, so she knows I
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: am real, Dre confessed that same day. He admitted to
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the scheme against Alice Chambers. He admitted to two prior
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: attempts he described as incomplete. One of them, It would
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: emerge months later, had a name attached to it. Iris Cobb, 55,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: of Lexington, Kentucky, a former bank teller with 18 years
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: in the industry. She had received letters from a Paul
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Carlson in 2016. She had done a reverse image search
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: on her own. She had never reported it because, as
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: she told investigators, after the media coverage surfaced, she had
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: not lost anything she could name. The record notes her phrase.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: Nothing she could name. There are two ways to read
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: what Vincent Dray built. Vincent Dray built. Picture the Louisville
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: forwarding account. One year, cash. A name that was not his.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Picture the script with its bracketed contingencies. If she mentions
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: money worries, pivot here. Picture the compass rose. Drawn by
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: hand in the lower right corner of the final page
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: of every letter. For two and a half years. Not
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: as affection, but as a notation. A signal that the
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: sequence was still running. One reading is that this was
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: purely financial. Dre had constructed a machine designed to reach. Eventually,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: a document with Alice's name and signature on it. The
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: customs container story was the approach vector. The signature request
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: would have followed. Some version of a financial instrument. A
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: transfer authorization. A wire that was the destination the script
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: was navigating toward. The compressed timeline after July, the pivot
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: to crisis. The in-person visit to read her loyalty card number.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: All of it, consistent with acceleration toward a close. But
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: that reading collapses slightly when you stand in the storage unit.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: A purely financial operation does not laminate a photograph and
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: inscribe it. A purely financial operation does not write for Alice.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: So she knows I am real on the back of
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: a prop. That line was not in the script. It
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: was not a contingency note. It was written in Dre's
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: own hand and fixed to the wall of a room
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: that was never meant to be seen. The second reading
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: is harder to name. Dre had run this before. Iris
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Cobb in 2016. Two other attempts he called incomplete. But
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: only Alice's file had the photograph on the wall. Only
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Alice's letters were worth taking. Only Alice's tote was worth
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: driving to a marsh and concealing underwater with bungee cords
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: he had purchased using her own account, as if the
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: letters needed to be kept somewhere he could find them again.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: The record does not resolve that. The confession addresses the mechanics.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: It does not address the wall. What the evidence confirms
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: is this. Alice never transferred money. Alice never signed anything.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: The machine never completed its run, and somewhere in the
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: gap between what Dre built and what he wrote on
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the back of that photograph, there is a question the
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: documents leave open. It is not a comfortable question, but
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: it is the one the evidence actually asks. Detective Marcus
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Webb executed the second warrant on a storage unit rented
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: under a misspelled version of Vincent Dre's name in the
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: southern suburbs of Indianapolis 11 days after the arrest. What
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: he found inside recontextualized everything the first search had established.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: The photograph was laminated and fixed to the wall. Tom
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Brewer's face, taken from public posts documenting engineering work in
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: East Africa. Below it, André' s own handwriting for Alice. So
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: she knows I am real. Beside the photograph, a ream
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: of thin airmail paper blank. the same stock Alice had
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: been receiving for two and a half years, and on
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: the shelf below that, a three-page script with bracketed notes
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: in the margins, instructions for adjusting the narrative depending on
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: how Alice responded. That script produced the confession. Dre admitted
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: the scheme against Alice Chambers in full. He admitted two
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: prior attempts. He described as incomplete. He was 49 years old,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: originally from Columbus, Ohio, and his only prior legal exposure
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: was a civil fraud judgment in Georgia in 2014, an
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: investment scheme that never produced criminal charges. This was his
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: first arrest. The charges were conspiratorial fraud and deceptive identity
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: under Indiana statute, the sentence. Four years, three weeks after
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: the case received media coverage, a woman named Iris Cobb,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: called the Delmore Police Department from Lexington, Kentucky. She was
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: 55 years old, a former bank teller of 18 years,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: and she had something to add to the record. In 2016,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: she had received letters from a man who called himself
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Paul Carlson. She had conducted a reverse image search on
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: the photograph he sent. She found a real person. She
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: stopped writing. She never reported it because as she explained
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: to investigators, She had not lost anything she could name.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Her testimony was included in the sentencing file. The tote
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: did not surface until about three and a half months
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: after Dre's arrest. Holly Burns found it on the morning
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: of the 4th of March, 2020, at approximately six in
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: the morning, while she was watching birds at Cutter's Marsh.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: She called 911 at 714. The container was half submerged,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: held in place by the bungee cords, Dre had charged
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: to Alice's loyalty card number on the 14th of October.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: The plastic seal had held. The letters inside were dry.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: The laminated photograph was still attached to the outside. Alice
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: never transferred money. Alice never signed a document. The machine,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: as it was designed, never completed its run. What Dre
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: had built toward a financial close, the customs container story,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: the name and signature request that investigators believe was coming next,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: stopped before it arrived. The evidence confirms that. The sentencing
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: record confirms that. What the sentencing record does not address
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: is the wall of the storage unit. Why a purely
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: transactional operation required a laminated photograph fixed at eye level
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: in a room. No one was meant to enter. The
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: script had bracketed notes for contingencies. The photograph had no
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: bracketed notes. It was not a contingency. It was something else,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: and the documents leave it there without a label. Iris
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Cobb's name being in the sentencing file means at least
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: two women received these letters. Dre described two other attempts
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: as incomplete. The record does not establish how many more
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: there were or where those files are now. Alice Chambers
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: spent 27 years in Delmore. She volunteered with a literacy
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: program for 11 of them helping people learn to read
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: and write. She filled out a pen pal form in
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the spring of 2019 because she believed in letters. She
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: believed in the specific weight of words on paper, in
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: the discipline of writing to someone you cannot see, in
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the idea that a stranger might be worth the time
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: it takes to compose a sentence carefully. She was not
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: wrong about any of that. The letters she received for
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: two and a half years were manufactured. The man was
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a fictionist, The compass rose in the lower right corner
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: of every final page was a detail in a script.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: But Alice's responses were not manufactured. Her handwriting was hers.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Her questions were genuine. Her attention to another person, a
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: person who did not exist, was real. There is something
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: in this case that resists a clean summary. Not because
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: the facts are unclear. They are not. Dre built a system,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: ran it against a woman who had done nothing wrong,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: was caught, confessed, and was sentenced. The mechanics are documented.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: What resists summary is what Alice represents in this story.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: A person who wrote back, who kept writing, who brought
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: the letters to a friend at lunch and said, look
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: at this man, look at what he wrote. Not because
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: something felt wrong, but because something had felt right for
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: two and a half years, and she wanted to share it.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Sherry Hunt ran the reverse image search that same evening.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: She is the reason the machine stopped. Friendship is also
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: a system. It runs on attention and repetition, and showing up.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: It turns out that system is faster. The tote is
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: in evidence storage. The letters are inside it. Dry, written
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: in Alice's hand, to a man who never existed. She
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: wrote them the same way. She taught adults to read
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: one careful word at a time in the belief that
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: language was worth the effort. She was not wrong. The
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: person who received those letters was the wrong one. That
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: is not a distinction the evidence makes, lightly, and neither
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: should anyone else. This show is made by Oba Media.