Latest / Narcisist Psychology / The Notebook, the Gym Bag, and the Man Who Rewrote a Life
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: The morning of December eleventh, two thousand nineteen, a plow
- 0:08Speaker 1: truck driver named Lauren O'Connor was four hours into her
- 0:11Speaker 1: shift when her head lights caught something on the shoulder
- 0:15Speaker 1: of Fenwick Road. A gym bag zipper split wide open,
- 0:19Speaker 1: its contents fanned across nine inches of fresh snow inside
- 0:24Speaker 1: a spiral notebook and a photograph of a man shirtless, smiling,
- 0:30Speaker 1: a measuring tape across his chest, someone else's handwriting across
- 0:35Speaker 1: the bottom. The man in that photograph had been reported
- 0:38Speaker 1: missing forty eight hours earlier, and the bag had just
- 0:42Speaker 1: been thrown from a moving car. That single object on
- 0:45Speaker 1: the roadside carried two years of someone's life inside it.
- 0:49Speaker 1: The question was whose version of that life it actually recorded.
- 0:53Speaker 1: The note book belonged in a practical sense to a
- 0:57Speaker 1: contractor named Neil Davis, but the measurements written across every page,
- 1:02Speaker 1: taken every three weeks, logged in Davis's hand were Carl Hughes's,
- 1:07Speaker 1: Carl's chest, Carl's waist, Carl's arms. Carl had never once
- 1:13Speaker 1: held the notebook himself, and by the time forensic analysts
- 1:17Speaker 1: finished examining it, they found that at least six of
- 1:20Speaker 1: its pages had been altered after the original recording numbers changed,
- 1:26Speaker 1: progress erased, regression, manufactured at precisely the moments it would
- 1:31Speaker 1: do the most damage. This is the story of how
- 1:34Speaker 1: one man dismantled another man's ability to trust himself, and
- 1:38Speaker 1: how a split gem bag zipper on a snowy road
- 1:41Speaker 1: began to unravel at all. Carl Hughes was fifty two
- 1:45Speaker 1: years old and had lived on Fenick Road in Drayden
- 1:48Speaker 1: Township for most of his adult life. He was a
- 1:51Speaker 1: semi retired electrician, the kind of man who calibrated things
- 1:55Speaker 1: for a living voltage load capacity, the tolerance between what
- 2:00Speaker 1: a circuit can carry and what will make it fail.
- 2:03Speaker 1: He had spent decades reading systems accurately and trusting what
- 2:07Speaker 1: he read. Colleagues described him as methodical, precise, not a
- 2:12Speaker 1: man who made guesses when he could make measurements. He was, also,
- 2:15Speaker 1: by his own description, private. He did not join things.
- 2:19Speaker 1: He had, never belonged to a gym, never worked with
- 2:22Speaker 1: a personal trainer, never submitted his body to measurement by
- 2:25Speaker 1: another person. He built things in his garage, maintained his
- 2:29Speaker 1: own truck, and kept a life that was organized around
- 2:32Speaker 1: competence around the reliable satisfaction of work that either held
- 2:37Speaker 1: or didn't, and knowing which was which. In the spring
- 2:41Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, Carl and his wife Brenda divorced. He
- 2:46Speaker 1: kept the house on Fenwick Road. His daughter renee twenty
- 2:50Speaker 1: eight lived in Morrow Falls, about forty minutes away. She
- 2:54Speaker 1: came every Thursday. His son Dereck was less present. Carl's
- 2:58Speaker 1: whorld after the divorce Horse was quieter, more solitary, but
- 3:02Speaker 1: stable in the way that a well maintained house is stable,
- 3:05Speaker 1: not warm exactly, but holding. He was not a man
- 3:10Speaker 1: looking for a mentor. He was not a man looking
- 3:13Speaker 1: for a trainer or a program or a system imposed
- 3:16Speaker 1: from outside. That matters because what happened next did not
- 3:20Speaker 1: begin with Carl seeking something he lacked. It began with
- 3:24Speaker 1: someone who had already studied him. Neil Davis had first
- 3:27Speaker 1: worked on the Fenneck Road property in twenty twelve. He
- 3:31Speaker 1: came back in twenty fourteen. Both times he worked jobs
- 3:35Speaker 1: on Carl's house, sub flooring, structural work, and in doing
- 3:40Speaker 1: so he walked the layout. He knew which rooms connected,
- 3:45Speaker 1: he knew the electrical panel, He knew how the garage
- 3:47Speaker 1: opened and where the entry points were. At the time,
- 3:51Speaker 1: Carl was still married. Davis was a contractor with a
- 3:54Speaker 1: van and a business name, and there was nothing remarkable
- 3:58Speaker 1: about any of it. Three years after his second visit,
- 4:01Speaker 1: in February of twenty seventeen, Davis came back. Carl had
- 4:06Speaker 1: called Crestwood Home Services for a sub floor in repair.
- 4:09Speaker 1: Davis showed up at the door, recognized the house, and
- 4:13Speaker 1: got the job. What followed in the weeks after that
- 4:16Speaker 1: first visit looked from the outside like an unexpected friendship.
- 4:22Speaker 1: Davis was attentive. He showed up early, he stayed late.
- 4:26Speaker 1: He asked Carl questions about his work, his history, his
- 4:29Speaker 1: years as an electrician. He expressed what appeared to be
- 4:33Speaker 1: genuine admiration for Karl's precision, his self sufficiency, his knowledge
- 4:38Speaker 1: of systems. He told Carl, according to later testimony, that
- 4:42Speaker 1: a man who understood load tolerance and calibration had a
- 4:46Speaker 1: discipline most people would never develop. Renee noticed the change
- 4:50Speaker 1: in her father by the fall of twenty seventeen, not alarm,
- 4:55Speaker 1: not yet. Karl was talking differently. He referenced Davis often.
- 5:00Speaker 1: He seemed lighter, more engaged, as though the quiet of
- 5:03Speaker 1: the post of force House had found some company to
- 5:06Speaker 1: fill it. She described it later as watching her father
- 5:09Speaker 1: come back online after a long stand by. She would
- 5:13Speaker 1: spend the next two years watching something else happen instead.
- 5:17Speaker 1: The garage training began in June of twenty seventeen. Three
- 5:21Speaker 1: mornings a week, Carl Hughes drove to his own garage
- 5:24Speaker 1: and Davis was already there. No equipment at first, just
- 5:29Speaker 1: a spiral notebook, a measuring tape, and Davis's attention. Davis
- 5:34Speaker 1: recorded Karl's measurements at roughly three week intervals, chest arms wait.
- 5:40Speaker 1: He wrote everything down in his own handwriting. Carl never
- 5:44Speaker 1: held the notebook, Davis kept it, took it when he left,
- 5:48Speaker 1: brought it back for the next session. This was presented
- 5:52Speaker 1: at the time as professional practice a record. Davis said
- 5:56Speaker 1: that he maintained for all his clients that notebook would
- 5:59Speaker 1: become the most important object in this case. Karl had
- 6:03Speaker 1: spent thirty years as an electrician. His professional life was
- 6:07Speaker 1: built on a single principle. A reading is either accurate
- 6:11Speaker 1: or it isn't. You trust the instrument, you verify the result.
- 6:15Speaker 1: You do not guess what Davis understood and what the
- 6:19Speaker 1: prosecution would later argue was deliberate is that this exact
- 6:23Speaker 1: discipline made Karl uniquely vulnerable to a specific kind of attack,
- 6:27Speaker 1: not against his body, against his ability to read himself.
- 6:32Speaker 1: By late two thousand seventeen, the measurements in the note
- 6:35Speaker 1: book began to serve a new purpose. When Karl felt
- 6:38Speaker 1: he was making progress, Davis would open the note book
- 6:42Speaker 1: and show him a number. The number said otherwise. When
- 6:45Speaker 1: Karl pushed back, and according to testimony, he did push
- 6:48Speaker 1: back more than once, Davis would compare the current reading
- 6:53Speaker 1: to an earlier page. The earlier page confirmed the regression.
- 6:57Speaker 1: The instrument did not lie. Here is what investigators would
- 7:01Speaker 1: eventually confirm. At least six of those pages had been
- 7:05Speaker 1: altered after the original measurements were recorded. A handwriting examiner
- 7:09Speaker 1: testified that the changes were post recording modifications, numbers adjusted,
- 7:14Speaker 1: not corrected. The instrument had been lying for months. Carl
- 7:18Speaker 1: had no way to know, because Carl had never been
- 7:22Speaker 1: allowed to hold it. One image captures what was happening
- 7:25Speaker 1: more precisely than any testimony could. Prosecutors entered a photograph
- 7:30Speaker 1: into evidence. Carl, shirtless, standing against a white wall, a
- 7:35Speaker 1: measuring tape stretched across his chest. He is smiling. His
- 7:39Speaker 1: name is written across the bottom of the photograph in
- 7:41Speaker 1: someone else's hand. Carl had no knowledge the photograph had
- 7:45Speaker 1: been taken. The prosecution argued it documented something beyond a
- 7:50Speaker 1: training session. It documented possession. By mid two thousand eighteen,
- 7:56Speaker 1: the structure around Carl had changed in ways that were
- 7:59Speaker 1: hard to nane from the inside. Davis had suggested converting
- 8:03Speaker 1: Carl's spare bedroom into a dedicated training space. Carl paid
- 8:08Speaker 1: for the materials. Davis used Carl's truck for supply runs,
- 8:12Speaker 1: sometimes for days at a time. Supplements arrived and Karl
- 8:17Speaker 1: paid for those. Two then came two separate transfers described
- 8:21Speaker 1: as loans for a training facility Davis said he was opening.
- 8:25Speaker 1: The facility never existed. No equipment receipts were ever produced.
- 8:31Speaker 1: By spring of two thoy nineteen, Carl had transferred nineteen
- 8:35Speaker 1: thousand dollars, but the money was almost secondary to what
- 8:38Speaker 1: the money represented. Karl's daughter, Renee, drove forty minutes from
- 8:43Speaker 1: Morrow Falls every Thursday. She had been watching her father
- 8:47Speaker 1: since the fall of two thousand seventeen, first with relief
- 8:51Speaker 1: he seemed less isolated after the divorce, then with a
- 8:55Speaker 1: creeping unease, she struggled to articulate. By the time she
- 8:58Speaker 1: put it into words, it sounded simple. She told investigators.
- 9:03Speaker 1: He used to trust himself. He built things and they
- 9:06Speaker 1: worked or they didn't, and he knew which was which,
- 9:10Speaker 1: and then he stopped trusting himself about anything. In October
- 9:14Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, Karl told Renee that Davis had
- 9:18Speaker 1: informed him he was regressing. Karl could not dispute it.
- 9:22Speaker 1: He could not produce the note book because he had
- 9:24Speaker 1: never been permitted to hold it. He could not point
- 9:27Speaker 1: to a measurement he had personally verified because he had
- 9:30Speaker 1: never been permitted to make one. He had spent more
- 9:33Speaker 1: than two years being assessed by an instrument he was
- 9:36Speaker 1: not allowed to read. And now the instrument said he
- 9:40Speaker 1: was going backward, and the man who built his life
- 9:43Speaker 1: on accurate readings had no way to argue with it.
- 9:46Speaker 1: Renee contacted Detective Marcus Webb. Webb was a fifteen year
- 9:51Speaker 1: veteran with Drayden Township. When Renee came to him in
- 9:54Speaker 1: October of two thousand nineteen. She was not reporting a
- 9:58Speaker 1: crime she could name. She was reporting a change in
- 10:02Speaker 1: her father that frightened her. Webb took the meeting anyway.
- 10:05Speaker 1: What he found when he started pulling records was not
- 10:08Speaker 1: a single case. It was a pattern wearing different names.
- 10:13Speaker 1: Davis had operated under at least two prior business names
- 10:17Speaker 1: before Crestwood Home Services appeared in the Drayden area. In
- 10:21Speaker 1: the county civil records, Webb found a contract dispute involving
- 10:25Speaker 1: a man named Tom Vickers. It had been quietly settled.
- 10:30Speaker 1: Vickers had not pressed charges. Webb found him, and Vickers
- 10:35Speaker 1: agreed to testify. Then Webb found Bernard Keene, a former
- 10:39Speaker 1: machinist who had paid Davis substantial sums between two thousand
- 10:43Speaker 1: eleven and two thousand thirteen for services that were minimal
- 10:48Speaker 1: or fictional. Keene told investigators he had not reported it
- 10:52Speaker 1: because he hadn't thought anyone would believe him. Two men,
- 10:56Speaker 1: same structure, no complaints until Webb came looking. Webb also
- 11:01Speaker 1: ran the reference Davis had provided to Carl, a man
- 11:04Speaker 1: named Jerry Nance, presented as a satisfied former client whose
- 11:09Speaker 1: results were exactly what Karl could expect. Investigators discovered that
- 11:13Speaker 1: Jerry Nance was Davis's half brother. The relationship had never
- 11:17Speaker 1: been disclosed. The investigation was six weeks old. When Carl
- 11:22Speaker 1: Hughes's daughter called Webb again. It was December ninth, two
- 11:26Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. Carl had not answered his phone, he had
- 11:31Speaker 1: not been seen. Renee filed a missing person's report, and
- 11:35Speaker 1: what should have been a welfare check became something else entirely.
- 11:39Speaker 1: Webb and a second detective went to the Fennick Road house.
- 11:43Speaker 1: They did not find Carl outside. They went in. Davis
- 11:47Speaker 1: arrived at the house while the detectives were already inside.
- 11:51Speaker 1: He said almost nothing. He asked for an attorney. He
- 11:55Speaker 1: received one forty eight hours later. On the morning of
- 11:59Speaker 1: December eleventh, a plow truck driver named Lauren O'Connor was
- 12:03Speaker 1: working a county road route in the aftermath of roughly
- 12:06Speaker 1: nine inches of overnight snowfall. She had been on shift
- 12:10Speaker 1: since four in the morning. At some point on her circuit,
- 12:13Speaker 1: she saw something on the shoulder of Fenwick Road that
- 12:17Speaker 1: did not belong there. A gym bag, its zipper split
- 12:21Speaker 1: contents spread across the snow. She stopped inside the bag,
- 12:25Speaker 1: the spiral notebook and the photograph of Carl. Forensic analysis
- 12:30Speaker 1: subsequently confirmed that the jim bag had been in Davis's vehicle.
- 12:34Speaker 1: The trajectory that emerged from that evidence was specific. Before
- 12:38Speaker 1: returning to Carl's house on the night of his arrest,
- 12:41Speaker 1: Davis had driven a loof of county roads and thrown
- 12:45Speaker 1: the bag from the window. He came back, the detectives
- 12:49Speaker 1: were waiting. The bag had landed in the snow less
- 12:52Speaker 1: than a mile from the house where Davis had first
- 12:55Speaker 1: learned Carl's name. At trial, Davis's defense had a single
- 12:59Speaker 1: coherent threat to pull the notebook, his attorney argued, was
- 13:03Speaker 1: a professional record he maintained for all his clients. Carl
- 13:07Speaker 1: had always been free to see it. The training payments
- 13:10Speaker 1: were a legitimate exchange for legitimate services. The two transfers
- 13:15Speaker 1: described as loans were informal arrangements between friends. Davis acknowledged
- 13:21Speaker 1: the money existed, but denied any controlling intent. Picture what
- 13:25Speaker 1: that defense requires you to believe. It requires you to
- 13:29Speaker 1: believe that a professional trainer keeps client records in his
- 13:32Speaker 1: own vehicle, never gives the client a copy, and adjusts
- 13:36Speaker 1: measurements after the fact for reasons unrelated to manufacturing evidence
- 13:40Speaker 1: of failure. It requires you to believe that a man
- 13:44Speaker 1: who had worked inside Carl's house in twenty twelve and
- 13:48Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, who knew the layout the panel the entry points,
- 13:54Speaker 1: returned five years later by coincidence and developed a genuine friendship.
- 13:59Speaker 1: It requires you to believe that Jerry Nance was a
- 14:01Speaker 1: reference and not a prop despite the fact that Nance
- 14:05Speaker 1: was Davis's half brother and that relationship was never disclosed
- 14:09Speaker 1: to Karl. And it requires you to ignore the photograph.
- 14:13Speaker 1: Karl did not consent to that image his name in
- 14:16Speaker 1: someone else's hand written across his chest. The prosecution's argument
- 14:21Speaker 1: was not rhetorical. It was forensic. That photograph recovered from
- 14:26Speaker 1: a bag Davis threw from a moving car before returning
- 14:29Speaker 1: to face detectives was not a training document. It was
- 14:33Speaker 1: something you keep when you want to keep a record
- 14:36Speaker 1: of someone. The head fake in this case runs in
- 14:39Speaker 1: one direction for a long time. It looks on the
- 14:42Speaker 1: surface like a fraud case. A contractor who overcharged a
- 14:46Speaker 1: lonely divorcee nineteen thousand dollars no receipts, a facility that
- 14:52Speaker 1: never opened. Webb initially ran it through contractor in civil records.
- 14:57Speaker 1: Vicker's case had been civil. Keene had framed his own
- 15:01Speaker 1: experience as a business dispute. The financial thread was real,
- 15:05Speaker 1: and it was damaging, But it was also the least
- 15:09Speaker 1: of what happened to Carl Hughes. The forensic psychologist for
- 15:12Speaker 1: the prosecution, Gregory Stewart, had spent eleven years working coercive
- 15:17Speaker 1: control cases. He met with Carl three times before writing
- 15:21Speaker 1: his evaluation. What Stuart described to the jury was not
- 15:24Speaker 1: a financial crime with psychological side effects. It was a dismantling.
- 15:30Speaker 1: A man who calibrates things for a living, Stuart testified,
- 15:34Speaker 1: is a man who can be taught to distrust his
- 15:36Speaker 1: own calibration, and once that distrust is established, the manipulator
- 15:42Speaker 1: becomes the only functioning instrument in the room. That sentence
- 15:46Speaker 1: recontextualizes every other fact in the case the garage for
- 15:51Speaker 1: three week intervals. The notebook. Karl was never allowed to
- 15:54Speaker 1: hold the photograph taken without his knowledge. The regression announced
- 15:59Speaker 1: at the precise moment. Karl had no independent measurement to
- 16:03Speaker 1: push back with. These were not the by products of
- 16:07Speaker 1: a financial scheme. The financial scheme was the by product
- 16:10Speaker 1: of this. Davis was convicted on all counts wire fraud,
- 16:15Speaker 1: theft by deception, criminal harassment. He was sentenced to seven years.
- 16:19Speaker 1: Through his attorney, he acknowledged borrowing money. He did not
- 16:23Speaker 1: acknowledge what the notebook said about the rest of it.
- 16:26Speaker 1: The jury had the notebook, They had the altered pages.
- 16:31Speaker 1: They had the photograph. They had Renee's testimony about a
- 16:34Speaker 1: father who stopped trusting himself. They had Stuart's eleven years
- 16:39Speaker 1: of pattern recognition aimed at a single case. They returned
- 16:42Speaker 1: a verdict in less than four hours. The jim bag
- 16:46Speaker 1: never went back to Fenick Road. Neither did the notebook.
- 16:50Speaker 1: Both were entered into evidence, cataloged and held. Carl Hughes's measurements,
- 16:55Speaker 1: two years of them recorded in someone else's handwriting on
- 16:59Speaker 1: page which, as someone else had altered, passed into the
- 17:02Speaker 1: custody of a court house. They became property of the state.
- 17:07Speaker 1: The document that had been used to tell Carl what
- 17:09Speaker 1: his body was doing, what it was failing to do,
- 17:12Speaker 1: what it could not be trusted to report on its
- 17:15Speaker 1: own sat in an evidence room in Drayden Township, while
- 17:19Speaker 1: Carl sat at home on Fenwick Road without it. That
- 17:22Speaker 1: distinction matters. Davis had constructed a system in which Carl's
- 17:27Speaker 1: reality was always somewhere else in the notebook. In Davis's
- 17:31Speaker 1: assessment in the judgment of a half brother presented as
- 17:35Speaker 1: a stranger. The Notebook's absence from Carl's house did not
- 17:38Speaker 1: end the problem it represented. It just meant the problem
- 17:42Speaker 1: was no longer walking through his door. The Thursday dinners
- 17:45Speaker 1: came back in January of twoenty twenty, Renee drove the
- 17:50Speaker 1: forty minutes from Morrow Falls. Carl made food. They sat
- 17:54Speaker 1: at the same table where for two and a half
- 17:57Speaker 1: years he had been quietly learning to doubt everything he
- 18:01Speaker 1: knew about himself. He is described as recovery, not recovered.
- 18:07Speaker 1: The record draws that line carefully, and it is worth
- 18:10Speaker 1: drawing carefully here too. Recovery from coercive control does not
- 18:15Speaker 1: have a clean shape. Karl was a man who had
- 18:18Speaker 1: spent a working life calibrating things voltage, load resistance. His
- 18:24Speaker 1: trade was precision, and his trade was also trust. Trust
- 18:28Speaker 1: that the instrument in his hand was telling him the truth.
- 18:31Speaker 1: Davis had not simply taken nineteen thousand dollars. He had
- 18:35Speaker 1: spent months teaching Karl to outsource that trust. You do
- 18:39Speaker 1: not simply take it back when the source is arrested.
- 18:41Speaker 1: Renee testified so that Karl did not have to. That
- 18:45Speaker 1: was not a small thing. She stood in a corporal
- 18:48Speaker 1: and described watching her father lose his own voice, then
- 18:52Speaker 1: found her own to replace it. In the record, the
- 18:55Speaker 1: jury deliberated for less than four hours. The verdict covered
- 18:59Speaker 1: wire fraud, theft by deception, and criminal harassment seven years
- 19:04Speaker 1: Davis called it informal loans between friends. The forensic handwriting
- 19:09Speaker 1: examiner called it something else. Six altered pages, measurements changed
- 19:14Speaker 1: after the fact, at leverage moments to manufacture decline that
- 19:18Speaker 1: did not exist, to make a man believe his body
- 19:21Speaker 1: was failing him when it was not, to ensure that
- 19:23Speaker 1: the only stable number in Carl Hughes's world was the
- 19:27Speaker 1: one Davis decided to write down, there is something in
- 19:30Speaker 1: this case that does not resolve cleanly. Even after the verdict,
- 19:34Speaker 1: Bernard Keene, the prior victim from years before, had not reported,
- 19:39Speaker 1: Tom Vickers had settled quietly. Neither man had named what
- 19:43Speaker 1: happened to them in terms that produced a criminal file.
- 19:47Speaker 1: Davis had operated for years in the space between what
- 19:50Speaker 1: the law names and what it does not. What finally
- 19:53Speaker 1: closed that space was not a complaint. It was a
- 19:56Speaker 1: daughter who drove forty minutes every Thursday and noticed it.
- 20:00Speaker 1: In the fall of twenty nineteen that her father had
- 20:03Speaker 1: stopped trusting himself about anything. She called that a loss.
- 20:07Speaker 1: What she gave back by testifying was the record, the
- 20:11Speaker 1: official account of what happened to Carl Hughes on Fenwick Road,
- 20:16Speaker 1: his version in her voice in a room where it
- 20:19Speaker 1: could not be altered. The notebook did not return to Carl,
- 20:23Speaker 1: but his daughter did every Thursday. That is where the
- 20:26Speaker 1: story stands. This show is made by Obo Media