Latest / Why Humans Lie / She Left an Empty Wheelchair in the Snow - He Stayed Behind

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She Left an Empty Wheelchair in the Snow - He Stayed Behind · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At eight fourteen on the morning of February ninth, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a birder named Russell Thorpe stopped at the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: edge of a field off County Route seven and took
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a photograph. In the center of the field sat an
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: empty wheel chair. Four inches of fresh snow covered the
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: ground in every direction. There were no tracks leading to
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: the chair, there were no tracks leading away. The chrome
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: footrests caught the low winter sun, and on the seat,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: folded neatly, was a wool blanket. That is not how
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: wheel chairs end up in fields. Somewhere near by, a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: sixty two year old woman named Sharon Sheridan was thirty
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: one pounds underweight, living inside a house she could no
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: longer leave on her own terms. She had not chosen
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: that wheel chair, She had not chosen the hospital bed
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: installed in what used to be the guest room, and
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: the man who had arranged all of it was at
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: that moment still inside the farmhouse on Gullfork Road. What
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Russell's photograph captured was not abandonment. It was a signal.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Sharon had placed it there herself, in the dark at
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: two in the morning. She had been planning it for
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: three months This is the story of how one person
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: methodically dismantled another's reality, not with violence, not with locks,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: but with kindness, patience, and a handwritten ledger hidden in
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: a panel van. Before any of this, Sharon Sheridan had
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: a life that ran on precision and warmth in equal measure.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: She had managed the front office of a dental practice
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: on Birch Avenue for twenty two years. Patience remembered her
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: by name before she remembered theirs. She knew which children
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: needed the Great Fluoride and which needed the bubblegum. She
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: kept the schedule tight and the waiting room calm, and
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: she did it without anyone noticing how much effort that required.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: On thirds, she volunteered at the Millhaven Savings Cooperative on
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Fourth Street six years, never missed a shift. Connie Slade,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the cooperative's director and one of Sharon's closest friends, would
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: later describe Sharon as the kind of person who arrived
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: early and stayed late, and never mentioned either. After the shift,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Sharon and a small group of regulars walked three blocks
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: to Paully's Diner, tomato soup, half turkey sandwich, a library
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: book opened beside the plate, every Thursday, the same ritual,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: the kind of routine that looks unremarkable until it disappears.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Sharon was sixty two in the winter of twenty nineteen.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: She was the younger daughter of Frank Sheridan, a retired
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: electrician who had lived in the farmhouse on Gull Fork
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Road since twenty ten. Frank was around eighty by then,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: dealing with early stage vascular dementia and a bad hip
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: that had taken most of his range of motion. He
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: was still sharp on his good days, but his good
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: days were getting shorter. Sharon had moved back into the
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: farmhouse to help him. She was not legally obligated to.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: She simply did it the way she did most things,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: without announcement, without asking for recognition. Frank's older daughter, Lynette Pierce,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: lived in Columbus. She called every week. The sisters had
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: their differences, the way adult siblings often do, but the
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: calls were consistent. Lynette checked in. Frank answered that rhythm mattered,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: and it held until it didn't. In March of twenty seventeen,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Sharon's car died on the Route thirty on ramp. A
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: man named Eric Erickson pulled over. He was forty four,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: large framed, described by multiple people as calm and capable.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: He looked at the alternator, told her what was wrong,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: and fixed it on the shoulder of the highway. He
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: did not charge her. He seemed like a gift. That
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: is the precise word Connie Slade used later. Within four months,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Eric was at the farmhouse four nights a week. He
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: helped with Frank's medications. He drove Sharon to appointments. He
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: carried groceries from the truck to the kitchen without being asked.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: He was never loud, He never demanded anything. He simply
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: made himself indispensable, one small task at a time, until
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: the farmhouse on Gullfork Road had reorganized itself around his presence.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Sharon introduced him to her Thursday friends. He was polite,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: he shook hands and remembered names. Nobody thought to ask
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: why a man they had never met was now driving
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Charon to a volunteer shift she had managed alone for
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: six years. The first Thursday Sharon missed was in December
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: of two thousand seventeen. She told Connie she was needed
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: at home. Connie understood. Everyone understood. That is the thing
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: about the early stages of what was happening to Sharon.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: It was designed to be understood. Every step had a
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: reasonable explanation. The explanations were of the mechanism. By the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: following spring, Eric had formal written authorization to act as
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Frank Sheridan's representative with the pharmacy, the doctor's, the home
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: health agency, and the insurance company. By May of twenty eighteen,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: his name was on the account at Millhaven's Savings and
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Trust as a second signatory. Sharon had handed him the
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: keys to her father's life. She thought she was sharing
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: a burden. She did not yet know she was transferring
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: a door. By May of twenty eighteen, approximately nine thousand
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: dollars had left Frank Sheridan's account. No written agreement, no receipts,
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: no records of any kind except one in the lock
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: box Eric kept bolted to the floor of his panel van.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: There was a handwritten ledger. Every withdrawal, every date, every
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: amount recorded in Eric's own hand. He was not careless,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: He was meticulous. The ledger was not a mistake. It
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: was bookkeeping. The question that would later occupy Detective lou
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Mancini was simple and unsettling. Who keeps records that precise
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: unless they believe the records will never be found. That
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: question leads to another image, a second debit card, also
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: in the lock box, linked directly to Frank's account. Frank,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: who had early stage vascular dementia and a bad hip,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: and had lived on Gull Fork Road since twenty ten. Frank,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: who by spring of twenty eighteen could not drive himself
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: to a pharmacy, could not call his own insurance company,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: could not reach his older daughter in Columbus without going
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: through the man who had moved into his house. Lynette
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Pierce called every week. Sharon's phone number had not changed.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Eric answered it. That detail matters more than it first appears.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Sharon was not locked in a room, Her phone was
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: on the table, Her sister's voice was available one call
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: away every single week through the summer of twenty eighteen.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: And yet Lynette spent months speaking to Eric, hearing that
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: things were fine, that Sharon was tired, that Frank was stable,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: and had no reason to doubt it. The wall between
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: the sisters was not a wall at all. It was
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: a voice, calm capable, reasonable. In October of two thousand eighteen,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Frank Sheridan died. He was eighty years old. Cardiac arrest
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: secondary to existing conditions, no investigation. Eric handled the funeral arrangements.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Within two weeks, he had moved into the master bedroom.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: The guest room where Sharon's things had been, was now
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: needed for something else. By December of twenty eighteen, Sharon
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: no longer had access to her own bank account. Eric
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: gave her a weekly cash allowance. She could not drive.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: He controlled the vehicles. She could not call for help
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: without him knowing. He monitored the phone. She was sixty
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: two years old, thirty one pounds underweight, and living in
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: the house where she had grown up, and every exit
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: had been sealed without a single lock being turned. Then
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: in January of two thousand nineteen, a hospital bed appeared
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: in the guest room. Eric told anyone who asked that
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Sharon had been having night time falls. She had not.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: She had not fallen once. The bed was the last
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: image in a sequence that had started with a stalled
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: car on a highway on ramp, a gift of a man.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Connie Slade had said. Now Sharon was sleeping in a
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: hospital bed, in a room she had not chosen, and
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: a house that had been reorganized around someone else's authority.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: She had been planning her exit for three months. On
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the night of February eighth into February ninth, nineteen, the
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: temperature in Millhaven dropped below twenty degrees. There were four
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: inches of fresh snow on the ground by two in
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: the morning. At two o'clock, Sharon Sheridan got out of
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: the hospital bed. She moved through the dark farmhouse. She
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: went to the back door, unlocked it and left it open.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Then she took the wheel chair, though one Eric had
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: placed in the house as part of the furniture of
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: her manufactured helplessness, and she pushed it out into the
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: snow covered field behind the property. She left it there,
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: upright in the center of the field, chrome footrests catching
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: the dark. A wool blanket folded neatly on the seat.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Then she went back inside and waited. She had not
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: pushed the wheel chair to the middle of the field
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: because she needed it. She pushed it there because she
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: needed someone to see it. Four inches of fresh snow,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: no tracks going in, no tracks coming out, just the
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: chair standing alone in unbroken white. When Russell Thorpe arrived
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: at Kessler Creek bottom Lands at first light for his
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: morning birding route along County Route seven. He saw the
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: chair from the road. He stopped. He took a photograph.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: At eight fourteen in the morning, he called the non
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: emergency line. Deputies arrived at nine o'clock. They found the
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: back door of the farm house on Gull Fork Road
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: standing open. Sharon Sheridan was located at nine forty in
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: the morning inside the house in the hospital, bed thirty
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: one pounds underweight. Her first words to the deputy were these,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: I knew some one would come. I've been planning it
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: for three months. She had staged the only signal she
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: could send without being caught sending it. She could not call,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: she could not leave, She could not write a letter
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: and mail it. But she could put an object in
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: a field where no object should be, leave a door open,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: and trust that the world was still paying attention. It
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: was the most precise act of the entire case, and
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: it worked. Eric Erickson was arrested five days later, on
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: February fourteenth, twenty nineteen, charges financial exploitation of an at
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: risk adult, unlawful restraint, wire fraud. The lock box in
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: his panel Van held the ledger, the second debit card
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: in Frank Sheridan's original insurance paperwork, documents that had no
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: reason to be in a handyman's vehicle unless he had
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: taken control of everything they represented. There is something that
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: does not encapsulate easily in the evidence record. Sharon had
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: been living under those conditions since at least December of
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, possibly longer. She had endured the hospital bed,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: the allowance, the monitored phone, the controlled vehicles, and she
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: had been planning for three months, building a plan that
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: required nothing except an empty field and someone looking in
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the right direction. That is not a person who had
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: given up. That is a person who understood precisely what
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: she had left to work with. After Eric's photograph was
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: published by the Milhaven County Sheriff in the weeks following
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: his arrest, a woman named Sandra Voss called from Harford County, Maryland.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: She was fifty eight years old and she lived in
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: bel Air. She recognized the face. In two thousand twelve,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: seven years before Charon pushed a wheel chair into a
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: snowy field, Sandra Voss had encountered a man matching Eric's
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: description in bel Air. The pattern she described to investigators
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: was nearly identical. A helpful presence during a vulnerable period,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: progressive integration into her household, the slow transfer of practical authority.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Sandra had not known his last name at the time.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: She had not filed a report that resulted in any
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: action for seven years. She had no way to name
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: what had happened to her and no way to find
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: the man it had happened with. Her account was entered
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: into the sentencing record as evidence of pattern. That word
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: pattern is the pivot point of everything that came before
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: it in this case, because the central question once Eric
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: was in custody was not whether he had done these things,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: he had kept a ledger. The ledger answered that the
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: question was what kind of person does this and how
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: picture the on ramp in March of two thousand seventeen,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: a woman's car dies, a man stops, He is calm,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: capable and does not charge her. He seems like a gift.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: The record does not confirm that Eric chose that on
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: ramp deliberately, that he targeted Charon in advance, that the
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: break down was anything other than coincidence. The transcript does
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: not support that conclusion. But here is what the record
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: does show. Within four months, he was in the house.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Within a year Charon had missed her first Thursday. Within
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: fourteen months, his name was on her father's bank account.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Within twenty months, Frank was dead and Eric was in
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the master bedroom. Within twenty six months, Sharon was in
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: a hospital bed, with a manufactured medical history and no
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: access to her own money. Heather Bennett, the licensed clinical
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: social worker who documented the isolation sequence for Adult Protective Services,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: identified four distinct phases. A pretext of helpfulness, manufactured dependency,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: the transfer of every external relationship to a single gatekeeper,
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: and finally, the labeling of the victim's own perceptions as
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: pathology the moment when Charon's understanding of her situation was
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: reframed by Eric as confusion or instability. That last phase
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: is the most disorienting to examine. By the time a
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: person's reality has been systematically replaced, the replacement feels like
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: the truth. The hospital bed was for her safety, the
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: cash allowance was to help her manage. The monitored phone
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: was because she needed support. Each individual piece was reasonable,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: the sequence was not. The ledger recontextualizes everything. A man
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: who documents his own financial crimes in his own handwriting
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: is not operating impulsively. He is operating from a position
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: of certainty, certainty that the person he is documenting has
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: no remaining avenue to contradict him. The ledger was not recklessness,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: it was confidence. Sandra Voss's testimony shifted that confidence into
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: a structure. This had not been a single contingent set
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: of circumstances. It had been a method applied once in
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: bel Air in two thousand twelve, applied again in Milhaven
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: beginning two thousand seventeen. The same sequence, the same patience,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the same manufactured reasonableness. What Charon pushed into that field
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: at two in the morning was not just a signal.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: It was a refusal, a refusal to let the replacement
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: be permanent. And the fact that it worked, that Russell
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Thorpe looked in the right direction, that the door was open,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: that the ledger was exactly where it would be, means
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: that the method for once met something it could not
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: account for a sixty two year old woman who had
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: been planning for three months and had not given up.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Eric Ericksson was arrested on Valentine's Day twenty nineteen. The
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: date has no significance beyond coincidence, and yet it lands
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: with a particular weight when you consider what the previous
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: twenty three months had looked like. For Sharon Sheridan. The
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: charges were financial exploitation of an at risk adult, unlawful restraint,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and wire fraud. Detective lou Manchini's team had the panel
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: van within hours of Sharon's removal from Gull Fork Road.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: The lock box was in the cargo area. Inside it
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Frank Sheridan's original insurance paperwork, a second debit card linked
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: to Frank's account, and the handwritten ledger. Every withdrawal recorded
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: in Eric's own hand, every transaction documented by the person
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: who committed it, an ink kept in a locked box
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: in a vehicle he controlled. The ledger was not discovered
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: by accident. It was found because Sharon had told investigators
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: exactly what to look for. Eric pleaded guilty in September
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen. He was sentenced to eleven years. That sentencing,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the court received testimony that extended the record back seven
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: years before Gulfork Road. Sandra Vas was fifty eight years
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: old and living in Harford County, Maryland, when she saw
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Eric's photograph after it was published. Following his arrest, she
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: contacted the Milhaven County Sheriff's office. She told investigators that
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: in twenty twelve in bel Air, Maryland, a man matching
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Eric's description had used a near identical sequence with presenting
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: as helpful, integrating himself into her household during a period
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: of vulnerability, gaining financial access, intercepting her communications, and systematically
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: narrowing the people she could reach. She had not filed
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: a report at the time. She had not known his
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: last name. Her account was entered into the sentencing record
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: as evidence of pattern. That word pattern carries legal weight
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: for a reason. A pattern means that what happened to
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Sharon Sheridan was not improvised. It was not opportunistic in
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: the way a single impulsive act is opportunistic. It was
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: a method, tested, refined, reployed. Heather Bennett. Heather Bennett, the
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: licensed clinical social worker who had documented Sharon's isolation sequence,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: described the progression in her case notes with clinical precision,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: pretext of helpfulness, pretext of helpfulness, manufactured dependency, transfer of
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: external relationships to a single gate keeper, and finally, the
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: replacement of the victim's perception of reality with the gate
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: keeper's version. Bennett had seen variations of this structure before.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: What distinguished the Sheridan case. She noted was the degree
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: of documentation Eric himself had produced. The ledger was, in
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: clinical terms, a record of his own certainty that the
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: system he had built was closed. It was not closed.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Charon had found the one gap. By November of two
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, Sharon Sheridan was living in a rental apartment
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: on Birch Avenue, the same street where she had managed
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: a dental office for twenty two years. She had returned
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: to her Thursday volunteer shift at the Millhaven Savings co
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Operative on Fourth Street. Connie Slade, the co operative director,
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: was there when Sharon came back. The farmhouse on Gulfork
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Road passed to Lynnette Pierce, Sharon's older sister in Columbus.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: What Lynette did with it afterward is not part of
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the public record. The property had been their fathers. Frank
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Sheridan had lived there since two thousand ten, a retired
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: electrician with a bad hip and early stage vascular dementia,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: who died in October of twenty eighteen at eighty years
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: old of cardiac arrest secondary to existing conditions. His death
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: was not investigated at the time. The record does not
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: allege foul play. What the record does establish is that
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: by the time Frank died, every external relationship he had
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: medical but financial, pharmaceutical had been formally transferred on paper
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: to the man sleeping four nights a week in his house.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: That is the part of this case that does not
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: resolve cleanly. The legal system closed around Eric Ericksson with
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: eleven years and a guilty plead. The financial exploitation was documented,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the unlawful restraint was documented. Sandra Voss's testimony placed the
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: method across two states and seven years. What cannot be
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: fully measured is the interior damage, the specific texture of
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: what it means to have your own perception of reality
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: treated daily as a symptom, To be told that your
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: confusion is the problem. To lose your phone, your car,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: your bank account, your sister's voice on the other end
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: of the line, and to be told each time that
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: this is helped. Sharon Sheridan had planned her escape for
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: three months, three months of waiting for the right combination
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: of conditions. A snowstorm, a night Eric was not watching
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: an unlocked door. She pushed a wheelchair into a dark
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: field and left it in the open where someone might
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: see it. She did not know Russell Thorpe would be
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: watching birds at eight in the morning. She did not
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: know he would have a camera. She only knew that
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: she had to leave something visible that she herself could
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: not be blamed for. That is not a woman who
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: had lost lost her grip on reality. That is a
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: woman who understood with precision the system that held her
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: and found that the one move it had not anticipated.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Every Thursday, she goes back to the co operative tomato soup,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: half a turkey sandwich, the short walk to Polly's diner afterward,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: the ordinary architecture of a life rebuilt from the one
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: piece that was never actually taken. She knew some one
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: would come. She had been planning it for three months.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obo Media