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He Kept Her Life in a Ledger - She Paid for His Silence · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At two in the morning on March eleventh, twenty nineteen,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a runner named Kent Stewart found a man standing on
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: the footbridge at Callaway Reservoir. The man was barefoot, his
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: shirt was missing two buttons, his feet were muddy, and
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: his arms were wrapped around a book. The book's spine
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: read a Life Kept. The name on the cover was
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: not his. His name was Glenn Price, and the book,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: he told Kent was his. It would take investigator's weies
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: to understand what he meant by that, because on paper
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the math was clean a literary agent, a signed contract,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: a published memoir, a name change described as standard industry practice.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Glenn Price had not been robbed of a wallet or
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: a car. He had been robbed of something harder to
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: hold in your hands, his name, his words, his version
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: of himself, and somewhere in a County evidence locker taped
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: on under a shelf behind materials nine years old, a
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: business card was waiting. It had been there for two years.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Nobody knew it existed. What happened between the writer's conference
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: in Cincinnati in October of twenty sixteen and that footbridge
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: in the early hours of twenty nineteen is a study
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: in how thoroughly one person can dismantle another's reality, not
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: with force, not with sophisticated technology, with patience, reframing, and
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a broken storm door latch. Glenn Price was forty four
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: years old when his manuscript was finished. He had spent
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: the better part of a decade writing it. He was
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: a grant writer by profession. That is work that requires precision.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: You argue for funding on behalf of institutions, and the
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: argument has to hold every word is accountable, every claim
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: is sourced. Glen understood language as a tool with weight
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: and consequence. He lived in a house on Orchard Terrace
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: in Callaway, Yucky, with two cats named Ba and Foss.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: B was a tortoiseshell with a thyroid condition that required
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: daily medication. Foss was a gray tabby. The cats appear
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: in the original acknowledgments of a Life Kept Thanked by Name.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Glenn began the manuscript in two thousand thirteen. It took
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: three years to reach a complete draft. The memoir was
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: not a public document at that stage. It was a
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: private reckoning, the kind of writing that costs something to do,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: that a person guards carefully because it holds the specific
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: weight of their actual life. He brought it to a
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: writer's conference in Cincinnati in October of twenty sixteen. That
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: is where he met Dean Cox, and that meeting would
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: change everything. Cox was forty nine. He ran a literary
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: agency called Dean Cox Literary, based in Nashville. His profile
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: was verifiable, website LinkedIn presence a stated specialty in narrative nonfiction.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: He was the kind of agent who knew the vocabulary
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: of a memoorist's ambitions. He could speak the language of
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: the work, and Glenn spoke it to. Cox offered representation
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the following month. Glenn signed in November of twenty sixteen.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: There is nothing in the record to suggest Glenn hesitated.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Why would he. He had written a serious book, he
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: had found a credentaled agent. He had done everything a
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: careful person is supposed to do. What Glenn could not
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: have seen was that the process Cox was about to
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: begin had already been rehearsed. In twenty eleven, a memoorist
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: named Patrice Greer had signed with Cox. She was based
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: in Lexington, Kentucky. Eight months after signing, she discovered Cox
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: had not submitted her manuscript to a single publisher. She
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: terminated the contract and walked away. For years afterward, she
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: wondered whether she had overreacted, whether she had misread this situation,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: whether leaving had been an error on her part. Patrice
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Greer would not hear Dean Cox's name again for eight years,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: but the moment she did, she contacted Glenn's attorney within
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: forty eight hours. Glenn Price did not know any of this.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: In November of twenty sixteen, he had a signed contract,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: an agent, with a working website, and a finished draft
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: of the most important thing he had ever written. What
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: he did not know yet was that Cox had already begun.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Cox did not move quickly. That was the first thing
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: that should have been obvious and wasn't. From January of
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, he began what investigators would later describe as
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: an incremental substitution process eighteen months, step by step, each
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: step small enough to feel like a correction rather than
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: a theft. The first document to change was Glenn's name.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: On February twenty second, two thousand seventeen, Cox sent an email.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: In it, he explained aimed that the name Glenn Price
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: presented a branding problem. The solution, he wrote, was Glenn
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Price a cleaner sound, he said, more marketable, and then
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: the phrase that should have stopped everything. This was, Cox wrote,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: standard industry practice. It is not, it has never been.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: But Glenn Price had never published a book before. He
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: had no way to measure that claim against anything real.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Cox had presented himself as the expert. Glenn had deferred
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: to the expert. That is exactly what a careful trusting
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: person does. In March of twenty seventeen, Cox submitted the
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: manuscript to Harmon and Fell's Publishing in New York. The
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: contract named Glenn Price, the submission named Glenn Price. Those
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: two documents existed simultaneously, and no one flagged the gap.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Then August arrived, and with it a payment that didn't
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: add up. Glenn expected ten thousand, two hundred dollars from
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: the advance. He received four thousand. The remaining six thousand,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: two hundred Cox explained had been applied to developmental editing costs.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Glen received no invoice, no itemized breakdown, no list of
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: what those costs had covered or who had performed the work,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: just a number subtracted from what he was owed. With
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Cox's calm explanation that this was how it worked. Glenn
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: asked about it more than once. Each time, Cox reframed
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: the question not as a reasonable financial inquiry, but as
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: evidence of Glenn's inexperience is impatience, his failure to understand
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: how publishing actually functioned. There is a particular kind of
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: coercion in that move. It doesn't require a raised voice.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: It requires only that the target be made to feel
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: that their own perception is the problem. Glenn stopped pushing.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: That is the consequence Cox was building toward. In February
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen, the book was published. The cover
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: read A Life Kept by Glenn Price. Inside the biographical
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: note described a Nashville journalist with a professional background that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: bore no relationship to Glenn Price's actual life, and the
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: acknowledgment's page, the page where Glen had thanked the people
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: who had held him while he wrote the most difficult
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: thing he had ever written, including b and Foss, had
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: been replaced entirely new names, unknown names, among them a
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: name that appears nowhere else in the record. Vicky Odom
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: described as the first reader who understood Glenn Price's name
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: had been removed from his own book, his life had
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: been re author He kept asking Cox's questions. Cox kept
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: providing answers that felt reasonable in isolation and wrong in accumulation.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: That is not an accident, that is architecture. By March
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, Glen had been living inside that architecture
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: for two years. Kent Stuart was a runner. He used
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: the Callaway Reservoir path most mornings, but on March eleventh,
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, something pulled him out near two in the morning.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: The record doesn't explain why. What it records is what
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: he found. Glenn Price was standing at the footbridge, barefoot,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: missing shirt buttons. His feet were in the mud at
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: the reservoir's edge. He was holding a copy of a
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Life kept. The name on the spine was Glenn Price.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Stuart asked if he was all right. Glenn told him
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: the book was his. Those were the words he used,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: not I wrote this, not they stole it, just the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: book is mine. Stuart got him off the bridge. He
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: made sure Glenn was safe. That is all the record shows.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: What the record also shows is that investigators who later
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: encountered that detail took weeks to understand what Glenn had meant.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: They filed it as a statement of distress, A man
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: in crisis, making a claim that felt metaphorical. It was
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: not metaphorical. It was the most precise thing Glenn had
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: said in two years. His attorney, Sandra Chu, hired a
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: licensed private investigator named Larry Richardson. In April of twenty nineteen,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Richardson executed a civil subpoena on Cox's files. What he
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: brought back to the conference table was not speculation. It
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: was columns, dates on the left, amounts on the right,
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: clean as accounting paper. The payment trail did not waver,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: It did not require interpretation. It showed, in documentary sequence
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: what had been taken, when it had been taken, and
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: by whom. When Glenn sat across from that table and
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: read those columns, he was not learning something new about
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Dean Cock. He was learning something new about himself. That
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: his confusion had not been a flaw, that his uncertainty
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: had not been in experience, That the thing he had
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: suspected for two years and talked himself out of believing
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: had been real the entire time. That moment is the
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: one that cannot be recovered in a sentencing memo. It
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: is not a legal finding. It is the specific cost
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: of what Cox built The first search warrant reached Cox's
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Nashville office in May of twenty nineteen. Investigators found files,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: They found records, but the most damaging materials were not there.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: The warrant had been drawn too narrowly. What it captured
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: was partial. A second warrant came six weeks later. This
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: one reached a storage unit in Murfresboro, Tennessee, that Cox
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: had rented under a name adjacent to his agency. Inside
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: twelve bankers boxes, the fourth box held a folder. Inside
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: the folder were communicatations between Cox and a man named
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Barry Shull. Berry Shual was a records clerk at the
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Callaway County Sheriff's Department. Three payments totaling just under four
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars had moved from Cox to Shoal. In exchange,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Shull had accepted a sealed envelope and placed it where
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: civil subpoenas would not reach, inside the Callaway County evidence locker,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: behind materials from a case nine years old. The envelope
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: held two things, a USB drive containing a back up
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: of Glen's original unaltered manuscript, and a business card taped
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: to the underside of the shelf above it, Dean Cox Literary, Nashville, Tennessee.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: That card had been in the evidence locker for two
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: years before investigators found it. Cox had placed it there
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: not as a signature, but as insurance. The manuscript back
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: up was leverage he could produce or destroy. The card
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: was a marker only he could have planted, and he
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: had hidden it where he believed it would never be found.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Confronted with the Murfrey's Borough evidence and the proof of
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Shull's involvement, Cox confessed. The confession was procedural. No expression
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: of remorse appears in the record. What Cox gave was
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: a technical acknowledgment, the kind that moves a case from
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: investigation to sentencing. He admitted to the fraud counts. He
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: admitted to the theft. The hearing ran four contested sessions
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: before the outcome was fixed. Forty one months on fraud
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: and theft counts, followed by eighteen months of supervised release.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Barry Shull was charged separately and pleaded to a single count.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Here is where the head fake lives, and it only
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: resolves now. For months, the shape of the crime had
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: seemed clear. Cox was a fraud who had stolen a book,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: pocketed money, and left a writer in ruin. All of
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: that was true, But the question investigators had not fully
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: answered was this, Why had Cox retained the original manuscript
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: at all? If the goal was permanent rature, the USB
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: drive should have been destroyed. Keeping it was a risk.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: The answer is not in the confession. It is in
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: the card taped under the shelf. Cox did not keep
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: the manuscript because he planned to return it. He kept
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: it because it had value as long as Glenn Price
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: remained alive and disputable. A destroyed manuscript is a finished crime.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: A hidden manuscript is a contingency. If Glenn ever got
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: close enough to the truth to become dangerous, the drive
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: existed as a negotiating instrument. Cox had not stolen the
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: book to erase it. He had stolen the book to
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: own it. That is why the acknowledgments mattered so much.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: The original page, the one with b and Foss and
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: the real names, had to be gone not because it
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: proved authorship, because it proved a person, and a person
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: with witnesses is harder to erase than a name on
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: a spine. The corrected A Day of a Life Kept
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: was published eleven months after sentencing. Glenn Price's name on
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: the cover, his original acknowledgments restored inside, including thanks to Bay,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the tortoises, shell cat, the thyroid problems and foss the
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: gray tabby the people who had held him while he wrote,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: had been given back to the page. There is something
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with in that a man's acknowledgments page is
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: not evidence. It is not legal documentation. It is the
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: part of a book where a person says, these are
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: the ones. I could not have done this without. Cox
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: removed that page because it was the most human part
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: of the manuscript, and it was the first thing Glenn
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Price restored. Dean Cox confessed six weeks after the Murfresborough
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: storage unit was searched, not because he wanted to, because
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: the fourth banker's box had made confession. The only remaining
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: option that box held a folder. Inside the folder were
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: communications between Cox and Bear Marry Shull, a records clerk
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: at the Callaway County Sheriff's Department, three payments totaling just
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: under four thousand dollars in exchange. Shull had stored a
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: sealed envelope inside the evidence locker, tucked behind materials from
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: nine years prior, taped under a shelf where no standard
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: subpoena would think to look. The envelope held a USB drive.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The drive held Glen Price's original manuscript, unaltered complete. Cox
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: had kept it. That was the part. Investigators kept returning
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: to a destroyed manuscript leaves no leverage a hidden one does.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: As long as Glen Price remained alive, indisputable the original
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: existed as a negotiating instrument. This was not the behavior
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: of someone who wanted the crime finished. It was the
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: behavior of someone who wanted the crime managed. The confession
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: when it came was procedural. No accounting for what two
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: years of sustained manipulation had cost a person. No acknowledgment
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: of the bridge or the barefoot walk, or the book
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: Glen had been holding with some one else's name on
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: the spine. Cox answered the questions put to him and
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: said nothing more. Barry Shull was charged separately. He pleaded
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: to a single count at sentencing. The hearing ran across
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: four contested sessions before the court reached a final number.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Forty one months on fraud and theft counts. Eighteen months
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: supervised release to follow. Patrice Greer, the memoirrist from Lexington
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: who had walked away from Cox, in two thousand eleven,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: after discovering he had never submitted her manuscript, contacted Sandra
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: Chu within forty eight hours of Coxe's arrest becoming public.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: She had spent years wondering if she had overreacted. The
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: arrest answered that question without ceremony. The rights to A
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Life Kept were restored to Glen Price by court order.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: There is a detail from the evidence that resists easy explanation,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: and it stays with anyone who looks closely at this case.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Cox's embossed business card was taped to the underside of
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: a shelf inside the Callaway County evidence locker. It had
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: been there for two years, hidden behind unrelated materials from
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: nine years prior. It took a civil subpoena, a licensed
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: private investigator, and a second search warrant to reach it.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: It should not have been possible to hide something there,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: and yet it sat for twenty four months, inches from
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: the sealed envelope that held the proof of what Glenn
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Price had always known was true. Glenn Price wrote A
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Life Kept across three years, beginning in two thousand thirteen.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: He drafted it in a converted sun porch with a
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: broken storm door latch, He dedicated it to people who
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: had sat with him while he worked through the hardest material.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: He finished it in twenty sixteen and carried it to
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: a writer's conference in Cincinnati, where he met the man
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: who would spend the next two years convincing him it
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: had never really been his to begin with. That is
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: the mechanism worth understanding. Cox did not arrive with threats.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: He arrived with the language of expertise, the vocabulary of care.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: He made Glenn feel grateful for corrections that were never corrections.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: He made Glen feel responsible for losses that were never losses.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: He replaced the name on the contract, the name on
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: the book, the names in the acknowledgments, and finally the
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: name Glenn Price used to understand himself. By the time
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Kent Stuart found Glenn at the Reservoir footbridge at two
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: in the morning on March eleventh, twenty nineteen, the dismantling
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: had been running for more than two years. It is
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: worth being honest about what this kind of case resists.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: There is no single moment where everything breaks. There is
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: no locked room, no weapon, no threshold clearly crossed. There
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: is a pattern that only becomes visible in documentation in
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the clean columns of a payment trail laid out on
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: a conference table by a private investigator who had no
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: emotional stake in what they proved. That distance was what
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: made it legible. Glenn could not have seen it from
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: inside it. That is not a failure. That is what
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: sustained gaslighting does. The corrected edition of A Life Kept
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: was published eleven months after sentencing. Glenn Price's name on
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the cover, his original acknowledgments restored inside. The people who
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: had held him while he wrote had been given back
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: to the page. A book is not only what it argues,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: it is also the record of who was in the room.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: Glenn Price got his room back. This show is made
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media