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The Counselor Who Wasn't: How a Fake Therapist Rebuilt Her Life · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At four forty seven in the morning. On September eleven,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a fourteen year old on a bicycle
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: stopped at the edge of a driveway on Glenside Terrace
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: and noticed something that should not have been there. A
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: silver four door sat crooked against the curb, driver door
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: hanging open, interior light burning in the dark. On the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: passenger seat, a Manila folder marked BOYD and Associates Attorney
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Client privileged, lay face up and clipped to its cover
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: was a small, yellow, sticky note with six words written
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: in ballpoint pen tell him the counselor already knows he'll fold.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: The boy was Carl Foster. Carl had started the paper
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: route three weeks earlier. On August twenty one, two thousand nineteen,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: he was three weeks into his paper route for the
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Harwick Courier. He would later describe the note the way
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: fourteen year olds described things they cannot quite categorize. Not
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: as evidence, not as a threat, but as something that
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: felt wrong, in the way a shoe left in the
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: middle of a road feels wrong. He tucked the newspaper
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: into the slot, pedaled on and could not stop thinking
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: about it. Those six words would eventually reach a prosecutor's desk,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and when they did, they pulled at a thread that
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: unraveled nine years of work, four towns, five women, and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: a scheme so methodical it had its own ledger. What
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Happened to the Man inside that House is a story
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: about how completely one person's reality can be rebuilt around
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: them while they are still living in it, and it
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: began three years before Carl Foster ever picked up a newspaper.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Todd Murphy was not the kind of man who attracted drama.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: That is not a diminishment. It is, as it turned out,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: the most important thing to understand about him. He had
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: worked as a project estimator for Heartwell Contracting out of
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: the Dunfield office for eleven years. His job required him
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: to look at a structure, a wall with a floor plan,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: a set of specks, and calculate what it would cost
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: to make it real. He was precise by training, methodical
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: by temperament. He coached under ten soccer on Saturday mornings,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: the kind of coaching where you spend more time tying
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: cleats than running drills. Every Thursday morning, Tod drove to
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Patty's table on Root nine and slid into the corner booth.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Connie Aldridge, the waitress who had worked that section for years,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: knew his order from the moment she saw his truck
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: pull into the lot. Black coffee, two eggs over medium
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: rye toast sausage. He had sat in that booth for
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: the better part of a decade. It was the kind
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: of ritual that says something about a person, not that
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: they are boring, but that they are rooted, that they
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: have decided, in small and specific ways, what their life
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: looks like. He and Sandra had lived at fourteen Calloway
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Drive for eleven years. They owned the house outright. By
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: any external measure, the Murphy household was stable. Sandra Murphy
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: born Kowalski was Tod's wife. Friends described her as warm, opinionated,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: the kind of person who brought food to neighbors without
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: being asked. She and Todd had built something ordinary in
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: the best sense of the word. A life with familiar rhythms,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: a paid off mortgage, a college fund they had been
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: adding to for years. In late two thousand seventeen, Sandra
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: began to change. She became quieter, more guarded. Tod noticed
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: it the way you notice a gradual shift in temperature.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Not a single cold morning, but a season, arriving so
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: slowly you cannot name the day it started. She began
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: seeing a therapist, a man named doctor Allan Reeves, a
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: licensed clinical social worker whose office was listed at the
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Millhaven Professional Center on Grant Avenue. She did not explain
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: much about the sessions. Todd did not push. People are
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: allowed their private work. What Todd did not know, what
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: he could not have known, was that doctor Allan Reeves
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: did not exist. The man Sandra was seeing twice a
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: month was Kevin Slade, former paralegal, no valid clinical license.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: The twenty seventeen license bearing the name Alan Reeves had
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: been obtained through a falsified application. The address on file
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation was
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: a male forwarding service in Decatur. The other thing Todd
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: did not know, the attorney Sandra would eventually hire to
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: handle her divorce filing in March twenty nineteen was Troy Boyd.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: And Troy Boyd had been inside their house three years earlier,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: not as a lawyer, but as a contractor. In Autumn
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, Boyd's company, Clearview Home Services, LC, had been
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: hired to replace skylight flashing and reseal the vents. Boyd
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: had entered the house he had spoken with Sandra while
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Tod was at work. That visit was not random, and
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: it was not the first time Boyd had used clear
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: view to open a door. The question is how a
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: man like Tod, careful, grounded, professionally trained to find the
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: flaw in a set of numbers, ended up on the
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: wrong side of a scheme this precise The answer starts
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: with what was being built around Sandra while Tod watched
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: from the outside and called it a difficult year. The
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: scheme had a geometry to it, not chaos geometry, and
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: once you see the shape, you cannot unsee it. Start
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: with a number, ninety four thousand dollars. That was the
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Murphy family's college fund held in a joint investment account.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: In January two thousand nineteen, that account was closed. The
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: email address attached to it was changed quietly without Tod's knowledge.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: The money moved to a brokerage account Tod had never seen,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: held in a name he did not recognize. By the
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: time Sandra announced the divorce in March, the transfer was
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: two months old. The account had already gone cold. Tod
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: is a project estimator. His entire professional life is built
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: around finding the number that does not belong. He catches
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: discrepancies in bid sheets, in material invoices, in labor projections.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: He finds the flaw. That is his job. And yet
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: ninety four thousand dollars left his household before he noticed
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: it was gone. That asymmetry is not an accident. It
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: is the proof that something was managing his awareness. Think
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: about what had been assembled around him by the time
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: that account closed. Sandra had been seeing doctor Allan Reeves
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: for over a year. Whatever she was hearing in that
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: office on Grant Avenue, whatever framing, whatever language, whatever version
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: of her marriage, she was being handed twice a month.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Todd was not in that room. He was at heartwell contracting,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: reading bid sheets. He was on Thursday mornings at Patty's table,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: eating two eggs over medium and drinking black coffee, believing
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: that his wife was getting help. He was coaching under
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: ten soccer. He was being exactly who he had always been, stable, predictable.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: The present stability in this scheme was a liability. The
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: more reliably Todd showed up, the easier it was to
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: predict where he would not be. Harvey Bennett did not
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: announce himself. That is the thing about a former insurance
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: fraud examiner. He already knows that the most important questions
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: are the ones that do not sound like questions. Harvey
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: is Sandra's older brother brother. He had watched his sister
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: change over two years. He had watched her become someone
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: who quoted her attorney's opinions the way a person quotes
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a doctor with a certainty that was not her own.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Sandra had always been someone who argued. She pushed back,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: she asked why, and now she was repeating phrases clean
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: and pre formed, about what was fair, about what Todd deserved,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: about what the counselor already understood. Harvey recognized borrowed language
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: when he heard it. The dinner he arranged with Sandra
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: in September twenty nineteen looked from the outside like a
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: family check in. It was also partly investigative. He did
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: not tell her that he asked careful questions, the kind
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that sounded like concern and function like probes. Near the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: end of the meal, he asked for Reeves's office address,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: just to have it. Sandra gave it to him without
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: hesitation Milhaven Professional Grant Avenue. Harvey drove past it the
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: next morning. The suite listed as Alan Reeves LCSW shared
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: a floor with Boyd and Associates Family Law, same building,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: same floor, different doors. Harvey had spent a career reading
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: the geography of fraud. He knew that proximity when it
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: is not disclosed, is not a coincidence. He pulled the license.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation showed one
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: record for Alan Reeves, Clinical social Worker, issued in two
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: thy seventeen, with no prior licensing history anywhere in the state.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: The address on the application was a mail forwarding service
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: in Decatur. A real therapist has a trail, supervision hours,
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: prior registrations, continuing education records. Alan Reeves had none of
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: those things. He had a piece of paper dated twenty
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: seventeen and an address that received mail for dozens of businesses.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Harvey called of Todd's attorney, Diane Schaeffer, the same afternoon.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: Within seventy two hours of Bennett's call. On September twentieth,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Todd retained Diane Schaeffer as his attorney. Schaefer filed the
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: emergency motion to preserve marital assets. The next morning, September
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: twenty first, the motion named the ninety four thousand dollars transfer,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: It named the account, It named the name on that account,
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Kevin Slade picture. The morning of September twenty third, two
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, investigators arrive at Boyd and Associates with a
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: search warrant. They are looking for client files, financial records, correspondence.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: They find something else. First, a locked lateral filing cabinet
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: in a back office. Inside are folders for six clients.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Five of them are not Todd Murphy's divorce case. They
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: are separate cases, separate women, separate towns, Rockford, Peoria, granted
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: in Sangamon County. And inside each folder there is evidence
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: of the same structure, the same architecture. The boid slaid
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Emil chain comes out of that cabinet hundreds of messages,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: dating from January two thousand eighteen. The messages do not
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: read like an attorney consulting a therapist about a mutual client.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: They read like co ordination scheduling strategy. One message references
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: a time line, another references the projected value of an asset.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: They are not clinical notes. They are operational Here is
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: where the head fake lands, because up to this point,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the reasonable conclusion is that Boyd was running a legal
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: play that he had found vulnerable women, steered them toward
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: his practice, and used a fake therapist to soften them
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: psychologically before taking their cases. Manipulation, yes, fraud possibly, but
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the motive looks like legal fees. It looks like billable hours.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: The ledger rewrites that the second warrant covers Boyd's personal
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: residence in a home office. On a shelf, investigators find
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: a spiral notebook. The handwriting is Boyd's. The notebook tracks
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: five women across four towns over nine years. Each entry
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: has the same fields, name, marital assets, date of first contact,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: date Slade's engagement began, projected settlement value. Sandra Murphy's row
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: shows a projected value of two hundred fourteen thousand dollars,
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: and at the far right of her row, written in
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: ink that does not match the rest of the entry, darker,
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: slightly different pen a single word stalled. That word was
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: written in September after Carl Foster read the sticky note.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: After Boyd left, rattled, drove away in the wrong car,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: came back to find the door still open after something
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: in the operation had begun to slip. The ledger was
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: not i legal document, It was not a client file.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: It was a scorecard. And the scorecard shows that Sandra
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Murphy was not a divorce client who happened to hire Boyd.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: She was a target who had been selected, entered into
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: a log, and assigned a dollar value three years before
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: she filed for divorce. The scheme was not about legal fees.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: It was about liquidating what people had built. The strongest
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: evidence of that sits in the account records. The ninety
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: four thousand dollars moved to a brokerage account in Kevin
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Slade's name, a man who held no valid license, who
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: operated under a false identity, and whose only documented connection
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: to Troy Boyd was a paralegal position he had held
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: roughly ten years earlier. The money did not move toward Boyd,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: It moved toward Slade. That structure, the separation of the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: attorney from the account, is not an accident. It is
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: designed to survive a bar complaint. It is designed to
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: survive a first pass audit. It almost survived everything. What
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: it did not survive was a fourteen year old on
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: a bicycle reading a note that a lawyer wrote for himself.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Tell him the counselor already knows. He'll fold That sentence
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: on a yellow sticky clipped to a privileged folder in
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: an open car, sitting in a driveway in the dark.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Was meant to Steady Boyd before a difficult meeting. It
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: was a private cue card. It was never meant to
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: be read, but it was read, and the word counselor
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: used by a family law attorney to describe a therapist
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: representing the opposing spouse's wife landed wrong. It landed in
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: the hands of some one who passed it to Harvey Bennett,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: and Harvey Bennett knew exactly what to do with a
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: word that did not belong. Harvey Bennett did not go
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: to law enforcement first. He went to a county court database.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: He already had the word counselor sitting in his memory
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: like a splinter. A family law attorney does not call
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: a therapist the councilor in a private Attorneys use names,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: They use case numbers, They used titles when they need distance.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: That word was too specific and too casual at the
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: same time. It meant Boyd knew the therapist not as
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: a referral as a working relationship. Bennett had spent nearly
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: two decades examining insurance fraud. He knew that the first
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: document you look for is not a smoking gun. It
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: is a license, a credential, a registration, something that should
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: exist and either does or does not. He searched the
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation database for Alan
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Reeves LCSW. The license existed, It had been issued in
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. There was no prior history, no supervised hours
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: logged in Illinois, no reciprocal license from another state, no
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: continuing education trail. The address on file for the original
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: application was a mail forwarding service and decatur a licensed
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: clinical social worker with no professional history before twenty seventeen,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: and a mailing address that was a mail box at
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: a commercial forwarding center. Bennett wrote that down. Then he
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: drove to Milhaven. The suite listed for Alan Reeves at
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: the Millhaven Professional Center on Grant Avenue was real. The
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: name plate was real, but the receptionist who answered the
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: door told Bennett that doctor Reeves saw clients by appointment
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: only and that she handled scheduling. Bennett asked how long
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: the practice had been open. She said a little over
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: two years. He asked where doctor Reeves had trained. She
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: said she didn't have that information. He thanked her and
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: walked to the parking lot. Then he called his sister.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: The conversation Bennett had with Sandra Murphy that evening is
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: not part of the public record. What is on record
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: is what followed it. Within seventy two hours of Bennett's call,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: on September twentieth, retained Diane Schaeffer as his attorney. Schaefer
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: filed the emergency motion to preserve marital assets the next morning,
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: September twenty first. The motion named a specific brokerage account,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: the same account the ninety four thousand dollars had been
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: moved into eight months earlier, and flagged a discrepancy in
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the account's registered email address. The account was in Kevin
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Slade's name. Todd Murphy had never heard the name Kevin Slade.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Schaefer's motion triggered a financial hold on the account. The
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: money the college fund was frozen before it could move again.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: On September twenty three, twenty nineteen, Boyd's office at the
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Millhaven Professional Center was searched under warrant. The lateral filing
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: cabinet locked yielded a second set of client folders, five names.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Boyd had represented each of those clients in divorce proceedings.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: In four of the eleven Boyd divorce filings pulled from
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: public court dockets over the prior six years. Boyd had
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: represented both sides sequentially, never simultaneous, which would have triggered
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: a formal conflict of interest filing, but close enough in
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: timing that the financial picture of each marriage had already
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: shifted before the second representation began. In two of those
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: four cases, marital assets had been liquidated before the filing date.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Boyd's e mail history, recovered from his office server included
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: a chain between his personal account and an address registered
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: to Alan Reeves dating back to January twenty eighteen. The
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: messages were not clinical consultations. They were coordination scheduled assessments
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: of timeline. One message sent by Boyd read, She's close
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: pushed the withdrawal conversation this week. Sandra Murphy's therapy sessions,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the one she had attended faithfully for nearly two years,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: the ones she believed were helping her under stand herself,
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: had not been clinical care. They had been intelligence. Slade
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: had been feeding information back to Boyd. What Sandra feared,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: what she felt guilty about, what arguments she would accept,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: The withdrawal of the joint account, the need to move quickly,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: the certainty that Todd would contest everything, and that she
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: needed protection. Now those were not therapeutic insights, they were instructions.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: A second warrant reached Boyd's personal residence in Millhaven. The
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: spiral notebook was found in a desk drawer. The ledger
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: five women, four towns, nine years. The fields were meticulous, name,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: marital assets at time of first contact, date of first
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: contact date, slades engagement began, projected settlement value. The towns
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: were Rockford, Peoria, Granton in Songomann County, and Harwick. Sandra
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Murphy's row showed a projector value of two hundred fourteen
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Beside it, in different ink, written at a
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: different time, was a single word stalled. The ledger was
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: admitted into evidence over defense objection. It became the center
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: of the case. Troy Boyd pleaded guilty to wire fraud,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: conspiracy to commit fraud, and unauthorized practice of law in
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: a conflict of interest context. Kevin Slade pleaded separately to
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: impersonation and fraud. The ninety four thousand dollars, every dollar
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: of it, was recovered from the brokerage account and returned
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: to the Murphys. Sandra Murphy cooperated fully with prosecution once
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: investigators walked her through the complete picture of what had
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: been done to her. She had not been a participant.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: She had been the mechanism. There is a detail in
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: this case that is easy to pass over, and it
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: is the one that has the longest reach. Troy Boyd
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: ran this operation across four town over nine years. He
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: had a ledger. He maintained it carefully. He used a
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: home services company to get inside a house while a
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: husband was at work. He used a falsely licensed therapist
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: to map a woman's psychological interior. He moved money through
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: a name that was not his own. He did all
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: of this in sequence with documented precision, and it almost worked.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Every layer of the structure was designed to absorb scrutiny
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: and reflect it back. The therapy practice looked legitimate, The
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: license was real, even if the history behind it was invented.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: The attorney representing Sandra in the divorce was a licensed
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: attorney of record. The account, the money moved into was
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: a real brokerage account. A bar complaint would have found
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: nothing immediately actionable. A first pass audit of the account
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: would have cleared Boyd's name, because his name was not
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: on it. The structure failed because of a single failure
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: of compos Boyd left a driveway, rattled, got into the
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: wrong car, and left a folder sitting open in the
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: right one. A fourteen year old on a pre dawn
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: paper route read six words he was not meant to read,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: and those six words found their way to a retired
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: insurance fraud examiner who knew exactly what a wrong credential
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: looked like. Carl Foster was three weeks into his first job.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: He had no idea what he had found. He told
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: an adult, because that is what you do when something
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: seems strange. At five in the morning, in the dark.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: That was enough. Sandra Murphy spent roughly two years in
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: sessions that were designed to dismantle her certainty about her
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: own marriage, her own judgment, and her own capacity to
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: protect what she and Tod had built together. The withdrawal language,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: the urgency, the sense that she needed to act now
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: before Tod acted first. None of it came from her.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: It was placed there session by session by a man
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: who held no valid license, and reported to a man
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: who stood to collect a fee and a cut of
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: what disappeared. What Sandra lost in those two years is
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: not fully recoverable. The money came back, the clarity about
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: what had been done to her that took longer, and
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: the record does not say how much longer. Todd Murphy
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: returned to his regular Thursday booth at Patty's table on
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: the first Thursday of October twenty nineteen. Connie Aldrich brought
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: his order without being asked. Black coffee, two eggs over
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: medium rye toast sausage. He had not been there in months.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Some things hold, Some things, once broken, take longer to
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: name than to fix. The ledger had five rows. Sandra
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Murphy's was the one that said stalled, and that word
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: written in different ink added later at the moment the
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: operation began to slip is the closest thing this case
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: had to an ending that means something It installed and
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: then it fell apart because a boy on a bicycle
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: read something he should not have read and decided it mattered.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obo Media