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The Sunflowers, the Open Door, and the Man Who Wasn't Real · Relationship Cheating Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 5.40 in the morning on November 14, 2019, a
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: 14-year-old girl named Wendy Foster was three stops into her
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: paper route on Fenwick Drive when she noticed the door
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: to Unit 7 standing open, not a jar, open and
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: on the kitchen counter inside. Visible through a three-inch gap
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: sat a mason jar of fresh sunflowers tied with a
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: yellow hospital ribbon. Wendy had delivered to that address for
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: two years. She knew the woman who lived there. She
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: called the non-emergency line. What investigators found when they arrived
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: was not a crime scene in any conventional sense. No
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: sign of struggle. No missing person. Just a quiet apartment,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: a jar of flowers, and a woman named Rhonda Hoffman
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: who had vanished into the dark Indiana morning, chasing something
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: that was never real. The goodnight texts were always warm,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: always perfectly timed. Three people took shifts writing them. Rhonda
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Hoffman turned 32 in August of 2019. She worked as
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: a dental hygienist at a practice on Carver Boulevard in
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Grover Falls, Indiana. By all accounts, she was methodical, precise,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and quietly funny. The kind of person who remembered her
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: patients' names and their children's names and asked about both.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: She had also survived something that most people do not.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: At 27, Rhonda was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. The treatment
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: was aggressive. The recovery was slow. She spent months inside
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: a body that felt like it belonged to someone else,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: and she came out the other side changed in ways
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: she was still learning to name. By 28, she was
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: in remission. She went back to work. She rebuilt her
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: routine with the careful deliberateness of someone who understood. at
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: a cellular level, how fast ordinary life could be taken
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: away before the diagnosis. Rhonda had saved $ 41, 000. She kept
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: a spreadsheet. She tracked every transfer, every bill, every deposit.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: The spreadsheet was not anxiety. It was evidence of how
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: seriously she took the future she had almost lost. She
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: lived in Unit 7 on Fenwick Drive on a month-to-month lease.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Her closest friend was a coworker named Amanda Erickson, also
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: a dental hygienist, at the same Carver Boulevard practice. They
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: had worked side-by-side for years. Amanda was the kind of
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: friend who noticed things, the kind who asked follow-up questions
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: when the first answer felt incomplete. In March of 2019,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Rhonda joined an online support group called Survivors in Step.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: It had 400 members. The group was built around shared experience, illness, recovery,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: the particular loneliness of having faced something your healthy friends
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: could not quite reach. It was, on its surface, exactly
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: what it claimed to be. A community. A place to
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: be understood. She found it through a search. She joined quietly.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And within a few weeks, a man named Daniel Marsh
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: replied to one of her posts. Daniel's profile described a
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: finishing contractor based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His photo showed a
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: man in a workshop, sleeves rolled, the kind of image
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: that reads as honest and unhurried. He wrote carefully. He
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: asked real questions. He remembered what Rhonda told him and
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: referenced it days later, which felt, in the language of
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: online connection, like being truly seen. By April, they were
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: messaging daily. By June, those messages were the first thing
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Rhonda read each morning and the last thing she read
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: before sleep. Amanda noticed. She asked to join the group
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: in July. Her request was declined. Survivors in Step, according
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: to its stated policy, was for survivors only, people with
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: documented experience of serious illness. Amanda did not qualify. She
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: accepted that, but she did not stop watching. There is
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: something particular about the dynamic between Rhonda and Amanda in
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: this period. Rhonda was not naive. She was a woman
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: who had stared down a lymphoma diagnosis and come out
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: of it with her spreadsheet intact and her sense of
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: self largely whole. Amanda knew that, which is why she
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: did not push hard. She asked questions. She raised doubts gently.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: She stayed close. What neither of them knew yet was
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: that the group itself, All 400 members, the infrastructure, the
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: carefully managed access controls. The decline of Amanda's request had
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: been built three years earlier, not for Rhonda, but for
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: exactly this purpose. The first crack appeared in a photograph.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Amanda had been watching Daniel's profile for weeks by October 2019.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: She could not join the group, but she could see
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: what was public. One image had bothered her since the summer.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: A man in a workshop, sleeves rolled to the elbows.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: the kind of photo that looks spontaneous but holds too still.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: She ran it through a reverse image search. The result
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: came back in seconds. The face belonged to Brian Selke,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: a finishing contractor from Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose public Instagram had
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: posted that same image 18 months earlier. Daniel Marsh did
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: not exist. Amanda brought the search result to Rhonda. She
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: sat with her and showed her the screen. Rhonda looked
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: at it. She acknowledged it. And then she found a
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: reason it might not mean what it appeared to mean.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe Daniel had borrowed the photo. Maybe the algorithm had
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: pulled the wrong match. She did not stop messaging him
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: that night. This is the part of the story that
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: is hardest to hold at a distance. Not because Rhonda
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: was foolish, but because she was not. The reverse image
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: search had worked. The evidence was on the table. And still,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Eight months of daily messages weighed more than a database match.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: That is not a failure of intelligence. That is the
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: mechanics of attachment doing exactly what it was designed to do.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: Amanda saved the search result. She did not push further.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: She waited. Three weeks later, on November 3rd, Rhonda transferred $ 1, 100.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: The request arrived as a crisis. Daniel's truck had broken
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: down on Interstate 65 near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He was stranded.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: He needed the money to get back. The transfer went
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: through Western Union. Rhonda logged it on her spreadsheet. She
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: still kept the spreadsheet and marked it as a loan,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: the kind of accounting a careful person does when they
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: expect repayment. Six days later, on November 9th, a second
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: request came. This one was larger, $ 7, 000. The explanation involved
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: a medical situation, the details of which shifted slightly depending
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: on which message Rhonda read first. She sent the money. $ 8, 100
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: total in two transfers across six days. That same day,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: a new phone number called her. Tennessee area code. A
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: woman's voice, generic, short, leaving a message that said nothing
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: specific and asked Rhonda to call back. It did not
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: sound like Daniel. It did not claim to be Daniel.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Rhonda did not recognize the voice. Amanda did not recognize
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: it either. But she saved the voicemail anyway. She could
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: not have said exactly why. It was the kind of
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: instinct that arrives before the reasoning does. Something in the
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: texture of the message felt scripted the way a sentence lands,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: when it has been rehearsed rather than spoken. That voicemail
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: would become the first thread investigators pulled. The next request
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: came on the evening of November 13th. $ 14, 000. The story
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: had escalated. A legal complication. Time-sensitive. A window that would
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: close by morning. Daniel needed the money at a Western
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Union in Moorfield before the location opened for the day.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: He would meet her there and explain everything. Rhonda agreed.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: She arrived at the Western Union parking lot in Moorfield
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: at approximately 4.30 in the morning of November 14th. The
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: location did not open for hours. She waited. At some
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: point in those two hours, something shifted. Investigators reviewing the
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: timeline later could not pinpoint the exact moment, and Rhonda
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: herself described it as a slow accumulation rather than a
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: single realization. The parking lot was empty. The building was dark.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: No one came. The story she had been holding in
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: her mind, the truck, the medical situation, the legal complication,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: the man who had read her posts and remembered every detail,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: began to lose its weight. At 4.47 in the morning,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: she texted Amanda. The message read, I figured it out.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: I need to go. I'm sorry. I'll explain when I'm back.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: She drove to Amanda's apartment. She rang the doorbell at 5.50
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: in the morning. She had not sent the $ 14, 000. Forty
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: minutes earlier, at 5.40, a 14-year-old named Wendy Foster had
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: been making her paper route along the Sycamore Terrace circuit
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: on Fenwick Drive. She reached Unit 7. The door was
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: standing open, on the table inside, visible through a three-inch gap,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: sat a jar of fresh sunflowers with a hospital ribbon
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: tied around the stem. Wendy called the non-emergency line. The
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: sunflowers did not belong to Rhonda. That detail would take
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: investigators a day to confirm. Rhonda had not put them there.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: She had not received them. When she walked through her
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: apartment door the following morning, she saw the jar on
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: the table and did not understand where it had come from.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: The ribbon was the kind used in hospital gift shops, pre-tied, generic.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: The flowers were fresh enough that they had been placed
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: within the previous 12 hours. Someone had been inside Unit
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: 7 before Wendy Foster arrived at 540. The open door,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: the jar, the ribbon, each element read, individually, as an
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: accident or a coincidence. Together they described something more deliberate.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Investigators noted that the staging, a visible gift and open door,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: a pre-dawn discovery, was consistent with a scenario designed to
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: be found, not left. Amanda arrived at Fenwick Drive at
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: 8 in the morning. She and Rhonda sat together in
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the apartment. Amanda still had the voicemail on her phone.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: She played it again. Then she pulled up the number.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: The area code was Tennessee. The number was registered to
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: a prepaid carrier. It had been active for less than
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: three weeks. She filed a report that after She gave
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: investigators the voicemail, the reverse image search result, the transfer
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: records Rhonda provided, and the dates. The case entered the
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: system as wire fraud. What investigators found when they pulled
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: the number was not Daniel Marsh. There was no Daniel Marsh.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: There was a prepaid phone, purchased in cash, registered to nothing.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: But the carrier record showed call patterns, times, durations, the
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: cadence of outgoing contact that matched the escalation in Rhonda's
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: transfer timeline almost exactly. The calls got longer as the
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: requests got larger. The pauses between calls got shorter. That
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: pattern was not improvised. It was a schedule. Three days after,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Rhonda stood in that parking lot on November 17th. A
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Grover Falls area sheriff's deputy ran a routine traffic stop
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: on State Road 28, approximately 90 miles from Fenwick Drive.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: The driver was Rachel Powell, 38 years old, from Muncie, Indiana.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: In Rachel's car, the deputy found a prepaid phone. The
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: number on that phone matched the Tennessee number Amanda had saved.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Also in the car, a secondary phone containing correspondence with
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Rhonda and at least two other women, and a notebook.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: The notebook contained usernames, passwords, and scripted message sequences organized
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: by Persona, at least four active profiles across two platforms.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: It was not a record of a single scheme. It
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: was a system. Picture the notebook for a moment, not
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: as a piece of evidence in a folder, but as
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: an object someone carried in a car. Columns of usernames, passwords,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: sentences written out in advance, The kind of phrasing that
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: sounds spontaneous, that sounds like it is being thought of
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: for the first time, for you. I never told anyone
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: this before. I remembered what you said last week, scripted
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: as Intasy, indexed, ready for the next name on the list,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: at least four personas, two platforms. The messages sent to
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Rhonda from Daniel Marsh were not a singular obsession with
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: a single woman. They were one thread in a system
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: that was running simultaneously. While Rhonda was reading her good
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: morning message, at least two other women were reading theirs.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: The group had 400 members. Rachel had built it three
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: years before her arrest. The access controls, the declining of
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Amanda's request, the invitation-style structure, the focus on illness survivors,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: were not incidental features. They were architectural. The group selected
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: for people who had faced something isolating, who had been
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: through something their closest relationships could not fully reach, and
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: who had found a community that understood them in a
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: way their daily lives did not. Rhonda was not a
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: target of opportunity. She was a product of the system.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: When Rachel cooperated with investigators, she identified the cleared transfer
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: accounts and helped locate the secondary phone. She did not
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: cooperate on prior conduct. Her plea agreement, finalized in February 2020,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: covered the wire fraud charges related to the act of investigation.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: It excluded anything that predated it. Approximately six months after sentencing,
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: an investigator in Callaway County surfaced a 2017 case, same method,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: a support group, a persona, a fabricated emergency, a wire transfer, $ 22, 000 lost.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: The victim in that case never fully came forward. Rachel's
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: cooperation agreement excluded that prior conduct. The connection was noted
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: in the record. It went no further. The question the
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: notebook raises is not who Rachel Powell was. The record
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: answers that. The question it raises is structural. How many
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: threads were running that investigators never found? The secondary phone
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: held correspondence with at least two other women beyond Rhonda.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Those cases are not on the public record. The names
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: of those women are not known. Walk the geometry of it.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: A group built three years in advance. Access controls that
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: selected for vulnerability and excluded accountability. Scripted language engineered to
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: feel unrepeatable. A prepaid phone registered to nothing. A notebook
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: that went everywhere. The sunflowers in Unit 7 had a
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: hospital ribbon. Fresh. placed within 12 hours of Wendy Foster's arrival.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: No one has publicly said who put them there. Rachel,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: in her cooperation, identified financial accounts and a phone. She
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: did not place herself at Fenwick Drive. The open door,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the jar, the ribbon, they remain in the record as documented,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: but unexplained. What the evidence does show, without ambiguity, is this.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: The moment Rhonda sat in that parking lot at 4.30
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: in the morning and something shifted, that moment was not
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: the system failing. That was the system reaching its limit.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Rhonda had built her $ 41, 000, one careful decision at a time.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: She walked away from the $ 14, 000 transfer the same way,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: one decision at a time, in the dark, alone, before
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: the building opened. She rang Amanda's doorbell at 5.50. Amanda
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: opened the door. That is where the money stopped. Rachel
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Powell was arraigned in February of 2020. She pleaded to
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: a reduced wire fraud count. She did not receive the
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: maximum sentence. The cooperation she gave investigators was real, but bounded.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: She identified the financial accounts she located the secondary phone.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: She walked investigators through the transfer chain. She did not
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: cooperate on the 2017 conduct. The agreement excluded it. That case,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: the Callaway County loss of $ 22, 000, sits in the record
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: as a linked method with no formal resolution. The victim
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: in that case never fully came forward. The connection was noted.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: It went no further. Brian Selke, the finishing contractor in
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Chattanooga whose photographs built the Daniel Marsh persona, was never
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: a suspect. He was a man whose public images were
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: scraped and repurposed without his knowledge. His face attached itself
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: to eight months of fabricated intimacy. He had no part
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: in any of it. The secondary phone Rachel carried held
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: correspondence with at least two other women beyond Rhonda. Those
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: cases are not on the public record. The names of
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: those women are not known. The notebook documented scripted sequences
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: for at least four active personas running across two platforms simultaneously.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Whether all of those threads were investigated to the same
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: depth as Rhonda's case is not confirmed in any available filing.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Survivors in Step 400 members, built over three years, was
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: the recurring infrastructure. It was not constructed for Rhonda. Rhonda
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: was one entry point among several. The group was access control,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: vetting mechanism, and delivery system in one. Its architecture selected
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: for people at a particular intersection, recent medical crisis, social trust,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: limited outside accountability. It found them with precision. The total
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: confirmed loss from Rhonda was $ 8, 100, $ 1, 100 on November 3rd, $ 7, 000
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: on November 9th, The $ 14, 000 transfer never cleared. It never
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: cleared because Rhonda sat in a parking lot at 4.30
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: in the morning, waited, and then drove to Amanda's apartment instead.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: That is the number the case closes on, $ 8, 100 lost, $ 14, 000
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: not lost. The difference between those two figures is a
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: decision made alone in the dark. by a 32-year-old woman
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: who had already survived something harder than a parking lot.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Early spring of 2020, Rhonda Hoffman and Amanda Erickson walked
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: across the Fenwick Drive bridge. The details of that walk
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: are not in the case record. What is documented is
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: that they were both there, and that Rhonda, at some
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: point after the sentencing, went back to that street. The
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: sunflowers that Wendy Foster found at 5.40 in the morning
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: on November 14th fresh in a jar, with a hospital ribbon,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: were gone by then. Who placed them remains unexplained in
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: the public record. Rachel's cooperation identified accounts and the phone.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: It did not address the open door, the jar, or
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: the ribbon. There is something about that ribbon that stays.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Not as evidence of a worse crime, as evidence of
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: the level of construction involved. Someone sourced a jar. Someone
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: chose sunflowers. Someone tied a hospital ribbon. because that detail
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: would read as care to a woman who had spent
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: years inside the language of illness and survival. The ribbon
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: was a prop. It was also a choice. And that
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: distinction between gesture and engineering is, is what this case
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: keeps insisting on. Rhonda's $ 41, 000, saved before remission, was not
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: fully recovered. 8,100 of it went through wire transfers that
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: were cleared before investigators could intercept them. The financial system
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: that moved that money moved it fast and left little
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: to reverse. That is not unusual in wire fraud. It
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: is one reason the offense carries federal weight. It is
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: also one reason the people who run these operations at scale,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: the ones with notebooks and secondary phones and four active personas,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: tend to keep running them until something small and procedural
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: stops them. In Rachel's case, it was a traffic stop
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: on State Road 28. Wendy Foster was 14 years old
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: when she called the non-emergency line. She had a paper
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: route She noticed an open door before six in the
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: morning because that was outside the ordinary and she did
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: the thing that seemed right. She is not a footnote
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: in this case. She is the first person who put
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: a name to a wrong thing. This case is closed
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: in the narrow legal sense, Rachel Powell pleaded. The court
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: processed the outcome. But the two women whose names appear
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: only in the secondary phone's correspondence, they have no equivalent
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: of that morning. No Wendy at the door. No Amanda
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: with a saved voicemail. No traffic stop that happened to
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: hit the right car on the right road. The bridge
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: is still there. Rhonda walked across it in the spring.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: That has to count for something. This show is made
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: by Oboe Media.