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He Studied Her Routines-Then Vanished Her World Overnight · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: At six forty in the morning, a utility lineman named
0:07
Speaker 1: Karen Walsh was cutting through a service lane behind Briar
0:10
Speaker 1: Hollow Subdivision when she saw it, a framed photograph eight
0:15
Speaker 1: inches by ten sitting upright on a concrete retaining wall.
0:19
Speaker 1: The woman in the picture wore a yellow cardigan and
0:22
Speaker 1: stood at a cruise ship gangway, smiling. Engraved on the
0:26
Speaker 1: frame to l every port is home when you're with
0:30
Speaker 1: me g. The photograph was dry. It had rained the
0:34
Speaker 1: night before. Someone had placed it there after the rain.
0:38
Speaker 1: Someone had chosen this spot at the rear of fourteen
0:41
Speaker 1: twelve Saddler Court, in the dark, between eleven at night
0:45
Speaker 1: and dawn, and the woman in the yellow cardigan had
0:48
Speaker 1: been missing for thirteen days. Reading this case, one detail
0:51
Speaker 1: kept surfacing above all the others. The photograph was not hidden.
0:55
Speaker 1: It was displayed. That single fact resists every simple explanation,
1:01
Speaker 1: and it will matter enormously before this is over. Lauren
1:05
Speaker 1: Young had not called her sister on Wednesday night. In
1:08
Speaker 1: four years, she had never missed that call. What followed
1:12
Speaker 1: those two connected facts, a framed photograph and a silent phone,
1:17
Speaker 1: is a study in how completely one person can dismantle
1:21
Speaker 1: another's reality and how long it takes for the damage
1:24
Speaker 1: to become visible. Lauren Young was born around nineteen sixty
1:28
Speaker 1: three in Cartwell, Ohio. She had worked for the same
1:32
Speaker 1: regional insurance firm for twenty two years, first as a bookkeeper,
1:36
Speaker 1: then as a full accountant. Her colleagues described someone who
1:40
Speaker 1: arrived early, caught other people's errors without embarrassing them, and
1:44
Speaker 1: kept a small succulent on the corner of her desk.
1:48
Speaker 1: She was methodical, she was calm. She was, by every account,
1:52
Speaker 1: exactly who she appeared to be. In twenty fourteen, her husband,
1:56
Speaker 1: Frank died. The loss reshaped her life in ways that
2:00
Speaker 1: were quiet rather than dramatic. She inherited the Clement Drive house,
2:05
Speaker 1: a two hundred forty thousand dollars life insurance policy, and
2:09
Speaker 1: Frank's brokerage account. She kept the house immaculate, not compulsively,
2:14
Speaker 1: but with the kind of attention that says a person
2:17
Speaker 1: respects what they have. She grew vegetables in the backyard.
2:21
Speaker 1: She learned which grocery stores stocked the brand of sparkling
2:25
Speaker 1: water she preferred. Her closest friend was Diane Colton. Her
2:29
Speaker 1: sister was Patricia Odom, who lived two hours away in Columbus.
2:34
Speaker 1: Every Wednesday, at ten fifteen in the evening, Lauren called Patricia,
2:39
Speaker 1: not approximately ten fifteen ten fifteen. The call had started
2:44
Speaker 1: the year Frank died, when Patricia worried and Lauren wanted
2:48
Speaker 1: to reassure her. By twenty seventeen, it was no longer
2:52
Speaker 1: about reassurance. It was simply the shape of their week.
2:56
Speaker 1: Patricia once said she set her kettle on at ten
3:00
Speaker 1: twelve so the tea was ready. That is the kind
3:03
Speaker 1: of person. Lauren Young was, someone whose habits were acts
3:07
Speaker 1: of love. She was not isolated when George Sullivan appeared.
3:11
Speaker 1: She had a job, a friend, a sister, a garden,
3:15
Speaker 1: a Wednesday night call that had not broken in four years.
3:19
Speaker 1: That stability is important to hold on to, because what
3:22
Speaker 1: happened next did not require Lauren to be vulnerable in
3:26
Speaker 1: any obvious way. It required only that someone study her
3:30
Speaker 1: carefully enough to understand which thread, if pulled slowly enough,
3:34
Speaker 1: would eventually loosen everything else. Sullivan arrived in Cartwell in
3:38
Speaker 1: late twenty sixteen. He was sixty three years old. He
3:43
Speaker 1: described himself as a fee only financial adviser, semi retired
3:48
Speaker 1: newly settled after years in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. He rented a
3:53
Speaker 1: house at fourteen twelve Sadler Court. He attended community events.
3:58
Speaker 1: He found his way to a final financial seminar at
4:01
Speaker 1: the Cartwell Public Library in the spring of twenty seventeen,
4:05
Speaker 1: and that is where he met Lauren. He remembered the
4:07
Speaker 1: names of her plants. That detail, reported later by Lauren herself,
4:12
Speaker 1: sounds minor. It is not minor. It is the first
4:17
Speaker 1: data point in a pattern that investigators would eventually document
4:20
Speaker 1: across twelve years, three states, and eight women. Sullivan was
4:25
Speaker 1: not charming in the way that word usually implies, meaning
4:30
Speaker 1: loud or magnetic. He was charming in the way that
4:34
Speaker 1: makes a person feel seen. He paid attention, He asked
4:37
Speaker 1: follow up questions. He returned two weeks later with a
4:41
Speaker 1: reference to something Lauren had mentioned in passing. By the
4:45
Speaker 1: end of twenty seventeen, he was present at Clement Drive
4:48
Speaker 1: four or five evenings a week. Lauren was not naive.
4:53
Speaker 1: She was an accountant who caught other people's errors for
4:56
Speaker 1: a living. That is the detail that matters most here,
4:59
Speaker 1: and the that makes what followed so difficult to reduce
5:03
Speaker 1: to any simple explanation. What Sullivan was doing was not
5:07
Speaker 1: visible as it happened. Each step had its own logic.
5:11
Speaker 1: Each concession seemed reasonable at the time, and by the
5:15
Speaker 1: time the pattern was recognizable, Lauren was already deep inside it.
5:20
Speaker 1: Early in twenty eighteen, Sullivan said something about Diane Colton.
5:25
Speaker 1: It was small, a hesitation, a question framed as concern,
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Speaker 1: something like had Lauren noticed that Diane sometimes redirected conversations
5:36
Speaker 1: back to herself. Lauren had not noticed, or had not
5:41
Speaker 1: framed it that way, But the observation had waited because
5:44
Speaker 1: Sulliban had spent months earning the right to be believed.
5:48
Speaker 1: He had remembered the names of her plants. He had
5:51
Speaker 1: shown up. So the doubts settled in quiet and unremarkable,
5:56
Speaker 1: and Diane began to recede. This is how the icelation worked,
6:01
Speaker 1: not through demands, through suggestions that arrived wearing the costume
6:05
Speaker 1: of care. By the end of twenty eighteen, Lauren's social
6:10
Speaker 1: world had contracted around a single center of gravity. Sullivan
6:14
Speaker 1: was there four or five evenings a week. Patricia was
6:17
Speaker 1: in Columbus, two hours away, reachable on Wednesdays. Diane was complicated. Now,
6:24
Speaker 1: according to the new version of events, Lauren was living inside.
6:28
Speaker 1: The friends who remained were peripheral. The people who might
6:32
Speaker 1: have noticed the change were the people Sullivan had quietly
6:36
Speaker 1: made harder to reach. Then came February two thousand nineteen.
6:40
Speaker 1: That month, Lauren moved her brokerage account to a firm
6:43
Speaker 1: Sullivan had recommended. She also signed a document a limited
6:48
Speaker 1: power of attorney. She told investigators later that she had
6:52
Speaker 1: read it. She had believed it was standard paperwork, the
6:56
Speaker 1: kind that accompanies a financial transition. The document itself was real,
7:02
Speaker 1: the framing around it was not. Between February and October
7:07
Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, eight months, one hundred eighty seven
7:10
Speaker 1: thousand dollars moved out of Lauren's accounts. The transfers went
7:14
Speaker 1: to an account held under a name that was of
7:17
Speaker 1: misspelling of Sullivan's own, not a different name, a misspelling,
7:21
Speaker 1: one letter, transposed, one character altered, the kind of difference
7:26
Speaker 1: that clears automated review because it is close enough to
7:30
Speaker 1: match a pattern without triggering a flag. It cleared three
7:33
Speaker 1: of them. That number three automated reviews is the detail
7:38
Speaker 1: that says something about how the financial architecture of the
7:42
Speaker 1: operation was designed. This was not improvised. The account name
7:47
Speaker 1: the transfer schedule. The incremental amounts each element had been
7:52
Speaker 1: chosen to stay inside the threshold of visibility eight months,
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Speaker 1: no alerts. One hundred eighty seven thousand dollars. October seventh,
8:02
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Sullivan's credit card recorded a charge to a
8:06
Speaker 1: cartwell florist flowers and a fruit tray build to the
8:10
Speaker 1: Sadler Court address. Two days later, on October ninth, Lauren
8:14
Speaker 1: Young did not call her sister. That was the first
8:17
Speaker 1: missed Wednesday call in four years. Patricia Odom waited until
8:22
Speaker 1: Thursday morning. She called Lauren's cell, no answer. She called
8:27
Speaker 1: the house line, no answer. She drove two hours from
8:31
Speaker 1: Columbus and found the Clement Drive house, locked, Lauren's car
8:35
Speaker 1: in the garage, and a handwritten note on the kitchen counter.
8:39
Speaker 1: The note said Lauren had taken a spontaneous trip. It
8:44
Speaker 1: was in Lauren's handwriting. Patricia stood in that kitchen and
8:47
Speaker 1: something did not fit. She knew her sister's voice the
8:51
Speaker 1: way you know a piece of music you have heard
8:53
Speaker 1: ten thousand times. The note was written in Lauren's hand,
8:57
Speaker 1: but the word it used, spontaneous, was not the Lauren's word.
9:01
Speaker 1: Lauren did not take spontaneous trips. Lauren had a vegetable
9:05
Speaker 1: garden she tended on a schedule. Lauren called every Wednesday
9:09
Speaker 1: at ten fifteen without fail for four years. Lauren was
9:14
Speaker 1: the person who showed up when she said she would.
9:17
Speaker 1: Patricia filed a missing person report the next morning, October eleventh.
9:21
Speaker 1: Detective Sandra okafor pulled the credit card records under emergency
9:26
Speaker 1: missing person provisions. The florist charge on October seventh was there,
9:31
Speaker 1: so was the gap after it. Nothing on Lauren's accounts
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Speaker 1: moving after that date. No gas station, no grocery store,
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Speaker 1: no motel, A person who had vanished from the financial
9:42
Speaker 1: record as completely as from her sister's Wednesday nights. Ocaffer
9:46
Speaker 1: worked outward from Sadler Court. She canvassed the block. She
9:50
Speaker 1: spoke with a neighbor named Bob Fenner, who mentioned something
9:54
Speaker 1: he had seen the week before Lauren disappeared. Sullivan had
9:58
Speaker 1: been in the service lane behind the house after dark,
10:02
Speaker 1: carrying the small flashlight. Fenner had not thought much of
10:06
Speaker 1: it at the time. The lane had no cameras. Then
10:10
Speaker 1: on a Tuesday morning in late October. Then on a
10:13
Speaker 1: Tuesday morning in late October, a utility lineman named Karen
10:18
Speaker 1: Walsh found something on the concrete retaining wall at the
10:21
Speaker 1: eastern edge of Briar Hollow Subdivision, the rear boundary of
10:26
Speaker 1: fourteen twelve Sadler Court. It was a framed photograph eight
10:31
Speaker 1: by ten under glass Lauren Young in a yellow cardigan
10:36
Speaker 1: at a cruise shipped gangway. The frame had been set
10:39
Speaker 1: upright on the concrete carefully, some time between eleven the
10:43
Speaker 1: previous night and six forty in the morning. The engraving
10:46
Speaker 1: on the back read to l every port is home
10:51
Speaker 1: when You're with me g read one way, the photograph
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Speaker 1: was a keepsake. Read another way, it was a record.
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Speaker 1: It said she was with me. It was placed where
11:03
Speaker 1: it would be found, but not inside the house, not
11:07
Speaker 1: on the front step, not anywhere that would immediately draw attention.
11:11
Speaker 1: It was placed at the rear boundary the service lane,
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Speaker 1: the same path Sullivan had walked after dark with a flashlight.
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Speaker 1: Okafort looked at that photograph for a long time. What
11:22
Speaker 1: she was holding was the first physical object that placed
11:26
Speaker 1: Lauren in Sullivan's orbit at a specific, deliberate moment, and
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Speaker 1: it had been left behind, not taken. Whether it was
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Speaker 1: a signal, a disposal of evidence, or something else entirely
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Speaker 1: she could not say. The question went into the file unanswered.
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Speaker 1: Three days later, on October twenty fourth, Lauren Young was
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Speaker 1: found at a motel outside Clarksburg, West Virginia. She told
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Speaker 1: the responding officers three times that she had come voluntarily.
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Speaker 1: The word voluntarily is where the case becomes genuinely difficult.
12:00
Speaker 1: Lauren said it clearly. She was not restrained. There were
12:03
Speaker 1: no visible injuries. She had checked into the motel herself,
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Speaker 1: under her own name. By every surface measure, a woman
12:13
Speaker 1: had taken a trip with a man she trusted. That
12:15
Speaker 1: was the version of events that sat in the initial report.
12:19
Speaker 1: But there is another way to read that word, and
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Speaker 1: it is the way that trauma specialist Kimberly Becker began
12:25
Speaker 1: to examine the moment she drove to Clarksburg on October
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Speaker 1: twenty fifth. Picture what Lauren knew at that moment. She
12:32
Speaker 1: had spent two and a half years inside a version
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Speaker 1: of reality that Sullivan had built around her, one careful
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Speaker 1: brick at a time. The people who might have challenged
12:42
Speaker 1: that version, Diane Patricia, the peripheral friends, had been gradually
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Speaker 1: moved to the edges of her life. The financial decisions
12:50
Speaker 1: she had made felt like her own decisions, because each
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Speaker 1: one had arrived with a reasonable explanation, with patience, with
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Speaker 1: the voice of some one she trusted completely. The power
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Speaker 1: of attorney she had signed in February she still believed
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Speaker 1: was standard paperwork Cowork. If control does not announce itself,
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Speaker 1: it does not require a locked door or raised voice.
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Speaker 1: What it requires is sustained, methodical redefinition of what is normal,
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Speaker 1: of who is trustworthy, of what a person is capable
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Speaker 1: of deciding on her own. By the time Lauren sat
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Speaker 1: in that motel room and told officers she had come voluntarily,
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Speaker 1: she was not lying. She was reporting the reality she
13:33
Speaker 1: had been given. Becker testified to this at sentencing. Her
13:37
Speaker 1: clinical assessment, built across months of twice weekly sessions with Lauren,
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Speaker 1: described a process of incremental erosion, each isolated step reasonable,
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Speaker 1: the cumulative effect total now hold that against the prospecting notebook.
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Speaker 1: Investigators found it in a storage unit Sullivan maintained in Dunmore, Pennsylvania,
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Speaker 1: under an alias a legal path, eight names, three states,
14:03
Speaker 1: twelve years. Each entry included the woman's name, city, estimated
14:08
Speaker 1: date of widowhood, and an asset figure drawn from obituary
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Speaker 1: notices and county records. Lauren Young appeared on page thirty one.
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Speaker 1: Two of the eight women on that list were deceased,
14:21
Speaker 1: three were located and interviewed. None of them had known
14:24
Speaker 1: the others existed. The note book did not prove what
14:28
Speaker 1: Sullivan had done to each woman on the list. It
14:31
Speaker 1: proved that he had been looking for them methodically over
14:35
Speaker 1: more than a decade, using public records to identify women
14:39
Speaker 1: who had recently lost a spouse and who held liquid assets.
14:43
Speaker 1: The romance, the patients, the remembered plant names, the doubt
14:49
Speaker 1: planted about Diane. All of it sat inside a framework
14:53
Speaker 1: that had been designed before he ever walked into the
14:55
Speaker 1: Cartwell Public Library. Lauren had read the Power of Attorney.
15:00
Speaker 1: She had not understood what she was signing because the
15:02
Speaker 1: months that preceded the signing had been spent ensuring she
15:06
Speaker 1: would not question it. That is the recontextualization that Becker
15:10
Speaker 1: placed before the court, and it is the one that
15:13
Speaker 1: changes everything that came before. The spontaneous note in Lauren's handwriting,
15:18
Speaker 1: the florist charge two days before the mist call, the
15:22
Speaker 1: photograph left on the retaining wall, the three automated reviews
15:26
Speaker 1: that cleared one hundred eight seven thousand dollars. Each of
15:29
Speaker 1: those things looks different now. Sullivan was arrested November third,
15:35
Speaker 1: two thoy nineteen. He confessed in January in a proffer session. Partially,
15:40
Speaker 1: he acknowledged the financial conduct. He described the relationships as
15:45
Speaker 1: mutual and consensual. He declined to characterize his methods. He
15:50
Speaker 1: was sentenced to nineteen years. He will be eighty two
15:53
Speaker 1: years old when he is eligible for release. The seventy
15:56
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars never came back. Instigators followed the wire
16:01
Speaker 1: transfer as far as a foreign correspondent bank account, then
16:05
Speaker 1: the trail ended. The financial forensics report ran two hundred
16:10
Speaker 1: fourteen pages, and it could not close that final gap.
16:15
Speaker 1: One hundred eleven thousand dollars was returned. The rest is gone.
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Speaker 1: That number is worth holding for a moment, not as
16:23
Speaker 1: an abstraction, but as what it was. It was the
16:26
Speaker 1: remainder of a life insurance payout that Frank Young had
16:30
Speaker 1: left behind, money that was meant to carry Lauren through
16:33
Speaker 1: the rest of her years. Lauren had told the officers
16:37
Speaker 1: who found her at the Clarksburg motel that she had
16:40
Speaker 1: come voluntarily. She said it three times. She believed it
16:45
Speaker 1: that belief was not naivety. It was the result of
16:48
Speaker 1: twenty six months of careful patient construction, a reality assembled
16:52
Speaker 1: around her piece by piece until the one she had
16:55
Speaker 1: built herself was gone. Kimberly Becker, the trauma specialist who
16:59
Speaker 1: drove to work West Virginia the morning after Lauren was located,
17:02
Speaker 1: would later testify its sentencing. What Becker described to the
17:06
Speaker 1: court was not a crime of opportunity. It was a system.
17:11
Speaker 1: Coercive control does not require a locked door. It requires
17:15
Speaker 1: that the person inside no longer reaches for the handle.
17:19
Speaker 1: That testimony shaped the sentence nineteen years Sullivan will be
17:26
Speaker 1: eighty two years old when he becomes eligible for release.
17:30
Speaker 1: The prospecting notebook recovered from the Dunmore storage unit listed
17:34
Speaker 1: eight women across three states spanning twelve years. Two of
17:38
Speaker 1: those women were deceased by the time investigators found the
17:42
Speaker 1: legal pad. Three of the remaining women were located and interviewed.
17:46
Speaker 1: None had known the others existed. The notebook did not
17:50
Speaker 1: constitute a conviction for what Sullivan had done to each
17:53
Speaker 1: of them. It constituted a record of selection, methodical patient
17:57
Speaker 1: drawn from public obituaries and county property filings. Lauren was
18:01
Speaker 1: on page thirty one. Detective Okaphor, who had pulled the
18:05
Speaker 1: credit card records under emergency missing person provisions and followed
18:09
Speaker 1: them to a Florist charge and then to a motel
18:13
Speaker 1: in West Virginia, said in a later interview that the
18:15
Speaker 1: case had made her rethink how her department classified welfare
18:19
Speaker 1: checks on adults. The category of voluntary departure had almost
18:24
Speaker 1: closed the file before it opened. The photograph found on
18:28
Speaker 1: the retaining wall Lauren in the yellow cardigan. The engraved
18:32
Speaker 1: frame the inscription that read every port is home when
18:37
Speaker 1: You're with me was never conclusively explained. Oquefhor's working theory
18:43
Speaker 1: was that Sullivan placed it there, either as a signal
18:46
Speaker 1: or as a way to sever the association with the address.
18:50
Speaker 1: The prosecution did not press the point. The photograph was
18:53
Speaker 1: admitted as physical evidence of access and proximity. Its meaning
18:57
Speaker 1: if it had one beyond that, remains unresolved. In the
19:01
Speaker 1: spring of twenty twenty, Lauren Young sold the house on
19:05
Speaker 1: Clement Drive. She moved to Columbus, ten minutes from Patricia.
19:10
Speaker 1: The Wednesday calls resumed ten fifteen in the evening, same
19:15
Speaker 1: as they had been for four years before. Sullivan arrived
19:18
Speaker 1: in Cartwell. The calls that Patricia had kept a record
19:21
Speaker 1: of in her own way, not written down, just known,
19:24
Speaker 1: the way you know the shape of something you depend on.
19:28
Speaker 1: Lauren kept a vegetable garden in Patricia's back yard. There
19:32
Speaker 1: is something clarifying about that detail, not because it resolves anything,
19:36
Speaker 1: but because it restores the person. An accountant who spent
19:40
Speaker 1: twenty two years doing careful, honest work, a woman who
19:45
Speaker 1: called her sister every Wednesday at ten fifteen, who grew things,
19:50
Speaker 1: who had a friend named Diane, and a house she
19:53
Speaker 1: had shared with Frank, and a life that was fully
19:55
Speaker 1: in specifically hers, before a man with a legal pad
19:59
Speaker 1: and twelve years of practice walked into a library seminar
20:02
Speaker 1: and sat down two seats away. She got some of
20:06
Speaker 1: it back, not all of it. The money that is gone,
20:10
Speaker 1: the two years are gone. What she retrieved was the
20:13
Speaker 1: knowledge of what had happened to her. Not comfort, not
20:16
Speaker 1: justice exactly, but clarity. Becker's sessions gave her that the
20:22
Speaker 1: word for what Sullivan had done existed, and it had
20:25
Speaker 1: a literature, and Lauren was not the first knowing. That
20:29
Speaker 1: does not make the seventy six thousand dollars reappear. It
20:33
Speaker 1: does not give back the Wednesday calls she missed, but
20:36
Speaker 1: it means that when Lauren Young digs in Patricia's backyard
20:39
Speaker 1: on a Saturday morning, she knows the name of what
20:43
Speaker 1: she survived, and she knows that a missed phone call,
20:47
Speaker 1: one missed phone call on a Wednesday night in October
20:52
Speaker 1: was the thing that broke a system designed to be invisible.
20:56
Speaker 1: George Sullivan had built that system over twelve years and
20:59
Speaker 1: across us eight lives. What he had not accounted for
21:03
Speaker 1: was a sister who drove two hours when her phone
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Speaker 1: didn't ring. This show is made by Obo Media.