Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Wrote Her Madness: The Psychologist Who Invented Gloria

Transcript

He Wrote Her Madness: The Psychologist Who Invented Gloria · Why Humans Lie

0:03
Speaker 1: At six fifteen in the morning, a fifteen year old
0:06
Speaker 1: paper boy named Wayne Andrews found a storage unit on
0:10
Speaker 1: Farrow Mill Road. Standing open. Inside on bare concrete sat
0:14
Speaker 1: a single cream colored flat size seven upright, perfectly centered
0:21
Speaker 1: as if placed there by someone who wanted it found.
0:24
Speaker 1: When officers traced the unit to Shannon Weaver, she told
0:28
Speaker 1: them something that would take investigators months to fully understand.
0:32
Speaker 1: She said she did not own the cream colored flats.
0:35
Speaker 1: She said she had never visited that unit. Both statements,
0:39
Speaker 1: it would turn out, were true in ways that pointed
0:42
Speaker 1: directly at a man named Terry White. There is something
0:45
Speaker 1: specific about this case that resists easy summary. It is
0:50
Speaker 1: not a story about violence. There is no body, no
0:54
Speaker 1: missing person, no moment of sudden rupture. What Terry White
0:58
Speaker 1: did to Shannon Weaver happy, and an increment so small
1:01
Speaker 1: that Shannon herself could not locate where her own account
1:04
Speaker 1: of her life had stopped being hers. That is what
1:08
Speaker 1: made it so difficult to investigate, and that is what
1:11
Speaker 1: makes it worth examining closely. What follows is the documented
1:14
Speaker 1: record of how one person systematically dismantled another person's sense
1:19
Speaker 1: of her own reality using access patients and a method
1:24
Speaker 1: that a forensic psychologist would later describe in court documents
1:27
Speaker 1: as memory substitution. Shannon Weaver was forty eight years old
1:31
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty nineteen. She had worked as
1:35
Speaker 1: a billing coordinator at Dellard Regional Medical Center for eleven years.
1:39
Speaker 1: Her colleagues described someone meticulous and consistent. She kept a
1:43
Speaker 1: color coded paper calendar on her desk. She had baked
1:46
Speaker 1: banana bread for the billing department the previous Friday. She
1:50
Speaker 1: had been divorced since twelve and twelve and had no children.
1:54
Speaker 1: She lived alone on Plover Street in a house she
1:57
Speaker 1: had maintained with the same steady attention she brought to
2:00
Speaker 1: everything else. Her sister Patricia, described Shannon as someone who
2:04
Speaker 1: did not do things impulsively. She planned, she confirmed she
2:09
Speaker 1: followed through. The relationship Shannon valued most outside her family
2:14
Speaker 1: was with Donna Faber. Donna had been Shannon's college roommate.
2:19
Speaker 1: A car accident in twenty fifteen had left Donna using
2:22
Speaker 1: a wheelchair, and after that, Shannon had driven to Donna's
2:26
Speaker 1: apartment every Tuesday evening without exception four years of tuesdays
2:31
Speaker 1: Thai food from the place near the Community Center, staying
2:35
Speaker 1: until nine or nine thirty, the kind of friendship that
2:38
Speaker 1: functions like infrastructure, invisible until it disappears. By the fall
2:43
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, Shannon had stopped going. The texts Donna
2:48
Speaker 1: received in the months that followed explained the absence. They
2:52
Speaker 1: came from Shannon's number. They said things like I think
2:56
Speaker 1: I needed some space. They expressed something vague and muse usual,
3:00
Speaker 1: as if the distance were a shared decision. Donna held
3:03
Speaker 1: on to them. She didn't push back. She assumed Shannon
3:07
Speaker 1: was going through something private, and she waited. Patricia, when
3:11
Speaker 1: she read those texts more than a year later, said
3:14
Speaker 1: she had never heard Shannon use language like that in
3:17
Speaker 1: thirty years, not once. The phrasing wasn't Shannon's, the rhythm
3:21
Speaker 1: was in Shannon's, but the number had been Shannon's, and
3:25
Speaker 1: the name on the thread was Shannon's, and for months
3:27
Speaker 1: that had been enough. Terry White had entered Shannon's life
3:31
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty seventeen. He was forty four,
3:36
Speaker 1: a software contractor working for Northgate Systems, which held a
3:40
Speaker 1: service contract with Dellard Regional. His work gave him badge
3:45
Speaker 1: authorized administrative access to the hospital systems. That access also
3:49
Speaker 1: put him in the same physical spaces as Shannon. She
3:52
Speaker 1: described him in later accounts as kind a little sad
3:56
Speaker 1: in a way that made her want to help. By
3:59
Speaker 1: August of twenty seventeen, they were meeting for coffee. By November,
4:04
Speaker 1: she had given him a key to her house. The framing,
4:08
Speaker 1: as Shannon recalled it, was practical. He had offered to
4:11
Speaker 1: help with something, a repair, a delivery, and giving him
4:15
Speaker 1: a key seemed like a reasonable response to a reasonable request.
4:20
Speaker 1: That is the detail that would take years to fully examine,
4:23
Speaker 1: not the key itself, but the fact that Shannon remembered
4:27
Speaker 1: choosing to give it. She remembered the logic of it.
4:30
Speaker 1: She remembered it feeling like her decision. What the evidence
4:33
Speaker 1: would later show is that the decision making Shannon remembered
4:37
Speaker 1: had been constructed for her, piece by piece, over many months.
4:41
Speaker 1: The key was not the beginning. It was not even
4:44
Speaker 1: close to the beginning. The question that investigators would eventually
4:48
Speaker 1: have to answer was not what Terry White had taken.
4:51
Speaker 1: The financial records made that part legible. The harder question,
4:56
Speaker 1: the one that Ryan Cooper, a forensic psychologist retained by
4:59
Speaker 1: Shan Bannon's attorney, would spend months working through was how
5:04
Speaker 1: White had managed to take it while leaving Shannon with
5:07
Speaker 1: a complete and confident account of having chosen everything herself.
5:11
Speaker 1: That answer began in January of two thousand eighteen, and
5:16
Speaker 1: it started with a storage unit Shannon did not know
5:19
Speaker 1: she was paying for. In January of twenty eighteen, a
5:24
Speaker 1: storage unit was leased in Shannon Weaver's name. She did
5:27
Speaker 1: not sign the paperwork, She did not choose the padlock code.
5:31
Speaker 1: She did not know the unit existed. Unit forty four
5:35
Speaker 1: at a facility off Faro Mill Road, was paid for
5:39
Speaker 1: through a debit account linked to Shannon's banking, an account
5:44
Speaker 1: that had been quietly restructured two months earlier. The contact
5:49
Speaker 1: email on that account was not hers. The security questions
5:52
Speaker 1: were not ones she had chosen. She had been steered
5:55
Speaker 1: away from the statements, away from the login, away from
5:59
Speaker 1: the Accounts exist distance entirely, not through force, through the
6:03
Speaker 1: steady accumulation of small redirections, each one framed as a convenience.
6:08
Speaker 1: This is where the architecture becomes visible. In March of
6:12
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, two more accounts followed the same pattern, three total,
6:20
Speaker 1: restructured within a sixty day window. Security questions changed recovery
6:26
Speaker 1: contacts changed. Shannon's access to her own financial life narrowed
6:30
Speaker 1: without her registering the change, because each step came wrapped
6:34
Speaker 1: in a narrative she had helped construct or believed she had.
6:38
Speaker 1: That is the first image to hold, not a theft,
6:41
Speaker 1: not a forgery. Three accounts quietly turned to face away
6:46
Speaker 1: from their honor. The second image arrived in the fall
6:49
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, and it was a silence. Shannon Weaver
6:54
Speaker 1: had visited Donna Faber every Tuesday for four years. Donna
6:58
Speaker 1: was her former college roommate, a wheelchair user since twenty fifteen,
7:03
Speaker 1: and the visits were one of the fixed points in
7:05
Speaker 1: Shannon's week Thai food. Usually they stayed late. Then in
7:11
Speaker 1: the spring of twenty eighteen, the visits became irregular. By fall,
7:15
Speaker 1: they had stopped from Donna's side, the relationship did not disappear.
7:21
Speaker 1: Messages kept arriving from Shannon's number. They were warm, plausible,
7:27
Speaker 1: slightly distant. One read, according to the record, something close
7:31
Speaker 1: to I think I needed some space. Shannon's sister, Patricia,
7:35
Speaker 1: who had known Shannon for thirty years, was later shown
7:39
Speaker 1: those messages. Patricia said Shannon did not talk that way,
7:43
Speaker 1: not in thirty years. The metadata on those messages told
7:47
Speaker 1: a different story than the sender field. Three of the
7:50
Speaker 1: texts sent from Shannon's number between October of two thousand
7:54
Speaker 1: eighteen and February of twenty nineteen were transmitted at times
7:58
Speaker 1: when Shannon's hospital badge had logged her inside Dellard Regional
8:03
Speaker 1: connected to the internal network. The routing path of the
8:06
Speaker 1: messages did not match a phone inside that building. Some
8:09
Speaker 1: one else had sent them. Some one who had access
8:12
Speaker 1: to a device configured to appear as Shannon's number, and
8:16
Speaker 1: who knew exactly when Shannon would be stationary and accounted
8:20
Speaker 1: for that device would not be found for another year,
8:23
Speaker 1: but it was already in motion. The third image is
8:27
Speaker 1: the shoe. In the third week of April two thousand nineteen,
8:31
Speaker 1: at approximately six fifteen in the morning, a fifteen year
8:35
Speaker 1: old paper boy named Wayne Andrews finished his route on
8:39
Speaker 1: Faro Mill Road and noticed that the roll up door
8:42
Speaker 1: on Unit forty four was open, not a jar open.
8:46
Speaker 1: He looked inside. The unit was empty except for one thing,
8:50
Speaker 1: a single cream colored flat women's size seven sitting upright
8:54
Speaker 1: on the bare concrete floor, positioned near the center of
8:57
Speaker 1: the space. Wain called his mother. His mother called the
9:01
Speaker 1: non emergency police line. Officers who responded noted the shoe
9:05
Speaker 1: in their report and attempted to locate the unit's leaseholder.
9:09
Speaker 1: The name on the lease was Shannon Weaver. When officers
9:12
Speaker 1: reached Shannon at her home on Plover Street, she came
9:16
Speaker 1: to the door in a bath room. She was asked
9:18
Speaker 1: about Unit forty four. She said she did not have
9:22
Speaker 1: a storage unit. She said she had not been to
9:24
Speaker 1: Faroe Mill Road in weeks, possibly longer, and she said
9:29
Speaker 1: she did not own cream colored flats. That statement, I
9:33
Speaker 1: do not own cream colored flats, would become one of
9:37
Speaker 1: the most examined sentences in the subsequent investigation, not because
9:42
Speaker 1: it was obviously false, because it was at the time
9:45
Speaker 1: she said it genuinely true as Shannon understood her own life.
9:49
Speaker 1: Detective Phil Garner began pulling the financial thread in early
9:53
Speaker 1: May of two thousand nineteen. The unit lease payments traced
9:56
Speaker 1: back within days back through a restructured Debbi account to
10:00
Speaker 1: Shannon's primary banking but the account number itself was one
10:05
Speaker 1: Shannon did not recognize when shown it. She had never
10:08
Speaker 1: seen the account number. She did not remember opening a
10:11
Speaker 1: secondary account. Garner noted in the investigation record that Shannon's
10:16
Speaker 1: responses were not evasive. They were confused in the specific
10:21
Speaker 1: way of someone encountering a gap between what they knew
10:25
Speaker 1: about their own life and what the document showed. There
10:28
Speaker 1: is something in that description that resists easy summary, not guilt,
10:34
Speaker 1: not fabrication, a gap. Shannon's interior map of her own
10:38
Speaker 1: decisions did not contain these coordinates. By mid May, Donna
10:43
Speaker 1: Faber produced the full thread of messages from Shannon's number.
10:47
Speaker 1: The metadata analysis followed quickly. Three messages sent while Shannon
10:51
Speaker 1: was badged inside the hospital on internal Wi Fi had
10:55
Speaker 1: originated from a routing path inconsistent with that location. This
11:00
Speaker 1: was not a technical anomaly. This was a second phone
11:04
Speaker 1: or a device configured to transmit as Shannon's number, operated
11:07
Speaker 1: by someone who knew Shannon's schedule precisely enough to send
11:12
Speaker 1: messages during her confirmed shifts. That kind of precision does
11:16
Speaker 1: not come from observation. It comes from access. Terry White
11:21
Speaker 1: had badge authorized access to Delard Regional's administrative systems. He
11:26
Speaker 1: knew the hospital's network architecture. He had held a key
11:29
Speaker 1: to Shannon's house since November of twenty seventeen. And he
11:34
Speaker 1: had been present consistently and warmly throughout the entire period
11:38
Speaker 1: during which the accounts were restructured, the storage unit was leased,
11:42
Speaker 1: and the messages were sent. But here is the thing.
11:45
Speaker 1: The investigation had not yet confirmed whether any of this
11:49
Speaker 1: was connected to a prior pattern or whether Shannon was
11:52
Speaker 1: an isolated case. Detective Carla Simmons ran the background search
11:57
Speaker 1: on White during the third week of May two thousand nine.
12:00
Speaker 1: What she found in Columbus required a separate interview. Joyce
12:04
Speaker 1: Pelham was fifty one years old and had not spoken
12:08
Speaker 1: about Terry White in four years. She had signed a
12:12
Speaker 1: non disclosure agreement as part of a civil settlement reached
12:15
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen, a judgment against White for unauthorized
12:19
Speaker 1: financial use. She had closed that chapter. She had not
12:23
Speaker 1: been told she would hear his name again. Simmons drove
12:27
Speaker 1: to Columbus, Pelham agreed to speak. The pattern Pelham described
12:31
Speaker 1: was not identical to Shannon's, but the shape of it
12:35
Speaker 1: was the same, work place entry, financial access, framed as assistants,
12:40
Speaker 1: isolation from a close female friend, a storage unit she
12:45
Speaker 1: had rented. She said, though she could not fully account
12:48
Speaker 1: for the circumstances of signing the lease. The NDA had
12:52
Speaker 1: kept Pellam's account sealed. It had also kept it from
12:55
Speaker 1: Shannon's investigators until that week in May. White had known
12:59
Speaker 1: that he had arranged it that way. When officers executed
13:04
Speaker 1: the arrest warrant at the Northgate System's regional office Indelard
13:07
Speaker 1: on May twenty ninth, two thousand, nineteen, White did not resist.
13:12
Speaker 1: Within forty eight hours of his arrest, he began co operating,
13:17
Speaker 1: identifying the location of a locked storage bin inside Unit
13:21
Speaker 1: forty four, one that had not been visible during the
13:24
Speaker 1: initial response in April because the unit's roll up door
13:27
Speaker 1: had been closed again by the time officers arrived with Shannon.
13:31
Speaker 1: The bin contained three things, printed copies of Shannon's account credentials,
13:36
Speaker 1: a burner foam partially configured to transmit using her number,
13:40
Speaker 1: and a zipper pouch holding a single cream colored flat
13:43
Speaker 1: women's size seven the matched pair. Shannon had believed she
13:48
Speaker 1: lost one of those shoes before the manipulation period. Before
13:52
Speaker 1: any of this had started, she had owned a pair
13:55
Speaker 1: of cream colored flats and thought she had misplaced one
13:59
Speaker 1: the shoe in the unit. It was not a prop
14:01
Speaker 1: sourced by White. It was hers, taken from her home,
14:05
Speaker 1: where he had held the key since twenty seventeen, and
14:09
Speaker 1: placed on the concrete floor of Unit forty four, upright
14:13
Speaker 1: near the center, positioned with care. Ryan Cooper, the forensic
14:18
Speaker 1: psychologist retained by Shannon's attorney, assessed the placement in the
14:23
Speaker 1: court documents. His conclusion was precise. The shoe was not
14:27
Speaker 1: a mistake. It was not a careless artifact. It was staged,
14:32
Speaker 1: a form of control extended into the act of ending
14:34
Speaker 1: the relationship, designed to create confusion, to make Shannon doubt
14:38
Speaker 1: her own account of her possessions, her memory, her choices,
14:42
Speaker 1: to make the gap in her interior map feel like
14:45
Speaker 1: her own failure of recollection rather than evidence of intrusion.
14:50
Speaker 1: Cooper's broader assessment went further in his analysis of Shannon's
14:54
Speaker 1: testimony against the documentary record. He identified what he termed
14:58
Speaker 1: memory substitution. White had not simply lied to Shannon. He had,
15:03
Speaker 1: over months, replaced the emotional significance of Shannon's own decisions,
15:08
Speaker 1: told her warmly and repeatedly that she had chosen everything
15:13
Speaker 1: that she had wanted. The help, that the key, the accounts,
15:17
Speaker 1: the distance from Donna had all come from her over time.
15:21
Speaker 1: The narration became her memory picture the Tuesday visits stopping.
15:26
Speaker 1: Shannon does not remember being told to stop going. She
15:29
Speaker 1: remembers feeling at some point that she needed space. The
15:34
Speaker 1: message Donna received, I think I needed some space, arrived
15:38
Speaker 1: from Shannon's number while Shannon was inside the hospital logged
15:42
Speaker 1: on internal WiFi. Shannon did not send it, but when
15:46
Speaker 1: she searched her own recollection of that period, she found
15:49
Speaker 1: something that felt like the feeling described in that message,
15:53
Speaker 1: a vague sense of distance, a pulling back. White had
15:57
Speaker 1: built that feeling into her, and then he sent the
16:01
Speaker 1: message that named it, so that if anyone ever asked,
16:04
Speaker 1: Shannon would confirm, yes, I did pull back a little.
16:08
Speaker 1: That confirmation was the architecture, not the financial fraud, not
16:13
Speaker 1: the fabricated messages, not the storage unit. The architecture was
16:17
Speaker 1: Shannon's sincere account of her own choices, aligning perfectly with
16:21
Speaker 1: White's narration of events. Cooper's assessment was entered into the
16:25
Speaker 1: court record. It was later used in Adult Protective Services
16:29
Speaker 1: training materials. The finding cited most frequently was this. In
16:34
Speaker 1: cases of this type, the most consistent feature is not
16:38
Speaker 1: the financial mechanism or the isolation pattern. It is the
16:42
Speaker 1: moment when the target's testimony becomes in good faith indistinguishable
16:47
Speaker 1: from the manipulator's version of events. That was what had happened.
16:51
Speaker 1: Shannon had not been deceived about the facts. She had
16:54
Speaker 1: been given a different set of memories of herself. Detective
16:58
Speaker 1: Garner executed the arrest warrant on the morning of May
17:01
Speaker 1: twenty ninth, two thousand nineteen, at the north Gate System's
17:05
Speaker 1: regional office in Dellard. White was led out of the
17:08
Speaker 1: building where he had held a service contract with the
17:11
Speaker 1: same hospital that employed Shannon Weaver. He did not resist.
17:16
Speaker 1: Within forty eight hours, he co operated strategically in Cooper's assessment,
17:21
Speaker 1: co operated in the way a person co operates when
17:25
Speaker 1: they are calculating what co operation is worth. He identified
17:28
Speaker 1: a locked bin inside Unit forty four. Officers opened it
17:32
Speaker 1: and found three things, printed copies of Shannon's account credentials,
17:37
Speaker 1: a Berner phone partially configured to route calls and messages
17:40
Speaker 1: through her number, and a zipper pouch containing a single
17:43
Speaker 1: cream colored flat size seven. It matched the shoe Wayne
17:49
Speaker 1: Andrews had found on the bare concrete floor of that
17:52
Speaker 1: unit in April. The pair was confirmed as Shannon's. She
17:56
Speaker 1: had owned them before the manipulation period began. She had
18:00
Speaker 1: assumed at some point that she had lost one. She
18:04
Speaker 1: had not lost it. It had been taken. In January
18:07
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Terry White pleaded guilty to two counts of
18:11
Speaker 1: identity fraud and one count of financial exploitation of an adult.
18:16
Speaker 1: He was sentenced to four years, with parole eligibility at
18:19
Speaker 1: thirty months. A civil judgment ordered restitution of more than
18:24
Speaker 1: nineteen thousand dollars to Shannon Weaver. The court also reopened
18:28
Speaker 1: the civil proceeding connected to Joyce Pellham's case from two
18:32
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. A second restitution judgment was issued. The non
18:37
Speaker 1: disclosure agreement Pellam had signed. The document that had kept
18:40
Speaker 1: her silent for four years, was voided she could speak.
18:45
Speaker 1: The record confirms she had not spoken about White in
18:48
Speaker 1: all that time, not because she had nothing to say,
18:52
Speaker 1: but because a piece of paper had told her she
18:54
Speaker 1: could not. There is something in that detail worth sitting with.
18:58
Speaker 1: Joyce Pellham had already been through this. She had gone
19:01
Speaker 1: to court, she had reached a settlement, and the terms
19:05
Speaker 1: of that settlement had ensured that the next person Terry
19:07
Speaker 1: White found Shannon Weaver forty eight billing coordinator, woman who
19:13
Speaker 1: brought banana bread and kept a color coded calendar and
19:17
Speaker 1: visited her friend every Tuesday for four years, would have
19:20
Speaker 1: no warning at all. The charges against White included unlawful
19:25
Speaker 1: use of electronic communications that covered the fabricated texts. The
19:30
Speaker 1: messages sent from Shannon's number while her badge placed her
19:33
Speaker 1: inside the hospital. The message that told Donna Faber that
19:37
Speaker 1: Shannon needed space. The message that used words, according to Patricia,
19:42
Speaker 1: that Shannon had never once used in thirty years of
19:44
Speaker 1: knowing her. Shannon resumed Tuesday visits with Donna in June
19:48
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. They ordered thy food, They did not discuss White.
19:53
Speaker 1: Shannon stayed until nearly ten at night. That detail is
19:57
Speaker 1: not a footnote. It is the outcome Cooper's court document,
20:02
Speaker 1: The one that described what White had done as memory substitution,
20:06
Speaker 1: was entered into Adult Protective Services training materials after the
20:09
Speaker 1: case closed. The finding sighted most often was this. The
20:14
Speaker 1: most consistent feature in cases of this type is not
20:17
Speaker 1: the financial mechanism. It is the moment when the target's
20:21
Speaker 1: testimony becomes, in good faith indistinguishable from the manipulator's version
20:25
Speaker 1: of events. Shannon Weaver had not been deceived about the
20:29
Speaker 1: facts of her life. She had been given a different
20:31
Speaker 1: account of herself, of her choices, of what she had
20:35
Speaker 1: wanted and when and why. And because White had offered
20:40
Speaker 1: that account with warmth, with patience, with apparent concern, because
20:44
Speaker 1: he had told her she had chosen everything, Shannon had
20:48
Speaker 1: over time accepted it. That is what makes this case
20:51
Speaker 1: difficult to look at directly. It is not the money,
20:55
Speaker 1: It is not even the isolation. It is the question
20:59
Speaker 1: of what it means means for a person's memory of
21:01
Speaker 1: their own decisions to be replaced from the outside, slowly,
21:05
Speaker 1: without force, without a single moment of obvious coercion, and then,
21:10
Speaker 1: when the replacement is complete, for that person to sincerely
21:14
Speaker 1: confirm the manipulator's version of events because it has become
21:19
Speaker 1: their version of events. Shannon Weaver spent nearly three years
21:23
Speaker 1: inside a reality that Terry White had constructed for her.
21:26
Speaker 1: She did not know she was inside it. That is
21:29
Speaker 1: the point, That was always the point. What remained after
21:33
Speaker 1: the arrest, after the plea, after the restitution order was
21:38
Speaker 1: the slower work. Shannon had a sistern. She had Donna.
21:42
Speaker 1: She had eleven years of institutional memory at a hospital
21:46
Speaker 1: that had not known what was happening inside its own
21:49
Speaker 1: administrative access bogs. She had Tuesday evenings and Thaie food,
21:54
Speaker 1: and the knowledge that the shoe she had thought she
21:57
Speaker 1: lost had been in a storage unit she had never visited.
22:00
Speaker 1: And she had eventually her own account of herself again.
22:04
Speaker 1: That account belongs to her, It always did. He just
22:08
Speaker 1: made her forget it for a while. This show is
22:11
Speaker 1: made by Obo Media