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How He Erased Her: The Planner That Proved a Quiet Monster · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At four fifty in the morning on April ninth, twenty nineteen,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: a County Road Greater operator named Aaron Ericson spotted something
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: in the ditch along Alderton Road. It was a burgundy
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: leather day planner with a brass snap and a pen
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: still looped through the road side. The name inside was
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Marilyn Weaver. She had been missing for five days. What
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: made that planner remarkable was not where it was found,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: It was what was written inside it. Fourteen months of
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: a woman's handwriting recording the slow, careful dismantling of her
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: own confidence, and the person doing the dismantling was someone
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: she trusted completely. This is the story of how Warren
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Roberts took a part Marilyn Weaver's sense of reality, piece
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: by piece over the course of eighteen months. Not with threats,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: not with violence, with something quieter and in some ways
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: harder to prove. People who knew Marilyn Weaver used a
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: specific word to describe her. Not organized, though she was
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: not reliable, though she was that too. The word they
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: kept landing on was steady. Her aunt Sandra put it
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: simply steady, not boring. Steady. Sandra Weaver, sixty one, a
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: retired county clerk, hosted Thursday dinners at her house on
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Grangers Street every week at six fifteen in the evening.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Marilyn had not missed one in three years, not for weather,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: not for illness, not for anything. She showed up, she
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: brought something, She stayed until the dishes were done. Marilyn
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: was twenty eight years old and worked as a bookkeeper
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: at Renner Fabrication in Milhaven. She lived in a ground
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: floor apartment at birch Terrace with a cat named Pockets.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: On the first Sunday of every month, she called her
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: mother in Duluth. These were not occasional habits. They were
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: the architecture of her life, and she had built them deliberately.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Coworkers at Renner Fabrication described someone who was precise and
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: calm under pressure. Bryan Selzer, who worked alongside her, and
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: said she caught errors that other people had already signed
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: off on. Dale Shott, who owned the company, said she
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: was the kind of employee who build systems around. She
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: had plans, not dramatic ones, but real ones. She had
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: been saving money consistently methodically since her mid twenties. She
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: was the kind of person who kept a day planner,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: not because she had to, but because she genuinely believed
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: in keeping track of things. The planner she carried was
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: burgundy leather with a brass snap and a pen loop
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: on the side. She started a new volume in February
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen. Warren Roberts arrived at Renner Fabrication in
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: August of twenty seventeen, contracted as an outside it consultant.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: He was thirty six, divorced, and by most accounts, composed
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: and attentive. He and Marylyn began dating in October of
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: that year. Roberts told Marilyn she was the most genuinely
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: rigorous person he had encountered in years. He said it
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: once early on, and it landed. For someone who had
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: spent her adult life being quietly competent and quietly overlooked,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Being seen that clearly by someone that articulate felt significant.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: It felt like being understood what no one around Marylynd
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: could see. Yet what she herself could not see was
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: that Roberts had already begun reading her. He knew what
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: she valued, he knew what she feared losing, and he
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: knew with considerable precision, how to use both something in
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: that planner was about to make all of it visible,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: but first another Thursday dinner would have to go missing.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: The first Thursday dinner Marylyn canceled was in September of
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. She called Sandra forty minutes before six p fifteen.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Roberts had phoned her around three that afternoon. She said
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: something had come up. Sandra noted it. She was a
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: retired county clerk, noting things was reflex The second cancelation
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: came six weeks later, same pattern. Roberts called around three.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Marylyn called Sandra around four thirty. The third cancelation arrived
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: before December. Sandra had started writing the Times down three
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: missed dinners in roughly three months, after three unbroken years.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: That was the first image that did not fit, but
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: the planner fit everything else. The planner, which Marilyn had
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: been filling since February of twenty eighteen, recorded something the
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: canceled calls could not. The architecture of how a person
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: begins to doubt their own memory, not all at once,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: one small entry at a time. On the first correction
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: appeared in late March of twenty eighteen. A single line
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: w says I agreed to cancel Thursday. I thought I hadn't.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe I had. That sentence is not a confession of wrongdoing.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: It is a person trying to reconcile two versions of
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: a conversation. The grammar alone is careful. I thought I
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: hadn't present tense doubt applied to a past event she
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: had been certain about. Two entries later, after what appeared
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: to be a similar disagreement, he's probably right, And then
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: a few weeks after that, I need to be more careful.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Read in sequence. The planner is a document of a
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: woman rewriting herself. Each entry is small, the cumulative weight
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: is not. Howard Lewis, the clinical psychologist who later consulted
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: with Victim Services on this case, reviewed the planner in full.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: His observation recorded in his consultation report was precise. The
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: entries show a consistent pattern in which Marilyn was not
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: correcting her behavior. She was correcting her perception of events
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: she had already experienced. There is a distinction there that
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: matters enormously. Roberts was not telling her she had done
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: something wrong. He was telling her she had remembered something wrong,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: and she being the kind of person who believed in
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: rigorous record keeping, responded the way she always had. She
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: made a note she tried to do better. By September
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen, Roberts had moved the relationship into
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: new financial territory, a joint checking account. The application was
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: filled out in the conference room at Renner Fabrication, Marilyn's
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: own work place in her own building, on a lunch break.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Two months later, in November, eleven thousand dollars moved from
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Marilyn's personal savings account to that joint count. She made
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: the transfer in person. Roberts was not present. Eleven thousand
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: dollars saved methodically since her mid twenties, transferred on a
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Tuesday afternoon, without visible coercion, because by that point the
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: coercion had already been completed. Also, by October of twenty eighteen,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Marylyn had given up her apartment at birch Terrace and
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: moved in with Roberts. Her cat pockets came with her.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: What did not come with her her car's current registration
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: and its insurance both had lapsed. Roberts had over the
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: preceding six months allowed the renewal deadlines to pass without mention.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: There is no direct quote from any transcript in which
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: he instructed Maryland not to renew them. The outcome was
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: that she could not legally drive her own car. She was,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: in practical terms, in a residence that was his, with
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: transportation that was his, and money in an account he controlled.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: In January of twenty nineteen, Roberts told Marilyn's friend Tina
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Vass something specific. He said Marilyn was in therapy. He
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: said she sometimes misremembered conversations, that it was something her
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: therapist was helping her work through. There is no evidence
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Marilyn was ever in therapy. The claim does not appear
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: in her planner, her financial records, or any medical documentation.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Roberts said it to Tina Vass once in passing as
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: a kind of parenthetical. Tina filed it away as concern.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: That is what made it effective. It was not a
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: dramatic accusation. It was a seed planted in a friend's mind,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: a quiet mechanism that if Marilyn ever said something alarming,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: would cause Tina to hesitate before acting on it. Detective
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Nora Finch, reviewing the case after Marilyn was found, identified
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: January two, thy nineteen as a turning point in Robert's strategy.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: The financial extraction had been completed in November. The ice
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: was largely in place. What remained was managing the perimeter
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the people who might eventually ask questions. The planner entries
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: stopped in March of two thousand. Nineteen April fourth arrived
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: without explanation in the record. What is documented is this,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: sometime that day, Marilyn opened a filing cabinet in Robert's home.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: She found a folder. Inside the folder were printed text
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: messages between Roberts and a woman named Pam Greer, his
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: former girlfriend. The messages detailed, in plain transactional language, the
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: plan transfer Maryland's savings, isolate her from her support network
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: and extricate Roberts once the financial transfer was complete. There
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: was a time line in those messages, a budget, specific
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: references to the joint account. Marilyn did not call Sandra.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: She did not call Detective Finch. She had no reason
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: yet to know Finch's name. What she did was take
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Roberts's truck, the vehicle she was legally able to drive,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: and she left Millhaven that night. She drove eighty miles
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: northeast to a town called Breck ferry and checked into
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: a motel. She left the planner somewhere along Alderton Road.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Whether it fell, whether she set it down, whether she
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: left it deliberately, that is not document What is documented
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: is what happened five days later. At four fifty in
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: the morning on April ninth, a county road grader operator
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: named Aaron Erickson was clearing the shoulder of Alderton Road.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: The plow blade caught something in the ditch. Ericsson stopped.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: She found a burgundy leather day planner with a brass
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: snap and a pen loop on the side. Maryland's name
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: was written inside the front cover picture. Roberts on the
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: morning of April sixth, Maryland has been gone for two days.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: He knows where the truck was heading, or he knows
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: what it represents. What he does is file a stolen
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: vehicle report. The truck, he tells the Sheriff's department, was
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: taken without his knowledge. That report created a version of
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: events in which Marilyn was not a woman who had
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: discovered something and driven away. She was, in that version,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: a person of interest in a theft. It was the
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: same logic as the therapy claim, not a dramatic lie.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: A structural one, a frame that, if accepted, would reinterpret
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: every subsequent fact. Walk it forward. If the truck is stolen,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Marilyn is the one with something to explain. Any account
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: she gives about the folder, about the messages, about the
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: timeline she found arrives precontaminated. She is the one who
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: took something that was not hers. She is the one
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: who disappeared without explanation. Roberts had done this before, not
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the same way, not the same victim, but the architecture
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: was familiar. In twenty thirteen, a woman named Claudia Feris
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: in Brenwick County had lost approximately nineteen thousand dollars through
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: a scheme that investigators later classified as identity theft. That
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: case had gone cold. There was no direct link at
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: the time between Warren Roberts and Brenwick County. What Roberts
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: had not accounted for was the consultation report. Howard Lewis,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: after working with Marylynd through Victim Services in the months
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: following her recovery, wrote a detailed clinical document. His report
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: was not an accusation. It was a forensic account of
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: the psychological pattern he had observed. It noted specific behavioral
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: signatures the financial sequencing, the perception correction loop, the preemptive
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: reframing of the victim's credibility. Those signatures were precise enough that,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: four months after Roberts's guilty plea, a forensic review was triggered.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Roberts had once left a coffee cup at a Brenwick
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: County attorney office. The DNA on that cup matched evidence
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: from Claudia Ferris's case. He agreed to an additional consecutive term.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: No second trial was required. Now consider what the folder
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: actually was. Roberts kept it in a filing cabinet, printed
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: organized dated Pam Greer. His former girlfriend had been through
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: something similar four years earlier. She had not reported it. Instead,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: at some point that is not precisely documented, she had
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: become a collaborator. The folder recorded their coordination, the financial plan,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the isolation sequence, the exit strategy. A man meticulous enough
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: to gaslight someone through a day planner had left a
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: paper archive of his method in a drawer she could open.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: That is the detail that does not fit the rest
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: of his precision. Every other element of what Roberts did
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: was calibrated, incremental, invisible. The folder was none of those things.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: It was complete. It was dated, and it was accessible.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: The evidence does not resolve why Roberts kept it. What
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: it does confirm is that Marilyn found it, and that
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: finding it, not the investigation, not the missing person report,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: not Detective Finch, was what broke the frame he had
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: built around her. She left, She drove eighty miles in
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: a truck she knew how to handle. She checked into
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: a motel, and she stayed there. That was not a
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: woman who had been broken beyond recovery. That was a
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: woman who, the moment she had evidence she could trust
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: more than her own corrected memory, acted on it without hesitation.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Detective Finch located Marilyn Weaver on April eleventh, twenty nineteen,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: at a motel in breck Ferry, eighty miles northeast of Milhaven.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Marilyn had been there for seven days. She was alive,
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: she was coherent, and she had left voluntarily. Roberts reported
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the truck stolen on April sixth. By then, Marilyn had
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: already been at the motel for two days. The theft
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: report was one more document designed to reframe the story,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: this time to make her disappearance look like his victimization.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: It did not hold Roberts was arrested on April fourteenth
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: at a different motel in a different direction, entirely from
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: breck Ferry. He had not gone looking for her. In
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: August twenty nineteen, Roberts entered a guilty plea theft by
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: deception and coercive control, the latter charged under a statute
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: that had only recently been codified. He was sentenced to
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: six years. Pam Greer cooperated with investigators and received a
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: suspended sentence in exchange for her testimony. The folder, the messages,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: and the financial records were all entered into evidence. Howard Lewis,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: the clinical psychologist who had consulted with Victim Services, completed
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: his final consultation note in November two thousand nineteen. That
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: document was not simply a clinical summer. It identified behavioral
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: signatures in Roberts's method, the financial sequencing, the perception correction loop,
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: the preemptive discrediting of Maryland's memory. Lewis's report was precise
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: enough that it triggered a forensic review of prior cases
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: carrying similar patterns. That review reached back to twenty thirteen.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Roberts had once visited an attorney's office in Brenwick County.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: He left a coffee cup behind. The DNA recovered from
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: that cup matched evidence tied to Claudia Ferris, a woman
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: who had lost approximately nineteen thousand dollars to an identity
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: theft scheme that investigators had never solved. Ferris had not
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: known Roberts's name, she had not known his face. She
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: had only known the damage. Roberts agreed to an additional
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: consecutive term. No second trial was required. What Lewis's report
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: made visible was not just the harm done to Marilyn Weaver.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: It was the infrastructure of the harm. The specific sequence
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: that Roberts had used more than once, refined across years,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: applied to at least two women before Maryland, and likely
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: tested before that. The folder in the filing cabinet was
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: not the record of one manipulation. It was the latest
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: version of a method. By spring twenty twenty, Marilyn Weaver
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: was working as a bookkeeper at a regional agricultural co
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: op outside Milhaven. She had returned to the city Thursday.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Dinners with Sandra had resumed at the house on Granger
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Street six point fifteen sharp. The routine unbroken in the
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: way that matters not because it had never been interrupted,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: but because it had survived the interruption. The Planner burgundy
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: leather brass snap penloop was entered into evidence and remained
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: part of the court record. Fourteen months of entries in
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Maryland's handwriting. Fourteen months of a woman recording in real
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: time the process of being convinced she could not try herself.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: The entries were not dramatic, that was exactly the point.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: The self corrections were small, they were polite, They were hers.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: There is something in this case that resists easy resolution,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: and it is not the legal outcome. Roberts pleaded guilty.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Pam Greer cooperated. The statute held. Claudia Feris received an acknowledgment.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: She had waited six years for Those are facts and
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: they are not nothing. What resists resolution is simpler and
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: harder than any of that. Marilyn Weaver kept meticulous records
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: of her own life. She was, by every account, a
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: rigorous person, someone who tracked what she owed, what she planned,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: what she remembered. Roberts identified that precision and used it
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: as the mechanism of the attack. He did not overcome
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: her careful habits. He rerouted them. He made her careful
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: habits work against her, so that her own handwriting became
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: the evidence that she was confused. She found the full
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: and she left. That is the line where the story turns.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Not a rescue, not an investigation. A woman who, given
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: one piece of information she had not been given access
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: to revise, made an immediate decision and drove eighty miles
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: into the dark. The Planner is still the Planner. The
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: entries still say what they say. But the last thing
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Marilyn Weaver wrote in it was a March date that
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: belongs to two thousand nineteen. Before she knew what was
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: in the drawer, before she had any reason to trust
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: her own version of events above his, she kept writing anyway.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Every week, in her own hand, she kept writing. That
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: is not a small thing. That is the record that
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: outlasted him. This show is made by Obo Media.