Latest / Dark Psychology Manipulation / of trotline; laces white at centers, double-looped bow, right-handed knot; leather stiff, not decomposing

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of trotline; laces white at centers, double-looped bow, right-handed knot; leather stiff, not decomposing · Dark Psychology Manipulation

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of February ninth, twenty nineteen, Darlene Pruitt
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: was running her trot line along the east bank of
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Sutter Fork when she found a shoe, not near the shore,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: not on the bank, on the sixth hook, suspended in
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: the current, as if something had placed it there with
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: deliberate care. The laces were still white at the centers,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: double looped a right handed bow. The leather was stiff,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: not rotting, not the leather of something that had been
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: underwater for weeks. It was a size ten new balance
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: orthopedic shoe, right foot only, and nobody knew where the
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: man who wore it had gone. There is something precise
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: about that image that resists easy explanation. A fishing hook
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: does not accidentally catch a tide shoe, and a shoe
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: that clean does not fall from a man in a river.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Within four days, investigators would find Ralph Sullivan alive, ninety
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: miles from his home in a memory care facility. He
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: had no medical reason to be in wearing the left
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: shoe of that same pair. The right shoe, the one
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: on the trot line, had been purchased online two months earlier,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: using Ralph's own credit card. Shipped to someone else's address.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: What happened to Ralph Sullivan between September twenty seventeen and
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: February twenty nineteen is not a mystery in the way
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: unsolved cases are mysteries. It is a different kind of puzzle.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: One man's life systematically disassembled by another, piece by piece
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: over sixteen months. Ralph Sullivan was sixty one years old
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: and had spent decades doing the kind of work most
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: people never think about. He was a retired civil engineering technician.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: He had measured grades, checked drainage specks, signed off on
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: the invisible infrastructure that keeps roads from flooding and bridges
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: from shifting. Precise work, methodical work.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: The work of someone who noticed when things were not alone.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: He lived alone in a modest house on Creekside Terrace
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: in Elmore, Indiana. His wife had died some years earlier.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: His daughter, Nora had moved to Columbus, Ohio. His son
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Brett lived in Carver. Ralph's life had contracted in the
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: way that lives due after loss. Quieter, more routine, but
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: not empty. Every Thursday, Ralph volunteered at the Elmore food Pantry.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: He had done it for four years without missing a shift.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Joyce Abernethy, who coordinated the pantry, would later describe Ralph
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: the way people described someone they genuinely admired, reliable, warm,
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: always on time, the kind of person who remembered the
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: names of the families that came through the line. In
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, Ralph was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. His neurologist
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: placed him on a monitoring protocol, routine check ins, medication adjustments,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: watchful waiting. The diagnosis was real. The disease was real,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: but at the level it had reached by twenty seventeen,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: it was not preventing Ralph from managing his own affairs.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: He was not confused, He was not incapacitated. He was
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: a man who had received a difficult diagnosis and was
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: living with it carefully, as he had lived with everything else.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: He also had money, not a fortune, but enough to matter.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: A pension that auto deposited monthly, a checking account at
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Pelham Federal Credit Union, and a brokerage account holding approximately
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: two hundred forty thousand dollars, money he had saved over
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: a working life, meant for his old age. In late
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: September twenty seventeen, Ralph's truck broke down on State Route fourteen.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: The belt had gone. He was on the side of
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: the road in Pelham County waiting a man hold over.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: He introduced himself as Curtis Christensen.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: He said he ran a handyman Sirvis called Handy Pro Services.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: There was a magnetic sign on the side of his
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: white van. Curtis could not fix the belt on the spot.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: He did not have the pauper, but he drove Ralph
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: to a heart store and back waited while Ralph sorted
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: out the repair and made sure.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: The man got home. It was the kind of thing
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: the decent person does.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: By January of twenty eighteen, Curtis was visiting Ralph once
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: or twice a week, coffeed herons small repairs around the house.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: He positioned himself not as a hired hand, but as
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: something closer to a friend, someone who showed up because
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: he wanted to, not because he was paid too. Ralph's
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: world had grown smaller since his wife died, smaller still
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: since the diagnosis, and here was someone attentive, useful, easy
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: to talk to, someone who treated him as capable and competent,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: even while quietly, steadily making him self necessary. What Curtis
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: was actually doing, as investigators would later reconstruct, it, was
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: studying Ralph, learning what Ralph feared, learning what Ralph valued,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: and building a version of himself that fit perfectly into
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: the space those fears and values had created. The manipulation
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: did not announce itself. It never does. The first thing
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Curtis moved.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Was the mail.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: October of twenty eighteen, Ralph Sullivan signed a form he
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: thought was.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: For automatic bill pay.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: The language was close enough to what he expected, the
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: form was not what he thought. Within days, Ralph's bank
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: statements stopped riving at Creekside Terrace. They started arriving at
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: a post office box registered to Curtis Christensen. Ralph never noticed,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: he had no reason to look. That single redirect was
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the hinge. Everything that followed turned on it. By then,
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Curtis had been inside Ralph's life thirteen months, long enough
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: to know the account numbers, long enough to know the balances,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: long enough to know that Ralph's pension auto deposited monthly
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: into the checking account of Pelham Federal Credit Union, and
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: that a brokerage account holding approximately two hundred forty thousand
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: dollars sat largely untouched. The withdrawals started the same month
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: the mail moved. They were structured carefully, each one below
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: the federal threshold the trigger's automatic reporting. Investigators would later
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: count them up. Between October of twenty eighteen and January
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, thirty one thousand dollars left Ralph's checking account.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: The brokerage account, the.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Larger prize was never touched. Curtis had not yet found
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: a mechanism clean enough to move that money without leaving.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: A clear trail back to himself.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: He was patient, and he was building towards something bigger.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: In November, Ralph's truck disc appeared, not stolen, sold. Curtis
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: had told Ralph the transmission was failing, that repairs would
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: cost more than the vehicle was worth. A buyer named
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Moorefield paid six thousand, two hundred dollars for the Chevy.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: Moorefield later told investigators he had never met Ralph Sullivan.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: The man who handled the sale told Moorefield.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: He was Ralph's son.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Ralph had lost his last independent way out of Elmore.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Then came December, and December's where the images start to compound.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Joyce Abernathy ran the Elmore Food pantry, where Ralph had
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: volunteered for four years without missing a shift. In early
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: December of twenty eighteen, Curtis walked in without Ralph. He
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: introduced himself as Ralph's caregiver. He told Joyce that Ralph's
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Parkinson's had worsened significantly, that Ralph was struggling, that he
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: needed more support than he had been forgetting. Joyce had
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: no reason to doubt Ralph had seen a little slower lately.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: What Joyce did not know, what no one outside the
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: medical record would know for weeks, was that Ralph's neurologist
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: had not changed his assessment.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Ralph was still.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: At monitoring stage, not residential care stage, not incapable of managing.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: His own affairs.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The clinical picture Curtis described to Joyce did not match
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: the clinical picture in the fire. Curtis was not recording
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Ralph's condition, he was constructing it. The same month, December
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, Curtis placed two online orders using Ralph's
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: credit card. Two pairs of orthopedic new balanced shoes size
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: ten Ralph's size, shipped not to Creekside Terrace, but to
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Curtis's own address at the time. No one flagged it.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: It was just shoes.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: Hold that image.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: January eighteenth, twenty nineteen, the power of Attorney document was
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: filed in Vance City, a city roughly ninety miles from Elmore.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: The notary was Peggy Harmon, who worked out of a
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: mailbox store. Peggy attested that a man appeared before her
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: with a valid Indiana driver's license.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: And signed the document. The POA granted Curtis Christensen broad authority.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: O were Ralph Sullivan's affairs. Ralph Sullivan's phone on January
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: eighteenth never left Elmore. Cell tower data would later place
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the device in the same cluster of towers it had
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: always used, the towers that covered Creekside Terrace and the
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: roads Ralph walked. His phone did not travel to Van City.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: It could not have been in two places at once.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Someone used Ralph's license in that mailbox store, someone signed
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: his name, and within days of that filing, Ralph Sullivan
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: was admitted to a memory care facility in Van City.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Under the authority of the document Curtis of just obtained.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Ralph was ninety miles from home, he had no car.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: No one at the facility had contacted his daughter, His
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: neurologist or his church. He was for all practical purposes gone.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: February ninth, two thousand nineteen, Darlene Pruett ran her trot
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: line on the east bank of Sutter Fork before dawn.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: The sixth hook held something that did not belong there.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: A single right foot shoe, size ten, New Balance Orthopedic.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: The laces were tied in a double looped bow, right handed.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Not the centers of the laces were still white. That
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: detail stopped investigator's cold leather submerged for weeks, discolors, it softens,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: then it begins to break down. The fiber in lace
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: corps absorbs water and darkens. Within days, the shoe was stiff,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: the lace centers were white. Whatever had put it in
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the river, it had not been there long. But there
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: was something else, something that only became visible once investigators
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: ran the purchase history on Ralph's credcon December of two
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, two pairs of New Balance Orthopedic shoes size
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: ten ship to Curtis christians AND's address, one pair two shoes,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: a left and a right. The shoe on the trot
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: line was the right shoe of a pair purchased with
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Ralph's card delivered to Curtis's door two months before anyone
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: reported Ralph missing. The left shoe of the same pair
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: was found on Ralph's foot when deputies located him in
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Advance City Memory Care Facility in February thirteenth. There was
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: a reason Curtis had fought that second pair online rather
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: than at a store. A store visit leaves a face.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: An online order shipped to your own address leaves a package.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: And packages can be opened, and shoes can be separated,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: and a right shoe can end up in a river,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: and a left shoe can end up on the foot
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: of a man ninety miles away, and the gap between
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: them can look to the right observer at the right moment,
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: like a body that the current took. The week Darlene
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: found that shoe, Nora Whitfield had not spoken to her
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: father in three weeks. She called the Pelham County Sheriff's
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: office on February eleventh, eleven. Deputies arrived at the Vance
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: City facility two days later.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Ralph was alive. He was confused about why he was there.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: His actual neurologist, contacted that same week, confirmed what the
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: medical file had always said Parkinson's at monitoring stage, not
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: residential care stage. Ralph Sullivan had not been and was
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: not incapable of managing his own affairs. The shoe was
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: in the river, the man it was meant to represent
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: was sitting in a memory care room ninety miles from home,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: wearing the other One picture the trot line at dawn.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: A woman reaches for the sixth hook and finds a
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: shoe instead.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Of a catch.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: She does not know yet that she has just ended something.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: The simplest version of events goes like this. Ralph, confused
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: and declining, wandered to the river.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: He lost a shoe.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: He was found later, disoriented in a facility where he genuinely.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: Needed to be.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Curtis was a caregiver who overstepped his authority, but was
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: responding to a real crisis. The shoe is coincidence, The
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: POA is over zealous. The withdrawals are reimbursement for services rendered.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: That version holds together for about thirty seconds. Then you
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: look at the purchase date on the shoes. Curtis ordered
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: both pears in December of two thousand, eighteen, six weeks
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: before the p OA was five, eight weeks before the
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: shoe appeared on the trout line. He had them shipped
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: to his own address, not Ralph's his. There is no
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: innocent explanation for why a caregiver orders his client's shoes
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: and has them delivered to himself, And there is especially
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: no innocent explanation for why one shoe hands up in
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: a river and the other ends up on the foot
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: of a man locked in a memory care facility under
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: a fraudulent power of attorney. Roger Dempsey, the elder law
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: investigator who reconstructed the sequence for the prosecutor, described the
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: shoe as probable staging. He was careful with that word probable.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: The evidence is powerful, the intent is not directly provable.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: No witness saw Curtis at Sutterfork. No finger prints were
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: recovered from the shoe in conditions that would survive river water.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: What the record shows is opportunity, motive, and a purchase
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: that has no legitimate explanation walk the other scenario. Curtis
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: built this over sixteen months. He redirected the mail, he
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: sold the truck. He narrated a medical decline that Ralph's
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: own neurologist did not recognize. He used Ralph's identity at
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: an obscure notary ninety miles away on a day Ralph's
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: phone never left only he was at the time of
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: his arrest the possession of a partially completed transfer authorization
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: form made out to an LC registered in his girlfriend's
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: maiden name that pointed directly at Ralph's brokerage account, the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: two hundred forty thousand.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Dollars he had not yet touched.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: The shoe fits that second version with the precision that
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: coincidence cannot reach. Shirley Baxter, sixty seven from Owensville, saw
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Curtis's name in a news brief in April of two
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. She called the prosecutor's office. In twenty fourteen,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: a man had offered her roadside help. He had positioned
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: himself as a caregiverer. He had initiated a male redirection.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: He had begun moving toward an estate sale and a
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: memory care placement before Shirley's son intervened. She had never
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: filed a report. Curtis had done this before, and he
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: had learned from it. The jury heard all over the shoes,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: the phone tower data, the notary, the withdrawal pattern, the
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: transfer form, the second victim who almost wasn't. They deliberated
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: for six hours on the Friday of trial week before
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: they returned, Curtis's attorney told the court that his client.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: Wished to address the judge.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Curtis said he had made mistakes.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: He did not say which ones.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: He did not say what he had done to Ralph Sullivan,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: or to Shirley Baxter, or to anyone else. The jury
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: convicted on all counts eleven years. Ralph Sullivan was found
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: on February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, in a memory care facility
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: in Van City, ninety miles from his home in Elmore.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: He was wearing the left shoe of the pair. The
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: right one had been hanging on Darlene Pruitt's sixth hook
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: in Sutterfork for four days. His actual neurologist reviewed his
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: condition after deputies made contact. The finding was unambiguous. Ralph
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Parkinson's was at monitoring stage. He was not and had
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: not been, incapable of managing his own affairs. The placement
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: had no medical basis, it had a financial one. Roger Dempsey,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: the elder law investigator who reconstructed the sequence for the prosecutor,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: estimated that Curtis Christiansen was six to eight weeks from
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: completing the transfer, the brokerage account two hundred forty thousand
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: dollars had not been touched. Curtis had not yet found
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: a clean mechanism. The partially completed transfer authorization form found
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: in his impounded van showed the destination and LLC registered
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: in his girlfriend's maiden name.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: That was the end point.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Ralph would have been declared incompetent, isolated, and effectively erased,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: while his savings moved through a shell company to someone
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: who had spent sixteen months pretending to be his friend.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Curtis was arrested February nineteenth, two thousand nineteen. He was
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: charged with financial exploitation of an endangered adult elder, abuse,
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: identity fraud, and theft. He denied everything. He denied it
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: for nine months. The trial came in November of two
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. The forensic accountant testified on Thursday.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: The foam tower data was entered into evidence. The notary from.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: The mailbox store in Van City described the man she
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: had witnessed signed the power of Attorney Shirley Baxter's account
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: of twenty fourteen, the roadside Help, the CARECI reposition, the
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: mere placement that her son interrupted was part of the record.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: On Friday morning, before the jury returned, Curtis's attorney told
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: the court his client wished to speak. Curtis said he
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: had made mistakes. He did not name them. He did
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: not describe what he had done to Ralph. He did
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: not acknowledge Shirley Baxter. He offered no accounting of the
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: thirty one thousand dollars moved and structured withdrawls, or the
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: shoe purchased with Ralph's card and delivered to Curtis's address,
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: or the identity used at a notary ninety miles away
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: on a day the phone data proved Ralph never left
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Elmore six hours of deliberation.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: Guilty on all counts, eleven years.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: There is something in this case that resists easy categorization,
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: and it is worth sitting with before moving on.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: Curtis Christensen did.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Not break into Ralph Sullivan's house.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: He did not threaten him.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: He brought him coffee, He drove him to appointments. He
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: showed up when the truck broke down on State Road fourteen.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: For more than a year, Ralph believed he had found
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: someone who genuinely cared whether he was doing well. That
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: trust earned patiently systematically was the instrument. The manipulation did
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: not happen despite the relationship.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: It happened through it.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Roger Dempsey's reconstruction documented each step the favors that built Depey.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: The medical narrative seated weeks before any medical record could
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: contradict it. The mail redirected so Ralph could not see
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: his own accounts draining, the truck removed so Ralph could
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: not travel without permission. The identity used at an obscure
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: notary in a city Ralph had not visited. Dempsey called
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: the shoe placement probable but unprovable. What is provable is
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: that Curtis bought two pairs of Ralph's orthopedic shoes in
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: December of twenty eighteen, using Ralph's card delivered to Curtis's address.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: One pair was found in the van.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: One shoe appeared on a trotline hook in early February.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: The right shoe, the one that would make a.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Daughter call a sheriff and a sheriff's deputy start asking
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: questions before the brokerage account could be touched.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: The thing about a case like.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: This is what it says about ordinary life.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: Ralph Sullivan was not naive.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: He was a retired civil engineering technician who had spent
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: four years volunteering at a food pantry.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: Because he believed in being useful to me.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: He had a daughter who called every week, He had
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: a community that noticed his absence, and still sixteen months
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: passed between the day Curtis stopped on State Road fourteen
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: and the day deputies found Ralph in a facility ninety
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: miles from home wearing one shoe. Shirley Baxter was luckier.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Her son intervened in twenty fourteen, but she never filed
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: a report, and so Curtis learned what had almost worked
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: and refined it and tried again five years later with
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: a man who lived alone. Ralph Sullivan moved to Columbus,
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Ohio in the spring of twenty twenty. He lives two
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: streets from his daughter, Nora. On Thursdays, he volunteers one
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: shift at a food pantry. He has not stopped that detail.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: A sixty one year old man back at a pantry
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: table on a Thursday, handing things to people who need
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: them is the part of this story that matters most.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Curtis Christensen spent sixteen months trying to reduce Ralph Sullivan.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: To an asset. He did not succeed.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: The asset had a daughter who called every week. The
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: asset had a shoe on a hook that didn't look
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: right to a woman pulling a trot line in February cold.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: The asset was still himself. Curtis's eleven year sentence does
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: not restore the thirty one thousand dollars or the year
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: Ralph lost inside a facility.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: He did not need.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: It does not reach the others who were never recorded.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: What it does is name what happened. This show is
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: made by Obomedia.