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The Neighbor Who Knew His Every Habit - How He Vanished $214K · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

0:03
Speaker 1: The folder was dry.
0:05
Speaker 2: That was the first thing Amanda Long noticed when she
0:08
Speaker 2: pulled it from beneath the observation ledge at Teller Marsh
0:12
Speaker 2: on a Tuesday morning in the third week of May
0:14
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen. Two inches of rain had fallen in the
0:18
Speaker 2: days prior. The ground under her boots was soft enough
0:22
Speaker 2: to hold a print, but the folder was dry, sealed
0:25
Speaker 2: along three edges with surgical tape and labeled on the
0:28
Speaker 2: front in block handwriting, Glen keep this safe. Amanda was
0:33
Speaker 2: a retired postal worker. She built her bird watching blind
0:37
Speaker 2: at Teller Marsh herself, plank by plank over a long winter.
0:41
Speaker 1: She knew exactly what.
0:42
Speaker 2: Had been under that ledge the week before.
0:45
Speaker 1: Nothing.
0:46
Speaker 2: She called Dunmore Police Department at six fourteen in the morning.
0:50
Speaker 2: What investigators would eventually find inside that folder was not
0:54
Speaker 2: a ransom note, not a weapon, not evidence of a
0:57
Speaker 2: crime anyone had thought to look for. It was a
1:00
Speaker 2: paper record of something far harder to name. Bank's statements,
1:04
Speaker 2: a handwritten log of dates and dollar amounts, a list
1:08
Speaker 2: of questions in careful, uncertain cursive, and a single diner
1:12
Speaker 2: receipt with seven words written on the back, you are
1:16
Speaker 2: not wrong about this The man who wrote those words
1:19
Speaker 2: was thirty eight years old. His name was Glenn Parker.
1:23
Speaker 2: He was not missing, He had not been physically harmed.
1:27
Speaker 2: He had driven to Tellermarsh the week before, told the
1:30
Speaker 2: one person who might have asked that he was visiting
1:33
Speaker 2: a cousin in terra hate, slipped the folder under the
1:36
Speaker 2: ledge and gone home. What he had left there was
1:39
Speaker 2: the only evidence he trusted himself to keep outside his
1:42
Speaker 2: own apartment, and he had not told a single person
1:46
Speaker 2: it existed. This is the story of seventeen procedures, twenty
1:51
Speaker 2: six months and sixty two thousand dollars. It is the
1:54
Speaker 2: story of how one man identified another man's loneliness and
1:58
Speaker 2: used it with the precision of a surgical instrument.
2:01
Speaker 1: And it is the.
2:02
Speaker 2: Story of how a dry folder on wet ground, found
2:05
Speaker 2: by a stranger at dawn became the thing that finally
2:09
Speaker 2: held the record straight. Glenn Parker had lived in Dunmore
2:14
Speaker 2: for six years by the spring of two thy seventeen.
2:18
Speaker 2: He worked as a compliance analyst, the kind of work
2:21
Speaker 2: that requires careful reading of documents and a tolerance for
2:24
Speaker 2: details most people find tedious.
2:27
Speaker 1: He was good at it.
2:28
Speaker 2: His colleagues described him as methodical, exact the person you
2:33
Speaker 2: wanted checking the numbers before a report went out. He
2:36
Speaker 2: was also, by his own account and by the account
2:39
Speaker 2: of people who knew him well, someone who had built
2:42
Speaker 2: his social world slowly and kept it deliberately small. His
2:46
Speaker 2: divorce had been finalized in twenty thirteen. It had not
2:50
Speaker 2: been contentious. It had simply ended the way some marriages do, quietly.
2:56
Speaker 1: And without a clear villain.
2:57
Speaker 2: Afterward, Glenn moved into a second floor apartment on Caldwell
3:02
Speaker 2: Avenue and settled into a life structured around routine. He
3:06
Speaker 2: went to work, he cooked at home most nights. On
3:10
Speaker 2: Tuesday mornings, at seven forty five, he walked three miles
3:14
Speaker 2: south to Teller's Diner on Orchard Street and sat in
3:18
Speaker 2: the corner booth by the window. He had taken that
3:21
Speaker 2: booth every Tuesday morning for the past four years. His
3:25
Speaker 2: two closest friends were Phil Garrett, a college friend living
3:29
Speaker 2: in Columbus, Ohio, and Deborah Clein, another college friend living
3:34
Speaker 2: in Portland. He called them regularly, not every week, but
3:38
Speaker 2: often enough that both would later describe the shape of
3:41
Speaker 2: those calls in detail, how long they ran, what Glenn
3:45
Speaker 2: talked about, the particular way, he circled back to the
3:48
Speaker 2: same worries across months. Neither Phil nor Deborah lived in Dunmore.
3:53
Speaker 2: Neither could drop by. That was simply geography, not negligence.
3:58
Speaker 2: But it meant that Glenn's daily life, the physical texture
4:01
Speaker 2: of it, was largely solitary. He was not unhappy, He
4:05
Speaker 2: was not in crisis. He was a man in his
4:07
Speaker 2: late thirties who had made his peace with a quiet
4:11
Speaker 2: life and was living it with some care. Procedure one
4:14
Speaker 2: came in September of twenty seventeen Glenn's left knee. He
4:19
Speaker 2: had injured it playing recreational soccer years earlier, and mentioned
4:23
Speaker 2: the lingering stiffness to his new doctrine. The surgery was
4:27
Speaker 2: scheduled within a week. The recovery took longer than expected.
4:31
Speaker 2: Procedure too was his chin, a scar from a childhood
4:35
Speaker 2: accident that had never bothered him. The doctor said he
4:38
Speaker 2: had noticed it and thought Glenn might want it addressed.
4:42
Speaker 2: Glenn had not brought it up. He agreed anyway. By
4:46
Speaker 2: the time the billing consultant later reviewed the charts, nine
4:50
Speaker 2: of the seventeen procedures would show the same pattern. Clinical
4:54
Speaker 2: notes that mirrored Glenn's own reported complaints almost word for word,
5:01
Speaker 2: as if the diagnostic justification had been written backward from
5:05
Speaker 2: what the patient had already said, rather than derived from
5:08
Speaker 2: any independent examination. The consultant would put it plainly in
5:13
Speaker 2: her written assessment. There was no documented basis in nine
5:17
Speaker 2: of seventeen cases for the procedures that followed, but that
5:21
Speaker 2: assessment came much later in the spring and summer of
5:26
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen. Glenn Parker was simply a man who had
5:30
Speaker 2: found a doctor he trusted. Sitting in a corner booth
5:33
Speaker 2: at Teller's Diner on Tuesday mornings, watching the street. He
5:37
Speaker 2: did not yet know that Roger Stewart had been watching
5:40
Speaker 2: him first. There is a number that anchors everything that followed.
5:45
Speaker 2: Seventeen seventeen procedures over twenty six months, sixty two thousand
5:50
Speaker 2: dollars paid, and the man who paid it had no
5:53
Speaker 2: idea until very late that he had been selected. Before
5:57
Speaker 2: he ever walked through a door. The pat became visible
6:01
Speaker 2: only in pieces, and only in hindsight.
6:04
Speaker 1: Start with the booth.
6:05
Speaker 2: For four years, Glenn Parker had taken the same corner
6:09
Speaker 2: table at Teller's Diner on Tuesday mornings seven forty five
6:14
Speaker 2: window seat Orchard Street visible through the glass. That was
6:18
Speaker 2: not a secret. It was simply a habit, the kind
6:21
Speaker 2: of habit a man builds when his weeks are quiet
6:24
Speaker 2: and his routines are the architecture of his days. Roger
6:27
Speaker 2: Stuart knew about the booth before he introduced himself. Phone
6:31
Speaker 2: location data would later place Stuart in the vicinity of
6:34
Speaker 2: Caldwell Avenue, one block from Glen's apartment, four separate mornings
6:39
Speaker 2: in February and March of twenty seventeen. On a specific
6:44
Speaker 2: morning in March, Stuart received a parking citation on Caldwell
6:48
Speaker 2: Avenue itself. Two weeks later, on a Tuesday, at seven
6:52
Speaker 2: fifty one in the morning, Stuart slid into the empty
6:56
Speaker 2: seat across from Glen Parker at Teller's Diner and struck
6:59
Speaker 2: up a conversation that lasted eleven minutes. Eleven minutes is
7:04
Speaker 2: not a long conversation, but it was long enough. By April,
7:08
Speaker 2: they were sharing that corner booth regularly. By June, Stuart
7:12
Speaker 2: had become what investigators would later describe as Glenn's most
7:16
Speaker 2: consistent social contact pacers tickets, a cabin weekend, the kind
7:22
Speaker 2: of gestures that feel like friendship and function like infrastructure.
7:27
Speaker 2: Glenn's calls to Phil Garrett in Columbus shortened his calls
7:31
Speaker 2: to Deborah Kleine in Portland.
7:33
Speaker 1: Thin This was not dramatic. There was no rupture.
7:37
Speaker 2: The contact simply contracted, the way contact does when a
7:42
Speaker 2: new relationship fills the available space. The first procedure came
7:46
Speaker 2: in September of twenty seventeen. Glenn's knee, his idea he
7:51
Speaker 2: had mentioned the old soccer injury, the stiffness that had
7:54
Speaker 2: never quite resolved. The surgery was scheduled within a week.
7:59
Speaker 2: The second procedure was Stuart's idea, Glenn's chin, a scar
8:04
Speaker 2: from childhood that Glenn had never once raised as a concern.
8:07
Speaker 2: Stuart said he had noticed it and thought Glenn might
8:10
Speaker 2: want it addressed.
8:11
Speaker 1: Glen agreed.
8:12
Speaker 2: That is the hinge, the shift from a patient presenting
8:16
Speaker 2: a complaint to a doctor identifying one. By the time
8:19
Speaker 2: an independent billing consultant reviewed the complete chart record in
8:23
Speaker 2: mid twenty nineteen, the scope of that shift was quantifiable.
8:28
Speaker 2: Nine of seventeen procedures showed clinical notes that mirrored Glen's
8:32
Speaker 2: own reported language, almost verbatim, not paraphrased. Mirrored, as though
8:38
Speaker 2: the diagnostic justification had been assembled after the fact, built
8:42
Speaker 2: backward from whatever the patient had already said, rather than
8:45
Speaker 2: derived from any independent clinical finding. The consultant's written assessment
8:50
Speaker 2: was direct. There was no documented basis in nine of
8:54
Speaker 2: seventeen cases. For the procedures that followed nine procedures no
9:00
Speaker 2: zh documented basis. But the consultant's report was not the
9:04
Speaker 2: first signal. The first signal came from a FOAM call
9:07
Speaker 2: in February of twenty nineteen. Phil Garrett, called Kimberly Wells.
9:12
Speaker 2: Wells was a licensed clinical social worker at the Dunmore
9:16
Speaker 2: Family Resource Center, Forty four years old, eleven years working
9:20
Speaker 2: exploitation and coercive control cases. Phil had received a call
9:25
Speaker 2: from Glenn that left him unsettled in a way he
9:28
Speaker 2: could not fully articulate. Glen had mentioned a jaw procedure
9:32
Speaker 2: scheduled for the following month. He had mentioned using his
9:36
Speaker 2: car as collateral for the cost, and he had quoted
9:39
Speaker 2: something Stuart had told him that Stuart did not think
9:43
Speaker 2: outside opinions were particularly helpful. Wells agreed to meet Glenn.
9:48
Speaker 2: He arrived twenty minutes late. He told her he was fine.
9:52
Speaker 2: She documented what she observed anyway, Glenn defended every procedure.
9:56
Speaker 2: When she gently raised questions about frequency and cost, he deflected,
10:02
Speaker 2: he minimized, and at one point he used a phrase
10:05
Speaker 2: that Wells would later note in her written report, a
10:08
Speaker 2: phrase she recognized not as Glenn's own reasoning, but as
10:12
Speaker 2: a borrowed conclusion delivered in his own voice. She requested
10:16
Speaker 2: any records Glenn had. He said he would think about it.
10:20
Speaker 2: A few weeks.
10:20
Speaker 1: Later, she reached out again.
10:23
Speaker 2: Glenn told her he had already handled it. He had
10:26
Speaker 2: not called her, he had not filed anything. What he
10:30
Speaker 2: had done somewhere in those intervening weeks was begin writing
10:34
Speaker 2: things down. The folder would later be described in the
10:37
Speaker 2: police report as a standard Manila folder sealed with two
10:42
Speaker 2: strips of surgical tape. The tape was not a message.
10:45
Speaker 2: Glenn had it in his car because it was the
10:47
Speaker 2: only tape he had. On the front in block handwriting, Glenn,
10:52
Speaker 2: keep this safe, he wrote it to himself. Inside bank statements,
10:57
Speaker 2: a handwritten log of procedure dates and the amounts build
11:01
Speaker 2: against each one. A list of questions things that had
11:05
Speaker 2: not added up, written in the careful, organized language of
11:08
Speaker 2: a man who spent his professional life tracking compliance anomalies,
11:13
Speaker 2: and one diner receipt folded once with seven words written
11:17
Speaker 2: on the back, you are not wrong about this. He
11:21
Speaker 2: wrote that to himself too. The third week of May
11:24
Speaker 2: two thousand nineteen, Glen Parker told Roger Stewart he was
11:29
Speaker 2: visiting a cousin in Terre Hate for the week end.
11:32
Speaker 2: He drove instead to Teller Marsh, a wet land area
11:36
Speaker 2: on the south side of Dunmore, three miles from the
11:39
Speaker 2: diner where he had spent four years. In a corner
11:42
Speaker 2: booth by the window, he walked the trail he had
11:45
Speaker 2: walked before. He hid the folder, then he drove home.
11:49
Speaker 2: There is something in that sequence that stops the analysis cold.
11:53
Speaker 2: Not the hiding itself, but the label. Glen, keep this safe.
11:59
Speaker 2: A man addressing himself because there was no one else
12:02
Speaker 2: he was certain he could address. He had built a
12:05
Speaker 2: paper record of what had been done to him, and
12:08
Speaker 2: his first act of safe keeping was to put it
12:10
Speaker 2: somewhere only a stranger would find it. He did not
12:13
Speaker 2: tell Phil, He did not tell Deborah. He did not
12:16
Speaker 2: contact Wells again. What he did instead was returned to
12:20
Speaker 2: his Tuesday routine at Teller's diner the following week, sit
12:24
Speaker 2: in the corner booth by the window and wait for
12:27
Speaker 2: what exactly is not entirely clear from any record, but
12:31
Speaker 2: the folder was in the marsh, and he had written
12:34
Speaker 2: himself a note that he was not wrong, and that
12:37
Speaker 2: seems to have been enough for the moment. Amande Long
12:40
Speaker 2: found it at six fourteen in the morning on a
12:43
Speaker 2: day in the third week of May twenty nineteen. Long
12:47
Speaker 2: was a retired postal worker who had built a bird
12:50
Speaker 2: watching blind at Teller Marsh and used it regularly before sunrise.
12:55
Speaker 2: She was not looking for anything. She saw the folder,
12:58
Speaker 2: read the label, and called Dunmore PD immediately. The folder
13:03
Speaker 2: was dry, there had been two inches of rain in
13:06
Speaker 2: the days prior. The ground around it was soft. The
13:10
Speaker 2: folder showed no moisture damage. Dunmore p D contacted Glenn
13:14
Speaker 2: that same morning. He confirmed the folder was his. He
13:18
Speaker 2: confirmed the contents were accurate. He agreed to cooperate fully.
13:23
Speaker 2: In the first week of June, Roger Stewart was interviewed
13:26
Speaker 2: by Dunmore PD. He used the word paranoid twice in
13:29
Speaker 2: reference to Glenn's concerns. He stated, with apparent confidence that
13:34
Speaker 2: he had never visited Glenn's neighborhood. The parking citation from
13:38
Speaker 2: Caldwell Avenue was in the record, The phone location data
13:42
Speaker 2: was in the record.
13:43
Speaker 1: The eleven minute.
13:44
Speaker 2: Conversation at seven fifty one on a Tuesday morning was
13:47
Speaker 2: in the record. Stuart's attorney advised cooperation. Shortly afterward, Stuart
13:52
Speaker 2: confessed picture the corner booth at Teller's Diner in the
13:56
Speaker 2: spring of twenty seventeen, a man said alone, Tuesday morning
14:02
Speaker 2: window seat, same as always. Another man comes through the door,
14:06
Speaker 2: makes eye contact and asks if the seat is taken.
14:10
Speaker 2: If that is what happened an opportunistic encounter, a doctor
14:13
Speaker 2: who happened to recognize a potential patient who happened to
14:17
Speaker 2: sit in a diner near his office, then what follows
14:20
Speaker 2: is unusual but not architecturally impossible. Doctors do meet patients socially.
14:26
Speaker 2: Friendships do precede professional relationships. The procedures under this version
14:31
Speaker 2: represent poor judgment, may be greed, but the encounter itself
14:35
Speaker 2: was random. But that version collapses the moment you check
14:39
Speaker 2: the parking citation. Stuart was on Caldwell Avenue in March
14:43
Speaker 2: of twenty seventeen.
14:45
Speaker 1: He had been in the vicinity of.
14:47
Speaker 2: That address four mornings in February and March.
14:51
Speaker 1: The diner meeting.
14:52
Speaker 2: Came two weeks after the citation. That is not the
14:55
Speaker 2: geography of chance, That is the geography of reconnaissance. Picture
14:59
Speaker 2: the entry reduction differently than a man who has already
15:02
Speaker 2: identified a target, who knows the address, knows the Tuesday routine,
15:08
Speaker 2: knows the corner booth, who walks through the door on
15:10
Speaker 2: a specific morning at a specific time, having already done
15:14
Speaker 2: the work of selecting the person sitting by the window.
15:17
Speaker 2: Under this version, the first procedure Glenn's knee, Glen's own
15:22
Speaker 2: complaint was simply the cost of establishing legitimacy. The real
15:27
Speaker 2: architecture began at procedure too, when Stewart introduced a concern
15:32
Speaker 2: that Glenn had never raised. From that point, the question
15:35
Speaker 2: is not whether procedures were medically justified.
15:38
Speaker 1: But who was generating the need.
15:40
Speaker 2: The billing consultants finding answers that precisely nine charts in
15:44
Speaker 2: which the clinical notes mirror the patient's own language verbatim
15:48
Speaker 2: notes reverse engineered from what the patient said, not from
15:52
Speaker 2: what an examination found. This is not a documentation shortcut.
15:57
Speaker 2: This is a record built to justify a decision all
16:00
Speaker 2: ready made. And then there is the isolation. Not dramatic,
16:04
Speaker 2: not coercive in any way the law would have recognized
16:07
Speaker 2: in real time. Stuart's claimed that outside opinions were not helpful.
16:12
Speaker 1: The shortening of Glenn's.
16:13
Speaker 2: Calls to Phil and Deborah, the accumulation of procedures that
16:18
Speaker 2: gave Glenn a physical reason to stay close to his doctor,
16:22
Speaker 2: a financial reason to stay invested in the outcome, a
16:25
Speaker 2: psychological reason to trust the man who had seen something
16:28
Speaker 2: worth fixing when no one else had. Patrick Dole, the
16:32
Speaker 2: man from Munsey who had eleven procedures over eighteen months
16:35
Speaker 2: and liquidated his retirement account, said it in a recorded
16:38
Speaker 2: statement years later. He had believed for a long time.
16:43
Speaker 2: He said that he was the one who had been.
16:45
Speaker 1: Confused, not deceived, confused.
16:48
Speaker 2: As though the disorientation itself had become the explanation. That is,
16:53
Speaker 2: the mechanism, not force, not threat, The steady, patient replacement
16:59
Speaker 2: of a person's own judgment with doubt about their own
17:01
Speaker 2: judgment until the doubt feels like clarity, and the clarity
17:05
Speaker 2: is someone else's entirely. Glenn Parker, a compliance analyst by profession,
17:11
Speaker 2: a man whose working life was built.
17:13
Speaker 1: Around identifying when something did not add up.
17:16
Speaker 2: Wrote himself a note on a diner receipt and hid
17:19
Speaker 2: it in a marsh because he needed to be certain
17:22
Speaker 2: he would not talk himself out of it before someone
17:25
Speaker 2: else found it. He was not wrong about that either.
17:29
Speaker 2: Roger Stuart's attorney advised cooperation. In June twenty nineteen, Stuart
17:35
Speaker 2: took that advice. He identified a climate controlled storage unit
17:39
Speaker 2: in Carmel, Indiana, rented under a business name, with no
17:43
Speaker 2: other footprint inside altered patient files and billing records, spanning
17:49
Speaker 2: three cities, three men, and the better part of a decade.
17:54
Speaker 2: The Carmel unit was the kind of place that only
17:57
Speaker 2: exists if someone planned from the beginning to need it.
18:01
Speaker 2: Dunmore p d handed the case to the Indiana Attorney
18:04
Speaker 2: General's office. The charges that followed were not assault, They
18:08
Speaker 2: were not battery. They were fraud and criminal deception, because
18:13
Speaker 2: that is the precise legal category for what Stuart had done.
18:17
Speaker 2: He had not broken bones. He had broken a person's
18:20
Speaker 2: ability to trust his own perception of reality. Stuart pleaded
18:24
Speaker 2: guilty in October two thousand nineteen. He was sentenced on
18:28
Speaker 2: three counts of fraud and two counts of criminal deception.
18:32
Speaker 2: Thirty days after the sentence, the Indiana Medical Licensing Board
18:36
Speaker 2: revoked his license. The Carmel unit answered another question, one
18:41
Speaker 2: that had not been asked yet. The files inside documented
18:46
Speaker 2: fort wayne nine procedures over fourteen months. A civil complaint
18:51
Speaker 2: settled in two thousand fifteen under a non disclosure agreement.
18:55
Speaker 2: The complaint was civil, not disciplinary. Stuart's Indiana medical license
19:00
Speaker 2: was renewed without incident afterward. The settlement kept his name clean.
19:04
Speaker 2: The unit also documented Munsey Patrick Dole, forty one years
19:09
Speaker 2: old at the time, eleven procedures across eighteen months. His
19:13
Speaker 2: retirement account liquidated, contact with his family severed. The records
19:18
Speaker 2: from Muncie were there, reorganized, stored, preserved. The reason Dole
19:24
Speaker 2: stopped treatment was not clear.
19:26
Speaker 1: In those files.
19:27
Speaker 2: What was clear was that the pattern had run its
19:29
Speaker 2: full course before Stuart moved on. Kimberly Wells, the licensed
19:34
Speaker 2: clinical social worker who had first met Glen in February
19:37
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, located Patrick Dole and requested an interview.
19:42
Speaker 1: Dole agreed.
19:43
Speaker 2: In a recorded statement, he described something that took considerable
19:47
Speaker 2: time to name. He said he had believed for a
19:50
Speaker 2: long time that He was the one who had been confused,
19:54
Speaker 2: not deceived, not manipulated, confused as though the only way
19:59
Speaker 2: to make sense of what had happened was to absorb
20:01
Speaker 2: the disorientation as his own failure of understanding. That is
20:06
Speaker 2: what complete dismantlement of a person's reality produces a survivor
20:11
Speaker 2: who cannot distinguish between the weapon and their own mind.
20:15
Speaker 2: Kimberly Wells documented a specific tactic in her formal report
20:19
Speaker 2: on the Stuart case. During his first interview with Dunmore
20:22
Speaker 2: p D. Stuart used the word paranoid twice to describe
20:27
Speaker 2: Glenn's behavior, the same framing he had used with Glenn himself.
20:31
Speaker 1: When Glenn raised concerns.
20:33
Speaker 2: Wells identified it as a deflection pattern she had documented
20:37
Speaker 2: in coercive control cases.
20:39
Speaker 1: The controlled person's eventual doubt is not incidental.
20:43
Speaker 2: It is the product. When someone uses the word paranoid
20:47
Speaker 2: to describe a person who is correct, that word is
20:51
Speaker 2: not a description, It is a continuation of the method.
20:55
Speaker 2: Glenn Parker was never charged with anything. He was the target.
20:59
Speaker 2: He was also the person who had the clearest, steadiest
21:03
Speaker 2: read on what was happening, even when the mechanism was
21:06
Speaker 2: specifically designed to make him doubt that reed.
21:10
Speaker 1: There is a diner on Orchard Street in Dunmore.
21:13
Speaker 2: Every Tuesday morning a man arrives and takes the back
21:17
Speaker 2: booth away from the window. Glenn Parker was still going
21:21
Speaker 2: as of the following two mays.
21:23
Speaker 1: After Stuart's sentencing.
21:25
Speaker 2: He had moved away from the corner booth by the window,
21:28
Speaker 2: the one he had sat in for four years, the
21:31
Speaker 2: one where Roger Stewart had first approached him on a
21:34
Speaker 2: Tuesday in March twenty seventeen. The back booth is quieter,
21:39
Speaker 2: less visible from the street. In the summer of twenty twenty,
21:42
Speaker 2: Phil Garrett drove from Columbus to Dunmore.
21:46
Speaker 1: He and Glenn ate together at that back booth.
21:49
Speaker 2: It was the kind of ordinary thing that had become
21:52
Speaker 2: for a while unavailable to Glenn, a friend at a
21:56
Speaker 2: table nothing owed nowhere to be after. Glenn also resumed
22:02
Speaker 2: walking the Teller Marsh Trail in the mornings, the same
22:05
Speaker 2: trail where Amanda Long sets up her bird watching blind
22:08
Speaker 2: before the sun is fully up, where a folder sealed
22:11
Speaker 2: with surgical tape sat above the water line through two
22:15
Speaker 2: inches of rain. What Glen Parker did building a physical record,
22:19
Speaker 2: hiding it somewhere he could not easily retrieve it, trusting
22:23
Speaker 2: that a stranger or the Earth itself would eventually surface.
22:26
Speaker 2: It was not the behavior of someone confused. It was
22:30
Speaker 2: the behavior of someone who understood, at a level beneath language,
22:35
Speaker 2: that his own certainty would not be safe in his
22:38
Speaker 2: own hands for much longer. He built an external anchor
22:42
Speaker 2: for a reality that was being systematically replaced. Patrick Dole
22:46
Speaker 2: said he had believed for a long time he was
22:48
Speaker 2: the one confused. Glenn Parker wrote himself a note that
22:52
Speaker 2: said the opposite. He just needed to put it somewhere
22:55
Speaker 2: he could not take it back. There is something in
22:59
Speaker 2: that distinction, or sitting with the difference between a person
23:02
Speaker 2: who loses their grip on what is real and a
23:05
Speaker 2: person who hides the evidence of their own clarity so
23:08
Speaker 2: it survives them. That difference is not personality. It is
23:12
Speaker 2: proximity to the moment of severance. Dole reached the end.
23:17
Speaker 2: Glen reached the folder first. Roger Stewart held the valid
23:21
Speaker 2: medical license for the duration of everything that happened in Dunmore.
23:25
Speaker 2: He was a licensed physician performing procedures in a licensed facility.
23:29
Speaker 2: The system that was supposed to flag him had already
23:32
Speaker 2: absorbed one complaint, sealed.
23:34
Speaker 1: It, and renewed his credentials.
23:36
Speaker 2: What stopped him was a retired postal worker, a waterproof folder,
23:41
Speaker 2: and a man who knew that he could not trust
23:43
Speaker 2: himself to hold on. This show is made by Oboe
23:47
Speaker 2: Media