Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Watched for 18 Months: The Birdhouse That Built a Predator
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At seven forty in the morning on a Tuesday in
- 0:06Speaker 1: early April of two thousand nineteen, a county surveyor named
- 0:10Speaker 1: Edward Carter knelt beside a cedar Renbirt house on a
- 0:14Speaker 1: steel pole at the edge of a vacant lot. He
- 0:17Speaker 1: had walked past that pole dozens of times over three years.
- 0:21Speaker 1: That morning something made him look closer. The camera was
- 0:24Speaker 1: the size of a coat button. It pointed directly at
- 0:27Speaker 1: the driveway, the side entrance, and the kitchen window of
- 0:30Speaker 1: forty four Mill Race Road. The woman who lived there
- 0:34Speaker 1: had no idea it existed, and the man who put
- 0:37Speaker 1: it there had placed it eighteen months before he ever
- 0:40Speaker 1: said a single word to her. That detail is worth
- 0:43Speaker 1: holding on to. Not a camera installed after a relationship soured,
- 0:48Speaker 1: not a jealous act born of intimacy. The camera came first,
- 0:52Speaker 1: the relationship was built around it. What happened to Gale
- 0:55Speaker 1: Crawford in Heller County is not a story about a
- 0:59Speaker 1: crime of passion or a moment of madness. It is
- 1:02Speaker 1: a study in patience, in the deliberate, methodical dismantling of
- 1:07Speaker 1: one person's reality by another who had been watching, learning,
- 1:11Speaker 1: and planning long before she ever knew his name. Mill
- 1:14Speaker 1: Race Road is the kind of street where neighbors notice
- 1:17Speaker 1: a car that does not belong, where the same faces
- 1:21Speaker 1: appear at the same mailboxes at roughly the same hours,
- 1:24Speaker 1: Where a woman who has lived in the same house
- 1:27Speaker 1: for eleven years becomes without intending to a kind of landmark.
- 1:31Speaker 1: Gail Crawford was sixty something, a widow, and by every
- 1:35Speaker 1: account a woman of steady, quiet routine. Her husband, Denis,
- 1:39Speaker 1: had died of a coronary at sixty one, and in
- 1:42Speaker 1: the years that followed she had built a life that
- 1:45Speaker 1: was full without being loud. She had her Tuesday card club,
- 1:49Speaker 1: which she had not missed in nine years. She had
- 1:52Speaker 1: Sunday service at Saint Ambrose Lutheran nine fifteen in the
- 1:56Speaker 1: morning every week. She had her library literacy volunteer shift
- 2:01Speaker 1: every other Thursday. She had a cat named Persimmon. She
- 2:05Speaker 1: had her daughter, Patrice, who lived in Columbus and called regularly.
- 2:10Speaker 1: Her neighbors knew her schedule the way neighbors do on
- 2:13Speaker 1: streets like that, not because they were watching, but because
- 2:16Speaker 1: she was simply consistent, dependable present. That consistency was not
- 2:21Speaker 1: incidental to what happened next. It was the foundation of it.
- 2:26Speaker 1: Sometime in the spring of twenty sixteen, a man named
- 2:30Speaker 1: Karl Simmons rented a property on Wickham Drive in Kellerton.
- 2:34Speaker 1: He was fifty eight years old. He drove a dark
- 2:38Speaker 1: blue Honda Civic. He told people he was a widower,
- 2:42Speaker 1: though no evidence of a prior wife has ever been confirmed.
- 2:45Speaker 1: He was by all outward appearance unremarkable. What is now
- 2:49Speaker 1: documented is that in May of two thy sixteen, within
- 2:54Speaker 1: weeks of moving to Kellerton, Simmons placed a wireless microcamera
- 2:59Speaker 1: inside a cedar bird house on a steel pole at
- 3:02Speaker 1: the edge of a vacant lot north of forty four
- 3:04Speaker 1: Mill Race Road. The camera was angled to capture the driveway,
- 3:08Speaker 1: the side entrance in the kitchen window. A power cable
- 3:12Speaker 1: ran down the interior of the pole to a weather
- 3:15Speaker 1: proof battery base at the ground. He was not yet
- 3:17Speaker 1: acquainted with Gale Crawford. He would not be for another
- 3:21Speaker 1: year and a half. In the spring of twenty seventeen,
- 3:25Speaker 1: a utility technician named Marcus Dunn lobbed an unauthorized power
- 3:29Speaker 1: splice on a secondary line running along the vacant lot fence.
- 3:34Speaker 1: The splice was documented, The follow up was never completed.
- 3:39Speaker 1: The camera had just been converted to permanent power. That summer,
- 3:43Speaker 1: a neighbor named Frank Ostrowski began noticing a dark blue
- 3:47Speaker 1: compact parked on the shoulder of mill Race Road in
- 3:50Speaker 1: the mornings. He would later identify the car from a
- 3:54Speaker 1: photograph as Karl Simmons's civic. A former mail carrier named
- 3:58Speaker 1: Vincent Pruitt remembered seeing the same man park near the
- 4:02Speaker 1: mill Race turn off and walk slowly watching the houses.
- 4:06Speaker 1: A woman named Tania Kessler recalled him asking about residence schedules,
- 4:11Speaker 1: whether they lived alone. By September of two thousand seventeen,
- 4:15Speaker 1: Simmons began attending Saint Ambrose Lutheran. In October of two
- 4:20Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, after a Sunday service, Reverend Alan Foost introduced
- 4:26Speaker 1: him to Gale Crawford. She shook his hand. She had
- 4:29Speaker 1: no reason not to. What she could not have known
- 4:32Speaker 1: was that the man standing beside the reverend already knew
- 4:35Speaker 1: which side of her house caught the morning light, which
- 4:38Speaker 1: door she used most often, and what time she left
- 4:41Speaker 1: for card club on Tuesdays. He had been watching for
- 4:45Speaker 1: eighteen months, The question that investigators would later spend weeks
- 4:49Speaker 1: trying to answer is not simply what Simmons did. It
- 4:53Speaker 1: is how completely he had already mapped a person's life
- 4:56Speaker 1: before she ever became aware he existed, and what that
- 5:00Speaker 1: mapping made possible next. The first thing Patrice Crawford noticed
- 5:04Speaker 1: was a photograph. It was sitting on a shelf in
- 5:07Speaker 1: her mother's bedroom closet, tucked between a folded cardigan and
- 5:11Speaker 1: a row of shoe boxes, the kind of place you
- 5:13Speaker 1: only look when you are looking for something else. The
- 5:16Speaker 1: photograph showed Gale's backyard, not a family snapshot, not a
- 5:21Speaker 1: holiday picture, just the yard, taken from an angle that
- 5:26Speaker 1: made no sense from inside the house. Patrese stood there
- 5:30Speaker 1: for a moment. She did not know yet what she
- 5:33Speaker 1: was holding, but something was wrong with it. That photograph
- 5:37Speaker 1: would become the first thread investigators pulled, and what came
- 5:41Speaker 1: apart when they pulled it would take months to fully understand.
- 5:46Speaker 1: By early twenty nineteen, Carl Simmons had been a presence
- 5:50Speaker 1: in Gail Crawford's life for over a year. He came
- 5:53Speaker 1: to Sunday service, He had dinner at her table twice
- 5:57Speaker 1: a week. He knew where she kept her spare key.
- 6:00Speaker 1: He had been listed as her emergency contact. He cried
- 6:03Speaker 1: in her kitchen once, telling her about losing his wife,
- 6:07Speaker 1: a wife that no record of any investigation would ever
- 6:10Speaker 1: confirm existed. Gale trusted him. That is not a failure
- 6:15Speaker 1: on her part. It is the result of something that
- 6:17Speaker 1: had been engineered carefully over a very long time. The
- 6:21Speaker 1: photograph showed a field of view, a precise specific field
- 6:25Speaker 1: of view, the driveway, the side entrance, the lower half
- 6:29Speaker 1: of the kitchen window. Patrice measured it against what she
- 6:33Speaker 1: could see from inside the house. No window matched, no door,
- 6:38Speaker 1: No logical standing position inside the property produced that angle.
- 6:42Speaker 1: It had to come from outside, from the north, from
- 6:45Speaker 1: the vacant lot. Jeffrey Williams, the private investigator Patrice retained
- 6:49Speaker 1: after the sheriff's inquiry stalled, had spent two decades working
- 6:54Speaker 1: elder exploitation cases as a county prosecutor before going independent.
- 6:59Speaker 1: When Patrie Pace brought him the photograph, he said later
- 7:02Speaker 1: that he knew within a few minutes what kind of
- 7:04Speaker 1: case it was. He had seen the geometry before Williams
- 7:09Speaker 1: walked the fence line of the vacant lot on a
- 7:11Speaker 1: Thursday morning. The lot had been empty for years. A
- 7:14Speaker 1: few overgrown hedges, a utility easement running along the back
- 7:19Speaker 1: and near the corner, bolted to a steel pole, a
- 7:22Speaker 1: cedar Rehn bird house, painted a weathered brown. He did
- 7:25Speaker 1: not touch it. He called Sergeant Louise Carver. Edward Carter,
- 7:29Speaker 1: a county surveyor, had walked past that same pole dozens
- 7:33Speaker 1: of times over three years. It fit a bird house
- 7:37Speaker 1: on a vacant lot, nothing unusual. He had noted it
- 7:40Speaker 1: peripherally the way you note a fire hydrant or a
- 7:43Speaker 1: utility marker present, expected invisible. On a Tuesday morning in
- 7:49Speaker 1: early April of two thousand nineteen, at seven forty in
- 7:53Speaker 1: the morning, Carter arrived to survey the lot boundary, and
- 7:58Speaker 1: for the first time Crouch to mark a stake near
- 8:01Speaker 1: the pole's base. He saw the cable. It ran up
- 8:04Speaker 1: the interior of the pole, thin and gray, disappearing into
- 8:09Speaker 1: the base of the bird house. The bird house itself
- 8:12Speaker 1: when Carver's team later opened it contained a wireless micro
- 8:15Speaker 1: camera approximately the size of a coat button, angled precisely
- 8:19Speaker 1: to capture the driveway, the side entrance, and the kitchen
- 8:23Speaker 1: window of forty four Mill Race Road, one detail Carver
- 8:27Speaker 1: noted in her report. The original battery base at the
- 8:31Speaker 1: bottom of the pole had been supplemented. A secondary wire
- 8:35Speaker 1: ran from the pole to an unauthorized splice on a
- 8:38Speaker 1: utility line along the fence. That splice had been logged
- 8:41Speaker 1: by a technician named Marcus Dunn in the spring of
- 8:45Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. He had filed the report. The follow up
- 8:49Speaker 1: was never completed. The camera had been running on permanent
- 8:52Speaker 1: power ever since. The serial number on the camera was
- 8:56Speaker 1: registered to Carl Simmons to an address on Wickham Drive
- 8:59Speaker 1: in Kellerton, a rental he had vacated four months before
- 9:03Speaker 1: his arrest, but had occupied since May of two thousand sixteen.
- 9:08Speaker 1: May two thousand sixteen, eighteen months before he attended his
- 9:12Speaker 1: first Sunday service at Saint Ambrose Luthlen, seventeen months before
- 9:17Speaker 1: Reverend Alan Faust introduced him to Gail Crawford. The camera
- 9:21Speaker 1: had been watching her before he ever said her name.
- 9:24Speaker 1: There is a detail that sits at the center of
- 9:26Speaker 1: this case and resists simple explanation. Carl Simmons did not
- 9:31Speaker 1: need the camera after he met Gail. By late two
- 9:34Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, he was inside her house. He knew her
- 9:37Speaker 1: routines because she told him he had access to her documents,
- 9:41Speaker 1: her conversations, her schedule. The camera had done its job,
- 9:45Speaker 1: and yet it kept running. Investigators pulled the device logs.
- 9:50Speaker 1: The camera had been active continuously from some time in
- 9:53Speaker 1: mid two thousand sixteen through the morning Carter founded in
- 9:57Speaker 1: early two thousand nineteen, nearly three year years of recorded data.
- 10:01Speaker 1: The storage had cycled and overwritten itself many times. Only
- 10:06Speaker 1: a fragment of the most recent material remained, but the
- 10:09Speaker 1: activity logs were intact. There were time stamps from Sunday mornings,
- 10:14Speaker 1: Tuesday mornings, every other Thursday. Carver later said in testimony
- 10:18Speaker 1: that the pattern of access timestamps corresponded almost exactly to
- 10:22Speaker 1: Gayle's known schedule, service times, card club, library literacy. The
- 10:28Speaker 1: camera was not recording ambient footage. It was being checked.
- 10:32Speaker 1: In November of twenty eighteen, Gail Crawford changed the beneficiary
- 10:36Speaker 1: on her forty seven thousand dollars life insurance policy. The
- 10:40Speaker 1: new beneficiary was Carl Simmons. In January of twenty nineteen,
- 10:46Speaker 1: she co signed a twelve thousand dollars loan. Simmons told
- 10:50Speaker 1: her it was for his roofing business, a business no
- 10:53Speaker 1: licensing record, no contractor, registration, no business filing of any
- 10:58Speaker 1: kind could confirm exist. Gaile was sixty something years old,
- 11:03Speaker 1: eleven years a widow, living alone at forty four Mill
- 11:06Speaker 1: Race Road, with a cat named Persimmon and a social
- 11:09Speaker 1: calendar built around people she had known for a decade.
- 11:13Speaker 1: She was not isolated, She was not without family. She
- 11:17Speaker 1: had a daughter forty miles away who called every week.
- 11:20Speaker 1: But Carl Simmons had positioned himself as the person she
- 11:23Speaker 1: called first, the emergency contact, the twice weekly dinner companion,
- 11:29Speaker 1: the man who wept at her kitchen table and told
- 11:31Speaker 1: her she was not alone. When Patrice Crawford first raised
- 11:35Speaker 1: her concerns, Gaile refused to cooperate. She told her daughter
- 11:39Speaker 1: she was wrong. That refusal is not a failure of intelligence.
- 11:44Speaker 1: It is the signature of the thing Simmons had built
- 11:46Speaker 1: inside her trust, a structure designed specifically so that the
- 11:50Speaker 1: person inside it cannot see it from within. Picture the
- 11:54Speaker 1: vacant lot. On a Sunday morning in the fall of
- 11:57Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, Simmons parks the dark blue civic on the
- 12:01Speaker 1: shoulder of Milray's Road, as neighbors had seen him do
- 12:04Speaker 1: for over a year. He walks the fence line, He
- 12:08Speaker 1: checks the camera housing, He knows which door Gale uses,
- 12:12Speaker 1: which window goes dark last at night, what time the
- 12:15Speaker 1: car leaves for church. Then that same morning he drives
- 12:20Speaker 1: to Saint Ambrose Lutheran and sits in a pew. One
- 12:24Speaker 1: version of events says this was opportunistic, that Simmons had
- 12:28Speaker 1: been casting wide, watching the neighborhood generally, and that Gale
- 12:31Speaker 1: became the target because she was available, isolated enough accessible
- 12:37Speaker 1: that the camera was reconnaissance that eventually found a mark.
- 12:40Speaker 1: But that version collapses the moment you look at the loan,
- 12:43Speaker 1: a twelve thousand dollars loan co signed in January of
- 12:48Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a roofing business with no verifiable existence,
- 12:55Speaker 1: a contractor crisis that Simmons apparently manufactured to justify the request.
- 13:00Speaker 1: That is not opportunism. That is a pre built mechanism.
- 13:05Speaker 1: It requires preparation, a cover story refined over time, and
- 13:09Speaker 1: the level of trust so deep that a request that
- 13:12Speaker 1: should have prompted questions prompted only a signature. Patricia Bowen,
- 13:17Speaker 1: sixty four years old, lived in Macon County, two hundred
- 13:22Speaker 1: miles south of Kellerton. She had met a man who
- 13:25Speaker 1: called himself Karl in two thousand thirteen. They had been
- 13:30Speaker 1: in a relationship. When she caught him going through her
- 13:33Speaker 1: financial documents. She ended it immediately. She never filed a report.
- 13:38Speaker 1: Ten days after Simmons's arrest, she contacted the Heller County
- 13:41Speaker 1: Sheriff's office. Her account established a pattern that predated Glee
- 13:46Speaker 1: Crawford by years. The widower story, the manufactured emotional crisis,
- 13:51Speaker 1: the gradual, methodical movement toward financial documents. What Simmons had
- 13:56Speaker 1: done to Gale was not improvised, It was rehearsed. The
- 14:00Speaker 1: strongest reading of the evidence is this The bird house
- 14:03Speaker 1: came first because it had to not to watch Gale
- 14:06Speaker 1: in particular, not yet, but to find her, to map
- 14:10Speaker 1: her routines precisely enough that by the time he walked
- 14:13Speaker 1: through that church door, every subsequent move could be timed.
- 14:17Speaker 1: The surveillance was not a crime of opportunity that preceded
- 14:20Speaker 1: a relationship. It was the methodology itself. The camera ran
- 14:26Speaker 1: for nearly three years because he needed it to keep running,
- 14:29Speaker 1: not for what it captured, for what it conferred. That
- 14:33Speaker 1: the structure held that she was still there, that the
- 14:37Speaker 1: next step was safe to take. Sergeant Carver described the
- 14:41Speaker 1: hour three moment of interrogation as feeling less like a
- 14:45Speaker 1: confession and more like a debrief. Simmons spoke in specifics.
- 14:49Speaker 1: She said, dates, timings, sequences, the kind of recall you
- 14:54Speaker 1: have when you have planned something long enough that the
- 14:57Speaker 1: planning becomes the memory. He had been watching Gale cross
- 15:00Speaker 1: Aufford's house for nearly three years before a county surveyor
- 15:03Speaker 1: crouched at the wrong spot at seven forty in the
- 15:05Speaker 1: morning and saw a cable that should not have been there.
- 15:09Speaker 1: They found Carl Simmons at the Oakhurst Trace rental in Kellerton.
- 15:13Speaker 1: He was retrieving personal items. He did not run. Sergeant
- 15:16Speaker 1: Louise Carver led the interrogation for the first two hours.
- 15:21Speaker 1: Simmons was careful, measured. He chose his words the way
- 15:25Speaker 1: a man chooses them when he has rehearsed the possibility
- 15:28Speaker 1: of this conversation. Then somewhere in the third hour, something shifted.
- 15:33Speaker 1: Carver would later describe it not as a breakdown, but
- 15:37Speaker 1: as a release. He stopped performing ignorance. He started talking
- 15:41Speaker 1: in specifics, dates, sequences, the precise order of decisions made
- 15:47Speaker 1: over nearly three years. It felt, she said, less like
- 15:51Speaker 1: a confession and more like a debrief. Six weeks after
- 15:55Speaker 1: his arrest, Carl Simmons entered a guilty plea stalking, financial
- 16:00Speaker 1: exploitation of a vulnerable adult, criminal fraud. The court sentenced
- 16:06Speaker 1: him to seven years. The plea agreement did not arrive.
- 16:09Speaker 1: In a vacuum. Ten days after the arrest, a woman
- 16:13Speaker 1: named Patricia Bowen called the Heller County Sheriff's office from
- 16:17Speaker 1: Macon County, two hundred miles south. She was sixty four
- 16:22Speaker 1: years old. She had met a man who called himself
- 16:25Speaker 1: Karl in twenty thirteen. The relationship had ended when she
- 16:29Speaker 1: caught him going through her financial documents. She had never
- 16:32Speaker 1: filed a report. She filed one now. Her account of
- 16:36Speaker 1: the widower story, the manufactured crisis, the slow migration toward
- 16:41Speaker 1: her finances, all of it matched the pattern documented in
- 16:44Speaker 1: Heller County with a precision that a defense attorney could
- 16:48Speaker 1: not argue away. Her statement shaped the terms of the plea.
- 16:52Speaker 1: The forty seven thousand dollars beneficiary change on Gaale Crawford's
- 16:56Speaker 1: life insurance policy, the one signed over to Karl's Simmons
- 17:00Speaker 1: in November twenty eighteen, was reverted. The signature that had
- 17:05Speaker 1: quietly transferred her daughter's inheritance to a man with a
- 17:08Speaker 1: camera in a bird house, was legally unwound. The co
- 17:12Speaker 1: signed loan of twelve thousand dollars is a different matter.
- 17:15Speaker 1: Jeffrey Williams, the p I Patrise Crawford retained when the
- 17:19Speaker 1: sheriff's inquiry stalled, confirmed that legal recovery is under way.
- 17:25Speaker 1: He estimates approximately sixty percent of that amount can be recovered.
- 17:29Speaker 1: The process will take roughly one additional year to complete.
- 17:33Speaker 1: The remaining forty percent, by his estimate, is simply gone.
- 17:37Speaker 1: There is one detail the record cannot close. At some
- 17:40Speaker 1: point during the relationship. The exact moment is not publicly confirmed.
- 17:46Speaker 1: Gail Crawford's emergency contact was changed from her daughter Patrise
- 17:50Speaker 1: to Carl Simmons. The person designated to be called if
- 17:54Speaker 1: something went wrong had been quietly replaced by the person
- 17:57Speaker 1: engineering the wrong. That change has since been corrected, but
- 18:01Speaker 1: it sits in the record as perhaps the clearest single
- 18:03Speaker 1: illustration of how completely one person's reality can be rearranged
- 18:08Speaker 1: without their knowledge. Gail Crawford initially refused to cooperate with investigators.
- 18:15Speaker 1: That is not a footnote. It is the point by
- 18:18Speaker 1: the time the camera was found, Simmons had been present
- 18:21Speaker 1: in her life for nearly eighteen months. He had weft
- 18:25Speaker 1: in her kitchen, He had sat in the pew beside her.
- 18:29Speaker 1: He had been to her experience a man who needed her.
- 18:33Speaker 1: The dismantling of that belief did not happen quickly, and
- 18:36Speaker 1: nothing in the public record suggests it happened without cost.
- 18:40Speaker 1: What the evidence does confirm is this, she retracted the
- 18:44Speaker 1: beneficiary change, she allowed the investigation to proceed, and somewhere
- 18:48Speaker 1: in that sequence, the Trice Crawford's name went back where
- 18:52Speaker 1: it had always belonged. There is something in this case
- 18:55Speaker 1: that resists simple categorization as a financial crime. The money
- 19:00Speaker 1: was the destination, but the surveillance came first, a camera
- 19:03Speaker 1: placed eighteen months before a single conversation, routines mapped before
- 19:08Speaker 1: a friendship existed. The relationship was not the crime with
- 19:12Speaker 1: a financial motive. The relationship was the instrument, built from
- 19:16Speaker 1: data collected through a lens the size of a coat
- 19:19Speaker 1: button mounted in a cedar Ren box on a vacant
- 19:22Speaker 1: lot in Heller County. Marcus Dunn logged an unauthorized power
- 19:27Speaker 1: splice in spring two thy seventeen and filed a report
- 19:32Speaker 1: that went nowhere. Edward Carter walked past that poll many
- 19:36Speaker 1: times over three years before he crouched at the right
- 19:39Speaker 1: angle on a Tuesday morning in early April twenty nineteen.
- 19:43Speaker 1: Patricia Bowen caught Carl Simmons going through her papers in
- 19:47Speaker 1: twenty thirteen and ended the relationship without filing a report.
- 19:52Speaker 1: Any one of those moments handled differently changes the timeline entirely.
- 19:57Speaker 1: Gail Crawford still lives at forty four Milli Race Road.
- 20:01Speaker 1: She has lived there for eleven years since Dennis died.
- 20:04Speaker 1: The Tuesday Card Club still meets Saint Ambrose Lutheran still
- 20:08Speaker 1: holds its nine fifteen service on Sunday mornings. The vacant
- 20:12Speaker 1: lot to the north is still there. The bird House
- 20:15Speaker 1: is not. What Karl Simmons understood, and what the evidence
- 20:19Speaker 1: demonstrates with uncomfortable clarity, is that trust is not a feeling.
- 20:25Speaker 1: It is a system, and systems, if you study them
- 20:28Speaker 1: long enough, from the right angle can be entered. This
- 20:31Speaker 1: show is made by Obo Media