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He Made Me Forget: How My Counselor Stole My Life and Ledger · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The note book was not dropped. It was placed spine inward,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: elastic band facing out, angled just so against the down
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: spout bracket to shed rain. A bird watcher named Megan
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Hunt almost walked past it on a Thursday morning in
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: June of two thousand nineteen. She didn't, and the moment
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: she pulled it free and read the first page, a
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: councilor's eleven year career began to collapse. The name on
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: the inside cover was William Hughes. What came after it
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: would take investigators months to fully read. That same week,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: fifty three miles away, a man named Ryan Cooper was
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: sitting in a house he no longer fully trusted himself
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: to understand. He had started doubting his own memory eight
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: months earlier, He had started doubting his own finances the
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: year before that, and six months before that, he had
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: started trusting the one person who, it turned out, was
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the reason for all of it. There are two things
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: worth knowing before this story moves forward. The first is
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: that Ryan Cooper is not a careless man. The second
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: is that William Hughes knew exactly how to use that
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: against him. Ryan Cooper had lived four blocks from Calvary
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Rich Community Church for eleven years. He walked to work
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: most mornings, crossing the same two intersections through Dellard County, Tennessee,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: arriving early enough to unlock the side entrance before the
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: staff began filtering in. He was the church's administrator, the
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: person who kept the building functioning, the accounts reconciled, the
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: schedules co ordinated. He was, by every account from colleagues, methodical,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: careful with detail, the kind of man who noticed when
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: something was two degrees off. He was also a widower.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: His wife, Diane, died in two thousand thirteen. They had
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: two children, Nichole, who was twenty six at the time
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: the story reaches its center, living in Knoxville, and Trevor,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: twenty three. Every Wednesday at ten fifteen in the evening,
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Ryan called them both. He had done it for four
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: years without missing a week, not as a ritual he
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: had announced or made sentimental, simply as something he did
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the way careful people do the things that matter to
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: them quietly. The cream colored Craftsman on Aldwell Street was
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: where he had raised his children, and where he had
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: watched Diane decline, and where he had come home alone
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: for six years after. He kept her jewelry in a
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: walnut box on the dresser in the bedroom. He did
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: not hide it. He did not need to. By the
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: fall of two thousand sixteen, Ryan had been managing the
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: administrative weight of Cavalry Ridge for a decade. He was
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: also quietly carrying grief that had never been formally addressed.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: He slept unevenly. He found himself at times losing the
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: thread of a conversation he had been certain he was following.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: He mentioned this to Gerald Foss, Calvary Ridge's pastor, less
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: as a complaint than as a fact he was noting aloud.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Foss had recently hired a licensed professional counselor to expand
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the church's pastoral care program. The man's name was William Hughes.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: He was forty four years old, credentialed, experienced, or so
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: his paperwork suggested, and he came with references that no
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: one had reason at that moment to question closely. His
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: office was in the education wing. He had been assigned
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: a side entrance building code for after hours access. Ryan
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: began bi weekly sessions with Hughes in January of twenty seventeen.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: He came by his own later account because he needed
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: to talk to someone who would actually listen. Grief does
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: not move on a schedule. It waits, and then its
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: surfaces in the spaces where a person is otherwise trying
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: to function. Hughes appeared to understand this. He asked the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: right questions. He returned to threads from prior sessions without
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: being prompted. He remembered the details Ryan offered. Ryan would
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: later tell Nicole in the language that would appear in
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: investigator's statements, that Hughes was the first person since his
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: mother who actually listened. That sentence said in the context
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: of trust, becomes something different when you understand what Hughes
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: was doing with every detail Ryan gave him, it becomes
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: a ledger entry. Because by spring of twenty seventeen, William
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Hughes had begun asking Ryan about his finances. The question
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Hughes raised in that spring session was framed as concern
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Ryan was carrying a great deal. Hughes observed the administrative
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: load of Cavalry Ridge, the unresolved grief, the general friction
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: of managing money alone. After years of sharing those decisions
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: with Diane and Ryan considered whether his current financial arrangements
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: were actually serving him, or had they simply become habit
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: something he maintained because changing anything felt like one more loss.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Ryan had not thought of it in those terms, but
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: now that Hughes framed it that way, yes, that was
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: probably accurate. Hughes mentioned a name, Patrick Seal, a financial adviser,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: someone Hughes described as careful, methodical, good with people who
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: had been through significant life changes. Hughes did not push.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: He mentioned the name once and moved on. That was
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: the technique, the mention that did not feel like a suggestion.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Ryan met with Seal that spring. The meeting went well.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Seal was calm, precise, and asked questions that felt like
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: he was genuinely trying to understand Ryan's situation rather than
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: sell him something. Over the following months, Ryan moved approximately
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: eighty seven thousand dollars into account ups that Seal managed.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: The document Ryan signed to authorize this was titled Account
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Consolidation and Asset Review Authorization. Ryan had not read past
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: page one. The actual legal text buried in the remaining
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: pages was a limited durable power of Attorney. It granted
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Seal broad authority over the transferred assets. Hughes was listed
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: as a co authorizing party. Ryan's signature on that document
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: meant that Hughes now held legal standing over a significant
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: portion of Ryan's financial life, not as a vague influence,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: but as a named party on a binding legal instrument.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: That is the first image that stays a document with
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: a friendly title, eighty seven thousand dollars moving quietly through
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: a door. Ryan thought he had only opened a crack.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: By March of two thousand eighteen, a letter arrived at
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: the Oldwell Street house. It was from Ryan's homeowner's insurance carrier.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: His policy had lapsed. The auto pay account it drew
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: from had been closed, the balance had been transferred. Ryan
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: held the letter and could not immediately account for how
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: this had happened. He had a vague memory of signing
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: something related to account consolidation, but the specifics would not come.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: He brought this to Hughes at their next session. Hughes
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: had a name for what Ryan was experiencing. He called
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: it paper fog, the way administrative grief could blur the
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: edges of decisions a person had technically made but emotionally
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: never processed. It was a reasonable sounding frame. It was
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: not a clinical term. It was something Hughes constructed in
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: that room. To explain away a consequence Hughes had engineered,
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: the insurance had lapsed because money Hughes could influence had
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: been moved. Hughes offered Ryan an interpretation that made Ryan
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: the source of his own confusion. Is the mechanism, stated, plainly,
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: manufacture the condition, then name it for the person living
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: inside it. There is a walnut box. It sat on
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: the dresser in the Aldwell Street bedroom since twenty thirteen,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: the year Diane died. The jewelry inside had belonged to her.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Ryan had not worn it, displayed it, or cataloged it.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: He had simply kept it, the way a person keeps
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: the thing that proves someone was real. Thanksgiving of twenty eighteen,
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Nikole was home. She noticed the box was lighter than
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: she remembered. She opened it, several pieces were gone. Nicole
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: asked Ryan about it quietly, without alarm. Ryan did not
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: know the pieces were missing. He had not looked closely
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: at the box in months. He thought for a moment,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: trying to reconstruct when he had last seen each item.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: He called Hughes, not the Sheriff's department, not a family friend,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: not anyone at Calvary Ridge. He called William Hughes at
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: nine forty seven in the evening and asked whether Hughes
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: had any idea what might have happened. Hughes did not
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: express surprise. He expressed concern, a careful, measured concern. He
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: raised the possibility that Ryan might be experiencing something Hughes
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: had been noticing for a while, memory disruptions, small dissociative episodes,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: possibly stress related. Had Ryan considered that he might have
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: moved the jewelry himself during one of those periods without
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: retaining a clear memory of it. Ryan had not considered that,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: but now that Hughes raised it, he could not rule
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: it out. That exchange is worth holding for a moment.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Ryan had not been diagnosed with any memory or cognitive condition.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: The dissociative episodes framing was not a clinical finding. It
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: was Hughes's suggestion, offered in a phone call. The night.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Jewelry that Hughes had physically removed from the house was
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: reported and missing. Hughes did not introduce doubt. He introduced
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: a self diagnosis, and he offered it at the exact moment.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: It would do the most structural damage when Ryan was
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: already uncertain, already trying to reconstruct what he knew, already
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: inclined to trust the person on the other end of
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: the call. The pieces were never recovered. Ryan did not
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: file a police report. Now, consider what Hughes had at
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: this point assembled. A power of attorney document Ryan had
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: signed without reading fully, a financial adviser with an undisclosed
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: personal relationship to Hughes managing Ryan's transferred assets, a building
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: code for Ryan's home given voluntarily for a legitimate reason,
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: never changed, And now a narrative. Ryan's own mind was unreliable.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: If something was missing, the most plausible explanation was Ryan himself.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: It was not a dramatic unraveling. It was a slow
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: re arrangement of the wall of the room Ryan trusted
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: himself to navigate. Picture the Aldwell Street house during Ryan's
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: working hours, the street is quiet. A man with the
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: door code enters through the front, moves through a space
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: he has visited at least six times. By the account
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: reconstructed from phone records, bank logs, bank logs, and the
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: testimony of the locksmith, Steve Farrow, he is not rushed.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: He knows the schedule, he knows which items are liquidatable
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: and which would be noticed immediately. He takes what the
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: notebook will later document, and he leaves. There are two
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: possible explanations for what Hughes was doing. The first is
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: opportunistic accumulation. That Hughes identified Ryan as a target with
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: particular vulnerabilities, gained access through a counseling relationship, and extracted
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: what he could through a combination of legal instruments and
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: physical access without a fully premeditated architecture. Under this this version,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: the power of attorney document was aggressive, but improvised. The
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: door code access was a convenience Hughes had not originally
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: planned to exploit. The dissociative episodes suggestion was reactive something
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Hughes invented on the night of Nicholl's call to protect himself.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: But this version collapses the moment you look at the
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: note book. The dark green leather notebook that Megan Hunt
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: found wedged behind a down spout bracket on June sixth
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen was not a record of one man's exploitation.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: It documented fourteen individuals across Hughes's career. The margin annotations
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: added in a second ink matching a second pen found
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: in Hughes's office were transactional amounts, dates, items obtained. The
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: note book had been moved from the Aldwell Street house
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: to the church exterior in April of two thousand nineteen.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: When Ryan first mentioned wanting to close the seal account,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Hughes created a retrieval point outside the house he no
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: longer felt safe accessing that is not reactive, that is
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: a system. The second version, and the one that the
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: evidence supports most fully, is that William Hughes had been
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: running a coordinated method since at least two thousand seven,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: counseling adjacent rolls, trust building, financial redirection, quiet exit, and
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: that Ryan Cooper was not a target of opportunity. Ryan
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: was a known profile, isolated, grieving, conscientious about his responsibilities,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: trusting of institutional relationships, and carrying the kind of paper
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: administrative weight that a person with Hughes's specific skill set
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: could turn into a lever. Bennett's reconstruction confirmed it Hughes
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: had held counseling adjacent rolls since two thousand seven across
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Bowling Green, Murfreesborough, Clarksville, and Shelbyville. Each position ended without
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: formal complaint. Each coincided with quiet financial disreus eruptions that
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: examined individually looked like mismanagement or coincidence. Two elderly members
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: of a Shelbyville congregation had experienced unexplained the count discrepancies
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: the year before Hughes departed that town. No one had
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: connected them. Hughes had never stayed long enough in any
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: one place to generate a formal record. The notebook was
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the record he had kept for himself. Here is what
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: that recontextualizes. The green leather notebook found by a bird
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: watcher on a damp June morning was not evidence Hughes
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: had forgotten. It was documentation Hughes had maintained deliberately and
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: then moved when the exit was near. He had placed
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: it outside the house at a retrieval point because he
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: planned to collect it he was interrupted. What the notebook
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: contained was not a confession. It was an operational log
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: fourteen names across twelve years, and the fact that it
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: smelled faintly of Aldwell Street Cedar when it was logged
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: into evidence after the trial suggests that for some portion
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: of its existence it had sat in Ryan Cooper's house
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: among the things belonging to a man Hughes had spent
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: two years teaching to distrust his own memory. Hughes was
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: arrested on June fourteenth, twenty nineteen. The charges read financial exploitation, theft,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: and on lawful use of power of attorney. He said
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: nothing that day. He said plenty later. In August of
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a man named Troy Wills was sharing
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: a cell with Hughes in the Dellard County Facility. Wills listened,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: then Wills talked to investigators. He reported that Hughes had
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: described his approach to Ryan Cooper with something close to
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: professional pride. The patience required the calibration of trust, the
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: way a grieving person's need for certainty could be redirected
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: into dependence. When detectives confronted Hughes with Wills's account in
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: September of two thousand nineteen, Hughes confessed formally. The confession
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: did not restore ausising dollar. It did not give Ryan
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Cooper back the Walnut Box or the five years he
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: had spent second guessing his own mind. But it closed
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: one specific and important door, the question of whether Ryan
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: had imagined any of it. He had not imagined any
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: of it. The trial took place in the spring of
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight counts, eight convictions. The sentence came down
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: at eleven years leon. Bennett's financial reconstruction entered into evidence.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Blow showed that approximately eighty seven thousand dollars had moved
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: through Patrick Seal's managed accounts between two thouy seventeen and
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. At the time Ryan gave his formal statement,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: the court process for partial recovery was still active. The
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: money had not been fully returned. Bennett had also done
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: something the prosecution had not initially requested. He had traced
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Hughes's employment history backward through Bowling Green, Murphy Borough, Clarksville,
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: and Shelbyville, twelve years of counseling adjacent rolls, each ending
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: without formal complaint, each coinciding with quiet financial disruptions that
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: no one had aggregated into a pattern. Two elderly members
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: of a Shelbyville congregation had reported unexplained account discrepancies the
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: year before Hughes left that town. No one had connected
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: those discrepancies to Hughes. No one had been looking. Bennett
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: forwarded the full record to prosecutors in three additional counties.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: The Green leather notebook, sown binding elastic strap, fourteen names
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: across twelve years, was returned to evidence storage after the trial.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: It remains there. There is a detail in the forensic
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: log that investigators noted but that had no legal weight
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: at trial. When the notebook was processed for evidence after
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the conviction, the examiner noted a faint cedar smell Aldwell Street.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: The house Ryan Cooper had lived in for years had
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: cedar lined closets. The note book had at some point
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: been inside that house. Hughes had kept his operational record
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: in the home of a man he was systematically dismantling.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: That is not carelessness. That is a particular kind of confidence.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: The week Hughes was arrested, Ryan Cooper changed the door
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: code on the Caldwell Street house he had been living
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: with that same code, though one he had volunteered for
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: a legitimate reason eighteen months earlier, for the entire duration
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: of what Hughes had done to him. Changing the code
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: took less than three minutes. Ryan Cooper resumed his Wednesday
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: evening calls to Nicole and Trevor the same week of
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the arrest ten fifteen in the evening, as he had
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: done for four years. Nicoll was twenty six and living
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: in Knoxville. Trevor was twenty three. Neither of them had
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: been able to make Ryan understand before the arrest that
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: what was happening to him was not something he was
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: doing to himself. This is the part of the case
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that resists a clean resolution. Hughes received eleven years for
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: what he did to Ryan Cooper, and by extension, for
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: what Bennett's record suggests he had been doing in quieter
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: increments since two thousand seven. The sentence is real, the
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: conviction on all eight counts is real. But the notebook
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: in evidence storage still has thirteen other names in it,
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: and the financial recovery was still incomplete when Ryan made
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: his statement. The document Ryan had signed, the one with
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the cover title Account Consolidation and Asset Review Authorization, was
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: a limited, durable power of attorney. Ryan had not read
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: past page one. Hughes had known he would not read
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: past page one, because Hughes had spent months calibrating exactly
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: how much cognitive load Ryan was already carrying and exactly
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: where his trust would override his caution. That is not
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: a legal technicality, that is a methodology. Hughes had developed
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: it across twelve years and at least four jurisdictions, and
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: it had never generated a formal complaint until a bird
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: watcher named Megan Hunt crouched down beside a downspout bracket
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: on a damp June morning and found a notebook that
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: smelled faintly of someone else's home. There is something in
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: this case that still lands hard, even after the conviction,
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: even after the sentence. Ryan Cooper was not a person
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: who failed to protect himself. He was a careful man
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: eleven years as a church administrator, a person who tracked details,
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: who called his children every Wednesday at the same time,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: who had kept a walnut box of his wife's jewelry
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: on his dresser for five years because he was not
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: ready to put it away. Hughes did not find a
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: gap in Ryan's defenses. He built the gap session by session,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: suggestions by suggestion, a clinical vocabulary applied to a grieving
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: man's ordinary confusion, until Ryan's own perception became the thing
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: he could no longer rely on. The name for that
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: applied with this precision over this duration is not manipulation
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: in the casual sense of word. It is the deliberate
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: dismantling of another person's reality. Ryan Cooper changed his door code,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: He called his children. He is still, according to the record,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: waiting for some portion of what was taken from him
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: to come back through the court process. The notebook is
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: in a storage room in Dellard County, fourteen names twelve
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: years Megan Hunt almost walked past it. This show is
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: made by Obomedia.