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He Rewrote Her Reality: The Man Who Stole an Old Woman's Life · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: No issue. On the morning of February ninth, twenty nineteen,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Lloyd Ford was reading utility meters on Tilman Road when
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: he found a woman's purse sitting upright on a meter pad.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: The brass clasp was intact, eighty three dollars in cash
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: was still inside. The leather surface was coated in frost,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: which meant it had been there all night in fourteen
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: degree air, untouched. A purse is not placed upright when
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: someone falls apart. It is placed upright when someone once
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: it found That same morning, less than a hundred yards away,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: an eighty one year old woman named Dorothy Peterson sat
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: alone in a house on Tilman Road. When a neighbor
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: checked on her. Dorothy asked one question. She asked when
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Randy was coming back. There was a twenty two year
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: old woman missing, and the person her grandmother was asking
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: about was the reason she was gone. This is the
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: story of how Randy Weber spent eight months dismantling one
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: woman's sense of reality, and how a structured leather purse
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: left in the frost became the detail that unraveled everything
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: he had built. Aldersport is the kind of small Ohio
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: town where a family name on a mailbox still means something.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Neighbors track each other's routines the way farmers track weather,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: not as surveillance, but as care. Dorothy Peterson had lived
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: on Tillmen Road for decades. Phil Norris, two houses down,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: had known her for fifteen years. Dorothy was eighty one.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: She lived in the house where her family had always lived.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Her granddaughter Rebecca had moved in to help care for her,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: and that arrangement had been working. Rebecca Peterson was twenty two.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: She had started cashiering at the local farm supply when
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: she was seventeen, and she had kept that job. Every
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Tuesday evening from six to eight, she volunteered at the
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Aldersport food shelf, helping sort and distribute goods to families
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: in the area. Bette Holman, the food shelf co ordinator,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: knew Rebecca's schedule by heart. Rebecca was the kind of
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: person whose absence would be noticed immediately she called back,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: she showed up. She kept her commitments with the consistency
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: of some one who understood that other people were depending
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: on her. She was, also, by the nature of her life,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: carrying a great deal. She was young, working and serving
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: as the primary caregiver for an elderly woman with increasing
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: cognitive needs. Dorothy's doctor, doctor Fay Osgoode at Harwick County
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Medical Group, had been monitoring Dorothy's cognitive state. The withdrawal
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: was gradual, It was noted, but it was not yet alarming.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Into that household in the spring of two thousand eighteen
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: came Randy Weber. Weber was thirty eight, based in the
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: nearby town of Dalton. He had no formal certification as
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: a home care aid. He presented himself as a handyman,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: some one who could help with repairs and errands, the
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: kind of informal arrangement that many families in small towns
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: rely on when professional services feel too distant or too expensive.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: He had one prior record, an expunged misdemeanor for check
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: fraud in two thousand eleven. That record was not visible
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: to the Peterson family when he arrived. What happened next
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: did not look like exploitation from the outside. That was
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: precisely the point. Weber moved through the household. Gradually, he
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: made himself useful, He made himself present, He made himself,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: over the course of months, indispensable. Doctor Anita Morse a
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: clinical psychologist consulted after Weber's arrest described his approach as
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: text book love bombing compressed into a narrow window. The
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: warmth came fast and without condition. The help arrived before
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: anyone thought to ask for it, Rebecca later wrote in
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: a spiral note book, and notebook investigators would eventually find
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: that Randy said she misremembered things. She wrote, maybe I do.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: That sentence in her own handwriting is the clearest record
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: of what Weber's method actually accomplished. He did not need
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: to lock a door. He had already rewritten the map
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: of the room. By June of two thousand eighteen, Phil
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Norris walked past the Peterson mail box and noticed it
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: had been re labeled. It read Weber Peterson. He had
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: known Dorothy for fifteen years. He said nothing. By October
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen, Dorothy signed a durable power of attorney.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Doctor Osgoode later flagged the signature as inconsistent with Dorothy's
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: established handwriting. At the time, no one caught it. The
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: household had been reorganized around one man's presence, and Rebecca,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: twenty two years old, was still in it, still working,
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  Speaker 1: still volunteering on tuesdays, b still trying to hold the
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: shape of her life together while something she could not
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: yet name was pulling it apart. The first concrete sign
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: that something had broken through the surface came from a pharmacist.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Curtis Beale worked at alders Port Food Drug In May
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen. He flagged a double refill on
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Peterson's prescription. The man who came in to collect
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: it identified himself as Dorothy's son in law. Dorothy had
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: no son in law. Beale noted it. He did not
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: report it until fall, when investigators came asking that gap
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: may to fall. Is where most of the damage was done.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: The joint bank account had been opened some time in
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: the spring of two thousand eighteen. Webber framed it as
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: household management. Easier for groceries, he said, easier for utilities.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: The account made practical sense on its surface, which was
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: exactly what it was designed to do. Over the next
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: eight months, eleven thousand dollars moved out of that account
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: in small increments, each one calibrated to stay below automatic
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: flagging thresholds. Not one transfer stood out on its own. Together,
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: they were a system. Here is the thing about that account.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Rebecca's name was on it too, which meant that when
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: investigators first looked at the withdrawals, the transfers appeared bilateral.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Two account holders, shared access, shared management. It was only
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: when Earl Graham, a civil investigator with Harwick County Adult
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Protective Services and a former sheriff's deputy, indeed mapped the
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: timing of every transaction against Weber's known movements that the
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: pattern became undeniable. Every withdrawal occurred on a day Weber
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: had been present in the house, not once on a
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: day he had not. January twenty ninth, two thousand nineteen,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Rebecca Peterson missed her Tuesday shift at the alder Sport
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Food shelf. That had never happened before. Be Holman, the
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: food shelf coordinator, held the intake spot open. She told herself,
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Rebecca must have had a reason. The reason was County
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Road eighteen. That evening, Rebecca was on the side of
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: that road with Randy Webber, whose truck had stalled. She
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: called for assistance. She stayed with him until it was resolved.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: She did not make it back to the food shelf
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: by six o'clock. When the situation cleared, Weber sent her
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: a text got home fine, seriously, thank you. The truck's
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: battery was later tested. It was fully charged. The breakdown
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: had not been a breakdown. It had been a rehearsal, or,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: more precisely, a repetition, because this is where the investigation opened,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: a door no one had expected to find. When the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: second search warrant came through. After Webber's arraignment, detectives went
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: to a storage unit registered in his name outside Delton.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Inside a prepaid phone, a folder of Dorothy's financial documents,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and a handwritten list four names, four of addresses. Two
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: of the names corresponded to elderly women in Carver County.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: One of those names had a small check mark next
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: to it. Rebecca's name was not on the list. Dorothy's
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: was not either, but Detective Marcus Holt of Carver County
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: looked at the list and recognized the method. In twenty sixteen,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: an elderly widower named Albert Finch had reported twenty three
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars missing from his accounts. A handyman had spent
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: several months at his home. The handyman had made himself useful.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: The case had stalled when Holt saw Webber's list and
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: the check mark he reopened it. Weber, when asked about
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: the list during his third interview, called it prospecting that
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: word landed in the court room and did not leave.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Not a crime of opportunity, not a relationship that went wrong,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: a selection process, a pipeline. Rebecca and Dorothy had been
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: inventory picture the moment. Earl Graham spread those bank records
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: across his desk and drew a line through the dates
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: He had spent three hours with Rebecca on February twelfth.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: She had come in guarded and left exhausted. She told
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: him she had been confused about her own memory for months.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: She said Randy had often explained to her what had
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: actually happened when she thought she remembered it differently. Graham
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: had heard versions of this before. What he had not
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: heard before was the notebook. Rebecca had kept a spiral
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: notebook in the months leading up to February eighth. She
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: had not kept it as evidence. She had kept it
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: because she was trying to figure out whether she was
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: losing her mind. One entry read Randy says, I misremember things?
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  Speaker 1: May I do? Graham described that notebook entry in forty
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: minutes of testimony at sentencing. He said it was the
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: clearest behavioral record he had encountered in eleven years of
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: elder financial exploitation cases, not because it documented what Weber
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: had taken, but because it documented what Weber had replaced.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: He had replaced Rebecca's confidence in her own perception. There
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: is something specifically difficult about this kind of harm. It
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: does not leave a mark that shows up in a photograph.
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  Speaker 1: It shows up in a sentence a twenty two year
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: old writes to herself at night, trying to decide whether
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: her own memory is trustworthy. Now consider what the physical
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: evidence did to that sentence. The truck battery was charged,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: The pharmacy visit was fraudulent, the power of attorney signature
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: was inconsistent, the bank transfers were timed to his presence.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Every concrete, testable fact pointed in the same direction. The
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: confusion Rebecca documented in that notebook was not a simple
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: of instability. It was the intended result of a deliberate
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: and documented process. Walk the scenario forward from County Road eighteen.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: If the breakdown was staged, and the battery confirms it was,
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  Speaker 1: then Weber needed Rebecca isolated from one commitment before he
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: could accelerate the financial moves he had already begun. The
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: food shelf shift was not incidental. Her absence that Tuesday
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: created a gap in the one routine she still controlled independently.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Within ten days, she had confronted him, walked out without
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: her purse, and was sleeping at a motel in Delton
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  Speaker 1: with thirty dollars. Now, picture the purse on the meter pad, upright,
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  Speaker 1: brass clasp intact, frost across the leather, eighty three dollars
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: inside her driver's license inside. A purse does not land
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  Speaker 1: that way. It falls, or it is thrown, or it
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  Speaker 1: is placed. This one was placed. Weber had framed the
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  Speaker 1: act to any one who might look as evidence that
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Rebecca had come apart, her id left behind, her cash
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: left behind, gone. But the storage unit told a different story.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: The prepaid phone, the folder, the list with its single
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: check mark. A person coming apart does not maintain operational infrastructure.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: A person running a system does. The version that held
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: was not the one Weber offered. He maintained through arraignment
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: that the relationship had been consensual, that Rebecca was unstable,
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: that he had provided genuine care. His attorney noted for
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: the record that some care had in fact been provided,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: and that remains uncontested. Weber was in the house, he
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: did tasks, he was present. What the evidence established was
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: the architecture beneath the presence, the manufactured entry point, the
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: staged dependency, but the financial extraction timed to his movement,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: the systematic erosion of Rebecca's trust in her own account
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: of events, and a handwritten list of four names that
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: proved none of it was singular. The coercive control charge,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: rarely prosecuted in Herrowick County, rested almost entirely on that
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: note book and on Earl Graham's mapping of the withdrawal dates.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: The jury did not deliberate long. Randy Webber was arrested
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: on the morning of February nineteen, two thousand nineteen. He
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: was thirty eight years old. He had been in Dorothy
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Peterson's house for roughly eight months. At the arraignment, he
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: maintained that everything had been consensual. He said Rebecca was unstable.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: He said he had provided genuine care. His attorney noted
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: for the record that some care had in fact been delivered,
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: and the record does not contradict that Weber fixed things.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: He was present he showed up. What the investigation established
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: was what lived underneath the showing up. Earl Graham testified
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: for forty minutes. At sentencing, walked the court through the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: withdrawal pattern. Eleven thousand dollars moved in small increments across
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: eight months. Each transfer kept below the threshold that triggers
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: automatic review. He mapped the dates against Webber's documented movements.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: The correlation was not incidental. Doctor Fay Osgoode testified for
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: twenty minutes. She described the appointment in late January twenty nineteen,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Dorothy sitting across from her, Weber in the room, Dorothy
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: turning to look at him before answering a routine health question.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Osgoode had noted it. She had not escalated. She testified
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: to that plainly. Doctor Anita Morse, the clinical psychologist consulted
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: after Weber's arrest, gave the framework a name. She called
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: it love bombing, compressed into a narrow window. Maximum warmth,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: maximum presence, maximum apparent indispensability, delivered fast enough that withdrawal
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: of all three would feel catastrophic before or the target
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: could assess what had happened. Textbook, she said, her word
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: the durable power of attorney Dorothy had signed in October
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, carried a signature that Osgood flagged as inconsistent
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: with Dorothy's prior documents. Weber had identified himself to the
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: pharmacist at Aldersport Food Drug as Dorothy's son in law
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: to obtain a second prescription refill. Dorothy had no son
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: in law. The second warrant reached the storage unit inside
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: a prepaid phone, a folder containing Dorothy's financial documents, a
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: handwritten list of four names and addresses. Two of the
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: names were elderly women in Carver County. One name carried
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: a check mark. Detective Marcus Holt of Carver County recognized
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: the method. He connected it to a twenty sixteen case
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: involving Albert Finch, an elderly widower twenty three thousand dollars
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: unaccounted for. That case was reopened after Weber's arrest. No
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: additional charges were filed before sentencing. Four names on a list,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: one check mark, Rebecca and Dorothy were entries in a
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: system Waber described in his own words during confession as prospecting.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: The confession itself was transactional. Weber did not express remorse.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: He exchanged the mechanics of the operation, how the transfers
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: were structured, how the power of attorney was obtained for
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: a reduction in one of the charges. He gave up
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the architecture in exchange for a lighter ceiling. The jury
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: convicted on financial exploitation six years. The coercive control charge
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: added eighteen months. That charge is rarely prosecuted in Harwick County.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: It rested on two things. Rebecca's spiral notebook, in which
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: she had written that Randy says she misremembers things and
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: maybe she does, and Earl Graham's precise mapping of the
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: withdrawal dates against us, the timeline of her social isolation.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Weber is eligible for parole review in four years. Rebecca
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Peterson was found at the Delton Motel on February tenth,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, physically unharmed. She had thirty dollars when she arrived.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: The motel manager, Vic Abbate, had extended her credit when
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the money ran out. She had walked out of the
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: house on Tilman Road on February eighth, without her purse,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: without her eighty three dollars, without her driver's license. She
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: had left those things behind, or rather they had been
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: left for her, staged on a meter pad in fourteen
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: degree air, to tell a particular story about who she
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: was and what had happened to her. Bette Hulman had
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: held her intake spot at the Aldersport food shelf through
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: February and into March. Rebecca returned in April twenty nineteen,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: Tuesday evening six to eight. Dorothy Peterson moved to columns
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: with her daughter Joanne. In March twenty nineteen, the woman
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: who had looked at Randy Webber before answering her own
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: doctor's questions left the house on Tilman Road and did
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: not go back. There is something that stays with anyone
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: who reads the full record of this case. It is
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: not the financial figure eleven thousand dollars is significant, but
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: it is not the most disturbing number here. The most
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: disturbing detail is the notebook. Rebecca kept it herself. She
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: was trying to hold on to what she knew was true,
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: writing it down so she would not lose it, and
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: in the same sentences she was already doubting whether she
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: had the right to trust her own memory at all.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: That is what eight months of sustained, methodical pressure does
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: to a person. It does not announce itself, It accumulates.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Phil Norris saw the mailbox label Webber Peterson in June
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen and did not report it. Doctor Osgood saw
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: Dorothy turn toward Weber before answering and did not escalate.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Curtis Beale flagged the double refill in May twenty eighteen
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: and reported it months later. None of these people acted
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: with malice. Each of them saw one piece. The piece
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: alone looked like it might be nothing. That is the
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: architecture this case exposes. It does not require secrecy. It
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: requires that each individual signal remained just plausible enough that
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: no one person feels certain enough to act. The isolation,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: the financial moves, the coached responses. None of it trips
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: a single wire loudly enough in isolation to force a response.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: The system depends on the gap between what any one
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: person sees and what the full picture contains. Rebecca Peterson
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: had worked the food shehelf since she was in her
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: early twenties, showing up on Tuesday nights to make sure
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: her neighbors had enough. When she came back in in April,
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: she came back to the same room, the same shift,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: the same work that return quiet and unannounced is the
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: detail this case leaves behind. Randy Weber called it prospecting.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: She called it Tuesday. This show is made by Obomedia