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She Was Never Alone: The Fourteen Cards That Mapped Control · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: At seven forty two in the morning on December ninth,
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Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a man named Jason Duncan stood at
0:12
Speaker 1: the edge of Pelton Reservoir with a four hundred millimeter
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Speaker 1: lens trained on a great blue heron. He never got
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Speaker 1: the shot. What his camera captured instead was a window
0:23
Speaker 1: and a woman standing behind it, one hand pressed flat
0:27
Speaker 1: against the glass. Fourteen small index cards hung from the
0:31
Speaker 1: curtain rod above her head, evenly spaced like a border
0:35
Speaker 1: she had made for herself. Jason posted the photo to
0:39
Speaker 1: a bird watching forum that afternoon. He thought it was
0:42
Speaker 1: interesting light. He had no idea that a woman he
0:46
Speaker 1: had never met would see that photo the next morning,
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Speaker 1: make a phone call and set in motion an investigation
0:54
Speaker 1: that would expose something investigators would later call one of
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Speaker 1: the most methodical cases of coercive control they had seen
1:01
Speaker 1: in Callaway Township. Here is what made the photo strange.
1:06
Speaker 1: Those fourteen cards were not decorations, and the woman in
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Speaker 1: the window, a sixty two year old retired librarian named
1:14
Speaker 1: Sarah Carter, did not put them there herself. Sarah Carter
1:18
Speaker 1: had spent thirty years at the Callaway Township Public Library,
1:23
Speaker 1: not thirty years in a vague institutional sense thirty years,
1:27
Speaker 1: knowing the name of every regular patron, keeping a running
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Speaker 1: mental list of which children had graduated to chapter books,
1:34
Speaker 1: and maintaining what her colleagues described as an almost architectural
1:38
Speaker 1: sense of order. She was the kind of person who
1:40
Speaker 1: returned phone calls the same day, who knew exactly where
1:45
Speaker 1: her car keys were, who had a dry joke ready
1:48
Speaker 1: before you finished the question. She had lived in the
1:50
Speaker 1: same colonial house on Fenwick Drive for twenty six years.
1:55
Speaker 1: Yellow clapboard siding, a side door she kept locked out
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Speaker 1: of the house was hers the way a reference section
2:03
Speaker 1: is a librarian's. She knew every corner of it, and
2:06
Speaker 1: she kept it exactly as she intended. Her husband, Carl,
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Speaker 1: died in two thousand eleven from a cardiac event. They
2:14
Speaker 1: had been married long enough that the house still had
2:16
Speaker 1: his rhythms in it, the way a room holds temperature.
2:19
Speaker 1: Sarah grieved, and then she got on with things. That
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Speaker 1: was how people who knew her described it, not coldly,
2:26
Speaker 1: but with the matter of fact resilience that had always
2:29
Speaker 1: been her register. She had one daughter, Ellen, who lived
2:32
Speaker 1: in Portland, Oregon. She called Ellen regularly. She had a
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Speaker 1: sister named Donna, who was in a care facility in
2:40
Speaker 1: Portman with advanced Parkinson's. Every Wednesday at two in the afternoon,
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Speaker 1: Sarah drove the fourteen miles to Portman and sat with Donna. Rain, cold,
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Speaker 1: family obligation, scheduling, conflict, none of it moved that appointment
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Speaker 1: Wednesday at two, fourteen miles every week. She had no
3:02
Speaker 1: documented history of anxiety. She had never been described by
3:06
Speaker 1: anyone who knew her as dependent, easily persuaded, or uncertain.
3:12
Speaker 1: The word her former colleagues reached for most often was
3:15
Speaker 1: self possessed. In February of two thousand eighteen, Sarah joined
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Speaker 1: Apex Wellness Center on Maywood Boulevard. She was sixty two
3:24
Speaker 1: years old. She had just retired. She wanted, as she
3:28
Speaker 1: told Anne purcell, a fellow librarian she stayed close with,
3:32
Speaker 1: to feel strong. In the next chapter, she signed up
3:35
Speaker 1: for personal training sessions with a forty seven year old
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Speaker 1: trainer named Alan Sullivan. Sullivan ran his own operation inside Apex,
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Speaker 1: a small business he called Sullivan's Strength. His manner was attentive,
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Speaker 1: He asked questions, he remembered details. Clients described him as
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Speaker 1: someone who made you feel genuinely seen, like the session
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Speaker 1: was built specifically for you, for a woman who had
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Speaker 1: just retired, whose husband was gone, whose daughter was three
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Speaker 1: times zones away. That attentiveness was not nothing. There was
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Speaker 1: no red flag in the room that first day, nothing
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Speaker 1: that would have caused Sarah Carter, with her thirty years
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Speaker 1: of professional judgment and her architectural sense of order, to
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Speaker 1: hesitate at the door. That is the part that matters most,
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Speaker 1: and it is the part that takes the longest to understand.
4:26
Speaker 1: The texting started in June of twenty eighteen, four months
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Speaker 1: into the training relationship. Sullivan sent the first message on
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Speaker 1: a Tuesday evening, not about accession, but about sleep. Had
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Speaker 1: Sarah been resting well? Was she managing stress outside the gym?
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Speaker 1: The tone was warm, professional even. He framed it as
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Speaker 1: follow through the kind of thing a diligent trainer does
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Speaker 1: to track client recovery. Sarah answered, honestly, she was sleeping unevenly.
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Speaker 1: The house felt large at night, he kept asking. By August,
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Speaker 1: he had named it. He called the daily check ins
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Speaker 1: a professional necessity, part of what separated serious training from
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Speaker 1: casual exercise. He told Sarah that without consistent data on
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Speaker 1: her sleep, her meals her stress levels. He could not
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Speaker 1: do his job properly. The frame held it made sense.
5:19
Speaker 1: Sarah Carter, who had spent thirty years cataloging information for
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Speaker 1: a living, understood the logic of consistent data. What she
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Speaker 1: did not see, what no one around her saw, was
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Speaker 1: that the data was never about fitness. By October, Sullivan
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Speaker 1: was eating dinner at the Yellow Colonial on Fenwick Drive
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Speaker 1: twice a week. He had become a presence in the house,
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Speaker 1: and then one evening, Sarah stepped onto her bathroom scale
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Speaker 1: and noticed something was off. The number was different than
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Speaker 1: she expected, not dramatically, just enough to notice. She mentioned
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Speaker 1: it to Sullivan. He had an explanation ready, technical specific
6:00
Speaker 1: old scales drift. He told her the springs lose calibration
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Speaker 1: over time. He had already replaced it with a better model.
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Speaker 1: He said it with the confidence of some one who
6:11
Speaker 1: had researched the question thoroughly. Sarah accepted the explanation. Why
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Speaker 1: wouldn't she. What investigators confirmed later through Ellen Carter's credit
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Speaker 1: card records was this. The original scale had been a
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Speaker 1: gift from Ellen. Sarah had never purchased a replacement the
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Speaker 1: new scale. Sullivan's scale read two and a half pounds
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Speaker 1: heavier than the original. A sixty two year old woman
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Speaker 1: working with a trainer who monitored her weight now had
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Speaker 1: a reference point Sullivan controlled. That is the first image.
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Speaker 1: Hold it there for a moment. The second image arrived
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Speaker 1: in December of two thousand nineteen inside a kitchen cabinet.
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Speaker 1: When Diane Voss conducted the welfare check, she photographed a
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Speaker 1: whiteboard mounted on the interior panel of a cabinet door.
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Speaker 1: The hand writing was not Sarah's. Investigators later confirmed it
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Speaker 1: matched Sullivan's. Among the instructions written there two lines no
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Speaker 1: contact with E unless logged E for Ellen and report
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Speaker 1: to a A for Allen. Sarah Carter, sixty two years old,
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Speaker 1: a woman who had managed a public institution for three decades,
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Speaker 1: had a cabinet in her own kitchen telling her to
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Speaker 1: log contact with her daughter and report her decisions to
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Speaker 1: someone else. She had been living with that board long
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Speaker 1: enough that it no longer looked strange to her. The
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Speaker 1: third image is a curtain rod. Jason Duncan was a
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Speaker 1: forty one year old biology teacher and amateur bird photographer.
7:45
Speaker 1: On the ninth of December two thousand nineteen, at seven
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Speaker 1: forty two in the morning, he was standing at the
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Speaker 1: edge of Pelton Reservoir with the Canon D S l
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Speaker 1: R and a four hundred millimeter lens. He was photographing waterfowl.
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Speaker 1: In the background of one frame across the reservoir was
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Speaker 1: the rear elevation of a house. In an upper window
8:07
Speaker 1: of that house stood a woman. She was looking out.
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Speaker 1: Hanging above her in the frame a curtain rod threaded
8:15
Speaker 1: onto it fourteen small objects index cards. Duncan posted the
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Speaker 1: photograph to a bird watching forum. The following day, Diane Foss,
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Speaker 1: a social worker who frequented the same forum, saw it.
8:28
Speaker 1: She did not see a scenic background. She saw a
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Speaker 1: woman standing very still at a window at seven forty
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Speaker 1: two in the morning with fourteen index cards above her head.
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Speaker 1: She called Callaway Township's non emergency line that same day.
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Speaker 1: The formal investigation opened on December twelfth. Those index cards
8:47
Speaker 1: were collected during the welfare check. Each one carried a
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Speaker 1: hand written instruction. Most addressed the body posture, eating windows,
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Speaker 1: movement targets, but two of them did something different. One
8:59
Speaker 1: ran feelings of doubt are a symptom of old patterns.
9:03
Speaker 1: The other read check in with a before making any decision.
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Speaker 1: That affects the program. The program as if her life
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Speaker 1: had been reorganized into something with a name, something with rules,
9:15
Speaker 1: something she was enrolled in. Investigators pulled Sullivan's foam records
9:20
Speaker 1: under the first court order, issued in late December. What
9:24
Speaker 1: they found was not a record of a training relationship.
9:28
Speaker 1: It was a record of surveillance. The volume of outgoing
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Speaker 1: messages from Sullivan to Sarah over eighteen months, The time
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Speaker 1: stamps early morning, late evening, during the hours she would
9:40
Speaker 1: have been driving to Portman to see Donna, formed a
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Speaker 1: pattern that had no professional explanation. The financial irregularities surfaced
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Speaker 1: within two weeks of the investigation opening. Two credit cards
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Speaker 1: had been opened in Sarah Carter's name. The billing address
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Speaker 1: was not Fenwick Drive. A male four forwarding order had
10:00
Speaker 1: redirected certain correspondents to a different address before Sarah ever
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Speaker 1: saw it. The cards had been opened using her personal information,
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Speaker 1: her date of birth, her Social Security number, information available
10:13
Speaker 1: to someone who had spent eighteen months inside her home,
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Speaker 1: inside her routines, inside her trust. She had not opened them.
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Speaker 1: She had not known they exist. The second court order
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Speaker 1: in February of twenty twenty produced access to a storage
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Speaker 1: unit Sullivan maintained on the outskirts of portmant Inside the unit,
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Speaker 1: investigators found a legal pad. On it organized notes about
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Speaker 1: Sarah Carter, not from the past few months, but from
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Speaker 1: the first month of their relationship. Pages of it observations
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Speaker 1: about her schedule, her vulnerabilities, her contact with Ellen, her
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Speaker 1: visits to Donna, and then below the section on Sarah,
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Speaker 1: similar notes on two other women identified only by initials.
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Speaker 1: When the legal pad was placed in front of Sullivan
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Speaker 1: in a room with his attorney, Bruce Weller, he asked
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Speaker 1: for a recess eleven minutes. Then he came back and
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Speaker 1: confessed the financial crimes against Sarah Carter. He did not
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Speaker 1: confess to a system. He did not confess to the
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Speaker 1: other two women. He said what he said and stopped there.
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Speaker 1: The notes on the two women had existed since the
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Speaker 1: first month. That fact did not fit the defense's argument
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Speaker 1: that his behavior was aberrational. It did not fit the
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Speaker 1: idea of a man who had stumbled into something and
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Speaker 1: lost control of it. Someone who writes structured notes in
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Speaker 1: the first thirty days is not stumbling. Someone who maintains
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Speaker 1: a legal pad across multiple years and multiple women is
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Speaker 1: not aberrational. But that argument that the crimes were pattern
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Speaker 1: not accident, would face a challenge. Before the sentence was
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Speaker 1: handed down, The defense attorney, Bruce Weller, moved to exclude
12:03
Speaker 1: the storage unit evidence. His argument was procedural, the second
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Speaker 1: search warrant had overreached. He told the court that even
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Speaker 1: if the legal pad existed and said what investigators claimed
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Speaker 1: it said, it could not be used to establish a
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Speaker 1: pattern of behavior for the purposes of sentencing. The crimes
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Speaker 1: Sullivan had confessed to were the crimes he should be
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Speaker 1: sentenced for, not implications drawn from notes about other people.
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Speaker 1: The court allowed the evidence, but the argument was not nothing.
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Speaker 1: It planted a version of events the record needed to answer.
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Speaker 1: Picture it from one angle. A trainer who became emotionally entangled,
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Speaker 1: who crossed lines he should not have crossed, who committed
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Speaker 1: financial crimes that were real and serious, but whose behavior,
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Speaker 1: however harmful, was the product of one disordered relationship, rather
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Speaker 1: than a deliberate, repeated methodology. That version does not require
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Speaker 1: a store or age unit full of structured notes. It
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Speaker 1: does not require a legal pad organized by category from
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Speaker 1: the first month. It does not survive Christine Doyle. Christine
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Speaker 1: Doyle was fifty four years old. She was a dental
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Speaker 1: hygienist from Fremont, Ohio. She had nothing to do with
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Speaker 1: Callaway Township, with Apex Wellness Center, or with Alan Sullivan's
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Speaker 1: life in twenty eighteen. She had been Sullivan's client in
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Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen in a different county at a different facility.
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Speaker 1: On the second day of the sentencing hearing, she walked
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Speaker 1: into that courtroom carrying a bank statement, a set of
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Speaker 1: text messages, and a photograph of a whiteboard. The whiteboard
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Speaker 1: was from November of two thousand fourteen. The handwriting matched.
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Speaker 1: Doyle told the court that she had not reported Sullivan
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Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen because she had not known what to report.
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Speaker 1: Her son had arrived from Columbus without warning, had seen
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Speaker 1: the situation, and had confronted Sullivan directly. Sullivan had left
14:01
Speaker 1: the financial damage was contained. Before Doyle fully understood what
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Speaker 1: had happened to her. She used the exact words she
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Speaker 1: had believed there was nothing to report. Five years later,
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Speaker 1: sitting in a sentencing hearing for a case in a
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Speaker 1: different county, she understood what she had been looking at.
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Speaker 1: The pattern placed next to itself collapsed the aberrational argument completely.
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Speaker 1: Two women, two counties, two whiteboards five years apart notes
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Speaker 1: from the first month. Both times, Sullivan received four years
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Speaker 1: in an Ohio State correctional facility. He became eligible for
14:37
Speaker 1: supervised release at two years and eight months, subject to review.
14:42
Speaker 1: The investigation into the two women, identified only by initials
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Speaker 1: in the legal pad remained open at the close of
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Speaker 1: the public record. Sarah Carter was not charged with any crime.
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Speaker 1: She continued her Wednesday visits to Donna in Portman without interruption.
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Speaker 1: In the spring of twenty twenty, she began working with
15:01
Speaker 1: a licensed clinical social worker named Heather Rogers, who specializes
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Speaker 1: in coercive control. There is a question this case leaves
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Speaker 1: open that no court record answers. When Ellen Carter visited
15:13
Speaker 1: for Thanksgiving, Sullivan present at the table and pulled her
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Speaker 1: mother aside and asked privately whether she was happy. Sarah
15:22
Speaker 1: answered with composure she was working on it. Ellen later
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Speaker 1: described feelings subtly managed the entire visit, though she could
15:29
Speaker 1: not name exactly why she left without pressing further. What
15:34
Speaker 1: Sarah Carter understood about her own situation at that Thanksgiving table,
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Speaker 1: how much she knew, how much she had begun to suspect,
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Speaker 1: is not in any file it belongs to her. The
15:46
Speaker 1: two women whose initials appeared in that legal pad had
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Speaker 1: not yet been publicly named when the record closed. Investigators
15:54
Speaker 1: in Callaway Township confirmed the inquiry was ongoing. Whether those
15:59
Speaker 1: women knew they were in the notes, whether anyone had
16:01
Speaker 1: yet told them, was not part of any public filing.
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Speaker 1: That gap matters because Alan Sullivan did not confess to
16:10
Speaker 1: the psychological architecture. He did not describe the whiteboard instructions,
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Speaker 1: the replaced scale, the Wednesday entries through the unlatched basement door.
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Speaker 1: He confessed only to what the financial records forced him
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Speaker 1: to confess. Two counts of identity theft and one count
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Speaker 1: of financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult. Charges were brought
16:31
Speaker 1: in relation to multiple victims, but did not encompass every
16:36
Speaker 1: person referenced in his notes. His attorney argued throughout the
16:40
Speaker 1: sentencing that the crimes were aberrational, a single departure from
16:44
Speaker 1: otherwise lawful conduct. Christine Doyle ended that argument on the
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Speaker 1: second day. She brought a bank statement, a folder of texts,
16:52
Speaker 1: and a photograph of a whiteboard taken in November of
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Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Her whiteboard, her county five years years before
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Speaker 1: Sarah Carter's case opened, the same method had already run
17:04
Speaker 1: its course on some one else. Doyle had not reported
17:07
Speaker 1: it at the time. She stood before the court and
17:09
Speaker 1: stated the reason plainly, she had believed that there was
17:13
Speaker 1: nothing to report. The defense's aberrational framing could not survive
17:17
Speaker 1: the arithmetic. Two women, two counties, two white boards, notes
17:23
Speaker 1: from the first month. In both cases, Sullivan received four
17:27
Speaker 1: years in an Ohio State correctional facility, with eligibility for
17:31
Speaker 1: supervised release at two years and eight months, subject to
17:35
Speaker 1: board review. Sarah was not charged with any crime. She
17:39
Speaker 1: still drives the fourteen miles to Portmen every Wednesday at
17:43
Speaker 1: two in the afternoon. Donna is there. That has not changed.
17:47
Speaker 1: What changed is harder to measure. In a court document.
17:51
Speaker 1: In the spring of twenty twenty, Sarah began working with
17:54
Speaker 1: Heather Rogers, a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in
17:58
Speaker 1: coercive control. What they discussed is private. What is known
18:03
Speaker 1: is that Sarah chose to go The case against Alan
18:07
Speaker 1: Sullivan clarified something that practitioners in coercive control have documented
18:12
Speaker 1: for years. The absence of physical violence does not mean
18:16
Speaker 1: the absence of harm. The mechanism here was precision, a
18:20
Speaker 1: replaced scale, a whiteboard inside a cabinet, a notation system
18:24
Speaker 1: that began in the first month and cataloged a woman's
18:27
Speaker 1: isolation like a project with milestones. Sarah Carter had lived
18:32
Speaker 1: inside that system for over a year before a stranger
18:35
Speaker 1: photographed window she was standing at, and a second stranger
18:39
Speaker 1: recognized what she was looking at. Two strangers, a bird, photographer,
18:43
Speaker 1: and a social worker. Neither of them knew Sarah. Neither
18:47
Speaker 1: of them was looking for it. That is the part
18:50
Speaker 1: of this case that resists easy conclusion. The system that
18:54
Speaker 1: surrounded Sarah. The neighbors, the colleague she trusted enough to
18:58
Speaker 1: confide in, the dog who sensed something wrong at a
19:01
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving table and left without pressing further. None of them
19:06
Speaker 1: had a frame for what they were seeing. Not because
19:08
Speaker 1: they failed her, because the method was designed to look
19:12
Speaker 1: like nothing. Heather Rogers, in public writing on coercive control,
19:18
Speaker 1: has described this as the central challenge in identification. The
19:22
Speaker 1: target rarely presents as a victim, and the perpetrator rarely
19:26
Speaker 1: presents as a perpetrator. The relationship looks from the outside
19:32
Speaker 1: like mentorship, like wellness, like someone finally taking care of
19:36
Speaker 1: themselves after years of loss. Sarah Carter had buried her
19:40
Speaker 1: husband in twenty eleven. She had retired after three decades
19:44
Speaker 1: at the Callaway Township Public Library. She had been described
19:48
Speaker 1: by people who knew her as direct, self sufficient, with
19:52
Speaker 1: a dry sense of humor that could stop a room.
19:55
Speaker 1: She was not a person anyone thought needed rescuing. According
20:01
Speaker 1: to the record, is precisely what Alan Sullivan saw when
20:05
Speaker 1: he introduced himself at Apex Wellness Center in February of
20:10
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. There is a question this case leaves open
20:14
Speaker 1: that no court record answers. When Ellen Carter visited for Thanksgiving,
20:19
Speaker 1: Sullivan at the table and pulled her mother aside and
20:23
Speaker 1: quietly asked whether she was happy. Sarah answered with composure
20:27
Speaker 1: she was working on it. Ellen later described feeling subtly
20:31
Speaker 1: managed for the entire visit, though she could not name
20:35
Speaker 1: exactly what she had felt. She left without pressing further.
20:39
Speaker 1: What Sarah Carter understood about her own situation at that
20:43
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving table, how much she knew, how much she had
20:47
Speaker 1: begun to suspect, is not in any file. It belongs
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Speaker 1: to her. This show is made by Obo Media