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The Mason Jar on the Porch: How Love Became a Prison · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: The jar was sitting on the porch railing when Shannon
0:06
Speaker 1: White arrived with the morning paper. It was May seventh,
0:10
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a sixteen ounce mason jar, hand labeled
0:14
Speaker 1: in black marker Scark Garden, August twenty eighteen, red wax seal,
0:20
Speaker 1: lid perfectly centered, and the front door behind it was
0:24
Speaker 1: standing open. Nicole Clark had been missing for nine days.
0:28
Speaker 1: Detective Kent Hughes responded within the hour. He stood on
0:32
Speaker 1: the porch a four four one two Briar Crest Drive
0:36
Speaker 1: and studied that jar without touching it. He was wearing gloves.
0:41
Speaker 1: He did not pick it up. He just looked at it.
0:43
Speaker 1: Later he would write in his notes that it was
0:46
Speaker 1: the detail that refused to make sense no matter how
0:49
Speaker 1: long he stared at it. A jar of tomatoes preserved
0:53
Speaker 1: in August, placed on a railing in May, in front
0:57
Speaker 1: of an open door belonging to a woman. No one
0:59
Speaker 1: could go fine. It meant something. He just did not
1:03
Speaker 1: know what yet. There are cases where the first puzzle
1:06
Speaker 1: piece is dramatic, a broken window, a body, a phone
1:10
Speaker 1: lighting up with calls that go unanswered. And then there
1:14
Speaker 1: are cases like this one, where the first piece is
1:17
Speaker 1: a jar of home made tomatoes on a porch railing
1:20
Speaker 1: in a small Ohio town, and the wrongness of it
1:24
Speaker 1: is so quiet that it takes a moment to settle
1:26
Speaker 1: in your chest. What happened to Nicole Clark started months
1:30
Speaker 1: before that jar appeared. It started with a man she
1:33
Speaker 1: thought she knew, a plan she never saw coming, and
1:37
Speaker 1: a system of control so carefully built that by the
1:40
Speaker 1: time it collapsed, she was sixty miles from home and
1:43
Speaker 1: did not fully understand why Delmore, Ohio is the kind
1:47
Speaker 1: of place where people stay, not because there is nowhere
1:50
Speaker 1: else to go, but because it fits. It sits roughly
1:54
Speaker 1: between Columbus and Zanesville, flat and steady, with tree lined
1:59
Speaker 1: streets that hold their shape through every season. People shop
2:03
Speaker 1: at the same hardware store their parents used. They wave
2:07
Speaker 1: from driveways. They know which neighbor puts the Christmas lights
2:10
Speaker 1: up too early and which one never takes them down.
2:14
Speaker 1: Nicole Clark had lived on Briar Crest Drive for nine years.
2:17
Speaker 1: By the spring of twenty nineteen, she was forty four
2:21
Speaker 1: years old, a licensed practical nurse at Delmore Community Hospital,
2:25
Speaker 1: the kind of professional whose coworkers described her as meticulous
2:29
Speaker 1: and warmed in the same breath. She worked long shifts.
2:33
Speaker 1: She came home and tended her vegetable garden in the
2:36
Speaker 1: back yard. Every August she ran a full canning operation tomatoes,
2:41
Speaker 1: green beans, bread and butter pickles, labeling each jar by
2:45
Speaker 1: hand with the garden name and the year.
2:48
Speaker 2: She had a.
2:49
Speaker 1: Grown son, Marcus, who lived in Columbus. They spoke regularly.
2:53
Speaker 1: She was divorced, steady, self sufficient, the kind of woman
2:58
Speaker 1: who had built her life delivered britly, piece by piece
3:01
Speaker 1: over years. Tuesday Evenings belonged to the Delmore Community Choir
3:06
Speaker 1: Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Morrow Street, seven o'clock. Nancy
3:11
Speaker 1: Pelton conducting with the same handwritten attendance notebook she had
3:15
Speaker 1: used for eleven years. Nicole sang alto. In three years
3:20
Speaker 1: of membership, she had missed one rehearsal one. Nancy Pelton
3:25
Speaker 1: remembered which one, because she had written a small note
3:28
Speaker 1: beside Nichole's name called out sick apology text. Three years
3:33
Speaker 1: of Tuesday Evenings marked present every single week. That consistency
3:39
Speaker 1: was not a minor detail, It was the architecture of
3:42
Speaker 1: her life. Reliable, rooted, known in September of twenty eighteen,
3:49
Speaker 1: Micole created a profile on a dating app called Paired.
3:53
Speaker 1: This was not impulsive. Acquaintances would later describe it as
3:57
Speaker 1: something she had considered for a while, was cautious by nature.
4:02
Speaker 1: The app had a reputation for slightly older users, people
4:05
Speaker 1: who were serious about finding a real connection rather than
4:09
Speaker 1: a casual one. Raymond Gallagher found her there. He presented
4:13
Speaker 1: himself as fifty one years old, a civil engineer based
4:17
Speaker 1: in Cincinnati, divorced professional. He had a company, harrow Bridge Consulting,
4:23
Speaker 1: and a measured, intelligent way of communicating that felt, by
4:27
Speaker 1: all accounts, genuinely considered.
4:30
Speaker 2: He did not rush.
4:31
Speaker 1: He asked questions and remembered the answers. He mentioned her
4:35
Speaker 1: garden unprompted in a message weeks after she had described
4:40
Speaker 1: it small things, specific things, the kind of attentiveness that
4:44
Speaker 1: reads as care. By the time the calendar turned to
4:48
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Nicole had transferred thirty one thousand, four hundred
4:52
Speaker 1: dollars to a Kentucky credit Union account registered to harrow
4:57
Speaker 1: Bridge Consulting, seven separate transfers across u six months, each
5:01
Speaker 1: one preceded by a reason that felt urgent and real,
5:04
Speaker 1: a contract delayed, a bridge inspection fee, an equipment bond
5:09
Speaker 1: that had to clear before a project could advance. The
5:13
Speaker 1: explanations were technical enough to require trust, and Raymond had
5:17
Speaker 1: spent months earning exactly that. There is a particular cruelty
5:22
Speaker 1: in what happened next, not physical cruelty. There is no
5:25
Speaker 1: evidence Raymond Gallagher ever raised a hand. The cruelty was architectural.
5:30
Speaker 1: He had been building something in Nikole's mind since September,
5:34
Speaker 1: and by April of twenty nineteen, the structure was complete.
5:39
Speaker 1: She trusted him with her money. She trusted him with
5:42
Speaker 1: her evenings. She trusted him with a second phone, a burner,
5:46
Speaker 1: which he had bought at a Columbus walmart in February
5:49
Speaker 1: and given to her as what he called a romantic gesture,
5:53
Speaker 1: a private line just between them. On the night of
5:57
Speaker 1: April twenty second, twenty nineteen, Cole Clark sat down in
6:01
Speaker 1: her usual chair at Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church. Nancy Pelton
6:06
Speaker 1: marked her present. Rehearsal began somewhere between seven thirty and
6:12
Speaker 1: seven forty in the evening. Nichole stood, told the woman
6:16
Speaker 1: beside her she needed to take a call and walked
6:19
Speaker 1: out into the night. She left her winter coat on
6:21
Speaker 1: the chair. She left her personal phone on the seat.
6:24
Speaker 1: She took only the burner Raymond had given her. She
6:27
Speaker 1: did not come back.
6:29
Speaker 2: The morning after.
6:29
Speaker 1: Nicole Clark walked out of Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church. The
6:33
Speaker 1: chair she had been sitting in still held her winter coat.
6:37
Speaker 1: Her personal phone sat on the seat cushion beneath it.
6:40
Speaker 1: Nancy Pelton's attendant's notebook showed her name marked present, then
6:44
Speaker 1: crossed out a question mark written beside it in pencil.
6:48
Speaker 1: That question mark was the first crack in what would
6:51
Speaker 1: become a very long fault line. Pelton called Nichold's number
6:55
Speaker 1: the following morning, no answer. She called again. The phone
7:00
Speaker 1: rang from the coat pocket in the empty rehearsal room.
7:03
Speaker 1: For nine days, Nicole Clark was simply gone. No missing
7:07
Speaker 1: person report, no alarm raised. At Delmore Community Hospital, where
7:12
Speaker 1: she was scheduled for shifts. The people closest to her
7:15
Speaker 1: assumed there was an explanation. There usually is then a
7:19
Speaker 1: detail surface that did not fit any explanation. On April
7:24
Speaker 1: twenty third, twenty nineteen, one day after Nicole left the
7:28
Speaker 1: choir rehearsal a gas station security camera on Route forty,
7:33
Speaker 1: eleven miles east of Delmore, recorded something. Nicole's Honda Accord
7:38
Speaker 1: pulled into the Sunoco station at six forty seven in
7:41
Speaker 1: the evening. A man was in the passenger seat. He
7:44
Speaker 1: got out, walked to the driver's side rear tire, and
7:48
Speaker 1: crouched beside it for approximately forty seconds. Then he stood,
7:53
Speaker 1: returned to the passenger seat and waited. Fourteen minutes later,
7:58
Speaker 1: a Chevrolet Silverado pulled into the lot. Nikole got out
8:02
Speaker 1: of the Accord and got into the Silverado. The Silverado left,
8:07
Speaker 1: the man from the passenger seat, walked toward the highway
8:10
Speaker 1: and disappeared from frame. The Accord stayed where it was
8:14
Speaker 1: Three days after that, on April twenty sixth, the station
8:17
Speaker 1: owner reported the abandoned vehicle to Delmore p D. That
8:21
Speaker 1: same day, someone filed a missing person report for Nikoll Clark.
8:26
Speaker 1: The two events happened within hours of each other, nine
8:29
Speaker 1: days after she had left her coat on a church chair.
8:32
Speaker 1: Detective Kent Hughes pulled the Sunoco footage within forty eight hours.
8:36
Speaker 1: He watched the man crouch beside the tire. He noted
8:40
Speaker 1: the time forty seconds. He noted what the man did
8:43
Speaker 1: not do. He did not change the tire, did not
8:47
Speaker 1: call any one, did not pomp air. He simply crouched,
8:50
Speaker 1: did something small with his hands, and stood back up.
8:54
Speaker 1: When the accord was examined, the rear driver's side tire
8:58
Speaker 1: valve stem was loose, not punctured, not removed, turned just
9:03
Speaker 1: enough that AYR had been bleeding out slowly, a leak
9:07
Speaker 1: that would take miles to become noticeable, timed to strand
9:11
Speaker 1: the car somewhere inconvenient, somewhere that would require help. The
9:17
Speaker 1: Silverado was registered to harrow Bridge Consulting, a limited liability
9:22
Speaker 1: company out of Kentucky. Hughes ran the name. There was
9:26
Speaker 1: no office, there was no staff directory. There was a
9:30
Speaker 1: post office box and a credit Union account, and into
9:34
Speaker 1: that account, and into that account. Between October of two
9:38
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen and April of two thousand nineteen, seven wire
9:42
Speaker 1: transfers had arrived, totaling thirty one thousand, four hundred dollars.
9:46
Speaker 1: All seven originated from accounts belonging to Nicole Clark. That
9:51
Speaker 1: was the image that stopped the investigation cold for a moment.
9:55
Speaker 1: A woman's life savings moving in seven careful installments into
9:59
Speaker 1: a shell company registered to a man who now appeared
10:02
Speaker 1: on a gas station camera loosening the valve stem on
10:06
Speaker 1: her tire.
10:06
Speaker 2: But here is the thing.
10:08
Speaker 1: The Silverado's registration led to a name Raymond Gallagher, listed
10:13
Speaker 1: as managing member of Harrowbridge Consulting. When Hughes began building
10:18
Speaker 1: a profile, something in the timeline refused to add up.
10:22
Speaker 1: Both of those seven bank transfers had been initiated from
10:25
Speaker 1: the same mobile device. Forensic analysis of the device ID
10:30
Speaker 1: placed that second phone in a Columbus hotel room. The
10:33
Speaker 1: room had been signed for under the name Raymond Gallagher,
10:36
Speaker 1: using his own identification. He had transferred money out of
10:40
Speaker 1: Nicholl's account while sitting in a hotel using a phone
10:44
Speaker 1: she did not know he could access on days when
10:47
Speaker 1: Nichole was verifiably on shift at Delmore Community Hospital. She
10:51
Speaker 1: had not sent those transfers.
10:53
Speaker 2: He had.
10:54
Speaker 1: The burner phone he had given her in February, presented
10:58
Speaker 1: as a romantic gesture. A private line just between them
11:02
Speaker 1: had been the instrument. He had used it to send
11:05
Speaker 1: her a fishing link, captured her banking credentials, and conducted
11:09
Speaker 1: two transfers himself when she was at work and unreachable.
11:13
Speaker 1: The other five she had sent willingly, believing each reason.
11:17
Speaker 2: He gave her.
11:18
Speaker 1: The last two she had not sent at all. On
11:21
Speaker 1: June third, twenty nineteen, a woman named Brenda Kowalski called
11:26
Speaker 1: the Delmore p D Tip line from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
11:30
Speaker 1: She had seen the news coverage. She recognized the name
11:34
Speaker 1: Raymond Gallagher. In two thousand fifteen, she had known him
11:38
Speaker 1: as Ray Garland. He had been an engineer then too,
11:42
Speaker 1: he had been recently divorced.
11:43
Speaker 2: Then two.
11:45
Speaker 1: He had given her a phone too, found later in
11:48
Speaker 1: the glove compartment of his rental car, second handset, same model.
11:53
Speaker 1: She had lost money.
11:54
Speaker 2: She did not.
11:54
Speaker 1: Publicly disclose the amount of the relationship had ended.
11:58
Speaker 2: When she confronted him, and he.
11:59
Speaker 1: Simply stopped responding. Hughes set the Kowalski call beside everything
12:04
Speaker 1: else he had and looked at the shape of it.
12:07
Speaker 1: Raymond had not improvised. He had a system. He had
12:11
Speaker 1: an architecture, and somewhere inside that architecture, and somewhere inside
12:16
Speaker 1: that architecture there was a version of Nicole Clark that
12:20
Speaker 1: he had constructed from the very first message on the
12:23
Speaker 1: paired app In September of twenty eighteen, a version that
12:27
Speaker 1: trusted him, that believed the projects were real, that answered
12:32
Speaker 1: the burner phone because it felt like intimacy, not surveillance.
12:36
Speaker 1: The question that had been sitting underneath every other question
12:39
Speaker 1: now came into focus. Where was Nicole? Nicole had not
12:43
Speaker 1: been taken. There is no evidence of physical force in
12:47
Speaker 1: any record. What the investigation established was this. Raymond had
12:52
Speaker 1: told her in the days after she left the choir rehearsal,
12:56
Speaker 1: that her house was being watched, that she was in
12:58
Speaker 1: danger from people knected to a deal gone wrong, that
13:02
Speaker 1: she needed to stay somewhere safe and quiet and off
13:05
Speaker 1: her regular phone until he could sort it out.
13:08
Speaker 2: She believed him. She stayed.
13:10
Speaker 1: She was in a motel in Zanesville, Ohio, sixty miles
13:14
Speaker 1: east of Delmar, believing she was hiding from a threat
13:17
Speaker 1: that Raymond Gallagher had invented. On June eleventh, twenty nineteen,
13:23
Speaker 1: investigators located her there. She walked out of the motel
13:26
Speaker 1: room under her own power. She had not understood until
13:30
Speaker 1: that moment what had actually happened to her, The detail
13:34
Speaker 1: that no report quite captures, but that the record implies
13:38
Speaker 1: in the gap between her departure and her return. She
13:41
Speaker 1: had been maintaining the story he gave her for fifty days.
13:45
Speaker 1: Picture Raymond Gallagher on the night of April twenty second,
13:49
Speaker 1: sitting in the passenger seat of Nicole Clark's Accord as
13:52
Speaker 1: it moved east on Route forty. He already knew where
13:56
Speaker 1: the Silverado would be waiting. He already knew the motel.
14:01
Speaker 1: He already knew, with the precision of some one who
14:03
Speaker 1: had done this before, how long it would take for
14:07
Speaker 1: the tire to go soft. The version of events that
14:10
Speaker 1: seems most obvious, that this was a kidnapping, a man
14:15
Speaker 1: forcing a woman into a car and driving her somewhere
14:19
Speaker 1: against her will, collapses the moment you account for what
14:23
Speaker 1: Nicoll did in the weeks that followed. She stayed in
14:26
Speaker 1: that motel voluntarily. She did not call the police. She
14:31
Speaker 1: did not reach out to her son, Marcus in Columbus.
14:34
Speaker 2: She answered the.
14:35
Speaker 1: Burner foam when Raymond called, and believed the danger was real,
14:39
Speaker 1: because Raymond had been building the reality she inhabited for
14:42
Speaker 1: seven months before that night.
14:44
Speaker 2: That is, the architecture, not.
14:47
Speaker 1: Chains, not threats, a version of the world constructed in
14:51
Speaker 1: careful increments in which Raymond was the only person she
14:55
Speaker 1: could trust and the only source of information about what
14:58
Speaker 1: was happening around her. Walk the sequence forward from that recognition.
15:03
Speaker 1: He had given her the Burner phone in February. He
15:06
Speaker 1: had her banking credentials captured through a fishing link sent
15:10
Speaker 1: on that same device. He had transferred two payments himself
15:14
Speaker 1: when she was at work, proving he could operate within
15:18
Speaker 1: her financial life without her awareness. He had created Harrowbridge
15:22
Speaker 1: Consulting as the destination for her trust and her money simultaneously,
15:26
Speaker 1: and when the moment came to move her physically, he
15:29
Speaker 1: had loosened a valve stem forty seconds before she would
15:33
Speaker 1: need to call some one for help. Every element was
15:36
Speaker 1: load bearing. Remove the Burner phone and she has a
15:39
Speaker 1: line back to the world. Remove the fishing capture and
15:42
Speaker 1: the financial trail looks like consent throughout. Remove the valve
15:46
Speaker 1: stem manipulation and there is no pretextual rescue, no silverado,
15:52
Speaker 1: no clean separation from her car and her coat and
15:55
Speaker 1: her personal phone on that church chair. The head fake
15:59
Speaker 1: in this case is the jar. When Shannon White found
16:02
Speaker 1: the sealed Mason jar balanced on the porch railing at
16:06
Speaker 1: four four one two Briar Crest, Drives, Clark Garden, August
16:11
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, written in marker on the lid. The natural
16:15
Speaker 1: assumption was that someone had left a signal, a message,
16:19
Speaker 1: evidence of Nichol's location or her state of mind. Investigators
16:24
Speaker 1: cataloged it, Hughes examined it with gloves. There were no
16:28
Speaker 1: finger prints from Raymond Gallagher on the glass. The jar
16:31
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with Raymond. Nikole had left it
16:34
Speaker 1: there herself weeks before she disappeared, for a neighbor who
16:39
Speaker 1: had asked about her canning, the ordinary gesture of a
16:43
Speaker 1: woman who grew tomatoes.
16:45
Speaker 2: And shared them.
16:47
Speaker 1: It had sat on the railing through two rainstorms and
16:50
Speaker 1: a cold snap, unnoticed until a fifteen year old paper
16:54
Speaker 1: carrier saw a front door standing slightly open on a
16:58
Speaker 1: Tuesday morning and left her route to check. The jar
17:02
Speaker 1: was not a clue about where Nicole was. It was
17:06
Speaker 1: a clue about who she had been before Raymond Gallagher
17:09
Speaker 1: decided to dismantle that person, one carefully chosen detail at
17:13
Speaker 1: a time. Nicole Clark was found alive on June eleventh,
17:17
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, in a motel room in Zanesville, Ohio, sixty
17:23
Speaker 1: miles east of Delmore fifty days after she had walked
17:27
Speaker 1: out of a choir rehearsal to answer a phone call
17:30
Speaker 1: and never come back. She had not been held at gunpoint.
17:34
Speaker 1: Raymond Gallagher had told her the house on Briar Crest
17:37
Speaker 1: Drive was under surveillance, that dangerous people were watching her,
17:41
Speaker 1: that the safest thing she could do was stay somewhere quiet.
17:45
Speaker 2: And wait for him to sort it out.
17:47
Speaker 1: She believed him because she had been given methodically and
17:50
Speaker 1: over seven months, every reason to believe him, and no reliable.
17:54
Speaker 2: Means of checking.
17:56
Speaker 1: The burner phone he had given her in February was
17:59
Speaker 1: her primary line of contact. Her personal phone was still
18:02
Speaker 1: on a chair in a church on Morrow Street. Four
18:06
Speaker 1: days after Nicholl was found, Raymond Gallagher was arrested at
18:10
Speaker 1: a Hampton Inn in Indianapolis. He had traveled there under
18:14
Speaker 1: his own name. He denied everything for nine months after
18:18
Speaker 1: his June arrest. He denied everything through two preliminary hearings
18:22
Speaker 1: and a formal deposition. His position was consistent and simple.
18:27
Speaker 1: He had no idea what any of this was about.
18:30
Speaker 1: Then came the third day of trial in Montgomery County,
18:33
Speaker 1: March twenty twenty. Prosecutors introduced the full sequence of bank
18:38
Speaker 1: transfer time stems from first horizon. Two of the seven transfers,
18:43
Speaker 1: totaling a significant portion of the thirty one thousand, four
18:46
Speaker 1: hundred dollars moved to the harrow Bridge Consulting account had
18:50
Speaker 1: been initiated from a mobile device while Nicole Clark was
18:54
Speaker 1: verifiably on shift at Delmore Community Hospital. The device id
18:59
Speaker 1: from forensic analysis matched a hotel room in Columbus registered
19:03
Speaker 1: under Raymond Gallagher's own name. He had been in Columbus,
19:07
Speaker 1: she had been at the hospital. The money had moved,
19:11
Speaker 1: He had initiated it. Raymond Gallagher changed his statement on
19:16
Speaker 1: day three. He was convicted on two counts of wire fraud,
19:20
Speaker 1: one count of identity fraud, and one count of unlawful restraint.
19:24
Speaker 1: The sentence was eleven years. Pam Weston and Connie Ruiz,
19:29
Speaker 1: the two women investigators identified during the financial reconstruction, co
19:34
Speaker 1: operated fully with prosecutors. Pam, a school administrator from Dayton,
19:39
Speaker 1: had lost approximately nine thousand dollars. Connie, a dental hygienist
19:45
Speaker 1: from Akron, had lost approximately four thousand. Neither had disappeared,
19:50
Speaker 1: Neither had known the others existed. Each had been given
19:53
Speaker 1: a different version of Raymond widower, separated man, devoted partner,
20:00
Speaker 1: the same architecture adjusted for each audience. Brenda Kowalski, who
20:05
Speaker 1: had called the tip line on June third, two thousand nineteen,
20:09
Speaker 1: had met him in two thousand fifteen under the name
20:13
Speaker 1: ray Garland. Investigators found a second phone in her account
20:17
Speaker 1: of events in the glove compartment of a car. The
20:20
Speaker 1: pattern was not new. It had simply never intersected with
20:24
Speaker 1: a missing person's report before. There is something clarifying about
20:28
Speaker 1: the moment. Raymond Gallagher changed his statement not because it
20:32
Speaker 1: brought resolution, the evidence had already done that, but because
20:36
Speaker 1: of what it revealed about the whole operation. For nine months,
20:40
Speaker 1: he had maintained the same position with the same confidence
20:44
Speaker 1: he had used to maintain seven months of fiction with Nicole.
20:48
Speaker 1: The denial was not desperation. It was reflex.
20:52
Speaker 2: He had been.
20:52
Speaker 1: Performing a version of events for so long that performing
20:56
Speaker 1: became the default. What dismantled him was not an interrogation
21:01
Speaker 1: or a confession. It was a time stamp, a record
21:04
Speaker 1: of a device in a hotel room in Columbus initiating
21:07
Speaker 1: a transfer while a woman was clocked in for a
21:10
Speaker 1: shift forty miles away. The system he had built to
21:14
Speaker 1: extract money from Nichole's trust, used her own financial identity
21:18
Speaker 1: against her, and then the record of that system, kept
21:21
Speaker 1: in ordinary bank logs, was used against him. The precision
21:26
Speaker 1: he had relied on became the precision that convicted him.
21:29
Speaker 1: Nicole Clark still lives in Delmore. The garden on Briar
21:34
Speaker 1: Crest Drive was replanted by the time the trial ended
21:37
Speaker 1: in March twenty twenty. The tomatoes come up every summer.
21:41
Speaker 1: The canning happens every August, the same as it always did.
21:46
Speaker 1: The jar that Shannon White found on the porch railing,
21:49
Speaker 1: the one Hughes had studied with gloves, the one that
21:52
Speaker 1: looked like a signal and turned out to be a
21:55
Speaker 1: neighbour's portion of an ordinary harvest, was cataloged, held through
21:59
Speaker 1: the investigation, and eventually returned to Nicole. No finger prints
22:04
Speaker 1: from Raymond Gallagher, no message hidden in the wax seal.
22:10
Speaker 1: Just tomatoes from a garden she had tended for nine years,
22:14
Speaker 1: left for someone who asked. Raymond Gallagher spent seven months
22:19
Speaker 1: constructing a version of Nicholl's reality so complete that she
22:23
Speaker 1: abandoned her coat, her phone, and her choir because stayin
22:27
Speaker 1: felt More dangerous than leaving. She rebuilt the garden is
22:31
Speaker 1: proof of that the jar was never about him.
22:34
Speaker 2: It never was.
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