Latest / Narcisist Psychology / The Glass That Proved She Wasn't Lost: How Trust Was Stolen
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: A glass of orange juice sat on the back step
- 0:06Speaker 1: of a house in August, full, untouched, no condensation on
- 0:10Speaker 1: the outside, no insects circling the rim. In direct summer sun.
- 0:16Speaker 1: That should have been impossible. The man who found it
- 0:20Speaker 1: was a meter reader named Kenneth Graham. He had no
- 0:24Speaker 1: reason to look twice at a glass of juice, but
- 0:27Speaker 1: something about it stopped him. The glass was filled nearly
- 0:30Speaker 1: to the brim, as if some one had set it
- 0:32Speaker 1: down one second ago and walked back inside. Except no
- 0:37Speaker 1: one had walked back inside. The woman who lived there
- 0:41Speaker 1: had been missing for nine days. That glass would become
- 0:44Speaker 1: the first thread investigators pulled, and what unraveled from it
- 0:49Speaker 1: was not a story about a woman who vanished. It
- 0:51Speaker 1: was a story about a woman whose reality had been quietly,
- 0:55Speaker 1: methodically taken apart, piece by piece by someone she trusted completed.
- 1:00Speaker 1: Her name was Rebecca Coleman. She was twenty eight years old,
- 1:05Speaker 1: and the person dismantling her world at a certification, a
- 1:09Speaker 1: calm voice and a plan that had worked before. To
- 1:12Speaker 1: understand what happened to Rebecca Coleman, you need to understand
- 1:16Speaker 1: what her life had cost her to build. Rebecca completed
- 1:20Speaker 1: her second stay at Whitmore Recovery Center in April twenty
- 1:23Speaker 1: twenty two. Two years later, in April twenty twenty four,
- 1:27Speaker 1: Dennis Schultz stopped beside her car on the roadside. That
- 1:31Speaker 1: number matters because anyone who has watched someone fight their
- 1:34Speaker 1: way through recovery knows that the second time carries a
- 1:38Speaker 1: different weight. The first time is often shock and revelation.
- 1:43Speaker 1: The second time is harder. It means the person knows
- 1:47Speaker 1: exactly what they are fighting, and they are choosing to
- 1:50Speaker 1: fight it anyway. Rebecca came out of Whitmore with a
- 1:53Speaker 1: structured life, a small apartment at four fourteen Callaway Street
- 1:57Speaker 1: in Garvey, an outpatient therapist, doctor Philip Vance, whom she
- 2:02Speaker 1: saw on a regular schedule, a medication routine, a non
- 2:05Speaker 1: opioid antidepressant and a sleep aid, both carefully calibrated to
- 2:10Speaker 1: her recovery needs, and every Tuesday, without exception, she attended
- 2:15Speaker 1: a meeting at the church on Mercer Avenue, where her
- 2:18Speaker 1: friend Marissa Twyer drove across town to sit beside her.
- 2:22Speaker 1: Marissa had been doing that drive every Tuesday for three years.
- 2:26Speaker 1: She had begun making the drive before Rebecca's second stay
- 2:29Speaker 1: at Whitmore and continued through Rebecca's recovery. That detail matters
- 2:34Speaker 1: not because it is touching, though it is. It matters
- 2:38Speaker 1: because it tells you something precise about Rebecca's network. The
- 2:42Speaker 1: people around her showed up on schedule consistently, with enough
- 2:46Speaker 1: regularity that anyone paying close attention could map exactly when
- 2:51Speaker 1: she would be where and who would be watching her.
- 2:54Speaker 1: Aunt Linda Poole sixty one, lived in Garvey and served
- 2:59Speaker 1: as Rebecca's prime marry family anchor. Linda was the person
- 3:02Speaker 1: Rebecca called when something felt wrong. Linda was the person
- 3:06Speaker 1: who noticed when something was off before Rebecca said a word.
- 3:10Speaker 1: She had been that person for years. Rebecca had plans.
- 3:15Speaker 1: She was rebuilding, slowly, deliberately, the way people rebuild when
- 3:19Speaker 1: they know the foundation has to hold. This time, she
- 3:23Speaker 1: was not naive about her situation. She was careful. She
- 3:26Speaker 1: kept her appointments, she maintained her routines. She had, by
- 3:31Speaker 1: every account from people who knew her well, earned back
- 3:34Speaker 1: something that is very hard to earn back, a stable
- 3:37Speaker 1: sense of herself. That stability was the target. In late April,
- 3:42Speaker 1: Rebecca's car broke down on the side of the road.
- 3:45Speaker 1: A man stopped to help. His name was Dennis Schultz.
- 3:49Speaker 1: He was forty three years old, and he held a
- 3:52Speaker 1: certification from the National Association of Sober Companions, a credential
- 3:57Speaker 1: that positioned someone as a professional support figure for people
- 4:01Speaker 1: in recovery. Within approximately forty five minutes of meeting her
- 4:05Speaker 1: on the road side, he had her phone number. The
- 4:08Speaker 1: following Tuesday, Rebecca described him to Marissa. She called him
- 4:12Speaker 1: unexpectedly kind. There is something specific about that phrase, not
- 4:17Speaker 1: just kind, but unexpectedly kind, that signals something important about
- 4:22Speaker 1: how Denis Schultz presented himself. He did not come in
- 4:26Speaker 1: loud or overwhelming. He came in calibrating. Later, forensic psychologist
- 4:32Speaker 1: doctor Angela Norris would describe his affect as calibrated warmth
- 4:37Speaker 1: effect that presents as spontaneous but functions strategically. At the time,
- 4:43Speaker 1: Rebecca had no reason to read it that way. Nobody did.
- 4:47Speaker 1: What nobody knew yet was that Denis Schultz had done
- 4:50Speaker 1: this before. Six years earlier, and four hundred miles to
- 4:55Speaker 1: the west, a thirty one year old woman named Tanya
- 4:58Speaker 1: or had vanished. Her family was told she had relapsed
- 5:02Speaker 1: and left voluntarily. Authorities classified it as a voluntary disappearance.
- 5:08Speaker 1: That classification was false, but that would not become clear
- 5:11Speaker 1: for years, not until a glass of orange juice sat
- 5:16Speaker 1: untouched in August sun and a meter reader named Kenneth
- 5:20Speaker 1: Graham could not quite look away. The weeks after that
- 5:23Speaker 1: April roadside meeting moved quickly. Dennis Schultz did not rush.
- 5:27Speaker 1: He attended the Tuesday evening meetings at the church on
- 5:30Speaker 1: Mercer Avenue, the same meetings Rebecca had kept for over
- 5:34Speaker 1: a year. He sat where she could see him. He listened,
- 5:38Speaker 1: He never pushed. By the time he moved to Calloway
- 5:42Speaker 1: Street in mid June, he was already inside the architecture
- 5:46Speaker 1: of her daily life. Not visibly, not loudly. He was
- 5:50Speaker 1: there the way a weight is there before you notice
- 5:53Speaker 1: you are carrying it. That is when the medication changed.
- 5:56Speaker 1: Dennis had positioned himself as someone who could help manage
- 6:00Speaker 1: Rebecca's routine, her prescriptions, her schedule, her appointments. On the surface,
- 6:06Speaker 1: it looked like support. What it actually was control of
- 6:10Speaker 1: every pill that entered her body. Her antidepressant was not
- 6:14Speaker 1: an opioid. Her sleep aid was not a controlled substance.
- 6:18Speaker 1: Neither showed up on the standard panel used by her
- 6:21Speaker 1: recovery program at Whidmore. They were legitimate prescriptions. The third
- 6:26Speaker 1: compound was not three weeks before Rebecca disappeared. A receipt
- 6:30Speaker 1: was generated at a compounding pharmacy twelve minutes from the
- 6:34Speaker 1: Callaway Street apartment. The name on the receipt was Denis Schultz.
- 6:38Speaker 1: The prescription came from a physician named doctor Marcus Webb,
- 6:42Speaker 1: whose license was already under review. The compound was custom
- 6:47Speaker 1: a benzo diazepine derivative blended with a sedating antihistamine. It
- 6:52Speaker 1: appeared nowhere in Rebecca's treatment records. It appeared nowhere in
- 6:56Speaker 1: the standard monitoring program for people in recovery from opioid use.
- 7:01Speaker 1: It was designed to be invisible. Dennis had, according to
- 7:05Speaker 1: doctor Angela Norris's later forensic evaluation, mapped the surveillance gaps
- 7:10Speaker 1: in Rebecca's life and inserted himself precisely there. The compound
- 7:15Speaker 1: did not need to be detected, it only needed to
- 7:18Speaker 1: be administered. But something happened twice in July, two Fridays,
- 7:23Speaker 1: roughly three weeks apart. Linda Poole described Rebecca on those
- 7:27Speaker 1: days as like herself again, like the real her, almost
- 7:32Speaker 1: agitated with energy. She was sharp, she was present, she
- 7:36Speaker 1: wanted to talk, and then within a few days that
- 7:39Speaker 1: version of her was gone again. Those two fridays correspond
- 7:43Speaker 1: to gaps in the compound's refill cycle. Denis had miscalculated
- 7:48Speaker 1: the dosing twice. The clarity Rebecca showed was not a
- 7:52Speaker 1: good day. It was the sedation wearing off and her
- 7:55Speaker 1: real self surfacing through the fog before he could restore it.
- 7:59Speaker 1: She did not know that was happening. That is the
- 8:03Speaker 1: part that does not settle easily. She was emerging briefly
- 8:08Speaker 1: from something she had no name for. Rebecca had been
- 8:11Speaker 1: reported missing on July twenty fifth. Nine days later, on
- 8:15Speaker 1: August third, a man named Kenneth Graham was reading utility
- 8:19Speaker 1: meters on Calloway Street. He came around the back of
- 8:22Speaker 1: four hundred fourteen and stopped. There was a glass of
- 8:26Speaker 1: orange juice sitting on the rear step, full almost to
- 8:30Speaker 1: the brim. The sun had been hitting that wall directly
- 8:33Speaker 1: since morning. It was August. No condensation on the outside
- 8:37Speaker 1: of the glass, no insects at the rim, no oxidation
- 8:41Speaker 1: on the surface. In that heat. None of those things
- 8:44Speaker 1: were possible unless the glass had been placed there very
- 8:48Speaker 1: recently or unless something had prevented anyone from retrieving it.
- 8:52Speaker 1: Kenneth Graham left a note and flagged it. Detective Iris
- 8:56Speaker 1: Paulson and her partner Tom Hensley arrived within the at
- 9:00Speaker 1: four hundred fourteen. The rear door's old padlock had failed
- 9:04Speaker 1: to engage. It was not cut or forced separately. At
- 9:09Speaker 1: the storage facility in Perrin, the padlock on Unit twelve
- 9:12Speaker 1: had likewise failed to engage. Those mechanical faults meant entrances
- 9:17Speaker 1: had been accessible without a key, and the glass should
- 9:20Speaker 1: not have still been there. Denis had placed it outside
- 9:24Speaker 1: to dispose of the last traces of the compound. The
- 9:27Speaker 1: plan was to come back. The padlock was supposed to
- 9:31Speaker 1: be locked. He had no way of knowing it had failed.
- 9:35Speaker 1: The glass went to the lab, and what came back
- 9:37Speaker 1: confirmed what the receipt had implied. Residue consistent with a
- 9:42Speaker 1: benzodiazepine derivative and a sedating antihistamine compounded together. Not a
- 9:48Speaker 1: standard prescription, not a controlled substance under the state monitoring program,
- 9:53Speaker 1: something built to fit precisely through the gaps inside Dennis's car.
- 9:58Speaker 1: Technicians found two partial fingerprints under the driver's side visor.
- 10:03Speaker 1: One belonged to Rebecca Coleman. That surface is touched from
- 10:07Speaker 1: the passenger seat. The second partial was run through the database.
- 10:12Speaker 1: It matched an open case six years old, four hundred
- 10:16Speaker 1: miles to the west, a woman named Tanya Or thirty
- 10:20Speaker 1: one years old when she vanished, whose family had been
- 10:23Speaker 1: told she relapsed and left on her own, Tanya Or,
- 10:27Speaker 1: whose disappearance had been classified as voluntary. The pharmacy footage
- 10:32Speaker 1: showed Dennis's gray Chrysler on five separate dates. The passenger
- 10:37Speaker 1: was never visible above the shoulder. The image was genuinely ambiguous.
- 10:41Speaker 1: It could not confirm identity, but it placed the car,
- 10:45Speaker 1: it placed the dates, and it placed pressure on a
- 10:48Speaker 1: man who now had a pharmacy receipt, a glass of residue,
- 10:52Speaker 1: a fingerprint from a cold case, and a forensic psychologist
- 10:56Speaker 1: describing his emotional presentation as strategic rather than genuine. That
- 11:02Speaker 1: combination did not leave him much room. Everything in the
- 11:05Speaker 1: evidence pointed toward one conclusion, and investigators were building toward
- 11:10Speaker 1: its steadily. The receipt, the residue, the cold case finger print.
- 11:15Speaker 1: Dennis Schultz, methodical and credentialed, who had inserted himself into
- 11:20Speaker 1: a vulnerable woman's life and then erased her from it.
- 11:23Speaker 1: The shape of the case felt clear that was the assumption,
- 11:27Speaker 1: and it was wrong in one specific important way. Picture
- 11:31Speaker 1: Kevin Baker sitting across from Linda Poole in early August.
- 11:35Speaker 1: He was not a detective. He was a clinical social
- 11:38Speaker 1: worker who specialized in coercive control, which meant he understood
- 11:43Speaker 1: something that standard missing persons investigation did not always account for.
- 11:48Speaker 1: He was not looking for where Rebecca had gone. He
- 11:51Speaker 1: was mapping how she had been prepared to disappear without
- 11:54Speaker 1: anyone noticing she was being taken. Baker pulled Marissa Dwyer's
- 11:59Speaker 1: account from that last Tuesday evening. Marissa had sat with
- 12:02Speaker 1: Rebecca and felt a mild unease she could not name.
- 12:07Speaker 1: She had dismissed it because she did not want to
- 12:09Speaker 1: be the kind of friend who dampened everything. She told
- 12:12Speaker 1: Baker the unease was there, she had chosen to set
- 12:16Speaker 1: it down. Baker documented it and moved to the pharmacy records.
- 12:20Speaker 1: The compound was not on Rebecca's treatment panel. But here
- 12:23Speaker 1: is the thing. It was not supposed to be. It
- 12:27Speaker 1: was designed around the specific gaps in what the program monitored.
- 12:31Speaker 1: This was not opportunistic someone had researched exactly what would
- 12:37Speaker 1: and would not show up. That reframed the question. The
- 12:41Speaker 1: working assumption had been that Denis was exploiting a relationship
- 12:45Speaker 1: he had stumbled into the roadside meeting in April, an
- 12:48Speaker 1: opportunist who recognized vulnerability and moved quickly. But the compound
- 12:52Speaker 1: told a different story. You do not commission a custom
- 12:55Speaker 1: formulation designed around a specific recovery programme's monitoring gaps unless
- 13:00Speaker 1: you have done this before. You do not know which
- 13:04Speaker 1: gaps to target unless you have already tested the edges
- 13:07Speaker 1: of the system. The finger print from Tanya Or's cold
- 13:10Speaker 1: case was already in the record. When Baker brought his
- 13:13Speaker 1: coercive control mapping to Detective Paulson alongside that print, the
- 13:18Speaker 1: picture shifted completely. The April roadside meeting was not where
- 13:23Speaker 1: this began. The credential the National Association of Sober Companion's
- 13:28Speaker 1: certification was not incidental. It was the mechanism. It was
- 13:33Speaker 1: how Dennis Schultz located women in exactly the right kind
- 13:37Speaker 1: of vulnerability, Women who had already fought hard to stabilize themselves,
- 13:43Speaker 1: women whose support systems were calibrated to interpret declining function
- 13:47Speaker 1: as relapse rather than harm. He had not stumbled into
- 13:51Speaker 1: Rebecca's life. He had positioned himself to find her, and
- 13:55Speaker 1: somewhere forty miles east in a storage unit in a
- 13:58Speaker 1: town called Perrin that was positioning was still active. The
- 14:02Speaker 1: confession came without a lawyer present making final arguments. Dennis
- 14:06Speaker 1: Schultz negotiated it himself. He would confirm Rebecca Coleman was
- 14:11Speaker 1: alive and the state would not pursue the maximum sentence.
- 14:15Speaker 1: That was the trade. He gave up the location in
- 14:19Speaker 1: exchange for the ceiling. Detective Paulson and Kevin Baker were
- 14:22Speaker 1: already moving before the paperwork was signed. Perrin is forty
- 14:26Speaker 1: miles east of Garvey, a storage facility on the outer
- 14:30Speaker 1: edge of town, Unit twelve. The padlock on the door
- 14:34Speaker 1: had not been forced. It had simply failed an old
- 14:38Speaker 1: mechanism that had not fully engaged. That mechanical failure was
- 14:43Speaker 1: the only reason Kenneth Graham's discovery at four hundred fourteen
- 14:47Speaker 1: Calloway Street had meant anything at all. The juice glass
- 14:51Speaker 1: that Dennis had placed outside to disappear had stayed because
- 14:55Speaker 1: the door he expected to open never did. Inside Unit twelve,
- 15:00Speaker 1: Rebecca Coleman was alive. She was sedated and under the
- 15:04Speaker 1: custody of Sheila Lowe, a woman Denis had paid to
- 15:07Speaker 1: hold that position. Rebecca did not know where she was.
- 15:11Speaker 1: According to records reviewed after the fact, she may not
- 15:14Speaker 1: have fully known she was anywhere at all. She was
- 15:17Speaker 1: hospitalized for six days. Her recovery afterward was described in
- 15:22Speaker 1: court documents as complicated and nonlinear. That phrase does not
- 15:27Speaker 1: fully carry what it means. For weeks, possibly months, the
- 15:31Speaker 1: architecture of her own perception had been chemically managed by
- 15:35Speaker 1: some one else. The compound had been designed to fit
- 15:38Speaker 1: invisibly inside her life. Her clarity in July. Those two
- 15:43Speaker 1: Friday afternoons when Linda said she seemed like herself again
- 15:47Speaker 1: were not breakthroughs. They were accidents. Dennis had miscalculated the
- 15:52Speaker 1: dosing cycle twice. Rebecca had surfaced without knowing she had
- 15:56Speaker 1: been submerged. The legal consequences moved through the CIS to
- 16:00Speaker 1: mid stages. Dennis Schultz was found guilty of unlawful restraint,
- 16:04Speaker 1: criminal intoxication, and related charges. Sheila Lowe entered a separate
- 16:10Speaker 1: guilty plea doctor Marcus Webb, the prescribing physician who had
- 16:15Speaker 1: authorized the custom compound. Three weeks before Rebecca disappeared, surrendered
- 16:20Speaker 1: his medical license. The fingerprint mattered in ways that extended
- 16:24Speaker 1: beyond this case. The second partial print recovered from beneath
- 16:29Speaker 1: the driver's visor in Denis's car. The surface reachable from
- 16:33Speaker 1: the passenger seat matched a cold case file opened six
- 16:36Speaker 1: years earlier. Tanya Or had been thirty one when she vanished.
- 16:41Speaker 1: Her disappearance had been classified as voluntary after she contacted
- 16:45Speaker 1: her family to say she had relapsed. That classification was false.
- 16:50Speaker 1: Tanya Or was found alive. She was located in a
- 16:53Speaker 1: residential facility in another state, carrying memory gaps spanning fourteen months.
- 16:59Speaker 1: Her case was reopened. Authorities noted that additional charges remained
- 17:03Speaker 1: under review, pending forensic analysis. The outcome of that review
- 17:07Speaker 1: had not been made public as of the time this
- 17:10Speaker 1: episode was produced. Six years a woman whose disappearance had
- 17:14Speaker 1: been sealed as a choice she made a family that
- 17:17Speaker 1: had been handed a story about relapse and left to
- 17:20Speaker 1: carry it. Dennis Schultz's certification as a sober companion was
- 17:24Speaker 1: not a credential he had earned and then misused. It
- 17:28Speaker 1: was the search mechanism. It produced, access to women who
- 17:31Speaker 1: had fought their way to stability, and whose support systems
- 17:35Speaker 1: were structurally trained to interpret deterioration as regression rather than harm.
- 17:40Speaker 1: That is what doctor Angela Norris meant when she described
- 17:44Speaker 1: his affect as calibrated warmth, not that he was skilled
- 17:48Speaker 1: at seeming kind, that the kindness was the architecture. There
- 17:52Speaker 1: is something specific about this case that does not leave easily,
- 17:57Speaker 1: not the crime itself, the design of it. Rebecca Coleman
- 18:01Speaker 1: was twenty eight years old and two years out of
- 18:04Speaker 1: Whitmore Recovery Center when Dennis Schultz stopped beside her car
- 18:09Speaker 1: on an April afternoon. She had built something meetings on
- 18:13Speaker 1: Tuesday mornings at the church on Mercer Avenue, her aunt Linda,
- 18:16Speaker 1: sixty one years old, and driving out to Garvey to
- 18:19Speaker 1: check in her friend Marissa, making that same Tuesday drive
- 18:23Speaker 1: for three years without being asked twice. Rebecca had people,
- 18:28Speaker 1: she had structured, She had, by every measure, done the
- 18:31Speaker 1: hard work. Dennis did not find a gap in her defenses.
- 18:35Speaker 1: He found the defenses themselves and learned to speak their language.
- 18:40Speaker 1: The thing. Marissa said afterward that she had felt a
- 18:43Speaker 1: mild unease and set it down because she did not
- 18:46Speaker 1: want to be the kind of friend who dampened everything.
- 18:49Speaker 1: That line has wait not because she failed, she did
- 18:52Speaker 1: not fail, but because the manipulation was engineered specifically so
- 18:56Speaker 1: that the people closest to Rebecca would interpret their own
- 18:59Speaker 1: inns sins as over reaction. The doubt was not incidental,
- 19:04Speaker 1: It was load bearing. Kevin Baker, a clinical social worker
- 19:08Speaker 1: who specialized in coercive control, not a detective, was the
- 19:12Speaker 1: one who named what had been visible all along. He
- 19:15Speaker 1: mapped it. He brought the map to Detective Paulson. The
- 19:18Speaker 1: system found Rebecca because someone understood the system well enough
- 19:22Speaker 1: to describe exactly how it had been defeated. What this
- 19:25Speaker 1: case leaves behind is not a question about whether justice
- 19:30Speaker 1: was served. Dennis Schultz is convicted, Sheila Lowe is convicted,
- 19:35Speaker 1: Doctor Marcus Webb no longer holds a license. Those outcomes exist.
- 19:41Speaker 1: What it leaves behind is the question of the credential,
- 19:44Speaker 1: a certification that in this case functioned as a targeting system.
- 19:49Speaker 1: The National Association of Sober Companions did not create Dennis Schultz,
- 19:54Speaker 1: but the access that credential provided was real, and Rebecca
- 19:58Speaker 1: Coleman was not the first person to move through his
- 20:00Speaker 1: life without knowing what she had entered. Tanya Or is alive.
- 20:05Speaker 1: Rebecca Coleman is alive. Their recoveries are their own and
- 20:09Speaker 1: they belonged to no one else's telling. The juice glass
- 20:13Speaker 1: stayed on the porch because an old padlock did not
- 20:17Speaker 1: catch one mechanical failure in August heat under direct sun.
- 20:22Speaker 1: That is the margin. That is what the difference looked
- 20:25Speaker 1: like from the outside. This show is made by Obo Media.