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He Gave Him a Name - How a Friend Erased Randy's Life · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: At four forty in the morning on the ninth of
0:06
Speaker 1: September two thousand eighteen, a snowplow operator named Russell Phillips
0:11
Speaker 1: was six miles into his run on Decker Hollow Road
0:14
Speaker 1: when his headlights caught something on the gravel shoulder above
0:18
Speaker 1: Teller Creek, a black Duffel bag sitting upright as though
0:23
Speaker 1: someone had set it down carefully and walked away. Phillips
0:26
Speaker 1: had worked that route for eleven years. He knew every pothole,
0:31
Speaker 1: every frost heave, every mailbox leaning toward the road. That
0:35
Speaker 1: bag had not been there the night before. He called
0:38
Speaker 1: the non emergency line for the Harnett County Sheriff, and
0:42
Speaker 1: what they found inside that bag would take investigators more
0:46
Speaker 1: than a year to fully understand. Three changes of clothes
0:51
Speaker 1: size medium, a prepaid phone in sealed packaging, a spiral
0:56
Speaker 1: notebook roughly forty pages filled in careful ballpoint, a ziplock
1:01
Speaker 1: bag containing a social Security card and a laminated state ID,
1:06
Speaker 1: and a sealed envelope addressed by hand to a licensed
1:09
Speaker 1: clinical social worker named Sandra Snyder at eight fourteen Pratt
1:14
Speaker 1: Avenue in Kellerton. The name on the ID was Randy Adams.
1:20
Speaker 1: That detail stopped the first deputy un scene. The bag
1:23
Speaker 1: had not been abandoned. It had been packed deliberately, carefully,
1:28
Speaker 1: with documents that take time to gather and an envelope
1:32
Speaker 1: addressed to a specific professional. Someone had decided to leave,
1:36
Speaker 1: and they had planned for what came after. What nobody
1:39
Speaker 1: on Decker Hollow Road knew that morning was that Randy
1:42
Speaker 1: Adams had driven out there himself the night before, and
1:45
Speaker 1: that the bag and the notebook inside it contained something
1:49
Speaker 1: that a fourteen year veteran of victim advocacy would later
1:52
Speaker 1: call the most organized documentation of coercive control she had
1:56
Speaker 1: ever encountered in her career. This is the story of
2:00
Speaker 1: how one person dismantled another person's reality, piece by piece
2:04
Speaker 1: over the course of more than a year, and how
2:07
Speaker 1: the person being dismantled figured out what was happening before
2:10
Speaker 1: most people would have had a name for it. Randy
2:13
Speaker 1: Adams grew up on Moss Street in Kellerton with his mother, Connie.
2:18
Speaker 1: By the time he was twenty two, he had a
2:21
Speaker 1: second floor apartment in a four unit building on Collier Street,
2:25
Speaker 1: a truck payment he was keeping up with, and a
2:28
Speaker 1: night shift at a regional distribution warehouse that he had
2:31
Speaker 1: held without interruption for four years. He was not the
2:35
Speaker 1: kind of person who called in sick without a reason.
2:38
Speaker 1: He was not the kind of person who was late.
2:41
Speaker 1: He was also a baritone. He had sung with the
2:44
Speaker 1: Kellerton Community Chorus since he was sixteen years old, which
2:48
Speaker 1: means he joined around two thousand and nine and had
2:52
Speaker 1: sung with them for about a decade. Douglas Van, the
2:55
Speaker 1: chorus director, a retired music teacher, confirmed whatever one who
3:00
Speaker 1: knew Randy already understood. Randy arrived fifteen minutes early every
3:06
Speaker 1: single rehearsal, not on time early. That was not a quirk,
3:11
Speaker 1: that was character. Patricia Hume, his second grade teacher, now
3:16
Speaker 1: retired in Florida, remembered something specific about Randy as a child.
3:21
Speaker 1: She said he would observe a room before he entered it.
3:24
Speaker 1: That detail would matter later. Understand what Randy's life looked
3:29
Speaker 1: like in early twenty eighteen. He was twenty five, paying
3:33
Speaker 1: his own bills, stable at work, embedded in a community
3:37
Speaker 1: he had chosen and kept for nearly a decade. Nothing
3:41
Speaker 1: about that picture suggested vulnerability, and that is precisely the point.
3:46
Speaker 1: Coercive control does not target people because they are weak.
3:51
Speaker 1: It targets people because they are present, and because presents
3:55
Speaker 1: can be slowly redirected. George Paget arrived in Kellerton approximately
4:00
Speaker 1: eighteen months before the summer of two thousand eighteen, which
4:04
Speaker 1: places him there around early two thousand seventeen. He was
4:07
Speaker 1: thirty eight years old. He came from Briar Falls, roughly
4:11
Speaker 1: ninety miles to the north, with a stated history of
4:14
Speaker 1: being a former contractor who had gotten caught up with
4:17
Speaker 1: the wrong people. He rented a room in a boarding
4:20
Speaker 1: house on Kessler Street run by a woman named Vera Nolan.
4:24
Speaker 1: He picked up occasional work at a lumber yard. He
4:27
Speaker 1: met Randy Adams in February of two thousand eighteen at
4:31
Speaker 1: a gas station. What happened in the weeks that followed
4:35
Speaker 1: moved faster than anyone who knew Randy would have predicted.
4:39
Speaker 1: Paget offered what clinicians recognize as love bombing, sustained attention,
4:44
Speaker 1: specific praise, a certainty about Randy's value that felt at
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Speaker 1: first like being genuinely seen. Randy had spent years being
4:54
Speaker 1: reliable and steady, and mostly unacknowledged for it. Paget acknowledged
4:59
Speaker 1: him constantly by the final days of February, something else
5:02
Speaker 1: was already in motion. Before most people would consider a
5:06
Speaker 1: friendship to be established. Paget had submitted a fraudulent male
5:10
Speaker 1: forwarding request, routing Randy's correspondence to a PO box Paget controlled.
5:15
Speaker 1: That request would later be certified by a forensic document
5:19
Speaker 1: examiner as written in Paget's hand. Randy did not know
5:24
Speaker 1: about it yet. He was still at that point being
5:27
Speaker 1: made to feel like the most important person in some
5:29
Speaker 1: one else's world. That is where the dismantling began, not
5:33
Speaker 1: with a threat, not with a demand, with attention, and
5:37
Speaker 1: by the time Randy understood what was underneath it, his mail,
5:41
Speaker 1: his money, and his name were already somewhere else. The
5:45
Speaker 1: male forwarding request was submitted in the final days of
5:49
Speaker 1: February two thousand eighteen. That is the number that matters,
5:54
Speaker 1: not weeks into the friendship, not months days. Randy had
5:59
Speaker 1: not yet seen the inside of Paget's boarding room on
6:02
Speaker 1: Kessler Street, he had not yet learned Paget's middle name,
6:06
Speaker 1: and Paget had already re routed every piece of correspondence
6:10
Speaker 1: addressed to Randy Adams to APPEO box. Randy did not
6:13
Speaker 1: know existed. March arrived and Vera Nolen, the woman who
6:18
Speaker 1: ran the boarding house, noticed something. Mail arriving for Paget
6:23
Speaker 1: carried a different name on the return labels, Randy Adams.
6:27
Speaker 1: She asked about it. Paget told her it was a
6:30
Speaker 1: shared po box arrangement. She accepted that. Later, when investigators
6:34
Speaker 1: contacted her, she remembered the conversation precisely. By April, Paget's
6:40
Speaker 1: name appeared on Randy's bank account, not as a secondary contact,
6:44
Speaker 1: as a joint holder. The account Randy had opened at
6:47
Speaker 1: twenty two, the year he started the night shift at
6:51
Speaker 1: the regional distribution warehouse. The account tied to the truck
6:54
Speaker 1: payment he made every month without missing one. Randy did
6:58
Speaker 1: not remember in any set specific moment deciding to add him.
7:02
Speaker 1: That is one of the things that becomes clear in
7:05
Speaker 1: the notebook, the spiral bound one with roughly forty pages
7:09
Speaker 1: of careful ballpoint writing that would eventually end up in
7:13
Speaker 1: a bag on the shoulder of Decker Hollow Road. Randy
7:16
Speaker 1: had documented the sequence not as a legal record, as
7:20
Speaker 1: an attempt to understand it himself. He wrote out each
7:24
Speaker 1: step the way a person writes when they are trying
7:26
Speaker 1: to locate the exact moment something went wrong and cannot
7:30
Speaker 1: find it. The utilities came first, then the renter's insurance,
7:34
Speaker 1: then the account. Each transfer of access had arrived wrapped
7:38
Speaker 1: in a reason that sounded like closeness each one had
7:41
Speaker 1: felt in the moment, like trust, moving in both directions.
7:46
Speaker 1: In August of twenty eighteen, seventeen withdrawals left Randy's account
7:52
Speaker 1: in a single month. The total was four thousand dollars.
7:56
Speaker 1: Randy had documentation of his own deposits, he did not
8:00
Speaker 1: have an explanation for the outflows. He confronted Paget. Paget's response,
8:04
Speaker 1: according to what Randy later documented, was to turn the
8:08
Speaker 1: confrontation sideways. He told Randy that he had not realized
8:12
Speaker 1: Randy was tracking him like a suspect. He said it
8:15
Speaker 1: with something that read as hurt Randy, who had spent
8:19
Speaker 1: his adult life being the reliable one, the one who
8:22
Speaker 1: showed up fifteen minutes early, the one who did not
8:24
Speaker 1: cause scenes. Randy absorbed it. He apologized. The four thousand
8:29
Speaker 1: dollars was never returned. In September, Randy asked Paget to leave,
8:35
Speaker 1: and Paget did. He took his things from Collier Street
8:38
Speaker 1: and returned to the room on Kessler Street, but he
8:41
Speaker 1: kept coming back. The building at Collier Street was a
8:45
Speaker 1: four unit, second floor walk up. The landlord, Don Esterley,
8:49
Speaker 1: had installed a rear staircase years earlier as an emergency exit.
8:54
Speaker 1: There was no exterior lock on it. Esterley later told
8:57
Speaker 1: investigators he had planned to fix that freeak years he
9:01
Speaker 1: had not fixed it. Randy had changed the front lock
9:04
Speaker 1: at his mother, Connie's suggestion. The front lock was solid.
9:08
Speaker 1: He had not known about the rear staircase as a
9:11
Speaker 1: point of entry. He did not know anyone did until
9:14
Speaker 1: something in the apartment began to feel wrong in a way.
9:18
Speaker 1: He could not document objects slightly out of place, the
9:22
Speaker 1: particular sense that a space had been occupied in his absence.
9:26
Speaker 1: He had no proof, not yet. The notebook he was
9:30
Speaker 1: filling during this period was not written as evidence. It
9:33
Speaker 1: was written as a record for himself. Dates, amounts, specific
9:38
Speaker 1: phrases Paget had used during conversations. Randy kept returning to
9:44
Speaker 1: Sandra Snyder, the licensed clinical social worker who eventually received
9:49
Speaker 1: the bag, would later describe it as the most organized
9:52
Speaker 1: document of coercive control she had encountered in fourteen years
9:56
Speaker 1: of advocacy work. She did not say most dramatic, did
10:00
Speaker 1: not say most extreme. She said most organized. That word
10:04
Speaker 1: is worth sitting with. Randy had been keeping the record
10:08
Speaker 1: since spring. He had also, in spring of twenty eighteen,
10:13
Speaker 1: stopped going to choir, the Kellerton Community Choir, where he
10:17
Speaker 1: had sung baritone since he was sixteen, where he had
10:20
Speaker 1: arrived every rehearsal fifteen minutes early for years. Douglas Vann,
10:25
Speaker 1: the choir director, confirmed the attendant's pattern and then confirmed
10:30
Speaker 1: its sudden end. Randy had not given a reason anyone
10:34
Speaker 1: could reconstruct precisely. What the timeline shows is that the
10:38
Speaker 1: withdrawal from choir coincided with the period when Paget's presence
10:42
Speaker 1: in Randy's life was densest. Isolation does not always look
10:47
Speaker 1: like a locked door. Sometimes it looks like not going
10:50
Speaker 1: somewhere you used to love. And here is what those
10:53
Speaker 1: two facts, the organized notebook and the abandoned choir point
10:57
Speaker 1: toured together. Randy had unders stood on some level what
11:01
Speaker 1: was happening. He was documenting it, he was withdrawing into it,
11:06
Speaker 1: and he had not yet found the move that would
11:08
Speaker 1: change his situation. The bag he placed on decker Hollow
11:12
Speaker 1: Road on the night of September eighth. Was that move
11:15
Speaker 1: picture what Russell Phillips saw at four forty in the
11:18
Speaker 1: morning on September ninth, a snow plow operator with eleven
11:22
Speaker 1: years on the Decker Hollow Road route, running the same
11:25
Speaker 1: six miles over Teller Creek he had run hundreds of
11:29
Speaker 1: times before, a bag in the road's shoulder that had
11:32
Speaker 1: not been there on any previous pass. Inside it three
11:36
Speaker 1: changes of clothes in a medium size, a prepaid foam
11:40
Speaker 1: in sealed packaging, forty pages of documented evidence, a Social
11:45
Speaker 1: Security card and a laminated State I d In Randy
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Speaker 1: Adams his name, and a sealed envelope addressed by hand
11:51
Speaker 1: to Sandra Snyder at eight fourteen Pratt Avenue. Randy had
11:55
Speaker 1: placed his own identity documents in that bag, not copies
12:00
Speaker 1: the originals. Think about what that means for a moment.
12:04
Speaker 1: He was not throwing away his identity. He was removing
12:07
Speaker 1: it from the space where paget could reach it. The
12:10
Speaker 1: envelope for Sandra Snyder contained, according to her later account,
12:14
Speaker 1: a written request that she serve as a temporary custodian
12:17
Speaker 1: of the documents and the note book. Randy had researched her.
12:22
Speaker 1: He had chosen her specifically. He had written the address
12:25
Speaker 1: in the same careful hand that filled the notebook's forty pages.
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Speaker 1: Now Here is the thing that does not resolve easily.
12:32
Speaker 1: The bag ended up with the county sheriff. Before it
12:35
Speaker 1: reached Sandra Snyder, Phillips called the non emergency line. The
12:40
Speaker 1: sheriff's office locked it, assessed it, and then, and this
12:45
Speaker 1: is the part that required the most institutional navigation, forwarded
12:49
Speaker 1: the materials to Snyder as the addresses of the sealed
12:52
Speaker 1: envelope directed. She received the bag, she read the note book,
12:56
Speaker 1: She contacted Randy, and then investigators began and working backward
13:01
Speaker 1: through what the notebook contained. The mail forwarding request had
13:04
Speaker 1: been submitted before anyone would have called Paget and Randy friends.
13:09
Speaker 1: The bank account had been accessed jointly for months. A
13:12
Speaker 1: laptop Paget had sold before his arrest, recovered from the
13:16
Speaker 1: buyer during the investigation, contained a cropped photograph of Randy
13:20
Speaker 1: and downloaded financial statements from Randy's account. Paget's finger prints
13:25
Speaker 1: were recovered from the night stand beside Randy's bed and
13:28
Speaker 1: from the interior handle of the rear staircase door. He
13:32
Speaker 1: had not needed a key. He had never needed a key.
13:37
Speaker 1: The question the evidence raised was not whether Paget had
13:40
Speaker 1: been inside, It was how many times and what he
13:43
Speaker 1: had been looking for each time he went back. Eight
13:47
Speaker 1: months after Paget's sentencing, forensic reviewers examining his former apartment
13:52
Speaker 1: in Briar Falls found a DNA sample on a door handle.
13:56
Speaker 1: It matched the profile taken from Paget in Kellerton. The
13:59
Speaker 1: name him attached to the prior case was Chris Avery,
14:03
Speaker 1: twenty eight years old two thousand fifteen. Avery had reported
14:07
Speaker 1: that someone was entering his apartment through a rear access
14:11
Speaker 1: point and using his name to open credit accounts. The
14:15
Speaker 1: case had been filed and then archived as inconclusive, no arrest,
14:20
Speaker 1: no resolution, just a name in a file. Paget had
14:24
Speaker 1: done this before, possibly not for the last time, if
14:28
Speaker 1: Kellerton had not been different. And Kellerton was different for
14:31
Speaker 1: one reason, Randy had written everything down, placed it in
14:35
Speaker 1: a bag, driven six miles to a rural road in
14:38
Speaker 1: the dark, and trusted that someone would find it. Someone did.
14:43
Speaker 1: George Paget was arrested on the ninth of September twenty nineteen,
14:48
Speaker 1: exactly one year later, almost to the day. The trial
14:53
Speaker 1: moved quickly once it began. Prosecutors laid the evidence in
14:57
Speaker 1: sequence the male forwarding request in Paget's certified handwriting, the
15:02
Speaker 1: finger prints on the night stand, and the rear staircase
15:04
Speaker 1: handle the laptop recovered from the buyer Paget had sold
15:08
Speaker 1: it too before his arrest. On that laptop, investigators found
15:13
Speaker 1: a cropped photograph of Randy in financial statements downloaded from
15:17
Speaker 1: Randy's account. The jury heard all of it, and on
15:21
Speaker 1: the afternoon of the fifth day, before the defense had
15:24
Speaker 1: finished presenting, Paget confessed. The jury deliberated three hours and
15:28
Speaker 1: forty minutes. They returned nine guilty verdicts identity, fraud, unlawful entry,
15:36
Speaker 1: and financial exploitation, three counts of each. Sandra Snyder, who
15:41
Speaker 1: had described the note book as the most organized document
15:45
Speaker 1: of coercive control she had encountered in fourteen years of
15:49
Speaker 1: advocacy work, later noted that the prosecution's case rested almost
15:54
Speaker 1: entirely on what Randy had assembled himself. The dates, the amounts,
16:00
Speaker 1: the sequence of small permissions that had become an architecture
16:03
Speaker 1: of control. Randy had not needed investigators to reconstruct it,
16:08
Speaker 1: he had already done it. There is something specific about
16:11
Speaker 1: that detail that does not let go easily. Not the verdict,
16:16
Speaker 1: not the finger prints, the fact that a twenty six
16:18
Speaker 1: year old working the night shift at a regional distribution
16:21
Speaker 1: warehouse had understood with enough clarity to document it, page
16:25
Speaker 1: by page, exactly what was happening to him, and had
16:29
Speaker 1: found a way to get that documentation out of his
16:32
Speaker 1: own apartment and into the right hands. Without Paget knowing,
16:36
Speaker 1: without a phone call any one could intercept, without any
16:40
Speaker 1: one he could be sure would believe him, he drove
16:43
Speaker 1: six miles to a rural road in the dark and
16:46
Speaker 1: placed his trust in a stranger's head lights. Eight months
16:49
Speaker 1: after sentencing, forensic reviewers returned to Paget's former apartment in
16:54
Speaker 1: Briar Falls, ninety miles north of Kellerton. They found a
16:58
Speaker 1: DNA sample on a door hand. It matched the profile
17:01
Speaker 1: taken from Paget during the Kellerton investigation. The case that
17:06
Speaker 1: sample connected to belonged to Chris Avery, twenty eight years old.
17:12
Speaker 1: Twenty fifteen. Avery had reported that someone was entering his
17:16
Speaker 1: apartment through a rear access point and using his name
17:19
Speaker 1: to open credit accounts. The case had been filed and
17:23
Speaker 1: then shelved inconclusive. Paget now faces additional charges in the
17:28
Speaker 1: Briar Falls jurisdiction. Chris Avery's case was not inconclusive because
17:32
Speaker 1: the evidence was absent. It was inconclusive because no one
17:36
Speaker 1: had a name to attach to it. Yet the rear
17:39
Speaker 1: access point the financial accounts opened in someone else's name
17:43
Speaker 1: the same architecture. Four years earlier, in a different city,
17:48
Speaker 1: Paget had moved ninety miles south and started again. What
17:52
Speaker 1: stopped him was not a locked door, Randy had changed
17:56
Speaker 1: his lock. Paget came through the back staircase. What's stopped
18:00
Speaker 1: him was forty pages of ball Point inc. A sealed
18:04
Speaker 1: envelope addressed to a specific woman on Pratt Avenue, and
18:08
Speaker 1: a man who had decided on the night of the
18:10
Speaker 1: eighth of September that the only person he could trust
18:13
Speaker 1: with his own story was himself. There is an open
18:17
Speaker 1: question that the record does not fully answer. How many
18:20
Speaker 1: times did Paget go back into that apartment after Randy
18:23
Speaker 1: asked him to leave. The finger prints confirm he was there,
18:27
Speaker 1: they do not say how many times or what he
18:30
Speaker 1: was looking for on each return. That question remains without
18:33
Speaker 1: a number What the w record does answer is this,
18:37
Speaker 1: Randy Adams return to the Kellerton Community Choir on a
18:40
Speaker 1: Wednesday in November of two thouy nineteen. He arrived fifteen
18:44
Speaker 1: minutes earlier, the same habit he had carried since he
18:48
Speaker 1: was sixteen years old, before any of this, before a
18:51
Speaker 1: man at a gas station in February learned his name
18:54
Speaker 1: and decided what to do with it. Douglas Van, the
18:57
Speaker 1: choir director, confirmed he was there baritone section, fifteen minutes
19:03
Speaker 1: before the others. There is something in that image that
19:06
Speaker 1: resists easy summary, not triumph exactly, not resolution in any
19:12
Speaker 1: clean sense. A young man walking into a church basement
19:15
Speaker 1: in November early because that is how he has always
19:19
Speaker 1: done it, because some part of him had held on
19:22
Speaker 1: to that through all of it, and it was still
19:25
Speaker 1: intact when the rest had been sorted out. The note
19:28
Speaker 1: book that Sandra Snyder received is part of the case
19:31
Speaker 1: record now, the forty pages Randy wrote carefully in a
19:35
Speaker 1: spiral bound book he then carried out of his own
19:38
Speaker 1: life and left on a dark road for a stranger
19:41
Speaker 1: to find. It is evidence, but it is also something else,
19:45
Speaker 1: a record of a person who refused to disappear inside
19:49
Speaker 1: someone else's version of who he was. He wrote his
19:52
Speaker 1: own name back into existence and some one found it.
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