Latest / Fake Love Stories / He Learned Her Thursdays: The Voice That Stole Lauren's Trust

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He Learned Her Thursdays: The Voice That Stole Lauren's Trust · Fake Love Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of April 14th, 2019, 8, a church
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: volunteer named Emily Patterson pulled open the door of storage
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: unit 41 at Tallow Basin, self-storage, and found something that
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: should not have been there. Two folding tables, a laptop,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: a headset, and a ceramic mug printed with the name Lauren.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: The mug was mass-produced. It had no fingerprint significance, no
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: forensic weight, but it told investigators something immediately. Someone had
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: been sitting in that rented darkness, holding a cup with
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a woman's name on it, and talking to her. The
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: voice on the other end of the call never belonged
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: to the man she thought she knew. This is the
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: story of how a telephone becomes a weapon. How warmth, specific, remembered,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: personalized warmth, can be manufactured in a storage unit. and
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: delivered through a headset to someone who reads the fine
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: print on contracts, who is organized, who is precise. Lauren
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Christensen was not the kind of person this happens to,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and that is exactly the point. Before this ends, the
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: notebook will change everything, and the mug will never come back.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Lauren Christensen was 28 years old in the winter of 2019,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: and she was not unhappy. She taught second grade at
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Birchfield Elementary in Delworth, Indiana. Her students knew her as
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the teacher, who kept pencils sharpened and explanations clear. Her
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: colleagues described her the same way, organized, precise, the kind
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: of person who reads the fine print. On Thursdays, she
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: drove out to County Road, 4, and visited her great-aunt
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Norma Vail. Norma was 81, sharp-memoried, and kept a dish
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: of butterscotch discs on the table beside her chair. Lauren
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: brought a fresh bag every week. The drive was 30
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: minutes each way, and she made it without fail. That
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: detail mattered. Not because of what it said about Lauren's calendar,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: but because of what it revealed about the shape of
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: her week. Thursday had a particular weight. It was the
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: day she showed up for someone who needed her. Lauren
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: had graduated from Kelmer University and rented a duplex on
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Tanner Court. Her closest friend was Crystal O'Connor, a paralegal
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: who had moved to Indianapolis but stayed close. Her colleague
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Beth Aldridge had been nudging her, the way colleagues do,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: toward trying again, reinstalling the dating app she had deleted
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: months before, in January of 2019. Lauren reinstalled it. She
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: was not reckless. She was not lonely in a desperate way.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: She was a 28-year-old woman who read profiles carefully and
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: answered messages slowly. On February 2, 2019, she matched with
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: a profile named Glenn Lame. The profile said he was
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: a civil engineer. It said he was based in Qatar
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: on a long-term infrastructure contract. His photograph showed a composed,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: professional-looking man. The photo belonged to a man named Andrew Saville.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: a civil engineer in Portland, Oregon, who had never been
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: to Qatar, had no dating app profiles, and had no
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: connection to any of this beyond the fact that his
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: LinkedIn image was publicly visible. The man behind the profile
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: was Glenn Lane. That was, in fact, his real name.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: He was 36 years old, from Southern Ohio, and he
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: rented an apartment in the Riverside district of Delworth before
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: this happened. He had worked as a customer retention specialist
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: at a call center in Columbus. His job had been
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: to keep people on the phone, to listen, to find
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: the thing they needed to hear and say it back
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: to them with patience and precision. He was very good
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: at it. What Lauren heard from the first conversation was
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: a voice she described later as measured and warm, with
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: a slight flatness that made it feel steady rather than performed.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: He asked questions and remembered the answers. He mentioned Norma.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: He mentioned the Thursday drives. He mentioned butterscotch candy. By March,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: she looked forward to his calls the way she looked
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: forward to those drives, as a fixed, reliable point in
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: the week. The person she was talking to did not exist.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: But the feeling of being known, specifically and carefully known,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: was real. And that feeling was not an accident. The
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: notebook was spiral-bound. College ruled. and divided into columns. Not
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: a diary. Not a journal. Something closer to a ledger.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Each row held a name beside the name. The platform,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: the start date, a series of short codes that tracked
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: emotional stage, and a running dollar total that climbed through
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: each row like a body temperature rising before a fever breaks.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: But the column that stopped investigators when they first opened it,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the column that took a moment to understand, was labeled
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Anchored Details. Under Lauren's name in that column, two entries,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Great Aunt, Assisted Living, Butterscotch Candy, and Thursdays. He had
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: written down her Thursdays. The detail was not incidental. It
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: was operational. He referenced Norma not because he cared, but
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: because the reference worked. It created the sensation of being
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: seen inside an ordinary life, The drives, the hard candy,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the particular shape of her week. That sensation was the product.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Everything else, the profile, the photographs, the voice, was delivery infrastructure.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: There were six names in the notebook. Lauren's dollar total
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: read $ 11, 060 at the time of recovery. The highest total
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: in the ledger belonged to a woman whose name investigators
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: would later confirm as Judith Farrar. Judith was 54 years old.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: She worked as a bookkeeper near Delworth. Her total read
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: approximately $ 31, 000. She had been matched with the same profile name,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: the same template, the same measured voice explaining the same
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: engineering contract in Qatar, cycling the same six-week delay, end
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: of April arrival, on rotation, patient enough to run it
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: again the moment the previous deadline passed without consequence. Judith's
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: anchor details entry noted a son in the Navy and
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: a bad hip. It noted that she preferred phone calls
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: to video. That preference, the phone, not the face, was
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: not a limitation Glenn Lane worked around. It was something
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: he selected for. The voice was the asset. He knew that.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Crystal O'Connor was a paralegal. She was Lauren's closest friend,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: and she was precise in the way that people who
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: read contracts for a living tend to be precise. In
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: March of 2019, she ran a reverse image search on
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the photograph from Glenn's profile. The result came back in seconds.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: The image belonged to a LinkedIn profile for a civil
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: engineer named Andrew Suttle, based in Portland, Oregon. Suttle had
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: never been to Qatar. He had no dating app presence.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: He had no connection to any of this. His photograph
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: had simply been visible. Crystal told Lauren what she had found.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Lauren did not end contact. Not immediately. That is the
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: detail that is hardest to sit with. Not because it
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: reflects poorly on Lauren, but because it shows exactly how
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: thoroughly the manipulation had taken hold. She had been told,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: with evidence in front of her, that the photograph was stolen.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Her response was to defend him. To find an explanation.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: To send the question back into a place where it
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: could stay uncertain a little longer. Two days of silence followed.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: No call. No message from Glen Lane. Then she sent $ 800.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: The silence was not absence. It was pressure, engineered, timed,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: and drawn from the same operational discipline that filled the
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: notebook's columns. A customer retention specialist knows that the pause
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: before the customer leaves is the moment of maximum leverage.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: He had learned that in a call center in Columbus,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: he applied it here. The $ 800 was not the first transfer.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: It would not be the last, but it was the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: one that arrived after the warning, after the evidence, after
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: the friend who read fine print told her clearly what
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: she had found. That sequence matters. It is the clearest
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: measure of what four weeks of a careful patient voice
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: can build inside a person who is not naive, not reckless,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: and not unsophisticated. The feeling of being known is not
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: a small thing when it is threatened. The mind will
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: work very hard to protect it. Picture the storage unit
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: on the morning of April 14th. Unit 41, Tallow Basin, self-storage.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Glenn Lane had described it to himself in a practical way,
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: as church-owned, infrequently accessed, and never alarmed. He used it
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: as a workspace. Two folding tables, a laptop, a headset,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the notebook open, And on one of those tables, a
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: ceramic mug printed with the name Lauren. It was mass produced.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: It had no forensic significance. Investigators logged it into evidence
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: and it was never returned. What it held was something
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: harder to quantify. The image of a man sitting in
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: a rented storage unit calling a woman by name with
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: her name printed on the object in his hand and
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: feeling nothing particular about the distance between those two facts.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: A church volunteer named Emily Patterson, arrived that morning to
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: retrieve a folding table for a weekend event. She found
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: the hasp unseated. She opened the unit. She saw the tables,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: the laptop, the headset, the notebook. She called her coordinator.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: By 9.40 in the morning on April 14th, Unit 41
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: was a crime scene. Sergeant Tom Vail of the Delworth
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Police Department ran the notebook's app name against open complaints
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: on April 14th. It matched a complaint filed in early
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: March by a woman who had asked investigators to move quietly.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Judith Farrar's case and Lauren's were the same operation, run
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: from the same unit, in the same handwriting. Glenn Lane
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: was arrested three days later on April 17th at his
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: apartment in the Riverside District under his real name. he
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: cooperated in interrogation. He confirmed all six victims himself, unprompted,
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: and walked investigators through the coding system in the notebook
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: without being asked. He said he had never intended to
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: meet any of them in person. There is a version
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: of this story where that statement reads as a small mercy,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a version where it means the relationship such as it
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: was had a defined limit, that the voice was the
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: whole of it, and nothing worse was coming. But there
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: is another version, one that did not surface until eight
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: months after sentencing in December of 2019, when a DNA
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: match connected Glenn Lane to a case in Franklin County, Ohio,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: from 2015. The victim was a man named Herbert Sklein.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: He was 83 years old. Someone had called him repeatedly,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: impersonating a financial advisor. Then, that someone had visited his home.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Herbert Klein lost his savings. The case was closed without
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: a suspect. Herbert Klein died in 2017. The DNA came
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: from a coffee cup left on his kitchen table. The
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: cup had been collected in 2015 and held in evidence
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: for four years without a match. When Lane's booking profile
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: entered the system after his arrest in Delworth, the comparison ran.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: December 2019, the match was confirmed. Herbert Klein's daughter was
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: notified that same month. She had buried her father two
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: years before anyone knew who had sat at his table.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Glenn Lane pleaded guilty in August of 2019, six counts
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: of wire fraud. The sentence was seven years. He had
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: cooperated fully. He had named all six victims himself, walked
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: investigators through the notebook's coding system without being asked, and
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: confirmed every entry without correction. The prosecution did not need
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: to reconstruct his operation from fragments. He handed it over intact.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: That cooperation did not reduce what the six women and
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: men had lost. Lauren Christensen's total came to $ 11, 060. Restitution
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: returned approximately $ 4, 200, less than half. The remaining balance exists
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: as a court order, enforceable on paper, uncertain in practice.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: dependent on Lane's finances after release. Judith Farrow's losses stood
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: at approximately $ 31, 000. She had filed her complaint in early March,
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: asked investigators to move quietly, and waited. The quiet handling
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: she requested helped investigators work without alerting Lane before the
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: storage unit was discovered. That restraint cost her nothing forensically.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: It cost her everything financially before the arrest could happen.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Six names were in the notebook. Six separate operations, each
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: with its own start date, emotional stage code, and running
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: dollar total. The anchor details column held the specifics that
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: made each one work. The great aunt, the candy, the Thursdays.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: A son in the Navy, a bad hip, a preference
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: for phone over video. Lane had learned those details the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: way anyone learns them, by asking and by listening. The
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: difference was what he did with what he heard. His
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: call center background had given him the patience and the
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: scripting discipline for long-form telephone intimacy. He knew how to
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: stay on the line. He knew how to return. He
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: knew that the end of April was far enough away
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: to feel real and close enough to feel urgent. The
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: six-week rotation cycled that deadline forward without the victim ever
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: marking a missed arrival by the time the date passed,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: a new one had replaced it. The relationship felt continuous.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: The departure date never came because the departure was never
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the point. He stated in interrogation that he had never
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: intended to meet any of them in person. The ceramic
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: mug printed with Lauren's name was logged into evidence. It
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: was never returned. It sits in a property locker somewhere, mass-produced,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: purchased at no particular cost, printed with a name that
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: was not chosen for sentiment. It was chosen because it worked.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Lauren Christensen went back to Birchfield Elementary. She still teaches
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: second grade. On Thursdays, she still drives out to County
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Road 4 and sits with Norma Vale. She still brings
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: butterscotch discs. Those details were in Glenn Lane's notebook, anchor details.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: He had written them down under her name as operational data.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Levers to use, not things to protect. And yet those
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: are the same details that describe her life continuing. The
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: same Thursdays. The same great-aunt. The same hard candy in
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: a dish by the chair. He cataloged what mattered to her.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: She kept doing it anyway. In December of 2019, eight
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: months after Lane's sentencing, Herbert Klein's daughter received a phone call.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: She learned that the man who had sat at her
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: father's kitchen table in 2015, the man who had called him,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: repeatedly pretended to be a financial advisor, and left a
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: coffee cup on that table, had a name. She had
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: buried her father in 2017. Without that name, the cup
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: had waited in an evidence bag for four years until
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Glen Lane's booking profile gave it a match. There is
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: no resolution that returns what Herbert Klein lost. There is
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: no version of a December phone call that does not
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: arrive too late. What remains is a record, a spiral
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: notebook cataloged as evidence, a DNA match from a discarded cup,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: a sentence of seven years for six counts of wire
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: fraud with no prior fraud convictions in Indiana to suggest
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the system had seen him before. The thing that made
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Glen Lane effective was not a disguise. It was patience.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: and the knowledge that a voice heard often enough, at
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: the right hour becomes familiar in a way that feels
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: like safety. Lauren described it to a victim advocate afterward,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: she said. The hardest part was not the money. The
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: hardest part was the specific memory of feeling understood. She
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: said he used it the way you would use a key.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: A key implies a lock. It implies that something real
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: was there. Something worth protecting. Something that could be opened.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: She was not wrong about any of it. The lock
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: was real. The feeling was real. What was false was
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: the hand holding the key. That is what this kind
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: of fraud takes. Not credulity. Not carelessness. It takes the
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: ordinary human need to be known by someone, and it
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: turns that need into an entry point. Lauren Christensen is organized, precise,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: and reads the fine print. She is also someone who
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: brings candy to an 81-year-old woman every Thursday, because she
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: loves her. Glenn Lane found the second fact more useful
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: than the first. She is still doing it. That matters.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oboe Media.