Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Moved Into Her Spare Room - She Lost $41,000 to a Stranger

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He Moved Into Her Spare Room - She Lost $41,000 to a Stranger · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of February seventh, a runner named Chad
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Bailey found a check book lying open on a picnic
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: table at the Keswick Mill Road rest area. Frost had
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: crystallized across the pages. The book had been there for
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: nine days, through overnight freezes, through rain, through a week's
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: worth of mornings, when no one stopped to ask why
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: it had been left behind. The last entry, dated January
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: twenty ninth, read four thousand, two hundred dollars paid to
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: someone named f. Zeller for a car repair. The car
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: hadn't been near a shop since October. That detail, a
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: payment for work that never happened, is what unraveled everything.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: The check book belonged to Dawn E Sanders, sixty two
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: years old, of Hardened Bluff. She was a licensed foster
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: parent of thirty one years. She was a part time bookkeeper,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: and by the time that frost covered check book was found,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: her savings account held eleven dollars and forty cents. Don
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Sanders lived in a pale yellow house on Fenwick Court,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: a quiet residential street in Hardened Bluff. She was up
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: every morning by five fifteen. On Wednesdays, at six forty five,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: she called her sister Paulette, who lived thirty miles away
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: in Grover City. Every six weeks she kept an appointment
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: with a foot specialist. She drove a nine year old
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Sedan with two hundred thousand miles on it, and she
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: kept that car running because she needed it, not because
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: she could afford to replace it. For thirty one years,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: she had opened her home to children the county couldn't
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: place anywhere else. That was not a casual commitment. That
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: was the organizing principle of her life. She was also
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: a bookkeeper. She understood numbers, She kept a register, She
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: tracked every transaction in a spiral notebook. She maintained herself dates, amounts, reasons.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The people who knew Don Sanders described someone methodical, reliable,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: and deeply oriented toward others. She was, by every account,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: exactly the kind of person who pays attention. That matters
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: because what happened to Don Sanders was not the result
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: of inattention. It was the result of a system designed
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: specifically to exploit the qualities that made her good at
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: caring for people. The man who called himself Frank Zeller
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: was trim, likely in his late forties, and described in
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: records as a property manager and maintenance worker. He first
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: appeared at the County Foster Care office approximately three weeks
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: before Dawn's car broke down, asking, according to witnesses, about
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: volunteer opportunities. Investigators later found no evidence that he followed
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: through on any of those inquiries. What they found instead
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: was a towing record in April of the prior year,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: down sedan stalled on Carpenter Highway, six miles east of
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Hardened Bluff. Maddox Towing responded. Mechanic Phil Oster on Featherstone
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Street serviced the car afterward. Oster's finding was specific. The
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: fuel pump relay had been disconnected, not worn out, not corroded, disconnected.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: It was a thirty second fix. The rest of the
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: car's electricals, Oster noted were in better shape than expected
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: for a vehicle of that age. Investigators could not prove
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Zeller disconnected that relay. The record is clear on that point.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: What the record does show is that Zeller was in
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: town three weeks before the breakdown, and that the breakdown
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: gave him an organic, unremarkable reason to be present on
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: a roadside where a woman driving alone needed help. Within
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: six weeks of that breakdown, Zeller was visiting Dawn's home
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: three to four times a week. He told her his
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: mother had been a foster parent. Investigators later concluded that
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: detail was almost certainly not true. It is not proven
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: false on the official record, but the probability, according to
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: the case file, sits somewhere close to zero. What it
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: accomplished was immediate and precise. It told Don Sanders that
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: this man understood her life's work from the inside, that
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: he had been shaped by it, that caring for vulnerable
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: children was something they shared. By September, Zeller had moved
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: into her spare bedroom. He never paid rent. The spare
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: bedroom was the beginning of the end, not because Zeller
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: moved in, but because of what moving in allowed him
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: to do next. Don Sanders kept a spiral notebook. Thirty
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: one years as a licensed foster parent had made her
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: meticulous about details, names, dates, amounts, who owed what and when.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: It was not suspicion that drove her to write things down.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: It was simply how she was built, and so some
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: time after Zeller settled into that spare room, she began
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: keeping a record of the money. The first check came
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: within weeks of his arrival, then another the register entries
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: were tidy and specific reimbursements, supplies, contributions towards shared expenses.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: On the surface, each one had a reason attached. Investigators
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: reviewing the bank statements later identified twenty four checks across
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: nine months, totaling forty one thousand dollars. That number deserves
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: a moment of silence. Forty one thousand dollars drawn by
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: a sixty two year old part time bookkeeper, A woman
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: who drove a nine year old sedan with two hundred
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: thousand miles on it, A woman whose Wednesday morning routine
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: included a six forty five call to her sister Paulette,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: not because any one required it, but because that was
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the shape of her life. Steady, accountable, faithful to the
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: people she loved. Four times, according to investigators, Dawn raised
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: the question of rent four times. Zellar did not pay it.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: What he did instead was recite. He enumerated his contributions,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: the errand he had run, the repair, he had handled,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: the time he had given. He made the accounting feel
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: like ingratitude. On her part, she stopped asking. The last
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: register entry was dated January twenty ninth, four thousand, two
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars The notation read F Zeller re m vehicle.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: The car had not been to a shop since October.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Craig Barrett, the Harmon County financial crimes investigator assigned to
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: the case, later described what he found in that check
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: book register as a kind of document in itself, not
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: a record of legitimate transactions, a record of a process.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Each entry showed the shape of how Dawn had been
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: trained to explain the money away. She had not been
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: deceived once. She had been taught check by check to
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: provide her own explanations. But the note book was gone.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: At some point after Zeller moved in, he discovered Dawn
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: was keeping it. The case file does not record the
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: exact conversation. What it records is the outcome. Zeller told
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: Dawn that the note book was a sign of distrust,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: that a person who truly believed in him would not
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: be keeping score. Dawn apologized she threw the note book
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: away herself. There is no more efficient way to destroy
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: evidence than to convince the person who created it that
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: the evidence is the problem. For four days after the
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: note book was discarded, Zeller said nothing to Dawn. He
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: did not argue, he did not leave. He simply withdrew,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: meals eaten separately, rooms moved through without acknowledgment, silence used
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: the way a door is used to close something off.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: On the fifth day, he returned to normal. Dawn, by
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: every account, was relieved. That pattern the ledger of grievances,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the silence, the return repeated across the following weeks. Each
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: cycle cost her something she could not yet name. Then
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: came late January, something broke. The case file does not
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: specify what triggered it, but investigators noted that by the
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: final days of January, Dawn's behavior shifted in ways her
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: routine made visible. The Wednesday call to Paulette did not happen,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: the foot specialist appointment was missed, and on an afternoon
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: she had no documented reason to be there. Dawn drove
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: to the rest area on Keswick Mill Road, four and
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: a half miles from her house on Fenwick Court, sat
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: at a picnic table, checked her bank balance on her phone,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: and left her check book behind. She checked into a
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: motel in Grover City with cash thirty miles away, four
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: days before anyone reported her missas. Here is what the
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: evidence suggested, and here is where it demanded. More than
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: one reading the most immediate picture was this a woman
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: in crisis, overwhelmed, who had walked away from her own life.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: The check book left at the rest area, the cash motel,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the silence. It looked on the surface like someone who
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: had chosen to disappear. Barrett would later describe the early
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: hours of the investigation as oriented toward finding Dawn, not Zeller.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Picture the rest area on Keswick Mill Road at five
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: forty five on a February morning, Chad Bailey running his
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: usual morning loop. Frost still stiff on the grass, The
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: picnic table coming into view at the two mile mark.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: The check book sitting open, its pages gone pale and
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: rigid after nine days of overnight freezes. A document of
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: someone's financial life left out, like something discarded. Everything pointed
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: toward Dawn as the central figure who needed to be found.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: She was the missing person. She was the one who
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: had vanished. But the moment Barrett looked at where that
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: rest area sat, four and a half miles from Dawn's house,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: on a route she had no ordinary reason to use,
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: a different question surfaced. Zeller, in an earlier interview, had
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: mentioned using that rest area himself. It was a turnaround
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: point on his route to the storage unit he rented
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: on Keswick Road. The check book had come to rest
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: in a place Cellar new that recontextualized the frost nine
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: days of abandonment did not suggest Dawn had dropped it
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: carelessly on a walk. It suggested the check book had
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: been there since January twenty ninth, the same day as
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: the last register entry, the four thousand, two hundred dollars
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: payment the car that had not been serviced since October.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: The storage unit on Keswick Road was the next image
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: warrant served inside financial record, a burner phone and a
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: second set of identification documents under a name investigators could
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: not immediately match to anyone in the system, not Frank
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Zeller's name, another name entirely, and forty miles north in Norace,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: a PO box registered under a variant spelling of Zeller's
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: name held something Barrett would later describe in testimony as
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: a ledger of obligations, a leather bound notebook. Inside it,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: women's names, approximate asset values, emotional profiles written in shorthand
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: running totals. Dawn Sanders had an entry. Her target figure
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: was sixty thousand dollars, the amount extracted when the check
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: book surfaced was forty one thousand. She had not been
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: the only one. On February eighth, a deputy found Don
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Sanders at a motel in Grover's City, thirty miles from
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: Hardened Bluff. She had checked in four days earlier, paying
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: cash at the front desk. The incident report described her
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: as alert but distressed. Her savings account held eleven dollars
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: and forty cents. That number is not an abstraction. Don
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Sanders had spent thirty one years opening her home to
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: children who had nowhere else to go. She had kept
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: a bookkeeper's discipline her entire adult life. The kind of
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: person who logged a four dollar eight m fee in
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: the register the same day she incurred it eleven dollars
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: and forty cents was not carelessness. It was the end
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: point of a system designed to take everything she had
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: in increments small enough that she never saw the total
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: until it was gone. The day after she was found,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: investigators moved on Zellar. He was arrested on a Thursday
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: at a diner on Route nine. He was having breakfast
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: with a recently widowed property owner from the adjacent county.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: He was already working at sentencing, Zeller's public defender argued
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: that the payment represented in formal loans between consenting adults.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Barrett's testimony answered that argument with the ledger, a leather
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: bound notebook, women's names, asset valuations, emotional profiles in shorthand,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: running totals, and target figures circled in ink. Don Sanders's
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: target was sixty thousand dollars. Forty one thousand had been
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: extracted when the check book surfaced at the rest area.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: That is not the record of a loan. That is
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: a budget. The court sentenced Zeller to eleven years on
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: four counts of elder financial exploitation and two counts of
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: fraud related to those schemes. Then the sentencing hearing opened
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: a new chapter. A woman named Marilyn Craft stood during
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: the victim impact portion. She was fifty eight years old
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: from Deering Falls. In two thousand fourteen, she said her
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: car broke down on a county road. A man matching
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Zeller's description stopped to help. Within days, he told her
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: his mother had been a foster parent. She dated him
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: for three months. A neighbor grew suspicious and ran his
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: license plate. The name on the registration did not match
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: the name he had given her. She ended the relationship immediately.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: She had never reported it. She had never reported it
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: because she had caught it herself, exited cleanly, and assumed
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: it was an isolated incident. That assumption held for a decade.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: The identical line his mother was a foster apparent deployed
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: not once, but at minimum twice to women whose public
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: records or visible circumstances identified them as caregivers. Investigators subsequently
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: opened an inquiry in the adjacent jurisdiction. The name on
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: the second set of identification documents found in the Keswick
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Road storage unit remained unmatched at the time of sentencing.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: What that means, how many identities, how many approaches, how
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: many targets? Who caught it early and said nothing remains
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: an open question in the record. What is not open
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: is this the ledger existed, The profiles were written before contact.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: The breakdown on Carpenter Highway happened three weeks after Zeller
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: was seen asking about volunteer opportunities at the County Foster
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Care office. Barrett could not prove, on the evidence available
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: that Zeller disconnected the fuel pump relay himself, but he
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: could prove Zeller was in the county mapping the landscape
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: before Dawn's car ever stopped on the side of that road.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: The structure preceded the relationship. The relationship was the structure.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: There is a specific kind of damage done when someone
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: uses your own defining quality against you. Don Sanders's capacity
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: for care, the thing she had given to children who
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: needed it for over three decades, was the precise instrument
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Zeller identified, calibrated, calibrated, and spent nine months converting into cash.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: He did not overwhelmed her, He did not threaten her.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: He showed up, consistently, made her feel understood, and then
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: made it costly in emotional terms to notice what was happening.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: When she raised rent, he recited everything he had done
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: until she apologized for asking when she kept a record,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: He told her that the record itself was the problem,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: and she believed him, not because she was foolish, because
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: she had spent her whole life trusting that care offered
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: in good faith would be received in good faith. The
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: spiral notebook she kept is gone. She destroyed it herself.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: That detail does not belong to negligence or confusion. It
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: belongs to the manipulation Zeller did not take it from her.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: He made her want to get rid of it. Her
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: own evidence erased by her own hand because he had
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: successfully reframed her accuracy as an accusation. That notebook would
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: have shown in Dawn's own handwriting exactly when the pattern started.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: It does not exist anymore. What does exist is the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: ledger and the ledger in a way, the destruction of
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: the notebook cannot undo prove the inverse of everything Zeller
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: had performed for nine months. Every expression of gratitude he made,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: every moment he framed himself as someone she had helped.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: All of it was budgeted. The warmth had a target figure.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: It was sixty thousand dollars. He had reached forty one thousand.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: When the check book left his orbit and landed where
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: someone could find it. A runner named Chad Bailey, on
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning loop he had run twice a week
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: for years, picked it up off a frost covered picnic
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: table and did not put it back down. Dawn was located.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: The note book is gone. Marilyn Craft came forward. The
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: second identity remained unresolved. Zeller is eleven years into a sentence.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: This case does not resolve into something clean. What it
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: resolves into is this. There is a woman in Hardened
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Bluff who spent thirty one years building something a practice
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: of care, a ledger of her own in which every
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: entry balanced, and another person saw that and built a
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: system around taking it apart. She was found alert and
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: distressed with eleven dollars and forty cents. The question the
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: record leaves open is not whether Zeller will face additional charges.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: That investigation is ongoing. The question the record leaves open
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: is how many other names were in that note book
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: that no one has come forward to confirm. How many
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: women caught something early, went quiet and moved on, How
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: many are still quiet now? Dawn Sanders name was circled
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: in ink. This show is made by Obo Media.