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The Scale, the Saturdays, and the Trainer Who Quietly Took Her Life · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of January ninth, twenty nineteen, a jogger
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: named Diane Riley stopped on the Callaway Creek Trail outside Harwick, Ohio.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: A Border Collie mix stood alone at the creek bank,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: wearing a harness. Clipped to the d ring was a
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: full set of keys, house key, a car key, a
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: gym cart, a loyalty tag from Hartwell's Grocery. Everything around
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: the dog was crusted with frost. The keys were completely dry.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: That single fact, dry metal in a world of frozen
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: grass told investigators that something had happened to those keys
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: after the frost fell, something recent, something wrong. The dog's
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: name was Biscuit. He belonged to a fifty four year
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: old woman named Tracy Norris who lived eleven minutes away
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: at fourteen Pembroke Lane. Her purse was on the kitchen counter,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: her phone was on the kitchen counter, her wallet was
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: on the kitchen counter. Tracy herself was gone. What followed
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: was a twenty seven day investigation from January seventh to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: February third, that would pull apart not just a disappearance,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: but an entire constructed reality, a relationship built floor by
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: floor on deception, financial predation and a tactic so methodical
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: it had a prior victim who never saw justice. The
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: evidence would eventually rest on a hidden notebook, a fitness app,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a forged signature, and eleven handwritten pages a convicted murderer
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: sent to a journalist years after the verdict. This is
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the story of how one man dismantled Tracy Norris's reality
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: and how she quietly fought back. Tracy Norris had lived
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: at fourteen Pembrooke Lane for twenty two years. She moved
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: in with her husband, Dennis, when the neighborhood still had
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: a hardware store on the corner. Dennis died in twenty
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: fourteen and Tracy stayed. The house was hers, the garden
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: was hers, and the life she rebuilt after his death
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: was entirely her own construction.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: She was the.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Eldest of three siblings. She sang alto in the Harwick
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Community Choir, directed by Frank Okafort rehearsals every Thursday from
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: six fifty to nine ten in the evening. She was
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the kind of person who showed up early and stayed
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: to stack chairs. She kept a spiral notebook in the
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: kitchen drawer to log what she planted when she watered
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: what the raised beds needed next. Garlic went in before
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: the first hard frost. She knew the schedule by heart.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Her closest friend was Joanne Meredith, who would later describe
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Tracy's personality in two words, organized and stubborn. Tracy called
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Joanne after choir. Tracy texted back within minutes.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Tracy did not disappear.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: By the fall of twenty seventeen, Tracy had been a
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: widow for three years. She was not isolated, but she
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: was lonely in the specific way that comes after a
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: long marriage ends surrounded by people, missing one person.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: In particular.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: That autumn, her neighbor Susan Aldridge, hosted a dinner.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Tracy went, So did.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: A man named Paul McCarthy, who arrived with a mutual
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: acquaintance named Kevin Pratt. Paul was fifty eight, recently divorced,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: recently relocated from Columbus. He told Tracy he had grown
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: up in Dunmore, which was true. He told her he
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: had known her slightly as a girl, which may also
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: have been true. He was calm, attentive, and easy to
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: talk to. He remembered details, He asked the right questions,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Joanne would later recall that Tracy described Paul as not
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: pretty but interesting. That word interesting was exactly the right target.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Tracy was not looking for a romance novel. She was
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: looking for someone worth her attention.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: Paul.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Paul McCarthy understood that. By January twenty eighteen, he was
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: spending weekends at Pembrook Lane. By March, he had a
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: drawer in Tracy's bedroom. By June, he was driving her car.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: He explained that his own car was.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: In the shop.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Tracy accepted this without question because she had no reason
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: not to. He was her companion, and companions help each
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: other out. Records would later show that Paul McCarthy had
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: no registered vehicle in Ohio for at least five years
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: before twenty nineteen. There was no car in the shop.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: There had never been a car. That was the first
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: documented line. It would not be the last, and it
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: points to a question that would define the entire investigation.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: If Paul had been constructing a fiction from the very beginning,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: how far back did the construction go, and who had
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: he built it on before. In August of twenty eighteen,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: someone walked into a bank branch on the north side
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: of Hartle and opened a checking account in Tracy Norris's name.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: The branch was on Paul McCarthy's daily running route. His
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: fitness app confirmed it. The account had a contact phone number,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: a prepaid line that would eventually go dark.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: The electric bill.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: At fourteen Pembrooke Lane was re routed to it the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: following month. Tracy's name was on the paperwork, her signature
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: was on the application, but the handwriting analyst who examined
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: those documents at trial reached a different conclusion. The signature
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: was Paul's imitation of Tracy's. She had never been inside
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: that branch. By September, the debit card tied to the
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: account was moving gas purchases forty miles from Harwick, a
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: sporting goods store in Columbus, a motel in Bexley on
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: a weekend when Tracy was at choir rehearsal. Joanne confirmed
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the rehearsal. Tracy had texted from the church parking lot
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: that same evening. Someone was spending Tracy's money in play race.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Tracy had never been. While Tracy sang alto in the
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: second row, here is the detail that stops you cold.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: The motel receipt, the gas station the sporting goods run.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: None of it triggered an alert. Each transaction was calibrated
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: to stay under the thresholds that would flag automatic review.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Whoever did this understood how financial monitoring worked. They had
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: done this kind of arithmetic before. Tracy meanwhile, noticed something
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: was wrong. She noticed the way a person notices when
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: the furniture has been moved an inch, not enough to name,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: enough to feel. She did not go to the bank.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: She did not call the police. She went to her
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: kitchen drawer and pulled out a spiral notebook. She crossed
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: out the garden logs and started writing down what she saw.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: That notebook became the record of a mind being told
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: it was broken. She wrote down the new account number
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: she had found referenced in a piece of mail. She
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: wrote dates of car trips she had not taken. She
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: wrote down a confrontation with Paul, who told her she
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: was confused that grief does things to memory that she
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: was still processing Denis. She wrote, He told me I
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: was imagining it. I am not imagining it. Paul had
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: done this before. In twenty fifteen, a courthouse clerk named
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Maria Espinoza flagged a civil case from an earlier period,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: a woman named Deborah shull Ad sued Paul McCarthy for
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: the return of sixty two thousand dollars taken over nineteen
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: months by making himself a secondary account holder and moving
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: money in small quiet transfers. When Deborah confronted Paul, he
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: told her she had memory problems. He suggested she see
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: a doctor, and then he found her notebook and destroyed it.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: The case settled under a non disclosure agreement.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: No criminal charges.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Paul walked away did not know any of this. As
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: of January fifth, twenty nineteen. The record shows she did
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: not know Paul's history. She knew only what she had
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: written down herself in her own hand, in a note
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: book she did not keep in the kitchen drawer. She
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: hid it in the garden, wrapped in a plastic bag,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: tucked into the straw mulch over the garlic row. The
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: last entry was dated January fifth. It read p doesn't
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: know I have this. I think I need to call someone.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: I think I need to call Joe. She did not
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: call jo Anne. Two days later, at approximately two in
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: the morning on January seventh, her neighbor Herb Dawson, saw
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: her step onto her front porch in a coat. She
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: stood briefly, she went back inside. That was the last
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: confirmed sighting of Tracy Norris alive. Her purse, wallet, and
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: phone remained on the kitchen counter. Her car sat in
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the driveway with a full tank. Biscuit was gone. Detective
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Cynthia Burke was assigned to the case on January tenth.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: She had the key ring, she had the dog. She
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: had a missing woman, and no sign of a struggle
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: inside the house. The working assumption at that stage was
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: that Tracy had left on her own, that something had
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: pulled her out into the cold at two in the
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: morning and she had not come back. That assumption did
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: not survive the kitchen counter. A woman does not walk
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: out of her house at two in the morning in
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: January without her phone.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: Not In two.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Thousand nineteen, Burke pulled the financial records. Within the first
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: seventy two hours, the new account appeared immediately. The transaction pattern,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: calibrated amounts, prepaid contact line, a card used in places
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Tracy had never mentioned going. Did not look like a
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: widow mismanaging her finances. It looked like architecture. Burke requested
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: the account application. She she sent the signature page to
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: the handwriting unit. While she waited, she found something else.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Burke assigned January tenth, visited Pembroke Lane on January twenty second.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: She walked the garden. It was January in Ohio, bare
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: raised beds, frost hardened soil, straw mulch over the rows
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: where Tracy had planted garlic the previous fall. Burke reached
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: into the straw. The plastic bag was right where Tracy
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: had put it. Reading that notebook changed the shape of
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: the investigation. This was not a woman who had wandered
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: away in confusion. This was a woman who had been
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: told she was confused, had refused to believe it, and
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: had been quietly methodically building her own case against the
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: man sleeping in her house. Every entry was dated, Every
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: observation was specific. The confrontations with Paul were recorded in
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: Tracy's own voice, steady, precise, not panicked. The last line,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: I think I need to call Joe landed differently. Once
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Burke understood what came before it. Tracy had been two
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: days away from making a call that might have changed everything.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: She did not get those two days. The handwriting report
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: came back. The signature on the account application was a
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: forgery that closed one question and opened a much larger one.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: If Paul mc arthy had been systematically dismantling Tracy's finances
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: and simultaneously convincing her she was imagining the evidence of it,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: when had he planned to stop the Deborah shell case
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: answered that Burke found it through the court house clerk's
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: flag on an old civil filing sixty two thousand dollars
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen months the same script, memory problems, confusion see a doctor.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: The note book found and destroyed, the settlement sealed. Paul
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: McCarthy had a play book. He had run it before,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: he had refined it, and the one variable that changed
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: between Deborah Shull and Tracy Norris was not the method.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: It was the note book. Tracy had hidden hers somewhere
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Paul could not reach it, and by January fifth, she
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: was two days from using what was in it. There
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: is a version of this story where Paul McCarthy's plan
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: worked exactly as he intended. Picture the account draining slowly
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: transfer by transfer through the fall of twenty eighteen and
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: into winter. Picture Paul at the sporting goods store in Columbus,
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: buying what he needed for a clean departure picture the
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: motel in Bexley, not a romantic gesture, a logistics stop.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: In this version, he takes the money and leaves. Tracy
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: wakes up one morning and he is gone. She calls Joanne,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: she calls the bank. She tries to explain what happened,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: and finds she cannot quite prove it because the notebook
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: in her drawer is full of dates and anomalies that
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: look on their own like the record of a worried mind.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: The account closes, the prepaid phone goes dark. Paul is
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: already three states away, and the civil suit, if it
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: ever comes, settles quietly under terms she cannot disclose.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: That was the plan.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Paul described it himself in eleven handwritten pages sent to
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: a journalist after his second appeal was denied. He wrote
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: that he had intended only to take the money and leave.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: He described Tracy's death as a situation that accelerated beyond
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: its intended resolution. But the plan had already started to
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: fail before January seventh. Tracy's notebook was not in the
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: kitchen drawer. She had written down too much, too precisely.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: She had named a date for the call she was
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: going to make Paul could not find the notebook because
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: she had put it somewhere he would not think to
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: look in the cold ground under the straw where she
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: grew things. Walk through what the evidence constructs for the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: night of January seventh. Herb Dawson sees Tracy on the
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: porch at approximately two in the morning. She is wearing
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: her coat. She goes back inside. At some point between
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: that moment and dawn, she is strangled. Her body is
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: moved eleven miles from Harwick to a drainage culvert, where
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: it will not be found for nearly four more weeks
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: until a hunter notices disturbed ground on February third. The
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: key ring is the detail that does not fit any
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: version of this except the one that actually happened. Tracy's
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: keys were in her coat pocket. Paul took them for
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: house access after she was dead. He needed to come
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: back to move the car to manage the scene to
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: buy time. When he returned before dawn, this had followed
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: him to the water's edge. The dog had stayed with
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Tracy's body through the night. Paul clipped the keys to
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: the harness, possibly to stop the dog circling. Possibly simple
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: expedients and left, frost had not yet fallen when he
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: clipped them. By the time Diane Riley found Biscuit at
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: six forty five in the morning on January ninth, frost
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: covered everything on that creek bank, everything except the dry
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: circle of metal sheltered against the dog's side through the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: long night. The keys were dry because Biscuit kept them warm,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: and Biscuit stayed.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: Because that is what a dog does.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: It waits at the last place its person was for
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: as long as it takes that image. The dry keys,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: the frost, the dog that did not leave is what
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: brought Detective Burke to fourteen Pembrooke Lane on January ninth.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: It is what led to the notebook in the garden.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: It is what connected Paul McCarthy to a pattern that
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: a sealed settlement had kept invisible for four years. And
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: it is what Tracy Norris, writing alone in her kitchen
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: two days before she died, had been trying to build toward.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: She had seen what was happening. She had documented it
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: with precision. She had hidden the evidence somewhere safe. She
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: had been two days from making the call. The note
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: book survived. Paul McCarthy could not reach it. This time,
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: and in the end it was exactly what the jury read.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Paul McCarthy was arrested on January twenty eighth, two thousand nineteen,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: three weeks after her disappearance on January seventh, and six
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: days before her body was found on February third. Investigators
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: had enough by then, the forged signature on the bank
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: account application, the prepaid phone, the fitness app data placing
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: him at that branch, the hidden note book, and Deborah
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Shoal's sealed civil case, which a court house clerk named
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Maria Espinoza had surfaced from a two thousand fifteen filing.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: The arrest came before the body. The evidence did not wait.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Tracy was recovered on February third, a hunter noticed disturbed
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: and round near a drainage culvert eleven miles from Harwick.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: She had been there since the early hours of January seventh.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Cause of death was strangulation. The trial moved with unusual
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: speed given the volume of documentary evidence. Handwriting analysis confirmed
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: the account application signature was Paul's. Imitation of Tracey's financial
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: records showed the transfers the gas purchases forty miles from Harwick.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: The motel in Bexley on a Thursday night, while Tracy
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: stood in a church parking lot texting Joanne from choir rehearsal.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: The hidden note book was entered into evidence and read
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: in full. Paul McCarthy offered no credible alternative explanation for
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: any of it. The jury returned a verdict of murder
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: in the first degree plus two counts of felony financial
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: exploitation of a vulnerable adult. The sentence was life without parole.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: He appealed twice. The first appeal was denied, the second
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: was denied in the spring of twenty twenty three. After
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the second denial, Paul McCarthy wrote to a journalist eleven
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: handwritten pages. In them, he admitted he had planned to
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: take the money and leave.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: He had never intended.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: He wrote for things to go further than that.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: He described Tracy's.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Death as men's and these are his words. A situation
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: that accelerated beyond its intended resolution. That phrase requires a moment.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: He did not write that he lost control. He did
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: not write that something happened. He wrote that a situation
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: accelerated beyond its intended resolution. The language is the point.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Even in confession, he framed Tracy Norris as a problem
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: that outpaced his management of it, not a person a situation.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: The note book she kept, the one wrapped in a
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: plastic bag and buried in the straw mulch over the
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: garlic row, had an entry dated January fifth, two thousand nineteen,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Two days before she died. She wrote that Paul did
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: not know she had it. She wrote that she thought
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: she needed to call someone. She wrote, I think I
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: need to call Joe. She did not get to make
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that call. What Paul McCarthy built over fourteen months was
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: not impulsive. The case record shows a sequence proximity, then dependence,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: than financial access, than isolation from the people who might
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: have noticed it.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: He had done it before Deborah Shall had documented it.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: She had taken him to civil court and won a settlement.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: The NDA that followed meant the pattern stayed sealed, invisible
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: to Tracy, invisible to anyone who might have warned her.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Tracy Norris was not naive. She was observant enough to
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: notice the account anomalies. She was disciplined enough to document
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: them in sequence in her own hand, hidden where he
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: could not reach. She was clear eyed enough to write
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: two days before she died.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: That she was not imagining it.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: She had survived grief, managed a household alone for five years,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: grown food, sung in a choir, kept her friendships close.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: She was not a woman who missed things. What she
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: faced was a method designed specifically to make a careful
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: person doubt their own careful observations. That is what makes
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: this kind of manipulation so difficult to see from the inside.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: It does not announce itself. It borrows the vocabulary of care,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: you're confused, you're grieving, let me help, and uses it
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: to sand down the edges of a person's trust in themselves.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: The notebook survived because she hid it in the one
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: place she knew he would not look. He had found
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: and destroyed Deborah Shoals, He did not find this one.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Joanne Meredith adopted Biscuit in February of twenty nineteen, the
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: same month Tracy's body was recovered. The dog spent just
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: over three years in Joanne's yard in the sun. He
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: died of old age in the summer of twenty to
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: twenty two. Tracy Norris was fifty four years ogd. She
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: had lived on Pembroke Lane for twenty two years. She
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: grew garlic in a raised bed and logged the harvest
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: in a spiral notebook kept in the kitchen drawer. She
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: sang alto in the Harwick Community Choir on Thursday evenings
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: from six fifty to nine ten. She described Paul McCarthy
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: to her friend Joanne as not pretty interesting. She was
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: two days from making a phone call that might have
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: changed what happened next.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: The notebook is the.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Thing that stays, not because it convicted him, the financial
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: records alone would have done that, but because of what
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: it proves about her. She saw it, she named it,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: she wrote it down, she hid it somewhere safe. She
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: was right about all of it, and she knew she
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: was right, and she kept going anyway. That is not
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: a small thing in the middle of being told repeatedly
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: by someone she trusted that her own perception was broken.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: She trusted it anyway. She just needed two more days.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Hobo Media