Latest / True Crime: Killer Secrets / The Laundry Bag Under the Roots: The Dellwood Racket

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The Laundry Bag Under the Roots: The Dellwood Racket · True Crime: Killer Secrets

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of June 6th, 2017, a border collie
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: named Pip stopped at the base of a cottonwood tree
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: along the Kettner Creek Trail and would not move. His
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: owner tried the leash twice. Pip kept digging. What came
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: loose from the roots was a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. Inside,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: roughly $ 60, 000 in banded cash and a spiral notebook. On
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: top of the bag, pressed into the dirt, was a
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Teamsters local 228 union card belonging to a man named
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Dennis Albright, a man who, investigators would later confirm, had
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: never set foot near that tree. Marsha Mueller had been
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: in Delwood for three weeks. She had moved there after
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: a divorce, into a rented apartment on Aldine Street, with
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: a suitcase, a collie, and no particular plan for what
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: came next. That Tuesday was hot. Cottonwood seeds were coming
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: down slow, like ash from something that had already burned.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: She called 911 and then she stood there, holding the leash,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: waiting 40 minutes in the sun, while Pip sat beside
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: the bag, as if he had done exactly what he
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: was supposed to do. He had. The spiral notebook would
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: take Detective Emily Hayes 10 months to fully unravel. But
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: the first thing anyone could see right there on the
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: trail before the evidence bags were even opened, was that
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the notebook was tidy. 31 business names. Monthly payment amounts
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: between $ 400 and $ 2, 200. Dates going back years, and two
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: initials in the margin. P and G. Not a single
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: entry was late. Not one business had missed a payment.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: That is not luck. That is something else entirely. Delwood
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Avenue runs six blocks through the older commercial spine of
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Sutter Falls. The kind of street where most of the
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: businesses have been there long enough that their owners know
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: which parking meters stick and which back doors the delivery
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: trucks prefer. A tailor shop. A restaurant that serves lunch. Only.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: A frame shop that has not updated its window display
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: since 2011. Small places. Family run. with the specific gravity
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: of businesses that have survived by not drawing attention to themselves.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Grant Parker had been part of that street for 22 years.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: He was 50, nine years old when this ended. He
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: owned Delwood Wash and Fold, a coin laundromat, on the
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: corner of Delwood and Marin, and the building immediately next
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: to it, which he had purchased separately in 2008. He
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: was a donor to the Delwood Wash Association. the kind
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: of donor whose name appeared on the printed program at
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: the annual dinner. He had graduated from the same high
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: school as two sitting city council members, a fact that
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: came up more than once in conversations about who knew
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: whom in Sutter Falls. By every visible measure, Parker was
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: a fixture, a neighbor, the man who kept the change
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: machines stocked and remembered your name. April Nelson had worked
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the front counter at Delwood Wash and Fold since 2003.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: She was 61. She raised her son alone, and he
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: was grown now, living in Tucson with his own children.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Every Tuesday night, Nelson went to a watercolor class at
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: the community center on Birch Street. Every Wednesday at 9.30
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: in the evening, she called her son. The grandchildren were
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: usually already asleep by then, and she and her son
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: would talk without interruption for twenty minutes or half an
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: hour about ordinary things. Behind her apartment building, she kept
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: a small garden, tomatoes, herbs, a row of marigolds along
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the back fence. She had been processing the envelopes at
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: the laundromat for ten years, without ever being told what
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: was in them. She had not asked. Some things on
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Delwood Avenue she understood. you learn to see without looking
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: directly at them. The man who had built that understanding
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: was Parker, and the way he built it did not
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: start with a threat. It started with a loan. When
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the owner of a dry goods store two blocks down
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: needed to replace his HVAC system in 2011, Parker offered
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: to cover the cost. No paperwork, no interest rate discussed,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: just a handshake and an amount. When the woman who
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: ran the Vietnamese restaurant on the corner needed a new
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: commercial refrigerator the following spring, Parker stepped in the same way.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: In 2013, when the owner of a pawn shop on
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Printer Street needed legal fees he could not afford, Parker
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: paid them a real loan each time. No written terms.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: The written terms came later. They came in the form
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: of a monthly amount delivered in cash to a man
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: who drove a gray Nissan, and whose name, in the
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: spiral notebook recovered from the Kettner Creek Trail, appeared only
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: as the initial P. Stephen Orr, had been working as
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: a maintenance contractor at the laundromat since 2010. He collected.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Parker held the ledger, and 31 businesses on and around
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Delwood Avenue paid, every month, without fail, because they understood,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: without anyone having to say it plainly, exactly what the
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: alternative looked like. What that alternative looked like is something
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Detective Emily Hayes would spend the better part of 10
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: months reconstructing. Hayes was 38, a financial crimes investigator who
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: had transferred out of narcotics four years earlier. She was
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: the kind of detective who pinned case photos to her
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: monitor and left them there until she could explain every face.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: After June 6, 2017, One of those photos was Dennis Albright.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Albright was 53 years old. A former Teamsters local 2-2,
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: a chop steward from Printer Street in Delwood. He had
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: been suspended from the union in 2015 following a sealed
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: disciplinary review. In April of 2016, he had filed a
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: police report. His wallet was stolen. The report was logged,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: confirmed in the system, and largely forgotten. His union card
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: expired March 2015, had been sitting on top of $ 60, 000
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: in cash under a cottonwood tree for reasons that at
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: the start of the investigation made no sense at all.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Hayes kept his photo on her monitor anyway. What she
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: did not yet know was that the card had nothing
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: to do with Albright. It had been placed there by
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: someone who never thought about who Dennis Albright was, someone
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: who needed a marker to find the tree again. reached
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: into a pocket, and used what was there. The card
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: did its job. It pointed somewhere, just not where anyone
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: first assumed. The notebook had 31 names. Hayes spread the
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: pages on her desk and counted them twice. 31 businesses,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: all within six blocks of Delwood Avenue. Each entry carried
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: a dollar amount. The lowest was $ 400 a month, the
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: highest $ 2, 200, and a date. Some entries had two letters
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: beside them, P or G. Not a single name was
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: missing a payment. That detail stopped her. In any ledger
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: of that size, covering what appeared to be years of transactions,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: there are gaps. Someone gets sick. Someone's cash flow dips.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Someone forgets. But this ledger had no gaps, no partial payments,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: no asterisks. Every business, every month, on time. The last
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: entry was dated May 31st, 2017, six days before Pip
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: found the bag. 31 businesses paying fixed amounts, month after month,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: with the precision of a utility bill. That is not voluntary.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: That is a system with consequences. Hayes traced the businesses
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: against city records. A dry cleaner on Kettner. A restaurant
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: supply shop. A nail salon. a family-owned hardware store, a
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: place that fixed shoes. None of them had any obvious
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: connection to each other, or to the laundromat. But they
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: were all within walking distance of Delwood Wash and Fold.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: And they all paid. The initials took her a week.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: P appeared most often, beside the larger amounts beside the
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: entries with the most consistent dates. G appeared less frequently,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: clustered in earlier pages. Hayes cross-referenced business registration records, utility accounts,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: anything that might anchor a name to a first initial.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: She was looking for someone who moved through that neighborhood
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: on a predictable schedule. Someone with a reason to be
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: inside 31 different businesses without drawing notice. She found him
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: through a gray Nissan. A parking citation. Kern Street, September 2016.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Belonged to a vehicle registered to a maintenance contractor. His
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: name was Stephen Orr. He had worked at Delwood Wash
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: and Fold since 2010. P, as it turned out, was
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: not for Parker. It was for the man Parker, Sent.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: The G entries were older. They stopped in 2014. Hayes
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: never fully closed that thread, but the pattern of amounts
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: and timing suggested a prior collector who had been replaced.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: The ledger did not explain why. It did not need to.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: What the ledger needed was a center. Grant Parker had
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: owned Delwood Wash and Fold for 22 years. He also
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: owned the building next door. He was a known face
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: in the neighborhood. Not just a business owner, but a presence.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: He had donated to the Delwood Wash Association. Three years running.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: He had graduated from the same high school as two
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: sitting city council members. When Hayes pulled his name, it
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: came back clean. No record. No complaints on file. A
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: photograph of him at a ribbon-cutting ceremony from 2015. But
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Parker also owned the building next door. City records listed
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: the upper floor of that building as storage. It was
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: not storage. At some point between 2009 and 2010, the
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: precise start date was never established. Parker had been running
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: a private card game on that floor every Friday night.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Seven to nine players, invitation only. A locked cabinet with bourbon.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: The table was set by eight in the evening. The
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: players were business owners from the surrounding blocks. Declining the invitation,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: according to testimony gathered later, had its own message. Nobody
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: said what happened if you declined. Nobody had to. The
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: card game is where the architecture becomes visible. Picture the room.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: A private table, familiar faces. The kind of setting where
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: a man might mention casually that his walk-in refrigeration unit
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: had been failing for weeks. Parker would listen. Parker would help.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: That is how the loans began. A pawn shop owner
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: needed a new HVAC system. Parker covered it. A restaurant
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: owner faced a legal dispute and couldn't front the fees.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: Parker knew someone. The amounts were real. The help was real.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: no written terms. The written terms came later in a
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: different form. Monthly payments, fixed amounts, delivered in cash to
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: a man driving a gray Nissan. The businesses that received
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: the loans paid. And then, because the table was populated
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: by neighbors and neighbors talk, the businesses that had not
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: received loans paid too. The logic spread without anyone needing
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: to announce it. By 2013, The ledger had 26 names.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: By 2016, 31. Hayes identified the enforcement mechanism in October
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: of 2017, four months into the investigation. She had been
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: running the 31 business names against city compliance records, code violations,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: inspection notices, zoning flags. What she found was this. 11
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: of the 31 businesses in the ledger had received code
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: compliance notices in the two years prior to the bag's discovery.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Nine of those 11 had been issued by the same inspector.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: His name was Walter Fenn, 20 years with the Sutter
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Falls Building and Zoning Department. His photograph hung in the
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: department lobby under a plaque recognizing his length of service
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: in eight of the nine cases where Fenn issued a notice.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: The notice had arrived within three weeks of a missed
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: or reduced payment. In six of those eight, the notice
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: was withdrawn within 30 days, coinciding precisely with the resumption
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: of full payments. The violations Fenn cited were real, or
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: real enough. A blocked egress, a ventilation deficiency, a signage infraction.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Each citation was defensible on paper, but the calendar could
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: not be explained away Hayes obtained a warrant for phone records.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Fenn's personal cell phone had placed 23 calls to an
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: unregistered prepaid number over a 10-month period. Cell tower data
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: placed that prepaid device at or near Delwood Wash and
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Fold on 17 of those 23 dates. The photo in
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the lobby suddenly meant something different. Fenn was not an
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: outlier in the system. He was its pressure valve. the
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: mechanism that converted a missed payment into a municipal headache
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: and a resumed payment into relief, the businesses in the
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: ledger did not need to be threatened with violence every month.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: They needed only to remember what a code violation felt
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: like and to understand that the timing of such things
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: was not random. That understanding kept 31 businesses paying on
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: time for at least eight years. The system had a clerk,
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: April Nelson, was 61 years old. She had worked at
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: the front counter of Delwood Wash and Fold since 2003.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: She knew the rhythms of the place the way you
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: know a house you have lived in for decades, the
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: sounds that are normal and the sounds that are not.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: She processed the envelopes when they came in. She noted
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: the faces. She did not ask questions. Nelson was not recruited.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: She was not paid extra. She was simply someone who
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: had been present long enough to understand the arrangement without
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: anyone spelling it out and who had calculated, month after month,
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: that the cost of saying something was higher than the
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: cost of staying quiet. She had a son in Tucson.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: She had a watercolor class on Tuesday evenings. She called
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: her son every Wednesday at 9.30 in the evening after
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: the grandchildren were in bed. She had a small garden
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: behind her apartment where she grew tomatoes and peppers and
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: sometimes just sat, she knew. And for ten years, she
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: did not speak. What changed was a four-second look. Patricia
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Sosa owned an alteration shop on Kern Street. She had
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: fallen two weeks behind on her payment. Not a refusal,
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: a delay. The kind that happens when a small business
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: has a slow month. Kevin Larch came to the laundromat
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: to find her. He waited at the counter until she
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: was inside. Then he turned and looked at her. He
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: did not speak. He did not move toward her. He
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: looked at her for four seconds and walked out. Nelson
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: was standing six feet away. She had seen Kevin Larch before.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: She had seen the dynamic before. But something about that
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: particular afternoon, the silence of it, the efficiency, the way
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Sosa's face changed while Larch's face stayed completely still, reached
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: a different place. Nelson went home. She sat in her
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: garden for two hours. The following Friday, she called an attorney.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: The decision did not come from courage, exactly. It came
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: from the accumulated weight of 10 years and from one
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: moment that made that weight impossible to ignore any further.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: She did not go to the police directly. She went
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: to a lawyer first, then negotiated the terms of her cooperation, carefully.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: She had lived inside this system long enough to know
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: that entering it on the wrong terms could leave her
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: with nothing. Her cooperation opened the second archive. Investigators located
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: a storage unit registered to a dissolved LLC on the
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: east side of Sutter Falls. Inside, a second ledger, beginning
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: in 2009, a fireproof box containing loan documentation that Parker
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: had promised, in each case, to destroy, and 31 envelopes.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: one for every business in the notebook, each containing a
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: signed cash transaction receipt. Parker had told every borrower the
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: same thing. The paperwork would not be kept. There would
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: be no record. He kept every single one. Now consider
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: what that means. A man who built his operation on trust,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: on being the neighbor who helped, the familiar face, the
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: donor at the association dinner, had quietly archived the proof
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: of every arrangement he had ever made. He did not
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: keep those envelopes out of carelessness. He kept them because
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: a man who holds the receipts holds the relationship. The
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: image of reliability was not incidental to the scheme. It
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: was the instrument. Without it, the loans don't get taken,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: the invitations don't get accepted. Fenn has no cover, and
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: nobody pays. Parker was arrested at 6.15 in the morning.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: On June 22, 2017, Outside his house on Delmont Circle,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: he did not shout. He did not argue. According to
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: arresting officers, he nodded once, as though confirming something he
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: had already calculated. Fenn was arrested later that same day.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: He said nothing. Then, and he said nothing at trial.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Kevin Larch was taken into custody four days later when
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: he walked into a restaurant on Voss Street, To collect
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: a payment and found officers waiting, he had not been
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: told the operation was over. Pete Larch was arrested that
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: same week. The four-second look in the laundromat had ended
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: eight years of organized silence. In the spring of 2018,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Grant Parker stood before a sentencing judge in Sutter Falls.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: He was 59 years old. years old. The court handed
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: him 19 years. His minimum release date puts him at 78.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Kevin Larch received 11 years. Pete Larch received eight. Walter Fenn,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: who had said nothing at trial and nothing at arrest,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: was convicted and sentenced. to seven years. His photograph still
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: hung in the lobby of the building and zoning department
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: on the day the verdict was read. Stephen Orr, who
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: had cooperated fully and served as the second witness at trial,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: received three years of probation. No prison time. The man
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: who drove the gray Nissan and collected the envelopes walked out.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: April Nelson received full immunity. She continued working in Delwood.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: She never went back inside the laundromat Dennis Albright, whose
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: union card had spent weeks on Detective Emily Hayes' monitor
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: as a potential suspect, was confirmed innocent. His wallet had
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: been stolen in April of 2016. He had filed a
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: police report the same day. He never knew his card
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: had been used to mark a buried cash of $ 60, 000
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: in cash. Hayes spent 10 months on the case. She
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: had taken the photograph of the card from the evidence
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: log on her first day and placed it on her monitor.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: She kept it there until sentencing. There is something particular
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: about that detail, not dramatic, just methodical. The kind of
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: attention that does not give up on an object until
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: it has given up its full meaning. In August of 2017,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: a woman named Deborah Shin drove 40 miles south from
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Mineral Ridge. She had seen a photograph of Grant Parker
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: in a local newspaper. She called the police. She told
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: investigators that in 2006, Parker had lent her $ 4, 000 when
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: she owned a small print shop in Sutter Falls. She
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: had signed for the loan. The pressure that followed, she said,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: had not let up until she closed her business and
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: left the city. She had never reported it. She testified
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: at the sentencing hearing 12 years after the fact. The
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: notebook found under the cottonwood root contained 31 names. The
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: racket predated that notebook. It predated the storage unit, the
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: card games, and Stephen Orr. Deborah Shin's case suggests Parker
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: was refining his system as far back as 2006. How
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: many others closed quietly and left without calling anyone stays unrecorded.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: An independent audit of all inspection records filed by Walter
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Fenn during his last five years of service was launched
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: following his conviction. Those findings have not been made fully public.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: What began on a Tuesday morning in June of 2017
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: with a woman holding a leash in 90 degree heat
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: ended in a courthouse with sentences totaling more than 48
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: years of combined prison time. Between those two moments, One notebook,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: 31 envelopes, 23 phone calls, and a four-second look across
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: a laundromat counter. There is a detail that has stayed
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: unresolved from the first minutes of this story. The union
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: card belonging to Dennis Albright, sitting on top of that
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: vacuum-sealed bag, under the cottonwood root. Stephen Orr told investigators
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: he had found it on the ground near the tree
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: and used it as a marker. a way to find
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: the right spot again. He said he never thought about
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: who Albright was. That is probably true. The card was convenient.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: It was flat, it was durable, and it was there.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Or picked it up without considering the name on it
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: or the face in the photograph. But here is what
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: that card did, without anyone intending it. It sat on
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: top of $ 60, 000 and a ledger documenting eight years of
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: organized coercion. It led Hayes not to Albright. She cleared
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: him in days, but through Albright's car to the notebook,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: through the notebook to the laundromat, through the laundromat up
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: a staircase, into a room that no document had ever
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: called anything other than storage. And in that room on
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: Friday evenings, 31 business owners had understood, without a single
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: word being spoken directly, exactly why they were there, and
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: exactly what would happen if they stopped coming. Orr said
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: he had not thought about who Albright was. The card
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: had done its job. Deborah Shin closed her print shop
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: and left Sutter Falls in 2006. She drove back 12
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: years later to say what had happened to her. April
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: Nelson tends a garden behind her apartment and calls her
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: son in Tucson on Wednesday evenings. The question that stays
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: open is not whether the system was real. That notebook
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: held 31 names, and no second notebook has been found.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oboe Media.