Latest / Dark Psychology Manipulation / underneath: no one filed a report. No one else noticed she was gone
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: On the morning of May ninth, two thousand nineteen, a
- 0:07Speaker 1: County Cooperative lineman named Dawn Burke pulled her truck on
- 0:11Speaker 1: to ferris Mill Road at roughly seven fifteen to investigate
- 0:15Speaker 1: a service interruption. The power had been cut two days
- 0:19Speaker 1: earlier for non payment. She was there to read the situation,
- 0:22Speaker 1: nothing more. What she found stopped her at the garden.
- 0:26Speaker 1: The soil between the tomato rows was damp. Someone had
- 0:30Speaker 1: watered it within the last forty eight hours, but the
- 0:33Speaker 1: house behind it was locked, the windows dark, and the
- 0:37Speaker 1: power had been off since May seventh. Burke pressed her
- 0:40Speaker 1: face to the kitchen window. On the counter, a cell
- 0:43Speaker 1: phone sat plugged into a charger that had no power
- 0:47Speaker 1: to give it. Beside it, a ceramic mug held a
- 0:50Speaker 1: half inch of cold coffee, a lipstick mark still crisp
- 0:53Speaker 1: on the rim, an open note book covered in handwriting
- 0:57Speaker 1: lay flat on the counter, and on top of the notebook,
- 1:00Speaker 1: holding it open, sat a man's ring. Nobody had reported
- 1:05Speaker 1: Laura Moore missing. Not a family member, not a coworker,
- 1:10Speaker 1: not a friend from the choir she had sung with
- 1:12Speaker 1: every Tuesday for four years. The only person who noticed
- 1:16Speaker 1: something was wrong was a woman dispatched to read a meter.
- 1:20Speaker 1: That absence. The absence of an alarm is where this
- 1:23Speaker 1: story begins, because what happened to Laura Moore was not
- 1:28Speaker 1: the kind of thing that announces itself. It was the
- 1:31Speaker 1: kind of thing designed from the very first moment to
- 1:34Speaker 1: look like love. Laura Moore was thirty two years old
- 1:39Speaker 1: and had been renting the house on ferris Mill Road
- 1:42Speaker 1: since September of twenty eighteen. She had moved there after
- 1:46Speaker 1: what people closed to her described only as a complicated
- 1:51Speaker 1: relationship end. She did not talk about it much. What
- 1:54Speaker 1: she did instead was plant a garden. The tomatoes went
- 1:59Speaker 1: in along the see south row were the light of
- 2:01Speaker 1: her strongness. She kept a notebook in the kitchen for lists, groswoots,
- 2:06Speaker 1: work tasks, things she needed to think through. She worked
- 2:10Speaker 1: remotely as an account's payable clerk for a freight company
- 2:13Speaker 1: called Vantage Freight, logging hours from a desk near the window.
- 2:17Speaker 1: On Tuesday evenings, she drove to Calvary Lutheran for choir practice.
- 2:22Speaker 1: Eleven women four years the same alto section. It was
- 2:27Speaker 1: the fixed warm point of her week. She was not,
- 2:30Speaker 1: by any measure, someone who disappeared in January of twenty nineteen,
- 2:35Speaker 1: Laura met a man named Randy Draper through a dating app.
- 2:39Speaker 1: He presented himself as a forty year old civil engineer
- 2:42Speaker 1: working rotating contracts across the Midwest. The work kept him moving,
- 2:46Speaker 1: he said, It explained the odd hours and the stretches
- 2:50Speaker 1: of silence. The first time they met in person came
- 2:53Speaker 1: at the end of that month, on a county road
- 2:56Speaker 1: about two miles from Laura's former work place in Selby.
- 3:00Speaker 1: Draper's truck had broken down. She happened to be near by.
- 3:04Speaker 1: She stopped, offered to drive him to a gas station
- 3:08Speaker 1: and did. It was the kind of thing you do
- 3:11Speaker 1: for some one stranded on a cold road. It felt
- 3:14Speaker 1: at the time like chance. Within three weeks of that afternoon,
- 3:19Speaker 1: he was calling her every night. Within six weeks he
- 3:23Speaker 1: told her he loved her. In March, he gave her
- 3:26Speaker 1: a ring and said it had belonged to his father.
- 3:29Speaker 1: He asked her to keep it safe for him. What
- 3:32Speaker 1: Laura did not know, what she had no way to know,
- 3:35Speaker 1: was that Randy Draper ran the same sequence with at
- 3:39Speaker 1: least two other women at the same time. Forty five
- 3:43Speaker 1: miles west of Ferris Mill Road, a paralegal named Kim
- 3:47Speaker 1: Ashworth was receiving the same nightly cause. Sixty miles south
- 3:52Speaker 1: in Varnell, a dental hygienist named Peggy Slade was three
- 3:57Speaker 1: weeks behind Kim. In the same pattern, each woman believed
- 4:01Speaker 1: she was the only one. Each woman had been given
- 4:04Speaker 1: a version of Randy calibrated specifically to her, and the
- 4:09Speaker 1: broken down truck on the county road was not chance.
- 4:13Speaker 1: Investigators would later confirm that Draper's gray two thousand sixteen
- 4:18Speaker 1: Chevrolet pickup had logged three roadside assistance calls in the
- 4:22Speaker 1: eighteen months before his arrest. Each call placed him within
- 4:26Speaker 1: five miles of a woman he was in early contact with.
- 4:29Speaker 1: The coolant tose a mechanic would not could be manually
- 4:33Speaker 1: loosened in under two minutes. The breakdown that felt like
- 4:37Speaker 1: fate was an engineered entry point, a manufactured moment of
- 4:41Speaker 1: need designed to produce one specific thing, a debt of
- 4:45Speaker 1: gratitude that felt to the woman who incurred it like
- 4:48Speaker 1: the beginning of a story. What that debt was used
- 4:51Speaker 1: for and how far it reached is where the trail
- 4:54Speaker 1: gets harder to follow. The debt of gratitude had a price.
- 4:58Speaker 1: It just took a while for the number to be visible.
- 5:01Speaker 1: By February of twenty nineteen, each of the three women
- 5:05Speaker 1: had begun transferring money into an account held under the
- 5:08Speaker 1: name Victor Teale. The amounts were modest, at first, four
- 5:12Speaker 1: hundred dollars, here six hundred there, never enough to feel
- 5:16Speaker 1: like a demand, always framed as something else entirely. Laura
- 5:21Speaker 1: was told the transfers were a good faith deposit on
- 5:24Speaker 1: a lake property Draper was hoping to close before spring.
- 5:28Speaker 1: Kim Ashworth was told the money went into a contractor
- 5:31Speaker 1: Esquire account for renovation work on a property he managed.
- 5:35Speaker 1: Peggy Slade understood it as a personal loan, the kind
- 5:39Speaker 1: you extend to someone you trust, someone who has told
- 5:42Speaker 1: you he loves you, someone who will pay it back
- 5:45Speaker 1: as soon as the contract clears. Three women, three stories,
- 5:51Speaker 1: one account. The name on that account, Victor Teal, belonged
- 5:56Speaker 1: to a man who had died in Dunmore in two thousand,
- 5:59Speaker 1: six seventeen. His identity had been used to open financial
- 6:03Speaker 1: instruments for at least two years before any of these
- 6:06Speaker 1: women met Randy Draper. That is the detail that reorients everything.
- 6:10Speaker 1: The account was not improvised, It was not reactive Victor
- 6:15Speaker 1: Teal's name was in place before Laura drove anyone to
- 6:18Speaker 1: a gas station, before Peggy crossed a parking lot, before
- 6:22Speaker 1: Kim answered a message on a dating app. The infrastructure
- 6:25Speaker 1: for the extraction existed before the relationships did. By late
- 6:30Speaker 1: April of twenty nineteen, the three women had collectively transferred
- 6:35Speaker 1: eleven thousand, three hundred dollars into that account. The account
- 6:39Speaker 1: had been drawn to zero twice and partially refilled. The
- 6:43Speaker 1: amounts each woman sent ranged from four hundred to twenty
- 6:47Speaker 1: two hundred dollars per transferred. The ceiling was not accidental.
- 6:52Speaker 1: Cheryl Novad, the licensed clinical social worker who would later
- 6:55Speaker 1: testify at Draper's sentencing, described the calibration person the financial
- 7:01Speaker 1: ask was engineered to stay within what she called the
- 7:05Speaker 1: what you do for someone you love threshold, the amount
- 7:09Speaker 1: of person will transfer without consulting anyone, without filing documentation,
- 7:14Speaker 1: without a conversation that might introduce a second opinion large
- 7:19Speaker 1: enough to matter, small enough to feel like trust. Kim
- 7:23Speaker 1: Ashworth entered therapy with Cheryl Novak in April of twenty nineteen.
- 7:28Speaker 1: The presenting concern, as Kim described it at her first session,
- 7:32Speaker 1: was relationship anxiety. She said she was having trouble sleeping.
- 7:37Speaker 1: She said she checked her bank statements compulsively and then
- 7:41Speaker 1: felt guilty about it. She said Randy was wonderful, attentive patient.
- 7:46Speaker 1: She said the problem was probably her. Cheryl asked a
- 7:49Speaker 1: standard question, could Kim share her phone records from the
- 7:52Speaker 1: past sixty days? Kim agreed, Then she canceled her next
- 7:56Speaker 1: two appointments. That sequence the agreement that the retreat is
- 8:01Speaker 1: its own kind of evidence, not of guilt, not of complicity,
- 8:05Speaker 1: but of something Cheryl would later name in court, the
- 8:09Speaker 1: point at which a person's instincts and their emotional loyalty
- 8:13Speaker 1: come into direct conflict, and loyalty wins. Because by April,
- 8:18Speaker 1: Kim had been told, in various configurations that her concerns
- 8:22Speaker 1: were anxiety, that she was doing that thing, that she
- 8:26Speaker 1: was inventing problems that didn't exist. The gas lighting had
- 8:30Speaker 1: been applied not as dramatic confrontation, but a steady, patient correction,
- 8:35Speaker 1: the kind that sounds like reassurance until you realize you
- 8:39Speaker 1: have stopped trusting your own read on a situation. Cheryl
- 8:43Speaker 1: didn't have Kim's phone records, but she had enough she
- 8:46Speaker 1: recognized the architecture, love bombing that creates emotional depth, unexplained
- 8:51Speaker 1: absences that generate competition for attention, the woman can't verify
- 8:56Speaker 1: financial requests framed as intimacy rather than transaction, and then
- 9:01Speaker 1: the slow erasure of the woman's confidence in her own perception.
- 9:06Speaker 1: She had seen the structure before in her eleven years
- 9:09Speaker 1: of counting victim advocacy of work. She didn't yet have
- 9:13Speaker 1: a name for the man at the center. Forty five
- 9:16Speaker 1: miles east, Laura had a notebook. The notebook had been
- 9:20Speaker 1: sitting open on her kitchen counter the morning Dawn Burke
- 9:24Speaker 1: pressed her face to the window. Its contents were not
- 9:27Speaker 1: visible through the glass, but when investigators later cataloged what
- 9:31Speaker 1: Laura had left behind, the notebook was documented alongside the ring,
- 9:36Speaker 1: the phone, the cold coffee. What it contained was a
- 9:39Speaker 1: list Laura had been writing down questions she could not answer,
- 9:43Speaker 1: gaps in contact. She could not explain a phone number
- 9:47Speaker 1: that did not match the area code of any city
- 9:49Speaker 1: Draper claimed to be working in references to conversations she
- 9:54Speaker 1: did not remember having. She had written things down because
- 9:57Speaker 1: she had started to distrust her own memory of them.
- 10:00Speaker 1: That is the consequence of sustained gaslighting. You stop keeping
- 10:04Speaker 1: the record in your head. You write it on paper instead,
- 10:08Speaker 1: because paper doesn't second guess itself. When Cheryl Novak testified
- 10:13Speaker 1: at Draper's sentencing, she described the notebook this way. Laura
- 10:17Speaker 1: had been trying to write her way back to herself
- 10:19Speaker 1: before she was interrupted. The list was not evidence that
- 10:23Speaker 1: Laura was confused. It was evidence that she was thinking clearly,
- 10:27Speaker 1: and that someone had spent months working to convince her otherwise.
- 10:31Speaker 1: The ring was sitting on top of the notebook when
- 10:34Speaker 1: Burke arrived. Laura had been looking at it when Draper
- 10:37Speaker 1: knocked on her door the evening of May seventh, She
- 10:40Speaker 1: placed it on the open page and went to answer.
- 10:43Speaker 1: She left to help someone close a property that did
- 10:46Speaker 1: not exist, and she left behind in that kitchen written
- 10:50Speaker 1: proof that some part of her already knew something was wrong.
- 10:53Speaker 1: The question that remained, the one investigators would have to
- 10:57Speaker 1: reconstruct from transfer records, lawns, and a gray pickup truck
- 11:02Speaker 1: service history, was how far back the system actually went
- 11:06Speaker 1: and how many times it had run before Laura Moore
- 11:09Speaker 1: ever stopped on a Cold County road. Deputies located Randy
- 11:13Speaker 1: Draper at the Brex City Hotel. Or the morning of
- 11:16Speaker 1: May fourteen, twenty nineteen, eighty miles from Ferris Mill Road,
- 11:22Speaker 1: Room twelve, Laura Moore was sitting at the small table
- 11:25Speaker 1: near the window, uninjured, with a paper cup of gas
- 11:29Speaker 1: station coffee going cold in front of her. She had
- 11:32Speaker 1: been there since the evening of May seventh. She believed
- 11:36Speaker 1: she was waiting for a property closing that had already
- 11:39Speaker 1: been postponed twice. She had not been taken. She had
- 11:42Speaker 1: driven herself. That distinction matters not because it diminishes anything
- 11:47Speaker 1: that happened, but because it is the most precise measure
- 11:50Speaker 1: of how the system worked. Draper had not needed force.
- 11:54Speaker 1: He had needed her to feel responsible. A woman who
- 11:57Speaker 1: goes voluntarily is a woman who can not not easily explain,
- 12:01Speaker 1: even to herself, that something is wrong. Investigators brought Draper
- 12:06Speaker 1: to the Harlan County substation that afternoon. The session lasted
- 12:10Speaker 1: four hours. According to the interrogation record, he was patient throughout, calm,
- 12:16Speaker 1: concerned for the questioners, willing to clarify anything they needed.
- 12:21Speaker 1: He held that composure for two hours. Then an investigator
- 12:24Speaker 1: placed three sets of bank transfer records on the table.
- 12:28Speaker 1: Laura Moore's account. Kim Ashworth's account, Peggy Slade's account, each
- 12:33Speaker 1: showing wire transfers to a prepaid business account, each transfer
- 12:37Speaker 1: logged under a different cover story, all three resolving to
- 12:42Speaker 1: the same routing round. The investigator said, a name Victor Teel.
- 12:47Speaker 1: Four hours of careful performance came apart in the next
- 12:50Speaker 1: few minutes. Draper admitted to three simultaneous relationships. He admitted
- 12:56Speaker 1: to staging the roadside breakdowns, a loosened coolant hose, a
- 13:00Speaker 1: county road, a woman who stopped because stopping is what
- 13:04Speaker 1: decent people do. He admitted to the financial fraud. He
- 13:08Speaker 1: admitted that Victor Teal had been dead since two thousand seventeen,
- 13:12Speaker 1: and that he had been using Teale's identity for financial
- 13:15Speaker 1: instruments for at least two years before any of these
- 13:18Speaker 1: women met him. The system had not started with Laura
- 13:21Speaker 1: Moore or Kim Ashworth or Peggy's slave. It had been
- 13:25Speaker 1: running before they existed in his life. In twenty twenty,
- 13:29Speaker 1: Draper entered a guilty plea three counts of wire fraud,
- 13:33Speaker 1: one count of identity theft, one count of financial exploitation.
- 13:38Speaker 1: The court sentenced to him to seven years. Cheryl Novak
- 13:42Speaker 1: testified at that sentencing, she had been Kim Ashworth's therapist
- 13:46Speaker 1: since April two thousand, nineteen. Kim had come in presenting
- 13:51Speaker 1: what she called relationship anxiety, apologizing even as she described
- 13:56Speaker 1: symptoms that Cheryl recognized from more than a decade victim
- 14:00Speaker 1: advocacy work. Cheryl had asked to see phone records. Kim
- 14:04Speaker 1: had agreed, then canceled the next two appointments. She was
- 14:08Speaker 1: not ready to see it yet. The system works partly
- 14:11Speaker 1: because it makes the evidence feel like an accusation against yourself.
- 14:16Speaker 1: At sentencing, Cheryl described the manipulation architecture in plain language,
- 14:21Speaker 1: love bombing first to build emotional debt, then triangulation through
- 14:26Speaker 1: unexplained absences so each woman competed for attention she had
- 14:30Speaker 1: no way to verify. Then financial asks calibrated to stay
- 14:35Speaker 1: inside the threshold of what you do for someone you love.
- 14:38Speaker 1: And then when doubt surfaced, gaslighting, your anxious, your doing
- 14:43Speaker 1: that thing, your inventing problems. The architecture was designed to
- 14:47Speaker 1: make a woman's own instincts feel like her worst quality.
- 14:52Speaker 1: Three months after Draper's arrest, a detective from Weller Township
- 14:56Speaker 1: contacted Harlan County. In twenty sixteen, a woman named Anita
- 15:01Speaker 1: Coburn had reported an identical pattern, a roadside breakdown, a
- 15:06Speaker 1: rapid emotional escalation, a series of transfers into a business
- 15:11Speaker 1: account under a name she could not verify, and then
- 15:14Speaker 1: gas lighting so consistent she had started to believe she
- 15:17Speaker 1: was the problem. The methodology matched drapers across every documented point,
- 15:23Speaker 1: but Anita Cockburn declined further proceedings. The case went cold.
- 15:28Speaker 1: The Weller township link sits in a file attached to
- 15:32Speaker 1: Draper's name. It has not been prosecuted. It is closed
- 15:36Speaker 1: to no one. That means two thousand sixteen is the
- 15:40Speaker 1: earliest confirmed date on record for this operation, and two
- 15:44Speaker 1: thousand sixteen was not the beginning. It was simply the
- 15:48Speaker 1: first time some one wrote it down and handed it
- 15:51Speaker 1: to law enforcement. Laura Moore returned to the house on
- 15:55Speaker 1: Ferris Mill Road in late May two thousand nineteen. There
- 15:59Speaker 1: is no public statement from, no interview, no account, no
- 16:04Speaker 1: record of what those first days back looked like. What
- 16:08Speaker 1: the record shows is smaller than that and more durable.
- 16:12Speaker 1: She went into the garden, the south row tomatoes at Maida.
- 16:16Speaker 1: They had deeper roots than the others, and that section
- 16:19Speaker 1: of the bay caught more direct sun, and the rain
- 16:22Speaker 1: had been steady enough that the two day power cut
- 16:26Speaker 1: hadn't mattered much. She spent an afternoon in the dirt
- 16:30Speaker 1: assessing what could still be saved, pulling what couldn't. The
- 16:33Speaker 1: garden had continued without her, some of it had died,
- 16:37Speaker 1: some of it hadn't. The last Tuesday of May, she
- 16:40Speaker 1: was at Calvary Lutheran for choir practice. Eleven women, four years,
- 16:46Speaker 1: the fixed warm point of her week continuing. She did
- 16:49Speaker 1: not speak publicly. That is her right, and it is
- 16:53Speaker 1: worth naming plainly, plainly. The expectation that a person who
- 16:58Speaker 1: has been systematically deceived, eve and financially exploited owes the
- 17:02Speaker 1: public an account of her recovery is itself a form
- 17:06Speaker 1: of intrusion. What she did, returned, tended, what survived showed
- 17:11Speaker 1: up on Tuesday is sufficient and complete. Kim Ashworth remained
- 17:15Speaker 1: in therapy with Cheryl Novak. Peggy Slade's recovery is not
- 17:19Speaker 1: part of the public record. Both women transferred money they
- 17:22Speaker 1: will not get back. The combined total across all three
- 17:26Speaker 1: was eleven thousand, three hundred dollars metered across months, calibrated
- 17:31Speaker 1: to stay below the amount that triggers disclosure below the
- 17:35Speaker 1: amount that feels like a crime while it is happening.
- 17:37Speaker 1: The ring that Draper gave Laura in March two thousand nineteen,
- 17:42Speaker 1: the one he said had belonged to his father, was
- 17:45Speaker 1: still on the note book when investigators cataloged the kitchen.
- 17:49Speaker 1: It was not a keepsake. It was an instrument of
- 17:52Speaker 1: manufactured intimacy, and Laura had placed it on the page
- 17:56Speaker 1: she was reading when he knocked the instrument of trust
- 17:59Speaker 1: sitting on the record of doubt. She had assembled that
- 18:02Speaker 1: image herself without knowing what it meant. Cheryl Novak's phrase
- 18:06Speaker 1: from the sentencing carries more than it appears to. Laura
- 18:10Speaker 1: had been trying to write her way back to herself
- 18:12Speaker 1: before she was interrupted. The note book was not evidence
- 18:16Speaker 1: of a woman who was confused or unstable, or losing
- 18:19Speaker 1: her grip. It was evidence of a woman whose critical
- 18:21Speaker 1: thinking was intact and functioned, a woman who was being
- 18:25Speaker 1: told methodically that her own clarity was a symptom of
- 18:30Speaker 1: her weakness. She wrote the questions down because writing them
- 18:33Speaker 1: made them real in a way that her own memory,
- 18:36Speaker 1: after months of gas lighting, no longer could the instincts survived,
- 18:42Speaker 1: The record survived, The garden largely survived. What did not survive,
- 18:48Speaker 1: what cannot be returned, is the year she lost to
- 18:52Speaker 1: a system built by someone who had been running it
- 18:55Speaker 1: since at least twenty sixteen, under a dead man's name,
- 19:00Speaker 1: on roads chosen because they were close enough to be
- 19:03Speaker 1: convenient and empty enough to look like chance. Anita Coburn's
- 19:07Speaker 1: twenty sixteen report is the detail that refuses to close cleanly.
- 19:13Speaker 1: A woman reported it, the pattern was documented, and then
- 19:16Speaker 1: the case went cold, and the system continued, and three
- 19:20Speaker 1: more women sat across from the same loosened hose, the
- 19:24Speaker 1: same six week declaration of love, the same transfer request,
- 19:28Speaker 1: framed as trust. That is not a failure of any
- 19:31Speaker 1: one person. It is a failure of the threshold, the
- 19:35Speaker 1: point at which something stops looking like a private relationship
- 19:40Speaker 1: and starts looking like a crime. Draper calibrated his operation
- 19:45Speaker 1: to stay below that threshold at every stage. Below the
- 19:48Speaker 1: transfer amount that triggers a bank flag, below the relationship
- 19:52Speaker 1: duration that looks like premeditation, below the geographic distance that
- 19:57Speaker 1: connects three women who never knew each other exist. The
- 20:00Speaker 1: system failed where the evidence was written down and the
- 20:04Speaker 1: roots ran deep enough. That is the only honest way
- 20:07Speaker 1: to end this, not with a resolution that feels complete,
- 20:12Speaker 1: because the Weller Township file is still open and Amita
- 20:15Speaker 1: Coburn is still out there, and seven years is the
- 20:19Speaker 1: sentence that the court determined to fit the documented crimes.
- 20:22Speaker 1: Whether it fits the scope of what was done is
- 20:25Speaker 1: a question The record leaves unanswering. What the record does
- 20:29Speaker 1: give back. Is this a woman in a garden on
- 20:32Speaker 1: a late May afternoon, pulling what couldn't make it, leaving
- 20:36Speaker 1: what could? South Road tomatoes with roots that held a
- 20:40Speaker 1: Tuesday evening at Calvary Luthman eleven voices the same as always,
- 20:46Speaker 1: Laura Moore, who had written down the truth before she
- 20:48Speaker 1: was interrupted, and who came back to tend what survived.
- 20:52Speaker 1: This show is made by Obo Media