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She Wrote It Down: The Notebook That Outed Her Killers · True Nightmare Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: There are crimes where the body disappears and investigators spend
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: years searching. Then there are crimes where the body disappears,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: the killers walk into a coffee shop minutes later, and
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: one of them says out loud exactly what he just
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: did with his hands. This story has a body that
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: was never found, a conviction built entirely on paper trails
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: and note books, and a mother's son pair who had
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: already done this before twice. What happened at East sixty
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: fifth Street in Manhattan on July fifth, nineteen ninety eight
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: is not a mystery in the traditional sense. The mystery
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: is something colder. How does a woman write down in
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: her own handwriting that the man living down the hall
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: looks like he should be in jail toy pot and
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: still end up in a duffel bag in oboken. There
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: is something in this case that stayed with me long
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: after I first read through the details. It is not
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: the violence. It is the note book. East sixty fifth Street, Manhattan,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight. The town house at that address was
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: not a rental property in any ordinary sense. It was
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the home of Irene Silverman, eighty two years old, a widow,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: a former rocketed and a woman who had spent decades
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: cultivating the kind of life that required very little from
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the outside world, and gave a great deal in return.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: The house itself was multimillion dollar property, a limestone facade
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: on one of the most expensive residential blocks in New
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: York City. Irene had converted several rooms into high end
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: suites rented to a small, carefully chosen number of tenants.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Not for the income. She did not need it, more
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: for the company, for the particular pleasure of a well
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: run house with interesting people inside it. She was careful
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: about who she led through the door. That detail matters.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: In early nineteen ninety eight, a young man named Manny
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Grin contacted her about a room. He paid six thousand
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: dollars in cash, moved in quickly, and settled into the
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: household's rhythms. He was polite, quiet, kept mostly to himself.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: His real name was Kenny Kymes. He was twenty three
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: years old, and Manny Gerrin had never existed. The woman
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: who invented that alias was Sante Chimes, Kenny's mother at
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: sixty three. Sante had been operating under false identities for
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: the better part of four decades. At least twenty two
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: documented aliases, multiple fake social security numbers, multiple passports under
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: different names. She had done federal time in the mid
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighties five years for trafficking and enslaving undocumented women
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: as household staff. She had walked out of that sentence
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and resumed exactly what she was doing before, just with
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: more practice and less visibility. The goal at Irene's town
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: house was not robbery in the conventional sense. Sante had
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: incorporated a shell company and intended to forge a deed
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: transfer to steal the property itself, a multi million dollar
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Manhattan town house signed over on paper to a corporation
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: that existed only to receive it. To make that work,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: she needed Irene's signature, and to get the signature, she
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: needed Kenny close. Within twenty four hours of moving in,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Kenny had planted a listening device in the common areas.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: He began intercepting Irene's phone calls. What Sante and Kenny
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: did not account for, what appears nowhere in their planning,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: was Irene's instincts. She started writing things down a private
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: note book kept in her room. In it, she noted
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the things about Manny Gerrin that did not sit right
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: with her, that he moved in ways designed to avoid
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the security cameras, that she at once looked toward his
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: door and seen his feet stop in the gap just
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: beneath it, motionless, as if he was standing there listening.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: She told people around her that she did not trust him.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: She wrote that he looked like he should be in jail.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: She was right about all of it, and she wrote
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: it down before any one came to look. That note
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: book would later become one of the most significant pieces
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: of evidence in a murder trial where the victim's body
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: was never recovered. But in the weeks before July fifth,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: it was just a woman in her eighties trusting what
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: she felt than how she had run for decades. The
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: air in that house had changed. Irene had noticed it,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: She just didn't know yet what it meant. The plan
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: was already running before Irene noticed anything was wrong. Kenny Cymes,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: operating as Manny Kareen, had been inside her home for days.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: He paid six thousand dollars in cash, no hesitation, no
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: questions asked dot TWA, and moved into one of her
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: suites with a single piece of luggage and a manner
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: that Irene described in her private notes as oddly rehearsed.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Within twenty four hours of arriving, he had planted a
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: listening device in the walls of her home. He was
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: intercepting her phone calls before she had learned his last name.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: The goal was the house itself. Sante had incorporated a
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: shell company specifically designed to receive the deed once Irene
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: signed it over. The forgery didn't require violence. It required
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: proximity access and a signature on a document Irene would
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: never willingly produce. Every day Kenny stayed in that building
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: was another day to get close enough to make that happen.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: What Sante hadn't planned for was the woman already living there.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Irene Silverman had spent decades reading rooms and reading people.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: She had been a rocotte, a socialite, a widow who
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: maintained one of the most valuable private properties on the
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Upper east Side entirely on her own terms. She was
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: eighty two, and she was sharp. Something about Manny Grin
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: didn't fit. She couldn't name it immediately, but she started watching.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: She noticed he moved through the house at angles. He
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: took routes that kept him out of frame when security
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: cameras were positioned near the staircase. He lingered in hallways
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: at odd hours. One evening, Irene was walking past his
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: room and stopped. She could see his feet under the door.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: He was just standing there on the other side, motionless.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: She didn't knock. She walked away and wrote it down.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: That notebook became something no one expected. Page by page,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Irene documented what she saw. The camera avoidance, the unusual hours,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: the way he answered questions with questions, the expression on
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: his face when he thought no one was looking. She
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: told people she didn't trust him. She told them he
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: looked like he should be in jail. These weren't vague feelings.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: She was building a record. She never got the chance
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: to act on it. The listening device was working. Kenny
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: was capturing her calls, her conversations, the rhythm of her day.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: He knew when she was alone, He knew which hours
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: the house was quiet. The rational explanation for any single detail,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: the cash payment, the odd hours. The camera avoidance was
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: thin but possible, a private guest who valued discretion, a
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: man on an irregular schedule. It was only when you
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: held every detail at once that the shape became unmistakable.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Detective Tom Hovegem, the NYPD lead on the case, would
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: later describe the crimes operation as unlike anything he had
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: encountered in his career, not because it was sophisticated in
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: a technical sense, but because it was sustained. Most crimes
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: collapse under their own momentum. The cime's approach was deliberate, patient,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: and layered. Sante had been running operations like this for
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: forty three years. She had at least twenty two known aliases,
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: multiple forged passports, and a federal conviction from nineteen eighty
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: five for the trafficking and enslavement of Mexican workers. She
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: had been treating people as instruments for longer than Kenny
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: had been alive, and Kenny had been shaped entirely inside
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: that world. He had no prior convictions before nineteen ninety seven,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: no independent record, no separate life. People who crossed paths
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: with him in those years described someone who seemed to
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: exist in a kind of controlled orbit, present, responsive, but
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: anchored to Sante in a way that didn't resemble a
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: normal adult relationship. He was twenty three years old, and
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: he had never operated outside her instructions. By the first
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: week of July, the plan had stalled. Irene hadn't signed anything.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: She was asking questions. The window was closing, and Sante
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: decided the approach would change up. Live Fifth, nineteen ninety
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: eight began as an ordinary Sunday on East sixty fifth Street.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: Then Kenny went to Irene's room. What happened inside that
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: apartment took only minutes. Kenny dragged her through the door.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Sante tazed her. Kenny strangled her with his hands until
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: she stopped moving. There was no confrontation in the way
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the word usually implies. No escalation, no argument that crossed
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: a line. It was a transaction. Irene Silverman was eighty
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: two years old and she had been right about everything
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: and it didn't matter. Her body was folded into a
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Duffel bag. They drove across the Hudson River to Hoboken,
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: New Jersey. The bag went into a trash bin. Irene
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Silverman former Rockety widow, the woman who had written down
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: every suspicious detail she noticed about the man living in
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: her home. She was left in the dark in a
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: dumpster in a city she didn't live in. Her body
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: has never been found. Then Sante and Kenny went to
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Trump Tower. They ordered pastries. They drank coffee. Kenny Chimes
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: looked down at it, hands wrapped around the cup, and said,
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: according to later accounts, that these were the hands that
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: had just been around Irene's neck, and now they were
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: around a cup of coffee. He said it plainly, without
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: apparent emotion, the way someone might note the weather. That
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: line is not the most disturbing thing about what followed.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: The most disturbing thing about what followed. The most disturbing
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: thing is that they stayed. They sat in Trump Tower
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: for an extended period after the murder. They were not panicked,
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: They were not in a hurry. The plan for the
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: day continued, because the murder had been part of the
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: plan for the day, and now it was complete, and
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: the next items remained. Those next items led them hours
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: later to a Hilton hotel on sixth Avenue. A pre
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: existing sting had been waiting for them, not for Irene's murder,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: which no one yet knew had occurred, but for a
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: bad check written on a stolen car. An associate name
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Stanley had turned, lured them in and tipped off the
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: NYPD and FBI. Sante and Kenny arrived more than six
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: hours late. They had not been expected to be that delayed.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: No one in the room knew why. When law enforcement
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: moved in, Sante threw a black bag on the floor
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: and announced it wasn't hers. Kenny wet himself. Kenny wet himself.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: The bag contained seven passports, five bank books, checks written
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: in Irene Silverman's name, and a forged social Security card
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: in Irene's name. It was not the bag of someone
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: who had spent the morning eating pastries at Trump Tower.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It was the bag of someone who had been carrying
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: a murderer's paperwork and hadn't yet found a place to
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: put it down. The apartment on East sixty fifth Street
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: was searched that evening. What investigators found in the suite
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: rented by Manny Guerrerein has not been publicly cataloged in full.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: What has been confirmed. The shower curtain was missing, there
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: were multiple wigs, there was a date rape drug, and
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: there were papers on which someone had been practicing Irene
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Silverman's signature over and over, the letters slightly different each time,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: the way a person practices until the hand learns to
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: lie in Sie Sante's handwriting on a separate sheet of paper.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: There was a list duct tape, rope, garbage bags. Not
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: a shopping list, a preparation list written before the fifth
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: of July, written before anyone in that house knew how
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: the week would end, except for the person who wrote it.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this case where everything fits
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: together cleanly. Sante Cymes was a career criminal with a
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: documented history of exploitation and fraud. Kenny was her instrument,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: raised in isolation, shaped into compliance over twenty three years.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: The scheme targeting Irene Silverman followed the same logic as
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: everything that preceded it. Identify a vulnerable asset engineer access,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: extract value, disappear rational, predatory, entirely explainable. That version fails
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: at the notebook. Irene Silverman identified Kenny Kymes as dangerous
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: before he gave her any reason she could articulate clearly.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: She wrote it down, She told people. She documented his
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: patterns with the precision of someone who had lived long
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: enough to trust the specific discomfort of a room that
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: feels wrong before anything in it has visibly changed. She
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: was not frightened in a vague way. She was recording evidence,
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: and she continued living in the same building as the
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: man she suspected, moving through the same hallways, passing his
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: door because she had no proof, only notes. The evidence
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: assembled after her death onned a portrait of a woman
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: who had been entirely correct every instinct she documented, held
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: the feet under the door, the camera angles, the expression
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: she couldn't name. The notebook was handed to investigators as
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: part of the search, and it became one of the
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: most unusual documents in the trial. A victim's pre mortem
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: record of her own danger, written in her own hand,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: describing a man who would later confess to her murder.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Then there's the timeline. Sante and Kenny were not arrested
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: for killing Irene Silverman. They were arrested for a bad check.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: The sting had been in motion before July fifth, if
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Stanley had not turned, if the Hilton meeting had happened
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: on a different days and Kenny would have walked out
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: of New York with a forged deed to one of
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: the most valuable properties on the Upper East Side, and
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Irene would have been listed as missing. Her body was
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: never found. There was no blood, no physical evidence at
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: the scene, no DNA. The case against them was built
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: entirely on circumstantial evidence. The documents in the bag, the
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: practice signatures, the to do list, the timing. Prosecutors brought
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: eighty four charges. They had no body. The defense pressed
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: that point throughout. What the jury had instead was a
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: record of everything Sante and Kenny carried on their persons
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the afternoon of July fifth, arriving at a sting hour's
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: late with a bag full of a dead woman's identity
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: documents and a man who couldn't control his body when
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: he understood what was about to happen. The conviction came
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: without a corpse, one hundred twenty years for Sante, one
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: under twenty five years for Kenny. There is something in
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: the structure of this case that refuses to resolve cleanly.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Regardless of the verdict. Irene Silverman knew, she wrote it down.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: She was found to be right in every particular, and
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the knowledge didn't protect her. The legal system caught the
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: people responsible by accident on a charge unrelated to the murder,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: hours after her body had already crossed a river. If
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: the bad check had never surfaced, if Stanley had stayed loyal,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the case would not exist. There would only be a
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: missing woman and an empty house. The notebook would still
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: be there, Irene's handwriting, the feet under the door, the
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: man who looked like he should be in jail, and
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: no one would have read it. The trial opened on
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: December sixteenth, nineteen ninety eight, and Manhattan had never seen
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: anything quite like it. Eighty four charges, No body, no DNA,
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: no single piece of physical evidence that placed Irene Silverman's
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: hands into a killer's grip. What the prosecution had instead
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: was a paper trail so dense and so damning that
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: it functioned like a confession. The defendants never gave Irene's
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: notebook to do this. The forged deed sitting in a
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: bag at the Plaza Hope, the checks in a dead
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: woman's name tucked inside a black bag Sante had thrown
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: across a hotel lobby floor. While insisting it wasn't hers,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: Sante performed that is the only word for it. She
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: appeared on sixty minutes, tears streaming, voice breaking, proclaiming her
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: innocence with the precision of someone who had rehearsed it.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: She smiled at cameras she dressed carefully for court. She
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: had spent forty three years building a self that could
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: not be pinned down, and she intended to use every
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: year of that practice inside that court room. It almost
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: worked as theater. It did not work as evidence. Kenny
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: sat beside her and said almost nothing. The jury deliberated
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: and came back with convictions across all lady four counts.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Sante received one hundred twenty years, Kenny received one hundred
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: twenty five. The judge sentenced them to more time than
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: either of them could ever serve, which was the point.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: There was nobody to bury. There would be no parole
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: to deny. The sentences were the only finality the case
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: would ever allow who. Then, in March of two thousand one,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: something shifted. Kenny was transferred to California to face charges
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: connected to David Kasden, the sixty three year old family
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: friend Kenny had shot on the back of the neck
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: while Costin was making coffee. Costin's body had been found
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: in a dumpster in a Granada Hill's alley. Within days,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: that case had evidence, That case had remains, and prosecutors
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: in California were prepared to seek the death penalty for Sante.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Kenny confessed. He admitted to Kasdin's murder. He admitted to
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: the death of Sayed Bellal Ahmed, the banker who had
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: traveled a Nassau in September of nineteen ninety six to
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: investigate suspicious wire transfers and who had never come back.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: Kenny described how he and Sante had drawed Dhmed's drink,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: held him under the water in a bath tub, and
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: disposed of his body in the sea. Ahmed was still
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: officially listed as a missing person he had been for
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: five years. The confession was the first time a charge
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: was ever formally filed for his death. His body has
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: never been found. The plea kept Sante off death row.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Both were sentenced to life without parole in California to
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: run consecutively with the New York sentences. They would die
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: in prison. The math made that certain Sante Cymes died
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: on May nineteenth, two thousand fourteen. She was seventy nine
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: years old. She never admitted guilt, Not for Irene, not
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: for Kasdin, not for Ahmed. Do for Kasden, not for Ahmed.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: The woman who had operated under at least twenty two aliases,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: who had forged identities the way other people changed clothes,
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: left the world in a prison bed under the name
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: she had been given at birth. She was the one
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: fixed point in a life built entirely on fiction, and
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: even at the end she refused to let the fiction go.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: What stayed with the investigators, with the prosecutors, with everyone
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: who had sat in that court room was not the conviction.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: It was what the conviction had required. A woman had
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: been murdered inside her own home. Her body had been
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: folded into a duffel bag and driven across the Hudson
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: River and dropped into a garbage bin in New Jersey,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: and it had never been recovered. Irene Silverman, who had
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: danced on Broadway, who had thrown parties in a mansion
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: on East sixty fifth Street, who had written careful notes
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: about the tenants she did not trust, had simply disappeared.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: The law had to prove she was dead without the
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: one thing that makes death undeniable. Kenny Chimes is still
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: in prison. According to people who know the family, he
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: has begun showing remorse. What that means for a man
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: who strangled an eighty two year old woman in her
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: own home, who shot a family friend while that man
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: made coffee, who held a stranger's face under water until
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: he stopped moving, That is a question each person has
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: to answer for themselves. There is something in this case
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: that I have not been able to set aside. And
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: it is not the murders, as monstrous as they were.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: It is the note book. Irene Silverman, days before she died,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: was writing down what she saw. She noted that the
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: man calling himself Manigerrin avoided cameras. She saw his feet
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: beneath her door. She wrote that he looked like he
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: should be in jail. She told people she did not
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: trust him. She was gathering evidence in the only way
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: available to her, in the careful handwriting of a woman
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: who had spent eighty two years learning to pay attention.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: That notebook was entered into evidence. It helped convict them.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: She knew something was wrong. The rational explanation, odd tenant,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: mild concern, nothing more, had already stopped working for her.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: She just did not know, could not have known that
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: the thing she was documenting was already in motion. The
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: plan had been running since before she opened the door.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: The listening device was in place within twenty four hours
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: of Kenny's arrival. The corporation to seize her property had
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: already been formed. The forged deed was already waiting in
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: a bag at the Plaza Hotel. Everything she feared was
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: already true. She simply had no version of the story
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: where she could see it all at once. The last
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: confirmed image of Irene Silverman is not dramatic. It is ordinary,
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: in the way that final things often are. A woman
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: in her own hallway, in her own house on a
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: July morning, with no reason to believe this day would
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: be different from any other. She did not know she
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: was being watched. She did not know the man down
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: the hall had a to do list that included duct tape, rope,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: and garbage bags. She never got the chance to turn
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: that page. This show is made by Obermedia.