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He Tore Her Life Apart Quietly - The Proof Left On A Trail · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The book was still intact enough to read the due date.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: A library hardcover, spine cracked and pages bloated with old
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: water wedged in the mud beside a white oak on
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the Sycamore Fork Greenway in Hartwell Township, eastern Tennessee. The
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: date stamped inside the front cover was fourteen months before
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: that trail existed. Kenneth Owens found it on a cold
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Tuesday in March. He was semi retired, walked the greenway
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: most mornings with a neighbour's beagle mix named Pepper, and
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: the trail had only been cut that passed winter. He
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: almost stepped over the book, Pepper didn't. The dog stopped,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: nosed the cover, and Kenneth reached down and picked it up.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: The title was The Space between My Names. The author
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: listed was Jay Barrett, and on the back cover, below
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: a short biography of a literary agent named Jean Barrett
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: was a photograph of a woman who was not John
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Barrett at all. Kenneth didn't know that yet. He brought
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: the book home, dried it out, and set it on
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: his kitchen table. It took him three days to mention
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: it to anyone. There is something about this case that
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: resisted easy explanation from the first document examined, not because
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the facts were complicated, because the facts were so specific
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: and so consistent that the only way to make them
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: add up was to accept that someone had spent years
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: quietly taking apart another person's life, not violently, not suddenly,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: but peace by peace. In the language of help and
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: care and professional interest. What makes this case matter is
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: not what was taken. It is how long the taking
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: went unnoticed, and what it cost the person it was
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: taken from. That woman on the cover was Lauren Thompson.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: She was thirty one years old when she moved to
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Hartwell Township. By the time Kenneth Owens found her library
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: book on a trail that hadn't yet existed when she
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: checked it out, she had been gone from that address
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: for over a year, and almost no one had thought
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: to ask where she went. Lauren Thompson grew up moving.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Her mother, who would later become the subject of Lauren's memoir,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: was the kind of person who reorganized the furniture when
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: she was anxious, who made decisions by walking through a
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: space first and feeling whether it held her. Lauren inherited
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: that quality, a trust in the physical environment as a signal.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: She was drawn to rooms with good light and to
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: people who asked follow up questions. By her late twenties,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: she had settled into freelance copy of diting, which suited her.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: She worked carefully and on her own schedule. She had
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: a college friend in Portland named Meredith Solis, and a
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: writing group in Knoxville, where she'd met a teacher named
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Andrea Poe.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: She had a.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Tabby cat named Birch, who, according to people who knew her,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: she fed at six in the morning and six in
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: the evening without variation. She was the kind of person
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: who called back the same day. The memoir had been
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: years in the making. Lareen's mother had been diagnosed with
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: early onset dementia when Lauren was still in her mid twenties,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: and writing about it was not something Lauren did quickly
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: or carelessly. The manuscript was personal in the way only
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: something long.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: Carried can be. It was written in a.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Voice that was plainly hers, precise, restrained, occasionally funny in
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: the way that grief sometimes forces. She submitted it to
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Meridian Literary Partners in Knoxville, roughly eight months before she
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: moved to Hartwell.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: Township.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Meridian was registered as a limited liability company and described
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: itself as a boutique literary agency.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Its principal was.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: A man named Jean Barrett, who went by j Barrett
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: in professional correspondence. He was fifty three years old and
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: identified himself off as a literary agent with contacts at
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: small and independent presses. Meridian's verifiable placement record, as later
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: confirmed in court filings, consisted of exactly two books with
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: small presses. Barrett called Lauren within forty eight hours of
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: receiving her submission. People who knew her described that call
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: as a turning point in her effect about the project.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: He used the word necessary.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: He said the manuscript was the kind of work that
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: arrived once in a long while, and that his job
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: was simply not to get in its way.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: What followed was a.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Period that Lurn later described in fragments as feeling like
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: being noticed for the first time after a long effort
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: to be seen. Barrett responded to e mails within the hour.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: He remembered details she mentioned in passing. He asked about Birch.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: He expressed concern specifically and repeatedly about whether Lauren was
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: protecting her time, whether the freelance work was crowding out
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: the the memoir whether her environment in Knoxville was the
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: right one for finishing it. The suggestion that she moved
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: to Hartwell Township came from Barrett. He framed it as practical, quieter, cheaper,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: a good community of readers, a library she would love.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Lauren moved eight months after signing with Meridian. She had
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: by that point told Barrett her approximate neighbourhood in Knoxville.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: She had not given him her specific address. He already
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: added that would not become clear for another two years.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: What her neighbour, Robert Ashby, noticed looking back was not
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: that Lauren seemed unhappy. It was that she seemed to
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: become progressively less present. She was friendly when he saw
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: her they shared a wall on Dellwood Avenue, but the
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: frequency of those conversations dropped. The invitations she'd mentioned to
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: writing events and group readings became less frequent, and then stopped.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: He assumed she was deep in work. He assumed she
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: was fine. That is the assumption. This case depends on
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: the assumption that withdrawal is contentment, that silence is choice.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Lauren Thompson was a consistent library patron at the Hartwell
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Township branch until she wasn't. The branch librarian, a woman
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: named Helen Marsh, would later say she noticed the gap
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: that Lauren had come in regularly for months and then
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: simply didn't. Helen didn't flag it. Then she would flag
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: something else much later in a way that changed everything.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: But by the time Pepper the Beagle stopped on a
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: muddy trail and Kenneth Owens reached down for a water
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: logged hardcover with the wrong name on it, Lauren had
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: already been gone from Dellwood Avenue for more than a year.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: She had left quickly. Her neighbor saw her carry out
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: a few boxes over two days, and then the unit
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: was quiet. She did not tell Ashby where she was going.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: She did not tell well Meredith, who assumed deadlines. She
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: did not tell Andrea, who had by then drifted out
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: of regular contact through a process neither of them had
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: quite decided on. What she did take was birch. The
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: book left Delwood Avenue the same way Lauren did, quietly
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: without announcement, slipping out of the life it.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Had been built inside.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: But there are things a book cannot hide. The dedication
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: page was still legible when Kenneth Owens found it, despite
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: the water damage, despite the months in the mud, near
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: a white oak on what would become Sycamore Fork Greenway.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: The text was faded at the margins, but the center
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: held four words into the dedication, and the.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: Page told you everything.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: The cover refused to b who waited by the window.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: A first person dedication, not a thank you, not a
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: professional acknowledgment, A specific private address to a specific creature,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: written by someone who knew that creature, who.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Had watched it wait.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Birch was a tabby cat, Lauren Thompson's tabby cat, and
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Jay Barrett had never mentioned owning one. Helen Marsh was
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the branch librarian at Hartwell Township, and she had watched
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Lauren come through the library doors regularly across the munths
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Lauren lived on Delwood Avenue. She had also watched that
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: pattern stop. When Kenneth brought the water logged hard cover
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: to the desk, Helen looked at the author.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: Photo on the back of the jacket and went still.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: The face in that photograph was not a stranger's face.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: It was the face of the woman who had been
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: checking out books bringing a canvas tote, asking quiet questions
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: about the periodicals collection, and then simply stopped coming. The
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: name printed beneath the photograph read Jade Barrett. The face
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: belonged to Lauren Thompson. Helen called Clifford Coleman that afternoon.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Clifford Coleman was fifty six, a paralegal in civil practice
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: and before that, a financial crimes analyst at a regional bank.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: He was also Robert Ashby's nephew, Ashby being Lauren's neighbor,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: the man who had shared a wall with her on
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Dellwood Avenue and watched her become progressively less present. Clifford
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: had heard the story second hand through family. When Helen
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: reached him, those two streams of information converged into one
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: question that did not have an innocent answer. How does
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: a woman's face end up on a book published under
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: another person's name. Clifford pulled the copyright registration that afternoon.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: The registration listed j. Barrett as sole author. The filing
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: date was consistent with the period after Lauren finalized what
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: she called her manuscript. There was no co author credit,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: no acknowledgment of Lauren's contribution. The press was based in Asheville,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: a small operation, the kind that relies on agent relationships
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: to source its titles. Clifford had enough for a Warren request,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: but first he needed to understand the structure underneath. The
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: first warrant returned something investigators had not expected to find.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: In one place, Barrett maintained a cloud back up account,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: and inside it time stamped across three separate sessions. Were photographs,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: not landscape photographs, not personal records from Barrett's own life.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: They were photographs of documents, specifically a driver's license, a
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: social Security card, and a set of financial records, all
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: belonging to Lauren Thompson. The time stamps placed the second
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: session inside Lauren's Knoxville apartment. During a visit she had
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: documented in her own records as a professional meeting, Barrett
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: had told her there was a problem with the filing
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: cabinet lock in the shared workspace corner of her apartment,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: the one she used for client contracts and manuscript drafts.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: He had fixed it, he said, he had also the photographs, confirmed,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: opened it and recorded everything inside. That is the thing
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: about the filing cabinet. It was never broken, no repair
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: was needed. The request to fix it was the access
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: those photographed documents then moved through the record in traceable ways.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: A post office box was opened in Knoxville and Lauren's name,
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: using her photographed identification. Lauren never rented that box. Royalty
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: statements for the book were mailed there. An advance account
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: bearing Lauren's name and social Security number was established. Four thousand,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: two hundred dollars deposited into it following publication. The control
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: credentials for that account and the linked email address pointed
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: to bear it. Lauren did not have access to the
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: account that bore her own name. She could not withdraw
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: from it, could not view the statements, could not confirm
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: it existed. The money sat there, unreachable in her identity.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: There is a particular quality to that specific fact. It
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: is worth sitting with for a moment. The aco acount
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: existed to create the appearance of a transaction, an author
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: receiving payment, while the author herself remained invisible inside it.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: It was not just theft of words.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: It was construction of a parallel version of Lauren Thompson,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: one who had written the book, received the advance and
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: moved on. But here is the thing about constructed versions.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: They leave seams the building maintenance log at Dellwood Avenue
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: showed two work orders submitted under the property management company's
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: account after Lauren moved in. No tenant had requested either one.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: The log traced both to an account connected to Phil Dunbar,
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: a leasing agent. Dunbar had provided Barrett with the lease
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: a dendum that contained Lauren's unit number and address information
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Lauren had not yet given Barrett at the time he
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: received it. Barrett had never entered through a broken door
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: or a forced window. He walked in with paperwork. Everything
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: in the evidence record pointed toward a single obvious conclusion.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: The annotated manuscript would be in Barrett's office. His Knoxville
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: suite at Meridian Literary Partners was the logical place a
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: man who had built this kind of parallel paper architecture
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: would keep the physical proof of his authorship claim close
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: in a filing cabinet of his own, in a professional
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: space he controlled. That is what the second warrant targeted.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: First investigators went to Meridian. They went through the suite.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: What they found there was Barrett's operational records, correspondence agency contracts,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: a catalog showing exactly two books placed with small presses
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: across a career that spanned more than a decade two books.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Neither was Lauren's no annotated manuscript in the office. The
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: lease on the storage unit was held under Barrett's ex
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: wife's name. The unit was in a facility across town,
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: not connected to Meridian's address, not associated with Barrett's professional
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: identity in any documentation. Inside it, in side a totepin
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: on the second shelf from the floor, was a printed
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: copy of the manuscript, Lauren's Memoir about her mother's early
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: onset Dementia, written in Lauren's voice, structured in Lauren's sequence,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: built from the specific private weight of Lauren's family history.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Barrett's handwriting covered the margins. His initials marked the top
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: corner of individual pages. The dates he had written, scattered
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: across months of notation, placed his engagement with the manuscript
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: squarely inside the period when Lauren believed he was preparing
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: it for submission. He had not been preparing it for submission.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: He had been learning it, inhabiting it, making the manuscript
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: something he could claim to have produced. The storage unit
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: was the scene the constructed version could not hide, because
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Barrett had not thrown the manuscript away, and that is
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: the thing that does not have an innocent explanation. A
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: legitimate agent who receives and transmits a manuscript does not
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: keep a personally annotated physical copy in a storage unit
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: reed under someone else's name. You keep that copy only
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: if the annotations are the proof of your ownership claim.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: You keep it only if you intend to need it.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Three days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Barrett's
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: attorney made contact with the prosecution. The session was closed,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the agreement reached. There set a sentencing cap in exchange
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: for a full confession. The court upheld the restitution figure
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: of sixty one thousand dollars. A forensic accountant had calculated
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: it from lost professional opportunities the contracts. Lauren could not
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: pursue the platform, she could not build the two years
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: in which her work circulated under someone else's name while
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: she lived quietly in a place she had moved to,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: partly on Barrett's recommendation. The defense objected to the figure.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The court was not persuaded. What Barrett could not explain,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: what the defense never addressed directly was the dedication page
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: B who waited by the window, A man who steals
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: a manuscript and publishes it under his name, as to
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: publish it as it was written, or risk someone who
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: knew the original noticing the gap. Barrett left the dedication intact.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: He had no cat named Birch, He had no creature
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: waiting by any window. The dedication survived in the published
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: book because removing it would have required him to understand
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: in that moment that someone might one day hold the
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: book and know.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: Helen Marsh held.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: It, and she knew four years that was the sentence
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: eligible for supervised release after twenty eight months. The number
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: sits differently depending on where you stand. For Barrett, it
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: meant a cap a ceiling negotiated three days before a trial.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: He was not confident he could survive. For the court,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: it reflected the confession and the cooperation. For Lauren, it
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: meant the work she had done over three years. The
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: story of watching her mother disappear. Sentence by sentence, had
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: circulated under a stranger's name for two years, while she
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: quietly rebuilt a life in a town she had moved
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: partly because that stranger suggested it. The restitution figure sixty
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: one thousand dollars came from a forensic accountant's calculation of
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: what Lauren could not pursue during those two years, lost contracts,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: a platform that could not be built because the book
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: existed under a name that was not hers. The defense objected,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: the court was not persuaded. The copyright reversion was filed
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: before sentencing. An attorney that Clifford Coleman, connected Lauren to
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: handle the paperwork. The memoir, her account of her mother's dementia,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: the years of small erasures, the ordinary devastation of watching
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: someone forget themselves, was returned to her legally. Whether Lauren
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: will publish it again under her own name is not
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: part of the public record. She had relocated to Asheville
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: before the sentencing date. She did not attend the proceeding
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: in person. By the time the sentence was read, she
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: was already somewhere else. Birch was confirmed with her. The
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: detail that matters beyond the sentencing came fourteen months later.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: A Caldwell County detective working as separate matter identified a
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: prior victim, a woman in her late thirties, unnamed in
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: any public record, who had experienced an identical pattern of
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: manipulation before Lauren's case, the same method, the same sequence,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: an agent relationship documents accessed identity infrastructure built in the
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: victim's name without her knowledge. That case had never reached
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: the charging stage. When investigators made contact after Barrett's conviction,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: the prior victim declined to continue cooperating. Her reasons are
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: not part of the record. The connection to Barrett's case
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: was established through method alone, which means the annotated manuscript
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: in a storage unit was not the origin of the approach.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: It was a refinement.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: There is a question this case does not fully answer,
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: and it is worth naming.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Honestly.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: The prior victim exists in the record as a method
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: match and a decision not to continue.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Nothing more.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: What she lost, how long the pattern ran in her case,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: whether she ever found what Lauren found on a trail
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: in March, none of that is confirmed. The system reached
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: her too late or not at all, and she chose
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: to step back.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: That is her right.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: It is also an incomplete picture of what Barrett had
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: built before. Lauren never submitted a manuscript to Meridian Literary Partners.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: What the record does answer is how the unraveling began,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Not with a detective, not with a warrant, with a
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: beagle named Pepper pulling towards something in the mud near
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: a white oak, and a man named Kenneth Owens who
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: mentioned the find at a dog groomers on Clements Street.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: And a librarian named Helen Marsh who looked at a
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: cover photograph and recognized a face that had been a
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: regular presence in her branch, and then without explanation, was
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: not the impossible due date on that library book, stamped
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: fourteen months before the trail was cut. Is the thing
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: that holds the whole structure together. The book left the
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: library before the trail existed. Someone abandoned it on a
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: drainagiesment that would later become sycamore for Greenway. The soil
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: held it through the seasons, and when the trail finally
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: reached that spot, the book was waiting. Lauren had written
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: a book about what it means to watch someone lose
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: the thread of themselves, to see memory and selfhood separate
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: in slow increments that look from the outside like ordinary aging.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: She wrote it about her mother. She had no way
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: to know while she was writing it that the process
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: she was documenting would be turned against her, that another
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: kind of erasure was being prepared, that her name, her face,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: her social security number, and the most personal story she
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: had ever told would be used to build a version
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: of her she could not access or correct. Birch waited
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: by the window. Lauren is in Asheville. The copyright belongs
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: to her again. That is the end of what the
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: record confirms, and it is enough to see clearly what
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: was taken and what survived the taking. This show is
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: made by Oboemedia.