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He Played "Reasonable Man" - Then Trapped Her Life Away · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On a Tuesday morning in July before seven o'clock, Lauren
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Powell was walking Riiker Creek with binoculars around her neck
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: when she noticed something wedged in the fork of an
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: oak tree. A prescription pill bottle, clean, dry, unweathered, as
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: if someone had set it there that morning, but Lauren
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: would later confirm she had photographed that same oak fork
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: the previous Thursday. It had been empty. The bottle was
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: labeled Curtraling fifty milligrams. The patient name read Burke, Cheryl A.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Burke had moved out of her apartment three years
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: before the bottle was found. She no longer lived in
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: that city, and the prescription on that label had been
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: dispensed during the same summer she first moved in. Years
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: before the bottle turned up in a tree she had
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: never walked past. What happened to Cheryl Burke did not
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: begin with a crime scene. It began with a dinner
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: party invitation and a landlord who took very careful notes.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: In the autumn, nine years before Lauren Powell found that bottle.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Nine years before the July when Lauren photographed the tree,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Burke was twenty four years old and moving into
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Apartment four Sea at the Halverson Arms. She had taken
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: a job as a front desk worker at a local
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: medical office. She was efficient, punctual, and by her own description,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a private person. Her mother lived four hours away. She
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: had not yet built close friendships in the city. She
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: brought one companion with her to the Halverson Arms, a
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: twelve year old tabby named Biscuit. Biscuit had hyper thyroidism
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: and required medication twice a day, Mathema'sole at seven in
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the morning and again at six thirty in the evening.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: That schedule was not incidental, It would matter later. Cheryl's
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: rent was six hundred forty dollars a month. Market rate
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: for a comparable unit in that neighborhood was eleven hundred
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: twenty dollars. The difference four hundred eighty dollars a month
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: existed because the Halverson Arms was rent controlled. It was
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: the only rent controlled building in Richard Muller's portfolio. Muller
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: was sixty three years old. He had managed the Halverson
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Arms for twenty two years to his property management company,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Westfield p M, which he ran out of a one
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: room office. He drove a gray Buick. He knew the
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: building the way someone knows a machine they have operated
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: for decades. Every tenant, every lease clause, every margin. Cheryl
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: met him shortly after she signed her lease. He was cordial, neighborly,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: even she had no reason to think otherwise. That first year,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Muller invited a small group of tenants to dinner at
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: his home. Cheryl was among them. The other tenants there,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: a man named Bill Strand and another named Derrick Ewan,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: were friendly and the evening was relaxed. Muller was a
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: good host. He asked questions, he listened well. By the
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: end of that dinner, without Cheryl realizing it, Muller had
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: learned several things. The name of her doctor, that she
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: was managing anxiety, that she was taking medication, and that
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: her nearest family was four hours away. A housing rights
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: investigator named Jessica Taylor, named Jessica Taylor, who would reconstruct
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the full time line years later while working for Crestmore
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Legal Aid described Meeler's approach in her notes as phased
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: and deliberately paced, each action individually explainable, collectively catastrophic. There
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: is something almost clinical about reading Taylor's reconstruction. Every element
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Muller used against Cheryl was something Cheryl had offered in
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: good faith, her isolation, her routine, her medical history, her
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: trust that a landlord who smiled and poured wine was
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: simply a landlord who smiled and poured wine. She was wrong,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: and the mechanism he built around her would take years
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: to fully see. The notices started in year two, not
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: one or two, the kind any landlord might file forty
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: one maintenance complaints against apartment for sea over seven years,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The building average was six. Cheryl didn't know that number.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: At first. Nobody told her. The complaints arrived as official
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: notices slid under her door, each one citing a different neighbor,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: a different grievance, a smell from her unit, noise during
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: quiet hours, a leak she had allegedly caused. Muller would
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: follow up in person, always calm, always apologetic, on her
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: neighbor's behalf. He never raised his voice. He presented himself
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: as the reasonable man caught between difficult parties. What Cheryl
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: had no way of knowing was that when investigators later
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: contacted those named neighbors, every single one of them none
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: recalled filing the complaints attributed to them forty one notices,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: zero confirmable sources. But here's the thing about a manufactured
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: paper trail. It doesn't need to convince the target. It
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: needs to convince a bureaucrat reviewing a file, and Muller
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: was building a file. Three of those forty one notices
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: were hand delivered during a specific window each evening between
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: six and seven o'clock. Cheryl's cat, Biscuit, a twelve year
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: old tabby being treated for hyperthyroidism, received his evening dose
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: of methemazle at six thirty. Muller knew Cheryl's evening routine.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: He knocked when she was least likely to step away
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: and most likely to open the door flustered, distracted her
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: hands full. The timing was not coincidental. It was a
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: feature Biscuit's medication schedule, Cheryl's isolation, her doctor's name. Muller
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: had gathered all of it at a dinner table with
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: wine and polite questions. He now deployed it with precision.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: When Cheryl mentioned the notices to a co worker named
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Sandra Yee, Sandra gently suggested that maybe Cheryl was reading
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: too much into it, that Mueller seemed like a good landlord.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: That anxiety could make things feel bigger than they were.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Muller had not spoken to Sandra Yee directly. He didn't
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: need to. He had seated enough information with enough people, neighbors,
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: building contacts, casual acquaintances that Cheryl's own social circle had
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: absorbed his version of events. Jessica Taylor's notes described this
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: as triangulation, surrounding the target with secondary voices that echo
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: the aggressor's framing without realizing they are doing so. By
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: year four, a letter arrived from the City Housing Office.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: It cited the accumulated maintenance history of Apartment four C.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: It was not an eviction notice. It was not legally actionable.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Cheryl hired a tenant wright's attorney named Scott Reeves, who
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: reviewed it and told her she was protected. But the
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: letter existed. Muller had successfully moved the conflict from his
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: desk to a government letterhead. When Cheryl and Mueller met
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: to discuss it, Muller told her he had only filed
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the notices for insurance documentation purposes. He said it gently,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: almost sadly, he said, he hoped she understood. Cheryl apologized
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: to him. She apologized to him that moment a woman
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: who had been subjected to four years of fabricated complaints.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Apologizing to the man who filed them is where Taylor's
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: reconstruction pauses longest, not because it is inexplicable, because it
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: is entirely explicable. Muller had spent four years making Cheryl
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: doubt her own perception. The apology was the proof it
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: had worked. There was one more detail Muller had been
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: collecting that nobody would understand until much later. Small objects,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: personal items. A birthday card from Cheryl's mother left on
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: the common area mailbox, a broken umbrella she had set
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: beside the trash, grocery receipts, items that individually looked like debris,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: items that, together with a prescription bottle bearing her name
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and her doctor's name in the refill number, could tell
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: a very different story about a woman's state of mind.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Muller kept them in a banker's box. The box was
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: labeled with Cheryl's apartment number. In year five, Muller said
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: something that Taylor flagged in her notes with a single asterisk.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: It happened at a brief meeting in the building lobby.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Cheryl had come to ask about a water stain on
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: her ceiling, a real maintenance issue, one she had documented herself.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: Muller listened patiently, Then, without any direct prompt he said,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: I think sometimes anxiety can make things feel more threatening
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: than they are. He was not speaking to her diagnosis.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: He was speaking about the stain officially, but he used
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the word anxiety, her word, her condition, a condition he
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: had no professional knowledge of, except that she had mentioned
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: it at a dinner party two years earlier over whine,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: because he had seemed like a good listener. That sentence
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: did two things simultaneously. It offered her a charitable interpretation
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: of her own complaint, and it placed her psychiatric history
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: into the official conversational record of a maintenance dispute. If
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Cheryl ever escalated to a housing court, to a mediator,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: to anyone, Muller had already begun seeding the idea that
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: her perceptions were compromised. Cheryl moved out in year seven,
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: not because of an eviction, not because of a court order,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: because she was exhausted. She described it later in a
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: supplemental statement to investigators as feeling like she had been
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: slowly methodically convinced that the apartment was making her sick,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: and that the sickness was her. She took biscuit and
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: a few boxes and left. Muller rented apartment four Sea
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: at eleven twenty dollars per month within six weeks. The
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: forty one notices, the banker's box, the triangulated social network,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the city letter, the lobby comment, all of it dissolved
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: back into ordinary property management paperwork the moment the unit
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: turned over. There was no complaint on file from Cheryl,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: no housing court record, no police report, just a vacancy
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: and a four hundred and eighty dollar monthly gain. Three
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: years passed. Then a fifty one year old bird watcher
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: named Lauren Powell walked Reiker Creek one Tuesday morning in
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: July before seven a m. And stopped at an oak
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: tree she had photographed the previous Thursday. The fork of
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: that tree had been empty on Thursday. It was not
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: empty now. The bottle was dry. That was the first
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: thing that registered as wrong. A prescription bottle left in
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: an oak fork near a creek through a full summer
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: which show weathering, UV, discolouration, moisture, condensation inside the cap,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: grime in the label adhesive. This bottle had none of that.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: The label was clean. The interior was dry. It looked
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: like something that had just come out of a drawer.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Lauren Powell photographed it. The label read Certralene fifty milligrams
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Burke Cheryl a Doctor m okafor refill number four, dispensed
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: July of the year Cheryl moved in picture. What that
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: looks like to an investigator who doesn't know Cheryl Burke
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: yet a prescription bottle near a public trail, clean and dry,
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: belonging to a woman who no longer lives in the area.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: The instinct is to look for the woman, to ask
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: whether she is all right. That instinct pointed directly at Cheryl,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: her name on the label, her psychiatric medication. A public location.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: It constructed a narrative about her mental state without a
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: single spoken word. Everything about that bottle pointed towards Cheryl
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: as the subject of concern, A vulnerable woman, a history
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: of anxiety medication that had apparently been discarded near a creek.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Every investigator's first assumption would be find her, check on her.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: But the bottle had never been outside. It had been
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: in storage, and the storage unit was Muller's. A locked
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: unit at Creekside Self Storage held a banker's box labeled
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: with Cheryl's apartment number, inside a broken umbrella, a birthday card,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: two grocery receipts, and that prescription bottle. Items collected, preserved,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: and held for years. Muller's phone records placed a call
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: to his nephew, Craig Solas within the five day window
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: after Muller's arrest in the second week of August, and
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: before investigators publicly connected the bottle to him, Solies placed
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: it there. He admitted it to investigators within forty eight
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: hours of being contacted without resistance. The bottle was not
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: a coincidence. It was not debris. It was the final
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: instrument in a campaign that had been running for nearly
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: a decade, and it was built from the first moment
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Cheryl mentioned at a dinner table that she was managing
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: anxiety and seeing the doctor. Here is what recontextualizes everything.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Muller had not improvised the banker's box meant he had
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: been planning a credibility attack from at least year one.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: The dinner party was not a social event. It was reconnaissance.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Every maintenance notice, every lobby comment, every triangulated neighbor. Those
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: were not escalating responses to a difficult tenant. They were
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: steps in a sequence that always ended here. A clean
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: dry bottle in a public place bearing her name, suggesting instability,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: deployed the moment he needed to discredit her. The reasonable
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: man hadn't lost patience, he had never had any. Mercer
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: County Detective Andrea Coulson surfaced a prior victim while cross
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: referencing Muller's property history. Brenda Chow had been twenty nine
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: when Muller targeted her, also rent controlled, also forced out
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: through accumulated administrative pressure. Also unable to trace the shell
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: company he had used because he registered it under a
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: cousin's name. Choe had kept Muller's notes. They matched Taylor's
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: reconstruction of the Sheryl Burke campaign point for point. Muller
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: had done this before the mechanism had a version history.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Donna Ucebi had worked Muller's books part time for eleven years.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: She knew the numbers, she knew the property names, and
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: sometime in the weeks after Muller's arrest in the second
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: week of August, she knew enough to call investigators. That
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: call changed the timeline's direction. Muller had been arrested on
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the stre ng of Lauren Powell's discovery and the physical
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: evidence pulled from the buick, but it was a cheb's
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: tip that accelerated the investigation from suspicion to confession. In
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: early October, roughly three months after the July bottle discovery,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Richard Mueller confessed. He was charged with seven counts of
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: harassment and stalking related to multiple victims, including Cheryl Burke
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: and Brenda cho. The district attorney agreed not to pursue
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: the maximum charge on three of those counts in exchange
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: for full cooperation. Gerald Marsh Muller's defense attorney negotiated carefully.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: The cooperation included a detailed account of Craig Solis's role
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: the storage unit and the triangulation contacts seeded among Cheryl's neighbors.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: The following spring, Muller was sentenced to six years. Early
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: release was possible contingent on completing a mandated treatment program
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: six years for nine years of precision. Housing rights investigator
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Jesse aka Tailor later reconstructed the full sequence in her
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: case notes for Crestmore Legal aid. What she found was
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: not a landlord who had lost patience. It was a
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: landlord who had never intended to share that building with
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: a rent controlled tenant at all. The four hundred and
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: eighty dollars monthly differential between Cheryl's six hundred forty dollars
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: and the eleven twenty dollars market rate was by Mueller's
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: own accounting records, was by Mueller's own accounting records. The
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: engine of everything A chibi confirmed that Halverson Arms was
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the only rent controlled property in his portfolio. Every other
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: building had been cycled free of protected tenants. Cheryl was
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: the last one. What Taylor's reconstruction made visible was the
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: sophistication of the instrument forty one maintenance notices over seven
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: years against a building average of six. None of the
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: attributed neighbors, when interviewed, recalled filing them. Three of those
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: notices had been delivered during the exact window of Biscuit's
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: evening mithemisol dose six thirty in the evening, when Cheryl
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: was fixed in place and least likely to answer the door.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Calmly Muller had mapped her routine. Brenda Chow's records from
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Mercer County confirmed this was not improvisation. Choe had been
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: twenty nine when Muller ran the same sequence against her,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: she had kept his notes. Detective Andrea Coulson cross referenced
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: those notes against Taylor's reconstruction, and the match was structural,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: same phases, same paper trail escalation, same shell company architecture
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: with a cousin's name inserted to block any trace back
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: to Mueller. Choe's documentation became part of the supplemental filing.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: Muller had aversion history. Cheryl's case was not the first iteration.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: The prescription bottle itself, the piece of evidence that had
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: sent the whole investigation sideways for weeks, was traced to
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Creekside's self storage banker's box number one, labeled with Cheryl's
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: apartment number four C inside a broken umbrella, a birthday card,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: two grocery receipts, and the bottle. Muller had collected it
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: at some point in year one. He had kept it dry,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: he had kept it clean, he had kept it waiting.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Craig Solis admitted everything within forty eight hours of being contacted,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: no resistance. Muller had called him within the five day
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: window after his arrest and before the public connection to
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: the bottle was announced, Solis placed the bottle in the
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: fork of the oak. He thought, He told investigators that
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: he was helping his uncle. He did not know what
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: the bottle was for. He knew it was Cheryl's. Cheryl
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Burke is thirty three. Now. She lives in a different city.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: She works as a senior coder at a regional hospital system,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: a career she built incrementally, piece by piece through the years.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: She was also dismant a reality that had been constructed
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: around her without her knowledge. She left Halverson Arms before
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Mueller's arrest. She does not know from the public record
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: at what exact point she walked out of apartment for
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: sea for the last time. What the record does show
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: is that she took Biscuit with her. Biscuit died peacefully
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: at seventeen, still in the Halverson Arms apartment. According to
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: the case file notation, that detail is small. It is
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: also the only part of this story that belongs entirely
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: to Cheryl, a cat who outlived the campaign and a
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: woman who was present for it. There is something in
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: this case that resists clean resolution, not because the legal
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: outcome is ambiguous. Mueller confessed he was sentenced. The evidence
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: was documented with unusual specificity, but because the harm Mueller
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: inflicted is not the kind that a six year sentence
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: addresses directly. Nine years of a person's life shaped by
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: a manufactured maintenance notices, deliberate social isolation, and a landlord
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: who sat across a dinner table and listened for weaknesses
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: the way a surveyor marks terrain. The legal system named
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: seven counts of harassment and stocking. What it could not
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: name precisely is what it costs a twenty four year
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: old to spend the next nine years doubting her own
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: perception of events that were real. What stopped Muller was
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: not a housing court. It was a bird watcher who
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: walked the same trail twice a week and noticed that
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: something had appeared in a tree fork that had been
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: empty four days earlier. It was a bookkeeper who knew
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: the numbers and decided to make a call. It was
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: a prior victim who had kept notes she should never
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: have had to keep. The systems designed to catch what
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: Muller did not catch it. The people did. Brenda Cho
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: waited years for someone to connect her case to another victim.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Burke spent nearly a decade in an apartment where
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: every piece of ordinary life, a maintenance noticed, a neighbor's comment,
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: a city letter, a missing umbrella, had been quietly arranged
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: to make her question herself. She questioned herself. That is
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: not a failure. That is what the campaign was engineered
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: to produce. She stayed anyway, She built a career anyway.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: She took her cat to the vet at seven in
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: the morning and six thirty in the evening, and she
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: held that routine through nine years of orchestrated uncertainty. That
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: is the part of this story that does not fit
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: inside the seven counts. The reasonable man was never reasonable.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: He was patient, and the distinction in the end is everything.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: This show is made by O O M Media