Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Gave Me Coffee, Took My Life: The Quiet Theft of Charles Foster

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He Gave Me Coffee, Took My Life: The Quiet Theft of Charles Foster · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On August eleventh, twenty nineteen, a utility lineman named David
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Lawson climbed a power pole on the eastern edge of
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Darrow County, Ohio to trace a grid fault that had
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: knocked out service to a stretch of Roote nine. When
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: he reached the top, he looked down into the backyard
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: of a rental house at four thousand, four hundred eight
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Heesler Mill Road and stopped. There was a hospital bed
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: in the yard, not collapsed, not broken, standing upright, frame intact,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: the kind with adjustable rails and a motor housing at
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the base. The grass beneath it had yellowed and died
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: in the shape of the frame. An extension cord ran
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: from the bed's motor across the dead grass, through a
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: gap in the back door, and into the empty house.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: The cord was still live. That cord was the reason
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: the grid had faulted. The house had been vacant for months.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Lawson called his supervisor, His supervisor called the county sheriff,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: and somewhere in Darrow County that morning, a forty eight
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: year old man named Charles Foster was trying to piece
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: together where the last two.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Years of his life had gone.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: This is the story of how one man methodically dismantled
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: another man's grip on his own reality. Not with violence,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: not with threats, but with patience, pharmacology, and a level
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of premeditation that an investigator with seventeen years on the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: job would later describe as unlike anything in his career.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: What happened to Charles Foster did not begin with the
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: hospital bed in a dead back yard. It began with
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: a cup of coffee. And the distance between those two
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: things is the distance between a man who trusted someone
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: and a man who could no longer trust his own memory.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Charles Foster was not a man who invited chaos. That
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: much was clear to anyone who knew him. He was
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: forty eight years old, a civil engineer with Darrow County
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Public Works, nineteen years in the same apartment. He showed
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: up at seven forty five every morning. He left at
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: four thirty exactly. He drove a nine year old civic
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: He serviced on schedule and kept a legal pad on
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: his desk where he wrote down the tasks he planned
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: to complete and crossed them off as he finished them.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: His co workers described him as the person you called
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: when the numbers had to be right.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Outside of work, his world.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Was smaller, but just as structured. He lived alone in
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: an apartment on Vicker Street in Crestline, Ohio. The divorce
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: from his ex wife, Donna had been finalized years before,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: and their son, Patrick, seventeen, in the summer of twenty nineteen,
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: lived in Columbus. Charles spoke with Patrick every Thursday evening,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: not Thursday ish Thursday. His own physician, doctor James Vento
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: at Darrow County Family Practice, noted in his records that
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Charles was the kind of patient who arrived with the
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: written list of question chins and left only after each
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: one had been answered. His older brother, Raymond, was a
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: retired postal worker who lived in the Norwood neighborhood of Crestline,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: maybe a ten minute drive from Charles's apartment. Raymond had
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: a bad hip that had never been properly repaired, the
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: kind of chronic pain a man learns to manage by
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: moving carefully and sitting down often. Every Saturday morning, for
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: four years, the two brothers met for breakfast two eggs
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: over easy the box scores, maybe a slow walk around
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: the block if Raymond's hip would allow it.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: It was the.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Fixed point of Charles's weak four years, not a single
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Saturday missed until spring twenty eighteen, and then the Saturday stopped.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Raymond noticed immediately, but he told investigators later that he
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: had not pressed hard at first. Charles had told him
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: things were busy, that he was working through some things
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: that he would explain when he could. Raymond said that
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: in high he did not recognize the voice on the
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: phone as quite the same as the one across the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: breakfast table. The sentences were the same length, the words
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: were familiar, but something in the texture was different.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: He could not name it then, he could name it later.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: What Raymond did not know, what no one close to
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Charles new, was that in the fall of twenty seventeen,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Charles had enrolled in an outpatient program at Darrow County
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Behavioral Health. He had been struggling quietly with alcohol dependence
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: for several years, and he had finally asked for help.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: That decision took everything he had. He was not a
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: man who asked for help easily. The program assigned him
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: a sober companion in November of twenty seventeen. The companion's
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: name was Robert Yorke. The first meeting happened at a
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: coffee shop on Maple Street in November of twenty seventeen.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: York arrived before Charles. When Charles walked in, his order
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: was already on the counter, black coffee, exactly the way
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: he drank it. That detail seemed like attentiveness, the kind
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: of thing a good companion does. Pays attention, reads the
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: intake form, learns the preferences. But that detail was not
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: on the intake form. It would take investigators more than
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: a year to understand what that moment actually was. Not warmth,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: not intuition, something else, something that required Charles not to
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: notice the difference. By February of two thousand eighteen, Charles
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: had given York a key to his building's mail room.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The reason seemed practical. Charles worked long days at Darrow
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: County Public Works, and York offered to collect mail on
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: his behalf. By April, York was collecting that mail most
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: days of the week. This is the first image to
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: hold a key. A man with a key to a
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: mail room, arriving before the person whose mail it is
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: reading what comes in, noting what goes out. That spring,
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: the same spring, Raymond was noticing the changed texture of
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Charles's phone calls. Two prescriptions for clonazepam were filled at
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: a walk in clinic called Harperfield Family Medical, nine miles
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: outside Crestline. The prescriptions were issued in Charles's name by
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: a physician named doctor Eric Toll.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Toll had no.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Prior relationship with Charles. He saw the patient twice, he
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: issued the prescriptions twice. Charles had no recollection of visiting
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: that clinic, not once, not twice. The signature on the
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: prescription records did not match Charles's signature on file with
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: his employer, Darrow County Public Works. When investigators later compared
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: the two, the discrepancy was immediate. The forged signature is close,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: but not close enough. The question this opens is not
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: the obvious one. The obvious question is who forged it.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: The deeper question is this Charles was enrolled in an
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: outpatient recovery program. That program administered monthly drug screens through
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Doro County Behavioral Health. The samsapanel used by the county
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: tested for benzodiazepines. Klonazepam is a benzo diazepine. If Charles
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: was being given this drug, it should have appeared on
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: his screens. It never did every month Charles tested clean.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The answer to that question did not emerge until investigators
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: pulled Charles's calendar. The shared digital calendar York had access
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: to end over time, had come to manage almost entirely.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: The test dates were on it, every one of them.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: York knew month by month, and sometimes week by week,
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: exactly when Charles would be screened. The klenazepam was administered
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: in doses small enough and irregular enough to clear his
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: system before each appointment. It was controlled the way a
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: person and controls a thermostat, not enough to produce obvious symptoms,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: just enough to keep the temperature where you need it.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: The effects of low dose, irregular benzodiacepin exposure include antiograde amnesia, nusia,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the impairment of new memory formation, along with elevated compliance
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: and a reduced ability to track changes in relationships and finances.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Charles would not have appeared dramatically impaired. He would have
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: appeared tired, perhaps agreeable, a little slower than usual. His doctor,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: doctor James Vento at Darrow County Family Practice, had flagged
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: elevated liver enzymes at two separate appointments. It was noted
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: it was not yet connected to anything. By June of
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, York had moved into the spare bedroom of
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Charles's Vickers Street apartment. By that same month, Yorke's name
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: had been added to Charles's checking account as a joint
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: account holder. Hold that image to a man who collected
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: the mail, now sleeping in the spare room, now able
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: to withdraw funds. In July of twenty eighteen, a storage
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: unit was rented at Tanner Self Storage on Route nine
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: in Darrow County. The rental was in Charles's name, Charles
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: had no memory of it. Inside the unit, still in
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: its original box, was a hospital bed. The purchase receipt
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: was not in Charles's name. It was not an oversight.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: The name on the receipt was Robert York. York had
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: purchased a hospital bed and stored it in a unit
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: rented under his companion's identity five months before that companion
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: would relocate to the bed house where the bed would
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: eventually appear in the backyard. This is the moment the
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: architecture becomes visible. Every prior gesture, the coffee, the mail
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: room key, the spare bedroom. The joint account had carried
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: the surface plausibility of helpfulness. Companion who was exceptionally present
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: devoted even the storage receipt closes that reading permanently. In
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: October of twenty eighteen, Charles signed a power of attorney
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: in favor of York. Investigators later found no evidence that
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Charles received independent legal counsel before signing the document was notarized.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: The notarization was legitimate, the circumstances surrounding it were not.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Two months later.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: In December of two thousand eighteen, Charles moved out of
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: the Vickers Street apartment. York had arranged new housing a
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: rental property at four thousand, four hundred eight Hessler Mill Road,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: in a rural stretch of Darrow County. The county's own
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: records would later show the property had stood vacant since
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: March of that year. In January of two thousand nineteen,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the hospital bed was moved from the Tanner self storage
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: unit to the back yard of the Hessler Mill house.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: York provided Charles with an explanation. He said the bed
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: was for when Charles's father came to visit. Charles's father
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: had been dead for eleven years. That line lands differently
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: once you understand what the calendar looked like, what the
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: prescriptions had been doing, what the storage receipt proved. York
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: did not make a mistake, he said. A thing that
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Charles in that period, in that condition, could not effectively
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: challenge the dead father was a convenience. Charles's diminished capacity
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: to form and retain new memories meant that the contradiction
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: a bed for a dead man could be stated plainly
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: and still go unremarked. It was not sloppiness, it was
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: confidence in the design. In March of twenty nineteen, the
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Hessler Mill House went vacant in county records. Whatever the
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: arrangement had been, Charles was no longer there, And also
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: in March of twenty nineteen, a home equity loan application
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: was initiated against Charles's property on Vicker Street, the house
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: he owned outright. That loan, if it had closed, would
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: have transferred a substantial sum to an account Yorke controlled.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: It had not yet closed, not quite picture. The morning
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: of August eleventh, two thouy nineteen, David Lawson, a utility lineman,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: climbs a pole on the Route nine corridor to investigate
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: a fault in the local grid. From that height, he
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: can see into the backyard of the property at four thousand,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: four hundred eighty Hessler Mill Road. The yard is dry.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: The grass beneath a rectangular metal frame has yellowed and died.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: The frame is a hospital bed. An extension cord runs
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: from the bed across the yard and into the house
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: through a rear window. The cord is live. That is
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: why the grid faulted. A device in an empty house
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: in an empty yard, drawing power from the grid for
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: no visible purpose. Lawson called the share. When investigators arrived
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: at Hesler Mill Road, they found a house that had
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: been occupied and was not any more. Mail had accumulated,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: the bed remained, the extension cord remained plugged in. The
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: name on the accumulated mail led to Charles Foster. When
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: investigators located Charles, he was not at Hesler Mill Road.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: He was not at the Vicker Street apartment. He was
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: found in a condition that required three weeks of inpatient
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: treatment at Darrow County General Benzodiazepine discontinuation care, which is
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: medically managed because abrupt withdrawal from that class of drug
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: can be dangerous. The home equity loan had not yet closed.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Detective Norman Ferrell, a seventeen year fraud specialist with Darrow County,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: intercepted that loan application before the transaction completed. In the record,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: it reads like a procedural step. In effect, it was
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: the equivalent of catching a man in mid fall. The
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: last asset York had not yet reached. Ferrell's investigation moved
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: quickly once the loan was flagged. The pharmacy records at
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Harperfield Family Medical were polled, the storage unit records were pulled,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the calendar was pulled, the financial account records were polled.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Life insurance paperwork was also recovered. Charles's policy had been
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: modified to name York as the primary beneficiary. Each document
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: described the same architecture, piece by piece, built over nineteen months,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: and then a name came back from a record search
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: that changed the shape of the investigation. Patricia Hume forty one,
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: a paralegal from Dunmore Township, had filed a police report
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen against a man who had called himself
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: a life coach, moved into her home, isolated her from
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: her sister, placed himself on her financial accounts, and obtained
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: prescription angioletics in her name. From two separate walk in clinics.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: The report had been taken and filed, it had not
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: been forwarded. The man she had reported was Robert Yorke
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Ferrell contacted Hume. She drove to Darrow County the following day.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: She brought a binder inside it documentation, clinic receipts, account statements, correspondent.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: She had organized it herself after the police report went nowhere,
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: because some part of her understood that the paper needed
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: to exist, even if no one was ready to read
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: it yet. Yet, consider what the binder means alongside everything else.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: York had not improvised this. He had done it before
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: in a different county under a different label, life coach
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: rather than pure recovery companion, and he had walked away
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: when the report went nowhere. He had then obtained a
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: legitimate peer support certification in Ohio, joined a recognized agency,
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: built a reputation inside that agency. Connie Brear, his supervisor
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: at NIA Steadfast Recovery Partners, had called him the most
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: requested companion on staff, and he had applied the same
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: structure to Charles Foster that he had applied to Patricia Hume.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: The coffee order that was not on the intake form
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: was not intuition. It was method learned, repeated, refined. There
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: is one scenario that presents itself cleanly and collapses almost
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: immediately when you set it against the storage receipt. That
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: scenario is this York began as a genuine companion who
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: gradually became financially opportunistic, a person who took advantage of
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: proximity without prior intent. It feels plausible because it preserves
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: the early warmth, the coffee, the presence. But the hospital
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: bed was purchased and boxed and placed in storage in
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: July of twenty eighteen. Charles did not move to Hessler
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Mill Road until December of two thousand eighteen. York bought
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: that bed five months before the house it would appear
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: in was even selected. The end point of the plan,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the isolated property. The bed in the back yard was
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: part of the design before the design had fully deployed.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: There was no opportunistic drift. There was a sequence. What
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: that sequence was ultimately for whether the bed was intended
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: as a place to confine Charles while the equity loan finalized,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: or whether it served some other function in an end game.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: York never reached York did not say.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: His confession in October covered the charges to which he pleaded.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: The bed's precise purpose was not among them. It remained
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: at the Hessler Mill property, still plugged in, until the
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: county released the scene in late September of two thousand nineteen.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: The extension cord that caused the grid fault, the fault
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: that brought Lawson up the pole, the pole that gave
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Lawson a view of the yard, The yard where the
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: bed sat in dead grass, still drawing power, powering nothing.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Charles Foster spent those three weeks at Darrow County General
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: with Raymond.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: At his side. Raymond drove every day.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: His hip did not improve from the driving.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: He drove anyway.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Charles said later that what stayed with him more than
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the disorientation, more than the gaps in what he could recall,
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: was how reasonable each individual step had seemed at the time.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: A companion who knew how he took his coffee, a
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: key to the mail room so he didn't have to
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: rush home, a spare room that made sense because someone
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: was always there, A signature on a document he was
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: told was routine. Each step, in the moment.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: Of its happening, had the texture of ordinary life.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: That is what had to be built first, the texture
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: of ordinary life. Everything else was installed inside it. Atricia
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Hume had driven to Darrow County the morning after Farrell
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: called her. She sat across from him for four hours.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: She had brought a binder. Inside it were bank statements,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: prescription receipts, photographs of documents, and a handwritten chronology covering
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: eighteen months. She had built it after her twenty sixteen
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: report was filed and forgotten. She had not known whether
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: she would ever use it. She used it now. Ferrell's
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: team cross referenced toom's documentation against Charles's records. The overlap
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: was not coincidental. It was architectural. The same sequencing trust
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: established through attentiveness, access obtained through small practical favors, pharmacological
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: compliance through forged prescriptions at walk in clinics, financial control
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: through joint accounts, and power of attorney. York had run
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: the same structure twice. The second time he had added
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a hospital bed. On August twenty second, two thousand, nineteen,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: officers located Robert Yorke at a motel in Bellhaven, Ohio.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: He came with without resistance in the interview room. He
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: was cooperative in the way investigators noted that skilled manipulators
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: often are. He knew the shape of the evidence. At
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the two hour mark of a two hour, forty minute interview,
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: he requested a recess. When the interview resumed, he confessed.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: In October of twenty nineteen, York entered a guilty plea
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: three counts of theft by deception, two counts of fraud,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: one count of illegal procurement of a controlled substance. The
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: court sentenced him to seven years in the Ohio State
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Correctional system. Patricia Hume's twenty sixteen report had been taken, filed,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: and not forwarded. The department that received it had no
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: fraud specialist on rotation that year. The report sat in
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: a physical file. It did not reach Ferrell's desk. In
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, it did not reach anyone's desk until Hume
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: carried its contents there herself. What that three year gap
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: cost Charles Foster in financial damage and pharmacological harm was
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: documented by Ferrell across multiple financial accounts, a modified life
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: insurance beneficiary designation, two forged prescriptions, and a home equity
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: loan against a house Charles owned outright a loan Ferrell
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: intercepted before it closed. The interception was quiet work. Ferrell
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: identified the loan application during the financial audit and contacted
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the lender directly. The loan had not yet closed.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: He stopped it.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: That was the bureaucratic equivalent of catching a man mid fall.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: No drama, no announcement, just a phone call made in time.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Charles Foster spent three weeks at Darrow County General in
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: August of two thousand nineteen. The treatment was for benzodiazepine discontinuation.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: He survived it. Raymond was there every day. His hip
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: did not improve from the driving. He drove anyway. Charles recovered.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: He went back to Crestline. He still works in civil engineering.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: The people who know him describe some one who is
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: deliberate now in ways he was not before. Deliberate about
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: who holds his attention, who holds his keys, who knows
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: his schedule. York's Peer Recovery Supports certification had been issued
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: by the Ohio Chemical Dependency Professional's Board. That certification had
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: allowed him access to people in structured vulnerability, people who,
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: by the terms of their own recovery programs, were working
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: to rebuild trust in others. The credential was the door.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: The door was left open. What Charles described afterward, that
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: each step had seemed reasonable in the moment of its happening,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: is not a statement about his judgment. It is a
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: statement about the design. The design required that every individual
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: element look like care The coffee ordered in advance, the
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: key to the mail room, the spare room, the signature
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: on the routine document. None of it announced itself as
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: anything other than ordinary. The hospital bed remained at the
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Hessler Mill property until the county released the scene in
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: late September of two thousand nineteen. When investigators documented it
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: for the last time, the extension cord was still plugged in,
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: still drawing current, still powering nothing. It was the cord
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: that faulted the grid, the fault that sent Lawson up
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: the pole, the view from the pole that ended it.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: The first piece of the structure to malfunction was the
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: last piece any one had installed, and it gave itself
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: away by doing exactly what it was built to do.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Charles Foster is fifty five now.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: He has not missed a Saturday breakfast with Raymond since
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: the fall of two thousand nineteen.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: This show is made by Obomedias