Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Posed as Love, Stole $14,200 - The Man Behind Linda Marsh

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He Posed as Love, Stole $14,200 - The Man Behind Linda Marsh · Why Humans Lie

0:03
Speaker 1: On the morning of May ninth, twenty nineteen, Ruth Smith
0:08
Speaker 1: pulled her trot line at first light and found something
0:11
Speaker 1: that had no business being there. Hook number four held
0:14
Speaker 1: a waterproof sleeve, sealed tight and waited with a rusted
0:18
Speaker 1: hex bolt, turning slowly in the current of Catlet Creek.
0:22
Speaker 1: Inside were six pages of bank statements, a photocopy of
0:26
Speaker 1: a Social Security card, and a note printed in careful
0:29
Speaker 1: block letters each. He has been doing this to others.
0:34
Speaker 1: Check the name Todd Sharp. Ruth was sixty one years old.
0:38
Speaker 1: She had fished this stretch every spring for two decades.
0:42
Speaker 1: She knew what belonged in that water and what did not.
0:45
Speaker 1: Someone had placed that sleeve deliberately, someone who could not
0:49
Speaker 1: walk through a door. That question, why the creek? Why not?
0:53
Speaker 1: The Sheriff's office would take investigators two weeks to answer,
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Speaker 1: and when they did, the answer recontextualized everything that had
1:00
Speaker 1: already happened to a fifty four year old retired plumber
1:04
Speaker 1: named Charles Hicks in a town forty minutes north, who
1:08
Speaker 1: had spent nine months believing he was finally loved. Mayvale
1:12
Speaker 1: sits at the edge of Catlet County, the kind of
1:15
Speaker 1: place where the hardware store knows your truck, and the
1:18
Speaker 1: Thursday Bowling League has had the same eight teams for
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Speaker 1: eleven years. Charles Hicks had lived there his whole adult life.
1:26
Speaker 1: He had worked pipe for thirty one years, retired early
1:30
Speaker 1: on a partial disability, and moved into a house on
1:33
Speaker 1: Dunbar Street with a garden in the back yard that
1:36
Speaker 1: he took seriously, tomatoes in the south bed peppers along
1:40
Speaker 1: the fence. He sent photos of the first spring growth
1:43
Speaker 1: to his daughter Kelsey every Wednesday night without fail. She
1:49
Speaker 1: was studying nursing at a university four hours west, and
1:53
Speaker 1: the photos were their standing ritual. Hicks had been widowed
1:56
Speaker 1: for three years when he created a profile on Heartland
1:59
Speaker 1: Connecttions in February of twenty eighteen. His friends knew he
2:04
Speaker 1: was lonely. He did not advertise it, but the Thursday
2:08
Speaker 1: bowling group noticed he had stopped staying for the second pitcher.
2:12
Speaker 1: He was not a man who dramatized his own grief.
2:15
Speaker 1: He was a man who filled the hours with soil
2:18
Speaker 1: and routine and tried not to count them. Six days
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Speaker 1: after his profile went live, a woman named Linda Marsh
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Speaker 1: sent him a message. The early conversations were unhurried. Linda
2:28
Speaker 1: wrote long messages that remembered what he had said the
2:32
Speaker 1: week before. She asked about the tomatoes by name. She
2:36
Speaker 1: noted the brand of real he mentioned in passing and
2:39
Speaker 1: brought it up three messages later. Picks would later tell
2:42
Speaker 1: investigator Earle Bailey that the relationship felt from the beginning
2:47
Speaker 1: less like being pursued and more like being discovered. That
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Speaker 1: word discovered stayed in Bailey's notes. Linda Marsh never appeared
2:56
Speaker 1: on a video call. There was always a technical problem,
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Speaker 1: a froz in screen, a bad connection, a headset that
3:03
Speaker 1: would not cooperate. Hicks accepted each explanation. He had not
3:07
Speaker 1: grown up expecting video calls, and Linda's written voice was
3:11
Speaker 1: detailed enough to feel real. She knew things about him
3:15
Speaker 1: because he had told her things that felt at the
3:18
Speaker 1: time like intimacy. What it actually was, according to the
3:23
Speaker 1: evidence later assembled, was a method. Todd Sharp, thirty eight,
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Speaker 1: lived in a rented room above a tax preparation office
3:32
Speaker 1: on Holland's Pike in Brewster. He worked intermittent handyman jobs
3:37
Speaker 1: and spent significant time at the Brewster Public Library, where
3:41
Speaker 1: he accessed property records and obituary archives. Investigators would later
3:47
Speaker 1: document that he identified potential targets through public records, recently
3:52
Speaker 1: widowed homeowners, men whose names appeared in memorial notices, people
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Speaker 1: whose grief and assets were both a matter of public record.
4:01
Speaker 1: He operated three fictional profiles simultaneously on at least two platforms.
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Speaker 1: Sharpe's messages were not generic. They were long, specific, and calibrated.
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Speaker 1: They remembered, they circled back. They made the recipient feel
4:16
Speaker 1: that someone finally was paying the kind of attention that
4:19
Speaker 1: grief tends to a race. Hicks transferred fourteen thousand, two
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Speaker 1: hundred dollars across nine months. The pattern Sharp used followed
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Speaker 1: a documented escalation, a small early emergency repaid quickly to
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Speaker 1: establish trust, then a larger one, a mother's medical bill,
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Speaker 1: a frozen account, an urgent situation that required a specific
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Speaker 1: amount by a specific time. The requests were never stated plainly.
4:47
Speaker 1: They were embedded in distress. They arrived in late night calls,
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Speaker 1: in messages that framed the money as proof of the
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Speaker 1: relationship's reality. Sharp had positioned skepticism itself as the enemy.
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Speaker 1: The people in the un who have never felt a
5:01
Speaker 1: real connection, Linda told Hicks, will always try to talk
5:05
Speaker 1: you out of one. Charles Hicks believed her. He had
5:08
Speaker 1: no reason not to. And the first sign that something
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Speaker 1: was wrong did not come from Linda's messages at all.
5:16
Speaker 1: It came from a plastic device zip tide to a
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Speaker 1: fence post in his own backyard, a device he had
5:23
Speaker 1: never seen before and had not put there himself. Leon
5:27
Speaker 1: Prue had drove a utility truck for the Electric Cooperative
5:30
Speaker 1: and had seen a thousand fence post installations across Catlet County.
5:35
Speaker 1: He knew what belonged on a line and what did not.
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Speaker 1: In March of twenty nineteen, he was checking meter boxes
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Speaker 1: on Dunbar Street when something on Charles Hicks's back fence
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Speaker 1: stopped him. A small plastic device, zip tied to the
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Speaker 1: post at the yard side, low enough to miss from
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Speaker 1: the street. Not a meter reader, not a utility transponder,
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Speaker 1: something else entirely. Pruett pointed it out to Hicks the
6:00
Speaker 1: next time he saw him. Hicks looked at the device
6:03
Speaker 1: and did not recognize it. He had not put it there.
6:06
Speaker 1: He did not know when it had appeared, but he
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Speaker 1: knew one thing. The fence post sat at the far
6:13
Speaker 1: edge of the property, within range of his home Wi
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Speaker 1: Fi signal. That night, Hicks called Linda Marsh. He described
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Speaker 1: the device, told her what PRUITDT had said, said he
6:24
Speaker 1: was thinking about calling some one about it. Linda listened,
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Speaker 1: then she explained it away, probably a neighbor's signal booster.
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Speaker 1: She said, these things get installed all the time. You
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Speaker 1: don't want to cause a scene over nothing. Hicks accepted
6:39
Speaker 1: that he left the device where it was. That was
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Speaker 1: the first time Sharp used the relationship he had built
6:46
Speaker 1: to neutralize the one thing that could expose him, not
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Speaker 1: through force, through trust. The device was a boost Link
6:54
Speaker 1: wireless repeater modeled designation later entered into evidence as Exhibit seven.
7:00
Speaker 1: Its serial number was partially legible. It had been purchased
7:04
Speaker 1: with a prepaid debit card at an electronics retailer whose
7:07
Speaker 1: parking lot camera captured a gray Dodge pick up truck
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Speaker 1: on the relevant date in January of two thousand nineteen.
7:14
Speaker 1: The purchase time stamp placed the transaction on a Thursday afternoon,
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Speaker 1: a Thursday, specifically, when Charles Hicks was not home. He
7:23
Speaker 1: was at his weekly bowling league. He had told Linda
7:27
Speaker 1: about the bowling league during the early weeks of their
7:30
Speaker 1: correspondence the small domestic detail of his Thursday evenings, the friends,
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Speaker 1: the routine, the way it got him out of the house.
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Speaker 1: Sharp had listened, he had cataloged, and when he needed
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Speaker 1: Hicks a yard to be empty, he already knew exactly
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Speaker 1: when that would be. Hicks had not given Sharp a key,
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Speaker 1: He had given him something more useful, a schedule. The
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Speaker 1: second anomaly arrived without a warning. On a Tuesday morning
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Speaker 1: in late April of two thousand nineteen. A representative at
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Speaker 1: Catlet Valley Savings named Donna Ferris flag and access notification
8:05
Speaker 1: sent to Hicks's account the previous night to fourteen in
8:09
Speaker 1: the morning two fourteen in the morning from a device
8:13
Speaker 1: not registered to the account. The session had lasted eleven minutes.
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Speaker 1: It had accessed Balan's summaries and transfer history. Hicks had
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Speaker 1: given Linda his e mail address several weeks earlier. She
8:26
Speaker 1: had asked for it warmly, saying she wanted to send
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Speaker 1: him something, a longer letter, something she could not quite
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Speaker 1: fit into the app's message field. He had given her
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Speaker 1: the address without hesitation. The access attempt had come the
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Speaker 1: night after that conversation. Hicks used the same password variation
8:44
Speaker 1: for his e mail account that he used for his bank.
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Speaker 1: It was a common habit, the kind of thing most
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Speaker 1: people do and never think about until something goes wrong.
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Speaker 1: Ferris called Hicks changed his password. He did not file
8:58
Speaker 1: a report. He sat in the bank parking lot for
9:02
Speaker 1: a long time before he drove home. The bowling Alley
9:05
Speaker 1: connection moved slowly, the way these things do in small counties.
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Speaker 1: Dennis Albright bowled in the same Thursday league as Hicks.
9:14
Speaker 1: He heard about the fence post device, mentioned it to
9:17
Speaker 1: his brother in law, who worked in it for the county.
9:21
Speaker 1: The brother in law mentioned it to some one in
9:23
Speaker 1: the sheriff's department. By the first week of May two
9:26
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, that thread had reached investigator Earl Bailey. Bailey
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Speaker 1: drove to Dunbar Street on a Tuesday. He spent three
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Speaker 1: hours at hicks kitchen table with a yellow legal pad.
9:39
Speaker 1: He looked at the device on the fence post. He
9:41
Speaker 1: looked at the banking notification Hicks it saved. He looked
9:45
Speaker 1: at the dates, the bowling schedule, the e mail, the
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Speaker 1: two fourteen a M access the device installed On a Thursday.
9:54
Speaker 1: Bailey wrote four things in a column and drew a
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Speaker 1: line connecting them then he subpoened the boost link purchase records.
10:01
Speaker 1: The camera image from the parking lot was not dramatic.
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Speaker 1: It showed a gray Dodge pickup, angled partial plate, visible
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Speaker 1: timestamp matching the Thursday of the device purchase. It was
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Speaker 1: the kind of image that takes patients to use. Cross
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Speaker 1: referenced against DMV records narrowed by a county matched to
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Speaker 1: a registered owner. The registered owner was Todd Sharp of
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Speaker 1: Holland's Pike Brewster. Bailey ran the name no prior criminal
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Speaker 1: record in the state, an intermittent handyman, a rented room
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Speaker 1: above a tax office, nothing that would make him visible.
10:38
Speaker 1: Then Bailey found something else. A civil complaint filed in
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Speaker 1: another jurisdiction two years earlier, a woman named Betty Alcorn
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Speaker 1: that filed against a man she described as operating under
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Speaker 1: a false identity on a dating platform. The complaint alleged
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Speaker 1: financial fraud, emotional manipulation, and unauthorized access to personal information.
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Speaker 1: The complaint had been dismissed, the case had gone nowhere.
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Speaker 1: The name on the complaint was Todd Sharp. Bailey called
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Speaker 1: Marcus Webb, a detective in Alcorn's county. Webb had a
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Speaker 1: separate report on his desk, a man named Phil Nevatny
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Speaker 1: from Garfield Township, who had filed an informal complaint about
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Speaker 1: a woman named Susan he had met on a dating site.
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Speaker 1: Nodney had sent nine thousand dollars over several months before
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Speaker 1: growing suspicious, he had filed the complaint and then gone quiet.
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Speaker 1: Too embarrassed, Webb said to push it further. Three victims,
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Speaker 1: three profiles, one name Sharp had been doing this before Hicks.
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Speaker 1: He had been doing it while Hicks was sending money,
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Speaker 1: and after the civil complaint was dismissed and no one
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Speaker 1: came looking, he had simply continued. This is the part
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Speaker 1: of the case that resists easy framing. The record shows
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Speaker 1: a man who understood with genuine precision what grief costs people.
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Speaker 1: He did not guess at vulnerability. He researched it. He
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Speaker 1: sat in a public library and read obituaries and property
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Speaker 1: filings until he had a list. Then he became whatever
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Speaker 1: that person needed, not a con artist selling a story,
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Speaker 1: something closer to a mirror, reflecting the shape of a
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Speaker 1: connection that the target had already lost. Hicks described it
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Speaker 1: to Bailey as being discovered, not courted. The word matters
12:26
Speaker 1: courtship implies effort from outside discovery implies the thing was
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Speaker 1: already there, waiting, and Linda had simply seen it. Sharp
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Speaker 1: had engineered that feeling deliberately, the long messages that remembered details,
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Speaker 1: the specific callbacks, the late night calls that arrived exactly
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Speaker 1: when Loneliness peaques. He had built something that felt like
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Speaker 1: recognition because he had studied his subjects well enough to
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Speaker 1: construct it from their own material. When Hicks called Linda
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Speaker 1: about the fence post device, Sharp did not panic. He
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Speaker 1: leaned on the structure he had all ready built. The
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Speaker 1: trust was load bearing, and Hicks, who had told Linda
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Speaker 1: things he had not told his daughter Kelsey, four hours
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Speaker 1: west at nursing school, carried that trust all the way
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Speaker 1: to a parking lot in April, where he sat and
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Speaker 1: looked at his phone and chose not to make a call.
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Speaker 1: Pictured the arrest scene plainly May twenty third, two thousand, nineteen,
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Speaker 1: Bailey and two deputies at the rented room on Holland's Pike.
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Speaker 1: Sharp came to the door. Calmly. He was cooperative, measured pleasant,
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Speaker 1: in the way that people are when they have rehearsed
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Speaker 1: for a moment. They believed might never come. At the
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Speaker 1: County building, Bailey laid three items on the table. The
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Speaker 1: partial serial number from the boost link unit, the parking
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Speaker 1: lot image with the gray dodge visible. The phone records
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Speaker 1: showing calls from a prepaid number to Hicks's landline, calls
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Speaker 1: placed at hours matching the pattern of Linda's contacts from
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Speaker 1: a device registered to no one. Sharp asked for an attorney.
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Speaker 1: That was his right. Forty minutes later, after consulting with counsel,
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Speaker 1: he made a different decision. He confessed, not partially completely.
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Speaker 1: He named three victims. He described the method in enough
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Speaker 1: detail that Bailey's notes from that session became a significant
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Speaker 1: portion of the investigative record. Sharp explained the library research.
14:25
Speaker 1: He explained the profile construction. He explained the escalation pattern.
14:30
Speaker 1: He explained the fence post installation. He had used Hicks's
14:34
Speaker 1: Thursday bowling schedule, a detail shared in warmth in the
14:38
Speaker 1: early weeks of something that felt like a relationship, to
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Speaker 1: enter an empty yard and install a signal repeater that
14:45
Speaker 1: gave him access to Hicks's financial accounts. The intimacy had
14:49
Speaker 1: been the logistics. Now consider what the evidence assembled actually showed,
14:55
Speaker 1: because the sequence is not what it first appears. The
14:58
Speaker 1: early assumption when the f fence post device surfaced was
15:02
Speaker 1: that someone had targeted Hicks opportunistically, a signal thief, a neighbor,
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Speaker 1: someone looking for free internet access who had stumbled onto
15:11
Speaker 1: something more useful. Bailey's first inquiry pointed in that direction,
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Speaker 1: a local crime, a technical violation, probably someone close by,
15:21
Speaker 1: but the parking lot image collapsed that reading immediately. The
15:25
Speaker 1: truck was registered in Brewster, fourteen miles away. Sharp had
15:30
Speaker 1: no known connection to Dunbar Street. He had not stumbled
15:33
Speaker 1: onto Hicks. He had selected him. The property records and
15:37
Speaker 1: the obituary files at the Brewster library told the rest.
15:42
Speaker 1: Sharp had built a target list from public grief. He
15:45
Speaker 1: had chosen people whose losses were documented and whose assets
15:49
Speaker 1: were a matter of county record. Hicks appeared in a
15:52
Speaker 1: memorial notice for his wife and in a property filing
15:56
Speaker 1: showing a paid off home. He was, on paper exactly
16:00
Speaker 1: what Sharp was looking for, a man with money alone
16:04
Speaker 1: and recently broken open. The romantic operation came second, the
16:09
Speaker 1: financial access came third, but the research came first, before
16:14
Speaker 1: the profile, before the first message, before Linda Marsh existed
16:19
Speaker 1: at all. The relationship was not the con the relationship
16:23
Speaker 1: was the method of delivery. Sharp had understood something that
16:27
Speaker 1: most fraud investigators note only in retrospect. The hardest lock
16:31
Speaker 1: to pick is not a bank account. It is the
16:33
Speaker 1: threshold between a person's grief and their judgment. Build something
16:38
Speaker 1: on the grief side of that threshold, and the judgment
16:41
Speaker 1: never gets a clear look. Hicks had not been careless.
16:45
Speaker 1: He had been human, and Sharp had prepared for exactly that.
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Speaker 1: On May twenty third, twenty nineteen, investigators arrested Todd Sharp
16:55
Speaker 1: at a rented room above a tax office on Holland's
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Speaker 1: Pike in Brewster, the room whom contained a prepaid tablet
17:01
Speaker 1: in a box under the bed. It contained burner phones.
17:05
Speaker 1: It contained notes written in the same block lettering that
17:09
Speaker 1: appeared on the sleeve pulled from Catlet Creek two weeks earlier.
17:14
Speaker 1: Sharp sat straight and said little. He asked for an attorney.
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Speaker 1: Forty minutes later he began talking. He named three victims.
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Speaker 1: He described the method in sequence, beginning with the library
17:26
Speaker 1: research and ending with the fence post device. He explained
17:30
Speaker 1: the email trick. He explained the Thursday bowling schedule. He
17:34
Speaker 1: explained why he had never agreed to a video call
17:37
Speaker 1: a technical problem, always a technical problem. When investigators laid
17:42
Speaker 1: the boost link serial number, the parking lot image, and
17:45
Speaker 1: the phone records on the table in front of him,
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Speaker 1: the calm posture he had maintained since the arrest did
17:51
Speaker 1: not change. He simply stopped waiting and started confessing. By
17:56
Speaker 1: September of twenty nineteen, a federal judge had sentenced Sharp
18:00
Speaker 1: to six years in custody on two counts of wire
18:03
Speaker 1: fraud and one count of unauthorized computer access. Restitution was ordered.
18:10
Speaker 1: Charles Hicks eventually recovered approximately sixty percent of the fourteen thousand,
18:14
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars he had transferred to a woman who
18:18
Speaker 1: never existed. Phil Navatni, the widower from Garfield Township who
18:22
Speaker 1: had sent nine thousand dollars to a profile called Susan,
18:27
Speaker 1: did not appear at sentencing. He had been too ashamed
18:30
Speaker 1: to pursue his complaint independently. He was identified from Sharpe's tablet,
18:35
Speaker 1: and his loss was included in the record. He did
18:38
Speaker 1: not speak publicly. Walter Ames, the retired school teacher from Crestwood,
18:43
Speaker 1: had sent roughly two thousand dollars across three months before
18:47
Speaker 1: the arrest ended the operation. He was also identified from
18:50
Speaker 1: the tablet. He was also in the record, three men,
18:54
Speaker 1: three fictional women, one person, operating all of it from
18:58
Speaker 1: a rented room fourteen miles from the nearest victim. The
19:02
Speaker 1: sleeve in the creek paid off last handwriting analysis traced
19:06
Speaker 1: it to Betty Alcorn, a woman from another state who
19:09
Speaker 1: had filed a civil complaint against Todd Sharp two years
19:12
Speaker 1: before his arrest. That complaint had been dismissed. Sharp had
19:17
Speaker 1: faced no criminal consequence. Alcorn had walked away from the
19:20
Speaker 1: system with nothing, no vindication, no protection, no reason to
19:25
Speaker 1: believe that walking through another official door would produce a
19:28
Speaker 1: different result. So she had not walked through a door.
19:32
Speaker 1: She had driven to Catlet Creek. She had sealed her
19:35
Speaker 1: own bank statements and a photocopy of her Social Security
19:39
Speaker 1: card into a waterproof sleeve with a rusted hex bolt
19:43
Speaker 1: for weight. She had waited out and hung it on
19:45
Speaker 1: a trot line hook forty yards from the bank. She
19:49
Speaker 1: had written his name in block letters and left it
19:52
Speaker 1: there for someone, anyone to find. She said later that
19:56
Speaker 1: she included her own documents because she needed whoever found
19:59
Speaker 1: it to know she was real. That sentence carries the
20:03
Speaker 1: full weight of what Sharp had actually done, not just
20:07
Speaker 1: the theft, the erasure. He had taken money from these people,
20:10
Speaker 1: and then the system had taken their credibility. Alcorn had
20:14
Speaker 1: reached the point where her own financial documents, her own
20:17
Speaker 1: proof of existence, were the only argument she had left,
20:20
Speaker 1: and she had to hang them in a creek to
20:22
Speaker 1: make them count. Ruth Smith found them on the ninth
20:25
Speaker 1: of May two thousand nineteen. She brought them to Earl Bailey.
20:31
Speaker 1: Bailey found Sharp. The system that had failed Alcorn two
20:35
Speaker 1: years earlier worked finally because she had refused to stop.
20:39
Speaker 1: After investigators removed the boost link device from the fence
20:43
Speaker 1: post in Charles Hicks's yard, the post stood empty for
20:46
Speaker 1: a while. Hicks mentioned at some point that he was
20:50
Speaker 1: thinking of putting up a bird feeder. There is something
20:54
Speaker 1: in that detail that resists being explained away. The instrument
20:58
Speaker 1: Sharp had used to surveil Hicks's home to slip through
21:02
Speaker 1: the boundary between the digital and the physical had been replaced,
21:06
Speaker 1: in Hicks's mind, at least, with something that invites rather
21:10
Speaker 1: than extracts, something that waits for visitors instead of stealing
21:14
Speaker 1: from them. Sharp dismantled Charles Hicks's sense of what was real.
21:19
Speaker 1: He did it deliberately, systematically, and over nine months. He
21:24
Speaker 1: used Hicks's loneliness as a blueprint and Hicks's trust as
21:28
Speaker 1: a tool. When the investigation closed, the blueprint no longer
21:33
Speaker 1: belonged to Sharp Hicks had rebuilt on top of it.
21:36
Speaker 1: The bird feeder was going where the device had been.
21:39
Speaker 1: That is where the case ends. This show is made
21:43
Speaker 1: by Obomedia