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He Moved His Job to Watch Her: Three Years of Quiet Stalking · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Before six forty five. On the morning of April eleventh,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Amanda Patterson was doing what she did every
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: morning along the tree line behind Collier Avenue, watching for birds.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: She was fifty two, retired, unhurried. She had walked this
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: path so many times she knew each route by feel.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Then she stopped.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Wedged inside the hollow of a sycamore, sitting level on
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: two flat stones, was a sealed plastic box the size
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: of a shoe box. Placed with care. Amanda did not
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: touch it. She photographed it first, then called the non
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: emergency line at Harwick PD. That instinct photograph first would
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: matter more than she knew. What was inside that box
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: described three years of a woman's life in handwriting that
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: was not the woman's own. Teresa Carlson had lived at
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: four zero eight Collier Avenue for roughly eleven years since
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the end of her marriage to Brian Carlson. The house
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: was hers in every meaningful sense. She had chosen the curtains,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: worn grooves into the porch steps, learned which floorboards creaked
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: and which were silent. She was fifty three. She worked
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: as a real estate agent in Harwick, a mid size
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: city in central Ohio, and she was good at it,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: the kind of professional who remembered which families wanted a
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: north facing kitchen and which ones needed to be near
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: a school bus route. She was also, by every account
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: from people who knew her, organized, deliberate, someone who paid
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: attention to small things. Arthur Price, her neighbor, was an
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: older man who had stopped wearing a watch years before.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: He told investigators he set his internal clock by the
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: light on Teresa's front porch, which clicked on at six
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: fifteen every morning without variation. Beyond work, Theresa had helped
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: found the Harwick Reader's Circle, a book group that met
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: monthly and had grown over the years into something closer
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: to a standing community. Joanne Whitby had co founded it
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: with her Deborah Ange, had been a regular for nearly
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: a decade. The meetings were the kind Teresa planned weeks
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: in advance, the kind where someone always brought too much
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: food and nobody minded. She was not a person who
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: attracted chaos. She was, in every observable way the opposite.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: That is what made the contents of the sycamore box
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: so difficult to absorb. Inside were forty seven index cards,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: handwritten in compressed ordered script dates, time ranges, notes on movement.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: One entry read lights out kitchen nine forty, bedroom ten fifteen,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: no car. Another recorded which mornings Teresa's car left early
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: and which it did not. There was also a single
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: sheet of graph paper, a floor plan of four zero
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: eight Collier Avenue marked with the initials TC. Someone had
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: been watching Teresa Carlson, not briefly, not casually. The notebook
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: found with the cards, a four x six spiral notebook,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: contained entries stretching back to March of twenty sixteen, three
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: years of observation, organized like a project someone intended to finish.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: The question that Detective Sergeant Lewis Famm of Harwick p
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: D's Criminal Investigations Unit had to answer was not whether
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Teresa had been surveiled. The box made that undeniable. The
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: question was who had done it and why they had
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: left the record behind at all, because someone that methodical
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: does not leave three years of documentation in a tree
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: by accident. Fam laid the forty seven index cards across
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: his desk in the order they were found, and read
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: them from left to right like a calendar.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: The earliest date on any.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Card was March of twenty sixteen. That was three years
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: before the box turned up in the Sycamore, three years
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: before Teresa Carlson knew Vernon Whitfield name. Fham pulled the
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: employment records first. That was routine. What he found on
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: April fourteenth was not. Vernon Whitfield, forty eight, had started
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: at lake Point Realty Associates in Harwick in January of
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. His previous employer was Bridger Property Group
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: out of Columbus, ninety miles southwest. That part was unremarkable.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: What stopped Fham was the transfer history. Whitfield had not
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: been assigned to Harwick by Bridger. He had requested a
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: voluntary reassignment in the spring of two thousand sixteen that
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: allowed him to work out of a satellite office close
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: enough to make the drive. The request pre dated lake
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Point by nearly three years. It also aligned almost exactly
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: with the first entry in the spiral, Noblele. He had
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: not followed his job to Harwick. He had arranged a
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: job to justify being near Harwick. Jean Faulkner, a colleague
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: of Teresa's at the realty office, remembered the blue jeep
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Cherokee when fam asked dark blue. He said he had
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: seen it parked on streets near the office for maybe
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: two years. He assumed it belonged to some one in
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: the neighborhood. He had never mentioned it to Teresa. The
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: vehicle was registered to Vernon Whitfield. The placard in the
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: windshield identified the jeep as belonging to Bridger Property Group,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: but Bridger had no properties on or near Collier Avenue
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: during two thousand seventeen or two thousand eighteen. The placard
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: gave the vehicle a reason to be there, the reason
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: was false. That is two images now sitting side by side,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: a note book begun in March of two thousand sixteen,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: and a placard that made a blue jeep invisible for
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: two years. Neither one is an accident. The third image
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: came from the reader's circle. Deborah Ainge remembered the October
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen meeting clearly because Teresa had been unusually animated.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: She had been talking about Maine coastal towns, the light
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: in autumn, the idea of going some day. It was
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the kind of conversation that fills the space between agenda items.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Relaxed ordinary Ange remembered it because Teresa was not usually
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: given to open daydreaming. Two weeks later, Teresa found an
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: envelope in her mailbox, no return address. Inside was a
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: photograph of the main coastline and a single typed line,
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: you should go someday. Teresa had told people she found
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: it touching, a little mysterious, the way small romantic gestures are.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: She never connected it to the book club meeting.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Why would she.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: The room that night had held a dozen people she
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: had known for years. The notebook entry from that same
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: October read Maine used later he had been in the room,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: he had listened, and he had filed the detailed way
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: someone files a tool they intend to pick up again.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: On April seventeenth, Fham called Ralph Dempsey. Dempsey was a
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: licensed clinical social worker who consulted with the Prosecutor's office
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: on cases involving coercive control. FAM walked him through the
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: contents of the box without editorializing the cards, the floor plan,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the notebook, the transfer request, the placard. Dempsey listened without interrupting.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: When Fam finished, Dempsey said something that changed the frame
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: of the entire investigation. He was not watching her to
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: commit a crime. He was watching her to become inevitable.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: FAM had been building a surveillance case. Dempsey reoriented him.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: The note book was not a record of what Whitfield
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: planned to do. It was a record of what he
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: was manufacturing. Familiarity, proximity, the appearance of coincidence. Every entry
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: was a piece of raw material. The main photograph was
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: not a random romantic overture.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: It was a field test.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: He knew what she wanted to hear because he had
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: been in the room when she said it. He sent
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: it unsigned and waited to see how she received it. Then,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: on April third, twenty nineteen, eight days before Amanda Patterson
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: found the box Vernon, Whitfield introduced himself to Teresa Carlson
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: at a real estate seminar at the Harwick Convention Center.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Three dinners in eight.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Days, a day trip to Hawking Hills, a pace that
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: felt to Teresa like the natural momentum of two people
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: who simply clicked. She did not know that he had
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: known her schedule for three years. She did not know
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: he had a floor plan of her house. She did
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: not know about Maine. When FAM interviewed Teresa on April fourteenth,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: she described Whitfield as warm attentive, the kind of person
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: who remembered small detail. Of course, he remembered small details.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: He had been cataloging them since twenty sixteen. On April
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: twenty third, FAM brought Whitfield in for questioning. An attorney
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: was present for the first hour. Whitfield was cooperative in posture,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: careful in language. He acknowledged knowing Teresa. He said the
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: relationship was new and developing. He said nothing about the notebook.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: What he did not know sitting in that room was
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: that the box had already been processed, That FAM had
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: already matched the handwriting in the notebook to documents Whitfield
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: had signed at Lake Point, that the floor plan had
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: already been compared against county property records for four zero
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: eight Collier Avenue. Everything he denied was already on paper.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where the box
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: in the sycamore is evidence of obsession that never translated
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: into action. A man who watched from a distance, kept records,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and then, at the moment of introduction, stopped, turned the
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: surveillance off, and simply tried to be someone Teresa might choose.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Picture that version.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Whitfield sitting across from Teresa at dinner, asking about her work,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: her reading, her life, and genuinely listening, no longer filing,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: no longer calculating. The notebook closed, the project, abandoned, the
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: introduction his one real attempt at something ordinary. That version
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: is what his attorney gestured toward in the early hours
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: of April twenty third. The argument had a shape unusual behavior, yes,
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: perhaps troubling, but no contact, no threat, no harm. But
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: that version collapses the moment you look at the laptop
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: on April twenty ninth, facing the accumulated weight of the
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: handwriting match and the employment records, and the placard and
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: the notebook, Whitfield told fam where to find it, a
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: storage unit on Route nine. Inside was a laptop on
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the laptop for four folders, each containing a surveillance file.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Teresa Carlson was one subject. The other three were women
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: in Zanesville, Lancaster, and Chillicothe. The woman in Zanesville had
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: worked at a title notary office.
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  Speaker 2: She left the.
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  Speaker 1: City abruptly in twenty fourteen. She carried eleven thousand dollars
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: in credit card debt she did not remember accumulating. The
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: woman in Lancaster was a middle school art teacher who
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: filed a harassment complaint in two thousand fifteen, then withdrewid.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: She told the office she had no proof and was
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: afraid she would not be believed. The woman in Chillicothe
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: changed her phone number and moved to a different neighborhood
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: in two thousand thirteen. None of them knew each other.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: None of them knew the others existed. None of them
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  Speaker 1: knew the name Vernon Whitfield connected them all. The strongest scenario,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: the one the evidence will not allow you to dismiss,
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  Speaker 1: is that Teresa Carlson was not a departure from a pattern.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: She was the.
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  Speaker 1: Continuation of one. The distance he had maintained until April
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: third was not restraint, it was method. The introduction at
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: the convention Center was not an impulsive decision. It was
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: the scheduled next phase of a process that had begun
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: three years earlier, in a spring, when he arranged his
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: own job transfer to be close enough to start watching.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Dempsey's phrase stays with the record. He was watching her
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: to become inevitable. And then there is the fifth folder.
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  Speaker 1: It was on the laptop, sealed name on the tab,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: a name that did not match any database fam searched,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: not the women in the other files, not any one
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: connected to Whitfield's employment history or his known movements. Whether
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: it belonged to a future subject or someone already behind him,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: the record does not say that question has never been answered.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: It remains the one part of the case. The confession
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: did not close. Vernon Whitfield confessed on April twenty ninth,
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: two thy nineteen. The session was recorded. Louis Fad, Kevin Shay,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and Ralph Dempsey were present. Whitfield pleaded guilty to one
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: count of aggravated stocking in Harwick and agreed to cooperate
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: with prosecutors Zanesville and Lancaster. The sentence was a suspended sentence,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: five years of supervised probation, mandatory treatment, a permanent no
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: contact order covering all four women. Kevin Shea spoke to
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: the Harwick Register afterward. He said on the record that
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: the sentence was more lenient than the conduct warranted. The
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: price of that leniency was the cooperation. Without Whitfield's confession,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: The laptop stays in a storage unit on Route nine.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: The women in the other three files remain unaware of
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: each other. The full scope of the pattern stays buried.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: That is the transaction the legal system made. On May second,
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, Teresa Carlson was told about the other
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: four files.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Not one other woman.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Four She had believed for the eight days she knew
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Vernon Whitfield that she was meeting someone new. She learned
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: instead that she was, by the evidence, the fourth iteration
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: of a method that stretched back at least six years.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: The woman in Zanesville left her city suddenly in twenty
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: fourteen and carried debt she had no memory of accumulating.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: The woman in Lancaster withdrew her own harassment complaint because
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: she feared no one would believe her. The woman in
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Chillicothe changed her number and moved without fully understanding why.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Each of them had reorganized her life around a discomfort
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: she could not name because the name was never supposed
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: to be findable. Teresa found out all of this three
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: days after Whitfield confessed. Joe Anne Whitby, the woman Teresa
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: had called the mo moment the investigation began, was the
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: first person Teresa called again that night. The laptop also
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: held a fifth folder, sealed a name on the tab
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: that matched nothing in any database. Fam searched. Not any
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: of the four women, not anyone in Whitfield's documented employment history,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: not anyone connected to his known movements through Columbus or Harwick.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Whether that name represented a future subject or someone already
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: in the past, the record does not confirm the confession,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: did not address it. It remains the one closed door
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: the investigation could not open. The three years of index cards,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: the floor plan with Teresa's initials, the notebook entry that
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: read Maine use later written months before a photograph of
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: the main coastline arrived at her door in an envelope
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: with no return address. Every piece of it pointed toward
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: a man who had been engineering proximity long before he
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: introduced himself. Arthur Price, the neighbor who had set his
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: watch by Teresa's porch life for years, was interviewed by
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: FAM's team. He remembered the dark blue jeep. He had
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: assumed it belonged to someone at the agency. Jean Faulkner,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Teresa's colleague, had seen that same jeep parked near the
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: office on and off for approximately two years. He had
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: not reported it, he told investigators. He had not thought
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: it was his place to say anything. Nobody had thought
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: it was their place. That is not an indictment of anyone.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: It is an accurate description of how this kind of
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: conduct sustains itself. It occupies the space just below the
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: threshold of what people feel authorized to name. Teresa Carlson
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: was fifty three years old when a retired postal worker
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: found a waterproof box in the hollow of a sycamore
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: tree at the edge of her back yard. She had
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: built a life in that neighborhood. She had co founded
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: a reader's group. She had a colleague who noticed when
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: she seemed off. She had a neighbor her who quietly
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: marked time by her porch light. None of that had
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: been enough to make the watching visible. It had been
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: happening in the space between all of it, in the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: hours before six fifteen in the morning, in the margin
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: of a spiral notebook, in the deliberate choice to move
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: ninety miles in manufacture a reason to be present. What
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Ralph Dempsey said in that consultation on April seventeen stays
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: accurate past the case itself. Whitfield was not watching her
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: to commit a crime. He was watching her to become inevitable.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: The goal was not a single act The goal was
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: to be the only logical next step, to have already
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: occupied so much of the perimeter of her life that
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: the introduction, when it finally came, felt like arrival rather
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: than intrusion. That is what the forty seven index cards were.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: Four. That is what Maine Use later was. Four.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: The case is closed in the legal sense. The probation runs,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: the no contact order holds. The co operation produced charges
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: in other jurisdictions, the system moved. What does not close
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: is the question that the fifth folder leaves open. Somewhere
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: in a database Pham.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: Could not match. There is a name.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: The record does not say whether that person was ever found,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: ever warned, ever given the information that would have allowed
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: her to understand what had been happening around her. The
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: confession ended that folder did not Theresa Carlson still lives
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: in Harwood.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: That is what the public record shows.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: She did not leave, She did not change her name.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: The porch light, by all available evidence still comes on.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: There is something in that fact that resists easy interpretation.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: A woman learned that three years of her ordinary life
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: had been documented by a stranger, that her floor plan
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: had been sketched on to graph paper, that her mention
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: of a place she loved had been weaponized into a
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: romantic overture, and she stayed. Maybe that is not a
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: statement about anything. Maybe it is simply what a person
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: does when the alternative is letting the watching define the
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: geography of her own life. But it is worth sitting
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: with the distance he kept was designed to be invisible.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: The distance she holds now is entirely her own. This
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: show is made by Obamedia