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The Passport on the Ledge: How She Outsmarted Her Trafficker · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The US passport was sitting on the outside ledge of
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: a second floor window in East Dunmore, Ohio, opened to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: the photo page, waited by a single house key. The
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: window behind it was locked from the inside. Nobody answered
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: the door to Unit four. Howard Young had seen a
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: lot of strange things on his meter reading route he
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: worked every third Tuesday, moving building to building through Briarfield Terrace.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: But on a Tuesday morning in June of two thousand eleven,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: he stopped in the parking lot and looked up. The
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: passport was just sitting there, eleven feet off the ground,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: no ladder near by, no maintenance crew, no work ticket
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: on file. He filed an incident report before noon. Patrol
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: officer Ranata Villanueva responded to the non emergency call. Within
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: the hour, the passport was still there. She photographed it
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: in place, then retrieved it carefully. The name inside belonged
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: to a woman. The building superintendent said the unit was
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: subleased to some one named David Simmons. Nobody answered when
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Villanueva knocked. That detail would sit in a folder for
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: nearly two years before anyone understood what it meant. There
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: is something about the geometry of that moment that resists
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: easy explanation. A passport does not place itself on a
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: window ledge. Somebody chose that spot at that height facing outward.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Somebody wanted it found, and then went back inside and
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: locked the window. What follows is the story of how
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: one woman dismantled her own captivity piece by piece, and
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: how another man had spent nearly a decade building it.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Before any of this happened, Vicki Christensen was some one
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: people depended on. She had been a licensed practical nurse
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: for fifteen years in Sebu Province in the Philippines. Fifteen
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: years of night shifts and medication rounds, of memorizing dosages
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: and managing frightened painations with steady hands. Her colleagues trusted
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: her judgment. Her patients knew her by name. She had
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: built that career while raising her daughter Marisol alone. After
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: her husband died when Vicki was thirty nine, She did
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: not ask for help, visa that was simply not who
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: she was. By the time Marsol married and relocated to Canada,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Vicki was forty seven, the apartment in Cibou felt quieter
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: than it had in years. She had savings, skills, and
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: a profession. She also had an offer on the table.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Larry Simmons was fifty eight years old. He owned three
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: residential cleaning franchise locations across eastern Ohio. He attended a
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Lutheran church intermittently. He was described by his pastor, Reverend
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Dwight okefor as patient, generous, and devoted. He had approached
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Vicki through a sponsorship arrangement. A sponsored immigrant visa with
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Simmons listed as her employer and guaranteur, would provide work, housing,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: legal status, a path forward in the United States for
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: a widow in her late forties with a daughter already
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: living in North America. The offer had logic, It had warmth.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: It had a man who called often, who listened, who
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: seemed to understand what the last several years had cost her.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Craig Andrews, a licensed clinical social worker with Cuyahoga County
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Immigrant Services, would later testify for forty minutes at trial
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: about what came next. He called the first phase love bombing,
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: constant attention, reassurance layered on reassurance, the sense that someone
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: finally saw her fully after years of managing everything alone.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: That phase lasted approximately six weeks. Within two months of
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Vicky's arrival in the United States, her passport was gone.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Larry told her he was keeping it safe in a
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: locked desk drawer at his Clement Drive house. Her wages
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: from the cleaning franchise when into a joint account. The
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: debit card for that account was tied to Larry's phone.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Vicki had no personal cell phone of her own. The
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: address on her visa paperwork listed Clement Drive, Larry's residence,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: twelve miles from Briarfield Terrace, as her official domicile. The
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: literacy program at Saint Agatha Community Center had been part
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: of Vicky's week before the controls fully tightened every Wednesday
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: evening six to eight thirty on Orchard Mill Drive. She
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: had enrolled early while there was still some distance between
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the life she had planned and the one being constructed
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: around her. That Wednesday window would later become significant in
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: ways nobody anticipated. Yet, within one year of her arrival,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: her calls with Marisol had mostly stopped. Distance through cost,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: and the steady pressure of Larry's presence made them harder
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: to sustain. When they did speak, Vicki kept things brief.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: She had learned by then what happened when she said
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: the wrong thing. Andrews described the framework in four stages
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: at trial, love bombing came first, then document control, then
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: financial isolation, then something he called destruction of perceptual confidence,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: a process by which a person is made to feel
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: that their own memory and judgment cannot be trusted. Larry
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: told Vickie she misremembered things he told others. She was paranoid.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Reverend O Coffer recalled hearing the word twice in passing
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: as though it were simply a fact about her character.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The woman who had managed medication schedules for a ward
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: of patience, who had raised a daughter without support, who
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: had built a fifteen year career on precise and reliable judgment.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: That woman was being told systematically that her mind was unreliable.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Andrews had a clinical term for where that process leads
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: learned helplessness, the point at which a person stops testing
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: the boundaries because experience has taught them the boundaries always hold.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: But Vicki Christiansen had placed a passport on a window ledge,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: and that meant something in her had not stopped. The
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: passport had been on that ledge for two years before
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: anyone understood what it meant. Howard Young found it in
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: June of twenty eleven on his every third Tuesday meter
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: route through East Dunmore. He filed his incident report by noon.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Officer Renata Villanova responded, noting the passport still sitting open
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: to the photo page, waited by a single house key
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: eleven feet off the ground on the outside ledge of
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Unit four, window locked from inside, no ladder, no maintenance ticket,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: no work crew anywhere near the building. Villaneuva knocked on
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: the door to Unit four. Nobody answered. The case sat.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: It sat for nearly two years because there was no
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: obvious crime, only an object that should not have been
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: where it was, belonging to a woman nobody could locate
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: inside a building that had no record of her living there.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: The building Superintendent Denis Craft knew the unit had been
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: subleased to a man who called himself David Simmons. Cash payments,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: no lease in writing. When investigators later showed Craft a photograph,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: he identified the men immediately. The name on the photo
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: was Larry Simmons. Larry had used his own surname and
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: a different first name. That detail would resurface at trial.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: His attorney would call it an oversight. The jury called
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: it something else. The formal address for Vickie Christiansen, the
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: address on her sponsored immigrant visa was Clement Drive, twelve
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: miles away. That was where Larry lived. Rierfield Terrace was
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: not her address of record. It was something else, entirely
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: a location she knew about, watched, and eventually used. The
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Wednesday window opened the investigation in a way nobody had planned.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Beth Ingram was a retired county clerk who volunteered Tuesday
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: and Wednesday evenings at the Saint Agatha Community Center adult
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: literacy program on Orchard Mill Drive. In April of two
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, she noticed a bruise on Vicki Christiansen's forearm.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: She did not ask about it directly. She watched over
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the following weeks. She contacted Cuyahoga County Immigrant Services and
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: left a referral with Craig Andrews. Andrews was a licensed
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: clinical social worker. He had handled referrals like this before,
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: but something in the Ingram note stopped him. The detail
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: about the literacy program Vicki had enrolled before the controls
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: around her had fully tightened. The program was a remnant
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: of the life she had almost had, and somehow she
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: had kept it. Every Wednesday evening six to eight thirty
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: she was still there. Andrews reached Vicki through the program.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: He did not call her at home, there was no
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: home phone she controlled. He met her at Saint Agatha
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: in the building where she had been learning English for years,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: and he began mapping what she told him against everything else.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Here is the thing about the Wednesday footage. Investigators had
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: been looking at a gray Dodge Ram registered to Larry
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Simmons's cleaning franchise. The truck appeared on Briarfield Terrace parking
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: lot cameras on Wednesday evenings, specifically on the evenings Vicki
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: was at the literacy program. The pattern was consistent. Larry
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: was at the apartment on Wednesday nights. Vicki was not
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the apartment that had no record of her. Ira Bowen,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: the Dunmore detective assigned to the case, obtained a warrant.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: He entered unit four and found a filing cabinet in
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: the second bedroom. Inside it were documents belonging to four
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: other women. Two had expired visas, one one had a
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: green card in process. One file had no immigration status.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Listed at all. Three addresses were in Ohio counties, one
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: was in Pennsylvania. The name attached to the Pennsylvania file
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: was Priscilla odem Bowen later described the cabinet as a
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: control system. Each file contained enough documentation to make its
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: subject legally dependent on Larry Simmons continuing to cooperate with
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: her immigration status, and not one document in any of
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: those files had ever been returned to the woman it
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: belonged to. Everything the investigation had built pointed toward a
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: simple and terrible picture a man who had constructed a system,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: refined it over years, and used it on multiple women simultaneously.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: According to court documents, the trail of po boxes and
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: cash sublease arrangements attributed to Larry Simmons stretched back to
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: two thousand and four. That was six years before Vicky
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: cu Christianson arrived in the United States. The filing cabinet
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: in Unit four was not a coincidence or an improvisation.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: It was an archive picture the second bedroom of that
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: apartment on a Wednesday evening, Larry's truck in the parking
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: lot below. Four folders arranged in a cabinet, each one
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: a woman who had come to this country, with credentials,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: with competence, with a life already built, and each one
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: now dependent on a man who had made himself the
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: single point of contact between her legal status and the
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: government that controlled it. That was what the passport on
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: the ledge recontextualized. It was not a cry for help
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: in the conventional sense. Vicki had not thrown the passport
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: into the street. She had not left a note. She
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: had placed it precisely, deliberately on an eleven foot ledge
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: opened to her photograph, waited so it would not blow
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: away in a location she knew a city employee visited
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: every third Tuesday. She knew the route. She had been
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: watching the building for long enough to know it. The
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: head fake in the investigation had been the assumption that
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: the passport was evidence of someone else's crime against an
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: absent woman. But phone records, parking footage, and Andrew's testimony
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: established something that initially seemed impossible. Vicki had placed it
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: there herself, from inside the apartment through a window she
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: then locked behind her. She had not been inside that
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: apartment as a victim. She had been inside it as
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: someone conducting reconnaissance on her own situation. The window had
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: been locked from the inside because she had locked it.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: She had gone in, placed the object, and left during
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: one of the Wednesday evenings, when Larry's truck should have
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: been somewhere else entirely, but was already in the lot.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Andrew's testified for forty minutes. He described the four stages
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: of the manipulation framework, but the detail that landed hardest
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: in the court room was this, Vicki had understood at
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: some level that the learned helplessness had not fully reached
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: that the passport was her only leverage. She could not
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: call the police herself, she had no fond and she
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: had been told her own perceptions were unreliable. She could
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: not go to a consulate, Her movements were tracked, She
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: could not contact Marisol with anything specific, the calls were monitored.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: But she could place an object where the world would
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: eventually find it, and she could trust that a fifteen
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: year career built on precise and reliable judgment had not
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: been completely erased. She was right. Larry Simmons was arrested
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: in August two thousand thirteen. The charges were document servitude,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: wire fraud, and two counts of labor trafficking, one count
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: for Vicki Christiansen one for Priscilla Odom, a Pennsylvania woman
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: whose situation, according to investigators, was more severe. He went
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: to trial in the spring of twenty fourteen. The jury
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: deliberated for less than one day. They returned guilty verdicts
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: on all counts, every single one. His attorney had argued
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: throughout the proceedings that the arrangement was consensual and mutually beneficial.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: The jury rejected that argument completely. What the evidence had
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: shown instead was a system a sponsored immigrant visa used
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: as a leash, a locked desk drawer, a joint bank
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: account with a debit card on his phone, and a
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: gray truck circling on Wednesday evenings to monitor a woman
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: who had been told her own memory could not be trusted.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: The filing cabinet found in Unit four's second bedroom held
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: documents for four other women, three Ohio addresses, one Pennsylvania.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Two of the visas were expired, one green card was
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: in process. The fourth woman's status was never publicly confirmed.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Investigators found pattern evidence in three additional Ohio counties, PA
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: z oh boxes cash sublease arrangements, a trail of aliases
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: stretching back to two thousand four. Larry had been doing
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: this for nearly a decade before Howard Young found a
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: passport on a window ledge. An appeal to the Sixth
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Circuit failed in the fall of twenty eighteen, years after
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the conviction. After the appeals had run out, Larry gave
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: a confession not to law enforcement, to a journalist on
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: his own terms. At a time of his choosing. He
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: admitted that he had used visa sponsorship as a mechanism
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: of coercion with at least three women before Vicki. He
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: framed it in that interview as something other than what
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: the jury had already determined it to be, but the
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: admission was there. In his own words, the sponsorship had
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: been the instrument, the generosity had been the trap. Craig Andrews,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the licensed clinical social worker who had mapped the manipulation
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: framework and testified for forty minutes at rich trial, received
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: a Christmas card from Vicki the following December. It was
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: written in English. There is a word Craig Andrews used
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: in his testimony, dismantled, not broken, not deceived. Dismantled the
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: way you take a part a structure, piece by piece carefully,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: so that the person inside cannot identify the moment it
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: stopped standing. Vicki Christiansen had been a licensed practical nurse
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: for fifteen years. She had raised a daughter alone after
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: her husband died. She had a dry humor and precise
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: clinical instincts that her colleagues in CIBU had relied on.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: None of that disappeared when she arrived in the United
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: States at forty seven years old. It was systematically separated
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: from her, her documents, her wages, her phone, her ability
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: to contact Marisol, finally, her confidence in her own perceptions.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: What the case demonstrates and what makes it matter beyond
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the conviction, is that dismantling does not require confinement. Larry
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Simmons never locked Vicki in a room. He did not
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: need to. He had already locked the world out. She
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: could move through it, attend a literacy class on Wednesday evenings,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: stand at a bus stop, exist in public, and still
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: have no ground under her. Every mechanism of connection, documentation,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: and financial independence had been removed. The isolation was structural,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: not physical. The women in that filing cabinet, the ones
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: whose names never appeared in court, whose visas were expired
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: or in process, whose addresses were in counties investigators were
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: still mapping are the reason this case does not end
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: with a verdict. What Larry confessed to in twenty eighteen
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: on his own terms is that Vicky was not an
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: isolated incident. She was, by his own accounting, at least
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: the fourth Vicki was granted a t VISA federal trafficking
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: survivor status. Within six months of the arrest, she relocated
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: to Ontario, Canada, to be near Marissoon. The Christmas card
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Andrew's received was not just a gesture. It was evidence
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: of something the manipulation had tried hardest to destroy, her
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: capacity to reach toward people in her own words, in
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: a language she had been working to master. On Wednesday evenings,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: while a gray truck waited in the parking lot, she
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: had trusted that a fifteen year career of precise and
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: reliable judgment had not been completely erased. She had been
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: right about that, and she had been right to place
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: the passport on the ledge, open to her photograph, waited
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: by a single key, where the world would eventually find it.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: It did. This show is made by Obomedia