Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Stole Her Life Quietly: The Foster Dad Who Lived Two Lives

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He Stole Her Life Quietly: The Foster Dad Who Lived Two Lives · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: The folder was half buried in frozen leaves on creekside
0:07
Speaker 1: access trail in The first thing visible through the mud
0:10
Speaker 1: was a child's school photograph, a girl maybe seven, grinning
0:15
Speaker 1: at the camera.
0:16
Speaker 2: It was nine.
0:17
Speaker 1: Fourteen in the morning on February twelfth, two thousand nineteen.
0:24
Speaker 1: The folder should not have been there, and the moment
0:26
Speaker 1: of financial crimes investigator named Clifford Fisher opened it. He
0:30
Speaker 1: understood that what looked like an abandoned binder was actually
0:34
Speaker 1: the paper skeleton of a system designed to what consume
0:37
Speaker 1: people from the inside out. This is not a story
0:41
Speaker 1: about a violent crime. There are no bodies, no weapons,
0:45
Speaker 1: no dramatic chase through darkened streets. What happened in Sycamore County, Ohio,
0:50
Speaker 1: over the course of roughly two years is something quieter
0:54
Speaker 1: and in some ways more difficult to name. One man
0:59
Speaker 1: the thought glee dismantled another person's understanding of her own life,
1:04
Speaker 1: her finances, her judgment, her sense of what was real,
1:08
Speaker 1: while simultaneously exploiting children and his care and cycling through
1:12
Speaker 1: at least three Ohio counties with the same playbook. The
1:16
Speaker 1: folder on the trail was the first crack in a
1:18
Speaker 1: structure that had been years in the making. Before the folder,
1:22
Speaker 1: there was a woman with a steady life and no
1:25
Speaker 1: reason to suspect any of it was about to disappear.
1:28
Speaker 1: Tammy Powell had worked the night shift at Caldwell Regional
1:31
Speaker 1: Medical Center for nineteen years. She was fifty two, a
1:36
Speaker 1: licensed practical nurse, and her hours ran from eleven at
1:39
Speaker 1: night to seven thirty in the morning. She was the
1:42
Speaker 1: kind of person whose life had a reliable shape to it.
1:46
Speaker 1: Same hospital, same parking garage, same weekly phone call to
1:51
Speaker 1: her sister, Patrese in Zanesville every Wednesday at six fifteen
1:55
Speaker 1: in the morning, made from the front seat.
1:58
Speaker 2: Of her car before the drive home.
2:00
Speaker 1: She owned her house on Clement Avenue. The mortgage had
2:04
Speaker 1: been paid off in October of two thousand fifty. Her
2:07
Speaker 1: credit score sat in the low seven hundreds.
2:10
Speaker 2: She had never been married.
2:12
Speaker 1: She lived alone, and by every available measure, she had
2:16
Speaker 1: built something durable. There is something worth sitting with in
2:19
Speaker 1: that picture. Nineteen years at the same hospital, a paid
2:23
Speaker 1: off house, a sister she called every week without fail.
2:27
Speaker 1: Tammy Powell is not a person without anchors. She was,
2:31
Speaker 1: by any practical definition stable. That stability is exactly what
2:36
Speaker 1: made her useful to George Allen. Allan was sixty one
2:40
Speaker 1: at the time of his arrest. He held an active
2:42
Speaker 1: foster care license in Sycamore County, a license he had
2:46
Speaker 1: maintained for eleven years. People who encountered him described a
2:50
Speaker 1: heavy set man with a slow way of speaking, the
2:53
Speaker 1: kind of deliberateness that can read as thoughtfulness or as patience,
2:58
Speaker 1: depending on how much you already trust the person in
3:01
Speaker 1: front of you. Tammy met him in the spring of
3:04
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen at a county informational session for prospective and
3:09
Speaker 1: current foster parents. Allan had brought a cake. He stayed
3:14
Speaker 1: after the formal presentation to answer questions from other attendees.
3:19
Speaker 1: He was, according to people who were there, generous with
3:22
Speaker 1: his time. By July of twenty seventeen, Tammy and Allen
3:27
Speaker 1: were in a romantic relationship. By September, he was spending
3:31
Speaker 1: most nights at her house on Clement Avenue. What Tammy
3:35
Speaker 1: did not know, what no one in Sycamore County had
3:38
Speaker 1: yet assembled into a single picture, was that Allan had
3:42
Speaker 1: been operating variations of the same system since approximately two
3:47
Speaker 1: thousand four. Fairfield County, Perry County, Muskingham County. In each place,
3:55
Speaker 1: the pattern involved foster care reimbursements, the financial details of
3:59
Speaker 1: people to him, and a structured invisibility that moved faster
4:03
Speaker 1: than the paperwork meant to catch it. In December of
4:06
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, Allan sat down with Tammy and presented a spreadsheet.
4:12
Speaker 1: The proposal was reasonable on its surface. Consolidate the foster
4:16
Speaker 1: care operation at a house on Hollander Street, pool their resources,
4:20
Speaker 1: make the whole arrangement more efficient. He had numbers, He
4:24
Speaker 1: had a plan. Tammy moved to Hollanders Street in January
4:28
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen. The house on Clement Avenue, her house,
4:32
Speaker 1: the one she had spent years paying off, was rented
4:35
Speaker 1: to a young couple. The rental income went into a
4:38
Speaker 1: joint account at Tri State Community Bank. That felt logical,
4:43
Speaker 1: That felt like partnership. What she had not been shown.
4:46
Speaker 1: Buried in the account documentation was a clause that made
4:50
Speaker 1: Allan the primary account holder. Under that structure, he could
4:54
Speaker 1: transfer funds without her co signature. Tammy never received a him,
4:58
Speaker 1: She never received a chie Her access to that account
5:02
Speaker 1: existed in name only. By March of twenty eighteen, sixty
5:06
Speaker 1: percent of her paycheck was being deposited directly into the
5:09
Speaker 1: joint account. At Allan's suggestion, he had called it fiscal
5:13
Speaker 1: deficiency within forty eight hours of each deposit. According to
5:18
Speaker 1: bank records later subpoened by Fisher, that sixty percent was
5:23
Speaker 1: gone within forty eight hours of each deposit. The money
5:27
Speaker 1: was gone. That single pattern, verified across eleven months of
5:31
Speaker 1: bank records, is the kind of detail that looks like
5:35
Speaker 1: noise until you understand what surrounds it. Financial crimes investigator
5:40
Speaker 1: Clifford Fisher understood it immediately. The question was not whether
5:45
Speaker 1: the transfers were happening. The question was how long they
5:49
Speaker 1: had been happening, and how many people had been inside
5:52
Speaker 1: this same mechanism before Tammy Powell. The answer, when Fisher
5:56
Speaker 1: finally assembled it was worse than anyone in the Sycamore
5:59
Speaker 1: count Anty Prosecutor's office had expected. But the account structure
6:03
Speaker 1: was only one of three things running at the same time,
6:07
Speaker 1: and the second one started.
6:09
Speaker 2: With the name Tammy had never heard.
6:11
Speaker 1: Sandra Copp was twenty three years old in the spring
6:14
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen. She had aged out of the foster
6:18
Speaker 1: care system four years earlier after spending her adolescence on
6:21
Speaker 1: Briar Mill Road in Fairfield County, in a home licensed
6:25
Speaker 1: to George Allen. By April of twenty eighteen, her Social
6:29
Speaker 1: Security number was attached to the electric utility account at
6:33
Speaker 1: a house on Clement Avenue in Sycamore County, the house
6:37
Speaker 1: Tammy Powell owned. The transfer happened without Sandra's knowledge. It
6:43
Speaker 1: happened without Tammy's knowledge. The bill kept getting paid, so
6:47
Speaker 1: neither the utility company nor the tenants had any reason
6:50
Speaker 1: to flag it. The name on the account was simply
6:53
Speaker 1: different now, and the name on the account meant that
6:56
Speaker 1: Sandra Copp's credit profile, not Tammy's, would absorb or any
7:00
Speaker 1: future delinquency. That utility transfer buried in a single administrative
7:05
Speaker 1: field would later become one of the cleaner pieces of
7:08
Speaker 1: evidence in Fisher's file. It connected two women who had
7:11
Speaker 1: never met through a man who had spent years making
7:15
Speaker 1: sure they never would. Here is where the picture starts
7:18
Speaker 1: to shift. When Fisher pulled the full history of the
7:21
Speaker 1: tri state joint account, he found something that required a
7:25
Speaker 1: second read. The account had been structured from the beginning
7:29
Speaker 1: with Allan listed as the primary account holder, not as
7:33
Speaker 1: a co holder, but as the holder with Tammy's name
7:36
Speaker 1: carrying secondary authorization only. That structure gave Alan the unilateral
7:41
Speaker 1: right to transfer funds without her signature. Tammy had signed
7:45
Speaker 1: the paperwork. The question Fisher could not shake was whether
7:49
Speaker 1: she had understood what the paperwork said based on the
7:52
Speaker 1: access she was never given. No pin, no check book,
7:56
Speaker 1: no online credentials. His conclusion, documented in the financial forensics report,
8:03
Speaker 1: was that the account had been designed to look like
8:05
Speaker 1: partnership while functioning as something else Entirely. Sixty three thousand
8:11
Speaker 1: dollars in foster care reimbursements flowed through that account between
8:14
Speaker 1: January of two thousand eighteen and February of two thousand nineteen.
8:19
Speaker 1: Less than nine thousand was traceable to expenses for the
8:22
Speaker 1: children in Allen's care.
8:24
Speaker 2: Nine thousand.
8:25
Speaker 1: That gap, fifty four thousand dollars unaccounted for, sat inside
8:30
Speaker 1: the same structure that had also absorbed sixty percent of
8:33
Speaker 1: Tammy's nursing salary for eleven months. Fischer's forensic reconstruction showed
8:38
Speaker 1: a single account functioning as a collection point for at
8:41
Speaker 1: least three separate revenue streams, none of which had a
8:44
Speaker 1: clear documented disbursement path back to the people the money
8:48
Speaker 1: was supposed to serve. Then there was October. Tammy had
8:52
Speaker 1: noticed the numbers were not adding up. She had started
8:55
Speaker 1: a note book, careful specific entries of household expense against
9:00
Speaker 1: what she could see of the account. She kept it
9:03
Speaker 1: at the back of a kitchen drawer. Alan found it.
9:06
Speaker 1: What happened next is documented in Tammy's own later account
9:10
Speaker 1: to investigators. Allan did not raise his voice, He did
9:14
Speaker 1: not threaten her. He sat down, looked at the notebook
9:17
Speaker 1: and told her that it hurt him deeply. He said
9:20
Speaker 1: he was doing everything he could for their family. He
9:24
Speaker 1: said that trust was the foundation of what they had built.
9:27
Speaker 1: By the end of the conversation, Tammy apologized. She threw
9:31
Speaker 1: the notebook away herself. She destroyed the only contemporaneous record
9:36
Speaker 1: of her suspicion, and she did it voluntarily. Valentine's Day
9:41
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen nine fourteen in the morning, Lauren Hayes was
9:45
Speaker 1: walking her three year old rescue dog, Discuit, along creek
9:50
Speaker 1: Side Access trail on the east side of Caldwell. The
9:53
Speaker 1: trail ran through a corridor of scrub, oak and creek
9:56
Speaker 1: bottom brush that most residents used only in warmer wa months.
10:01
Speaker 1: February had left the ground frozen and the leaf cover stiff.
10:04
Speaker 1: Biscuit pulled toward a thicket off the center of the path.
10:08
Speaker 1: Half buried in the frozen leaf litter was a binder.
10:11
Speaker 1: Lauren pulled it free. The cover was damp and warped.
10:15
Speaker 1: Inside were documents, birth certificates, social Security cards, Medicaid enrollment forms,
10:22
Speaker 1: medical histories, seven children. The top sheet had a school
10:26
Speaker 1: photograph clipped to it, a girl maybe eight years old,
10:30
Speaker 1: smiling at the camera. Lauren called the police from the trail.
10:35
Speaker 1: By noon that day, officers had traced the address on
10:38
Speaker 1: the topmost document, forty eight twelve Hollander Street. The property
10:43
Speaker 1: was leased by Dennis Pruett and sublet to George Allen,
10:47
Speaker 1: who operated a licensed foster home there. By the time
10:50
Speaker 1: the first patrol unit reached Hollander Street, investigators found the
10:54
Speaker 1: house occupied. One of the children present was a nine
10:57
Speaker 1: year old boy named Marcus. He was sleeping on a
11:00
Speaker 1: mattress without a fitted sheet, in a room with a
11:03
Speaker 1: broken window. It was February in Ohio. The temperature had
11:08
Speaker 1: been below freezing for six consecutive days. Five days later,
11:13
Speaker 1: on February nineteenth, Allan was arrested. The binder had not
11:17
Speaker 1: been stored in the trail. Fisher's reconstruction of Allan's movements
11:21
Speaker 1: on the day the police arrived placed him leaving Hollander
11:24
Speaker 1: Street through the rear of the property, cutting north toward
11:27
Speaker 1: the trail access point. The binder, Fisher concluded, had either
11:31
Speaker 1: been dropped accidentally, possibly when Allan slipped on the frozen ground,
11:37
Speaker 1: or had fallen during a quick exit. It had been
11:39
Speaker 1: in the leaf litter for at least three days before
11:42
Speaker 1: Lauren and Biscuit founded, suggesting it was lost around February
11:46
Speaker 1: ninth through eleventh, which is consistent with Fisher's reconstruction placing
11:51
Speaker 1: Allan leaving Hollander Street on or about February eleventh before
11:55
Speaker 1: the February nineteenth arrest.
11:58
Speaker 2: That detail mattered.
11:59
Speaker 1: Alan had not abandoned the binder in a panic on.
12:02
Speaker 2: The day of the arrest.
12:04
Speaker 1: He had lost it days earlier, and had apparently continued operating,
12:08
Speaker 1: continued sleeping in the house on Clement Avenue, with Tammy
12:12
Speaker 1: continued presenting as a licensed foster parent in good standing,
12:16
Speaker 1: while somewhere behind him on a frozen trail, seven children's
12:20
Speaker 1: worth of documents lay in the mud. The gap between
12:23
Speaker 1: when the binder was lost, and when it was found
12:26
Speaker 1: is where the entire structure became visible. Picture Allen in
12:31
Speaker 1: the days before the arrest. He still had a functioning account.
12:35
Speaker 1: He still had TAMMY sixty percent arriving on schedule. He
12:39
Speaker 1: had a licensed home, a co operative woman who had
12:43
Speaker 1: apologized for doubting him, and a storage unit on the
12:46
Speaker 1: west side of Caldwell that held documents belonging to fourteen
12:49
Speaker 1: people filed according to Fischer's description of the unit, in
12:53
Speaker 1: a system that was meticulous, labeled organized. This was not
12:58
Speaker 1: a man in crisis. This was a man mid operation.
13:02
Speaker 1: That is what makes the binder so significant, not as
13:05
Speaker 1: evidence of guilt Fisher had that from the bank records,
13:08
Speaker 1: but as a window into what Allan believed.
13:10
Speaker 2: About his own exposure.
13:12
Speaker 1: He had walked away from Hollander Street carrying those documents,
13:16
Speaker 1: which means he knew exactly what was in them and
13:20
Speaker 1: exactly what their discovery would mean.
13:22
Speaker 2: He was managing risk.
13:25
Speaker 1: The fact that he dropped them and then kept going
13:28
Speaker 1: rather than retrieving them suggests he either did not realize
13:32
Speaker 1: he had lost them or calculated that going back was
13:35
Speaker 1: more dangerous than leaving them. Either way, he was wrong.
13:39
Speaker 1: When Fisher mapped the full picture, the joint account structure,
13:43
Speaker 1: the utility transfer in Sandra Copp's name, the reimbursement gap,
13:48
Speaker 1: the prior complaints in Perry and Fairfield Counties. A specific
13:52
Speaker 1: shape emerged. Each element taken alone had a plausible, innocent explanation.
13:59
Speaker 1: A primary account holder could be an administrative convenience. A
14:03
Speaker 1: utility transfer could be a paperwork correction. A reimbursement gap
14:07
Speaker 1: could be poor record keeping. In each prior county, the
14:11
Speaker 1: individual incident had been reviewed and closed without criminal referral.
14:16
Speaker 1: Perry County's Joanne Strickler had filed a complaint in twenty
14:20
Speaker 1: fourteen about an unauthorized use of her account number. Investigators
14:24
Speaker 1: at the time concluded it was an administrative error. It
14:28
Speaker 1: was not an administrative error, but that conclusion required seeing
14:33
Speaker 1: all the counties simultaneously. It required Fisher's subpoenas pulling records
14:38
Speaker 1: across Fairfield, Perry and Muskingham. And it required the binder
14:43
Speaker 1: which connected the financial apparatus to the children in Allan's
14:46
Speaker 1: care in a way that could not be attributed to
14:49
Speaker 1: paperwork confusion. One scenario insists Allan was running parallel systems
14:54
Speaker 1: with clean separation. The financial manipulation of adult women on
14:59
Speaker 1: one track, there reimbursement fraud on another, the identity documents
15:03
Speaker 1: as a third. Under this reading, the storage unit is
15:07
Speaker 1: the hub, a place where all three streams were physically archived, organized,
15:13
Speaker 1: and maintained. The fourteen sets of documents in that unit
15:16
Speaker 1: included six from former foster children and four from women
15:21
Speaker 1: with whom Allan had been in romantic relationships.
15:24
Speaker 2: Tammy's name was not in the unit.
15:26
Speaker 1: She had not yet been fully processed into the archive.
15:30
Speaker 2: That detail.
15:31
Speaker 1: Her absence from the storage unit is the clearest indicator
15:34
Speaker 1: of where she stood in the sequence. She was mid extraction,
15:38
Speaker 1: not complete. But there is a second way to read
15:40
Speaker 1: the binder on the trail. If Allan had intentionally left it,
15:44
Speaker 1: if it was not dropped accidentally, but deposited deliberately as
15:49
Speaker 1: a controlled release of information that would divert attention while
15:53
Speaker 1: he moved assets, then the organized storage.
15:56
Speaker 2: Unit becomes something different, not.
15:58
Speaker 1: A backup system, a contingency, except that reading collapses the
16:03
Speaker 1: moment you examined what the binder actually contained, the live
16:07
Speaker 1: identity documents of children currently in his care, not historical
16:11
Speaker 1: records of past placements. There was no strategic reason to
16:16
Speaker 1: release those The binder was not a calculated diversion. It
16:20
Speaker 1: was a mistake, and it was the first mistake Allan
16:23
Speaker 1: had made in fifteen years of documented operation. The storage unit,
16:27
Speaker 1: the bank account structure, the note book Tammy threw away
16:31
Speaker 1: the utility account in Sandra Copp's name. Each of these
16:35
Speaker 1: pointed toward a system built to survive scrutiny by distributing
16:39
Speaker 1: its components across jurisdictions, relationships, and administrative categories too mundane
16:45
Speaker 1: to trigger alarm. What ended it was not a financial audit,
16:49
Speaker 1: not a tip, not a former victim speaking to law enforcement.
16:53
Speaker 1: What ended it was a three year old rescued dog
16:56
Speaker 1: pulling toward a thicket on a frozen trail. On the
16:59
Speaker 1: nineteenth February two thousand nineteen, George Allen was arrested at
17:04
Speaker 1: four eighty two Hollanders Street. The charges filed by the
17:08
Speaker 1: Sycamore County Prosecutor listed eleven counts of identity fraud, four
17:12
Speaker 1: counts of financial exploitation, two counts of benefits fraud, and
17:17
Speaker 1: one count of child endangerment. Those counts did not correspond
17:22
Speaker 1: one to one to each victim named in the files.
17:25
Speaker 1: Prosecutors framed charges based on discrete acts and available evidence,
17:31
Speaker 1: not a simple victim to count mapping that last count.
17:35
Speaker 1: The single count covered Marcus, the nine year old sleeping
17:39
Speaker 1: on a mattress without a fitted sheet in a room
17:42
Speaker 1: with a broken window in Ohio in February. Allan said
17:46
Speaker 1: nothing at the scene. Two months later, in April, he
17:49
Speaker 1: confessed he co operated with investigators in exchange for a
17:53
Speaker 1: plea agreement that avoided the maximum concurrence sentencing, a combined
17:57
Speaker 1: term that, according to court records, would have exceeded forty years.
18:02
Speaker 1: As part of that cooperation, Allan led investigators to a
18:05
Speaker 1: storage unit on the west side of Caldwell.
18:08
Speaker 2: Inside.
18:09
Speaker 1: Financial crimes investigator Clifford Fisher found the records of fourteen
18:13
Speaker 1: individuals organized and labeled. Six were former foster children, four
18:20
Speaker 1: were women with whom Allan had maintained romantic relationships. The
18:24
Speaker 1: files were alphamatized. Tammy Powell was not in the unit.
18:28
Speaker 1: Her extraction, Fisher concluded, had been approximately sixty to seventy
18:32
Speaker 1: percent complete at the time of Allan's arrest. The remaining
18:36
Speaker 1: thirty to forty percent the equity in Clement Avenue, the
18:40
Speaker 1: personal accounts she had maintained had not yet been transferred.
18:45
Speaker 1: She had not yet been fully processed. Via civil judgment
18:49
Speaker 1: and a restitution order attached to Allan's plea agreement, Tammy
18:53
Speaker 1: recovered approximately thirty one thousand dollars. The joint account at
18:57
Speaker 1: Tri State Community Bank had held significly more at various
19:01
Speaker 1: points during the fourteen months she had deposited into it.
19:04
Speaker 1: The gap between what passed through that account and what
19:07
Speaker 1: was recovered is not explained by the public record. Sandrakopp,
19:11
Speaker 1: twenty three years old, learned during the investigation that her
19:15
Speaker 1: Social Security number had been attached to the utility account
19:18
Speaker 1: on Clement Avenue since April of two thousand eighteen. She
19:21
Speaker 1: had been a foster child in Allen's care in Fairfield
19:24
Speaker 1: County between two thousand eight and twenty twelve. She had
19:28
Speaker 1: been a minor when he first collected her information. She
19:31
Speaker 1: had not known her number was in use. Historical records
19:35
Speaker 1: reviewed during the investigation revealed that Allen had operated versions
19:39
Speaker 1: of the same system in at least three prior counties, Fairfield, Perry,
19:44
Speaker 1: and Muskinghem, dating back to approximately two thousand four. Joanne
19:49
Speaker 1: Strickler's complaint in Perry County in two thousand fourteen had
19:53
Speaker 1: been investigated and closed as an administrative error. The Muskingham
19:57
Speaker 1: County foster care application withdrawn one in two thousand and six,
20:01
Speaker 1: before background verification was complete. It generated no charges. Each
20:06
Speaker 1: jurisdiction had seen one piece. No jurisdiction had seen the pattern.
20:11
Speaker 1: Fisher later described the account structure as deliberately distributed, designed
20:16
Speaker 1: so that any single review would find nothing irregular. The
20:20
Speaker 1: joint account looked like shared finances. The foster reimbursements looked
20:25
Speaker 1: like household income. The utility transfer looked like a clerical update.
20:30
Speaker 1: Only when the fourteen months of records were laid side
20:33
Speaker 1: by side did the architecture become visible. Of the fourteen
20:37
Speaker 1: individuals identified in the storage unit, the public record does
20:40
Speaker 1: not confirm how many were notified, how many pursued civil remedies,
20:45
Speaker 1: or what recovery, if any, the six former foster children received.
20:50
Speaker 1: The court record for Marcus, his last name, sealed by
20:53
Speaker 1: the court, does not confirm his placement. After Allen's arrest
20:57
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty nineteen, Emmy Powell moved back
21:01
Speaker 1: to Clement Avenue.
21:03
Speaker 2: She returned to.
21:03
Speaker 1: The night shift at Caldwell Regional Medical Center, eleven in
21:07
Speaker 1: the evening to seven thirty in the morning. Nineteen years
21:11
Speaker 1: of service. On Wednesday mornings, she still called her sister
21:14
Speaker 1: Patrese from the hospital garage at six fifteen. The way
21:18
Speaker 1: she always had the house was hers. It had been
21:23
Speaker 1: hers since October of two thousand fifteen, when she made
21:27
Speaker 1: the final mortgage payment. Nothing Allen had done had reached
21:31
Speaker 1: the deed. That was the one perimeter that held This
21:35
Speaker 1: case is not difficult to be angry about. A licensed
21:38
Speaker 1: foster care provider used the administrative machinery of child welfare
21:44
Speaker 1: State Reimbursement's identity documents placement, paperwork placement as the operational
21:50
Speaker 1: infrastructure of a financial predation scheme spanning at least fifteen
21:55
Speaker 1: years and four Ohio counties. The system that was supposed
21:59
Speaker 1: to protect children in his care was the system he
22:02
Speaker 1: used to fund the operation. And when a woman who
22:05
Speaker 1: spent nearly two decades caring for strangers through the night
22:09
Speaker 1: began to sense something was wrong, she apologized to him
22:12
Speaker 1: and threw away the evidence herself. That last detail, Tammy
22:17
Speaker 1: discarding her own note book, is what this case keeps
22:20
Speaker 1: returning to. Alan did not destroy her perception directly. He
22:24
Speaker 1: made her feel that her perception was a betrayal of love.
22:28
Speaker 2: She did the rest.
22:29
Speaker 1: That is the mechanism this case documents with unusual clarity.
22:33
Speaker 1: Not force, not threat, but the slow replacement of someone's
22:37
Speaker 1: judgment with shame. The three year old rescue dog named
22:41
Speaker 1: Biscuit did not know any of this. Lauren Hayes did
22:45
Speaker 1: not know any of this. They were on the trail
22:48
Speaker 1: because it was a Tuesday morning in February.
22:51
Speaker 2: And the dog needed to walk.
22:53
Speaker 1: What Biscuit pulled toward in the frozen thicket was a
22:56
Speaker 1: binder holding the birth certificates, social Security cards, and medical
23:01
Speaker 1: histories of seven children. Tammy Powell's Wednesday calls to Patrese
23:06
Speaker 1: still happen.
23:07
Speaker 2: That is not a small thing.
23:09
Speaker 1: It is, in fact, the most precise measure of what
23:12
Speaker 1: Allan did not succeed in taking. This show is made
23:16
Speaker 1: by Obo Media