Latest / Missing person stories / She Vanished Between Stops: How a Blind Woman Outsmarted Her Kidnapper

Transcript

She Vanished Between Stops: How a Blind Woman Outsmarted Her Kidnapper · Missing person stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 9.52 on the morning of Thursday, June 13th, 2019,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: a woman named Paula Nance called the Dunmore Police Department
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and reported her sister missing. The call lasted four minutes.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Paula was calm, methodical, almost apologetic. But the detail she
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: kept returning to, the one she said made her certain
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: something was wrong, was not a missed text. or a
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: locked door. It was a phone call that never came.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Her sister had not missed that call in four years.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Lauren Sanders was 52 years old and had been blind
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: for 21 of them. The condition that took her sight
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: was neuromyelitis optica, an autoimmune attack on the optic nerves
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: and spinal cord. She lost her central vision first at 31.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: The peripheral followed over the next three years, narrowing like
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: a closing aperture until there was nothing left. Doctors told
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: her the progression was irreversible. What came after that is
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the part that matters for this story. Lauren did not
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: move home. She did not reduce her life to what
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: other people considered manageable. She found a bungalow on Whitfield
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Avenue in Dunmore, Ohio, and she made it hers. She
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: learned the distance from her front door to the kitchen
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: counter and steps. She learned which floorboard creaked third from
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the left in the hallway. She learned the sound the
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: radiator made before it kicked on and the precise weight
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: of her white cane against her palm. She worked as
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: a proofreader, contract work for two legal publishers, done at
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: her kitchen table using screen reader software and a braille display.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: It was precise, exacting work, the kind of work that
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: punishes inattention. She was good at it, and every Wednesday evening,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: without exception, she took the bus to Prentice Avenue and
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: tutored adult readers at the Dunmore Literacy Council from six
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: in the evening until nine. Phil Osteen, the council's tutor coordinator,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: would later tell investigators that Lauren had not missed a
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: single Wednesday shift in four years. He qualified that statement.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: There was one exception, a Wednesday when she had pneumonia.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: She called from the emergency room to apologize. That was
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: the kind of person Lauren Sanders was. Her routine was
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: not rigid out of anxiety. It was the architecture of
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: her life built with precision. She knew the six-block walk
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: from the council to the bus stop on Garfield Avenue.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: She knew which corner was Halsey Street by the change
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: in wind direction and the smell of the drainage grate
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: at the curb. She knew Route 8's schedule well enough
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: that she could feel when she was running late. On Wednesday,
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: June 12th, 2019, at 9.07 in the evening, a camera
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: on Prentice Avenue recorded Lauren leaving the Literacy Council, white
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: cane in hand, moving south at her usual pace. She
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: reached the corner of Halsey Street and stepped out of
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the frame. There were no cameras on the five blocks
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: between that corner and the bus stop on Garfield Avenue.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Lauren never reached the stop. The bus ran on time.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Her phone showed no outgoing calls after 9.03, when she
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: texted her sister a goodnight message from inside the council.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Paula sent a reply at 9.22. It was never opened.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: The following morning, Paula called at 8.15. No answer. She
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: called again at 8.30. No answer. At 8.41, she called
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Dunmore PD. The bungalow on Whitfield Avenue was locked. No
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: signs of struggle, no broken windows, nothing visibly out of place.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: To a responding officer with no prior context, it would
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: have looked like a woman who simply was not home.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: But Lauren Sanders did not simply not come home. She
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: called every morning. She had never missed a Wednesday. She
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: knew exactly how to get from the council to that
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: bus stop. And she had done it hundreds of times.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Without incident, Detective Wade Crawford caught the case that Thursday
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: morning he had 17 years on the Dunmore force. He
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: had never worked a case with a blind victim. He
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: would later describe the adjustment he had to make in
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: those first hours, stopping himself from thinking about how Lauren
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: navigated and starting to think, instead, about what had interrupted
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the thing she did, flawlessly, every week, without fail. That
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: reframe would turn out to be the most important decision
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: he made, because whatever happened to Lauren Sanders on Halsey
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Street that Wednesday night, it did not begin on Halsey Street.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: It had been planned, and the person who planned it
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: had been watching her for weeks. The planning began long
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: before June 12th. Crawford's first canvas of Whitfield Avenue turned
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: up a neighbor named Bob Tully, retired, lived, Two houses
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: north of Loren's bungalow kept irregular hours and a habit
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: of watching the street from his front window. Tully described
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: a dark pickup truck he'd noticed at least three times
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: in the two weeks before Loren vanished. Always parked on
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: the north side, facing east, engine off, always in the
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: morning when the block was quiet and most residents were
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: already gone. Tully had assumed a contractor, There were no
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: contractors working on Whitfield Avenue that month. A second neighbor
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: provided a partial plate. That number came back registered to
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a pickup owned by a cousin of a man named
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Roy Richardson. The address on file was Richardson's. Crawford ran
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: the name. Nothing immediate, flagged, but he kept it. Meanwhile,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: the forensic technician processing Lauren's bungalow pulled something from the
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: side entrance. That entrance was a known vulnerability. The latch
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: could be defeated by lifting the handle and pushing the
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: upper panel in a specific way. Lauren knew about it.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: She used an interior tension bar at night. During the day,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: she left it unbraced. The technician found a palm print
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: on the exterior panel. Clean, full contact. The pressure point
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: matched exactly where someone would push to pop that latch.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: It did not match Lauren. It did not match her
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: sister Paula. It did not match any visitor on record.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Crawford filed it, no hit yet. The investigation was 14
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: hours old and the address on the plate and the
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: palm print on the panel were two separate questions with
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: no bridge between them. Then the phone rang. Friday morning,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: June 14th, 951. A volunteer named Gail Padgett walked into
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Ridgeway Self Storage on the east side of Dunmore for
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: what she would later tell investigators was her 20th visit
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: to Unit 14C. She was there on behalf of the people,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Dunmore Literacy Council. The unit held donated materials, books, binders,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: stationery that got transported to the council building on Prentice
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: Avenue on a rotating schedule. Paget unlocked the roll door
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: and stepped inside. The unit smelled of cardboard and dust,
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: the way it always did. She started toward the back shelves.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Then she stopped. There was something scratched into the interior wall.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: The metal surface was dull grey, and the marks were thin,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: easy to miss if you weren't standing directly in front
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: of them. But Paget was. She read them once, then again.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Elle Sanders, a live June 12-teeth cedar, run R & D,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: and below that, a partial number, 8740. and then a
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: gap where the last digit had been obliterated. Paget photographed
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the wall with her phone and called 911. She sat
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: in her car and waited. A responding officer arrived 14
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: minutes later. Crawford was standing in that storage unit 20
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: minutes after the dispatch reached him. He looked at the inscription,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: four feet off the floor. Thin, precise lines. The letters
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: were uneven in pressure. but legible. Someone had worked with
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: a small, hard instrument, probably in darkness or near darkness,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: and they had not rushed. The partial number looked like
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: an odometer reading. Eighty-seven. Four hundred and something. Crawford noted it.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Then he looked again at the height, four feet, and
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: understood something. Whoever wrote this had not been standing upright.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: They had been sitting, or crouching, with their back against
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: the wall, and their arm extended and Laterally. That is
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: not how someone writes a message for help they expect
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: to be found easily. That is how someone writes when
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: they are constrained and working with whatever they have. Whatever
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: they have. Crawford looked at the bottom edge of the
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: message again. The instrument that made those marks was consistent, narrow, metallic.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: A forensic examiner would later describe it as consistent with
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: a thin, snap-close hair clip. The kind sold in drugstores.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: 12 to a pack. Lauren Sanders had been wearing her
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: hair up the night she disappeared. Picture the inside of
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Unit 14C after hours. No windows. A metal door that
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: locks from outside. A woman who cannot see, who has
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: been moved in a vehicle, who does not know exactly
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: where she is. But who knows she is in a
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: storage unit. Thin walls. Hollow reverb. The smell of paper
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: and cold metal. She knows the unit is visited. She
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: has heard someone come and go. She cannot shout loud
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: enough to reach the next unit. She cannot reach the
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: door from where she is positioned. but she has something
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: in her hair. The odometer fragment was the part that
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: didn't immediately fit. Crawford put it aside and focused on
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Cedar Run Road. Rural route, 11 miles east of Dunmore,
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: 12 miles long, four structures total. A dairy barn, a
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: pump station, a hunting cabin, and one rental trailer on
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: a gravel lot set back from the road on a
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: dirt track that was easy to miss at speed. Units, converged.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Crawford drove Cedar Run Road himself. Lauren was in the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: rear room of the trailer. She was seated on the
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: floor when they entered. She did not move toward the
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: sound of the vehicles outside. She did not call out.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: She had already done what she needed to do. She
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: had used 54 hours of captivity to learn that trailer
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: the way she learned every space. By sound, by pattern,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: by the interval of a dripping faucet every 22 seconds
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: by the frequency at which a loose wall panel vibrated
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: when the wind came from the southwest. She had identified
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: the cologne of the man who came and went as
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Stetson Original by Coty. Her father had worn it. She
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: knew where she was in the room. She was not
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: afraid of the door opening. Now consider what the odometer
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: fragment meant. Richardson had driven Lauren from Hulsey Street To
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: that trailer, the reading she scratched into the wall, 87,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: 400 and something, was what she had managed to read
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: from the dashboard in the moment she was placed in
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the vehicle, or during a stop, using residual environmental light.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: She could not read the last digit. She did it anyway.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: She gave investigators the narrowest possible corridor to search. Everything
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: pointed toward the message being a lucky guess, a desperate act,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: with no real precision. A blind woman in the dark,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: scratching numbers she could not confirm onto a wall. She
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: could not see in a unit. She was not even
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: certain would be checked in time. That version collapses the
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: moment you look at the four-year attendance record. Lauren Sanders
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: did not operate on luck. She operated on systems. She
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: had spent two decades building alternatives to sight. Memory, measurement, pattern, redundancy.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: The message on that wall was not a desperate gesture.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: It was a procedure she ran under duress, the same
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: way she had run procedures every Wednesday for four years
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: without a single unannounced absence. She trusted the system. She
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: had built it herself. The palm print matched Richardson the
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: day after the rescue, when his name surfaced again through
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: a second database query. Crawford ran after finding the Stetson
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: bottle on Richardson's bathroom shelf. during the arrest sweep. Richardson
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: had been employed by the Dunmore Literacy Council since January
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: of that year, five months before Lauren disappeared. His job,
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: transport donated materials between Ridgeway Self-Storage Unit 14C and the
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: council building on Prentiss Avenue. He had a key to
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: that unit. He knew Lauren's schedule because it was posted
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: on the shared materials board in the storage depot. He
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: had watched her from a borrowed truck on a quiet street,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: and he had scratched that message into the wall of
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: his own workspace, because Lauren Sanders, from the back of
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: his vehicle, in a voice she kept flat and practical,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: told him to, and he believed she was blind enough
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: that it would not matter. Roy Richardson was arrested on
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: the morning of June 17th, 2019, five days after Lauren
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Sanders walked out of the Dunmore Literacy Council for the
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: last time that spring. Officers took him at his apartment.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: He did not run. What followed surprised even Crawford. Richardson cooperated.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: In a recorded session with the detective, he confirmed that
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: he had scratched the message into the wall of Unit
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: 14C himself. Using a hair clip, Lauren had passed him
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: from the back of the vehicle while instructing him in
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: a flat, careful voice to write exactly what she said.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: He told investigators he complied, because he was certain she
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: could not verify what she had dictated. He believed her
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: blindness made her helpless to check his work. He was
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: wrong about that in every direction that mattered. Richardson also
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: disclosed where he had thrown Lauren's white cane into the
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: storm drain on the south side of Holsey Street, the
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: precise corner where the surveillance camera lost her. And he
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: directed investigators to a storage unit in Millhaven, Indiana. roughly
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: 40 miles east, across the state line. Inside that unit,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: analysts found materials linking Richardson to surveillance activity in at
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: least two prior jurisdictions. Women had been followed. Addresses had
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: been mapped. None of those cases had produced an arrest.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: And none had ever been connected to each other. Richardson
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: had simply moved on. Analyst Donna Wicks spent three days
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: tracing the geography. 14 years. Six counties in Ohio and Indiana.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: A church van service in Sandusky County. A Meals on
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Wheels route out of Fort Wayne. A non-profit supply depot
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: in Millhaven. Every position put him in proximity to vulnerable
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: people on predictable schedules. Every position ended quietly. The Dunmore
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Literacy Council was his seventh placement. Richardson was charged with
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: kidnapping and unlawful restraint. in Dunmore, Ohio. He was convicted.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: The court sentenced him to 22 years in the Ohio
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. His first eligibility for parole
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: would arrive when he was 80 years old. Lauren Sanders
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: spent approximately 54 hours in that trailer on Cedar Run Road.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: She was dehydrated. She had abrasions on both wrists and
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: one knee. She did not require hospitalizations. The hair clip
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: she had used to scratch the message, small snap close,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: black mat, sold in packs of 12 at any drugstore,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: was recovered by investigators and entered into evidence. The odometer
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: fragment she scratched alongside her name gave Crawford a search
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: corridor of less than one mile on a 12-mile road.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Four structures sat on that road. The trailer was the fourth.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: She had given them the answer. They had only needed
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: to drive it. There is something in this case that
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: resists easy summarizing, and it has nothing to do with
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: the legal outcome. Richardson's conviction closed the procedural record. 22 years,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: first parole eligibility, at 80 the machinery of consequence ran
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: as it was designed to run. But what stays is
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: not the sentence. What stays is the image of a
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: woman sitting on the floor of a dark trailer on
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: a rural road, counting a dripping faucet every 22 seconds,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: every 22 seconds, to track time, estimating a captor's height
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: by the angle of his voice. Identifying a cologne she
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: had not smelled since her father was alive, and using
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: all of it, methodically, to build the most efficient distress
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: signal she could construct with a single hair clip and
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: a metal wall. Richardson scratched that message because he thought
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: it would not matter He handed investigators the address of
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: his own crime. The case raises a question that the
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: trial record leaves open, not because the court failed to
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: answer it, but because the law was not designed to
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: ask it. Richardson moved through six counties over 14 years.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Reports were filed. Nothing connected. The Millhaven locker held evidence
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: of earlier surveillance. Those prior incidents remain unresolved by any
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: public record. The women who were watched... Whoever they were
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: never had their cases revisited in court. That is not
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: a failure of Lauren Sanders' case. It is a failure
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: that existed long before she walked south on Prentice Avenue
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: on the 12th of June, 2019 at 9.07 in the evening,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: white cane in hand heading for the Route 8 bus
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: stop six blocks away. She made that walk every Wednesday
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: for four years. She built a life of precise, reliable
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: systems inside a world that had taken her central vision
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: at 31 and her peripheral vision over the three years
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: that followed. She worked, she taught, she showed up. And
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: on the one Wednesday that the system around her failed
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: to protect her, she built a new one from nothing,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: in the dark, under duress. In 54 hours, when Crawford
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: reached the trailer... Lauren was sitting on the floor of
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: the back room. She did not move when she heard
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the vehicles outside. She had already done what she needed
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: to do. That sentence in the case file is four
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: words from the end of the rescue report. It reads
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: like a footnote. It is the whole story. story. This
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: show is made by Oba Media.