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He Lived In Her Bed: The Counselor Who Inherited Death · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of October thirteenth, twenty nineteen, a utility
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: meter reader named Lorie Slater paused outside four fourteen Delwood
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Court and glanced through the kitchen window. She saw a
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: cardigan draped over the back of a chair, a coffee
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: munk with a lipstick print on the rim and pinned
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: to the refrigerator with a pineapple magnet, a child's crayon
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: drawing of something that might have been a son. She
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: logged the reading and moved on. She had no reason
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: to linger. What she could not have known, what no
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: one on that street knew yet, was that the woman
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: who lived in that house had been dead for four days.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: The obituary for Linda Hargrove would not run until October seventeenth,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: but someone had already moved another person into her home.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: That gap four days between a death and a funeral
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: notice and a strangers sleeping in the dead woman's bed
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: is where this case begins, and before it ends, it
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: will require a toxicology panel that almost wasn't ordered, a
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: prepaid phone bought at a gas station on Route nine,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and a question from a young woman to an investigator,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: did the thing I put in a drawer? Actually matter.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: It mattered a great deal to understand what Scott Mason built,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: it helps to understand what he was building on top of.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Linda Hargrove was fifty three years old and had lived
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: at four fourteen Delwood Court in Corven County for twenty
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: two years. The house was hers outright paid mortgage, no encumbrances.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: She had a certificate of deposit at Corvin County Savings
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Savings Bonds and a life insurance payout she had received
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: after her husband, Paul died in twenty fifteen. Paul had
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: been a retired electrician. They had been married long enough
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: that the house still carried the shape of two people
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: even after he was gone. Then her son died. The
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: case filed does not specify when it specifies, only that
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: after the loss, Linda began grief counseling with a man
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: named Scott Mason in twenty seventeen. She kept a garden.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Her daughter Renee, would mention it at sentencing, not as evidence,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: just as a fact about who Linda was. Scott Mason
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: was forty one at the time. He presented as a
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: grief counselor in private practice. A website, a LinkedIn profile,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: client testimonials, nothing alarming on a casual search. His license
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: had been issued in a neighboring county. It had lapsed
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen after a complaint was settled quietly, never
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: publicly adjudicated, never visible to anyone who did not know
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: exactly where to look. He was, by every surface indicator,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a professional who helped people survive loss. He met Emily
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Simpson in February of twenty nineteen at a Trauma and
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Formed Care seminar in Corvin County. Emily was twenty eight.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: You worked as an intake coordinator for Corven County Family Services,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: in the specific part of that job where you sit
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: across from somewhere and determine whether the situation they have
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: described constitutes coercion. Her supervisor, June Aldrich, would later tell
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: investigators that Emily could identify a coercive dynamic and name
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: it without hesitating. She was good at her job. That
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: is not a small detail. Emily lived in a studio
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: apartment on the fourth floor of a building called Sadler
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Arms in Creston Falls. She had a cat named Persimmon.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: She kept a handwritten meal planning calendar taped inside a
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: cabinet door, and for more than two years without interruption,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: she had volunteered every Thursday evening from six to eight
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: thirty at the Creston Falls Literacy Alliance. That shift was
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: hers the way a regular pew belongs to a family,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: not assigned, just inhabited reliably week after week. By April
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: of two thy nineteen, she had rearranged two Thursday shifts
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: to spend time with Scott Mason. That was the first adjustment.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: At the time, it looked like nothing. It looked like
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: a person making room for someone new. Her co worker,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Deborah Holt, noticed something else, not that Emily seemed tired
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: or distracted. Deborah described it differently. Emily looked smaller, not physically,
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: just smaller, as if the space she occupied had been
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: quietly compressed. That is what the erosion looks like from
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: the outside, and by October the erosion was nearly complete.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: On the morning of October eighth, twenty nineteen, a man
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: called doctor Arthur Bennings's office from a prepaid phone purchased
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: at a gas station on Route nine. The receptionist, Paula Strand,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: took the call. The man identified himself as Linda Hargrove's nephew.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: He asked whether her heart condition was being managed aggressively.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: That phrase managed aggressively was the thing Paul Estrand could
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: not shake. She logged the call, she noted the phrasing
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: in the message, and then she filed it because there
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: was no reason yet to treat it as anything other
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: than a worried relative asking an awkward question. Cell tower
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: data would later place Scott Mason on Route nine that
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: same week. He had been inside four fourteen Delwood Court
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: many times by then, not as an intruder, as a
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: counselor as the man Linda Hargrove had trusted with her
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: grief since twenty seventeen, first after her husband Paul died,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: then after her son. Two losses two years apart, both
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: funneled through Scott Mason's office. He knew the layout of
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the house. He knew the service entrance at the back
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: of the property, a gap in the fence left over
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: from the original oil delivery access. According to investigators, he
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: had explored it deliberately during his visits to the house.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: It was not a detail noticed in passing, but a
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: route studied. On the afternoon of October eighth, Francis Doyle
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: was in her side garden. Francis lived next door to
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Linda on the east side. She was a retired nurse
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: with a fixed daily schedule, which is to say she
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: was the kind of neighbor who notices variations. She saw
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: a lean man approximately forty years old, wearing a dark jacket,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: exit the fence gap and walk away. She assumed he
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: was a repair man. She did not mention it to anyone.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Linda Hargrove died the following morning, October ninth, a cardiac
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: event at home alone. Her physician, doctor Benning, examined the
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: record and found nothing inconsistent. Linda had a documented heart condition.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: The death was recorded as natural. No investigation was opened.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: No one called it anything other than what it appeared
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: to be. Francis Doyle brought soup the next morning and
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: found her four days later. On October thirteenth, Scott Mason
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: moved Emily Simpson into four fourteen Delwood Court. The obituary
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: had not yet run. It would not run until October seventeenth.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: There were four days between the moment Emily carried her
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: things through that front door and the moment the county
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: was formally informed that the woman who had lived there
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: for twenty two years, was dead. Laurie Slater, the meter reader,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: who glanced through the kitchen window that same afternoon of
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: October thirteenth, saw a cardigan draped over a chair, a
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: coffee mug with a lipstick print on the rim, a
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: child's crayon drawing held to the refrigerator by a pineapple magnet.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: She assumed someone lived there. She forgot the window. She
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: would not be interviewed until fourteen months later. The crayon
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: drawing had come from Linda's craft bind in the spare room.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Scott Mason had placed it on the refrigerator himself. Emily
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: did not know that she was unpacking. Scott had told
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: her the arrangement was temporary, a favor to a recently
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: deceased client's estate while the family sorted paperwork. It was,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: he said, a way to help. Emily believed that she
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: had spent months becoming someone who organized her decisions around
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: what Scott needed, and this felt like a continuation of that,
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: not a rupture. But there were things that did not settle.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: She found the cardigan, She found traces of a life
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: still arranged the way a person would leave it, not
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the way an empty house feels. In the spare room,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: inside a craft bin, she found a child's crayon drawing
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: of what might have been a sun or a flower.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: She set it aside. Later, she could not say exactly
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: when she found a photograph tucked behind a book on
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: the living room shelf, a wedding photo a woman in
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: her fifties and a man with the look of someone
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: who worked with his hands. They were Scott's parents, She
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: asked him. Scott said the previous client had sentimental attachments
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: to the house. The family would collect things eventually. He
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: said it the way he said most things, patiently, with
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: the specific warmth that made questions feel slightly embarrassing to
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: have asked. Emily put the photograph in a drawer. What
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Emily could not know, what no one outside Scott Mason knew,
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: was that once days before the death of Linda Hargrove,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Mason had taken her to a coffee shop on Arden
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Boulevard and presented her with paperwork. The notary was Greg Faber.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Linda was present. She asked twice what she was signing.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Scott explained patiently. Faber notarized the document. It was a
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: power of attorney. It transferred authority over Linda's financial affairs
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: to a trust Scott controlled. Linda's assets were not insignificant,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: a paid off mortgage at four fourteen Delwood Court, alike,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: insurance payout from Paul's death, savings bonds, a certificate of
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: deposit at Corvin County Savings. Before her death was publicly known,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: transfers had already begun moving through that trust. Greg Faber
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: told investigators later that he wished he had asked more questions.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: It was Renee Hargrove Pratt who broke the silence. Linda's daughter,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: estranged from her mother but still listed on financial records,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: noticed the account transfers in December of twenty nineteen. She
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: contacted Corven County. The call landed on the desk of
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Carl Cox, a financial crimes investigator with the Sheriff's office.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Cox was methodical. He kept a pencil timeline on graph paper.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: He pulled documents, traced the trust, and began to see
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: the shape of something much larger than a disputed estate.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: He arrived at his first interview with Emily Simpson expecting
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: to find a co conspirator. He revised that assessment within
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: forty minutes What cost found instead was a woman who
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: had come to four fourteen Delwood Court, believing she was
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: doing Scott a favor, who had noticed things that troubled her,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: who had asked questions and been answered in a way
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: that made the questions seem smaller than they were, and
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: who had left mid November alone after Scott cited her instability.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: He had built her up over months, and then when
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: her presence was no longer useful, he had dismantled it.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: He withdrew attention, withdrew affection, redefined her discomfort as a
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: personal failure. She left before she could fully articulate what
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: was wrong. She called Deborah Holt that night. She said
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: she wasn't sure what had happened to the woman who
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: had lived there. Cox walked Emily through the timeline. He
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: showed her the Power of Attorney document. He told her
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: where investigators had found it, misfiled inside a drawer in
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the front room of four fourteen Delwood Court. Emily went
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: very quiet. Then, she said, said the photograph I put
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: it in the drawer? Was that? Did that matter? Cox
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: told her it had mattered a great deal. The drawer
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: where Emily had set aside the wedding photo of Linda
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and Paul Hargrove. The instinct she had suppressed because Scott
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: had answered her question patiently was the same drawer where
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: the power of attorney document had been misfiled. The thing
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Emily had been unable to say out loud had been
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: preserved physically by the act of her own hesitation. Picture
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: the inside of that coffee shop on Arden Boulevard, eleven
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: days before Linda Hargrove died. Linda is sitting across from
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Scott Mason. She asks for the second time what she
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: is signing. He leans slightly forward and explains. His voice
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: his patient, His expression is steady. This is a man
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: who has spent years in rooms with grieving people, who
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: knows exactly how to make a question feel already answered
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: before the answer arrives. The notary stamps the document, everyone stands.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Linda goes home. That sequence, the patience, the steadiness, the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: way a question dissolves before it can become a refusal
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: is the clearest window into how Scott Mason operated, not
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: through force, through calibration. He understood with precision how much
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: warmth it takes to make a person feel that clarity
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: is unnecessary. He had done it with Linda over two
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: years of counseling sessions. He had done it with Emily
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: over eight months of a relationship engineered from the day
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: they met. The version of events Mason appeared to offer
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: that he was a counselor helping an elderly client manage
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: her affairs, and that Emily's presence in the house was
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: an informal kindness collapse. The moment investigators pulled the cell
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: tower data, the prepaid phone on Route nine, The call
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: to doctor Benning's office asking whether a woman's heart condition
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: was being managed aggressively, placed the day before she died.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: That call is the thing that recontextualizes everything that came
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: before it, the months of trust building with Linda, the
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: scouted fence gap, the power of attorney notarized eleven days out.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: The crayon drawing retrieved from a dead woman's craft bin
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: and placed on the refrigerator with a pineapple magnet, so
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: that a kitchen viewed through a window four days before
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the obituary ran would look inhabited, domestically, continuously, innocently inhabited.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Nothing in that house was accidental. The cardigan on the chair,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: the mug on the counter. The drawing each object was
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: a calculation placed by a man who had already decided
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: what the next several weeks needed to look like from
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: the outside. When Carl Cox requested an expanded toxicology panel
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: not standard in the original autopsy, the results confirmed a
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: pharmaceutical agent consistent with cardiac suppression in Linda Hargrove's tissue samples.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: The death that doctor Benning had found consistent with the
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: documented heart condition was consistent with something else too. The
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: panel also produced a partial DNA match to a case
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: in Denny County from two thousand fifteen, a sixty seven
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: year old widower named Charles Pell, whose death had been
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: ruled natural, whose estate had been partially liquidated before he died,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: and whose grief counselor appeared in the file under a
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: slightly different spelling of the same name. DNA confirmed it
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: was the same man. Scott Mason was arrested in February
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: of twenty twenty. He was forty one years old. Six
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: days after his arrest, in a cell at Corvin County Detention,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: he talked to his cellmate, Derreck Pruett. Pruitt disclosed the
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: conversation to a corrections officer, then to the prosecutor. A
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: formal confession followed approximately three weeks after the IRAQ. The
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: trial began in September of twenty twenty. Mason was convicted
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: on all counts financial elder abuse, fraud, and homicide. He
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. At sentencing,
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Renee Hargrove Pratt read a victim statement. She said her
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: mother had kept a garden. She said it had gone
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: to seed by the time anyone thought to look. Emily
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Simpson left four fourteen Delwood Court in mid November of
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. She walked out alone after Scott Mason
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: had cited her instability as the reason she could no
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: longer stay. She returned to Sadler Arms to the fourth floor,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: to Persimmon and the handwritten calendar inside the cabinet door.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Deborah Holt received the call days later. She said afterward
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: that Emily had sounded like someone trying to remember what
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: her own voice was supposed to sound like. The word
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Deborah used in her statement was smaller, not exhausted, not
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: distressed in any obvious way, Smaller as if some dimension
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: of her had been quietly removed. That call was one
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: of the first threads Carl Cox pulled when he was
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: assigned the case. In December of two thousand nineteen. Renee
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: Hargrove Pratt had contacted Corven County after discovering account transfers
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: she could not explain. Cox came in expecting a financial
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: crimes case with two principles. He sat down with Emily Simpson,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: and within forty minutes he revised that assessment entirely. What
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Cox found was not a co conspirator. What he found
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: was some one who had been used as furniture, a
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: living object placed inside a dead woman's house to make
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: it look like the kind of place where nothing suspicious
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: had happened. Cox laid the time line out for Emily
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: in that interview, the dates, the accounts, the power of
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: attorney notarized eleven days before Linda Hargrove died. Emily listened,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: then she asked about the photograph. She had found, a
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: wedding photo of Linda and Paul Hargrove tucked behind a
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: book in the spare room. She had asked Scott about it.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: He had offered a vague explanation and told her to
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: put it somewhere. She put it in a drawer and
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: did not mention it again. That drawer, the one Emily
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: chose in the house she had been moved into four
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: days before Linda's obituary ran was where investigators later found
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: a misfiled power of attorney document bearing Linda's signature. Emily's
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: question to Cox was precise. She asked, the photograph I
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: put it in the drawer? Was that did that matter?
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Cox told her it had mattered a great deal. The
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: document had been preserved, undisturbed, in exactly the place her
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: instinct had led her. The same instinct that her supervisor,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: June Aldridge described as exceptional, the one that caught coercive
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: dynamics in other people's cases, had been operating the whole
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: time below the threshold of her conscious awareness. It just
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: could not see what it was looking at, not from inside.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Cox's expanded toxicology panel came back with a pharmaceutical agent
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: consistent with cardiac's oppression in Linda's tissue samples. The original
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: autopsy had found nothing inconsistent with her documented heart condition.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: There was no reason at the time to look harder.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Mason had known that he had known the profile of
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: the death he was designing, and he had known the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: physician who would receive it. The prepaid phone call to
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: doctor Benning's office on October eighth, the man asking whether
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Linda's heart condition was being managed aggressively, had been logged
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: by the receptionist, Paula Strand, because the phrasing struck her
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: as wrong. It took investigators tracing cell tower data along
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: Route nine to put a geography to it. The tower
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: placed Mason in that corridor during the week of October eighth.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: The phone had been purchased at a gas station on
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the same road. Francis Doyle had seen him on October eighth,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: a lean man in his early forties, dark jacket, exiting
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: through the fence gap on the east side of the property.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: She had assumed repairment. She had forgotten the window. Laurie
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Slater had also seen something, though she did not know
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: yet what. She had seen the kitchen window on October thirteenth,
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: the cardigan draped over the chair back, the coffee mug
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: with the lipstick print, the child's crayon drawing held to
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: the refrigerator with a pine apple magnet. That drawing had
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: come from Linda's kraftbin in the spare room. Mason had
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: placed it there himself. No child had drawn it for
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: that refrigerator. No child had ever lived in that house.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: The drawing was a prop. It was the most domestic
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: looking thing in the room, and it was entirely manufactured,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: placed by a man who understood that a child's drawing
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: on a refrigerator is the visual shorthand for a life
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: being lived, for a house that has nothing to hide.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Laurie Slater had stood at the meter outside, looked through
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: the glass, and seen exactly what Mason needed her to see.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Scott Mason was convicted in September of twenty twenty on
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: all counts financial elder abuse, fraud, and homicide. He was
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: forty one years old. He received a sentence of life
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: without possibility of parole. Charles Pell's case remained in Denny County.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: It had been ruled natural in two thousand fifteen. The
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: partial DNA match came back as a consequence of the
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: expanded panel Cox had insisted on for Linda Hargrove's case,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: a sixty seven year old widower an a state partially
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: liquidated before his death. A grief counselor whose name appeared
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: in the file under a slightly different spelling. DNA confirmed
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: it was the same man. That confirmation arrived as an
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: afterthought from a ROOT teen database query. It was not
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: the focus of the trial. It was a door opening
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  Speaker 1: onto a longer corridor than anyone had fully mapped. Greg Faber,
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  Speaker 1: the notary who had sat across a coffee shop table
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  Speaker 1: on Arden Boulevard and watched Linda Hargrove ask twice what
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  Speaker 1: she was signing, gave a statement to investigators. He said
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: he wished he had asked more questions. He did not
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  Speaker 1: explain what had stopped him. The record does not need
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: him to. What the record shows is a structure, A
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: man who identified grieving people in the specific window between
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: loss and reconstitution, when the social architecture around them had thinned.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Who built credentials a website, a LinkedIn profile, client testimonials
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  Speaker 1: that looked legitimate at casual distance and dissolved at close inspection.
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  Speaker 1: Whose license had lapsed in twenty sixteen after a complaint
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  Speaker 1: that was settled quietly and never adjudicated publicly. Who understood
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  Speaker 1: that a house looks lived in if it cont haines
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the right objects. Who understood that a death looks natural
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: if the physician has already categorized the patient, who understood
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: that a woman with professional training in identifying coercion could
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: still be moved incrementally away from her own calendar. By
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: April of twenty nineteen, Emily Simpson had re arranged two
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Thursday volunteer shifts for Scott Mason. By October twenty fourth,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: she missed the first one she had never missed in
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: over two years. By October thirteenth, she was sleeping in
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: the house of a woman who had died four days
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: before the obituary ran. She did not know that. She
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: could not have known that. What she knew was that
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: something had changed in the air pressure of her life,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: and she could not locate the source. There is something
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: in this case that resists a clean resolution, not legally
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: but humanly. Mason was convicted, the sentence was final, But
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: the mechanism that made it possible, the slow removal of
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: a person's reference points until the ground beneath them belongs
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: to someone else, that does not have a verdict. It
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: has only a recognition. Emily Simpson went back to Sadler Arms,
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: back to Persemmon, back to the handwritten calendar, and the
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Thursday shift, and the ordinary coordinates of a life that
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: had always been hers. She went back to work. She
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: asked one question of the investigator who interviewed her, and
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: the question was whether something she had done, a small
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: compliant act, a photograph placed in a drawer, had mattered.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: It had more than she knew. Linda Hargrove had kept
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: a garden at four fourteen Delwood Court for twenty two years.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Renee Hargrove Pratt said at sentencing that it had gone
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: to seed by the time anyone thought to look. That
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: is the image that stays, not the court room, not
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: the sentence, A garden that nobody tended, going quietly nothing,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: while the house beside it was staged to look like
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: a life still being lived. This show is made by Obomedia.