Latest / Relationship Cheating Stories / The Casserole Stamp That Exposed a Romantic Con Artist
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: The stamp on the bottom of the casserole dish read
- 0:07Speaker 1: Fort Drum, New York. Far from a woman who had
- 0:10Speaker 1: never once left Pelham County, Roy Callahan noticed it on
- 0:13Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning in July. Standing on the porch steps
- 0:17Speaker 1: in 91 degree heat, and he had no idea yet
- 0:20Speaker 1: that a single military inventory mark was about to unravel
- 0:23Speaker 1: eight months of carefully constructed lies. Roy was a meter
- 0:27Speaker 1: reader for Pelham Municipal Utilities. Eleven years on the north route.
- 0:31Speaker 1: He had seen overdue bills, broken equipment, the occasional dog
- 0:34Speaker 1: that needed watching. What he had not seen in eleven
- 0:37Speaker 1: years was a casserole dish crusted with old rice and
- 0:41Speaker 1: chicken sitting on a porch railing in the middle of summer.
- 0:44Speaker 1: The dish had been there long enough that the food
- 0:46Speaker 1: had dried and darkened in the heat. The smell was
- 0:49Speaker 1: the second thing he noticed. The sound was the first.
- 0:52Speaker 1: From somewhere inside the house, a bird was calling. Roy
- 0:55Speaker 1: logged the electricity readings. 341 kilowatt hours above the previous
- 1:01Speaker 1: month itself already high and triggered a standard alert before
- 1:05Speaker 1: he left he did not know whose dish it was
- 1:08Speaker 1: he did not know whose bird that was but he
- 1:10Speaker 1: wrote it all down because 11 years on a route
- 1:13Speaker 1: teaches a person what belongs and what does not that
- 1:16Speaker 1: dish had been sent in may by a man named
- 1:19Speaker 1: donald bailey except donald bailey did not exist Tracy Gray
- 1:23Speaker 1: had taught third grade at Warwick Elementary for 19 years.
- 1:27Speaker 1: She knew how to read a room full of 8-year-olds
- 1:30Speaker 1: at 7.45 in the morning. She knew which child had
- 1:33Speaker 1: not eaten breakfast and which one was carrying something heavier
- 1:36Speaker 1: than a backpack. Her colleagues described her as the kind
- 1:39Speaker 1: of teacher who noticed. She took early retirement to care
- 1:42Speaker 1: for her mother, Evelyn. It was not a difficult decision.
- 1:46Speaker 1: Evelyn had raised Tracy alone in the house at 4
- 1:48Speaker 1: Warwick Lane, the same house where Tracy had grown up.
- 1:52Speaker 1: After Tracy's father died when she was 20, there were
- 1:55Speaker 1: no siblings, no one else to take the calls at
- 1:58Speaker 1: 2 in the morning when Evelyn's breathing changed. Evelyn died
- 2:01Speaker 1: of congestive heart failure in November. Tracy was 54 years old,
- 2:06Speaker 1: living alone in the house where she was born, with
- 2:09Speaker 1: no classroom to return to and no mother to wake
- 2:12Speaker 1: up for. The one living presence in the house was Pepper,
- 2:15Speaker 1: a gray and yellow cockatiel, 12 years old, purchased by
- 2:19Speaker 1: Evelyn years before her illness progressed. Pepper had a schedule
- 2:23Speaker 1: that had not changed in six years. 7.15 in the morning,
- 2:27Speaker 1: pellets and fresh water, noon chopped vegetables, 4.30 in the afternoon,
- 2:32Speaker 1: a missed bath, and 20 minutes of flight. Tracy had
- 2:35Speaker 1: maintained that schedule without exception because Pepper was Evelyn's bird
- 2:39Speaker 1: first and because routine was the only architecture holding the
- 2:43Speaker 1: days together. Six weeks after Evelyn's death, Tracy's doctor recommended
- 2:47Speaker 1: she find a grief support community. Tracy joined Steadfast Circle,
- 2:52Speaker 1: an online group of roughly 800 members, most of them
- 2:55Speaker 1: navigating the loss of a spouse or parent. She was
- 2:58Speaker 1: hesitant at first. She described herself later as someone who
- 3:01Speaker 1: had spent her career listening. not speaking. Her first real
- 3:05Speaker 1: post was about mornings, the silence where the phone used
- 3:08Speaker 1: to ring. The orange juice, Evelyn's specific brand, still in
- 3:12Speaker 1: the refrigerator because she could not bring herself to throw
- 3:15Speaker 1: it away. It was the kind of detail that only
- 3:17Speaker 1: makes sense to someone who has lost someone slowly enough
- 3:21Speaker 1: to memorize every small thing. A man named Donald Bailey
- 3:24Speaker 1: responded within the hour. He wrote that his wife had
- 3:27Speaker 1: kept a jar of raspberry jam. a particular brand, from
- 3:31Speaker 1: a particular farmer's market. He had moved it to the
- 3:33Speaker 1: back of the shelf. He said he still did not
- 3:36Speaker 1: know what to do with it. It was an almost
- 3:38Speaker 1: perfect echo. Donald Bailey's profile photograph showed a man who
- 3:42Speaker 1: appeared to be around 60 years old, silver hair, a
- 3:46Speaker 1: fleece vest, standing on a trail somewhere in the American West,
- 3:50Speaker 1: squinting slightly into the light. His bio listed him as
- 3:53Speaker 1: a retired civil engineer from Spokane, Washington. Widower. His wife
- 3:58Speaker 1: had died of ovarian cancer in September. He was raising
- 4:01Speaker 1: his teenage granddaughter alone. The man in the photograph was
- 4:05Speaker 1: actually Stephen Pollard, 61 years old, a landscaping contractor from Bosman, Montana,
- 4:11Speaker 1: married for 32 years. He had never been to Spokane.
- 4:15Speaker 1: He had never been in a grief support group. He
- 4:18Speaker 1: had no idea his image had been taken from a
- 4:20Speaker 1: public Instagram account and used to build a life he
- 4:23Speaker 1: had never lived. The name Donald Bailey belonged to a
- 4:26Speaker 1: retired school teacher in Flagstaff, Arizona. Donald Bailey was 70
- 4:31Speaker 1: years old. He had, at some point in the years before,
- 4:34Speaker 1: received a handful of confusing messages from strangers. He never
- 4:38Speaker 1: looked into it. The man behind the profile had a
- 4:41Speaker 1: real name, but Tracy did not know it yet. And
- 4:43Speaker 1: for the next seven months, she would build something with
- 4:46Speaker 1: him that felt entirely real because he had studied her
- 4:49Speaker 1: posts long enough to know exactly which words would feel
- 4:52Speaker 1: like proof. The messages came every day. Not one or two.
- 4:56Speaker 1: Every day. For four weeks, then longer. Donald wrote in
- 5:00Speaker 1: the mornings before Tracy had finished her coffee. He wrote
- 5:03Speaker 1: late at night after he said he had put his
- 5:05Speaker 1: granddaughter to bed. The cadence was so consistent that it
- 5:08Speaker 1: started to feel like a second heartbeat. By February, they
- 5:11Speaker 1: were on video calls. Donald always initiated. And something odd
- 5:15Speaker 1: happened each time. Within a few minutes, the video would freeze, drop, struggle.
- 5:21Speaker 1: They would switch to audio only. His connection, he explained,
- 5:24Speaker 1: was unreliable out near Spokane in winter. Tracy accepted this.
- 5:29Speaker 1: She was not suspicious. She was grateful for the voice.
- 5:32Speaker 1: In February, Donald proposed a meeting. His granddaughter had a
- 5:36Speaker 1: specialist appointment in Charlotte, four hours from Pelham. They could
- 5:41Speaker 1: meet there. Tracy started to plan for it. Then the
- 5:44Speaker 1: appointment moved. Then it moved again. Then the girl had
- 5:47Speaker 1: a setback, a health complication again. that meant travel was impossible.
- 5:52Speaker 1: He sent Tracy something instead. A pressed wildflower, tucked inside
- 5:56Speaker 1: a card. A flower from a trail he said they
- 5:58Speaker 1: had walked together. Tracy kept the card. The postmark on
- 6:02Speaker 1: the envelope was from a mail forwarding service in Reno, Nevada.
- 6:06Speaker 1: Tracy did not notice. There was no reason she would have.
- 6:09Speaker 1: In March, Donald called with something harder to share. A
- 6:12Speaker 1: gap in a consulting contract, he said. A cash flow problem.
- 6:16Speaker 1: Short term. He needed $ 6, 000. He was embarrassed to ask.
- 6:20Speaker 1: Tracy sent the money. Two weeks later, he paid it back.
- 6:23Speaker 1: Every dollar. Detective Paul Hensley, from the Pelham County Sheriff's
- 6:27Speaker 1: Economic Crimes Unit, would later describe that repayment as the
- 6:30Speaker 1: most methodically calculated element of the entire scheme. Not the flower.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Not the echo about the raspberry jam. The repayment. It
- 6:38Speaker 1: reset Tracy's doubt and established something more durable than affection.
- 6:43Speaker 1: It established a pattern. Donald was someone who kept his word.
- 6:47Speaker 1: By June, three more transfers had followed. The total across
- 6:51Speaker 1: four transactions was $ 17, 000. Tracy was not a woman who
- 6:56Speaker 1: gave money carelessly. She was a retired school teacher who
- 6:59Speaker 1: had spent her savings on her mother's end-of-life care. She
- 7:02Speaker 1: gave because she believed she was helping someone she loved,
- 7:05Speaker 1: someone who had proven himself reliable. Her friend, Brenda, noticed
- 7:09Speaker 1: something shifting. Not an accusation. A question. The kind a
- 7:13Speaker 1: careful friend asks once. Tracy heard it. She did not
- 7:16Speaker 1: cut Brenda off. She simply became less available. Gradually. Quietly.
- 7:21Speaker 1: The way a door closes without a sound. If you
- 7:24Speaker 1: pull it slowly enough. That was June. By early July,
- 7:27Speaker 1: Pepper's 430 flight had stopped. On the eighth day of
- 7:30Speaker 1: active investigation, Paul Hensley received a file from a sheriff's
- 7:34Speaker 1: department in eastern Tennessee. Sandra O'Dum was 60 years old.
- 7:39Speaker 1: Retired hospital administrator, she had filed a complaint eight months
- 7:43Speaker 1: earlier in November. The same month, Tracy was still exchanging
- 7:47Speaker 1: morning messages with Donald. Sandra had lost $ 22, 000 over six
- 7:52Speaker 1: months to a man with a different account name and
- 7:54Speaker 1: a different photograph. Different name, different face. But there was
- 7:58Speaker 1: one detail in Sandra's statement that Hensley read twice. The granddaughter, sick.
- 8:03Speaker 1: A specialist, a travel complication, a setback. Sandra's statement described
- 8:08Speaker 1: the scenario almost word for word, not similar, nearly identical.
- 8:12Speaker 1: The phrasing matched closely enough that Hensley, according to investigative records,
- 8:17Speaker 1: noted it in the margin. Two women, two states, two
- 8:20Speaker 1: fictional men, one sick child who did not exist. Cynthia
- 8:24Speaker 1: Riley had been moderating Steadfast Circle for three years. She
- 8:28Speaker 1: was a volunteer, not law enforcement, not a licensed investigator.
- 8:32Speaker 1: She ran the group because she had lost her husband
- 8:34Speaker 1: and found the community useful. and then found herself wanting
- 8:37Speaker 1: to protect it. When Hensley contacted her about the Donald
- 8:40Speaker 1: Bailey account, she started looking on her own. She used
- 8:43Speaker 1: a different reverse image search tool than Hensley had. The
- 8:47Speaker 1: result came back to a public Instagram account. The man
- 8:50Speaker 1: in Donald's profile photograph was Stephen Pollard, 61, a landscaping
- 8:55Speaker 1: contractor from Bozeman, Montana, married for 32 years. He was
- 9:00Speaker 1: photographed on a hiking trail with friends. He was squinting
- 9:03Speaker 1: into the afternoon light. He had no idea. Now there
- 9:06Speaker 1: were two convergence points pulling toward a single location, the
- 9:09Speaker 1: mail forwarding address from the Reno service, and a prepaid
- 9:12Speaker 1: phone number documented in both the Pelham County case and
- 9:15Speaker 1: Sandra Odom's Tennessee complaint. Investigators traced the phone's purchase to
- 9:20Speaker 1: a convenience store in Henderson, Nevada. Security footage showed a
- 9:23Speaker 1: heavyset white man, approximately 50 years old, wearing a baseball cap,
- 9:28Speaker 1: paying cash. His face was partially obscured. His build was not.
- 9:33Speaker 1: the casserole dish on Tracy's porch, the one Donald had
- 9:36Speaker 1: sent in May saying it had belonged to his late wife,
- 9:39Speaker 1: retrieved from storage, carried something Cutler had not considered, a
- 9:43Speaker 1: small inventory stamp, a commissary mark from Fort Drum, a
- 9:47Speaker 1: military installation in upstate New York, far from a woman
- 9:50Speaker 1: who had never once left Pelham County. Records showed the
- 9:53Speaker 1: dish had been purchased at an estate sale in Reno, Nevada.
- 9:58Speaker 1: The stamp was not suspicious by its but it was specific,
- 10:01Speaker 1: it was checkable, and it connected the dish to a
- 10:04Speaker 1: geography that connected to the forwarding address, which connected to
- 10:08Speaker 1: the phone purchase, which connected to a man paying cash
- 10:11Speaker 1: in Henderson. Everything was pointing west. Picture the investigation on
- 10:15Speaker 1: day 16. Hensley has two victims, two states, one granddaughter,
- 10:21Speaker 1: who never existed. He has a mail forwarding address in Reno,
- 10:25Speaker 1: a prepaid phone bought in Henderson, a casserole dish with
- 10:29Speaker 1: a Fort Drum stamp that traveled across three states. He
- 10:33Speaker 1: has a photograph of a man who is not Donald Bailey,
- 10:36Speaker 1: and a name that belongs to a retired school teacher
- 10:39Speaker 1: in Flagstaff who never understood why strangers kept messaging him.
- 10:43Speaker 1: Every thread runs toward Nevada, the first version of events
- 10:47Speaker 1: that seemed obvious, someone operating out of Reno. The forwarding
- 10:50Speaker 1: service was there. The estate sale, where the dish was purchased,
- 10:54Speaker 1: was there. The phone was bought one hour east, in Henderson,
- 10:57Speaker 1: but Reno was where the physical trail concentrated. Investigators focused
- 11:01Speaker 1: on Reno first. There was logic to it, but the
- 11:04Speaker 1: financial thread moved differently. Tracing the wire from Tracy's bank
- 11:08Speaker 1: account required federal cooperation. The money had passed through two
- 11:12Speaker 1: intermediary accounts before it settled. When analysts reached the end
- 11:16Speaker 1: of that chain, the account was registered in Henderson, Nevada,
- 11:20Speaker 1: not Reno. Henderson. And the account holder was Warren Cutler,
- 11:24Speaker 1: 48 years old, resident of Henderson. Hensley pulled Cutler's record.
- 11:29Speaker 1: Two prior fraud convictions, both reduced to misdemeanors, both from
- 11:33Speaker 1: 11 years earlier. Nothing recent. Nothing federal. A man who
- 11:38Speaker 1: had learned, somewhere along the way, to operate at the
- 11:41Speaker 1: edge of what gets charged. When investigators arrived at Cutler's
- 11:45Speaker 1: address on a Tuesday in late July, 17 days after
- 11:49Speaker 1: Roy Callahan heard Pepper through the porch screen, Cutler did
- 11:52Speaker 1: not deny it. He did not ask for time to think.
- 11:55Speaker 1: He sat down and explained it. He described the scheme
- 11:58Speaker 1: as professional. His word, he had run four variations of
- 12:02Speaker 1: it over six years. He named Tracy Gray. He named
- 12:05Speaker 1: Sandra Odom. He identified a third victim with enough detail
- 12:09Speaker 1: to be traced. A fourth he mentioned only by state
- 12:13Speaker 1: and approximate dollar amount. That person's identity had not been
- 12:16Speaker 1: confirmed by the time he entered his plea. He had
- 12:20Speaker 1: not anticipated that the Fort Drum stamp would matter. He
- 12:23Speaker 1: had bought a dish at an estate sale because it
- 12:25Speaker 1: looked like something a widower might keep. He had not
- 12:28Speaker 1: examined what was printed on the bottom. Cutler pleaded guilty
- 12:31Speaker 1: to two counts of wire fraud and one count of
- 12:34Speaker 1: identity theft. Federal charges. The sentence handed down was 61 months.
- 12:39Speaker 1: There is something worth sitting with in the way this unraveled.
- 12:42Speaker 1: The repayment in March, the $ 6, 000 returned on schedule the
- 12:46Speaker 1: element Hensley called the most calculated part of the scheme,
- 12:50Speaker 1: was designed to close Tracy's last window of doubt. It
- 12:53Speaker 1: worked exactly as intended. but it also left a financial record,
- 12:57Speaker 1: a transfer in, a transfer out, traceable, in both directions,
- 13:02Speaker 1: if you knew to look. The thing built to make
- 13:04Speaker 1: Tracy trust completely was the same thing that eventually put
- 13:08Speaker 1: Warren Cutler's name at the end of a wire trail.
- 13:11Speaker 1: Warren Cutler entered his plea on a Thursday morning. There
- 13:14Speaker 1: was no trial, no courtroom argument about what the evidence
- 13:18Speaker 1: proved or didn't. He had already explained it himself, in
- 13:21Speaker 1: his own words, sitting across from investigators, who had followed
- 13:24Speaker 1: a wire trail from Pelham County to Henderson, Nevada. The
- 13:28Speaker 1: federal charges were two counts of wire fraud and one
- 13:32Speaker 1: count of identity theft. In the hallway outside the courtroom,
- 13:35Speaker 1: Paul Hensley gave no statement to reporters. There was nothing
- 13:39Speaker 1: ceremonial in how this ended. A number on a docket.
- 13:42Speaker 1: A man let out. A case marked closed. But closed
- 13:45Speaker 1: for whom? Sandra Odom had filed her complaint eight months
- 13:48Speaker 1: before Roy Callahan ever walked up the path at Fort
- 13:52Speaker 1: Warwick Lane. Eight months. Her $ 22, 000 was gone. The name
- 13:57Speaker 1: on her case was different. The photographs were different, but
- 14:00Speaker 1: the story Cutler had told her, the sick granddaughter, the
- 14:03Speaker 1: rescheduled visits, the small gifts that arrived smelling of sincerity,
- 14:08Speaker 1: was nearly identical, almost word for word. Two women in
- 14:11Speaker 1: two states, both grieving. Both reached through the same architecture
- 14:15Speaker 1: of manufactured trust, and the cases had not connected until
- 14:19Speaker 1: day eight of Tracy Gray's investigation. That gap matters, not
- 14:24Speaker 1: as an accusation, but as a fact about how these
- 14:27Speaker 1: schemes survive. They survive because each victim is made to
- 14:31Speaker 1: feel singular, made to feel chosen. The design of the
- 14:34Speaker 1: isolation ensures that no two women ever compare notes. Sandra
- 14:38Speaker 1: Odom did not know Tracy Gray existed. Tracy Gray did
- 14:41Speaker 1: not know Sandra Odom had already paid for the same lesson.
- 14:44Speaker 1: The fourth victim, the one Cutler mentioned only by state
- 14:47Speaker 1: and approximate dollar amount, had not been identified by the
- 14:51Speaker 1: time he entered his plea. She may still not know
- 14:53Speaker 1: what happened to her. She may still believe she was
- 14:56Speaker 1: unlucky in love, rather than deliberately targeted. That thread remains open.
- 15:01Speaker 1: Cynthia Riley did not wait for the legal process to
- 15:03Speaker 1: finish before she acted, within days of learning what had
- 15:07Speaker 1: happened to Tracy. She posted a warning inside Steadfast Circle.
- 15:10Speaker 1: She kept her language careful and did not name Cutler.
- 15:14Speaker 1: She described the pattern, the widower with a sick grandchild,
- 15:17Speaker 1: the escalating intimacy, the financial request, followed by a repayment
- 15:21Speaker 1: designed to dissolve doubt. She asked anyone who recognized it
- 15:24Speaker 1: to reach out. 243 responses came in over four days.
- 15:28Speaker 1: 14 of those contacts described details specific enough that Riley
- 15:33Speaker 1: forwarded them to Hensley directly. Whether any of those contacts
- 15:36Speaker 1: became additional cases in the record is not confirmed. What
- 15:39Speaker 1: is confirmed is that Riley did not abandon the group.
- 15:43Speaker 1: She was still moderating Steadfast Circle after the plea was entered.
- 15:47Speaker 1: 800 people who had found each other through grief were
- 15:49Speaker 1: still there. She had made the decision that the space
- 15:52Speaker 1: itself was not the problem. The predator was. By late August,
- 15:56Speaker 1: on a Wednesday afternoon at 4.30, Pepper flew again. It
- 15:59Speaker 1: was the first time since before Roy Callahan had walked
- 16:02Speaker 1: up the front path, the routine that had held for
- 16:04Speaker 1: six years, the nebulization, the 20 minutes of open air inside.
- 16:08Speaker 1: 4 Warwick Lane had simply stopped when Tracy stopped being
- 16:12Speaker 1: able to hold it. It resumed the way most things
- 16:14Speaker 1: resume after something breaks, quietly, without announcement. on an ordinary afternoon.
- 16:19Speaker 1: Tracy Gray is 54 years old. She taught third grade
- 16:23Speaker 1: for 19 years at Warwick Elementary, the school that shared
- 16:26Speaker 1: a name with the street she grew up on. She
- 16:29Speaker 1: gave that up to care for her mother. She lost
- 16:31Speaker 1: her mother in November. She spent the following December looking
- 16:34Speaker 1: for somewhere to put the weight of that, and she
- 16:37Speaker 1: found a forum where people said they understood. She was
- 16:39Speaker 1: not naive. She was not foolish. She was a woman
- 16:42Speaker 1: whose nervous system had absorbed too much loss in too
- 16:45Speaker 1: short a time, and she reached for connection the way
- 16:48Speaker 1: any person reaches for connection after a season of silence.
- 16:51Speaker 1: What Cutler found was not a weakness. He found a
- 16:54Speaker 1: person who still believed that other people grieved the way
- 16:57Speaker 1: she did. There is something the investigation never fully resolved,
- 17:01Speaker 1: and it is worth saying plainly. The real Donald Bailey,
- 17:04Speaker 1: 70 years old, a retired teacher in Flagstaff, Arizona, had
- 17:08Speaker 1: received confusing messages from strangers years before this case. He
- 17:13Speaker 1: never investigated them. He never knew his name was being
- 17:16Speaker 1: used this way. The real Stephen Pollard, 61 years old,
- 17:20Speaker 1: a landscaping contractor in Bozeman, Montana, had his photographs pulled
- 17:24Speaker 1: from a public Instagram account and handed to a man
- 17:27Speaker 1: he had never met, to be used as a face
- 17:29Speaker 1: for something Pollard would have no word for. Both men
- 17:32Speaker 1: were instruments, neither knew it. That is the quiet part
- 17:35Speaker 1: of the architecture. The scam does not just steal from
- 17:38Speaker 1: its target, it borrows other people's entire lives, their faces,
- 17:42Speaker 1: their names, their ordinary photographs taken on ordinary trails, and
- 17:47Speaker 1: turns those lives into weapons without their knowledge or consent.
- 17:50Speaker 1: 61 months. It is a number. Whether it accounts for
- 17:54Speaker 1: what it cost Sandra Odom, or what it cost Tracy Gray,
- 17:57Speaker 1: or what it cost the woman whose name was never confirmed,
- 18:00Speaker 1: that is not a question the sentencing document answers. What
- 18:03Speaker 1: the record does show is this, the thing that finally
- 18:06Speaker 1: broke the scheme, was not a sophisticated forensic tool. It
- 18:09Speaker 1: was a casserole dish sitting on a porch railing in
- 18:13Speaker 1: 91-degree heat, a meter reader who had been walking the
- 18:16Speaker 1: same route for 11 years and recognized when something on
- 18:19Speaker 1: it was wrong, a bird still calling out from inside
- 18:22Speaker 1: a house where the routines had stopped. Pepper called out
- 18:25Speaker 1: because she needed her 4.30 flight, because she had needed
- 18:29Speaker 1: it every day for six years, and no one had
- 18:32Speaker 1: stopped her from needing it. She had no understanding of
- 18:34Speaker 1: what had happened inside that house. She only knew the
- 18:37Speaker 1: schedule had broken, and she said so. She was right to.
- 18:41Speaker 1: This show is made by Oboe Media.