Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Loved Me, Then He Took My Life Savings: The Surveyor's Binder
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: A land surveyor named Todd Stein walked a county road
- 0:08Speaker 1: culvert in Renner Township one October morning and found a
- 0:13Speaker 1: leather bound financial portfolio sitting on the concrete lip thirty
- 0:17Speaker 1: feet inside the tree line. The binder was water damaged
- 0:21Speaker 1: freeze s thawed at the edges, but the gold leaf
- 0:24Speaker 1: on the cover was still legible. Roy Andrews. Inside the
- 0:28Speaker 1: front pocket was a wire transfer. Authorization for the sending
- 0:32Speaker 1: account was clear. The amount was clear, two hundred forty
- 0:37Speaker 1: thousand dollars. The date read October ninth, twenty nineteen. Someone
- 0:42Speaker 1: had carried this into the treeline and set it down,
- 0:46Speaker 1: not burned it, not buried it, set it down. That
- 0:50Speaker 1: single act, precise and inexplicable, is what started everything. What
- 0:55Speaker 1: investigators would uncover in the weeks that followed was not
- 0:58Speaker 1: a robbery or a break in. It was something slower
- 1:02Speaker 1: and more deliberate. A licensed financial adviser had spent nearly
- 1:06Speaker 1: a year dismantling one man's sense of reality, peace by peace,
- 1:11Speaker 1: until that man handed over every dollar his mother had
- 1:15Speaker 1: left him. And Roy Andrews did not even know it
- 1:18Speaker 1: had happened until a detective knocked on his door. There
- 1:21Speaker 1: are two things that make this case worth sitting with.
- 1:24Speaker 1: The first is the method text book, invisible and almost perfect.
- 1:30Speaker 1: The second is the detail that broke it open. Not
- 1:34Speaker 1: a confession, not a tip, a surveyor a culvert, a
- 1:38Speaker 1: binder that should have been gone. Roy Andrews was forty
- 1:41Speaker 1: eight years old in the fall of two thousand nineteen.
- 1:45Speaker 1: He taught chemistry at a high school in Renner Township,
- 1:48Speaker 1: a small community in Brackett County where the school parking
- 1:52Speaker 1: lot and the grain elevator were the two busiest addresses
- 1:55Speaker 1: in town. He had been there for years, long enough
- 2:00Speaker 1: that students from his early classes had kids of their own. Now,
- 2:03Speaker 1: his life, after his divorce from Sandra cho had settled
- 2:07Speaker 1: into something quiet and self sufficient. He rented an apartment
- 2:11Speaker 1: above a hardware store on Millbrook Avenue. He grated papers
- 2:15Speaker 1: at the kitchen table. He kept up a close friendship
- 2:18Speaker 1: with Greg Pauson, the shop teacher, and he called his sister,
- 2:22Speaker 1: Brenda Mays, every Wednesday night at ten fifteen, almost without exception.
- 2:27Speaker 1: Brenda lived in Columbus. The calls were not dramatic. They
- 2:31Speaker 1: were the architecture of a life that had learned to
- 2:34Speaker 1: be smaller than at once planned. The one rupture in
- 2:37Speaker 1: that life came in March of two thousand nineteen, when
- 2:41Speaker 1: Roy's mother, Patricia Andrews, died. Patricia left him two hundred
- 2:45Speaker 1: forty thousand dollars. Roy did not move quickly with it.
- 2:49Speaker 1: According to his sister, he held it for months without
- 2:52Speaker 1: touching it. It still felt like her money. Brenda later
- 2:56Speaker 1: said he knew he needed to do something responsible with it.
- 3:00Speaker 1: He was not the type to let a decision like
- 3:02Speaker 1: that slide. But he also was not the type to
- 3:05Speaker 1: trust easily, and he had no experience with investment accounts
- 3:09Speaker 1: or financial advisers. He had met Ryan Cooper the previous
- 3:13Speaker 1: January at a dinner hosted by Jeff Moran, the vice
- 3:17Speaker 1: principal at Roy's school. Cooper was thirty nine, independently licensed,
- 3:23Speaker 1: with an office at the Commerce Center in Brackett County
- 3:26Speaker 1: and roughly forty clients on his books. He drove a
- 3:29Speaker 1: least audie. He asked good questions, and he listened carefully
- 3:33Speaker 1: when people answered. At the dinner, Roy noticed him Later
- 3:38Speaker 1: at a Chamber of Commerce mixer. Roy crossed the room
- 3:41Speaker 1: and asked for his card that detail matters. Roy initiated
- 3:45Speaker 1: the contact Cooper had not pursued him directly. He simply
- 3:49Speaker 1: made himself available, and Roy walked toward him on his own.
- 3:54Speaker 1: By February, their contact had become frequent. Phone records reconstructed
- 3:59Speaker 1: later would show a pattern investigators and therapist Cynthia Sawyer
- 4:04Speaker 1: would describe as a love bombing phase, consistent attention affirmation,
- 4:09Speaker 1: the impression of a deepening friendship. Cooper remembered things Roy
- 4:14Speaker 1: mentioned in passing. He asked about Roy's mother, He showed
- 4:18Speaker 1: up where Roy would be. None of it looked like manipulation.
- 4:22Speaker 1: It looked like care. By May of twenty nineteen, Roy
- 4:27Speaker 1: had transferred the full two hundred forty thousand dollars into
- 4:30Speaker 1: a Cooper managed account. He signed the paperwork himself. Nobody
- 4:35Speaker 1: pressured him in any way. He could have named Brenda.
- 4:39Speaker 1: Mays noticed something shift between August and September. The Wednesday
- 4:43Speaker 1: calls kept coming, but Roy sounded different. Smaller somehow, was
- 4:49Speaker 1: how she described it. Later, less certain. He still mentioned Cooper,
- 4:53Speaker 1: but not the way he had in the spring when
- 4:56Speaker 1: the name came up with something close to warmth. By September,
- 4:59Speaker 1: Roy Roy had also signed a discretionary authorization for giving
- 5:03Speaker 1: Cooper the legal right to execute transfers on his behalf
- 5:07Speaker 1: without seeking approval first. Roy did not ask a second
- 5:11Speaker 1: adviser to review it. He did not flag it to anyone.
- 5:15Speaker 1: He trusted Cooper. That trust had been constructed carefully over
- 5:20Speaker 1: nine months, and by September it was the only financial
- 5:23Speaker 1: framework Roy had. On the morning of October seventh, twenty nineteen,
- 5:29Speaker 1: Ryan Cooper drove to Roy Andrews's apartment on Millbrook Avenue
- 5:33Speaker 1: without calling ahead. Roy let him in. That was the
- 5:37Speaker 1: kind of relationship they had built over nine months. You
- 5:40Speaker 1: did not need to announce yourself. Cooper stayed long enough
- 5:44Speaker 1: to accept coffee four minutes maybe five while Roy was
- 5:49Speaker 1: in the kitchen. That small window was where everything that
- 5:52Speaker 1: followed was made possible. Roy's account login credentials were written
- 5:56Speaker 1: on a notepad in the top desk drawer. Paper accessed
- 6:00Speaker 1: that notepad. He left without anyone knowing what he had taken.
- 6:04Speaker 1: Two days later, on October ninth, two hundred forty thousand
- 6:08Speaker 1: dollars moved out of Roy's account. The transfer was routed
- 6:12Speaker 1: to an entity called Harrington Capital Advisors, LLC, registered in Delaware.
- 6:18Speaker 1: The account emptied completely within six hours from there, funds
- 6:22Speaker 1: passed through two intermediary accounts before converting into cryptocurrency inside
- 6:28Speaker 1: an exchange. At that point, the chain broke. The money
- 6:32Speaker 1: did not stop moving, It simply became untraceable. Roy did
- 6:36Speaker 1: not know any of this had happened. He found out
- 6:39Speaker 1: when a detective knocked on his door. But here is
- 6:42Speaker 1: the thing about that October ninth transfer. It was not
- 6:45Speaker 1: illegal on its face. Cooper had obtained a discretionary authorization
- 6:50Speaker 1: from Roy the previous month. That form gave Cooper the
- 6:53Speaker 1: legal right to execute transactions without seeking Roy's approval. First.
- 6:59Speaker 1: Roy signed it himself. He trusted the man who handed
- 7:02Speaker 1: it to him. The form lived in the front pocket
- 7:05Speaker 1: of a leather bound financial portfolio binder. That binder was
- 7:09Speaker 1: found thirty feet inside a tree line, resting on the
- 7:12Speaker 1: lip of a culvert by a land surveyor named Todd stein.
- 7:16Speaker 1: Stein was running a property line that week. He saw
- 7:20Speaker 1: the binder, photographed it, and called the county sheriff. The
- 7:24Speaker 1: binder was water damaged softened by Friesthal cycles. Roy Andrews's
- 7:30Speaker 1: name was embossed on the cover in gold leaf. Inside
- 7:33Speaker 1: the front pocket, the wire transfer authorization form was still
- 7:37Speaker 1: partially legible. The sending account number was clear. The receiving account,
- 7:43Speaker 1: Harrington Capital Advisers, was visible. The amount two hundred forty
- 7:47Speaker 1: thousand dollars the date October nine. Cooper had driven the
- 7:53Speaker 1: County Road outside Renner Township on the same day the
- 7:56Speaker 1: transfer executed. Cell tower location data confirmed the route. He stopped,
- 8:03Speaker 1: He walked the binder thirty feet into the trees, and
- 8:06Speaker 1: then he drove away. He did not destroy it. That
- 8:10Speaker 1: choice would matter later. Deputy Marcus Webb traced the wire
- 8:15Speaker 1: within forty eight hours of Steyne's call. The destination was
- 8:19Speaker 1: Harrington Capital Advisers LC. When Webb pulled the Delaware registration,
- 8:24Speaker 1: no employees appeared, no physical address, no regulatory filings. The
- 8:30Speaker 1: LLC had been registered in two thousand seventeen using the
- 8:34Speaker 1: identity of a man named Denis Harrington. Denis Harrington had
- 8:38Speaker 1: died in two thousand fifteen. Harrington Capital Advisers LLC existed
- 8:44Speaker 1: entirely to receive money and disappeared. Cooper's name appeared nowhere
- 8:50Speaker 1: in the paperwork. That was the first loop. A dead
- 8:53Speaker 1: man's identity, a shell company, a binder in the woods.
- 8:58Speaker 1: Each one pointed inward toward a center the investigators could
- 9:03Speaker 1: not yet see. Detective Nora Page pulled the thread in
- 9:06Speaker 1: a different direction. She searched state and federal complaint databases
- 9:10Speaker 1: for anything connected to the financial pattern web head outlined.
- 9:15Speaker 1: On October twenty second, she found it. A complaint filed
- 9:19Speaker 1: in Indiana in twenty fifteen named a financial adviser operating
- 9:24Speaker 1: under the name Michael Trent in Harmon County. The victim
- 9:28Speaker 1: was a sixty one year old widow named Beverly Nast.
- 9:32Speaker 1: She had lost one hundred ninety thousand dollars. The complaint
- 9:36Speaker 1: described the same progression a trusted relationship, a discretionary authorization,
- 9:42Speaker 1: a transfer to an entity that dissolved before anyone could
- 9:45Speaker 1: follow it. Page obtained a photograph from the Indiana file.
- 9:50Speaker 1: She showed it to Roy. He identified the man in
- 9:53Speaker 1: the photograph as Brian Cooper. Beverly Nast, contacted by investigators,
- 9:58Speaker 1: identified the same f photograph within one hour. She was
- 10:02Speaker 1: now living on Social Security. Cooper was arrested October twenty
- 10:06Speaker 1: eighth at a motel outside Columbus. He had not yet
- 10:10Speaker 1: left Ohio. The question that kept surfacing during the investigation
- 10:14Speaker 1: was not how the money moved. Webb had mapped that
- 10:17Speaker 1: within two days. The question was how Roy Andrews, a
- 10:21Speaker 1: forty eight year old chemistry teacher with a graduate degree
- 10:24Speaker 1: and thirty years of professional discipline, had arrived at a
- 10:28Speaker 1: place where a man he met at a dinner party
- 10:30Speaker 1: could empty his entire inheritance without his knowledge. Therapist Cynthia Sawyer,
- 10:36Speaker 1: who entered the case later to help document the manipulation pattern,
- 10:40Speaker 1: described it in phases. The first phase was access. Cooper
- 10:45Speaker 1: had not targeted Roy directly. Roy walked across the room
- 10:49Speaker 1: at the chamber mixer and asked for Cooper's card. That
- 10:53Speaker 1: moment looked like Roy's choice in a narrow sense. It was,
- 10:58Speaker 1: but Cooper had placed himself at the dinner Jeff Moran hosted.
- 11:02Speaker 1: He had placed himself at the mixer. He had made
- 11:05Speaker 1: himself consistently warmly available in exactly the spaces where a
- 11:10Speaker 1: recently divorced man trying to rebuild a life would look
- 11:13Speaker 1: for connection. Roy's mother, Patricia, had died in March. The
- 11:17Speaker 1: inheritance arrived weeks after the funeral. Roy had not told
- 11:21Speaker 1: many people about it. He told Cooper. What followed between
- 11:25Speaker 1: February and April reconstructed from phone records, was the Fayse
- 11:29Speaker 1: Sawyer described as love bombing. Cooper called consistently. He remembered
- 11:34Speaker 1: things Roy mentioned in passing his mother's name, a book
- 11:38Speaker 1: he had been meaning to read, a restaurant he liked.
- 11:41Speaker 1: He showed up at events Roy attended, He asked questions,
- 11:44Speaker 1: and then listened to the answers. None of this registered
- 11:47Speaker 1: as a strategy. It registered as friendship. By May, Roy
- 11:52Speaker 1: had placed two hundred forty thousand dollars into a Cooper
- 11:55Speaker 1: managed to count. He had not asked Greg Paulson. He
- 11:59Speaker 1: had not asked his sister Brenda. The trust Cooper had
- 12:03Speaker 1: built did not invite second opinions. That was the architecture
- 12:07Speaker 1: of it. The discretionary authorization in September was the final
- 12:11Speaker 1: structural piece. Roy signed a form that removed the last
- 12:15Speaker 1: procedural barrier between Cooper and the money. No counter signature required,
- 12:20Speaker 1: no secondary review. Roy did not have a second adviser
- 12:24Speaker 1: look at it. He handed over that authority because the
- 12:28Speaker 1: relationship had been constructed over nine months to make that
- 12:32Speaker 1: hand over feel like a natural extension of confidence. Brenda
- 12:36Speaker 1: Mays heard the result in Roy's voice before she understood
- 12:40Speaker 1: what had caused it. He sounded smaller, less certain. The
- 12:45Speaker 1: man who had called her each Wednesday at ten fifteen
- 12:48Speaker 1: sounded like he was choosing his words more carefully than
- 12:51Speaker 1: he used to. She would understand later that this was
- 12:54Speaker 1: the contraction phase. The relationship had served its structural purpose.
- 13:00Speaker 1: The warmth was pulling back. Roy was already being prepared
- 13:04Speaker 1: psychologically for an absence he could not yet name. Cooper
- 13:08Speaker 1: visited on October seventh. He left with credentials written on
- 13:12Speaker 1: a notepad in a desk Troy. Two days later, Roy's
- 13:15Speaker 1: phone showed no alerts, no flags, no notifications. The discretionary
- 13:21Speaker 1: authorization meant the transfer required none. Roy made coffee on
- 13:25Speaker 1: October ninth, the same way he made it every other morning.
- 13:29Speaker 1: He had no idea the account had already been emptied
- 13:32Speaker 1: before noon. Cooper's formal confession came November fourth, three weeks
- 13:38Speaker 1: after his arrest. He confirmed the Harrington Capital Adviser's LC.
- 13:43Speaker 1: He confirmed the Dennis Harrington identity. He confirmed he had
- 13:47Speaker 1: accessed Roy's credentials during the October seventh visit. He confirmed
- 13:51Speaker 1: Beverly Nast as a prior victim under the name Michael Trent.
- 13:55Speaker 1: He offered to assist federal investigators in tracing the cryptocurrency
- 14:00Speaker 1: in exchange for reduced charges. The prosecutor declined picture the
- 14:05Speaker 1: moment Cooper walked into Roy's apartment on October seventh, he
- 14:10Speaker 1: had the discretionary authorization already in place. He had the
- 14:14Speaker 1: shell company registered, funded and ready. The visit had one
- 14:19Speaker 1: remaining purpose, the log in credentials on that notepad. Everything
- 14:23Speaker 1: else had been built across nine months. The four minutes
- 14:27Speaker 1: Roy spent in the kitchen were not an improvised opportunity.
- 14:31Speaker 1: They were the conclusion of a sequence that framing collapses.
- 14:36Speaker 1: One reading of the case, the early interpretation, the one
- 14:39Speaker 1: that felt intuitive, was that Cooper was an opportunist who
- 14:43Speaker 1: had found a vulnerable man and moved when the moment
- 14:46Speaker 1: allowed a lucky encounter at a dinner, an inheritance that
- 14:51Speaker 1: happened to arrive a form signed without full attention. But
- 14:55Speaker 1: Cooper had done this before. Beverly Nast in two thousand fifteen,
- 15:00Speaker 1: one hundred ninety thousand dollars a deceased identity recycled into
- 15:04Speaker 1: a Delaware LLLC two years later. The two week gap
- 15:08Speaker 1: between his Greer Road apartment in December two thousand eighteen
- 15:12Speaker 1: and the commerce center lease in January twenty nineteen. That
- 15:17Speaker 1: gap has no registered residential address attached to it. The
- 15:21Speaker 1: infrastructure for Roy's case was not assembled after the inheritance appeared.
- 15:26Speaker 1: It was assembled while Cooper was still constructing the relationship.
- 15:29Speaker 1: The binder left in the culvert carries its own logic.
- 15:33Speaker 1: Cooper drove the county road with it. He stopped, He
- 15:37Speaker 1: walked thirty feet into the trees. He set it down
- 15:40Speaker 1: on the lip of the culvert and left. He did
- 15:43Speaker 1: not burn it. He did not wait it and sink
- 15:45Speaker 1: it in the creek twenty feet away. He set it down,
- 15:49Speaker 1: water damaged and readable, in a location a surveyor running
- 15:53Speaker 1: a property line would reach within days. Jeff Soto shared
- 15:57Speaker 1: a jail cell with Cooper after the arrest, recorded their conversations.
- 16:02Speaker 1: In one of them, Cooper spoke about Beverly Nast. The
- 16:06Speaker 1: phrase that reached the trial record was this Lonely people
- 16:10Speaker 1: do not ask hard questions. That sentence does not explain
- 16:14Speaker 1: why the binder survived. Cooper knew Roy's habits, he knew
- 16:20Speaker 1: the terrain. He left the one document that could trace
- 16:23Speaker 1: the authorization back to its origin in a location designed
- 16:27Speaker 1: to be found. Whether that was collapse or calculation or something.
- 16:31Speaker 1: The eleven year sentence has not fully resolved. The record
- 16:34Speaker 1: does not say. What the record says is that todd
- 16:37Speaker 1: Stein photographed it on a Tuesday morning, called the sheriff
- 16:40Speaker 1: before noon, and Marcus Webb had a wire transfer destination
- 16:44Speaker 1: before the week was out. The record closes there. Beverly
- 16:49Speaker 1: Nast had been sixty one years old when she filed
- 16:52Speaker 1: her complaint in Indiana in twenty fifteen. She had identified
- 16:56Speaker 1: Cooper from a photograph within one hour of being shown it.
- 17:00Speaker 1: By the time her identification helped close the Bracket County case,
- 17:04Speaker 1: she was living on Social Security. The one ninety thousand
- 17:09Speaker 1: dollars Cooper had taken from her under the name Michael
- 17:12Speaker 1: Trent had not come back either. Two women, two inheritances,
- 17:18Speaker 1: one man man operating with different names in different states,
- 17:23Speaker 1: each time finding someone in transition, each time finding the
- 17:27Speaker 1: window between grief, between grief and stability, where a person
- 17:32Speaker 1: accepts comfort without demanding proof. Cynthia Sawyer, the therapist who
- 17:37Speaker 1: mapped the manipulation phases for investigators, described the pattern this way.
- 17:42Speaker 1: The damage is not only financial, the dismantling of someone's judgment,
- 17:47Speaker 1: their trust in their own perception does not resolve when
- 17:51Speaker 1: the conviction is announced. Roy Andrews had spent most of
- 17:54Speaker 1: two thoy nineteen believing he had found something real. The
- 17:58Speaker 1: process of understanding that the care was engineered, that the
- 18:02Speaker 1: attentiveness was tactical, that the friendship was a sequence of
- 18:06Speaker 1: calculated phases with a transfer amount at the end is
- 18:09Speaker 1: a different kind of loss than the money, and it
- 18:13Speaker 1: does not show up in sentencing guidelines. Roy Andrews was
- 18:17Speaker 1: forty eight years old when his mother died. He was
- 18:20Speaker 1: teaching chemistry in Renner Township, living above a hardware store
- 18:24Speaker 1: on Milbrook Avenue, trying to figure out what to do
- 18:27Speaker 1: with an inheritance that still felt like it belonged to Patricia.
- 18:32Speaker 1: He was not naive, He was not careless. He was
- 18:35Speaker 1: a person in grief who met someone patient enough to wait.
- 18:39Speaker 1: There is a question this case leaves open that the
- 18:42Speaker 1: eleven year sentence does not answer. The binder was left
- 18:46Speaker 1: on the culvert, not burned, not sunk, set down in
- 18:50Speaker 1: a location designed to be found. Cooper knew the terrain,
- 18:54Speaker 1: he knew how property surveys work in that county. Whether
- 18:57Speaker 1: he left it as an exit, a collapse, or something else,
- 19:01Speaker 1: the record does not resolve, but the effect was the same.
- 19:04Speaker 1: The one document that could trace the authorization back to
- 19:07Speaker 1: its source was preserved and placed where it would be discovered.
- 19:12Speaker 1: Roy Andrews did not find out the transfer had happened
- 19:15Speaker 1: from his bank. He found out when a detective knocked
- 19:18Speaker 1: on his door. What stays is this? A chemistry teacher
- 19:23Speaker 1: in a small township spent the better part of a
- 19:25Speaker 1: year being carefully, methodically made to feel less certain of himself.
- 19:30Speaker 1: His sister heard it in his voice before she had
- 19:33Speaker 1: words for it. His money was gone before he knew
- 19:36Speaker 1: the authorization had been used. And the man who built
- 19:39Speaker 1: that architecture of diminishment had a phrase for people like
- 19:43Speaker 1: Roy and Beverly, a phrase recorded in a jail cell
- 19:46Speaker 1: and entered into trial testimony. Lonely people do not ask
- 19:50Speaker 1: hard questions. Roy Andrews asked hard questions eventually, and so
- 19:56Speaker 1: did Brenda Mays, who noticed something was wrong in the
- 19:59Speaker 1: timbre of a Wednesday phone call, and Todd Steyn, who
- 20:02Speaker 1: stopped to photograph a binder on a culvert lip instead
- 20:06Speaker 1: of walking past it. The eleven years will run, The
- 20:09Speaker 1: two hundred forty thousand dollars will not come back. What
- 20:13Speaker 1: happened to Roy Andrews in two thousand nineteen was not
- 20:17Speaker 1: a lapse in judgment. It was a system built by
- 20:21Speaker 1: someone who had done it before and planned to do
- 20:24Speaker 1: it again. This show is made by Oboe Media.