Latest / Relationship Cheating Stories / He Wasn't Real: How Ruth Lost $4,000 to "Marcus Hale"

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He Wasn't Real: How Ruth Lost $4,000 to "Marcus Hale" · Relationship Cheating Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 5.58 a.m.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: On August 14th, 2019, a runner named Randy Sullivan came
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: around the bend of the canal path and stopped. A
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: woman was sitting on the embankment steps in the early light.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Her knees pulled to her chest, her clothes damp. She
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: was holding a stack of printed photographs. Sullivan would later
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: tell investigators that the top photo looked like it belonged
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: to three different people at once.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: The woman's name was Ruth Bailey.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: She had been sitting there since sometime before dawn. The
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: photographs in her lap were soaking wet, and she was
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: staring at them anyway. There was a man she had
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: been waiting for. He never came. What Sullivan found that
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: morning was not a crime scene in any traditional sense.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: No law had been broken in that particular moment, on
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: those particular steps, but something had been built over the
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: previous six months with extraordinary precision. a person assembled from
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: pieces of other people, a relationship constructed word by word,
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: and a trust engineered to fail in exactly this way.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: The photographs Ruth was holding were the only physical evidence
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: that the man she thought she knew had ever existed
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: at all.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: He had not.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Ruth Bailey was 28 years old in the winter of 2019.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: She had grown up in Patton Crossing and moved to Crestfield, Ohio,
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: in 2015, a deliberate choice.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Not a default.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: She worked as a billing coordinator, lived on Guerra Street,
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: and drove a nine-year-old Civic with a broken passenger mirror.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: She kept meaning to fix. Every month she sent money
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: to her mother, Vivian, without being asked. Every Thursday for
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: two years, she showed up to game night at the
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: anchor tap. That last detail matters more than it might seem.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: The Thursday game night was not something Ruth fell into.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: She was one of the people who kept it alive.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: the kind of person a gathering depends on, without quite
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: realizing it, her friend Kara Whitson had been going with
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: her almost from the beginning. Ruth was not desperate for connection.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: She had been on 15 first dates in her 20s,
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: had ended two longer relationships with clear-eyed self-awareness. She was
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: ready for something real. Ready is a different word than lonely.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: The profile appeared in late February 2019 on a general
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: social platform. The man in the main photo was standing
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: on a boat, somewhere sunny, mid-30s, relaxed. His name, according
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: to the profile, was Marcus Hale. His backstory was detailed
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: and consistent. Structural engineer, raised in Columbus, frequented a bar
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: in Clintonville, currently on a nine-month contract in Aberdeen, Scotland.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: The entry point was ordinary. Ruth had commented on a
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: post by a woman named Beth Elkoffer, a trivia fundraiser,
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: the kind of community thing Ruth would naturally engage with.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: According to the investigation, whoever was running the Marcus Hale
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: profile had been monitoring that regional group and identified Ruth specifically.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Her warmth was visible. Her engagement was genuine. She was,
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: from a targeting perspective, exactly what they were looking for.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: The connection request came within days of that comment. Ruth
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: accepted it. Within 10 days, the conversation had moved off
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: the platform entirely, onto a private messaging app. Within 8 weeks,
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: the contact was daily. Not just text, voice messages. A
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: voice feels different than typed words. It lands in a
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: different part of the brain. Ruth saved the messages. In April,
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: on the morning of Vivian's surgery, Marcus texted at 6.15
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: in the morning. Ruth told him, before she told anyone else,
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: that is not a small thing. That is the architecture
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: of intimacy, built carefully, one exchange at a time, until
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: the person on the other end of the phone feels
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: like the person who knows you best, by June. He
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: asked for $ 800. He explained it was for rent on
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: his Aberdeen flat. His contract payment had been delayed. He
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: attached what looked like a formal document. It would only
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: be a short time.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Ruth paid.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Ten days later, every cent came back. That repayment was
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: not generosity.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: It was engineering.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: The second ask came in July. This time, Marcus said
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: he was in the hospital. He sent a photograph of
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: a wristband. His name printed on it, a patient number,
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: the kind of detail that does not feel staged when
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: you are looking at it from 4,000 miles away. He
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: said it was an emergency appendectomy. He sent a voice
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: message too, the same voice Ruth had been saving for months,
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: the one that landed in a different part of the
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: brain than typed words do.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: He needed $ 3, 200.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: He was scared and alone.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Ruth paid.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: She stopped mentioning Marcus at Thursday game night after that.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: That silence is its own kind of data point. Kara
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Whitson noticed. She did not push. Ruth had always been
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: the one who asked about everyone else. The bartender's daughter.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: How someone's father's treatment was going. When Ruth went quiet
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: on something, you did not crowd her.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: You waited.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, on the other side of that $ 3, 200 international wire,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: a flag appeared. Dennis Smith was 34 years old and
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: worked bank fraud. His specialty was not numbers. It was images,
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: specifically where images came from and whether they were what
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: they claimed to be. When the wire transfer was flagged
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: in late July of 2019, the transaction itself was the
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: smallest part of what he would eventually find. Smith started
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: where any image investigation starts. He started with a reverse
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: image search. He ran every photograph Ruth had received from
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: Marcus Hale, through standard reverse image tools. Nothing came back.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: No matches.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: The photographs appeared to come from nowhere, either taken from
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: private accounts with no public index, or altered enough that
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: automated tools could not anchor them to a source.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: That absence was not a dead end. It was a signal.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: A photograph that leaves no trace is not a natural photograph.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: It has been prepared. Smith kept pulling the thread. The
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: boat photo, the one from Marcus's profile, the one Ruth
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: had first seen in late February, The man standing relaxed
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: in the sun took the longest. Standard reverse search failed.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: But image provenance work is not only automated, it is
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: forensic and patient. Eventually, Smith traced the original. A man
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: named Derek Paulson, a project manager from Akron, had posted
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: a photograph in 2016, a golf charter trip, himself on
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: the boat, sun behind him, exactly that posture. The face
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: in Marcus's photo was not Paulson's face.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: It had been replaced.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: The body, the boat, the light, all Paulson's, the face
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: belonged to someone else. Then the other photographs began to
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: unravel in the same way. Approximately 12 candid images that
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: Marcus had sent over months traced back to a fitness
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: instructor in Phoenix named Brian Tomas.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Tomas had posted them.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Publicly, faces retouched, backgrounds left intact, the hands in one photo,
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: the shoulders in another. a laugh that Ruth had looked
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: at and thought she was beginning to know. And the
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: biographical scaffolding, structural engineer, Columbus roots, the Clintonville bar, the
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: nine-month Aberdeen contract, traced to the public posting history of
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: a man named Paul Greer. Greer was a real structural
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: engineer in Columbus. He had written about his work online,
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: mentioned the bar, discussed contract structures in his field. None
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: of that information had been stolen from a database. It
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: had been assembled from things Greer had chosen to share
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: publicly over years, never imagining anyone was cataloging them into
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: a different man's life story. Three men, one profile. None
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: of them had ever communicated with each other. None of
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: them knew Ruth Bailey existed. The face that Ruth had
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: looked at for six months, that she had printed, carried
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: to an embankment, set on wet grass, and picked back up,
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: that face had never belonged to anyone she had spoken to.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: What about the voice? The voice messages were a single speaker, throughout.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: Audio analysis confirmed consistency, the same person across every recording,
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: a forensic linguistic consultant. Working informally on the investigation, noted
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: vowel flattening patterns consistent with coastal West African speech. Ghana
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: or Nigeria were mentioned as soft possibilities. That assessment was
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: a directional indicator only. It was not a legal determination.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: It was not presented as one. But it established something important.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: The voice was real, singular, and recorded by a human
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: being who had committed significant time to maintaining it. There
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: was a system here, not a sudden scam, not opportunistic fraud.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: a constructed methodology. On August 8, 2019, Marcus Hale told
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: Ruth he was in danger. He said he had discovered
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: illegal activity inside the contracting firm he was working for
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: in Aberdeen. He said he was scared. He said he
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: had made a decision. He was flying to Crestfield. He
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: wanted to meet her. He gave her a specific location,
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: the canal path near Ruth's neighborhood, and a specific time, 5.30
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: in the morning on August 14th. He said he loved her.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: He used those words for the first time. Ruth printed
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: every photograph she had. She did not tell Kara. She
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: did not tell her mother. She set her alarm for
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: before dawn on a Wednesday, and she drove to the
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: canal path alone, and she waited. 5.30 came and went.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: At approximately 5.58 in the morning, a man named Randy
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: Sullivan found her. Sullivan had run that same canal route
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: for 11 years, every morning without exception. He saw a
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: woman sitting on the embankment steps, knees pulled to her chest, soaked.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: The printed photographs were in her lap. Sullivan would later
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: describe the top photograph this way. It looked like it
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: belonged to three different people at once. Ruth had been
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: there since before three in the morning. She had set
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: the photos on the damp grass at some point and
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: picked them up again. She had been crying for hours.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: When Sullivan asked if she was all right, Ruth said,
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: she wasn't sure yet. That answer, measured, honest, provisional, is
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: the most precise thing she could have said. She was
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: 28 years old, a billing coordinator who sent money to
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: her mother every month, who asked about bartender's daughters by name,
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: who had been careful and deliberate her entire adult life.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: She had not been reckless.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: She had not been desperate. She had been for six months,
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: systematically deceived by someone who had studied her from a distance,
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: and built an entire human being around what she was
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: most likely to trust. There is something that resists easy
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: categorization about what happened on that embankment. Ruth did not collapse.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: She did not disappear. She sat with the evidence of
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: it in her hands, in the dark, in the wet,
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: and she waited until she knew. The following Thursday, she
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: was back at the anchor tap for game night. She
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: didn't explain where she'd been, She ordered potato skins. She
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: stayed until close. She asked Kara how the bartender's daughter
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: was doing, the one who had just started walking. The
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: investigation that followed moved in two directions at once. Smith
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: had the image provenance documentation, the audio analysis, the financial
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: transfer logs. and the IP records from the messaging platform.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Detective Victor Huang of the Crestfield PD worked the criminal thread. Together,
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: they built a case that pointed, specifically and consistently, toward
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: a man named Keith Snyder. Snyder was 41 years old.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: He rented a room in Fieldmere, a neighborhood in Columbus.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: He had no prior fraud convictions. There were two civil
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: complaints filed against him by women in other states, both dismissed,
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: neither resulting in any finding of liability. On paper, he
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: was unremarkable. Seven, picture the moment investigators first put his
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: name to this case. They had three dismembered identities, a
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: six-month voice performance, a constructed emergency, and a woman sitting
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: on an embankment with photographs that looked like they belonged
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: to three different people, and the man at the center
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: of it had no criminal record. That is what made
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: the methodology so durable. It relied on parts of the
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: system that are not criminal until the final transfer clears.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: The connection request is legal. The voice message is legal.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: The repaid $ 800 is legal. Every step of the escalation
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: ladder is unremarkable, individually, until it isn't. Snyder was questioned
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: in October of 2019. He denied everything. He denied through
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: the preliminary hearing in January of 2020. He denied through
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: a continuance in May. He denied through closing arguments at
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: trial in September. The jury convicted him on two counts
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: of wire fraud and one count of identity fraud. Four years,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: federal prison. But here is where the constructed man revealed
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: one more layer, the methodology Smith had documented. The image assembly,
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: the biographical harvest, the voice continuity, the escalating financial asks
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: with a strategic repayment did not look improvised.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: It looked rehearsed.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: Forensic review of Snyder's devices, conducted in the spring of 2021,
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: as part of a broader federal fraud network investigation. Match
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: that methodology to an earlier scheme. In 2016, a woman
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: named Louise Crane in Dayton had reported being targeted by
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: an identical pattern, same structure, same sequence of trust building, repayment, escalation.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: She had reported it at the time. The case went cold.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: No one had connected it to Snyder until the device
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: review opened the record back up.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Ruth was not the first.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Louise Crane's report had been sitting in a cold case
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: file for three years while the same method was refined
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: and used again. Months later, in the spring of 2021,
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: when a review matched Snyder's devices to the 2016 Crane scheme,
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: he received an additional consecutive sentence of 30 months. The
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: man who had never existed had been built by someone
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: who had built him before. The case closed in layers.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: each one arriving later than the last. Keith Snyder's trial
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: ran in September of 2020. He had denied every charge
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: through every proceeding, the October 2019 questioning, the January preliminary hearing,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: the May continuance. The jury was not persuaded by the denials.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: Two counts of wire fraud, one count of identity fraud,
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: four years, federal prison. The conviction rested on Dennis Smith's work,
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: audio analysis showing a single consistent speaker, image provenance documentation
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: linking photographs to Derek Paulson and Brian Tomas, IP records,
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: and transfer logs that led to Snyder's accounts. Ruth Bailey
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: lost $ 4, 000 in total, $ 800 in June, repaid. and $ 3, 200
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: in July, not returned. What lingers is not the sentence.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: It is the printed photographs, soaking wet on a canal
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: embankment at six in the morning, held by a woman
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: who had been waiting since three. Randy Sullivan had described
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: the top photograph as belonging to three different people at once.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: He was right, and he had no way to know
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: how completely he was right. Derek Paulson's boat, Brian Tomas's body,
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Paul Greer's voice and biography. harvested from public posts he
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: had made without any awareness they were being used. None
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: of those three men had ever met Ruth Bailey. None
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: of them had ever agreed to be Marcus Hale, the
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: man she had spoken to every day for five months.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: The man she had told about her mother's surgery before
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: she had told anyone else had been assembled from pieces
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: of strangers. Keith Snyder, 41 years old, renting a room
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: in the Fieldmere neighborhood of Columbus, had no prior fraud
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: convictions when he built that profile in late February of 2019.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Two civil complaints from women in other states had been dismissed.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Louise Crane's report from 2016 confirmed it was. Crane had
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: filed her report.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: The case went cold.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: For three years, the same method was available to be
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: used again.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: And it was.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Ruth Bailey was not the beginning of this. She was
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: somewhere in the middle of it. That fact arrived in
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: the spring of 2021. When forensic review of Snyder's devices
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: connected him to the crane scheme, he received an additional
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: consecutive sentence of 30 months. There is something that resists
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: easy resolution in all of this. Not the legal outcome.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: That part is settled. Snyder was convicted, sentenced, and sentenced again.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: The financial record is closed. The case by every official
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: measure What resists is the architecture of the thing. Ruth
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Bailey was not targeted because she was isolated or desperate
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: or careless. She was targeted because she commented on a
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: fundraiser post, because she expressed warmth in a public space,
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: because she was the kind of person who shows up
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: for things. The selection was precise. Snyder monitored that regional
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: group and chose her for exactly the qualities that make
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: a person worth knowing. The following Thursday after the 14th
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: of August, she went back to game night at the
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: Anchor Tap. She didn't explain where she'd been or what
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: had happened. She ordered potato skins. She stayed until close.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: She asked the bartender how his daughter was doing, the
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: one who had just started walking. That is not a
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: woman who was broken by what happened to her. That
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: is a woman who understood, standing on a damp embankment
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: at 6 in the morning, that the question of whether
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: she was all right was one only, she could answer,
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: and that she intended to answer it herself.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: She did. This show is made by Oboe Media.