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She Signed Everything: How a Surgeon Turned Care into Control · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At seven forty three in the morning on June third,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, a lineman named Robert Fitzgerald climbed a utility
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: pole on Delman Avenue in Crestwick, Ohio, fourteen feet up,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: zip tied to the cross arm with three black plastic ties,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: he found a German passport. A spider had built its
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: web between the passport cover and the pole. The web
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: was intact. That web mattered. It meant the passport had
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: been there for weeks. It meant someone had climbed up,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: punched a hole through the document, and fastened it above
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: the street with deliberate, quiet precision, not dropped, not thrown placed.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: The name inside was Lori Vogel. She was twenty eight
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: years old. She lived two houses away, and according to
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: the man who shared that house with her, she was
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: in Germany. She was not in German. What followed was
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: not a crime scene investigation in the traditional sense, no body,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: no blood, no broken lock. What investigators uncovered instead was
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: something harder to photograph. A system, a carefully built architecture
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of control designed to make one person disappear without ever
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: leaving the house. What broke that system was a spider
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: web three plastic ties and a lineman doing his morning rounds.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: To understand what Lori Vogel walked into, you have to
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: understand what she was walking away from. She arrived in
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Ohio in the spring of twenty eighteen, having accepted a
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: sponsored visa position at a company called Carmond Trade Partners.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: The work was account's coordination, administrative, careful, detail oriented, the
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: kind of work that suits someone who follows through. Friends
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: in Germany described her that way, reliable, methodical, in someone
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: who kept her work. She was twenty seven at the time.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: She had no family in Ohio, no old friends, no
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: safety net of familiar faces. Her one social connection in
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: the United States was a woman named Patricia Hass, a
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Columbus based contact she had maintained as a pen pal.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Patricia was not close enough to notice small changes. She
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: was close enough to notice when Lourie stopped responding entirely.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Laurie's employer and the man who had arranged her visa sponsorship,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: was Russell Dalton. He was forty four. He owned Carmont
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Trade Partners and operated out of a house on the
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: four hundred block of Delman Avenue in Crestwick. By August
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, Laurie had moved into that house. What
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: happened next did not happen all at once. By October
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, Laurie's finances had been consolidated into a
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: joint account that Dalton control. He told her the bank
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: had flagged her account for a RIOS regular activity, a
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: foreign national issue, he said, something that needed to be sorted.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: She believed him. Why wouldn't she. She was new to
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: the country, unfamiliar with the system, and he was the
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: person who had brought her there. The phone came next.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: The number of details Lourie did not know about her
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: own device was significant. A call filtering application had been
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: installed on her phone through a shared account Dalton controlled.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Messages from certain contacts, including Patricia Hass were silently rerouted
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: to a hidden folder. Laurie did not receive them. She
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: did not know to look. There was one exception to
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: the isolation. Every Wednesday evening from six to eight thirty,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Laurie volunteered at Saint Agatha's Community Center. Coordinator Francis Obe
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: later told investigators that Lourie had missed zero Wednesday shifts
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: in nine months. Zero. The consistency was striking, but so
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: was what it reat presented. For two and a half
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: hours each week, Laurie Vogel was outside that house without
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Dalton beside her, moving through the world on her own terms.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: That window was the only one she had, and it
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: was also, it would turn out, the window Dalton had
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: been using. Key card Logs from Carman's office showed that
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Dalton had badged out before five thirty in the evening
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: every Wednesday for at least four months. He had told
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Laurie he worked late on Wednesdays. He had not worked
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: late on Wednesdays. What he had done with those hours
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: during those specific evenings while Laurie was at Saint Agatha's
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: That question would drive the investigation forward in ways no
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: one initially anticipated. By late April of twenty nineteen, Laurie's
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: passport was gone. She assumed she had misplaced it. The
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: passport had been outside for at least three weeks before
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Robert Fitzgerald found it. The entomologist's report was specific. A
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: spider had built a web between the documents cover and
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: the cross arm of the utility pole. Spiders do not
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: build webs in a day. The web placed the passport
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: on that pole. No later than mid May of twenty nineteen.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Lourie had noticed it missing in late April. The math
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: was immediate and unsettling. Someone had climbed fourteen feet, punched
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: a hole through the corner of the document with a
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: nail or an awl, threaded three black zip ties through
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: that hole, and secured it to a cross arm on
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Delman Avenue. The ties were tight. The passport was dry,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: which meant it had been up there through at least
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: one rain event and had never come loose. This was
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: not carelessness, this was engineering. Detective Alan Marsh had the
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: passport in an evidence bag by mid morning on June third.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: He recognized the address printed inside Delman Avenue. He had
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: seen that street name forty eight hours earlier, attached to
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a welfare check filed by a woman in Columbus named
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Patricia Hass. Marsh drove to the house. He knocked on
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: the door. Laurie Vogel answered she was not in Germany.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: She had never been to Germany. She did not know
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: anyone had been trying to reach her. The call filtering
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: application on Laurie's phone had routed messages from Patricia Hass
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: to a hidden folder for months Laurie had not received
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: a single one. She had not known the folder existed.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: When Marsh explained this to her, she went quiet for
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: a long moment. Then she said she thought Patricia had
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: simply stopped writing. That sentence She thought Patricia had simply
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: stopped writing sat at the center of eleven hours of
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: conversation between Laurie and forensic social worker Douglas Evans. Evans
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: later described the process of helping someone understand that the
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: reality they had been living inside was constructed by another person,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: not discovered constructed. The financial control had come first, the account,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: the bank, flag story, the steady narrowing of what Laurie
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: could buy and wear. Then the phone, then the passport.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Each step had been timed. Each step had followed the
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: last so naturally that from inside the arrangement nothing had
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: looked like an arrangement at all. Laurie had apologized to
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Dalton when the passport disappeared. He had patted her shoulder
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: and told her not to worry about it. He already
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: knew exactly where it was. The key card logs placed
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: him leaving Carman's offices before five thirty every Wednesday for
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: at least four months, Wednesday was the night Laurie volunteered
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: at Saint Agatha's. He had told her he worked late
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, he had not been at the office. What
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: those hours contained, where he went, what he did. Investigators
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: could not initially say, but the logs made one thing clear.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: The alibi he had offered was false, and he had
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: built it for a reason. Pictured Dalton in April twenty nineteen,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: sitting at a keyboard composing an e mail to immigration
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: attorney Victor Pelm. The subject was procedural, the language was careful.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: He asked how to flag of visa as abandoned if
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: the holder had voluntarily surrendered documents. He used that phrase, specifically,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: voluntarily surrendered. Pell's reply was captured on the same chain.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Two weeks later, on May fourteenth, Dalton wrote again, this
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: time asking about withdrawing sponsorship for material misrepresentation. Those e
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: mails did not surface in the first warrant. The first
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: warrant had not included Carman's business servers. Dalton's attorney, Craig Moffatt,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: spent six weeks after the arrest arguing that the passport
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: situation was Lori's idea that she had asked Dalton to
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: hide it, that she had feared being tracked by some
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: one in Germany, that the whole thing was a misunderstood
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: act of protection. For six weeks there was no document
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: that directly contradicted that story. Then the second warrant came
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: through in late July twenty nineteen. The server E mails
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: were there. The April twenty ninth inquiry to Pell had
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: been sent, two days before Lourie's passport disappeared from inside
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: the house. Dalton had not been responding to a crisis
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Lourie created. He had been preparing the ground for one.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: He intended to create the sequence once visible collapsed. Every
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: other reading of events, he confessed on August fourth, Moffatt
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: was present. The recording described what Dalton called a relationship
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: that got out of hand. The judge reviewing the sentencing
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: record in October wrote that what the evidence actually described
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: was imprisonment without walls, the systematic removal of identity documents,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: financial control, and social isolation, each element reenforcing the next.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: And then there is a second name in the record.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Angela Foss, twenty six years old, a Filipino visa holder
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: who worked briefly in twenty fifteen for a logistics company
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: that shared a registered agent with Carmont Trade Partners. She
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: was reported missing by a co worker. The original investigation
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: concluded she had returned home voluntarily. Her family said she
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: had not. The case went cold. It stayed cold for
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: five years. In April twenty two, Kiner County, sixty miles
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: west of Crestwick, reopened a cold case. DNA review had
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: matched a profile from a two thy fifteen fraud investigation
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: to Russell Dalton. The source of the DNA sample was
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a coffee cup collected during a welfare check at Angela
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Foss's last known address. Dalton had been there his DNA
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: placed him in that room in that year. Angela Foss
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: was never found. No murder charge has been filed. The
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: case U remains open. What the pell emails described in
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: legal language was a mechanism. What the key card logs
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: described was a schedule. What the dissolved logistics company described
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: sharing a registered agent with Carmont operating briefly in twenty fifteen,
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: vanishing from record was a pattern. Each piece alone had
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: an explanation. Arranged together, they described something more deliberate than
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: any single explanation could contain. The passport ZIP tide fourteen
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: feet in the air. Was not the beginning of what
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Dalton built, It may have been the end of it.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Dalton was arrested on June ninth, twenty nineteen. The charred
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: sheet listed unlawful restraint, identity, document, fraud, and coercive control
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: under Ohio's expanded Domestic Statute, three separate counts, each one
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: describing a different layer of the same architecture. For six
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: weeks after the arrest, he held to a single story.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: The passport had been Laurie's idea. She had asked him
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: to secure it. She had a dangerous situation in Germany,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: he said, and she wanted the document somewhere safe. It
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: was a story that placed the entire structure of control
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: inside Laurie's own request. The second warrant ended that version.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Investigators obtained Carmon's business server emails in late July two
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: thousy nineteen. The pel chain came back in full four messages,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: two of them from April and May, weeks before the
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: passport disappeared from Lurie's room. The April twenty ninth e
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: mail asked Victor pell how to flag of visa as
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: abandoned if the holder voluntarily surrendered documents. The May fourteenth
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: e mail asked about withdrawing sponsorship for material misrepresentation, both
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: sent before Laurie ever noticed anything was missing. A plan
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: written down sent through a server preserved on August fourth,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: two thy nineteen. Dalton confessed. The session was recorded. His attorney,
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Craig Moffatt, was present. Dalton described what happened as a
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: relationship that got out of hand. That phrase, the one
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: that makes the whole thing sound like momentum, like weather,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: like something that simply occurred, sits in the record next
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: to the April twenty ninth email, the email that preceded
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the disappearance of the passport by weeks, the e mail
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: that used the word voluntary. The judge read both. In
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: October twenty nineteen, Dalton was sentenced to four years, with
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: parole review eligibility at thirty months. Moffatt argued for a
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: suspended sentence. The judge rejected it. The written opinion described
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: what the evidence had established, systematic removal of identity documents,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: financial control, and social isolation, each element reinforcing the next,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: each one making the others harder to escape. The judge's
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: phrase was imprisonment without wall. It is the most precise
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: legal description of what Dalton built. Laurie Vogel renewed her
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: visa independently in February twenty twenty. She did not leave Ohio.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: She is still there. That detail is worth pausing on.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: The state that held her has become the state she chose.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: The visa that was used as a leash is now
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: hers alone. Whatever that decision means to her privately, it
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: belongs entirely to her. There is a version of this
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: story that ends with the sentencing, and it is a
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: clean ending. The passport found, the e mails recovered, the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: confession recorded, the sentence handed down four years a judge's
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: written opinion a survivor who renewed her own visa and stayed.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: That version is true. It is also incomplete. Angela Foss
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: was twenty six years old when she disappeared from the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: record in twenty fifteen. She was a Filipino visa holder
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: working for a Logista company that shared a registered agent
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: with Carmont Trade Partners. A coworker reported her missing. The
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: investigation concluded she had returned home voluntarily. Her family said
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: she had not. The case went cold. It stayed cold
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: for five years, while Carmont Trade Partners continued to operate,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: while Russell Dalton continued to sponsor visa holders, while the
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: dissolved logistics company existed only as a filing with a
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: shared address. In April twenty twenty, six months after Dalton's sentencing,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Kiner County Sheriff's Office reopened the Angela Foss case. A
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: cold case DNA review had matched a profile from a
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: twenty fifteen fraud investigation to Dalton. The DNA came from
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: a coffee cup collected during a welfare check at Foss's
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: last known address. Dalton had been in that room, his
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: DNA placed him there in that year at that address.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Angela Foss has never been found. No murder charge has
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: been filed. The Kiner County case is open. What makes
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: this hard to hold is not the uncertainty itself. It
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: is what the uncertainty implies about the mechanism. The passport
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: on the pole, the call filtering app, the email to
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: pel about voluntary surrender. Those were not invented for Laurie Vogel.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: The question the Kiner County file asks, without yet answering,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: is how many times a version of this was assembled
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: before Laurie's passport ended up fourteen feet in the air
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: on a utility pole on Delman Avenue. Laurie survived because
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: her passport did not disappear and was found because Alignment
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: arrived at seven forty three in the morning on June third,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, because he stopped because he photographed it instead
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: of walking past. Angela Foss had no equivalent moment, no
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: object recovered at the right time by the right person,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: no chain of evidence that pulled her back into view
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: while she was still reachable. There is something in that
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: gap between Lorii's story, which has a resolution, and Angela's,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: which does not, that this case refuses to close. Around
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: the judge's written opinion described imprisonment without walls, Angela Foss
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: may never have had walls described at all. She simply
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: vanished from the record, and the record called it voluntary.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Russell Dalton is serving his sentence. Lori Vogel is in
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Ohio living a life that is hers. Somewhere in Kinner County,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: investigators are working a case with a DNA match, an
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: open file, and a woman who has not been found
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: the passport that started all of this. Three black zip
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: ties a punched hole in the upper corner. A spider
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: web between the cover and the pole was the piece
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: of evidence that broke through. One object that could not
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: be explained away, One object that refused to stay hidden.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Angela foss Deserve Irved one two. This show is made
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: by Oboe Media