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The Man Who Stole Her Memory: How a Counselor Broke Erin Tate · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of June fourteenth, twenty nineteen, a utility
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: meter reader named Wendy Ward pushed back a yue hedge
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: on the south side of a property on Aldercroft Lane
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: and found a leather bound agenda lying open in the
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: ventilation shaft. The name embossed on the cover in gold
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: leaf read Erin Tate. Erin had last seen it sitting
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: on her kitchen table the monday before, and she had
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: no idea how it got there. That detail should not exist.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: A personal journal does not travel from a kitchen table
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: into a sealed ventilation shaft on its own. Someone carried
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: it there, and whoever did that, had been inside her
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: home without her knowledge, had read what she wrote in private,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: and had placed the book somewhere it might never have
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: been found. What makes this case sit differently from others
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: is the specific kind of damage involved. No physical violence,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: no abduction. What Carl Ferrell allegedly built across nearly four
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: years was something forensic psychologist doctor Patricia Holden later described
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: in court as a confessional intake mechanism, a structured methodical
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: process for dismantling one person's grip on their own reality.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: By the time Eron Tate understood what had happened. She
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: had transferred forty one thousand dollars she believed she had
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: invested in a faith ministry, had spent more than a
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: year convinced her memory was deteriorating, and had quietly stopped
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: trusting her own sister. The agenda in the Ventilation Shaft
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: was the moment everything broke open. But the story of
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: how Erin got there starts four years earlier, in a
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: church fellowship hall on a Thursday evening, when she was
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: recently divorced, professionally steady and looking for somewhere to process grief.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: This is the story of how that search was turned
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: against her.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Erin Tate was forty eight.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Years old in June of twenty nineteen.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: She had worked triage.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: At Pelham Crossing Community Clinic for twelve years. Colleagues described
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: her as methodical and calm under pressure, the kind of
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: nurse who explains what she is doing while she is
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: doing it, so the patient never has to guess. She
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: had been divorced since late two thousand fifteen after a
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: long marriage, and she had handled the transition the way
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: she handled most things.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: She kept working.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: She kept her Wednesday calls with her sister Joanne, and
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: she looked for a structured way to process the loss.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Joanne lived in Tucson and worked night shifts for eleven
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: years without interruption. The two of them had spoken every
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Wednesday at ten fifteen in the evening. That call was
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: a fixed point. It did not move. In late two
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, Erin joined a Thursday evening grief support group
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: at Calvary Ridge Church in Pelham Crossing. The group was
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: led by Carl Ferrell. He was fifty one years old
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: lay pastoral counselor who had relocated to Pelham Crossing that
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: spring from Clarkton, roughly sixty miles away. His credentials were real,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: a master's degree in counseling psychology from a small Biblical
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: college in western Tennessee, and a certification from a lay
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: pastoral counseling board. Real, but, as the court record would
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: later note, insufficient for clinical standard of care. Ferrell also
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: ran a handyman's service on the side. He was useful, approachable,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and he remembered everything anyone told him. By the fifth
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: group session, Erin had moved to individual Tuesday meetings with Ferrell.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: That transition was not unusual in pastoral settings. What happened
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: inside those individual sessions reconstructed later from Erin's own notes,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Ferrell's cooperation statement and doctor Holden's forensic analysis is the
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: part that requires attention. Ferrell used what doctor Holden's report
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: calls the vault phase. He invited Erin to share things
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: she had never told anyone. Small confessions, professional missteps, private embarrassments,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: a workplace incident involving a colleague, a car accident she
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: had not reported, prescription medications she felt ambivalent about. He
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: received each disclosure without judgment. He made her feel that
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: the room was sealed. By spring of twenty sixteen, Erin
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: had shared her retirement account balance, her medication names, details
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: of the unreported accident, and the name of the colleague.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: She had shared them because the sessions felt safe, because
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Ferrell was consistent and warm, and because sharing felt like healing.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: That is the architecture of what doctor Holden documented. The
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: vault was not incidental. It was the intake mechanism. Something
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: else was happening in twenty sixteen that Erin did not
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: know about. In Clarkton, between twenty eleven and two thousand fourteen,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Ferrell had led another grief support group at a church there,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: a woman named Susan Prater had been a member. Susan
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: was sixty three, a widow, and over the course of
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: those years she had transferred sixty seven thousand dollars into
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: what Ferrell described as a faith ministry investment vehicle. Susan
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: spent three years afterward believing her financial judgment had been
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: corrupted by grief. She never knew Erin Tate existed. Erin
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: never knew she did either. Two women in two different towns,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: the same mechanism, the same vehicle. In autumn of twenty sixteen,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Ferrell introduced Erin to the investment opportunity. He had already
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: obtained her banking data, not through any technical intrusion, but
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: through a direct debit tithing form he had drafted himself
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: and distributed to the congregation. The form requested routing and
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: account numbers.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: It looked administrative. Erin filled it out.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Over the following fourteen months, she transferred forty one thousand
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: dollars in small, irregular amounts. The transfers were structured to
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: feel like acts of faith rather than transactions, and at
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: no point did Erin believe she was being defrauded. She
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: believed she was investing in something real, with a man
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: she trusted completely, in a context she had chosen freely.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: That belief was the point. It was not a side
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: effect of the manipulation.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: It was the goal.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: For fourteen months, Erin Tate transferred money she had earned
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: over twelve years of night shifts and triage decisions. The
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: amounts were small, forty dollars here, one hundred twenty there,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: never large enough to trigger alarm, never irregular enough to
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: feel wrong. The total reached forty one thousand dollars before
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: anything stopped. That is the first image worth sitting with,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: not the sum itself, but the structure of it. Ferrell
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: had not taken the money one clean act. He had
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: taken it in increments so small they felt voluntary every
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: single time. Aarin had moved to Aldercroft Lane forty one
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: in January of twenty eighteen. The house was six blocks
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: from Cavalry Ridge. She had chosen the location. She believed
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the proximity made sense. What she did not know, what
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: no one told her, because no one yet knew to
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: tell her, was that Carl Ferrell had done electrical work
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: at that address six years before she ever signed the lease.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: He had been inside the walls.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: He knew the south facing basement ventilation shaft. He knew
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: exactly which windows sat low enough and which hedge was
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: thick enough to shield it from the street. He had
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: not chosen that detail by accident. By early twenty eighteen,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: something else was shifting inside Erin. She began to believe
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: her memory was failing, not dramatically, not in a way
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: that would register as alarming to a doctor. Small things
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a con versation she thought she remembered clearly that Farrell
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: recalled differently, a detail she was certain of that he
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: would gently, patiently correct. The corrections were never unkind. They
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: came with concern. They came with the voice of a
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: man who wanted her to be well. And because Erin
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: was a trained clinician, because she had spent twelve years
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: watching patients misread their own symptoms, she applied that same
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: clinical skepticism to herself. If she and Ferrell disagreed about
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: what was said, she reasoned, it was more likely that
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: she had misremembered. That reasoning was exactly what he needed
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: from her. In March of twenty nineteen, Erin began keeping
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: a paper agenda leather cover, brass clasp, a loop for
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: her pen, her name in gold foil on the front page.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: She started writing notes after her Tuesday sessions, not a diary,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: clinical notation, medication, names, account number, the name of a
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: colleague from a story she had shared years earlier. The
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: entries were specific because Erin was precise by professional habit.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: She was in her own way.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Building evidence of her own mind working correctly. She had
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: last seen that agenda on her kitchen table on a
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Monday morning. By the time she looked for it again,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: it was gone. Nobody broke a luck, nobody tripped an alarm.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: The south window, the one beside the yew hedge on
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: the ventilation side of the house, showed no damage. Ferrell
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: later told investigators he had entered the property three times.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: He described each entry through that window without prompting. He
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: knew the sill height, He knew which direction the sash lifted.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: He had known it for six years. In April of
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a twenty six year old bank teller
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: named Phil n Wynn was working the counter at First
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Central Bank in Pelham Crossing. A woman came in and
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: attempted to open a savings account. The name on the
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: application was not hers. The social Security number belonged to
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Erin Tate. The address on file did not match Nuin
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: flagged the discrepancy internally. The woman later identified as Marcy Elgin,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Carl Ferrell's romantic partner, left the branch without completing the transaction.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: That flag sat in the bank's internal system, it had
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: not yet reached anyone who would recognize the name. Three
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: weeks later, a prescription was submitted electronically to a pharmacy
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: in a neighboring county. The prescribing provider ID belonged to
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Erin Tate. The submission came from a prepaid mobile hotspot
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: purchased with cash at a store forty miles from Pelham Crossing.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: At the time of submission, Erin was documented in a
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: staff meeting at the clinic. Her supervisor, nursing director Brenda Cahill,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: called her in. The compliance officer Doug Spears, traced the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: hotspot purchase. The device had been bought the prior tuesday.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Aaron's session with Ferrell was every Tuesday. That timing is
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: not confirmed as causal in the record, but it is
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: in the record. Scott Weaver was a financial crimes investigator
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: with the County Prosecutor's Office. He was thirty nine, and
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: he had been assigned to the first Central Bank Flag
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: as a routine identity fraud matter. He had circulated a
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: brief interdepartmental memo two weeks earlier noting Aaron Tate's name
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: in connection with possible financial irregularity. When patrol Sergeant Chris
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Atwell took a call on June fourteenth of twenty nineteen,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: he recognized that name immediately. The call was about a
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: leather agenda found in a ventilation shaft. When Deward read
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: utility meters for a living, she pushed aside the U
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: hedge at the south side of forty one Aldercroft Lane
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: to access the meter box and found the notebook wedged.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: In the shaft opening.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: She called it in because it had a name on it.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: She did not know what the name meant. She was
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: doing her job. When Atwell reached erin, she confirmed the
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: agenda was hers. She confirmed she had last seen it
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: on her kitchen table the previous Monday. She confirmed she
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: had no idea how it had come to be in
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the ventilation shaft of her own home, and she confirmed
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: something that stopped atwell mid sentence. She had never known
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: in all the time she had lived at that address,
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: that Carl Ferrell had once worked inside those walls. There
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: are two ways to read what Carl Ferrell did, and
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: only one of them is supported by the full record
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: picture the Tuesday sessions as Ferrell designed them. Aaron arrives,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: she sits, she speaks. She has been trained slowly and
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: carefully to believe that the discomfort of disclosure is part
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: of the process. She shares something she has never told anyone.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Ferrell receives it without judgment. He stores it. Over months
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: and then years. Those disclosures accumulate into a detailed inventory
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: her medications, her financial accounts, a professional mistake. She had
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: never reported the name of a man she had kissed.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Any One of those details offered in isolation is harmless together.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: In Ferrell's possession, they are leverage, not the dramatic leverage
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: of a threat, the quieter leverage of a man who
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: knows more about you than you remember telling him. One
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: version of events frames Ferrell as an opportunist who recognized
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: a vulnerable woman and improvised a man who stumbled into
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: a method under that reading the tithing form is coincidence.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: The prior knowledge of the house is convenience, and the
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: coordination with Elgin is impulsive. That version collapses the moment
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: you look at Susan Prater. Susan was in Clarkton. Ferrell's
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: grief group There ran from two thousand eleven twenty fourteen.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: The intake mechanism was identical, the investment vehicle was identical.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: The transfers totaled sixty seven thousand dollars. Three years passed
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: before Susan understood that her judgment had not been the problem.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Ferrell had already relocated to Pelham Crossing. By then, he
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: had already joined Calvary Ridge. He had already found erin.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: That is not improvisation, That is a system transported intact
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: from one city to another. The stronger reading, and the
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: one doctor Patricia Holden documented in her forensic report, is
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: that Ferrell's method was designed around a specific vulnerability, the
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: act of confession. The intake mechanism, what Holden called the
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: vault phase, functions because it mimics the structure of therapy
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: without its ethical constraints, A licensed clinician cannot use disclosed
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: information for person gain. Farrell had credentials that looked like
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: a clinician's but carried none of those obligations. He operated
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: in the gap between pastoral care and clinical practice, a
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: gap wide enough that no licensing board was watching. The
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: agenda is the clearest physical expression of what that gap
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: cost Erin. She had started writing her own notes because
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: she no longer trusted her memory. That distrust had been
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: carefully cultivated. The notebook was her attempt to hold onto
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: her own mind. Farrell photographed its contents. According to his
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: own statement during cooperation, he did not take the book immediately.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: He left it in the shaft, which means he had
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: already taken what he needed from it. The record does
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: not establish what additional use he intended for that information.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: He was arrested eight days after the agenda was found.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: What the record does establish is this, the method Holden
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: described in her report has since been used as curriculum
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: in continuing education seminar for pastoral counselors in three states.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: The behavior pattern has a name.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: The gap Ferrell exploited has documentation. That documentation exists in
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: part because Erin Tate kept a notebook because she refused
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: to stop trusting her own mind. Entirely, even when someone
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: was working very hard to make her doubt it. Eight
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: days after Wendy Ward pushed back that U hedge, Carl
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Ferrell was arrested at his desk inside the Cavalry Ridge
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Church office. It was the June twenty second, twenty nineteen.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Investigators had enough to charge him on four counts identity fraud,
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: unlawful financial exploitation, criminal trespass and fraudulent transmission of a
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: medical prescription. He was taken into custody without incident. During cooperation,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Ferrell described three separate entries into forty one Aldercroft Lane
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: through the south facing ventilation window, the same window though
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: he had known about since doing electrical work in that
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: house six years earlier. He then directed investigators to a
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: climate controlled storage unit twenty two miles outside Pelham Crossing,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: rented under a variant spelling of his middle name. Inside
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: they found the financial records of two women, Erin Tate
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: and Susan Prater. Susan Prater was sixty three years old,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: a widow from Clarkton. She had been part of Farrell's
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: grief counseling group at a church in Clarkton between twenty
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: eleven and twenty fourteen, she had transferred sixty seven thousand
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: dollars into the same Faith Ministry investment vehicle.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: For three years.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: After those transfers, she had believed her financial judgment was
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: simply deteriorating from grief. She had never heard of Erin Tate.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Erin had never heard of her. That storage unit is
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: the clearest proof that this was not a single incident
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: of exploitation. It was a transportable operation. Ferrell had run
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: it in Clarkton, packed it into his relocation, and rebuilt
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: it in Pelham Crossing with a new congregation and a
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: new victim. The forty one thousand dollars Erin lost and
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the sixty seven thousand Susan lost were not impulsive takings.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: They were the output of a documented three phase method
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: applied twice in two cities across nearly a decade. Marcy Elgin,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: whose attempt to open an account using Erin's social Security
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: number had set the financial investigation in motion, was not charged.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: The investigation concluded she.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: Did not know the full scope of what Ferrell was doing.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: The failed transaction at First Central Bank the alert, Phil
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Neuinn filed the Interdepartmental memorandum Scott Weaver had circulated two
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: weeks before the agenda was found. Each of those small
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: procedural moments, each one almost unremarkable on its own, formed
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: the chain that reached the storage union. Susan Prater filed
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: a separate civil action. The financial ministry reached a confidential
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: settlement and surrendered its records. In the spring of twenty twenty.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Ferrell was sentenced to nine years with credit for his cooperation.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: He had told investigators where to look. He had described
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: his own entries into Erin's home. The cooperation reduced his exposure.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: The sentence stood. Doctor Patricia Holden's forensic report, the one
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: that named Ferrell's method as coercive patterning with a confessional
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: intake mechanism, was admitted into the judicial record. It has
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: since been used as curriculum in continuing education seminars for
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: pastoral counselors.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: In three states.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: The gap Farrell moved through the space between pastoral care
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: and clinical licensing where no oversight existed, now has documentation
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: what he did to Erin and to Susan as a
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: name and a training module and a warning attached to it.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: The agenda was returned to Erin. After it was processed
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: as evidence, she did not keep it. There is something
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: in that detail that carries more weight than almost anything
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: else in this case. Erin Tate had started writing in
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: that notebook because she no longer trusted her own memory.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Someone had spent years teaching her not to. She wrote
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: down medication names, account numbers, the small facts of her
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: own life because she needed proof that her mind still worked.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: The notebook was returned to her as evidence.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: Of a crime.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: She gave it back she did not need it any more.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: The week after Farrell's arrest, Erin resumed her Wednesday night
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: calls with her sister Joanne. Those calls had continued every
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: week for eleven years, through the divorce, through the sessions,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: through the years when Erin believed she was changing and
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: growing under Pharrell's guidance. Joanne had told her in twenty
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: sixteen to stop seeing him. Erin had ignored that warning
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and told Farrell about it. Farrell had used it, and
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: still every Wednesday at ten fifteen, Joanne picked up the phone.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: The calls never stopped. They were just waiting. What Farrell
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: built was a replica of trust. He used the architecture
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: of confession the vocabulary of healing and the intimacy of
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: private disclosure to construct something that looked from inside like safety.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: That is what makes this category of harms so difficult
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: to see from inside it. A person does not hand
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: over their account information to someone they fear. They hand
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: it over to someone they believe.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Is holding them.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: The destruction of a person's confidence in their own perception
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: is not incidental to this kind of exploitation. It is
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: the precondition for everything that follows. Susan Prater spent three
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: years attributing her financial decisions to grief. Errantate spent two
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: years attributing her memory failures to age and stress. Both
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: explanations were available because Ferrell had played them there. That
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: is the mechanism hold and documented. That is what the
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: seminars now teach. This case did not resolve because of
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: sophisticated surveillance or forensic technology.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: It resolved because.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: A utility reader pushed back a hedge on a Friday morning,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: because a twenty six year old bank teller followed protocol
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: on an address discrepancy, because a compliance officer traced a
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: hotspot to a prepaid card, because Joanne kept calling on Wednesdays,
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: small ordinary acts of attention, each performed by someone who
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: did not know they were part of a chain. The
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: chain held Arran Tate was forty eight years old when
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: Ferrell was arrested. She had given four years and forty
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: one thousand dollars to as system built to extract both.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: What she did not give up through all of it
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: was the habit of writing things down, of insisting on
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: her own record. That record, in the end, is what
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: brought the chain together. This show is made by Oboe Media.