Latest / Relationship Cheating Stories / The 37 Letters: How a Snowplow Unmasked a Romantic Con Artist

Transcript

The 37 Letters: How a Snowplow Unmasked a Romantic Con Artist · Relationship Cheating Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 4.17 in the morning on a Tuesday in February,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a snowplow blade struck something hard on County Road 9.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Stephen Allen stopped the truck, climbed down into the dark
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: and the cold, and found a pale blue tin lockbox
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: with a brass clasp sitting in the gravel at the
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: edge of the road. Inside it, wrapped in a dish
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: towel printed with small red cardinals were 37 handwritten letters.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: None of it should have been there. The lockbox belonged
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: to a 52-year-old literacy teacher from Millhaven, Indiana. She had
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: not thrown it away. Someone else had. This is the
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: story of Jeanne Jenkins and of the two years she
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: spent corresponding with a man who did not exist. What
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: makes this case different from most fraud investigations is not
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the money. $ 6, 000 is real harm, but it is not
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: the number that stayed with the detectives. What stayed with
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: them was the letters themselves.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: 37 of them.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: The correspondence spanned two years. It was written by hand
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: on thin airmail stock, arriving about once every three weeks,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: almost without interruption. Gene had kept every one. And that decision,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: to keep them, to wrap them carefully, and store them
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: in a lockbox with a brass clasp, is the reason
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Douglas Andrews was convicted of wire fraud, mail fraud, mail fraud,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: and obtaining money by false pretenses in October of 2019.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: two prior victims never got that far. In Elkhart County
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: and in Vigo County, investigators opened similar cases and found
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: almost nothing to work with. Those victims had not kept
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: the letters.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Jean had.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: There is something precise and deliberate about the way this
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: case broke open, not with a confession, not with a tip,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: but with a snowplow blade at 4.17 in the morning,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: striking a piece of tin someone had thrown from a
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: car window. The physical details matter here in ways they
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: rarely do. Hold that thought. Millhaven sits in the northwest
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: quarter of Indiana, the kind of town where the library
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: doubles as a community anchor, and everyone on the volunteer
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: roster knows everyone else by first name. Jean Jenkins had
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: lived there long enough to be woven into both. She
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: taught adult literacy at the Millhaven Public Library.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: On Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: She had been volunteering at the Garrett County Food Shelf
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: every Wednesday for 11 years. Her coordinator there, Bet Stamos,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: describes Jean's schedule the way you describe a fixed point,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: something you orient around, because it is always where it
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: says it will be. Jean's house was on Osler Street.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: She had been divorced for some years. Her son Marcus
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: lived in Columbus, Ohio, close enough to visit, far enough
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: that the house was quiet most of the week. She
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: was not lonely in the way the word is usually meant.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: She was purposeful and social. and plugged into her community
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: in ways most people never manage. But purposeful people sometimes
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: feel the gap between busyness and connection. That distinction matters here.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: In September of 2016, Jean enrolled in a humanitarian pen
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: pal program run through Lutheran Social Services. The program matched
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: North American participants with individuals abroad, people in displacement, transition, difficulty.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Sean later described it as wanting to channel something outward.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Not loneliness, exactly, caring. She fell into caring. That is
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: a different thing. She was matched with a man identified
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: as Douglas Andrews, 48 years old, a Ghana-Haines civil engineer
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: working in Accra, navigating asylum proceedings in Nairobi. His profile
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: included a photograph, a professional headshot, clean background, measured expression.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Jean's friend, Diane Pell, a middle school teacher, saw it
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: at some point and commented on it, nothing alarming, a
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: real looking face. The first letter arrived in October of 2016.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: It was handwritten on thin airmail stock, the kind that
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: folds into its own envelope. It was careful and warm.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: It mentioned a daughter named Vera, eight years old, in Accra.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: It asked about Jean's work.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: She wrote back.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Over the next two years, 37 letters crossed between them,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: arriving roughly once every three weeks. She saged and kept
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: every one. She stored them in the pale blue tin
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: lockbox with the brass clasp that she kept in the
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: house on Osler Street. The correspondence never asked for anything.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: It built.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: It accumulated weight. A person, or something constructed to feel
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: like one, emerged from the pages, specific, consistent, detailed. What
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Jean did not know was that the photograph was not
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Douglas Andrews. It belonged to a civil engineer named Kwame
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Asante from Kumasi, Ghana. whose 2015 professional headshot had been stolen.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: It was being cycled through multiple scams operating from the
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: same Romanian server cluster. Asante had no knowledge of any
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: of it until investigators contacted him.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: He cooperated fully.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: The man writing to John, the real Douglas Andrews, 46
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: years old, from Muncie, Indiana, had spent his career in
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: freight and logistics. He worked at Farrow Grain from 2011
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: to 2013, then a freight brokerage in Terre Haute, then
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Lakeshore Transfer in Gary, Indiana. Starting in 2017, between 2011
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and 2013, he had rented an apartment on the north
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: side of Millhaven, four blocks from the public library where
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Gene taught.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: There is no record of them ever meeting. But he
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: knew the town. He knew its geography.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: And sometime in the late summer of 2018, after nearly
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: two years of handwritten letters, something in the correspondence shifted.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The shift began with a single sheet of paper. 36
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: of the 37 letters had arrived on the same thin
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: airmail stock, the kind that folds into its own envelope,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: semi-translucent in the light. Jeanne knew the weight of it
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: in her hands before she even opened one. But in
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: September of 2018, An envelope arrived that was heavier, stiffer.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Inside was a letter typed on standard copy paper. No
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: handwriting at all. Jeanne rationalized it. A resettlement office, she assumed.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: The kind that handles paperwork for asylum seekers transitioning between countries.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: The letter explained that a shipment of personal belongings was
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: being forwarded from Nairobi, and it needed her home address
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: for delivery coordination. She provided it three weeks later. A
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: wooden crate arrived at Osler Street. Four feet by three feet, steel-banded,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: shipped via Lakeshore Transfer. Sheen signed for it. She had
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: nowhere to put it, so she left it.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: In the garage.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: No one came to collect it. Then came the letter
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: about the customs bond. It asked for $ 4, 200, wired to
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: a Toronto account, to release the crate's contents through Canadian Customs.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Jeanne wired the money. 72 hours passed. The crate sat
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: in the garage. A second letter arrived requesting an additional $ 1, 800
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: for a secondary processing fee. She wired that too.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: $ 6, 000 total. Then silence.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Her son Marcus, calling from Columbus, Ohio, noticed something wrong
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: in her voice. She told him what had happened. He
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: drove to Millhaven the same day and called the police.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Detective Troy Ward of the Millhaven Criminal Investigations Division received
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: the case in late November of 2018. He went to
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Osler Street and opened the crate that same afternoon. Inside,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: a set of survey stakes, a theodolodite, a surveying instrument,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: the model was discontinued in 2003, and a bundle of
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: personal papers written in Twi, a language spoken in southern Ghana.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Total estimated value, approximately $ 300. Ward photographed the photograph John
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: had kept, the one of the man she knew as
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Douglas Andrews. and ran it through standard channels. The face
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: that came back belonged to Kwame Asante, a civil engineer
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: from Kumasi, Ghana, whose 2015 professional headshot had been stolen
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: and deployed across multiple scams traced to a Romanian server cluster.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Asante knew nothing. He cooperated.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: The crate itself was the next thread. Its shipping documents
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: listed a freight broker operating out of an Indianapolis UPS
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: store mailbox. A single operator shell with fabricated letterhead. The
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: email chain behind the customs demands routed back to the
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: same Romanian server infrastructure. The documents were fake. The brokerage
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: was fake. The customs process was fake. The crate had
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: been assembled to look like a life being packed and
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: shipped across two continents. But it was the employment records
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: that changed the geometry of the case. Ward pulled records
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: from Lakeshore Transfer, the Gary, Indiana freight company that had
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: physically delivered the crate to Sheen's garage. Douglas Andrews, the
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: real Douglas Andrews, 46 years old, from Muncie, Indiana, had
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: been employed there since 2017. Then, to trace earlier ties,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Ward pulled older records. Vesper Rentals, Millhaven Northside. Between 2011
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: and 2013, Andrews had rented an apartment. Four blocks from
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: the Millhaven Public Library. Four blocks from where Gene Jenkins
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: taught adult literacy.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Every Tuesday and Thursday for years.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: There is no confirmed record of contact, no verified meeting,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: no documented interaction. But he had lived in that town.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: He had known its streets. At some point between 2016
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: and 2018, someone had selected Gene Jenkins, a divorced woman
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: in her early 50s, active in her community, enrolled in
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: a humanitarian pen pal program as a target, and they
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: had written to her, by hand, for nearly two years
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: before asking for anything at all. The 37 letters were
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the architecture of the case, not the crate, not the
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: wire transfers. The letters, Ward laid them out, 36 on
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: thin airmail stock, handwritten, ink consistent across each batch, postmarks
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: routing through Accra and Nairobi with timing that matched the
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: stated narrative of a man moving from Ghana to a
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Kenyan resettlement facility. Then, one letter 37, typed on copy paper,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: a different weight entirely. John had held that anomaly in
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: her hands and filed it as administrative. She was not
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: wrong to do so. She had been given two years
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: of evidence that the person writing to her was exactly
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: who he said he was. Forensic analysis of the type
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: letter and the customs documents connected both to Andrews' printer
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: and email accounts. The ink chemistry on the handwritten letters,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: the paper stock sourcing, the postmark routing, all of it
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: was processed.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: What emerged was.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: A single correspondence architecture, constructed to build trust over time,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: then to leverage it at a single specific moment. The
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: pale blue tin lockbox with the brass clasp had held
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: all 36 handwritten letters, John had wrapped them in a
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: dish towel, small red cardinals on a white ground, before
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: placing them inside. When Ward photographed the lockbox before logging
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: it into evidence, the dish towel was still there. Those
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: letters were why two prior cases had never been prosecuted.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Victims in Elkhart County and Vigo County had each reported
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: similar patterns, a pen pal correspondence, a crate, a customs demand,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: wired money. Both investigations stalled. In both counties, the victims
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: had not kept the letters. There was no physical paper trail,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: no ink, no postmarks, no progression of correspondence to analyze.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Without that chain, the evidence collapsed to a wire transfer
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: and a shipping document.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Not enough.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Jeanne had kept everything. 37 letters, two years of postmarks,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: the dish towel, the lockbox. She had, without knowing it,
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: built the prosecution's case inside a pale blue tin box
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: On a shelf in her house, on Osler Street, everything
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: in the investigation pointed toward a foreign infrastructure. The Romanian
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: server cluster. The Ghanaian civil engineer whose photograph.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: Had been stolen. The Accra and Nairobi postmarks.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: The customs documents with their fabricated Canadian letterhead. The reasonable
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: read was an overseas operation.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: Sophisticated. Remote. Unreachable.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Picture the moment that version of the case collapses. Another reading,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: more local and immediate. begins with employment records. Ward is
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: looking at an employment roster from a freight company in Gary, Indiana.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: The name is there.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: The same freight company that physically delivered the crate. Andrews
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: had not just written the letters, he had moved the crate.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: He had routed it through his own employer's logistics network.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: The overseas infrastructure was real, but it was a layer.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Underneath it was a man who had once rented an
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: apartment four blocks from Jean's workplace, who understood local logistics
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: from the inside and who had used a freight job
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: to put a wooden crate in a woman's garage. The
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: question the evidence then raised was precise. When had he
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: identified her? The Pen Pal program was operated by Lutheran
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Social Services. It was designed for humanitarian correspondence. Volunteers in
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: the United States matched with displaced or asylum-seeking individuals abroad.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Jeanne had joined to channel what she described as loneliness
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: into something useful. She had not been looking for romance.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: The correspondence never described itself as romantic. It was warmer
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: than that and harder to name. What the physical evidence
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: established was that Andrews had selected the program as a vector,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: not a dating platform. A humanitarian program. The trust built
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: inside that frame was different. It carried the weight of
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: moral seriousness, of service, of caring for a stranger, because
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: it was the right thing to do. Jean had not
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: fallen in love. She had fallen into caring. The letters
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: asked her to be good.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: She was.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Andrews was arrested in February of 2019 at a motel
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: in Hammond, Indiana. In his room, investigators found the pale
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: blue tin lockbox. He had retrieved it from Jean's garage
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: at some point before or after his arrest and discarded
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: it from his car on County Road 9. A snowplow
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: driver named Stephen Allen struck it with his blade at 4.17
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: in the morning on the third Tuesday of 5, that February.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: The box still latched. slid into the roadside ditch. The
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: letters inside were still wrapped in the dish towel with
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: the small red cardinals. Andrews denied serious criminal intent. He
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: described the correspondence as genuine. He called what happened a situation.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: The jury, the jury, presented with 37 letters, forensic ink analysis,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: two sets of employment records, the fake customs documents, and
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: the stalled Elkhart and Vigo County files as pattern evidence,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: convicted him on all counts in October of 2019 wire fraud,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: mail fraud, obtaining money by false pretenses. The two years
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: of handwriting he had used to build Gene's trust became
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: the two years of evidence that dismantled every defense he offered.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: The pale blue lockbox was photographed by Detective Troy Ward
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: before it was logged into the Millhaven Public Evidence Room.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Ward had moved through the case with precision. The photograph identified,
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the employment records pulled, the freight chain traced backward through
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: an Indianapolis mailbox to a Romanian server cluster. Every threat
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: Andrews had trusted to dissolve had held. Gene recovered most
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: of the $ 6, 000 through a civil judgment. Collection is ongoing.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: That process by its nature takes years. The money she
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: wired arrived in a Toronto account and moved fast. The
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: civil system moves slower. John knew this going in. Kwame Asante,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: the real civil engineer whose 2015 professional photograph had been stolen.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: and used in this scheme, and others traced to the
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: same server cluster, cooperated fully with investigators. He had never
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: heard of John Jenkins. He had never heard of Douglas Andrews.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: His image had been a tool, borrowed without his knowledge,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: used to give a fiction of face. The Elkhart and
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Vigo County cases remained stalled. Those victims had not kept
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: their letters. There was no paper trail, no ink chemistry
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: to analyze, no postmark routing to reconstruct. The pattern evidence
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: those stalled files provided the jury was enough to show
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: intent and repetition, but not enough to charge. Andrews was
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: convicted on the counts tied to Jean. The others stayed open.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: In the file.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: That distinction matters. Jean Jenkins kept 37 letters in a
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: pale blue tin lockbox with a brass clasp. She kept
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: them not as evidence. She kept them because they had
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: meant something to her. and she did not yet know
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: what they were. That instinct, the same instinct that made
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: her a good literacy teacher, a reliable food-shell volunteer, a
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: woman who showed up on Wednesdays for 11 years, is
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the reason a prosecution was possible at all. The other
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: victims gave everything the scheme asked and had nothing left
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: to hand a detective. The jury convicted Andrews in October
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: of 2019 on all counts, wire fraud, mail fraud, and
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: obtaining money by false pretenses. What the record does show
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: is the gap between the two men, the one who
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: existed and the one gene, corresponded with. Kwame Asante, in Kumasi,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: had built a real engineering career. His photograph had been
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: taken in 2015, a professional headshot, the kind you use
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: when you are trying to be seen, clearly. Andrews used
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: that image to become invisible. There is something in this
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: case that resists a clean ending, and it is not
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: the verdict. The verdict came. The conviction held. Jean's money
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: is largely accounted for in a judgment she is still
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: collecting against. What resists is something smaller. It is the
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: dish towel. Small red cardinals on white cotton. Jean had
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: wrapped the letters in it when she placed them in
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the lockbox, not to protect them from legal scrutiny. Not
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: because she anticipated a ditch on County Road 9 or
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: a snowplow at 4.17 in the morning. She wrapped them
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: because they had mattered to her. That care survived the garage,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: survived the ditch, survived an Indiana winter. John Jenkins still
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: teaches adult literacy at the Millhaven Public Library on Tuesdays
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: and Thursdays. She still volunteers at the Garrett County Food
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Shelf on Wednesdays. 11 years in, then 12, then more.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Bet Stamos is still the coordinator. Jean still shows up.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: That continuity is not a small thing. The scheme had
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: targeted the part of Jean that wanted to do something
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: useful with the hours she had. It had dressed itself
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: in humanitarian language precisely because that language held weight for her.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: And yet the thing Andrews had borrowed to build credibility,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Jean's genuine desire to be of use, survived him entirely.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: He could exploit the impulse. He could not extinguish it.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: The two prior victims in Elkhart and Vigo counties had
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: lost money, lost trust, and had nothing left to hand.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: A detective. Jean lost money.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Lost trust, and handed detectives 37 letters, forensic ink, postmark routing,
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: and the lockbox recovered from a ditch. She had not
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: known she was building a case. She had thought she
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: was corresponding with a man who needed someone to write
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: to him. She was right about the need. She was
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: wrong about the man. That is the part of this
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: story that has stayed with investigators and with anyone who
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: has read the correspondence. Not the fraud mechanics, not the
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Romanian server cluster, not the fake customs bond. The part
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that stays is that Jean Jenkins was doing exactly what
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: she set out to do. She was caring for a stranger.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: The stranger was not who he said he was. But
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: the caring was real, and it outlasted everything he built
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: on top of it. The lockbox is in the Millhaven
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Public Evidence Room. The dish towel with the small red
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: cardinals is with it. John has the civil judgment. Andrews
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: has the conviction. And somewhere in Kumasi, a real engineer
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: named Kwame Asante lives a life his photograph was stolen
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: from mine unaware of the women who looked at his
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: face and decided to trust it. Unaware of the letters
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: written to a man who wore his image like a coat,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: he cooperated. He answered every question. he had no answers
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: to give because he had not been there Jean had
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: been there all 37 times she had been there this
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: show is made by obo media