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He Made Her Doubt Her Own Life - The Staged Shoe Mystery · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: At six forty in the morning on February seventh, two
0:07
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a bird watcher named Clifford Hill stepped on
0:11
Speaker 1: to the frozen edge of Panic Marsh and stopped walking.
0:15
Speaker 1: Forty yards out on the ice. Sitting upright in unbroken snow,
0:20
Speaker 1: was a single white women's sneaker, laces tied, no tracks
0:25
Speaker 1: leading to it, no tracks leading away. The shoe was
0:29
Speaker 1: a size eight and a half new Balance white, purchased
0:32
Speaker 1: the previous October at a sporting goods store in Delfield, Indiana.
0:37
Speaker 1: It was alone on the ice, the way objects are
0:40
Speaker 1: only when someone has placed them there deliberately. The woman
0:44
Speaker 1: who owned that shoe was not missing. She was in
0:47
Speaker 1: a hospital bed six miles away and had been for
0:50
Speaker 1: six days. That contradiction, a shoe staged for a story
0:55
Speaker 1: that had already failed, is where this case begins to
0:58
Speaker 1: crack open, Because what happened to Monica Phillips in the
1:02
Speaker 1: winter of two thousand nineteen was not an accident, and
1:05
Speaker 1: it was not a breakdown. It was an architecture. One
1:09
Speaker 1: person spent nearly three years dismantling another person's grip on
1:13
Speaker 1: her own reality, brick by brick, until she could no
1:17
Speaker 1: longer tell what was true about herself, and then he
1:21
Speaker 1: called nine one one. There is something specific about this
1:25
Speaker 1: case that resists easy categorization. The weapon was invisible, the
1:30
Speaker 1: wound looked self inflicted, and the man who built the
1:33
Speaker 1: whole structure stood at the center of it, presenting himself
1:37
Speaker 1: as the one person trying to help. Clifford Hill photographed
1:40
Speaker 1: the shoe and called the sheriff. That photograph would eventually
1:44
Speaker 1: land on the desk of Detective Don Ramsay, and what
1:47
Speaker 1: she found when she started pulling the thread would reshape
1:51
Speaker 1: every assumption anyone had made about the poe preceding three years.
1:56
Speaker 1: Monica Phillips was forty eight years old in the winter
1:59
Speaker 1: of two thousand two nineteen, and she had spent the
2:02
Speaker 1: better part of two decades making room in her life
2:05
Speaker 1: for children who had nowhere else to go. She had
2:09
Speaker 1: worked as an intake coordinator for the Indiana Department of
2:12
Speaker 1: Child Services for eighteen years. She was the person families
2:17
Speaker 1: encountered at the first and most frightening threshold of the system.
2:21
Speaker 1: She knew what that moment felt like for a child,
2:24
Speaker 1: and she took it seriously. Between twenty twelve and twenty nineteen,
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Speaker 1: She accepted seven foster placements into her Beijes ranch house
2:33
Speaker 1: on Vantage Street in Delfield. Seven children who needed stability
2:38
Speaker 1: found it, at least for a time, in her home.
2:41
Speaker 1: Her sister, Patrice, who lived in Fort Wayne, could have
2:44
Speaker 1: described Monica's schedule better than most people described their own.
2:49
Speaker 1: Monica called every Wednesday at eleven fifteen at night, not approximately,
2:55
Speaker 1: not around eleven eleven fifteen. The consistency was not impulsive,
3:01
Speaker 1: it was generous. Patrice always knew the call was coming.
3:05
Speaker 1: It was one of the small, reliable architectures Monica built
3:08
Speaker 1: into the people she loved. That reliability is worth holding onto,
3:13
Speaker 1: because the version of Monica that John Barrett would eventually
3:16
Speaker 1: present to her employer, her physician, and her licensing board
3:20
Speaker 1: was a woman coming apart at the seams, emotionally volatile,
3:24
Speaker 1: possibly unstable, possibly a danger to the children in her care.
3:28
Speaker 1: Barrett was fifty one when he met Monica at a
3:31
Speaker 1: Department of Child Services training seminar in the spring of
3:35
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. He presented himself as a volunteer affiliated with
3:39
Speaker 1: a nonprofit working in the foster care space. He had
3:42
Speaker 1: no foster certification. What he had was fluency, a practiced
3:47
Speaker 1: ability to speak the language of that world convincingly enough
3:50
Speaker 1: that a room full of professionals did not question him.
3:54
Speaker 1: The relationship began in August of twenty sixteen. By the
3:58
Speaker 1: spring of two thousand seven, teteen, Barrett had moved into
4:02
Speaker 1: the Vantage Street house. What happened next followed a logic
4:06
Speaker 1: that is only visible in retrospect. At the time, each
4:10
Speaker 1: individual move could be explained away. The joint account Barrett
4:14
Speaker 1: proposed made sense. They were sharing a home and shared expenses.
4:19
Speaker 1: The redirection of Monica's direct deposit into that account was
4:23
Speaker 1: a practical simplification. The debit card with a set monthly
4:27
Speaker 1: limit that Barrett administered was, he said, a budgeting tool.
4:32
Speaker 1: Monica was busy. She was managing a demanding job and
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Speaker 1: a household with a teenage foster child. She let the
4:40
Speaker 1: financial architecture settle around her because she trusted the person
4:44
Speaker 1: who built it. Meanwhile, Barrett had begun making quiet appearances
4:48
Speaker 1: in corners of Monica's professional and medical life, always without
4:52
Speaker 1: her present. He expressed concern about her to her DCS supervisor,
4:57
Speaker 1: Renee Aldridge. He spoke to her physician. He made contact
5:02
Speaker 1: with the licensing board that oversaw her foster placement certification.
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Speaker 1: In each conversation, he positioned himself as a worried partner,
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Speaker 1: a man watching someone he loved struggled and not knowing
5:14
Speaker 1: how to help. The concern he performed was meticulous. It
5:19
Speaker 1: was also surgical. Every conversation seated the same narrative. Monica
5:24
Speaker 1: was not well, had not been well for some time,
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Speaker 1: and the people around her should be watching carefully. He
5:30
Speaker 1: was not planting rumors. He was building a record. By
5:34
Speaker 1: January of twenty nineteen, Monica had been living inside a
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Speaker 1: version of her own life that had been quietly reframed
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Speaker 1: around her. Her money moved through accounts she did not
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Speaker 1: fully control. Her professional reputation had been gently eroded by
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Speaker 1: a man who never made a single accusation directly to
5:53
Speaker 1: her face, and she had no clear way to measure
5:56
Speaker 1: how far the ground had shifted because the shifting had
5:59
Speaker 1: been so slow. Oh and because the person doing it
6:02
Speaker 1: was also the person she came home to every night.
6:05
Speaker 1: What she did not know, what no one knew yet,
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Speaker 1: was that on January twenty second, a fifteen year old
6:13
Speaker 1: boy named Darnell led a man with a fake badge
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Speaker 1: into the house. Darnell was home sick that day. The
6:21
Speaker 1: man said he was from the water authority. He was
6:24
Speaker 1: in the utility area for about forty minutes, then he left.
6:28
Speaker 1: The water authority had no record of sending anyone to
6:31
Speaker 1: that address. Forty minutes. That is how long Barrett spent
6:35
Speaker 1: in the utility area of Monica's home. No repair order,
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Speaker 1: no record in any water authority log, just a man
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Speaker 1: with a badge that looked right, and a fifteen year
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Speaker 1: old who had no reason to think otherwise. What he
6:47
Speaker 1: left behind was not visible. It was not a broken
6:50
Speaker 1: lock or a cut wire. It was a small heating element,
6:55
Speaker 1: a fixed to the back wall of the medicine cabinet
6:58
Speaker 1: shared partition. The element raised the temperature inside the cabinet
7:03
Speaker 1: eight to twelve degrees fahrenheit over sustained periods, not enough
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Speaker 1: to melt anything, not enough to smelt enough over three
7:12
Speaker 1: weeks to slowly degrade the coating on Monica's antidepressant tablets.
7:16
Speaker 1: Each pill she took delivered more than the label said
7:19
Speaker 1: it would. She did not take extra pills. The bottle
7:23
Speaker 1: count was consistent with correct dosage. There was no early refill,
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Speaker 1: no excess. The prosecution retained a forensic pharmacist who confirmed
7:33
Speaker 1: what the numbers had already suggested. By the time Monica
7:36
Speaker 1: was found in her kitchen on the night of February first,
7:39
Speaker 1: her blood concentration from the medication was approximately four times
7:44
Speaker 1: the therapeutic level. She had done everything right, the prescription
7:48
Speaker 1: had been turned into something else without her knowledge. Barrett
7:52
Speaker 1: called nine one one at approximately nine twenty that evening.
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Speaker 1: He was the one who found her. He was the
8:00
Speaker 1: one who made the call. He had told her physician
8:03
Speaker 1: she was struggling. He had told her supervisor, He had
8:07
Speaker 1: told the licensing board. Now he was the man standing
8:11
Speaker 1: in the kitchen dialing for help, watching the record he
8:14
Speaker 1: had built close around her like a frame. Six days later,
8:18
Speaker 1: on the morning of February seventh, a man named Clifford
8:22
Speaker 1: Hill walked the eastern edge of Pennock Marsh at six
8:25
Speaker 1: forty in the morning. He was a bird watcher. He
8:28
Speaker 1: had walked that route for years. He stopped when he
8:31
Speaker 1: saw something on the ice forty yards from shore. A
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Speaker 1: single white sneaker women's size eight and a half new
8:39
Speaker 1: balance laces tied sitting upright on unbroken ice, with no tracks,
8:44
Speaker 1: no drag marks, no disturbance of any kind around it.
8:48
Speaker 1: Hill photographed it and called the sheriff. Monica Phillips was
8:51
Speaker 1: not missing. She was in a hospital bed at Aldridge
8:54
Speaker 1: County General. She had been there for six days, but
8:58
Speaker 1: someone had placed her shoe on a frozen marsh and
9:01
Speaker 1: left it to be found. Detective Don Ramsey received the
9:05
Speaker 1: case on February eighth. She had eleven years in Aldridge County.
9:10
Speaker 1: She had seen staged scenes before, but the shoe stopped
9:14
Speaker 1: her in a way she described in her case notes
9:17
Speaker 1: with unusual precision. The ice was thick enough to hold weight.
9:21
Speaker 1: The East Access road ran thirty feet above open water.
9:25
Speaker 1: The shoe had been placed, not thrown. Someone had gone
9:28
Speaker 1: out there and set it down carefully, laces tied upright
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Speaker 1: so that it would be read a specific way. Ramsey
9:36
Speaker 1: wrote he wanted her to be a woman who had
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Speaker 1: walked to the middle of a frozen marsh and left
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Speaker 1: a shoe. That sentence is the hinge of everything that followed.
9:45
Speaker 1: Because a woman who walks to the middle of a
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Speaker 1: frozen marsh at night and leaves a shoe is a
9:51
Speaker 1: woman whose hospitalization makes a different kind of sense. She
9:55
Speaker 1: is not a victim. She is a woman in crisis,
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Speaker 1: whose partner had been warning people from months, whose medications
10:01
Speaker 1: had already been flagged as a concern, whose judgment, according
10:05
Speaker 1: to the record Barrett had assembled, had been deteriorating for
10:08
Speaker 1: some time. The shoe was the final notation in that record.
10:12
Speaker 1: It was meant to be the one that made everything
10:15
Speaker 1: before it legally picture the investigation from two directions at once.
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Speaker 1: The first direction was physical. Ramsey requested the Water Authority
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Speaker 1: log for January twenty second nothing. She pulled the records herself.
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Speaker 1: No service call had been dispatched to Vantage Street. She
10:32
Speaker 1: asked Darnell to describe the man. His description matched Barrett.
10:36
Speaker 1: The fake badge was consistent with Water Authority materials, but
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Speaker 1: had not been issued by the authority. Someone had made
10:43
Speaker 1: it or obtained it outside official channels. The second direction
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Speaker 1: was historical. On February fourteenth, Ramsey found a civil filing
10:53
Speaker 1: in Warwick County from twenty eleven. A woman named Sandra Ogle,
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Speaker 1: a dental hygienist from Booneville, had petitioned for a restraining
11:02
Speaker 1: order against John Barrett. The petition alleged financial manipulation. Shortly
11:07
Speaker 1: after filing, Sandra was hospitalized following an apparent overdose of
11:12
Speaker 1: prescribed sleep medication. Three weeks later, she withdrew the petition.
11:18
Speaker 1: Ramsay drove to Boonville on February fifteenth and sat across
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Speaker 1: from Sandra Ogle. The details Sandra described had a shape
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Speaker 1: that was not hard to recognize, a relationship that gradually
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Speaker 1: reorganized itself around his preferences, financial arrangements that made sense
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Speaker 1: individually but not together, a hospitalization that arrived at the
11:40
Speaker 1: worst possible moment, and a withdrawal of the petition that
11:43
Speaker 1: she could not fully explain. Even years later. No criminal
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Speaker 1: conviction had resulted. The petition was withdrawn, not adjudicated. But
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Speaker 1: the shape of what Sandra described and the shape of
11:55
Speaker 1: what had happened to Monica were not two different shapes.
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Speaker 1: Everything had been pointing toward a man who had done
12:01
Speaker 1: this once before and made a mistake or gotten lucky
12:05
Speaker 1: and moved on. That was the direction. The evidence seemed
12:08
Speaker 1: to be heading one prior incident imperfectly resolved, followed by
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Speaker 1: a more refined attempt. But the forensic pharmacist's report reframed
12:17
Speaker 1: the picture. Barrett had not improvised the heating element, he
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Speaker 1: had not guessed at the pharmacology. The mechanism was specific, calibrated,
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Speaker 1: and designed to produce a result that looked exactly like
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Speaker 1: what the medical record would expect to see in a
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Speaker 1: woman whose partner had been telling doctors for months that
12:35
Speaker 1: she was not taking her medication correctly. The degradation, the
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Speaker 1: blood concentration, the bottle count consistent with compliance. Each element
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Speaker 1: pointed away from intervention and toward a woman whose condition
12:48
Speaker 1: had simply worsened on its own. The patience required to
12:52
Speaker 1: build that outcome was not the patience of someone who
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Speaker 1: had gotten lucky once. It was the patience of someone
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Speaker 1: who had practiced. Detective Ramsay presented the forensic pharmacist's findings
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Speaker 1: to the Aldridge County Prosecutor on February twenty eighth, two
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Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. Four days later, on March third, officers located
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Speaker 1: John Barrett at a Hampton Inn in Tarot Hate. He
13:16
Speaker 1: was arrested without incident. He had been there for eleven days.
13:21
Speaker 1: The charges filed in Aldridge County were specific and layered
13:25
Speaker 1: aggravated battery, financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, criminal confinement,
13:31
Speaker 1: and fraud. Warwick County subsequently filed related charges stemming from
13:35
Speaker 1: Sandra Ogle's case, two women, two counties, one set of
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Speaker 1: charges that would finally reach a verdict. The trial lasted
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Speaker 1: nine days. The prosecution walked the jury through every layer
13:49
Speaker 1: of the mechanism, the seminar, the relationship, the financial consolidation,
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Speaker 1: the planted doubt with supervisors and physicians, the fake contractor,
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Speaker 1: the heating element, the degraded medication, the blood concentration four
14:05
Speaker 1: times the therapeutic level, and the prescription bottle count that
14:09
Speaker 1: showed Monica had taken every pill exactly as directed. The
14:14
Speaker 1: defense offered no alternate explanation for the heating element. It
14:18
Speaker 1: offered no explanation for the shoe. The jury convicted on
14:22
Speaker 1: all counts in October of twenty nineteen. The sentence was
14:26
Speaker 1: fourteen years. Barrett's attorneys filed appeals. The third was denied
14:31
Speaker 1: in February of twenty twenty four. There is a detail
14:35
Speaker 1: from that same month that belongs at the center of
14:38
Speaker 1: this story, not at its edges. In February twenty twenty four,
14:43
Speaker 1: Barrett gave a recorded statement to a public defender investigator
14:47
Speaker 1: reviewing an unrelated case. He was not asked about Monica Phillips.
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Speaker 1: He was not asked about Sandra Ogle. He was asked
14:55
Speaker 1: in general terms about psychological pressure and how a person
14:59
Speaker 1: might make so offfering appear self inflicted. He answered, he
15:03
Speaker 1: said the key was patience. He said the key was
15:06
Speaker 1: being the one who called for help. Detective Ramsey received
15:10
Speaker 1: a copy of that recording. She forwarded it to Monica.
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Speaker 1: There is no clean way to describe what it means
15:16
Speaker 1: for a person to hear in someone else's voice a
15:19
Speaker 1: clinical description of what was done to them. The recording
15:22
Speaker 1: confirmed nothing the jury had not already decided, But confirmation
15:26
Speaker 1: and understanding are not the same thing. Monica had spent
15:30
Speaker 1: years knowing the verdict. The recording gave her the architecture
15:34
Speaker 1: the shoe at Pennic Marsh was never definitively explained at trial.
15:38
Speaker 1: The prosecution's theory, documented in Ramsey's case notes, was that
15:42
Speaker 1: Barrett placed it in the hours after calling nine to
15:45
Speaker 1: one one on February first, on the ice at the
15:48
Speaker 1: eastern edge of the marsh, thirty feet below the bridge
15:52
Speaker 1: on the East access road. Laces tied, no tracks, no
15:56
Speaker 1: disturbance in the surface around it. The theory held that
15:59
Speaker 1: he wanted her to be a woman who had walked
16:02
Speaker 1: to the middle of a frozen marsh and left a
16:04
Speaker 1: shoe behind. Monica was already hospitalized when Clifford Hill photographed
16:09
Speaker 1: it at six forty in the morning on February seventh.
16:14
Speaker 1: She was not missing, She was not in danger of
16:17
Speaker 1: being found. The shoe was not a clue about her location.
16:21
Speaker 1: It was a narrative, a story someone was preparing in
16:25
Speaker 1: case a different story needed to be told. The jury
16:28
Speaker 1: convicted without it. The shoe did not affect the verdict,
16:32
Speaker 1: but it stays. Monica Phillips was discharged from Eldridge County
16:36
Speaker 1: General on February nineteenth, two thousand nineteen. Patrece drove down
16:41
Speaker 1: from Fort Wayne and brought her home. She had been
16:44
Speaker 1: an intake coordinator for the Department of Child Services for
16:48
Speaker 1: eighteen years. She had taken in seven foster placements between
16:52
Speaker 1: two thy twelve and two thousand nineteen. She had built
16:55
Speaker 1: a life around the specific skill of recognizing when a
16:58
Speaker 1: child needed someone to pay. She is working again as
17:02
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty four. She still calls Patrese every Wednesday
17:07
Speaker 1: at eleven fifteen at night. That detail is not a footnote.
17:12
Speaker 1: The Wednesday calls where something Patrice had noticed changing the
17:15
Speaker 1: flatness in Monica's voice, the shorter answers, the way the
17:19
Speaker 1: calls became perfunctory rather than connective. Patrice had named that
17:23
Speaker 1: change to herself before she had any language for what
17:27
Speaker 1: was causing it. The calls became evidence before they became evidence,
17:31
Speaker 1: and now they are just calls again, Wednesday, eleven fifteen,
17:36
Speaker 1: her sister's voice on the other end of the line.
17:39
Speaker 1: What John Barrett did was not impulsive. The forensic record,
17:43
Speaker 1: the financial record, the medical record, and the pattern established
17:47
Speaker 1: by Sandra Ogle's case before Monica ever met him. All
17:51
Speaker 1: of it converges on the same fact. He built a system,
17:55
Speaker 1: he maintained it over years. He was careful enough to
17:58
Speaker 1: make the pill bottle catled look right. He was careful
18:02
Speaker 1: enough to install a heating element on the back of
18:04
Speaker 1: a medicine cabinet wall during a forty minute window when
18:08
Speaker 1: a fifteen year old was home sick and would not
18:11
Speaker 1: think to ask questions. He was careful enough to call
18:14
Speaker 1: nine one one himself, so that the first voice in
18:17
Speaker 1: the record was his voice, concerned, helpful, the one who
18:21
Speaker 1: noticed something was wrong. The recording he gave in twenty
18:26
Speaker 1: twenty four was not a confession. It was a tutorial.
18:30
Speaker 1: The distinction matters only slightly. Monica still has the capacity
18:35
Speaker 1: to be someone who notices when people need help. That
18:38
Speaker 1: capacity was the thing Barrett worked hardest to reach. He
18:42
Speaker 1: did not reach it. There is something clarifying in that,
18:45
Speaker 1: not comforting clarifying. The shoe on the ice at Pennock
18:50
Speaker 1: Marsh white, size eight and a half, laces tied, no
18:55
Speaker 1: tracks leading to it or away from it was meant
18:59
Speaker 1: to tell a story worry about a woman who had
19:01
Speaker 1: come apart. The story it actually told was about the
19:04
Speaker 1: man who placed it there, his patience, his precision, and
19:08
Speaker 1: the certainty he had standing on that bridge in the
19:11
Speaker 1: dark that no one would look hard enough to find him.
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Speaker 1: Someone looked. This show is made by Obo Media