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He Picked Her Like a File: How a Fake Technician Stole a Fostered Life · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At five forty in the morning on March eighth, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a snow plow operator named Roger Coleman dropped
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: his blade on Aldersgate Road in Calloway County and stopped.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: There was a cardboard box sitting on the center line,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: not near the shoulder, not pushed against a guard rail,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: on the center line, in the middle of an active storm,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: with a ring of undisturbed snow around its base that
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: told investigators it had been placed there some time between
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: two and six in the morning. Inside a dish towel,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: a sealed manila envelope, and a hard cover book. The
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: book was titled A Crooked Inheritance. The author's name on
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the cover was Eleanor Marsh. Nobody at the Callaway County
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Sheriff's Office had ever heard of Eleanor Marsh. The envelope
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: was addressed to the Callaway County Public Library. Thirty miles
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: west of that library, there was a small town called
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Sable Creek. A woman named Cheryl Norris had grown up there.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: She had written a memoir, and in February of that
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: same year, she had found her memoir listed for sale
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: on a publisher's website under a name she had never.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Agreed to use. Those two facts, the book on.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: The Road and Cheryl in Sable Creek, were not yet connected.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: That connection would take weeks to establish, a forensic accountant's
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: forty page report and the testimony of a woman who
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: had signed a document without understanding what it was. What
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: the evidence would eventually show is this someone had taken
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Norris's book, published it under a false name, kept
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: the money, and told Cheryl she was misremembering. There is
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: something about this case that resists easy summary. The weapon
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: was not a threat or a breakin.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: It was a.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Clause in a contracted endum, a repeated phrase, and the
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: specific vulnerability being twenty four years old, with a finished
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: manuscript and no one in publishing who knew your name.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Norris was eleven years old when her mother died.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Her father, Dennis, was an electrician who worked long shifts
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: and came home quiet. Her brother, Marcus, was older and
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: moved out within.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: A few years.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: What Cheryl had in the years after the funeral was
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: language she wrote on paper bags. She wrote in the
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: inside covers of library books, not permanently carefully in pencil
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: erased before the books went back she wrote the way
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: some people clean because it organized something that had no
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: other shape. By the time she was in her early twenties,
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: she had been working a morning shift at a veterinary
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: clinic in Pittsburgh since two thy fifteen, seven in the
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: morning to noon, five days a week. One of her
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: tasks was feeding a greyhound named Pepper, a clinic dog
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: recovering from a leg injury who had developed anxiety about
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: mule times. Cheryl started placing the bowl at exactly seven
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: eighteen every morning, not seven fifteen, not seven twenty seven eighteen,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: because she had tested it, and that was the interval
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: that kept Pepper calm. One creature's morning she had decided
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: would be predictable.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: She had been.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Writing the memoir in the hours around that shift for
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: two years. It was about her mother's illness, her father's
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: grief in the years after, and what it had meant
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: to grow up in a house where love and silence
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: occupied the same rooms. She called it The Crooked Thing
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: we called Home. By twenty seventeen, she considered it finished.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: She had never published anything. She knew no one in
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: the industry. A friend from a writing program, Angela Fuentes,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: had a distant connection to a literary agent in New
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: York named Earl Bennett. Angela passed along Cheryl query. Bennett
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: responded within forty eight hours by phone. That detail matters,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: though it would take Cheryl two years to understand why
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: agents who respond to unsolicited queries by phone within two
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: days are not responding to the query. They are responding
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: to something they have already decided. Earl Bennett was fifty
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: three in two thousand seventeen. His agency, Bennett Literary Partners,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: operated out of a sublease on the fourteenth floor of
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: a midtown Manhattan building. People in the industry who remembered
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: him from his earlier years described his reputation as having gone,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: in one account, from promising to peripheral. There had been
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: two civil judgements filed against him, one in two thousand
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: fourteen one in two thouy sixteen by former clients who
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: alleged misappropriation of advanced funds. Neither resulted in criminal charges.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: The publishing world is small, and the paper trail was civil,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: not criminal, and Cheryl Norris had no way of.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: Knowing any of it.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: What she knew was that an agent in New York
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: had called her back in under two days and told
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: her the manuscript was extraordinary, that her voice was distinctive,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: that she had written something true. She was twenty four
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: years old. She had spent two years writing about her
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: dead mother in a one room apartment in Pittsburgh. Before
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: a seven in the morning shift. Someone in New York
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: had read it and called it extraordinary within forty eight hours.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: What happened next would last approximately eight weeks. Bennett was attentive, warm,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: and specific. He remembered details from the manuscript in conversation.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: He checked in frequently. He sent her a summary of
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: his editorial vision for the book, in a three page
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: letter that showed line by line that he had actually
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: read it. He told her she reminded him of writers
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: whose careers he had made. He told her the book
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: deserved a real publisher, not a small press, and that
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: he could get it there. The agency agreement arrived in
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: early autumn of two thousand seventeen. Dennis Norris, Cheryl's father,
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: read the document carefully. He was an electrician with no
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: framework for parsing publishing contracts. He flagged one clause as
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: unusual and asked Cheryl about it. She asked Bennett. Bennett
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: explained it was standard language to allow him to act
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: quickly on her behalf without having to interrupt her with
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: administrative paperwork. Denis read it again. Nothing in his experience
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: gave him the tools to know that the clause in
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: the third addendum, the one granting Bennett editorial and presentation
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: authority without Cheryl's counter signature, was not administrative paperwork.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: It was a door.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Cheryl signed the agreement in the autumn of two thousand seventeen,
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: the door already opened. The first anomaly arrived in January
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen. Bennett told Cheryl he wanted to change
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: the title. The Crooked Thing We Called Home had been
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: her working title for two years. It came from a
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: line in the book, a description of the house her
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: father kept running after her mother died. Bennett proposed a
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Crooked Inheritance instead. He said it was more commercial, more searchable,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: more likely to catch an editor's eye. Cheryl agreed it
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: was a small thing agents suggest title changes. What came
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: next was not small. She asked to see the submission list.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: She wanted to know which editors he had sent the manuscript, to,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: which houses, what the responses had been. Bennett told her
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: he would compile it and send it.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: Over. Three weeks passed. She asked again. He told her his.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Assistant had it and was organizing the files. Another three weeks,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: she asked a third time. He said the list had
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: been lost in an e mail system migration, but that
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: he had contacted seven editors at major houses and that
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: two had responded with interest. Seven editors, two responses with interest.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Nothing on paper. Cheryl wrote in her journal, he has
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: now told me three different reasons why I cannot see
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: who has my book. She wrote it as an observation,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: not yet as an accusation. She did not yet have
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the vocabulary for what she was observing. Then Bennett introduced
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: a new phrase into their conversations. He said it the
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: first time after she followed up on the submission list. Again,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: he told her she was being anxious in a way
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: that could damage her relationship with the publisher. He said
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: it again when she asked about a timeline. He repeated
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: it with enough consistency that the phrase began to do
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: structural work. Cheryl's own question started to feel like a
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: professional liability. Asking began to carry a cost she could
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: feel but not measure. That is how information control and
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: psychological pressure work in the same room. The missing list
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: made asking necessary, the phrase made asking dangerous. Together they
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: made silence feel like the professional choice.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: But here is the thing.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: The silence was not hers to keep forever. In September
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen, Bennett called Cheryl with news Pharaoh House,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: a small New York imprint, had made an offer eleven
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars. He described it as a strong debut advance
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: for a literary memoir from a first time author. He
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: told her the deal was a validation of everything she
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: had written. Cheryl was in her apartment in Pittsburgh when
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the call came. She authorized him by email to execute
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the contract on her behalf. She never received a copy
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: of the contract. She asked once. Bennett said it was
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: still being finalized. She asked again in October. He said
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: contracts from Small Imprint were notoriously slow. She stopped asking.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: She had learned by then what asking cost. The money
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: moved in September of twenty eighteen, eleven thousand dollars from
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Faroe House into the Bennett Literary Partners operating account Victor Morse,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: the forensic accountant who later reviewed the records for the
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: new York County District Attorney's Office would document in forty
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: pages that not one dollar of that advance was ever
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: dispersed to Cheryl Norris, not to any account in her name,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: not to any account traceable to her. The money went in,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: the money did not come out in her direction. Cheryl
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: did not know this. In September of twenty eighteen. She
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: knew only that the book was sold, and that the
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: contract was slow, and that asking about it felt professionally dangerous.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: She kept her morning shift at the veterinary clinic. She
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: placed Pepper's bowl down at seven eighteen every morning because
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the great hound's anxiety spiked if the meal ran late.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: She had decided that one creature's morning would be predictable
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: outside of that hour. Very little in her professional life was.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: In February of twenty nineteen, Cheryl was at home when
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: she typed the name of the imprint into a search engine.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: She was looking for the publication date, which Bennett had
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: told her would be Spring. What appeared in the search
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: results was a listing from farow House's Upcoming Titles page,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: A Crooked Inheritance by Eleanor Marsh. Cheryl did not recognize
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: the name She looked at the listing for a long time.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Then she called Bennett. He told her she was misremembering.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: He said Eleanor Marsh was the pen name she had chosen.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: He said her real.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Name was in the acknowledgments. He said she had agreed
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: to this arrangement for privacy reasons, because memoir authors sometimes
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: prefer a layer of distance.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: He was calm, He was specific.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: It certain Cheryl had not agreed to a pen name.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: There is no documented record that she ever did. Her
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: name was not in the acknowledgments. She had no contract,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: She had no money. She had never held a copy
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: of her own book.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: Her Mother's Illness was.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: In that book, Her Father's Grief, The Greyhound named Pepper,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the seven eighteen feeding, the particular way Silence fills a
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: house where someone used to be. All of it was
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: about to be published under a name she had never
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: heard before she saw it in a search result. Bennett
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: had told her she was misremembering. She called her cousin,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Tracy Schmidt, that same week. Tracy Schmidt was a literary
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: rights attorney based in Philadelphia. She was Cheryl's cousin on
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: her mother's side. The call Cheryl made was not yet
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: a legal consultation. It was a cousin calling a cousin
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: because something felt wrong and she needed someone with the
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: right framework to tell her if it was. Schmidt asked
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: to see the agency agreement. Cheryl sent it. Schmidt read
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: the third adendum. The clause Bennett had described as standard
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: administrative language, the one that allowed him to make editorial
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: and presentation decisions without Cheryl's counter signature, was the legal foundation.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: For everything that had happened.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: It was not standard, It was the mechanism. With that
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: clause in place, Bennett had been able to change the title,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: authorize publication, approve a pen name, and execute a contract,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: all without Cheryl's explicit consent on any individual decision. The
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: door Denis Norris had flagged and asked about in the
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: autumn of two thousand seventeen had been opened this entire time.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Schmidt moved quickly. On March ninth of two thousand nineteen,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: she filed an emergency temporary restraining order. Faraow House's publisher,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Stephen Alcott, received notice the same afternoon. He voluntarily suspended
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: distribution before the end of the business day. Alcott later
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: told his attorney that Bennett had represented Eleanor Marsh to
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: him as a pseudonym chosen by the actual author for
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: privacy reasons. Alcott had no reason to question that he
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: had an agent's word, and he believed a signed release
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: from the author. That release had a signature on it.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: The name on the signature line was Eleanor Marsh. The
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: person who had signed it was Karen Fogel. Karen Fogel
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: was Bennett's former romantic partner. Investigators later obtained her recorded statement.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: She said she had been told the document was a
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: consent form for a client's privacy arrangement.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: She signed it in good faith.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: She did not know what the document was actually authorizing.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: She had been told it was routine picture. What this required,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Bennett needed a signed release from someone named Eleanor Marsh.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Eleanor Marsh did not exist, so he brought a document
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: to a woman who trusted him and told her it
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: was something else.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: She signed it.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: The publisher received a release.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: The book went to press.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Two women, neither of them fully aware of the other's role.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Both enrolled in the same mechanism, Cheryl as the source material,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Karen Fogel as the unwitting signature.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: The third party who held.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: The clause that made all of it possible was the
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: agreement Cheryl had signed in the autumn of two thousand seventeen. Now,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: consider what the evidence already showed at this point, before
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: any arrest, before any forensic accounting. Bennett had submitted a
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: book without producing a submission list he had received in
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: advance without dispersing it. He had authorized publication under a
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: false name without the author's documented consent. He had used
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: a third party's signature on a release document she did
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: not understand, and when the author found the listing and
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: called him, his response was to tell her she was misremembering.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: The pattern was not ambiguous. But one question remained, had
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: this ever happened before? The answer came in the form
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: of a forty page document. Forensic accountant Victor Morse submitted
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: his report to the New York County District Attorney's Office
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: in the weeks following Bennett's June twenty nineteen arrest. The
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: document traced every dollar of the eleven thousand dollars advance
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: from Farrell House. The money had entered the Bennett Literary
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Partners operating account. It had not moved toward Ryl Norris.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: It had not moved toward any account traceable to her zero.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: The advance had covered debts, including one owed to a.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: Printer in New Jersey.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Bennett was charged with wire fraud, criminal impersonation, and theft
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: by deception. He made bail, then in February twenty twenty,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: he violated its conditions and was remanded to Riker's Island.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: His cell made there was a man named Kevin Pruitt
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: awaiting sentencing on an unrelated fraud charge. Prewitt later reported
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Bennett's in cell statements to his own attorney, who passed
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: them to the d a's office. Bennett had not expressed remorse.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: He had expressed grievance. He said Cheryl had failed to
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: understand the publishing business. He said he had made her
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: career and she had destroyed his. Then, according to Pruitt's acount,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: he said something plainer. He had never intended to pay her.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: The advance covered what he owed. He had assumed she
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: would never find out because she was twenty four and
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: didn't know anyone. That sentence, she was twenty four and
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: didn't know any one is the clearest window into what
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Bennett had actually calculated. Not the clause in the third addendum,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: not the submission list that was never produced, not the
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: pen name she had never agreed to. The calculation was
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: simpler than any of those mechanisms. She was young, she
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: was isolated, and she was alone in a system. She
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: didn't understand that was the asset, that was what he
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: had prized. In September twenty twenty, Bennett delivered a formal
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: allocution in open court. In January two thousand twenty one,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: a jury convicted him on all free counts. He was
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: sentenced to four years. Faraoh House had voluntarily suspended distribution
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: the same afternoon. Tracy Schmidt filed the emergency temporary restraining
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: order on March ninth, two thousand nineteen. The civil action
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: followed five days later. Stephen Alcott, the publisher, co operated fully.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: He told his attorney he had been told Eleanor Marsh
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: was a pseudonym chosen by the actual author for privacy.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: He had no reason to question an agent's representation. He
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: had assigned release. He had not known the release was
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: signed by a woman who believed she was filling out
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: a consent for Karen Fogel co operated with investigators.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: She gave a recorded statement.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: She confirmed what she had been told what she had
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: believed and what she had signed.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: There was one thing that remained.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: A DNA swab had been taken from Bennett at the
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: time of his arrest in June twenty nineteen. The sample
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: was uploaded to a state database in the spring of
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty one. It produced a cold case match Bergen County,
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: New Jersey. Twenty eleven, a writer named Patricia Hale had
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: reported a sustained campaign against her forged correspondence sent in
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: her name, honorized access to her submission history. Her home
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: office entered while she attended a scheduled workshop. The case
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: had been investigated, no suspect had ever been identified. It
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: had sat open for nearly a decade. The DNA placed
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Bennett inside Patricia Hale's home office. No additional charges were
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: added to Bennett's existing sentence. The matter was referred to
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Bergen County for independent prosecution. Share Earl Norris had not
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: been an anomaly. She had not been an opportunity. Bennett
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: stumbled into. She had been a target in a practiced sequence,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: a sequence that predated her by eight years that had
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: been refined on at least one other writer who was
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: alone and knew and didn't know anyone. The third addendum clause,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: the love bombing, the missing submission list, the pen name,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: the enrolled signature. None of it was improvised. All of
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: it had been done before. There is a detail that
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: does not resolve cleanly, and it is the one. The
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: case began with the cardboard box on Aldersgate Road, the
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: dish towel, the sealed envelope addressed to the Calloway County
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Public Library, thirty miles from Sable Creek. Roger Colnan found
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: it at five point forty in the morning on March eighth,
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, one day before Tracy Schmidt filed the TRORO.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: The snow ring around the base of the box was unbroken.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Someone had placed it there during the storm between two
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: in the morning and five forty a m.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: And left.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: The handwriting on the envelope was examined by a forensic
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: document specialist. The assessment deliberate and careful, the writing of
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: someone who had practiced the letters. Karen Fogel denied sending it.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: The sender was never definitively identified. The handwriting on the
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: envelope was never matched to anyone in the record.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: What is confirmed.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Someone who knew what the book was, knew where Cheryl
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Norris was from, knew the library near her hometown, and
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: knew one day before the legal machinery moved that the
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: book needed to go home. That person rehearsed the address
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: before they wrote it. They drove or walked to a
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: rural road in a snow storm in the early hours
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: of a March morning. They set the box down on
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: the center line. They left before dawn. The book was
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: heading home before anyone had filed anything. Cheryl Norton began
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: writing The Crooked Thing we called Home because her mother
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: died when she was eleven and she needed somewhere to
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: put that. She wrote it in a one room apartment
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: in Pittsburgh around morning shifts at a veterinary clinic, where
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: she fed a greyhound named Pepper at seven eighteen every morning,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: because one creature's day should be predictable. She finished it
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: by twenty seventeen. She sent the query because she believed
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: the work was ready.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: She was right about that. It was ready.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: It found a publisher, It was printed and bound and distributed.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: The cover, said Eleanor marsh What Bennett had not calculated
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: could not have calculated was that someone inside his own
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: orbit would decide before the lawyers moved that the book
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: belonged somewhere else. Whoever that was, drove through a snow
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: storm with a hard cover memoir and set it down
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: thirty miles from the town where the real author grew up.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: The handwriting was practiced, the address was right, The library
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: was the right kind of place to send something that
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: needed to be kept.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: The question of who sent it remains open.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: That is the one loop the record cannot close. But
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: the book was already on its way back. This show
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: is made by Oboe Media