Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Stole Her Life With a Spreadsheet - The Cold-Calculated Betrayal

Transcript

He Stole Her Life With a Spreadsheet - The Cold-Calculated Betrayal · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of February eleventh, twenty nineteen, a fourteen
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: year old girl named Holly Griffin was walking her paper
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: route on Birchwood Terrace when she noticed something wrong. Under
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the porch of number four fourteen sat a small red
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: vinyl backpack, clean, no frost on the straps, no mildew
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: on the zipper pol The ground on that street had
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: been frozen solid since the second week of January. That
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: backpack should not have been clean. It should not have
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: been there at all. By nine that morning, a welfare
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: check was under way. What officers found inside the house
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: was a woman who believed it was December.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: She had not left in eleven days.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: She was uninjured, and she had no idea that the
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: man she trusted most had been dismantling her life piece
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: by piece for nearly three years. This is the story
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: of how that happened, not with violence, not with threats,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: with a spreadsheet, a paper planner, and a composition notebook
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: that one man kept hidden from the very first month
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: he knew her. Christine Jenkins was forty seven years old
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and owned her home outright.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: That detail matters.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: In Morrow Falls, Ohio, a three bedroom craftsman on Birchwood
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Terrace is not a small thing for someone earning around
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: thirty one thousand dollars a year as a medical transcriptionist.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: She had bought it herself, she had paid it off herself,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: and she ran it with the kind of discipline that
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: most people only talk about. Every Thursday evening, Christine sat
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: at her kitchen table with a spiral notebook and accounted
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: for every dollar that had moved through her week. Groceries, utilities,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: household supplies.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: She did not estimate, she did not round.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: The notebook was meticulous in the way that only someone
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: who has had to be meticulous stays meticulous, because the
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: margin for error was real and she knew it. But
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: the note book was only part of the picture. For
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: nine years, Christine had been a licensed foster parent. Eleven
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: children had come through that craftsman on Birchwood Terrace. Each
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: one arrived with needs she took seriously. She worked with
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: case workers, attended reviews, kept records. She was, by every
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: account in the case file, exactly the kind of foster
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: parent the system needs and rarely finds. The foster stipends
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: she received were not extra income. They went back into
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: the placements supplies, clothing, food, stability. Her older sister, Patricia,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: lived in Akron, about forty minutes away. Patricia worked second shift,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: so their calls landed late Wednesdays around eleven at night,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: a rhythm they had kept since their mother died eight
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: years before. Patricia described Christine the way people describe someone
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: they have known so long. The words come easy, organized, steady, warm,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: someone who called back, someone who was never late. Christine
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: was also, by her own admission, someone who wanted to
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: do more, more placements, more stability for kids who needed it.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: That desire was genuine. It was also, as it turned out,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: visible to the wrong person.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: In February of.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Twenty sixteen, Christine attended a dinner posted by the Lakewood
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: Bridge Alliance, a community organization that worked with foster and
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: adoptive families in the region. The Alliance was legitimate, It
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: ran events, connected families, offered support networks. That evening, she
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: met a man named Jerry Stuart. Stuart was forty four,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: introduced himself as a family advocate and volunteered regularly with
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: the Alliance. He was easy to talk to, He asked
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: the right questions, He remembered what people said.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Within a few weeks. Christine would see.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Him at alliance events and then gradually outside of them.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: He seemed to understand her work in a way most
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: people didn't. He talked about the system, about how hard
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: it was, about how important people like Christine were, two
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: kids who had nobody. What Christine did not know, What
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: no background check in Ohio would have revealed, was that
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: two civil complaints had been filed against Stuart in Pennsylvania.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Both were dismissed, no convictions, no record, a clean slate,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: at least on paper. The forensic accountant who would later
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: reconstruct what happened inside Christine's finances over the next thirty
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: months described it as the most methodically constructed exploitation she
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: had resaved seen in twenty two years of work. Brenda
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Whitley said that carefully she meant it, but in the
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: spring of twenty sixteen, none of that was visible. What
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: was visible was a man who showed up, who listened,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: and who seemed to care about the same things Christine
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: cared about. Within a few months, he was at her
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: house regularly. The Thursday notebook was still on the table,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: The Wednesday calls with Patricia were still happening. For a
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: little while longer everything looked the same. The Thursday notebook
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: sat on the same kitchen table where it had always sat,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: same spiral binding, same columns, same Christine handwriting. In August
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen, Jerry Stewart suggested something more practical, a
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: shared spreadsheet, He said, easier to track. He'd set it up,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: manage the columns, keep everything organized. Christine was busy, she agreed.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: The notebook went into a drawer. That single exchange a
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: paper planner for a digital one was not a small thing.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: The notebook had been Christine's. She opened it Thursday evenings,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: wrote the numbers herself, closed it herself. The spreadsheet was
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: something she rarely looked at. Stuart looked at it constantly.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Within weeks, his understanding of her finances was more complete
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: than her own.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: By March of.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Twenty seventeen, the relationship had deepened enough that Stuart raised
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: what he framed as a practical question. It would be easier,
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: he explained, if he could help manage the account directly
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: pay a bill if Christine was at work, handle a transfer.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: She was at an appointment. He had a form.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: She signed it at the kitchen table on a Sunday
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: afternoon football on the television, coffee going cold beside her.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: She did not read it fully. She trusted him. Stuart
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: was now a joint account holder on Christine's checking account.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: The stapans were the mechanism. Christine was a licensed foster parent,
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: which meant the State of Ohio deposited payments for each
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: child placed in her care. Six placements ran between August
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: of twothsy sixteen and December of twenty eighteen. Each time
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: a deposit cleared, within three to five days a transfer
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: left the account. The amounts ranged from four hundred dollars
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: to over twelve hundred. Across thirty months, the total exceeded
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: nineteen thousand dollars. Forensic accountant Brenda Whitley found something in
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: the time stamps that stopped her. The transfers did not
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: cluster around weekends when Christine was home. They clustered around
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: her medical appointments, the specific windows when Christine was unlikely
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: to be checking her phone. That was not a coincidence.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Whitley was willing to call a coincidence. But here is
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: the detail that refrains every transaction that preceded it. The
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: money moved out of an account designated for Christine's household
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: and for the children in her care. Stuart had built
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: a system with Christine's name on it to extract resources
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: from children she was licensed to protect. By late twenty seventeen,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Christine had stopped attending Alliance dinners. Stuart had mentioned carefully
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: that some of the organizers had been saying things she
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: wasn't sure exactly what. Stuart was vague about the specifics,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: which somehow made it feel more believable. Her caseworker, Audra
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Tompkins called less often. Stuart had used the word overstepping once,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: and Christine found it hard to argue with. After that,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: her sister Patricia an Akron, noticed the Wednesday calls going irregular.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Stuart was sometimes in the room when they spoke. When
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Patricia planned visits, something always came up. Her one unannounced
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: visit in early twenty eighteen found Christine thin and anxious.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Patricia did not have a word for what she was seeing.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: She just knew it was wrong. In late November of
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, a seven year old girl named Dea completed
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: ten weeks in Christine's care and was transferred to a
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: permanent placement. The departure was routine, In its paperwork, social
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: worker Kevin ash logged a child's backpack left behind a
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: clean red vinyl one for retrieval. He noted it for
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: the record. Jerry Stewart intercepted that note. He told Christine
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: the backpack had been picked up. She believed him. Somewhere
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: between that conversation and February eleventh of twenty nineteen, the
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: backpack appeared under the porch at four to fourteen Birchwood Terrace.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: When Christine saw it in January, she assumed she was
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: confused about the timeline of Daja's departure. Stuart confirmed her confusion. Yes,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: she must have forgotten things like that happened. It was
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: Brenda Whitley, not at the scene, but months later in
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: the sentencing hearing, who advanced what she called her working
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: theory the backpack placement was deliberate a disorientation tool, an
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: object Christine would see repeatedly question herself about repeatedly, and
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: ultimately explain away through her own doubt rather than Stuart's words.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Stuart never addressed the backpack when he confessed that piece
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: stayed open. Now picture what the investigation was actually working with.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: In early two thousand, nineteen, a welfare check had confirmed
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Christine Jenkins was disoriented, isolated, and had not left her
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: home in eleven days. In the middle of an Ohio winter,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: a fourteen year old on a paper route had found
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: a child's backpack under a frozen porch with no frost
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: on it, no mildew, no weathering of any kind, and
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: a forensic accountant was mapping financial transfers to a woman's
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: medical calendar. Each of those facts on its own pointed
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: in a clear direction, but the picture wasn't complete until
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: the second warrant. Detectives went into a storage unit registered
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: under a variation of Jerry Stuart's middle name, inside two
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: banker's boxes. The first box held financial documents from Pickett County,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: documents connected to a woman named Norma Claiborne. Norma was
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: fifty three years old, a foster career in Pickett County,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: and her relationship with Jerry Stewart had run from approximately
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: twenty twelve to two thousand fourteen.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: She had lost roughly.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Fourteen thousand dollars through a mechanism investigators would later describe
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: as identical. She had not pressed charges at the time
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: she had relocated. The second box held a composition notebook.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: The notebook had.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Columns foster Child names, stipend amounts received, amounts transferred out.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: The columns ran from the first month of Stuart's relationship
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: with Christine Jenkins. He had kept this record from the beginning,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: not as evidence of wrongdoing that he feared, but, according
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: to a margin note on the first page, as a
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: calculation of what Christine owed him for his household investment.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: He called called it a ledger.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Detective Sandra Cook placed the Clayborne documents beside the ledger
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: on the table in the interview room on March fourteenth
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen. Stuart looked at both of them for
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: approximately ninety seconds. Then he said he wanted to make
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: a statement. The investigation had spent weeks building toward a
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: specific theory that Stuart had opportunistically exploited access he gained
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: through a community organization, and that the financial manipulation had
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: grown over time as opportunity presented itself. That was the
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: shape of the case that seemed to be emerging, opportunistic adaptive.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: The ledger raised that version completely. A record kept from
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: month one organized by Child cross reference to the day
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: that was not opportunism, That was a plan that existed
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: before Christine Jenkins ever signed a form at her kitchen table,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: possibly before she ever trusted him enough to show him
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: the Thursday notebook, walk back through, every moment of warmth,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: every conversation about the system, every time he was simply
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: present when she needed some one to be.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: All of it now carried a different weight.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: The question investigators had been asking was when Stuart had
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: decided to do this. The ledger's answer was that he
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: had never decided to stop. Stuart's statement lasted less than
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: three minutes. He did not explain the backpack. That single
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: omission would matter. At sentencing, forensic accountant Brenda Whitley twenty
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: two years in financial crimes, told the court that, in
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: her professional assessment, this was the most methodically constructed exploitation
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: she had encountered.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: She went further.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: She presented a working theory about the back pack, that
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: it had been placed there deliberately during Christine's documented period
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: of disorientation as a tool to deepen her confusion about
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: the time line of Dadege's departure. Whitley was careful with
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: her language. She called it a working theory, not established fact,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: but she had done something the defense could not easily
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: rebut she had matched Stuart's transaction time stamps to Christine's
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: medical appointments. Every major transfer had occurred within days of
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: a scheduled absence from the house. The court had the ledger,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: it had the Clayborne documents, It had the time stamps.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Jerry Stewart pleaded guilty to four of the five counts
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, theft by deception, and
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: two counts of unauthorized electronic funds transfer. The fifth count
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: covered the Claiborne period in Pickett County.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: The sentence handed.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Down was six years and eight months. Norma Claiborne, fifty
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: three years old, had lost approximately fourteen thousand dollars through
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the same mechanism years earlier, and had not pressed charges
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: at the time. She had simply relocated. When investigators from
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Moral Falls contacted her, she co operated fully. Her documents
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: became the second box in the storage unit. Her silence
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: once had cost her nothing legally, whether it cost Christine
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: Jenkins anything is a question the record does not answer,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: and probably cannot. The Lakewood Bridge Alliance was a legitimate organization.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Its vetting process had not flagged Stuart. After the investigation concluded,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: the Alliance revised its screening protocols for volunteer roles involving
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: direct contact with foster families. That revision is documented. It
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: came too late for Christine. It may not be too
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: late for whoever comes next. Christine Jenkins did not attend
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: the sentence in hearing. At that point, she was eleven
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: months into therapy and working part time. The craftsman on
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Birchwood Terrace was still hers. She had not lost the
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: house financially. That was the outer edge of what Stuart
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: had not yet taken. When the backpack surfaced, eleven days
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: more of isolation, and the picture might have looked different.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: The Wednesday night calls with her sister, Patricia had resumed.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: By then, Patricia had been the one who noticed first,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: years before any investigator did. The visits that kept getting canceled,
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Christine's voice going thin, a quality of absence that had
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: no name, but Patricia described it later as watching someone
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: disappear in slow motion while they were still standing in
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: front of you. After Christine's voice came back, Patricia said
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: it took nearly a full year before it sounded like
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Christine's voice again.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Not afraid, not careful her own.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: There is a detail that does not appear in any
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: court filing. In the spring of twenty twenty, on a Wednesday,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Christine Jenkins walked out to the front porch of her
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Craftsmen on Birchwood Terrace and placed a ceramic frog planter.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Back beside the door.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: She had put it in the garage sometime during the
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: years Stuart had been in her life. The record does
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: not say exactly when she moved it or why. It
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: only says that she put it back herself. That is
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: not a legal fact. It does not appear in the
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: ledger or the forensic report, but it is the fact
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: that stays. Jerry Stewart had kept a composition notebook from
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: the first month. He had documented the names of eleven
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: children who passed through Christine's home, the stipends received for
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: their care, and the amounts he transferred out within days
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: of each deposit. He had written in the margin what
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: he believed Christine owed him. He had watched her budget
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: with the Thursday note book her whole adult life, and
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: then replaced that note book with a spreadsheet she could
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: no longer read. He had named the people around her
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: one by one until she stopped calling them. He had
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: kept a prior victim's financial documents in a storage unit
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: under a variation of his own name, beside a record
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: of everything he had done to Christine, and when investigators
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: placed both sets of documents in front of him, he
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: looked at them for ninety seconds and said he wanted
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: to make a statement. He did not explain the backpack,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: not then, not on record. Six years and eight months,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Christine Jenkins fostered eleven children across nine years. She kept
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: meticulous records of her own finances because she understood, down
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: to the dollar, what it meant to be responsible for
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: a child who had no one else. The system had
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: trusted her with that responsibility. She had never broken it.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: What was broken around her was built and maintained by
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: some one who knew exactly what he was doing from
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: the beginning and kept notes to prove it. The Ceramic
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Frog is on the Porch, a quiet testament to a
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: life reclaimed. This show is made by Obomedia