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Locked Shed, Secret Board: How He Redesigned Her Selfhood · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The lock on the shed door cost more than three
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars. That single fact stopped Harvey Stein cold on
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning in December, because the shed itself was
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: worth nothing. A farm supply structure on a dirt pad
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: without a permit, tucked behind a tree line on Least
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: County land. A bloyd disc lock bank vault grade on
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: a building with a folding chair, a garden hose, and
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: a dry erase board inside. What was on that board
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: would eventually be read into the court record, and when
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: it was a psychologist named Keith Dempsey described it as
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: something that had no precedent in his eleven years of
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: clinical work. A map of a person's selfhood redrawn in
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: someone else's handwriting, locked behind a door that only one
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: person had the key to. That person was Leon Rice,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: and the person whose selfhood had been redrawn was a
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: twenty eight year old bookkeeper named Diane Wallace, who had
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: no idea any of it existed. Diane Wallace worked in
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the bookkeeping department at Harland and Voss. She was organized, methodical,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: reliable in the way that people who are quietly proud
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: of their routines tend to be. She called her aunt
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Marge Pell. Every week they had dinner on Wednesday evenings,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: a habit they had kept for years. Marge was seventy one,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: sharp and the kind of person who noticed when things
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: were off before she could explain why Diane had a
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: coworker she was close to, bev Ochoa, an ex competitive
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: runner who worked two desks over. They talked about training
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: the way people talk about a shared language. Bev would
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: remember later in a statement to investigators that Diane had
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: been the one who suggested they coordinate workouts. That detail
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: mattered because it was one of the last things Diane
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: would suggest on her own. In September of the year
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: before the arrest, Harland and Voss launched a corporate wellness initiative.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: The company brought in outside fitness professionals Diane signed up.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: The trainer assigned to her program was Leon Rice, thirty
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: four years old, working out of Summit Conditioning on Haverford Pike.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Rice's intake process was not standard. Most personal trainers take
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: a few baseline measurements and move on. Rice took seven
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: body measurements, recorded heart rate at rest and under load,
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: asked about sleep quality, caloric intake, and stress levels. He
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: also administered what he called a psychological readiness questionnaire, a
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: document he had written himself. The questionnaire contained specific questions,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: how much do you trust your own judgment when it
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: conflicts with expert opinion? What is the worst comment you
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: have ever received about your appearance? How often do you
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: check a decision with someone else before committing to it.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: At the time, Diane answered those questions and moved on.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: She was there to get stronger. The questionnaire felt thorough
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: in the way that good professional intake often does nothing
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: about it felt wrong. By week six, Rice had suggested
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: that training at her previous GEM created what he called
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: contradictory training environments. Diane agreed and stopped going. By week eight,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: she had stopped discussing workouts with Bev Ochoa. The conversations
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: she explained to Bev had become noise. Bev would describe
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: that shift at trial. Before Rice, Diane had been someone
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: who asked questions, compared notes, pushed back. After eight weeks,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: she was someone who deferred, not dramatically, not in a
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: way that triggered an alarm, just quietly, in the way
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: a person stops reaching for something they have gradually been
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: told they cannot accurately judge. The Wednesday dinners with Marge
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: continued for a while. Two months into the program, Diane's
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: car moved not far from Space fourteen to Space eleven
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: in the parking structure on Decker Avenue. She noticed it
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: on a Tuesday evening, standing in the wrong spot, keys
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: in hand. Certain she remembered parking where she always parked.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: She checked the level, She checked the row. The car
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: was there, three spaces over engine cold, nothing disturbed inside.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: She mentioned it to Rice at their next session. He listened, nodded,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: and suggested she had been under significant cognitive load lately,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: stress affected memory that was well documented. She accepted that
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: What she did not know was that Rice had been
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: watching the parking structure for three weeks before he touched
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: that car. He had identified the blind spot spaces nine
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: through thirteen sat outside the camera frame. He had located
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: her spare key on a hook in her kitchen during
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: his first entry into her apartment. He had timed the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Wednesday dinners with march Pell confirming the window. The move
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: from Space fourteen to Space eleven was not impulsive. It
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: was the result of a reconnaissance operation that most people
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: would associate with a different kind of professional entirely. The
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: goal was not theft. The goal was a question Diane
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: would ask herself and not be able to answer. The
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: scale came next. In November, Diane stepped on her bathroom scale,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: and then the following morning stepped on the scale Rice
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: used at Summit conditioning. The numbers did not match. Her
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: scale read approximately four pounds higher than his. She mentioned
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: the discrepancy. Rice produced a calibration certificate. It confirmed he
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: said that his equipment was accurate. The document looked official.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: It listed a model number and a certification Detective Anita
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Foss would later examine that certificate. The model number on
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: the document did not match the scale in Rice's facility.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: The certification body did not appear in any registry of
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: calibration services recognized by the state. The certificate corresponded to
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: nothing verifiable, but Diane did not know that. In November.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: What she knew was that a professional with documentation had
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: told her that her own instrument was wrong. She threw
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: the scale away. Think about what that sequence accomplished without
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: a single false statement that could be checked in the moment.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: A woman had been trained over weeks to defer to
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: expert judgment on questions of measurement. She had been separated
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: from the friend who might have compared notes. She had
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: already accepted that her memory of where she parked her
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: own car might simply be unreliable. Now the instrument in
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: her bathroom, the one that told her something about her
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: own body, was gone, replaced by the number Rice gave her.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Keith Dempsey. Keith Dempsey, the clinical psychologist who worked with
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Diane in the weeks after the intervention and later testified
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: at trial, described the architecture of this process with a
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: precision that stopped the courtroom. He said Rice had not
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: changed Diane's mind. He had changed the tools she used
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: to assess her own mind. The distinction matters enormously. Changing
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: a person's conclusions is argument. Removing the instruments they used
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: to reach conclusions is something else. The notebook was her idea.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: That is the detail that his hardest to sit with.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Rice had not told Diane to record her measurements. He
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: had simply been consistent and methodical in his own tracking,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: session after session, entering numbers into his own system with
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: practiced focus. Over time, Diane began keeping her own record
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: at home. Morning measurements upper arm, waist, thigh weight. Using
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: the number from Rice's scale at their last session, she
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: logged the date, the number, the trend. By December, she
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: was calling Rice before dinner to read him that morning's figures.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The third Wednesday of December, Marge Pell did not wait
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: for an invitation. Diane had canceled the previous two dinners.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: The first cancelation came with an explanation a work deadline
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: plausible accepted. The second came with a shorter message, March
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: seventy one years old and not a woman who misread
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: two data points as coincidence. Drove to Decker Avenue without
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: calling ahead. She found Diane standing at the kitchen counter,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: left arm extended, measuring tape looped around her upper arm.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: Diane was reading the number aloud into her phone to
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Rice before sitting down to eat. Marge did not say anything.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Immediately she sat down, she watched her niece finish the call,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: logged the number in the notebook on the counter, and
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: then set the table for two as though nothing unusual
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: had just occurred. After dinner, while Diane was in the
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: other room, Marge picked up the notebook and photographed every page.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Four months of entries, dates, body measurements, caloric counts, notations
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: in Diane's handwriting that referenced Rice's assessments of each figure.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: She put the notebook back exactly where it had been.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: The Next morning, Marge walked into the Callum County Sheriff's
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: department and did not leave until someone listened. That someone
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: was Detective Anita Foss, eleven years in domestic violence, who
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: took Marge's statement and recognized the pattern in twenty minutes.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Not the individual facts, any one of them could be explained.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: The canceled dinners, the scale, the phone call before meals
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: it was, the shape of it, the system, a narrowing,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: the progressive replacement of Diane's own reference points with a
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: single external authority. Foss pulled the cue from the County
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Assessor's office. Three days earlier, a surveyor named Harvey Stein
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: had flagged an unpermitted structure during a routine the survey
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: of Callum County parcels, a shed on a private parcel
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: leased by a tenant named leon Rice. Stein had noted
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: the structure because of what was on it, an abloid disclock,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: the kind used on bank vaults and high security storage facilities.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Retailing above three hundred dollars on a farm supply shed
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: rented for eighty dollars a month in cash. Foss had
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: the warrant in forty eight hours. Picture the shed. On
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a Thursday morning in the third week of December. Deputies
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: approach a structure that has no business being locked the
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: way it is locked. They breach it inside a folding chair,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: a length of garden hose, and a dry erase board.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: The board was the thing. It held a grid four columns,
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: each headed by a set of initials. The fourth column
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: was labeled DW. That column had fourteen months of entries, dates,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: body measurements, numerical notations that matched the categories in Diane's
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: notebook exactly upper arm, waist, thigh weight recorded from Rice's
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: side of the phone calls she had been making before dinner.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: The other three columns were shorter, different initials, no names
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: attached to them anywhere in that room or in any
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: document Rice produced. Here is where the expected version of
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: this story collapses. The assumption, once the board was found
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: was straightforward. Rice had been running a fitness tracking scheme,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: perhaps for financial fraud, perhaps to extend client contracts, perhaps
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: some combination of the two, the elaborate lock, the cash rental,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: the off site record keeping. It read like four financial concealment.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Investigators looked for billing irregularities, inflated session counts, insurance fraud.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: They found none of that. The financial trail was clean.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: What the board actually documented was control, not money. Fourteen
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: months of a person's physical measurements recorded in secret, cross
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: referenced against what that person believed about her own body,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: tracked alongside the specific interventions that had made her stop
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: trusting herself. The board was not a ledger. It was
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: a map. Dempsey called it that at trial, a map
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: of a person's selfhood, redrawn in someone else's handwriting, locked
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: behind a door that only one person had the key to.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Rice had told his cell mate Pete Oxner that he
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: had managed four women at once, and that the records
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: were somewhere nobody would ever think to look. The phrase
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: he used was managed, not trained, not coached. Managed. Foss
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: confronted in a recorded interview seventy two hours after Oxner
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: came forward, she laid out the board, a calibration certificate
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: with its unregistered model number and its non existent certification body.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: An Oxner's account, the interview ran two hours and nineteen minutes.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Bryce confessed to all of it, but there was one
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: thing in that shed that Rice would not discuss. Forensic
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: processing of the concrete floor produced a DNA profile. That
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: profile matched an open missing person's case from a county
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: three hundred miles to the east. A woman named Sandra
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Vale had disappeared seven years before anyone opened that shed door.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The connection was under active investigation at the time Rice
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: was convicted on all charges in the spring, Rice declined
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: to address it. He has continued to decline. The three
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: women behind the other initials on that board have never
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: been publicly identified. What the record shows is this Rice
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: built a system precise enough to dismantle one woman's trust
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: in her own perception over fourteen months, and he ran
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: it on at least four people simultaneously in a locked
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: room on a least parcel for a rental fee he
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: paid in cash so that no paper trail would connect
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: him to the address. The questionnaire he administered on day one,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the one that asked how much a person trusted their
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: own judgment when it conflicted with expert opinion, was not
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: intake paperwork. It was a blueprint. Rice was convicted on
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: all charges the following spring, stalking, criminal trespass, unlawful surveillance.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: The jury returned its verdict on every count. Diane Wallace
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: was twenty eight years old when Marge Pell walked through
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: her door on that third Wednesday in December. She was
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: measuring her upper arm and calling a man to read
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: him the number before she allowed herself to eat dinner.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: That was where fourteen months of systematic dismantling had brought her,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: not through threats, not through violence, through the slow, methodical
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: replacement of her own judgment with his clinical psychologist, Keith Dempsey,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: worked with Diane for six weeks in the immediate aftermath
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: of the intervention. He testified at trial his description of
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: what Rice had constructed was precise, a map of a
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: person's selfhood re drawn in someone else's handwriting, locked behind
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: a door that only one person had the key to.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: That sentence landed in a courtroom. It belongs in the record.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Rice told his cellmate Pete Oaksner that he had managed
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: four women at once. The records, he said, were somewhere
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: nobody would ever think to look. The shed on Doug
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Fenner's parcel leased for eighty dollars a month in cash,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: no paper trail, a bank vault grade lock on a
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: structure that had no permit to exist. Deputies found a
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: dry erase board with four columns and four sets of
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: initials fourteen months of entry under DW three additional columns shorter,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: belonging to women whose names the public record has never disclosed.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Those three women have not been identified, what happened to them,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: whether anyone walked through their door the way Marge walked
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: through Diane's is not part of the public record. And
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: then there is the concrete floor. Forensic processing of the
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: shed produced a DNA profile from the surface of that floor.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: The profile matched an open missing person's case from a
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: county three hundred miles to the east. Sandra Vale disappeared
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: seven years before anyone opened that door. The connection between
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: her case and that shed was under active investigation at
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: the time of Rice's conviction. Rice was asked about it.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: He declined to respond. He has continued to decline. The
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: record does not establish what Sandra Vale's DNA means. It
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: does not confirm what happened to her, or when or
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: how her biological material reached that floor. What the record
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: establishes is that it was there in a locked room
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: that Rice paid eighty dollars a month in cash to
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: maintain in a room he told no one about. That
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: question has not been answered. There is something about this
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: case that resists easy framing. No physical violence against Diane
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Wallace appears in the record. Rice never raised his hand.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: He raised a calibration certificate. He moved a car three
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: spaces and waited to see if she would doubt herself.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: He asked her on day one how much she trusted
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: her own judgment when it conflicted with an expert's opinion,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: and then he spent fourteen months becoming the expert she
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: deferred to. That is not a lesser form of harm.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: Dempsey's testimony made that clear. The erosion of a person's
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: trust in their own perception is not a side effect
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: of manipulation. It is the mechanism. It is the point.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Diane Wallace went back to Wednesday dinners with Marge Pell
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: in January, three weeks after the arrest. She has not
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: missed one since. That detail is small, and it is
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: everything the ritual that Rice had disrupted. Two canceled Wednesdays
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: in a row. An aunt who noticed the silence and
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: showed up anyway. Turned out to be the thing that
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: held Marge pell Is seventy one years old. She brought
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: a stack of photographed note book pages to the Callum
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: County Sheriff's apartment and refused to leave until some one listened.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: That is also in the record. The entire case moves
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: from that moment. The questionnaire Rice administered to Diane on
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: their first session asked what the worst comment she had
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: ever received about her body was. It asked how she
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: responded when her own instincts conflicted with a professional's assessment.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: It asked how much she relied on external validation to
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: feel confident in her choices. He used her answers, He
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: built the system around them. The intake form was the blueprint,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: and the blueprint was drawn in her own words. What
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Rice understood, and what Dempsey put into clinical language for
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: the jury, is that the fastest way to control a
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: person's behavior is to make them distrust the evidence of
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: their own senses. Move the car, certify the scale, reframe
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: her friendships as noise. Each intervention individually is deniable. Collectively,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: they constitute a structure, a locked room inside her own mind.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Diane Wallace got her Wednesday's back. The three women behind
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the other initials on that board are still unnamed. Sandra
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Vail is still missing, Rice Sits convicted. The shed is empty,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: the board has been logged into evidence, and somewhere in
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: that evidence, on a concrete floor three hundred miles from
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Sandravale's last known address, there is a question that has
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: not been asked loudly enough yet. This show is made
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media.