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The Funeral Director's Envelope: How a Missing Shoe Exposed Murder · True Crime: Killer Secrets

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Before first light on November 14th, 2009, a county highway
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: grader operator named Nancy Green was running a pre-shift check
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: along Mill Race Road when her headlights caught something in
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the drainage ditch. A man, dressed in a button-down shirt
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and slacks. His hands folded neatly across his chest. One
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: dress shoe missing. Hands do not fold themselves. That detail, precise. deliberate,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: impossible to explain away, would eventually pull apart a three-year
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: racket built inside a funeral home. And it would lead
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: investigators to a woman who ran Sunday charity drives and
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: sat on the library board. A woman whom 41,000 people
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: in Harbin, population 41,000, thought they understood completely. What happened
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: to Raymond Tolliver started long before that ditch. And it
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: started in the worst possible way.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: At a funeral.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Harbin sits about 60 miles inland from the state capital,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the kind of mid-sized county seat where two funeral homes
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: have divided the community's grief between them for decades. Ashcroft
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: and Pine handled one half of town. Bowers Funeral Services
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: on Clement Street handled the other. Patricia Bowers had run
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: her firm for 19 years, 11 employees, roughly 220 funerals
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a year. She drove a tan Buick, attended city planning meetings,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and had served on the public library board long enough
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: that her name was on a donor plaque near the entrance.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Nobody in Harbin.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Thought of her as anything other than a businesswoman who
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: had built something steady in.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: A quiet town.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Raymond Tolliver had spent most of his working life inside
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: the county assessor's office. He retired at sixty-three. the kind
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: of retirement people in small cities measure in fishing trips
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: and grandchildren's baseball games. He was not a wealthy man.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: He was not a public figure. He was the sort
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: of person who noticed when something was wrong and wrote
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: a letter about it. About two years before his death,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Tolliver's mother had passed. Bower's funeral services handled the burial.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Sometime afterward, Tolliver believed he had been charged for services
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: that were never delivered.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: He kept the paperwork. He made calls.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: When nothing was resolved, he filed a formal written complaint
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: with the State Funeral Services Licensing Board, roughly six weeks
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: before Nancy Green found him in that ditch. The complaint
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: was still pending. Tolliver's wife, Marjorie, had not used Bowers
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: for anything. Her trust went to the competitor, Ashcroft and Pine.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: That fact mattered more than anyone realized at the time.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: It meant Raymond Tolliver was entirely outside Patricia Bower's sphere
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: of financial influence. He was not a grieving customer she
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: could manage. He was a retired bureaucrat with documentation, a
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: filing number, and nothing to lose by pushing. Darlene Weaver
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: was 41 years old. and worked as a state attorney
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: general's regional financial crimes investigator. Based in downtown Harbin, she
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: had been quietly building a file on Bauer's funeral services
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: since 2007. An anonymous tip had come in, alleging the
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: firm was collecting fees for services.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Never rendered.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Targeting families in the week or two after a burial.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: When grief is sharpest, and the last thing anyone wants
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: is a complication from the funeral home. Weaver found the
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: pattern plausible. She found it more than plausible. But a
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: pattern without a paper trail is not a case. For
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: three years, she had the shape of something without the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: substance to move on it. Raymond Tolliver's complaint existed in
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: a completely separate part of the bureaucracy, filed with the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: licensing board, not with Weaver's office. The two threads had
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: not connected. They had no reason to connect. Tolliver had
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: not spoken to Weaver. Weaver had not heard of Tolliver
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: in a town of 41,000 people, with two investigators looking
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: at the same institution from opposite angles. Those threads stayed parallel.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: They would not stay parallel for long. The cash envelopes
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: were the simplest part of the operation. Every month, without fail,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: a plain envelope appeared in Alan Voss's car in the
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: county employees. Parking lot on Whitfield Street. $ 800.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: No note. No receipt.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Voss was a clerk in the county health department, a
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: former administrative assistant at Bowers Funeral Services, and he knew
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: exactly what the money was for. He had a function.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Death certificates in Harbin required a primary filing, and in
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: certain circumstances, a secondary amendment, a formal correction submitted through
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: official channels. Voss had filed 11 such amendments through Bauer's
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: office with no legitimate public health basis. The corrections themselves
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: were trivial, adjustments to cause-of-death phrasing that changed nothing medically,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: but they looked official. They looked like unresolved administrative complications.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And when a Bauer's representative called a grieving family in
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the week after a burial and mentioned a continuity concern
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: with the paperwork... That language had weight because Voss had
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: given it weight. He had made the threat feel like bureaucracy.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: The calls followed a consistent pattern. Eddie Crane, or a
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: woman named Tina Morrow, would reach out within roughly a
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: week of a burial, sometimes sooner. The framing was always careful,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: always concerned in tone. There was a minor administrative issue
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: with the filing. Nothing serious, but it needed to be
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: resolved before the record was fully closed. The fee to
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: clear it ran between $ 400 and $ 900, payable in cash
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: or money order. Payable in cash or money order. More
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: than 90% of families paid on the first call. Those
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: who hesitated received a second call. Near total compliance followed.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Between 60 and 70 of the roughly 220 funerals Bowers
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: handled each year generated this secondary revenue.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: Off the books, $ 30, 000 to $ 45, 000.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Annually, routed through cash and money orders into an account
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: connected to a cleaning supply company operated by Patricia Bowers' cousin,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Douglas Vane. That company was the exit ramp. It gave
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the cash somewhere to go and, A business reason to exist.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Phyllis Moran had buried her son with Bowers in 2002.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: She refused both calls.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: A week after the second one, a man knocked on
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: her door and identified himself as a utility inspector. He
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: mentioned unresolved accounts. He was calm, specific, unhurried. She paid
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: the next day. She did not tell anyone. She kept
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: that door visit to herself for eight years. Because what
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: would she say, and to whom, and who would believe
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: her against a funeral home that had operated on Clement
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Street for nearly two decades?
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: That is the.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Friction the operation depended on. Grief does not fight back easily.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: The families most likely to pay were the ones least
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: equipped to question the mechanism that was taking their money.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: And the families who refused, who pushed back, who might escalate.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: There was a system for them too. Phyllis Moran's visitor
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: had a face. She just didn't know yet whose face
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: it was. Now consider what Darlene Weaver had assembled by 2010.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: She had the shape of a pattern. Anonymous tip, suspected
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: fee fraud, plausible mechanics. She had no signed complaints from families.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: She had no paper trail linking the money orders to
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Bowers directly. She had no name from inside the operation.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: willing to speak. The cleaning supply account existed, but connecting
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: it to funeral services fraud required a witness who understood
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: both ends of the transaction. Weaver had spent three years
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: watching a closed door. Fifty-four miles away, in a separate
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: filing cabinet in a separate office, Raymond Tolliver's complaint sat
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: with the state funeral services licensing board.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: A fee dispute from.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: His mother's burial, handled by Bowers roughly two years earlier,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Tolliver was 63, retired from the county assessor's office, trained
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: by decades of work to document things properly, to submit
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: forms to the right office, to follow the process. He
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: had done exactly that. His complaint had a filing number.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It also had a reader. Stephen Falk was the state
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: licensing board's regional coordinator. He had received discounted services from
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Bowers Funeral Services since 2004.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Not a large gift. Not dramatic.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Just a steady arrangement that sat quietly in the background
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: of his professional life.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: On October 29th, 2009, 16 days before Nancy Green found
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: Raymond Tolliver in that drainage ditch on Mill Race Road,
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: Falk called Bowers' office.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: The purpose, per the record, was a courtesy notification. Tolliver's
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: complaint had been filed. It was pending review. Falk thought
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Patricia Bowers should know. That call identified Tolliver by name
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: as a specific administrative risk. What kind of threat did
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Raymond Tolliver pose for a simple call to.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: Unleash such horror?
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: What happened after that call did not happen at the
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: licensing board. It happened through an intermediary in a decision
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Patricia Bowers communicated to Eddie Crane. Crane, who had worked
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: as a mortuary assistant at Bowers for 11 years and
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: had been retained for purposes that extended well beyond the
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: preparation room. Raymond Tolliver was killed by blunt force trauma
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: His body was driven to Mill Race Road in the
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: early hours of November 13th, 2009. Crane placed it in
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: the ditch on the south shoulder, roughly four miles outside Harbin.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Then he folded the hands across the chest, because that
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: was how he had always finished. There is something almost
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: mechanical about how Crane described what he did that night.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Not remorseful, not dramatic. He used the word finished. the
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: same way a craftsman might describe the last step of
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: a job. It is one of the details that stays
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: with this case long after the legal outcomes are known.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Nancy Green found the body before dawn on November 14th.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: She was a.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: County highway grader operator, starting her shift on Mill Race Road.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: She noted the folded hands in her statement to responding officers,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: and that detail entered the record as a possible significance,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: a deliberate arrangement. possibly ritual, possibly a message. Investigators spent
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: time on it. It seemed to point somewhere. It pointed nowhere.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: The habit had run unexamined for 11 years before a
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: single document made it visible. Eddie Crane folded hands. He
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: had done it hundreds of times in a legitimate professional context.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: On the night he drove Raymond Tolliver's body to a
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: drainage ditch, he did it again. Not as a statement,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: not as a warning, because the motion was automatic. The
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: most examined detail in the case turned out to be
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: the least meaningful one. But here's the thing. The folded
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: hands did matter, just not the way anyone thought. They
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: confirmed Crane's involvement more completely than almost any other physical
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: detail could have. When Crane gave his confession, he described
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the hand placement unprompted in the same sentence as the
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: location and the time He did not explain it defensively
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: or characterize it as symbolic. He described it the way
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: someone describes muscle memory, and that absence of calculation in
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: a confession full of careful language carried its own weight
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: with the investigators who heard it. Darlene Weaver received the
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: letter in late October of 2010, nearly a year after
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Tolliver's body was found. Eddie Crane had been arrested in
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: October of that year on a charge completely unrelated to Bowers,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: an assault in Millhaven County. At the detention center awaiting processing,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: he was placed in a cell with a man named
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Joseph Prater, who was there awaiting sentencing on a receiving
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: stolen property charge. Prater listened. Crane talked more than he
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: should have. Prater wrote a letter through his attorney to
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: the state attorney general's office. That letter reached Weaver. She
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: had waited three years for a crack in the door.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: The crack arrived through a jail cell. Crane's confession, negotiated
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: over the weeks that followed, was comprehensive. He confirmed the
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: call scripts, the fee structure, the Voss payment schedule, the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: cash envelopes in the Whitfield Street parking lot. He confirmed
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Douglas Vane's role running the cleaning supply account. He confirmed
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Stephen Falk's call on October 29, 2009, and what that
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: call set in motion. He confirmed that Patricia Bowers had
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: ordered Raymond Tolliver's death through an intermediary after Falk named Tolliver.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: As a risk.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: He stated, specifically, that it was the only killing in
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: the operation's history. Sharon Hayes came forward in December of 2010.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: She had been Bowers' office manager for eight years. She
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: cooperated in exchange for a reduced charge. She provided account numbers,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: the payment schedule, the specific amounts, the routing of money
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: orders through Vane's company. She was 44 years old and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: had two children. She testified to the mechanics of a
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: system she had processed without, by her account fully understanding
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: where the money originated. And Phyllis Moran, eight years after
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the man came to her door, saw Eddie Crane's photograph
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: in the newspaper after his arrest. She recognized him. She
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: called the number in the article. She told investigators what
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: had happened in 2002. The knock, the uniform, the mention
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: of unresolved accounts, the payment she made the next day.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Crane was the man at her door. He had been
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: doing this for a long time. There were two ways
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: to read what happened to Raymond Tolliver. and the difference
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: between them matters. Picture the week after Falk's call. Patricia
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Bowers knows there is a complaint at the licensing board.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: She knows the complainant's name. She knows the complaint involves
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: a fee dispute from a burial handled two years earlier,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the kind of dispute her operation had been generating systematically,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the kind that, if someone looked closely enough, could unravel
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: a structure that had been running quietly for years. The
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: logical response, the one that fits everything known about how
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: the operation behaved, would have been silence.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Patience.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: The complaint was pending. Pending is not resolved. Pending means wait.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: That version holds right.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: Up until you account for one fact.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Tolliver was not a Bowers customer when he filed. His
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: wife used Ashcroft and Pine. That meant he had no
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: ongoing financial relationship firm, no reason to accept a quiet settlement,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: nothing to lose by pushing the complaint through every channel
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: available to him. He was not a grieving widow who
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: could be managed with a follow-up call. He was a
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: retired assessor's office employee, with a documentation habit and a
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: bureaucratic vocabulary. He was, in the specific language of the
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: operation's vulnerability, uncontrollable. The killing was not operational protocol. Crane
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: said so explicitly. It was the only killing in the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: operation's history. But the decision followed the operation's internal logic, precisely.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Eliminate the one thread that could not be handled any
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: other way. Now run the second version. Falk places his
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: call as a professional courtesy, not understanding what he is
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: setting in motion. He has received discounted services since 2004,
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: He thinks of himself as maintaining a collegial relationship. He
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: does not know, or does not allow himself to know,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: what Bowers does with information about threats to the business.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: When he names Tulliver, he believes he is doing something minor.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: A heads-up between acquaintances. That version collapses the moment you
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: ask what Falk thought the courtesy notification was for. Bowers
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: ran a funeral home. Tulliver's complaint was a regulatory matter.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: There was no professional reason for Falk to call Bowers
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: ahead of a licensing board review, unless he understood, at
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: some level, that Bowers needed advance notice of something more
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: than an inspection date. The discounted services since 2004 are
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: not a minor background detail. They are the structure of
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: the obligation. No memo, no margin note, no surviving correspondence
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: from Falk names, Tolliver, or any.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: Outcome attached to him.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: His conviction was for obstruction, not conspiracy to commit murder.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: The jury's reading of his culpability stopped short of.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: The killing itself. That is the legal line. It is not.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: Necessarily the same as the moral one. The strongest reading
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: of the evidence is the one that recontextualizes what the
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: folded hands were. They were not a message to investigators.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: They were not a ritual. They were the signature of
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: a man who killed Raymond Tolliver the same way he
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: had done everything else inside that operation, as a procedure,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: with the habits of his profession still intact. Crane had
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: worked 11 years in that preparation room. He had learned
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: to finish carefully. He finished carefully on No Race Road, too.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: That is what makes the image hold, not the symbolism
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: anyone projected onto it, the absence of symbolism. the pure,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: unreflective habit of a man who had stopped distinguishing between
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: the work. Patricia Bowers went to trial in March of 2011.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: The proceedings lasted nine days. Nine days for 19 years
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: of operation. Nine days for the families who had paid
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: at their most broken, for the amendments filed with no legitimacy.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Purpose.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: For the envelopes left in a parked car on Whitfield Street.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: For Raymond Tolliver folded in a ditch on Mill Race Road.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: The jury convicted her on all counts. Racketeering, extortion, conspiracy,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: murder in.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: The first degree.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: The judge sentenced her to life without parole. She was
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: 57 years old. Eddie Crane received 32 years. His confession
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: had been the mechanism that broke the case open. A
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: letter from a cell, written by a man who had
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: not even been charged with anything connected to Harbin. His
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: cooperation reduced his exposure, but did not remove it.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: 32 years is what the record shows.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Alan Voss, the county health clerk who had filed 11
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: amendments with no public health basis, and collected $ 800 a
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: month in envelopes, served 22 months of a four-year sentence.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: Stephen Falk, the licensing board coordinator, who had made the
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: courtesy call on October 29th of 2009, 16 days before
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Nancy Green found the body, received an 18-month suspended sentence
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and five years of probation. He was not convicted of
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: conspiracy to commit murder. The jury drew the legal line
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: at obstruction. That line is in the record. What sits
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: on the other side of it is a matter the
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: record leaves open. Douglas Vane pleaded to money laundering. Three
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: years probation. Sharon Hayes, the office manager who had processed
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: payments through the cleaning supply account for eight years, cooperated
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: in December of 2010. She received a suspended sentence and
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: five years probation. By the spring of 2012, She had
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: relocated three counties north and taken.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: A bookkeeping job. She does not speak publicly.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Darlene Weaver had been building toward this since 27. Three
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: years of structure with no way in. The break came
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: from a county detention center, from a man named Joseph Prater,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: who was awaiting sentencing on a receiving stolen property charge
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: and had nothing particular to gain beyond the act of
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: sending the letter. Weaver received it late October of 2010.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Five months later, Bowers was convicted. Phyllis Moran, who had
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: buried her son with Bowers in 2002, and had refused
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: to pay until a man posing as a utility inspector
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: came to her door. Identified Eddie Crane from his photograph
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: in the newspaper after his arrest, she was 64 years.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Old when she came forward.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: She had carried the recognition for a month before she
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: made the call. The families who had paid in the
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: weeks after their losses, the $ 60 to $ 70 per year,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: the $ 400 to $ 900 per call, the near 100% compliance
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: on the second contact. Most of them never appeared in
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: the trial record by name. They were the operational fact.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: They were not, in most cases, the witnesses. Bower's Funeral
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Services on Clemens Street closed. Harbin had one dominant funeral
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: home left. Raymond Tolliver filed his complaint six weeks before
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: he died. He had buried his mother through Bowers roughly
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: two years earlier, and he believed he had been charged
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: for something that was not rendered. He put it in writing.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: He sent it to the licensing board. He did what
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: a person is supposed to do. He was 63. He
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: was retired. His wife, Marjorie, had already moved on to
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: a different funeral. He had no way to know that
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: his written complaint would move through a licensing coordinator who
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: had been receiving discounted services from Bowers since 2004, or
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: that his name would leave that coordinator's mouth and travel
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: back to a woman on Clement Street who treated it
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: as a threat to be removed. The legal outcomes are settled,
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: but the architecture of the case, who knew which fact
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: on which morning, and said nothing, has never been fully mapped.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: The operation ran on the specific vulnerability of grief. It
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: counted on the fact that people in the first days
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: after a loss are not positioned to push back. That
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: they will pay to make something stop, even something they
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: cannot fully understand. The near 100% compliance rate on the
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: second call is not a statistic about weakness. It is
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: a measurement of what grief does to a person's ability
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: to fight.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: Tolliver fought.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: He waited until he was ready, and then he filed
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: a formal written complaint, and that act is what killed him.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: The folded hands on Mill Race Road were not a ritual.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: They were not a message. They were the reflex of
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: a man who had long since stopped separating one kind
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: of work from another. That absence of ceremony is perhaps
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: the most disturbing thing in the record. Not that someone
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: chose to do this.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: That it had.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Become unremarkable enough to finish with professional habit. Patricia Bowers
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: is serving a life sentence.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: The people she collected from.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: The families who paid because they were afraid or exhausted
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: or simply did not know they could refuse, received no
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: restitution noted in the public record. Raymond Tulliver's complaint to
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the licensing board was eventually resolved.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: It was upheld. He was right.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Tolliver's pension was cancelled on a Tuesday in March. His
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: badge collected the same afternoon. His name removed from the
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: departmental roll before the week was out. This show is
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: made by Oboe Media.