Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Paid: How a Stranger Quietly Erased a Man's Life
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At eight forty seven in the morning on February ninth,
- 0:06Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a meter reader named Brian Bennett stepped
- 0:11Speaker 1: on to the screened porch at two fourteen Voss Drive
- 0:14Speaker 1: in Lynnfield, Ohio. The temperature was twenty two degrees. The
- 0:19Speaker 1: rocking chair on that porch was moving. No one was there.
- 0:23Speaker 1: On the chair sat a water stained Nike shoe box,
- 0:26Speaker 1: rubber banded shut. Resting on top of the lid was
- 0:30Speaker 1: a single index card four words hand written in blue ink.
- 0:35Speaker 1: He paid Brian Bennett called nine one one. What investigators
- 0:40Speaker 1: found inside that box would take them three days to
- 0:44Speaker 1: fully understand, and when they did, they would realize that
- 0:47Speaker 1: a sixty two year old man had been methodically erased
- 0:51Speaker 1: from his own life, one small decision at a time,
- 0:54Speaker 1: over the course of nearly two years. His name was
- 0:58Speaker 1: Eric Smith, and the person who did it never needed
- 1:01Speaker 1: to raise her voice or touch him once. There is
- 1:04Speaker 1: something about this case that stays with you long after
- 1:07Speaker 1: the facts settle. It is not the money, It is
- 1:10Speaker 1: not even the drugs. It is the precision of it,
- 1:13Speaker 1: the patience, the way one person can study another person's
- 1:17Speaker 1: loneliness and build an architecture around it so carefully that
- 1:21Speaker 1: the person inside never sees the walls. This is the
- 1:24Speaker 1: story of how that was done. Eric Smith had spent
- 1:27Speaker 1: thirty one years testing water. That was the job Municipal
- 1:32Speaker 1: water Quality Testing for Lynnfield, Ohio. Collect samples, run the numbers,
- 1:37Speaker 1: write the reports, make sure the water coming out of
- 1:40Speaker 1: people's taps was safe. It was careful, methodical work. Eric
- 1:45Speaker 1: was a careful, methodical man. He retired in twenty fourteen
- 1:49Speaker 1: at sixty one. He had a pension. He owned his
- 1:52Speaker 1: house on Vos Drive outright, no mortgage, no debt. He
- 1:57Speaker 1: had a modest ira Financially. He was not wealthy, but
- 2:02Speaker 1: he was secure in the specific way that a person
- 2:04Speaker 1: who has never overreached tends to be secure. His wife, Carrol,
- 2:10Speaker 1: had died in two thousand twelve, two years before retirement.
- 2:16Speaker 1: Eric stayed in Lynnfield because the house was his and
- 2:19Speaker 1: because leaving felt like a second loss he wasn't ready for.
- 2:23Speaker 1: He kept the routines Carroll had built into the house.
- 2:26Speaker 1: The porch light on at dusk, the same grocery run
- 2:30Speaker 1: on Thursday mornings, the rocking chair she had picked out
- 2:33Speaker 1: by hand. He had one daughter, Patrise Smith, who lived
- 2:37Speaker 1: outside Lynnfield, and worked nights. She and her father had
- 2:42Speaker 1: established a ritual that was, in its way, a form
- 2:45Speaker 1: of love made practical. Every Wednesday night, at eleven p m.
- 2:49Speaker 1: She called. He always picked up. In four years, that
- 2:53Speaker 1: call had been missed exactly once, a power outage on
- 2:56Speaker 1: her end, which she flagged immediately the next morning. Patrice
- 3:00Speaker 1: described her father as organized, almost to a fault. He
- 3:05Speaker 1: kept paper records of everything. Utility bills filed by month,
- 3:10Speaker 1: car maintenance logged in a spiral notebook, grocery receipts clipped
- 3:15Speaker 1: and saved. He was not a man who lost track
- 3:18Speaker 1: of things. That is important, because what was about to
- 3:21Speaker 1: happen to Eric Smith was designed to exploit precisely that quality,
- 3:25Speaker 1: his trust in systems, his belief that official things were official,
- 3:30Speaker 1: and his deep unspoken need for someone to show up.
- 3:34Speaker 1: Kimberly Anne Fleming was forty one years old in April
- 3:37Speaker 1: of twenty seventeen. Her work history was a list of
- 3:41Speaker 1: positions that placed her near vulnerable people and mere paperwork.
- 3:45Speaker 1: Home health aid, property manager, assistant, insurance office coordinator. She
- 3:52Speaker 1: had been let go from the insurance position in twenty fifteen.
- 3:55Speaker 1: The record shows the termination was attendance related nothing more.
- 4:00Speaker 1: No criminal complaint had ever been filed against her. She
- 4:03Speaker 1: had studied how systems worked. Specifically, she had learned that
- 4:08Speaker 1: utility companies used automated phone systems to confirm appointment details,
- 4:13Speaker 1: and that those systems read back work order numbers. If
- 4:16Speaker 1: you knew which prompts to press. On a Tuesday afternoon
- 4:20Speaker 1: in April of two thousand seventeen, she pressed the right prompts.
- 4:24Speaker 1: She wrote down a real Lynfield Gas and Electric work
- 4:28Speaker 1: order number. She put on a vest and picked up
- 4:31Speaker 1: a clipboard. Eric opened the door. He had no reason
- 4:34Speaker 1: not to. She had a work order number, she knew
- 4:39Speaker 1: the address. She was calm and professional and said all
- 4:43Speaker 1: the right things. She checked the pressure on a fitting
- 4:46Speaker 1: near the furnace, made a note, and told him everything
- 4:49Speaker 1: looked fine. She was gone in twenty minutes. One hour later,
- 4:53Speaker 1: the real technician arrived. Eric told him the issue had
- 4:57Speaker 1: already been resolved. He never reported the discrepancy. Why would he.
- 5:02Speaker 1: As far as Eric could tell, the system had worked
- 5:04Speaker 1: exactly as it was supposed to be. That was the
- 5:07Speaker 1: first wall going up. He just couldn't see it yet.
- 5:10Speaker 1: Seven days after that first visit, a casserole appeared on
- 5:14Speaker 1: Eric's porch. There was no note at first, just the dish,
- 5:18Speaker 1: still warm, left between the storm door and the front door,
- 5:21Speaker 1: where the cold couldn't get to it. Eric assumed it
- 5:24Speaker 1: was a neighbor. He was that kind of man, the
- 5:28Speaker 1: kind who assumed people were being neighborly, because in his experience,
- 5:33Speaker 1: they usually were. Fleming knocked the following afternoon to collect
- 5:37Speaker 1: the dish. She introduced herself properly this time, said she
- 5:41Speaker 1: lived near by, said she'd noticed he was on his
- 5:44Speaker 1: own and thought the least she could do was bring
- 5:47Speaker 1: a meal. Eric thanked her. He meant it. That was
- 5:50Speaker 1: the second wall. He still couldn't see any of them.
- 5:54Speaker 1: Over the following month she came back four more times,
- 5:58Speaker 1: once to pass along a handyman's number, once with rock
- 6:01Speaker 1: salt for the front steps before a frieze, once to
- 6:04Speaker 1: check whether the handyman had shown up, once more just
- 6:07Speaker 1: to visit. Each visit was short, each one was useful.
- 6:11Speaker 1: None of them asked for anything. By June of two
- 6:14Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, she was coming three times a week, and
- 6:18Speaker 1: then in September of that year something happened that changed
- 6:23Speaker 1: the geometry of the whole arrangement. Eric had a blood
- 6:26Speaker 1: pressure episode, not severe, but enough to frighten him. He
- 6:32Speaker 1: was alone when it started. Fleming was the one who
- 6:35Speaker 1: helped him regulate his medication, sat with him, made sure
- 6:39Speaker 1: he was stable. Before she left. A few days later,
- 6:43Speaker 1: Eric gave her a key to the house. He would
- 6:45Speaker 1: later tell investigators he had never given any one outside
- 6:49Speaker 1: his family a key to that house, not once in
- 6:52Speaker 1: the six years since his wife died. That key is
- 6:56Speaker 1: the first image to hold on to. Detective Russell Grant
- 7:00Speaker 1: of the Lynfield PD Financial Crimes Unit pulled Eric's bank
- 7:04Speaker 1: records within forty eight hours of the shoe box being found.
- 7:09Speaker 1: What he saw was not chaos, It was pattern. Between
- 7:12Speaker 1: October of twenty seventeen and November of two thousand, eighteen,
- 7:17Speaker 1: forty one cash withdrawals had been made from Eric's account.
- 7:21Speaker 1: Each withdrawal fell between four hundred and eight hundred dollars.
- 7:26Speaker 1: Taken together, they added up to approximately twenty six thousand dollars.
- 7:30Speaker 1: That alone might have looked like an older man paying
- 7:33Speaker 1: his bills in cash. Some people did, but Graham Cross
- 7:37Speaker 1: referenced the withdrawal dates against documented home expenses. The water
- 7:42Speaker 1: heater replaced in December of two thousand seventeen, nearly nineteen
- 7:46Speaker 1: hundred dollars in five withdrawals over five days. A roof
- 7:50Speaker 1: inspection in March of twenty eighteen, fourteen hundred dollars and
- 7:55Speaker 1: withdrawals clustered in the same week. The pattern repeated again
- 8:00Speaker 1: and again. Every time Eric spent money on his house.
- 8:03Speaker 1: A series of smaller cash withdrawals followed within days, as
- 8:07Speaker 1: if something was being siphoned off the top. Bank surveillance
- 8:11Speaker 1: footage showed Eric conducting thirty one of the forty one
- 8:15Speaker 1: withdrawals himself. In seven of those instances, a gray Honda
- 8:20Speaker 1: Civic registered to Fleming sat in the parking lot while
- 8:23Speaker 1: he was inside. She never went in she didn't have to.
- 8:28Speaker 1: Then Graham found the insurance document. In January of twenty eighteen,
- 8:33Speaker 1: Eric had changed the beneficiary on a forty thousand dollar
- 8:37Speaker 1: term life insurance policy he'd held since two thousand one.
- 8:41Speaker 1: The original beneficiary was his daughter, Patrice. The new beneficiary
- 8:46Speaker 1: was something called the Voss Road Family Care Trust. The
- 8:51Speaker 1: trust had been established three weeks earlier at a notary
- 8:54Speaker 1: office in Deering, Ohio, a town twenty miles from Lynfield.
- 8:59Speaker 1: Its sole trustee was listed as Margaret Cole Graham ran
- 9:04Speaker 1: Margaret Coal. Nothing came back. The name didn't exist in
- 9:08Speaker 1: any system that mattered. The notary appointment had been made
- 9:12Speaker 1: by phone. The caller had provided Eric's account number and
- 9:16Speaker 1: date of birth. That loop who was Margaret Coal was
- 9:19Speaker 1: still open, and it was about to open a bigger one.
- 9:23Speaker 1: The last four months of twenty eighteen or where the
- 9:26Speaker 1: timeline becomes something harder to look at directly. Patrese Smith
- 9:31Speaker 1: had noticed it in pieces. The Wednesday calls eleven p
- 9:35Speaker 1: m every week four years without interruption, had started running short,
- 9:40Speaker 1: ten minutes where there used to be forty. Eric said
- 9:43Speaker 1: he was tired. He said he was losing track of days.
- 9:47Speaker 1: He told Patrice that Fleming was helping him manage his medications,
- 9:51Speaker 1: and Patrice had no specific reason to question that his
- 9:54Speaker 1: doctor was involved. His prescriptions existed, The system, as far
- 9:59Speaker 1: as she could tell, was working. His physician had not
- 10:02Speaker 1: changed a single prescription. When toxicology was run after Eric's
- 10:07Speaker 1: rescue in February of twenty nineteen, the results showed chronic
- 10:12Speaker 1: low level benzodiazepine exposure. The compound found in his system
- 10:17Speaker 1: was not consistent with anything prescribed in Eric's name. It
- 10:21Speaker 1: was not a one time dose. It was sustained, gradual, calibrated.
- 10:27Speaker 1: Graham later described it in plain language. Something had been
- 10:31Speaker 1: making Eric fog over slowly for months. His fatigue was real,
- 10:36Speaker 1: his confusion about days was real, his shortening calls were real.
- 10:41Speaker 1: None of it was age. This is where the head
- 10:44Speaker 1: fake completes itself. Throughout the investigation, the obvious frame had
- 10:48Speaker 1: been financial, though withdrawals, the trust, the insurance policy, all
- 10:54Speaker 1: of it pointed to money as the motive and manipulation
- 10:56Speaker 1: as the method. Graham had assumed the benzodiazepine, when they surfaced,
- 11:01Speaker 1: would be incidental, a side instrument, something Fleming used to
- 11:06Speaker 1: keep Eric compliant while she moved the money. But the
- 11:09Speaker 1: ledger in the shoe box told a different story. Those
- 11:12Speaker 1: twenty two index cards did not record what Fleming had
- 11:16Speaker 1: spent on Eric. They recorded what Eric had spent on
- 11:19Speaker 1: his own house, his own water heater, his own roof,
- 11:24Speaker 1: his plumbing. The notations were Eric's expenses, written in Fleming's hand,
- 11:29Speaker 1: dated precisely, totaling thirty one thousand, two hundred twenty twenty
- 11:34Speaker 1: dollars over fourteen months, a larger figure than the roughly
- 11:38Speaker 1: twenty six thousand dollars in documented bank cash withdrawals. Fleming
- 11:42Speaker 1: had not been tracking her gifts to him. She had
- 11:45Speaker 1: been logging his costs, reframing them in her own private
- 11:49Speaker 1: accounting as his debt to her. The shoe box was
- 11:53Speaker 1: not evidence of generosity. It was a ledger of ownership.
- 11:57Speaker 1: He paid the index card on the outside of the box.
- 12:00Speaker 1: Graham had initially read it as a status note, a
- 12:03Speaker 1: confirmation that the insurance beneficiary change had gone through, that
- 12:07Speaker 1: the forty thousand dollars was now pointed at the trust
- 12:10Speaker 1: she controlled under the name Margaret Coal. But it was
- 12:14Speaker 1: also something else. It was the final entry in a
- 12:18Speaker 1: very long ledger. The question that remained, the question Graham
- 12:22Speaker 1: couldn't answer from bank records alone, was when exactly Fleming
- 12:26Speaker 1: had decided that Eric would not be coming back to
- 12:29Speaker 1: VOS Drive. Walk through the sequence as Graham reconstructed it.
- 12:34Speaker 1: Picture Eric in October of twenty eighteen, sitting in his kitchen,
- 12:38Speaker 1: confused about what day it is, handing over his pill
- 12:42Speaker 1: organizer to someone he trusts absolutely. The cash withdrawals have
- 12:47Speaker 1: been running for over a year. The insurance policy has
- 12:51Speaker 1: been redirected for nine months. The trust exists the alias
- 12:55Speaker 1: is in place, everything is set. All she needs is time.
- 13:00Speaker 1: One version of what happened next says Fleming plan to
- 13:03Speaker 1: keep Eric alive, sedated and co operative, indefino, converting his
- 13:08Speaker 1: assets gradually while he remained present and unalarmed. The ledger
- 13:13Speaker 1: supports this. It is a long term document, not an
- 13:17Speaker 1: exit record. The entries continue through January of two thousand nineteen,
- 13:22Speaker 1: four weeks before the shoe box appeared on the porch,
- 13:25Speaker 1: but that version runs into one hard fact. If indefinite
- 13:30Speaker 1: compliance was the plan, she didn't need to move him,
- 13:34Speaker 1: and she did move him. At some point in early
- 13:37Speaker 1: February of two thousand nineteen, Eric Smith was no longer
- 13:41Speaker 1: at two fourteen Voss Drive. He was in a motel
- 13:45Speaker 1: in Deering, Ohio, the same town where the vas Road
- 13:48Speaker 1: Family Care Trust had been notarized, severely dehydrated, disoriented, registered
- 13:55Speaker 1: under no name that matched his own. What caused the
- 13:58Speaker 1: plan to break is not in the record. What is
- 14:00Speaker 1: in the record is what Fleming left behind when she
- 14:03Speaker 1: left the house on February eighth, A water stained shoe box,
- 14:07Speaker 1: a rubber band, twenty two index cards, and one final
- 14:11Speaker 1: notation on the outside, written as though closing a column
- 14:15Speaker 1: in a book. Eric Smith had enough clarity on February
- 14:19Speaker 1: eleventh to remember that it was Wednesday. He picked up
- 14:22Speaker 1: the phone. He called nine one one himself. He later
- 14:26Speaker 1: described the moment as surfacing from deep water, not breaking through,
- 14:32Speaker 1: but rising slowly until the air was there. Patrece's number
- 14:37Speaker 1: was the first one he asked for. Three days after
- 14:40Speaker 1: Eric called nine one one from that motel room, endearing Kimberly,
- 14:44Speaker 1: Anne Fleming walked back through the door. She was still
- 14:47Speaker 1: registered there under the name Margaret Cole, the same alias
- 14:51Speaker 1: on the trust document, the same alias on the notary
- 14:54Speaker 1: record from three weeks before Eric's insurance policy changed hands.
- 15:00Speaker 1: She did not know the shoe box was already in
- 15:02Speaker 1: the evidence room at Lynfield PD. She did not know
- 15:06Speaker 1: Russell Graham had spent seventy two hours tracing forty one
- 15:10Speaker 1: cash withdrawals, one water stained Nike box, and a life
- 15:14Speaker 1: insurance beneficiary that led straight back to her. Fleming was
- 15:18Speaker 1: arrested February fourteenth, two thy nineteen, at the Deering motel
- 15:23Speaker 1: under the name Margaret Cole. When investigators laid it out,
- 15:27Speaker 1: the ledger, the trust, the alias, the benzodiazepines, she confessed
- 15:32Speaker 1: three charges elder financial abuse, obtaining property by deception, unlawful
- 15:39Speaker 1: administration of a controlled substance. That last charge is the
- 15:43Speaker 1: one that carries the most weight, because it names what
- 15:46Speaker 1: the index cards never did. The cards tracked dolls. The
- 15:51Speaker 1: toxicology report tracked something else, a slow, sustained chemical erosion
- 15:56Speaker 1: of a man's ability to think clearly enough to question
- 15:59Speaker 1: what was happening to him. Fleming entered a guilty plea
- 16:02Speaker 1: in September of two thousand nineteen, the sentence nine years
- 16:07Speaker 1: Graham later said that the ledger was the piece he
- 16:10Speaker 1: kept returning to, not because it proved the financial crime.
- 16:15Speaker 1: The bank records did that, but because it answered the
- 16:18Speaker 1: question that financial records alone cannot answer. Motive is one thing,
- 16:24Speaker 1: architecture is another. The cards showed that Fleming had built
- 16:28Speaker 1: a system debt, a cruel disguised as care, every casserole logged,
- 16:33Speaker 1: every bag of rock salt entered, every handyman referral counted.
- 16:38Speaker 1: She was not helping Eric manage his life. She was
- 16:41Speaker 1: running a tab. And the final notation he paid was
- 16:45Speaker 1: written the day the insurance beneficiary change cleared, not a confession,
- 16:50Speaker 1: a receipt. The forty thousand dollars term life policy redirected
- 16:54Speaker 1: to the Voss Road Family Care Trust. Sole trustee Margaret Cole,
- 16:58Speaker 1: was voided by the Ensure Sure. Following Fleming's arrest, Patrese
- 17:02Speaker 1: Smith was restored as beneficiary. The twenty six thousand dollars
- 17:07Speaker 1: in documented cash withdrawals was not recovered in full. Investigator's
- 17:13Speaker 1: confirmed partial restitution was ordered as part of sentencing, though
- 17:17Speaker 1: the full amount was not publicly detailed. Eric's IRA remained intact,
- 17:22Speaker 1: Fleming had not yet reached it. Six weeks after the arrest,
- 17:26Speaker 1: a photograph of Kimberly Anne Fleming ran on the front
- 17:29Speaker 1: page of the Lynnfield Courier. A woman named Diane Marsh,
- 17:33Speaker 1: fifty four, from Riverton, Ohio, saw it and called police.
- 17:38Speaker 1: Marsh told investigators that beginning in twenty thirteen, a woman
- 17:42Speaker 1: who called herself Kim had appeared after her husband's death
- 17:46Speaker 1: casseroles handyman referrals the same sequence. Marsh had found an
- 17:51Speaker 1: unfamiliar document referencing one of her savings accounts. She changed
- 17:55Speaker 1: her locks, she stopped answering the door. She had never
- 17:59Speaker 1: known the woman's last name until she saw the photograph.
- 18:03Speaker 1: No charges were filed in Diane Marsh's case, the statute
- 18:08Speaker 1: of limitations had run on certain applicable offenses and the
- 18:12Speaker 1: evidence available did not meet the threshold for prosecution. In
- 18:15Speaker 1: the remaining ones, Marsh's account entered the investigative record and
- 18:20Speaker 1: informed sentencing arguments. What that means. Plainly, Flemings had done
- 18:25Speaker 1: this before, possibly longer, possibly further. The Lynnfield case was
- 18:30Speaker 1: the one that left a ledger behind. Eric Smith spent
- 18:33Speaker 1: six weeks in a rehabilitation facility after his rescue. Within
- 18:38Speaker 1: one month of the benzo diazepines clearing his system, his
- 18:41Speaker 1: cognition had returned, largely to Norman. His physician's assessment not
- 18:46Speaker 1: a hope. The Wednesday calls resumed. There is something in
- 18:50Speaker 1: that fact that resists easy summarizing four years of eleven
- 18:55Speaker 1: PM calls. A missed call on February sixth that sent
- 18:59Speaker 1: Patrice to the porch on February ninth, and it was
- 19:02Speaker 1: the meta reader who got there first at eight forty
- 19:06Speaker 1: seven in the morning with a box he almost didn't
- 19:09Speaker 1: pick up a father who, despite everything done to erode
- 19:13Speaker 1: his mind, remembered what day it was and reached for
- 19:17Speaker 1: a phone and dialed. That detail is not a small one.
- 19:21Speaker 1: It is the center of the story. What Fleming built
- 19:24Speaker 1: over nearly two years was precise. She learned the entry
- 19:28Speaker 1: point a man alone, recently widowed, trusting of officials responsive
- 19:34Speaker 1: to care. She built proximity through manufactured need. She converted
- 19:38Speaker 1: proximity into access. She converted access into financial control, and then,
- 19:44Speaker 1: when financial control required cognitive compliance, she added the one
- 19:49Speaker 1: instrument that left no visible mark, a sedative administered gradually
- 19:56Speaker 1: in doses small enough not to alarm any one who
- 19:59Speaker 1: wasn't looking for it. The system was designed to be
- 20:02Speaker 1: invisible from the outside and incomprehensible from the inside. Eric
- 20:07Speaker 1: could not identify what was wrong with him because the
- 20:10Speaker 1: thing making it hard to think was also making it
- 20:13Speaker 1: hard to ask why he couldn't think. He surfaced anyway.
- 20:16Speaker 1: The question this case leaves open is not really about Fleming.
- 20:20Speaker 1: Her sentence is entered, her method is documented, her name
- 20:24Speaker 1: under its alias is in three separate court records. The
- 20:28Speaker 1: question is about the structure she exploited. Eric Smith was
- 20:32Speaker 1: not isolated. He had a daughter who called every Wednesday.
- 20:36Speaker 1: He had a neighbor with a dog. He had a
- 20:39Speaker 1: meter reader who noticed a rocking chair. He had a
- 20:42Speaker 1: physician who had not changed his prescriptions. Every one of
- 20:46Speaker 1: those people was present, and the scheme still ran for
- 20:49Speaker 1: nearly two years before the box sat on that porch.
- 20:53Speaker 1: Fleming did not succeed because no one was watching. She
- 20:57Speaker 1: succeeded because she made herself look like the one person
- 21:00Speaker 1: who was. Diane Marsh noticed an unfamiliar document and changed
- 21:05Speaker 1: her locks. The record does not say what made her
- 21:08Speaker 1: look twice at that document on that particular day. It
- 21:11Speaker 1: may have been nothing more than instinct. It was enough.
- 21:15Speaker 1: Eric Smith is sixty six now. He lives at two
- 21:18Speaker 1: fourteen Voss Drive. The Wednesday calls continue. According to the record,
- 21:23Speaker 1: the shoe box is in evidence storage at Lynfield p
- 21:28Speaker 1: d All twenty two index cards rubber banded in two stacks.
- 21:33Speaker 1: Each won a date and a dollar amount and a
- 21:36Speaker 1: two or three word notation recording what a man paid
- 21:40Speaker 1: for his own life while some one else kept the books.
- 21:43Speaker 1: This show is made by Obamedia