Latest / Why Humans Lie / He Called It Healing - How a Therapist Broke Her Reality

Transcript

He Called It Healing - How a Therapist Broke Her Reality · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of October fourth, twenty nineteen, a utility
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: lineman named Cheryl Anderson walked up the front path of
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: a pale green craftsman house on Tillman Street in Orville, Ohio.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: The electric meter had registered zero draw for eleven consecutive days.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: What she found in the side yard stopped her cold.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: A garden hose was dripping into a crawl space vent
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: outside temperature twenty nine degrees fahrenheit. The hose had been
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: running long enough to saturate the ground beneath the foundation,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: and tucked into the mail slot on the front door
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: was a sympathy card return address Ronald Peterson, postmarked September
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: twenty first. The woman who lived in that house had
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: been dead for two weeks. Her obituary would not be
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: published for another three days after that card was sent.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Someone already knew what followed was not a mystery that
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: unraveled all at once. But how did Diane get to
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: this point? Britt It was a slow unraveler, one that
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: had begun not in September, but almost two years earlier,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: in the office of a therapist three miles away. By
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: the time Cheryl Anderson stood in that frost hardened yard.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Diane Bowers had already lost her sense of what was real,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: her trust in her own perceptions, and finally, her life.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: The question was how completely one person had engineered that collapse,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: and whether he had done it before. Diane Bowers turned
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: forty eight in August two thousand nineteen. She had lived
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: on Tillman Street long enough that the neighbors knew her car,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: a nine year old Subaru, always parked at a slight
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: angle in the same spot. She had worked as a
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: bookkeeper at Norris Mechanical for fourteen years. Colleagues described her
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: as precise and unflappable, the kind of person who caught
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: errors quietly and never made anyone feel small for making them.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Every Thursday, from five to eight in the evening, Diane
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: volunteered at the Orville area food shelf. She had done
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: it for six consecutive years. Barbara Hoke, the food shelf coordinator,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: would later tell investigators that Diane missed exactly one shift
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: in all that time, the week her husband, Martin died.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Martin Bowers passed away in the spring of twenty seventeen.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: The cause was illness, and the death, while not sudden,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: left Diane hollowed in the way that long anticipated losses
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: sometimes due. She and Martin had built a life inside
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: the ordinary architecture of a small Ohio city, the craftsman house,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: the steady job, the Thursday evenings, giving something back. His
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: absence reorganized everything. Her daughter, Renata, twenty three and living
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: in Columbus at the time, watched her mother try to
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: reconstruct a shape for her days. Diane was not someone
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: who who collapsed publicly. She processed things inward methodically, the
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: same way she worked through a discrepancy in a balance sheet.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: When a colleague mentioned grief counseling, Diane considered it the
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: way she considered most practical suggestions, seriously, without drama. She
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: made an appointment in the fall of twenty seventeen with
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: a private practice therapist named Ronald Peterson, whose office sat
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: on Commerce Way, roughly three miles from Tilmunt Street. Peterson
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: was fifty one, held a master's in clinical counseling, and
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: carried an active Ohio license with no disciplinary record. He
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: had recently gone through a divorce of his own. He
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: presented by every visible measure as a credentialed professional doing
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: legitimate work. But the facade does not always reveal the
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: truth right Britain, Renata visited her mother that November. She
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: noticed a book on the kitchen table, a grief workbook,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: and flipped it open to the front page. The inscription
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: stopped her. She would describe it later as something she
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: felt before she understood it, a warmth that bent slightly wrong,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: a familiarity that exceeded what a therapist's note should carry.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: She closed the book and said nothing. She was twenty three.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: She told herself she was reading too much into handwriting.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: She was not reading too much into it, but she
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: had no evidence, only a feeling she could not yet name.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Over the following months, people who knew Diane noticed small shifts.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: She began apologizing for things that required no apology, arriving
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: on time, asking a simple question, taking up space in
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: a conversation. Barbara Hawke noticed that Diane stopped making the small,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: dry jokes she had always made during the Thursday shift
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: set up. She seemed hook recalled, like someone who had
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: started listening for something and couldn't stop listening long enough
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: to relax. Diane also began using a particular word with
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: unusual frequency. Her daughter noticed it first, just just a dinner,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: just some paperwork he helped with, just a conversation that
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: ran long. Each use of the word arrived as a
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: small reassurance, the kind offered not to the person being told,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: but to the person telling. Renata heard it and felt
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: the same formless unease she had felt holding the workbook.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: She still could not name it. And this is where
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: things get really strange written. What she did not yet know,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: what no one outside that Commerce Way office knew, was
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: that Ronald Peterson had begun calling Diane's anguish by a
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: specific name. He had a term for it. He used
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: it in sessions to explain why her instincts were firing incorrectly,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: why her discomfort was in data but noise. The term
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: did not exist in any clinical literature. It did not
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: appear in any licensing records or published research. It was
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: a word he invented, and Diane, who had spent fourteen
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: years catching errors in other people's numbers, had begun to
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: trust his accounting of her own mind over her own.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: The medication bottle sat on Diane Bowers's night stand, exactly
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: where it should have been. Thirty pills, prescribed September eighteenth,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: a thirty day supply fresh from the pharmacy two days
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: before she died. When investigators counted what remained, there were
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: four pills in the bottle. Twenty six were gone. The
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: bottle had no fingerprints on it. None, not Diane's, not anyone's.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: A prescription bottle handled daily by the person taking it,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: wiped clean. That single number, twenty six is where the
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: first image loop opens because the official ruling at the
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: time was accidental overdose, and an accidental overdose, by definition,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: is something a person does to themselves. So the question
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: the number asks is quiet but precise. If Diane took
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: twenty six of her own sleep aids, why did someone
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: wipe the bottle afterward? There is no answer that does
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: not implicate a second person in that room. Can you
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: believe it? Bread? But that room was not the only
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: place where something was wrong. Three weeks after Diane Bowers died,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: on October fourth, twenty nineteen, a utility lineman named Cheryl
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Anderson arrived at four fourteen Tillman Street to investigate a
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: billing anomaly. The house had drawn zero electricity for eleven days.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: The outdoor temperature that morning was twenty nine degrees fahrenheit
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: frost on the grass. Andersen moved around the foundation, checking
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: the meter and found a garden hose still connected, still running,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: dripping water into a crawl space. Vent Diane had not
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: used that hose since early September. Barbara Hawke confirmed it
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: the hose had been opened after Diane stopped being able
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: to close it. Some one had run water into the
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: crawl space of a dead woman's house and left it running.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Andersen also found something in the mail slot, a sympathy
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: card return address Ronald Peterson, Commerce Way Orville, postmark September
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: twenty first. The obituary would not be published until September
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: twenty fourth. He sent condolences for a death the public
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: did not yet know had occurred. Hold that postmark. It
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: is not done with this story yet. Peterson, when later
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: asked how he learned of Diane's death before the announcement,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: said he had heard through a mutual acquaintance named Dennis Frick.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Investigators located Frick immediately. Frick stated he had never met
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Diane Bowers. He also confirmed he had not spoken to
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Ronald Peterson since two thousand seventeen. The alibi dissolved the
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: moment it was checked, but to understand the magnitude of
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: this manipulation, writ we have to go further back, before
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: the bottle, before the hose, before the card, because the
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: architecture of what happened to Diane did not begin on
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: September twentieth. It began in fall twenty seventeen in a
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: commerce way office, when a recently widowed bookkeeper sat down
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: across from a recently divorced therapist and asked for help
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: with grief. Peterson held the Masters in Clinical Counseling. His
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Ohio license was current. There was no disciplinary record with
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the Ohio councilor Board at the time Diane became his client.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: He presented as qualified, credentialed, careful. What he brought into
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: the room was something else. Over the following months, he
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: introduced Diane to a term he called, according to accounts
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: later compiled during the investigation, something along the lines of
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: a named distortion specific to grief, a clinical sounding label
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: for why her instincts were misfiring, why her discomfort in
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: certain situations was a symptom rather than signal. The term
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: did not appear in any licensing literature, It did not
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: appear in any published clinical research. It was according to
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: every record reviewed a construction, a word designed to make
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: one specific person doubt one specific mind. Diane had spent
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: fourteen years catching errors in other people's numbers. She was
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: precise by training, and she began using that invented term
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: herself in conversation as though it had always existed. By
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: late twenty eighteen, people around her noticed the change, not
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: in what she said, but in how she moved through
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: a room. She apologized for arriving on time. She apologized
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: for asking questions at the Orville area foodshelf, where she
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: had volunteered every Thursday for six years, without a single
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: absence beyond the week Martin died. She stopped making the small,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: dry jokes she had always made during setup. Coordinader Barbara
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Houke described her as someone who had begun listening for
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: something and could not stop long enough to relax. She
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: began saying, just just a dinner, just some paperwork he
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: helped with, just a conversation that ran long. Each use
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: of the word was a small reassurance, offered not to
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: the person being told, but to the person telling. Her daughter,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Renata had seen the Grief Workbook in November twenty seventeen.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: The inscription inside felt wrong, too familiar, bent at an
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: angle that did not match the professional distance a therapist's
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: note should carry. Renata was twenty three. She told herself
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: she was reading too much into handwriting. She was not.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: The foam record is a single line in an evidence file.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: It is also the moment the entire shape of the
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: case changed. Ronald Peterson's cellular data placed his phone within
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: two hundred meters of four fourteen Tillman Street at eleven
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: fourteen in the evening on September twentieth, twenty nineteen. Diane's
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: death was estimated between eleven p m. That night and
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: two a m. The following morning. He was there, not
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: near there, not in the general neighborhood, within two hundred
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: meters of her front door during the window she died.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: He had never mentioned being anywhere near Tillman Street that night.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: But the phone data alone had a problem. It placed
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: a device, not a person. Defense attorneys have dismantled cases
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: on that distinction. But how prove it, brit What investigators
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: needed was something that put Peterson's body inside that house,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: not just his phone on the block. They found it
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: beneath it. Wayne County forensic Examiner Victor TAM inspected the
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: crawl space at four fourteen Tillman after Sheryl Anderson's discovery.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: The secondary water shut off, the one controlling the valve
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: that had been left partially open, is not accessible from
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: outside the foundation. There is no exterior your route to
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: that shut off. Whoever opened it was inside the crawl space.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: TAM documented scuff marks consistent with knee and boot contact
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: in the dirt, and in that same crawl space, pressed
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: into the ground near the shut off was a partial
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: boot print. In November twenty nineteen, investigators executed a warrant
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: on Peterson's storage unit. They seized a pair of boots.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: The tread pattern matched, the size matched. That is when
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: the phone record stopped being a data point and became
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: a narrative. And this is where the loop the postmark
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: opened finally closes brit and opens something much larger. Peterson
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: had claimed Denis Frick told him about Diane's death before
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: September twenty first. Frick had never met her. Peterson had
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: sent the card before the obituary. His phone had placed
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: him at her address during the death window. His boots
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: matched the print beneath her floor and the bottle near
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: her bed at twenty six, missing pills and no fingerprints.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: Investigators working the Diane Bauers case shared Peterson's name with
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Medina County Detective Phil Okafort at a file he had
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: never fully closed. Louise Vance fifty three years old, a
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: widow in Medina County, death ruled accidental in January twenty eighteen,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: grief counseling client of Ronald Peterson. Her daughter had noticed
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: a gradual withdrawal from family in the months before her death.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: A secondary contact name added to Vance's utility account had
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: been traced to a post office box Peterson used in
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. Accidental January two thousand eighteen. Two widows,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: same therapist, same pattern of isolation, two accidental deaths coincidence.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Britt Peterson was arrested in December of twenty nineteen in
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: his apartment on Milford Road in Worcester, O two counts
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: of aggravated murder. Picture the Commerce Way office at the beginning,
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Diane Bowers sitting in a chair that is new to her,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Martin four months dead, looking at a man whose credentials
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: are current, whose record is clean, whose manner is careful.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: She is a bookkeeper, she trusts systems that add up.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: He is a licensed therapist. He adds up. If you
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: hold only that image, you arrive at one conclusion. Whatever
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: happened to Diane was a sudden thing, a collapse of
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: judgment at the end a bad night with too many pills.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: That version does not survive the crawl space. But how
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: could this happen? Brit whoever went under that house knew
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: where the secondary shut off was. That shut off is
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: not labeled. It is not visible from a standing position.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: It requires navigating a low dark space to reach a
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: specific valve. You do not find it by accident. You
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: find it because you have been there before, or because
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: someone who lived in the house showed you where it
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: was in a conversation she no longer remembered. Was a reconnaissance.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Consider what the isolation pattern required. Diane began apologizing for
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: taking up space in late twenty eighteen. She was using
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: a clinical term invented, unlicensed, untraceable to explain to herself
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: why her discomfort was a symptom. She had given a
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: man she trusted access to her mind's accounting system, and
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: he had been quietly editing the ledger. By the time
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: her daughter heard the word just repeating through phone calls.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: The editing had been running for more than a year.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: That is not a bad night. That is architecture. Now
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Place Peterson at eleven fourteen p m. On September twentieth,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: two hundred meters from her door, place his boots in
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: the krawl space, placed twenty six pills missing from a
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: wiped bottom, and then placed the sympathy card in the
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: mail slot. On September twenty first, three days before the
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: world knew to be sorry. He was not a man
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: who lost control. He was a man who had been
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: planning the exit from this particular arrangement for long enough
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: to know which valve to turn. The jury in Wayne
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: County deliberated for nine hours. They convicted on all counts
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: in September twenty twenty one, life without Possibility of perule.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Two appeals both failed. In twenty twenty five, Peterson provided
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: a written statement to a journalist researching coercive control in
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: therapeutic relationships. He confirmed access, He confirmed the medication, He
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: confirmed the crawl space. He stated that he had believed
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: he was the only person who truly understood these women,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: and that this understanding entitled him to determine what happened
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: to them. He did not use the word murder. He
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: used the word understanding. Diane Bauers had trusted someone to
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: help her understand herself after the worst year of her life.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: That trust was the instrument. Every step that followed the
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: invented term, the borrowed key, the dripping hose, the wiped bottle,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: the card sent before the obituary was built inside the
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: space that trust created. She was precise. She caught errors.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: She would have caught this one too, if the errors
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: had been in some one else's numbers. The Oreville area
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Food Shelf has a volunteer on Thursdays who does the
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: set up. The shift runs five to eight in the evening.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: The small jokes that used to happen during that set
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: up are not there any more. That is the smallest
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: version of what was taken. Louise Vance was fifty three
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: years old when she died in Medina County in January
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen. Her death was ruled accidental. She was
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: a widow. She had been in grief counseling. Her daughter
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: had watched her pull away slowly from everyone who knew
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: her name. A secondary contact on her utility account traced
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: back to a po box Ronald Peterson used that year.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: When Peterson's name surfaced during Diane's investigation, detectives reopened the
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Vance case in late November two thousand nineteen. No separate
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: conviction has been entered in the record. The investigation remains open.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: That means there is a daughter in Medina County who
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: still does not have a final answer. Peterson was arrested
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: in December two thousand nineteen at his apartment on Milford
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Road in Worcester, Ohio, roughly three miles from the office
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: where Diane had first walked in and asked for help.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: The charges were two counts of aggravated murder, one for
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Diane Bowers in Wayne County, one for Louise Vance in
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Medina County. The arrest came eleven weeks after Cheryl Anderson
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: found a garden hose dripping into a crawl space vent
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: in twenty nine degree frost, a utility call that is
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: what broke it open. The Wayne County trial ran to
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: its conclusion in September twenty twenty one. The jury deliberated
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: for nine hours. They returned a verdict of guilty on
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: all counts. The sentence was life without possibility of parole.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Peterson filed two appeals, both failed. In twenty twenty five,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: he gave a written statement to a journalist studying coercive
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: control in therapeutic relationships. He confirmed the access, He confirmed
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: the medication, He confirmed the crawl space. He did not
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: say he had made a mistake. He said he had
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: understood these women better than any one else had, and
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: that this understanding had given him the right to determine
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: what happened to them. He used the word understanding. Not
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: once did he use the word murder. The Ohio Counseling
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Board has since updated its continuing Education requirements to include
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: modules on boundary violations and financial entanglement with vulnerable clients.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Those changes do not restore anyone. They are the system's
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: version of a sympathy card, sent after the fact, addressed
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: to the general public. There is a question worth sitting
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: with before this ends. Diane Bowers was not naive. She
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: was a bookkeeper who caught other people's errors for fourteen years.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: She was someone who showed up for six years running
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: every Thursday five to eight to help strangers. She was
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: someone whose daughter felt something unnamed and wrong in a
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: book inscription in November twenty seventeen, and could not yet
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: say why. Peterson did not succeed because Diane was weak.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: He succeeded because he had institutional authority and a clinical vocabulary,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: and he used both to tell her that her own
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: discomfort was a symptom rather than a signal. That is
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: the mechanism, that is the part that has nothing to
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: do with her, and everything to do with what he
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: chose to do with the trust she extended. And here,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Britt is where the word just did a lot of work,
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: just dinner, just paperwork, just a conversation, each one a
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: step taken inside the perimeter of something she had already
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: agreed to. By the time the perimeter had moved far
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: enough she had been trained to doubt the distance. The
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: pale green craftsman on Tillman Street is still there. The
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: food shelf in Orville still runs its Thursday shift five
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: to eight in the evening. Someone does the set up now.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: The small jokes that used to happen during that set
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: up are not there anymore. Barbara Hauke, the coordinator who
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: confirmed Diane had never missed a shift in six years,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: except the week Martin died, still knows exactly what Thursday
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: Evenings used to sound like. That is the smallest version
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: of what was taken, and it is not small at all.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: This show is made aid by Obomedia.