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He Replaced Her Life: The Shed Full of Her Photographs · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A meter reader named Russell Collins stopped at a locked
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: gate on the third Tuesday of November twenty seventeen. The
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: gate led to a garden shed behind fourteen Dunmore Lane.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: What he saw through the gap made him take a
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: step back. Every inch of the wall inside was covered
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: in photographs of the same woman. She had no idea
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: a single one had been taken. That woman was Jennifer Cooper.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: She had lived at that address for nineteen years. She
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: knew every creek in the hallway, every light switch, every
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: neighbor on the block. She believed she knew her own
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: home completely. The photographs proved otherwise, and the shed was
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: only the beginning. What investigators found in that Cobertaiso over
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: the following days described something that forensic experts would later
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: struggle to name with a single word. It was not theft,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: It was not a salt. It was a systematic, month's
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: long effort to replace Jennifer's memories with versions that someone
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: else had constructed for her, one photograph at a time.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: This is the case that became known in Hatchfield County
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: records as a stalking and identity fraud prosecution, but those
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: legal labels do not come close to capturing what was
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: actually done to Jennifer Cooper or to the woman forty
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: miles south in Copley Township whose name appeared in a
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: handwritten notebook found on that same shed shelf. By the
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: time this story is over, there are two questions worth
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: sitting with. The first is how someone dismantles another person's
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: sense of reality without ever raising a hand. The second
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: is how one woman noticed and what it cost her
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: to prove it. Jennifer Cooper was fifty four in November
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. She had lived at fourteen Dunmore Lane in
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Hatchfield for nearly two decades. The house was hers in
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: every sense that matters. She knew which drawer stuck in
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: humid weather. She knew her orange tabby cat Biscuit, needed
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: his thyroid medication at seven in the morning and again
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: at five thirty in the afternoon without fail, because at
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: fourteen years old, he was not a cat who could
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: afford a mist doose. She had been married once to
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Paul Cooper, and the marriage had ended. She did not
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: speak about that period in detail in public records, but
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: she had rebuilt methodically twelve years at the same job
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: as a medical billing coordinator, the same close friend Trudy
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Nance for the better part of those nineteen years on
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Dunmore Lane, a daughter named Melissa, a routine that was
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: not rigid, but reliable. That reliability mattered. It matters here
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: because what was done to Jennifer depended entirely on exploiting it.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: She was not a person who doubted herself carelessly. The
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: records show she was organized. When she eventually began to
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: notice that something was wrong inside her own home, she
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: did not panic. She started a written log. She documented
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: forty one entries. She kept that log folded in the
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: inside pocket of her coat and backed it up on
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: a public library computer using an email address. Kevin Wallace
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: had never seen that discipline would eventually help put him away,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: But in September of twenty sixteen, Jennifer did not yet
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: know his name. She knew only that her car had
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: broken down on Route nine, and that a tall man
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: in his early forties had stopped to help. He said
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: he was a contract a handyman. He was calm and competent,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: and he did not ask for anything in return. Within
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: a month, Kevin Wallace was inside her house. Within two months,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: he was spending the night. The progression felt at the
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: time like the natural rhythm of something good. He was attentive,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: He fixed things without being asked. He remembered small details
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: about her preferences in a way that felt like care.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Clinical social worker Beverly Schmidt, who later served as an
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: expert witness for the District Attorney, described this phase with
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: a specific term. She called it love bombing, consistent, calibrated
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: affection delivered at a pace designed to accelerate trust past
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: the point where a person's natural hesitation would normally slow
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: things down. Jennifer was not naive. She was fifty three
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: years old, she had raised a daughter, She had rebuilt
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: her life once already. But love bombing is not designed
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: to fool someone who is naive. It is designed to
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: overwhelm someone who is perceptive. The attention feels real because
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: the attention is relentless. The details feel significant because there
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: are so many of them. By November of twenty sixteen,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Wallace was a fixture at fourteen Dunmore Lane, and somewhere
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: in those early months, according to Beverly Schmidt's later analysis,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the second phase had already begun quietly below the threshold
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: of anything Jennifer could point to and name fiuoneste, punto, keela, manipoulacion, commenceaux,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: a manifestarce the form of soutelle. Small objects in the
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: house began to be replaced. A mug, a blanket, a
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: bar of soap. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would trigger alarm,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: just the steady, patient work of some one who was
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: testing how much of a person's environment could be substituted.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Before she noticed, she had not yet noticed, but she would.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: The first object Jennifer Cooper noticed was a mug, not
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: at first, not consciously. The mug had been on the
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: kitchen shelf for years, a wide, heavy thing with a
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: small chip on the rim that she had stopped seeing,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: the way people stopped seeing furniture they've owned too long.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: At some point in early two thousand seventeen, it was gone.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: A different mug sat in its place, same general shape,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: same shelf position. She did not remember replacing it. She
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: let it go. The blanket on the reading chair had
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: been a gift. She remembered the specific weight of it,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: the way the weave had softened over years of washing.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: At some point it was different. She did not remember
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: buying a new one. She let that go too. This
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: is the part that Beverly Schmidt would later explain in
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: precise clinical language during the trial. The replacement objects were
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: chosen for their interchangeability, not identical, but close enough that
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: the gap between original and substitute fell inside the range
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: of ordinary. Forgetting what Wallace was building, Schmidt testified, was
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: not confusion. It was doubt, specifically doubt directed inward. A
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: person who cannot trust her own memory of a mug
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: will not trust her own memory of anything. The bar
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of soap in the bathroom was different. Jennifer did not
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: remember buying a new one. She started to wonder if
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: she was tired. By March of twenty seventeen, the replacements
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: had moved beyond objects she used and into objects she
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: looked at. The photograph on the hallway wall showed Melissa
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: at her eighth birthday party. Jennifer had taken it herself.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: She remembered the moment the cake, the candle's Melissa's hair
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: loose around her shoulders in the way it always was
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: when she was young and didn't care about keeping it
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: neat the photograph on the wall showed Melissa's hair pulled
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: back Jennifer stood in the hallway for a long time.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: She asked Melissa about it in June, when three more
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: photographs appeared slightly wrong angles. She didn't remember choosing colors
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: slightly off from what she carried in her mind. Melissa
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: said she hadn't touched anything. The conversation was short and uncomfortable.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Melissa assumed her mother was misremembering. Jennifer, who was starting
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: to assume the same thing, dropped it. Then came the
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: photograph that did not know what month it was. It
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: was August of two thousand seventeen when Jennifer pulled a
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: framed photo off the living room wall and looked at
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: it closely enough to see the detail. The image was
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: dated June. In her memory, it was supposed to show
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: the back yard in summer, but in the background, just
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: visible behind the frame of the window, there was a
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: wall calendar February, and through the glass the trees outside
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: were bare, branches stripped clean the way they only get
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: in the dead of winter. The photograph had been taken
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: in February and placed in a summer frame. She did
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: not let that go. Jennifer Cooper took the photograph down
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: and put it in a box in the trunk of
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: her car. That night, she called Trudy Nance. Trudy had
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: been her closest friend, through the divorce, through the years
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: of rebuilding, through everything. Jennifer described the calendar the bare branches.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Trudy confirmed what Jennifer already knew but needed to hear
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: from someone else. That detail was impossible to misremember. A
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: calendar on a wall is not a feeling, It is
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: a fact. Jennifer started writing things down. Over the next
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: three months. She logged forty one photographs in a small notebook.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: She wrote descriptions of what she remembered and what she
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: was now seeing. She noted dates, locations within the house,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: specific details. At some point she made a second copy
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: on a computer at a public library, saved to a
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: cloud account with an email address Kevin Wallace had never
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: seen and did not know existed. This is the part
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: that requires a moment. Jennifer Cooper, while still living in
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: the same house as the man dismantling her reality, created
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a secret archive of evidence against him without ever confronting
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: him directly or alerting him to what she knew. She
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: had no law enforcement background, She had no formal investigative training.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: She was a medical billing coqu coordinator who had noticed
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: that a photograph did not know what season it was.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: She built the case herself. On the third Tuesday of
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: November twenty seventeen, Russell Collins stopped his truck at the
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: edge of the property at fourteen Dunmore Lane. Collins had
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: been reading meters on Dunmore Lane for eleven years. He
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: knew which gates opened inward and which ones stuck. He
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: knew which dogs barked at strangers and which ones just watched.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: He knew the shed at the back of the Cooper
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: property had never been locked before, and when he saw
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: the new padlock on the door and the electrical cord
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: running under the gap at the bottom, he stopped. He
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: called the non emergency line dispatcher. Travis Norwood took the call.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: A patrol unit was sent. The padlock on the shed
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: had already been forced open. It was hanging broken in
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: the hask. What was inside the shed stopped the responding officers.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: The walls were covered in photographs, hundreds of them. All
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: of this. Every image was candid doorways, windows, the kitchen,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: the yard. In none of them was the woman looking
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: at the camera in none of them did she appear
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: to know a camera was there. The woman was Jennifer Cooper.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Forensic technician Paul Engstrom catalog the contents of the shed
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: over the following day. He recovered a portable photo printer,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: archival grade paper, a camping lantern connected by extension cord
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: to an outlet inside the house, an outlet Jennifer believed
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: had been broken for months. Because Kevin Wallace had told
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: her the fuse had blown, she had put a child
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: proof cover over it herself. The outlet had never been broken.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Then Engstrom found the hard drive, two hundred sixty photographs,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: and beneath the printer a handwritten notebook in Wallace's own script,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: a list of original photographs and next to each one,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: a description of the replacement image that had been substituted.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: The methodology was documented in his own hand At the
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: bottom of several pages, a name appeared that was not
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Jennifer Cooper's. Deborah Finch, forty eight years old, Copley Township,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: forty miles south. Detective Morris Keene drove to Copley Township
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: the following Wednesday. Deborah Finch had ended her relationship with
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Kevin Wallace approximately eighteen months before Jennifer Cooper met him
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: on Route nine. In the months after the relationship ended,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Finch had undergone neurological testing. She had changed her medication.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: She had told her doctor that she was having trouble
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: trusting her own memory. She had never filed a police
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: report because she had never been certain enough of what
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: had happened to name it. She was certain now. The
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: note book gave the investigation something else. Co ordinate metadata
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: embedded in the replacement photographs, eleven locations across three counties,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: ten months of documented movement. Wallace had not been improvising.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: He had been executed. Picture what that notebook represents for
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: a moment, A man so methodical that he kept written
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: records of every original photograph he had stolen and every
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: substitute he had placed in its frame, A man who
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: documented his own project. Beverly Schmidt, reviewing the notebook during
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: trial preparation, said it was the most organized expression of
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: what she termed identity erasure she had encountered in her
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: professional career. Everything pointed toward a calculated obsession with Jennifer, specifically,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: a man fixated on one woman escalating across Yews but
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the notebook held a name from before Jennifer, and the
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: metadata held locations far outside Hatchfield, and the methodology, the patience,
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: the system. The archival paper chosen because it would age correctly,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: suggested something that had been refined before it was ever
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: turned on Jennifer Cooper. The question was not whether Wallace
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: had done this before. The question was how far back
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: the project actually began. On the Saturday of the last
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: week of November twenty seventeen, Kevin Wallace was arrested. The
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: charges filed that morning covered stoking, harassment, identity fraud, the
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: financial account access investigators had traced back through months of small,
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: invisible withdrawals, and criminal mischief. Additional charges were filed in
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: connection with Deborah Finch, added to the case, not because
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: she had come forward, but because a detective had driven
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: forty miles south and sat across from a woman who
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: had spent a year and a half doubting her own mind.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Finch never filed an independent report. She had not known
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: there was anything to report until the notebook named her.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Wallace said almost nothing a trial, no confession, no explanation,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: no statement that the record shows as substantive. He sat
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: through the proceedings with what witnesses later described as an
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: unremarkable composure, and when the jury returned, he received the
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: verdict without visible reaction. He was convicted on every charge.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Jennifer Cooper testified for two days. She brought the log
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: she had assembled across those final months, forty one documented replacements,
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: forty one hand written entries hidden in a coat pocket,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: backed up to a cloud account on a public computer
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: he never knew existed. She read from it on the stand.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Trudy Nance sat in the court room for both days,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: and she was there when the verdict was read. Think
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: about what Jennifer carried into that courtroom, not just the evidence,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: the twelve months of living inside a question she could
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: not neigh, the moment she opened a photograph of her
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: daughter and felt something was wrong before she could articulate
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: what the forty one times she chose to document instead
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: of confront because she understood somewhere below language that confronting
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: it would make it disappear. That log was not just evidence.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: It was proof that she had trusted herself when everything
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: around her had been arranged to make her stop. Wallace appealed,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: the state court denied it. A second petition followed that
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: was rejected to five years after the arrest, placing the
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: time line at approximately twenty two or twenty three, though
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the precise state has not been publicly confirmed. Wallace gave
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: a recorded statement to journalist stand Kowalski. In that recording,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: he described the full sequence of what he had done
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: to Jennifer Cooper and separately to Deborah Finch. Beverly Schmidt,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the licensed clinical social worker who had served as an
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: expert witness for the prosecution, reviewed a transcript of that recording.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: She said his tone was flat. She said the flatness
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: was more disturbing than remorse would have been. In the recording,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Wallace offered one sentence that Kowalski documented, people trust pictures
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: more than they trust themselves. He described the replacement project
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: as what he called the culminating act of erasure. The goal,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: as he laid it out in a flat voice, five
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: years too late, was to remove Jennifer's past and replace
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: it with aversion he had constructed, a version without the
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: history she remembered, a version that made her dependent on
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: whatever he confirmed. Beverly Schmidt had a clinical term for
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the architecture of it. She called it identity erasure. She
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: described the phases, the love bombing that established trust, the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: low level environmental manipulation that introduced doubt, and then the
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: photographic project that was never improvisation, it was design. What
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: the methodology shows and what Schmidt made plain in her
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: expert testimony, is that this was not a fixation that
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: began with Jennifer. Deborah Finch ended her relationship with Wallace
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: approximately eighteen months before Jennifer met him on Route nine.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: The neurological testing Finch underwent afterward, the medication changes, the
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: conversations with her doctor about not trusting her own memory.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: That was not the beginning of the project either. It
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: was a middle chapter of something that had been refined
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: before Finch and refined again before Jennifer. How far back
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: it reaches has not been established in the public record.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Jennifer Cooper still lives in Hatchfield. That detail matters. She
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: stayed at fourteen Dunmore Lane nineteen years in that house,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: and she stayed. The photographs on the walls are hers,
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: now verifiably documented, confirmed by the logs she kept and
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: by the person she trusted to look at them beside
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: her Trudy nance confirmed the calendar, Trudy Nance sat in
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the courtroom. Some things hold. After the verdict, Jennifer gave
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: a brief statement to victim advocate Christine Holbrook. The record
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: does not contain its full text. What is known is
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: that she described the experience of testifying as the first
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: time in over a year that she felt the sequence
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: of events belonged to her, That the log had given
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: her back the timeline that naming what happened in a
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: courtroom in front of a jury with her own handwriting,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: as the evidence had returned something that had been methodically removed.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: This case does not fit the shape of a crime
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: where the harm is obvious and immediate. There was no
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: single moment of violence. There was instead a sustained and
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: deliberate effort to make one woman stop trusting the most
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: basic instrument of her own cognition, memory. Wallace operated on
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the assumption that photographs are more trusted than recollection. He
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: was not wrong about the psychology. He was wrong about
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Jennifer Cooper. She noticed She documented she kept the original
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: in a box in her car. Deborah Finch, forty eight,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: of Copley Township, had her experience added to the case
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: record by a detective who followed a name in a notebook.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: She had not been believed, not disbelieved, She had simply
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: never found the language for it. She had undergone neurological testing,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: She had changed her medication. She had lived inside a
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: confusion that had a source she could not yet name.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: The investigation named it for her. There were no independent
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: charges filed in her case. What happened to her is
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: part of the trial record, because the notebook put her there.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Beverly Schmidt said something in her expert testimony that the
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: record preserved. She said, the most dangerous element of this
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: methodology is its invisibility. The victim experiences doubt before she
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: experiences threat. By the time the threat becomes visible, the
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: doubt has already done its work. The designed outcome is
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: a person who cannot trust her own account of events
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: well enough to report them. Jennifer Cooper reported them anyway,
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: with forty one entries and a cloud back up on
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: a computer he never knew she used. The case of
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Kevin Wallace is not closed in the sense that it
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: teaches something that cannot be closed. The technology required to
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: execute what he built inside that shed, the portable printer,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: the archival paper chosen to age correctly. The metadata scrubbed
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: just carefully enough. None of it was specialized, None of
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: it required resources most people do not have. Beverly Schmidt
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: noted for the record that the barrier to this methodology
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: is not technical, It is the assumption that no one
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: would do it. Jennifer Cooper is the reason this case
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: has a public record. Not the shed, not the note book,
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: not the coordinate metadata. Those things close the case. She
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: opened it one photograph at a time, written in a
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: log she hid in the pocket of her coat, preserved
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: on a server he never reached. She is fifty four
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: years old. She has a daughter named Melissa. She has
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: a fourteen year old orange tabby cat named Biscuit who
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: requires medication at seven in the morning and again at
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: five thirty in the afternoon. She has a friend named
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Trudy who answered a phone call in August and said, yes,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: something is wrong with that photograph. That is who she
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: was before any of this. It is still who she is.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obo Media.