Latest / Why Humans Lie / I Think I'm Disappearing: The Trainer Who Rewrote Her Life
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: A Tuesday morning in December twenty nineteen, a maintenance technician
- 0:09Speaker 1: named Susan Powell climbs out of her service truck on
- 0:12Speaker 1: Bellard Mill Road and kneels beside a sewer riser no
- 0:16Speaker 1: wider than eight inches across. She is there to inspect
- 0:20Speaker 1: a pump. What she finds instead are two notebooks tucked
- 0:24Speaker 1: inside the tube, wrapped in a plastic sleeve, dry in
- 0:28Speaker 1: a wet place. One of them does not belong to
- 0:30Speaker 1: anyone who lives at that address. It belongs to a
- 0:34Speaker 1: woman who disappeared three years earlier and was never found.
- 0:38Speaker 1: That detail, two notebooks, two women, one narrow pipe is
- 0:44Speaker 1: the center of this entire story. Three words are written
- 0:47Speaker 1: in the margin of the first notebook, in handwriting that
- 0:50Speaker 1: is small and urgent, I think on disappearing. The person
- 0:54Speaker 1: who wrote them was not missing. She was at that
- 0:58Speaker 1: moment driving to work with a packed lunch her partner
- 1:01Speaker 1: had prepared for her. She had a salary, a phone,
- 1:05Speaker 1: and a social life. She also had forty dollars a
- 1:07Speaker 1: day to spend and no memory of agreeing to that limit.
- 1:11Speaker 1: Her name was Angela Rafferty. She was twenty eight years
- 1:15Speaker 1: old when the process began. What happened to her over
- 1:18Speaker 1: the next thirty months is not a story about violence.
- 1:22Speaker 1: It is a story about the slow, deliberate dismantling of
- 1:26Speaker 1: a person's ability to trust her own mind. Before June
- 1:30Speaker 1: of twenty seventeen, Angela Rafferty's life had a specific texture
- 1:35Speaker 1: that people who knew her could describe without hesitation. She
- 1:38Speaker 1: coordinated billing for a pediatric dental group, a job that
- 1:42Speaker 1: required precision and patience in roughly equal measure. She played
- 1:47Speaker 1: recreational soccer on a league that met Thursday evenings, and
- 1:51Speaker 1: kept a standing Wednesday dinner with her aunt, Donna Rafferty,
- 1:54Speaker 1: at a Vietnamese restaurant on Clement Avenue. She had a
- 1:58Speaker 1: tight group of friends, including pre Dya Desai, who worked
- 2:01Speaker 1: in consumer credit and had known Angela since college. Two
- 2:05Speaker 1: years earlier, Angela had ended a relationship, she was not
- 2:08Speaker 1: looking urgently for another one. She had, according to people
- 2:12Speaker 1: who saw her regularly, the specific confidence of someone comfortable
- 2:16Speaker 1: with her own company. Then she injured her knee. The
- 2:20Speaker 1: injury sidelined her from soccer and pushed her toward physical
- 2:23Speaker 1: therapy and eventually toward a gym membership. In June of
- 2:27Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, she signed up for twelve sessions at Peak
- 2:31Speaker 1: Condition Fitness on Dalby Street in the Morefield district. Her
- 2:35Speaker 1: assigned trainer was a thirty four year old certified personal
- 2:39Speaker 1: trainer named Duane Keller. He had worked at the facility
- 2:43Speaker 1: for approximately two years. His client retention rate was notably
- 2:47Speaker 1: above the Jim's average. The first thing to understand about
- 2:51Speaker 1: Keller is that nothing he did in those early months
- 2:54Speaker 1: looked unusual. He remembered that Angela disliked eucalyptus scented product
- 3:00Speaker 1: and brought a different recovery balm without being asked. He
- 3:03Speaker 1: tracked her knee recovery carefully. He adjusted sessions when she
- 3:07Speaker 1: was fatigued without her having to request it. He paid
- 3:11Speaker 1: attention in ways that registered as care. By October of
- 3:15Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, they were in a relationship. People who
- 3:19Speaker 1: attended the Wednesday Dinners noticed a warmth in Angela that autumn.
- 3:23Speaker 1: Donna Rafferty, who had watched her niece navigate the previous
- 3:26Speaker 1: break up, described Angela as lighter. The word she used
- 3:30Speaker 1: later when recounting those months was lid up. That is
- 3:35Speaker 1: the word that stayed with Donna because the same quality
- 3:38Speaker 1: she called lid up in the fall of two thousand seventeen,
- 3:42Speaker 1: would fourteen months later look like something else entirely. In
- 3:47Speaker 1: January of two thousand eighteen, Angela moved into Keller's house
- 3:51Speaker 1: on Bellard Mill Road. The move happened quickly by most accounts,
- 3:55Speaker 1: but not unusually, so she was in love. The house
- 4:00Speaker 1: had a yard Keller cooked. By February of two thousand eighteen,
- 4:05Speaker 1: something had already shifted in ways so small they registered
- 4:08Speaker 1: only in retrospect. Angela arrived forty minutes late to the
- 4:12Speaker 1: Wednesday dinner on Clement Avenue. She explained it simply he
- 4:17Speaker 1: had needed her to stay. Donna noted the phrasing, she
- 4:21Speaker 1: did not yet know she was taking notes. By March,
- 4:25Speaker 1: Angela's individual bank account was closed. Her direct deposit salary
- 4:29Speaker 1: now routed into a joint account that Keller controlled. She
- 4:33Speaker 1: had a debit card with a spending limit of forty
- 4:35Speaker 1: dollars per day. Every single dollar she earned the full
- 4:39Speaker 1: salary of a billing coordinator at a dental group landed
- 4:43Speaker 1: in an account she could not access freely. Her friend
- 4:47Speaker 1: Priya Desai noticed by spring of that year that Angela
- 4:51Speaker 1: paid for everything in cash off an exact change, as
- 4:54Speaker 1: though calculating before she left the house. No one connected
- 4:58Speaker 1: these things yet they were just observations, each one ordinary
- 5:02Speaker 1: on its own. What no one outside that house could
- 5:05Speaker 1: see was that Angela was also being weighed. Literally. Keller
- 5:10Speaker 1: logged her body fat percentage with calipers, recorded her weekly
- 5:14Speaker 1: weigh ins, and tracked her caloric intake through a shared
- 5:18Speaker 1: app that updated in real time. By autumn of twenty eighteen,
- 5:22Speaker 1: she had lost twenty two pounds. She trained six days
- 5:26Speaker 1: a week. The app knew where she was. The structure
- 5:30Speaker 1: looked from outside like a dedicated athlete and her devoted coach.
- 5:35Speaker 1: That is not what it was, but the gap between
- 5:38Speaker 1: how it looked and what it was would take nearly
- 5:41Speaker 1: two more years, one sewer pipe, and one missing woman's
- 5:45Speaker 1: notebook to close. The forty dollars daily limit was not
- 5:48Speaker 1: a conversation. It was a structure, and structures, by design,
- 5:53Speaker 1: do not announce themselves. By the winter of twenty eighteen,
- 5:57Speaker 1: Angela Rafferty's world had contracted to the dimensions of a
- 6:01Speaker 1: house on Bellard Mill Road, a shared fitness app, and
- 6:06Speaker 1: a debit card that ran dry before noon. If she
- 6:08Speaker 1: bought coffee and lunch on the same day her salary arrived.
- 6:13Speaker 1: She never saw it. The money flowed into the joint account,
- 6:17Speaker 1: and from there Keller decided what it did. What made
- 6:20Speaker 1: this particular mechanism brutal was its invisibility. Angela was not
- 6:24Speaker 1: locked in a room. She drove to work, She answered
- 6:27Speaker 1: e mails. She showed up sometimes late to the Wednesday
- 6:31Speaker 1: dinners on Clement Avenue. But every small decision, every errand
- 6:36Speaker 1: every spontaneous purchase required a calculation. She could not always
- 6:40Speaker 1: complete forty dollars every day for a woman with a
- 6:45Speaker 1: full time salary. Priadisi. Angela's friend, who worked in consumer credit,
- 6:51Speaker 1: noticed the cash in spring of twenty eighteen exact change,
- 6:55Speaker 1: often as if Angela had counted it out before leaving home.
- 7:00Speaker 1: Rhea filed it somewhere in the back of her mind
- 7:02Speaker 1: and said nothing because there was no obvious thing to say.
- 7:05Speaker 1: Here is what was also happening simultaneously in that same house.
- 7:10Speaker 1: Angela's body was becoming a document. Keller logged her body
- 7:14Speaker 1: fat percentage with calipers. He recorded the measurements weekly. He
- 7:18Speaker 1: entered her caloric intake into an app. They both had
- 7:21Speaker 1: access to an app that updated in real time and
- 7:24Speaker 1: showed her location. Angela trained six days a week. By
- 7:28Speaker 1: autumn of twenty eighteen, she had lost twenty two pounds.
- 7:33Speaker 1: The numbers climbed and fell in that app like a
- 7:36Speaker 1: vital sign chart. Keller read them every day. This is
- 7:40Speaker 1: the image that kept recurring in later testimony. Not a
- 7:43Speaker 1: raised voice, not a visible threat. A man with calipers
- 7:47Speaker 1: and a spreadsheet, standing in a kitchen telling a woman
- 7:50Speaker 1: what her body weighed and what that number meant about her.
- 7:54Speaker 1: Donna Rafferty, Angela's aunt, started her notebook in November of
- 7:59Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. She did not call it a notebook. She
- 8:03Speaker 1: called it a list. She wrote down dates the restaurant,
- 8:07Speaker 1: the time Angela arrived, and the exact phrases Angela used
- 8:11Speaker 1: when she explained herself. Donna would later say she did
- 8:14Speaker 1: not know why she started writing, only that something in
- 8:18Speaker 1: the phrasing felt like it belonged to someone else. One
- 8:22Speaker 1: entry from that winter read simply, she said he needed
- 8:26Speaker 1: her to stay. She did not say I wanted to stay.
- 8:30Speaker 1: By twenty nineteen, something else was shifting inside the house.
- 8:34Speaker 1: Angela began writing in the margins of her training diary.
- 8:37Speaker 1: Keller's entries filled the main columns, a fat percentage, weighed
- 8:41Speaker 1: in pounds, caloric deficit, targets, session notes. What Angela wrote
- 8:47Speaker 1: occupied the white space around them, small pressed together handwriting.
- 8:51Speaker 1: Three phrases recovered from those margins would later be read
- 8:55Speaker 1: aloud in a Caulfield County court room. He took the
- 8:58Speaker 1: car again. Can't use the card. I think I am disappearing.
- 9:03Speaker 1: She needed to hide what she was writing, and she
- 9:07Speaker 1: found a place. The house on Bellard Mill Road had
- 9:10Speaker 1: a septic riser on the east side of the property,
- 9:13Speaker 1: an eight inch inspection tube capped at the surface used
- 9:17Speaker 1: by service technicians to access the system. Angela did not
- 9:21Speaker 1: know it was there. Every person in her life confirmed
- 9:25Speaker 1: she had never mentioned it. She found it by accident,
- 9:28Speaker 1: most likely during one of her outdoor training sessions, when
- 9:31Speaker 1: she stumbled on the cap in the grass. She put
- 9:34Speaker 1: the diary inside. Keller had been using that tube as
- 9:38Speaker 1: well for at least eighteen months before Angela found it.
- 9:41Speaker 1: He had stored a second training diary in the same riser.
- 9:45Speaker 1: That diary was not Angela's. It was written in the
- 9:48Speaker 1: same two hand format, clinical entries in one hand, marginal
- 9:53Speaker 1: writing in another. The name on the cover was not
- 9:57Speaker 1: Angela Rafferty. The initials were Cea. Carla Voss had been
- 10:01Speaker 1: reported missing from Teller County in August of twenty sixteen.
- 10:06Speaker 1: Teller County sat roughly ninety miles from Moorfield. Vas was
- 10:10Speaker 1: thirty one years old when she disappeared. She was never found.
- 10:15Speaker 1: Her diary inside Keller's riser predated Angela's by at least
- 10:20Speaker 1: eighteen months. The Tuesday in December of twenty nineteen arrived
- 10:25Speaker 1: cold and overcast. Susan Powell, lead technician with Clearwater Basin
- 10:30Speaker 1: Pumping and Service, had eleven years working Caulfield Valley. She
- 10:35Speaker 1: had serviced hundreds of risers. She pulled the cap on
- 10:39Speaker 1: the Ballard Mill Road unit at eight ten in the morning.
- 10:42Speaker 1: Two notebooks were inside. Powell later said she noticed immediately
- 10:47Speaker 1: that the second one was older, The cover was warped,
- 10:52Speaker 1: the pages at the top had moisture damage from condensation
- 10:56Speaker 1: against the tube wall. She set both aside, completed the
- 10:59Speaker 1: service check, and called her supervisor before leaving the property.
- 11:04Speaker 1: Angela was not home. Keller was at peak condition fitness
- 11:08Speaker 1: on Dowby Street, running the six thirty session. He ran
- 11:12Speaker 1: every Tuesday and Thursday. Four days later, on December fourth,
- 11:17Speaker 1: Angela left the house while Keller was at work. She
- 11:21Speaker 1: took her work laptop. She had took her work laptop,
- 11:25Speaker 1: a single overnight bag, and a collection of identity documents
- 11:29Speaker 1: she found in a shoe box in Keller's closet. Her
- 11:32Speaker 1: own passport, her own Social Security card, her own birth certificate.
- 11:37Speaker 1: They had been stored there without her knowledge. She drove
- 11:40Speaker 1: to Donna's house. She did not go back. The search
- 11:43Speaker 1: of the property came in February of twenty twenty. When
- 11:47Speaker 1: investigators recovered the two diaries from the riser. The forensic
- 11:51Speaker 1: picture shifted entirely. Keller's entries in Angela's diary ran for
- 11:56Speaker 1: almost three years. His handwriting was precise, clinical, hers ran
- 12:01Speaker 1: in the margins, like something trying to find room to exist.
- 12:05Speaker 1: And then there was Carla Voss's diary. Same structure, same
- 12:09Speaker 1: two hands, different woman, earlier dates. There is something here
- 12:14Speaker 1: that requires a pause. Keller had kept a record of
- 12:18Speaker 1: Carla Voss the same way he kept a record of
- 12:20Speaker 1: Angela Rafferty, the same calipers, the same format, the same
- 12:25Speaker 1: marginal handwriting from someone running out of space, and that
- 12:29Speaker 1: diary had been sitting in the ground, capped in a
- 12:32Speaker 1: tube on his own property for more than three years.
- 12:36Speaker 1: He had not destroyed it. What that means is something
- 12:39Speaker 1: the evidence cannot fully resolve. But what investigators found on
- 12:43Speaker 1: the diary's spine changed the shape of everything. A single
- 12:48Speaker 1: strand of hair adhered to the binding. DNA analysis matched
- 12:52Speaker 1: that hair to biological material recovered from a vehicle Keller
- 12:56Speaker 1: had owned in twenty fifteen, a vehicle he sold before
- 13:00Speaker 1: moving to Moorfield and before Angela Rafferty Ever walked into
- 13:04Speaker 1: peak condition fitness. Keller's attorney in pre trial filings described
- 13:08Speaker 1: the joint account as a mutual financial arrangement. He described
- 13:12Speaker 1: the training diary as Angela's own project. He said his
- 13:16Speaker 1: client had no knowledge of how the Voss Diary came
- 13:19Speaker 1: to be in the Riser. The jury heard all of it.
- 13:22Speaker 1: They deliberated for less than one day. Consider what the
- 13:26Speaker 1: riser contains if you look at it from the outside.
- 13:29Speaker 1: A caped inspection tube, an ordinary maintenance port on an
- 13:33Speaker 1: ordinary property. Keller knew where it was, he put something
- 13:37Speaker 1: inside it. For more than three years. The tube held
- 13:41Speaker 1: a record of a woman who vanished ninety miles away,
- 13:45Speaker 1: a woman whose disappearance was listed as an open missing
- 13:48Speaker 1: person's case in a neighboring county. He drove past that
- 13:52Speaker 1: tube every day. Walk the scenario where Keller stored the
- 13:56Speaker 1: Vos diary as a trophy deliberately. The way the DNA
- 13:59Speaker 1: evidenced and the two diary parallel structure suggest In that version,
- 14:04Speaker 1: the riser is not a hiding place born of panic.
- 14:07Speaker 1: It is a system. A man who controlled women through
- 14:10Speaker 1: documentation kept that documentation. He chose a location on his
- 14:15Speaker 1: own property because he believed it was inaccessible to anyone
- 14:19Speaker 1: but himself. The fact that he never destroyed it points
- 14:23Speaker 1: less toward carelessness and more toward a specific psychology. The
- 14:27Speaker 1: record had value to him. It was the proof that
- 14:30Speaker 1: what he had done had happened. The same logic that
- 14:33Speaker 1: made him log body fat percentages and caloric intake made
- 14:37Speaker 1: him preserve the evidence of it. But that version runs
- 14:41Speaker 1: into one fact it cannot explain cleanly. Angela found the
- 14:45Speaker 1: same riser. She was not supposed to know it existed,
- 14:49Speaker 1: and yet she stumbled on it and chose it as
- 14:51Speaker 1: the one place in that house where Keller could not
- 14:54Speaker 1: read what she wrote. She hid her record inside his
- 14:58Speaker 1: for months. Both documents tents sat in the same tube,
- 15:02Speaker 1: his version of Carla Voss and Angela's account of what
- 15:06Speaker 1: was being done to her. The narrative that Keller wanted,
- 15:09Speaker 1: the one he gave under partial confession, the one his
- 15:13Speaker 1: attorney filed, required both diaries to be invisible. One was
- 15:18Speaker 1: a missing woman's story, one was Angela running out of space.
- 15:22Speaker 1: In the margins, neither was supposed to surface. Susan Powell's
- 15:26Speaker 1: service call surfaced. Both the DNA strand on Vos's diary
- 15:32Speaker 1: did something specific to the timeline. Keller sold that vehicle
- 15:36Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, more than a year before Vas disappeared
- 15:40Speaker 1: and nearly two years before Angela joined the gym. The
- 15:44Speaker 1: hare predates everything. It places Keller in contact with the
- 15:47Speaker 1: VAS diary at a point when Carla Voss was not
- 15:50Speaker 1: yet a missing person. Teller County reopened the case and
- 15:54Speaker 1: filed additional charges. What those charges could not deliver, What
- 15:59Speaker 1: the physical, evera evidence still cannot answer, is where Carla
- 16:02Speaker 1: Voss is. That question remains open in the record and
- 16:07Speaker 1: in every filing sense. What the record does close is
- 16:10Speaker 1: the question of Angela Rafferty. She walked out on December
- 16:14Speaker 1: fourth of twenty nineteen with her own documents, documents that
- 16:19Speaker 1: had been removed from her possession and stored in a
- 16:21Speaker 1: shoe box in another person's closet. She left while Keller
- 16:25Speaker 1: was running the six thirty session. She did not tell
- 16:29Speaker 1: him she was going. She had planned it alone in
- 16:33Speaker 1: the margins of a diary she hid in a sewer
- 16:36Speaker 1: pipe she had been building toward a door. Keller was
- 16:40Speaker 1: arrested in March of twenty twenty. The charges were financial fraud,
- 16:45Speaker 1: coercive control, and identity theft, specifically two credit cards opened
- 16:51Speaker 1: in Angela's name without her knowledge or consent. He had
- 16:54Speaker 1: been running her credit while telling her she could not
- 16:57Speaker 1: spend more than forty dollars a day. At arraignment, his
- 17:01Speaker 1: attorney entered a partial confession structured to minimize Keller described
- 17:06Speaker 1: the joint account as a mutual decision. He described the
- 17:09Speaker 1: training diary as Angela's idea. He described his connection to
- 17:14Speaker 1: Carla Voss as non existent. The jury heard all three claims.
- 17:19Speaker 1: They also heard Joel Spence present the banking records, the
- 17:22Speaker 1: salary diversions, and the credit applications. They heard Linda White
- 17:27Speaker 1: testify about the four documented mechanisms of coercive control, financial isolation,
- 17:33Speaker 1: manufactured dependence on external body feedback triangulation, and three years
- 17:39Speaker 1: of systematically corrected personal judgment. The jury deliberated for less
- 17:44Speaker 1: than one day. In the autumn of twenty twenty one.
- 17:48Speaker 1: Dwayne Keller was convicted on every charge. Teller County's additional
- 17:53Speaker 1: charges filed after the DNA harelink placed him in contact
- 17:57Speaker 1: with Carla Voss's diary folded into the proceedings. The hare
- 18:02Speaker 1: had been on the spine of her diary. The vehicle
- 18:05Speaker 1: it matched had been sold in twenty fifteen. Carla vas
- 18:09Speaker 1: did not disappear until August of twenty sixteen. What that
- 18:14Speaker 1: sequence of dates means for what happened to her is
- 18:17Speaker 1: something the physical evidence raises and cannot answer. Carla Vos
- 18:21Speaker 1: has never been found. The record contains no specific sentence length.
- 18:27Speaker 1: What it contains is a conviction on every count and
- 18:30Speaker 1: a case file in Teller County that remains open. Because
- 18:33Speaker 1: a conviction for what was done to the living does
- 18:36Speaker 1: not close the question of where the missing went. There
- 18:40Speaker 1: is a specific kind of planning that happens in silence,
- 18:43Speaker 1: in the margins of a document someone else controls, in
- 18:46Speaker 1: a hiding place only you know about. Angela Rafferty spent
- 18:51Speaker 1: months in that silence. She wrote in a space so
- 18:55Speaker 1: small that investigators later needed magnification to read it clearly.
- 19:00Speaker 1: She noted the dates, She noted the phrases. She noted
- 19:03Speaker 1: when the car was taken, and when the card stopped working,
- 19:06Speaker 1: and when she first felt herself becoming someone she did
- 19:10Speaker 1: not recognize. She was not documenting for an investigation. She
- 19:14Speaker 1: was documenting to stay tethered to her own perception of
- 19:17Speaker 1: what was real. On December fourth of twenty nineteen, she
- 19:21Speaker 1: picked up her work laptop, her identity documents, and found
- 19:26Speaker 1: in a shoe box in his closet and a single
- 19:29Speaker 1: overnight bag. She walked out while Dwayne Keller was running
- 19:32Speaker 1: the six thirty session. She drove to Donna Rafferty's house
- 19:36Speaker 1: on Clement Avenue. She did not call ahead. Donna had
- 19:40Speaker 1: been writing things down too the Wednesday dinners, the exact phrases,
- 19:46Speaker 1: the forty minute delay in February of twenty eighteen, in
- 19:50Speaker 1: the words he needed me to stay. Two women in
- 19:53Speaker 1: two different places, keeping two separate records of the same disappearance,
- 19:58Speaker 1: one in a sewer pipe, one in spiral notebook on
- 20:01Speaker 1: a kitchen counter. Both records survived. Both were entered into evidence.
- 20:06Speaker 1: What this case surfaces is not complicated once you see
- 20:09Speaker 1: the full shape of it. Coorkive control dismantles a person's
- 20:13Speaker 1: ability to trust their own perception. It does not happen
- 20:17Speaker 1: in one event. It happens in the accumulation of small
- 20:20Speaker 1: corrections away in a limit on a card, a comment
- 20:23Speaker 1: about another woman, a remark that the door needs to
- 20:26Speaker 1: stay closed. Each one alone is nothing. Together, they replace
- 20:31Speaker 1: one version of reality with another. Angela Rafferty rebuilt the
- 20:36Speaker 1: original version, not all at once, in the margins, in
- 20:41Speaker 1: four inch increments of space along the edges of someone
- 20:45Speaker 1: else's document. Carla Voss does not have that ending her
- 20:49Speaker 1: diary surfaced. She did not, and the people who knew
- 20:52Speaker 1: her are still waiting for an answer that the record
- 20:55Speaker 1: has not delivered and may never delivered. What Angela carried
- 20:59Speaker 1: out of that house house on Bellard Mill Road, one nah,
- 21:03Speaker 1: in addition to a laptop and a bag and documents
- 21:06Speaker 1: that were hers to begin with, was the evidence that
- 21:09Speaker 1: she had known the entire time that something was wrong.
- 21:13Speaker 1: She had not lost herself completely. She had hidden herself
- 21:17Speaker 1: carefully in the one place she was certain he would
- 21:20Speaker 1: never look A locked riser on the side of a
- 21:23Speaker 1: septic tank eight inches wide, fourteen months sealed. She chose
- 21:28Speaker 1: it because he had told her to stay away from it.
- 21:31Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia.