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He Cut Her Face Out of Her Card - The Trainer Who Erased Her Identity · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At seven forty two in the morning on December ninth,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, a dog walker named Teresa Hollis stopped on
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: the ross Ford Trail inside Sycamore Flats State Park. Her
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: dog had found something in the brush beside the path.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Not a stick, not a dead bird, a woman's gym bag,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: neatly set down, as though someone had placed it there
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: on purpose. Inside the bag a water bottle, a resistance band,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: a pair of earbuds still in their case, a training
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: journal with entries through December fifth, and at the bottom
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: a laminated gym membership card. The card had been modified.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Where a woman's face should have been, there was a
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: clean rectangular window. Someone had cut it out with surgical precision.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: That card belonged to Carrol Snyder, forty eight years old,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a billing coordinator from East Farwell, Ohio, and Carol had
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: had not been seen in three days. What followed was
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: not a kidnapping. It was something slower and in some
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: ways harder to name. Over the course of nine months,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a man Carroll trusted had systematically dismantled her ability to
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: trust herself. By the time anyone noticed she was gone,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: she had already been disappearing for a long time. This
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: is the story of how that happened, and how the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: evidence left behind in a gym bag on a trail
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: told the whole story before Carol could tell it herself.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Carol Snyder had spent most of her adult life being competent.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: That was the word people used about her. Competent, reliable,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: the kind of person who called back the same day,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: who remembered birthdays, who showed up. She had worked as
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: a billing coordinator for more than a decade under her supervisor,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Dennis Falk, who later described her to investigators as one
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of the most organized people he had ever managed. Her
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: marriage to Martin Snyder had ended in two thousand fourteen
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: quietly and without drama, after years of growing apart. Their daughter,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Page was twenty two in December two thousand seventeen. By
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: all accounts, Carol had handled the transition the way she
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: handled most things, steadily, without complaint. She kept the bungalow
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: on the east side of Farwell. She kept her routines.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Every Wednesday, she drove to grist Ohio to visit her
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: older sister, Barbara Kimball. That drive took about forty minutes
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: each way. Carol made it without exception for years. In
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: early twenty seventeen, Carroll's doctor recommended she begin an exercise program.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Her cholesterol numbers had climbed, her energy had dropped. The
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: referral was practical, not alarming. In March twenty seventeen, Carrol
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: joined Pinnacle Fitness in Farwell and was assigned to a
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: personal trainer named Wade Osborne. Wade was the thirty four
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: years old He had been certified since twenty eleven. He
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: was articulate, attentive, and, according to later testimony, immediately compelling
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: in the way that certain people are, the kind of
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: compelling that feels like being taken seriously. The first session,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: by multiple accounts, established a tone that would define everything
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: that followed. Wade told Carol that her instincts about her
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: own body were almost entirely wrong. He said it as
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: though it were a kindness. He said it the way
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: someone says a thing when they expect you to be
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: grateful for the correction. Carol started at three sessions per week.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: She found the structure useful. She liked having a plan.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Within six weeks, the texts had become more frequent. Wade
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: was checking in daily. He was asking about her sleep,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: her stress levels, her meals. The messages were warm, specific, personal,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: in a way that felt at the time like professional
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: ad intentiveness. Later, Judith Weaver, the therapist who began working with
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Carrol in January twenty eighteen and who testified on coercive control,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: would describe this phase in clinical terms. The word she
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: used was love bombing. The effect was simpler. Carol began
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: to feel, perhaps for the first time in a long while,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: that someone was paying very close attention to her. That
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: attention was from the beginning a mechanism. By June twenty seventeen,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Carol had increased her sessions to five times per week.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: She was reorganizing her schedule around her training. She was
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: buying supplements weighed recommended through what appeared to be an
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: outside nutrition consultancy no though financial records would later show
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: that consultancy operated under an alternate business name registered to
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Wade himself. Over the following months, those payments would total
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: approximately six thousand dollars above standard training fees. What mattered
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: then was not the money. What mattered was that Carroll filled,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: for the first time in years, like she was being rebuilt.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: What she did not yet know was that rebuilding her
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: was not the gold. Dismantling her was. The journal was
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: the first thing that should not have been possible. Carrol
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Snyder kept it faithfully. Session notes, energy levels, mood ratings
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: scored on a scale of one to ten. She had
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: started it on Wade's instruction in March twenty seventeen, the
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: same week she joined Pinnacle Fitness. By July, she was
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: filling it in after every session, sometimes twice in one day.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: It was she believed evidence of her own progress, a
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: record she controlled. But in July, red ink began appearing
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: between her entries. Not corrections, not encouragement, andanations, phrases like
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: perception versus data. Check. The numbers written in Wade's hand
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: alongside entries where Carol had rated herself a seven or
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: an eight. The message, rendered in ball point and repeated
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: across weeks, was consistent, your sense of yourself is not reliable.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: The numbers know better. I know better. Carrol adjusted her
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: ratings downward. That is the first image to hold a
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: woman revising her own self assessments because a man with
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: a red pen told her the originals were wrong. It
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: seems at first like a training quirk. It will not
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: seem like a quirk. Later, by September two thousand seventeen,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: two other things had quietly changed. Carroll's Wednesday visits to
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: her older sister, Barbara Kimball in grist Ohio had grown irregular.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: By early October they had stopped entirely. Barbara would later
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: describe the explanations Carroll gave scheduling conflicts, fatigue, the demands
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: of the training regiment as almost plausible. That word almost
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: carried weight. Barbara knew her sister something in the phrasing
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: felt borrowed, like Carol was reciting rather than explaining. The
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: second change was financial. Records would later document approximately six
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars paid over several months to what appeared to
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: be an outside nutrition consultancy. The consultancy operated under an
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: alternate business name. That name on paper was not Wade Osborne,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: but the account it fed was two loops, then opening
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: at once. A woman losing her Wednesdays, a woman losing
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: money she did not know she was losing, neither visible
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: to the other, both deliberate. Paige Snyder drove to her
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: mother's bungalow in East Farwell on December second, two thousand seventeen,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: without calling ahead. She had not been able to reach
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Carol for several days. The calls had gone to voicemail,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: the texts had gone unread. She used her key. The
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: living room was intact, the kitchen was intact. But on
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: the wall where Carroll kept framed photographs, her daughter, her
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: sister Barbara, a picture from a trip years before, there
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: were only nail holes. The frames were gone, not fallen,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: not rearranged, gone as though they had been lifted one
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: by one and carried out. The wall was bare in
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: precisely the places where Carroll's life had been displayed. Page
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: called her mother again, no answer. That same week, Carroll
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: made what would be her last authorized appearance at Pinnacle
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Fitness December fifth, twenty seventeen. She arrived for a training session.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: At some point during that visit, she left the gym
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: floor and went to the locker room. The session was
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: with Wade. While she was in the locker room, Wade
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: opened her training journal. This detail would not become clear
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: until years later, after a second court appeal had been denied,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and Wade finally gave a recorded statement to a journalist.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: He confirmed it himself on December fifth, while Carol was changing.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: He located her journal in her bag and scratched out
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the final week of mood ratings she had written. The originals,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: recovered later under magnification ranged from six to eight. The
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: replacements all read two or three. She came back from
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the locker room, she picked up her journal. She did
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: not notice. December sixth was her last check in at Pinnacle.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: After that nothing, Her supervisor, Dennis Falk, noted the absence.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Her phone went quiet, and three days later, on December ninth,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: at seven forty two in the morning, a dog walker
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: named Teresa Hollis was moving along the ross Ford Trail
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: in Sycamore Flat State Park when her dog veered off
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the path and found something not a stick, not debris,
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: a woman's gym bag left on the ground near the
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: trail's edge, inside a water bottle, a resistance band, an
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: earbud case, a training journal with scratched out entry, and
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: at the bottom, a laminated Pinnacle Fitness membership card Carrol
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Snyder's card with a clean rectangular window cut from the center.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: The window was exactly the size of a face hers
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Farwell p D opened A welfare channel officer Dennis Vargo
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: took the report. The bag was Carrol's, the card was Carrol's.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Carrol was not there. There was a fact the investigation
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: turned on that almost no one noticed at first. Wade
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Osborne had resigned from Pinnacle Fitness effective November thirtieth, twenty seventeen.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: That resignation was on record. What was not widely checked
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: in those initial days was his access history. When Pinnacle's
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: security logs were pulled, they showed something that should have
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: been impossible. After his resignation date. Wade had entered the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: building not once, at least three documented visits after hours
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: use a key card. The card was from two thousand thirteen,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: the first time he had worked at Pinnacle. When he
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: left that year, the card had never been deactivated. It
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: had been overlooked a small administrative failure, an accident that
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: did not stay accidental. Those after hours entries gave him
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: access to staff files, to the locker room, to Carrol's locker.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: The gym bag had not been abandoned on the ross
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Ford Trail. It had been placed there on December fourteenth,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: three days after Carrol was found at a motel outside Farwell, disoriented,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: physically depleted, having been missing for days a connection emerged
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: that reframed everything. Judith Weaver, who had begun working with
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Carrol after she was found, made contact with a woman
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: named Sandra Petrie. Sandra had encountered a personal trainer between
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen and two thousand fifteen. She knew him
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: as w Allen. She had never filed a formal complaint,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: but the pattern she described, the daily texts, the journal,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: the financial requests, the isolation from family was not similar
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: to what Carol had experienced. It was identical. Sandra Petrie
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: was not a dead end. She was the case picture.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: What that means structural. Wade had done this before. He
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: had a name he used and a name he discarded.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: He had a method refined across at least two targets,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: the love bombing, the red ink, the supplements, the framing
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: of outside relationships as threats. None of it was improvised,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: it was practiced. But here is the thing that collapses.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: The simpler version of events, the version where Wade's method
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: is about financial gain, where the six thousand dollars is
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: the point that version cannot account for the membership card
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: six thousand dollars has a logic cutting a woman's face
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: out of her own photograph and placing it in her
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: bag after she has already lost her sense of her
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: life does not follow from financial motive. It follows from
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: something else. Wade eventually said what that something else was.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: In his recorded statement years after conviction, he used words
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: that were specific and deliberate. He said he had wanted
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Carol to understand that she did not have a face
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: without him, not that she owed him money, not that
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: she had violated a contract, That she did not have
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: a face without him. The journal annotations in red, the
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: framed photographs removed from her walls, the mood ratings scratched
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: down to two and three. Read backward from that sentence,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: they are not a sequence of manipulations. They are a
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: single argument, assembled piece by piece, delivered to one person
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: over nine months. The membership card was not the cruelest moment.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: It was the conclusion the argument had been delivered. Now
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: came the accounting. Wade Osborne was arrested on December twenty second,
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: twosy seventeen. The charges were theft by deception, stalking, and
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: unlawful entry. The access log from Pinnacle Fitness showed at
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: least three after hours entries using the twenty thirteen card
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: that the gym had simply failed to deactivate the Altar
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Journal was entered into evidence. The financial records documenting approximately
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: six thousand dollars in payments to Wade's alternate business name
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: were entered into evidence. The face cut membership card recovered
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: from the gym bag Teresa Hollis found on the Rossford
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Trail on December ninth, was entered into evidence. The trial
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: was held in October two thousand eighteen. Wade Osborne was
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: convicted on all counts. The sentence was four to seven years.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: He filed two appeals. The first was denied. The second
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: was denied in twenty twenty two. Six weeks after that
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: second denial, Wade gave a recording statement to a journalist.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: He was no longer fighting his conviction. He had nothing
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: left to leverage, and so, apparently for the first time,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: he told the truth in full. He confirmed that he
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: had removed the framed photographs from Carol's bungalow himself during
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: after hours visits she did not know were happening. He
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: confirmed that on December fifth, while Carol was in the
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: locker room after their final authorized session, he had scratched
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: out her mood ratings in the journal and written lower
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: numbers in their place. The originals, still faintly visible under magnification,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: had ranged from six to eight. He had replaced them
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: with two and three. He confirmed that he had prepared
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: the membership card, cut her face cleanly from the laminet,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: and placed it in her gym bag during one of
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: those same after hour's locker visits. Then he said why.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: He said he had wanted Carol to understand that she
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: did not have a face without him. Judith Weaver, the
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: therapist who began working with Carrol in January twenty eighteen,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: testified at trial on coercive control. She described the systematic
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: removal of external reference points the sister, the daughter, the
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: mirror on the wall, the mood rating written in Carol's
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: own hand, as a documented psychological method. The goal is
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: not physical control. The goal is epistemological. You make a
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: person unable to trust their own perception. Once that is accomplished,
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the only remaining reference point is the one you provide.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Sandra Petrie testified as well. She had known Wade as
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: w Allen between two thousand fourteen and two thousand fifteen.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: She had not filed a formal complaint at the time,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: but she described the same sequence, the daily contact, the journal,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: the financial requests, the framing of outside relationships as dangerous.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Her testimony did not introduce a new case. It confirmed
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: that Wade's method had been tested, refined, and deployed more
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: than once. Carroll was not the beginning. Carrol Snyder was
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: found on December eleventh, two thousand seventeen, at a motel
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: outside Farewell. She was disoriented and physically depleted. She had
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: been missing for five days. By spring of two thousand eighteen,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: she had resumed her Wednesday visits to her older sister
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Barbara in grist Ohio. Those visits had stopped in early
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: October two thousand seventeen, when Wade had framed the relationship
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: as a threat. They started again quietly without announcement, on
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: a Wednesday in March. That detail appears in the record
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: with no elaboration. It does not need one. Carrol has
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: not returned to personal training. There is something in this
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: case that resists the frame of a straightforward crime. The
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: charges that sent Wade Osborne to prison, theft by deception, stalking,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: unlawful entry, are accurate. They are also incomplete. What the
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: charges describe is what investigators could attach a statue to.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: What they cannot fully name is the nine months during
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: which one person systematically dismantled another person's ability to perceive
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: herself accurately. The law has words for the intrusions it
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: struggles with the architecture. Judith Weaver's testimony gave the architecture
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: a name, coercive control. The concept holds that the most
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: damaging harm in cases like this is not any single act.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: It is the cumulative effect of many small acts, each
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: of which might seem ambiguous in isolation, designed together to
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: collapse the target's internal compass. The journal annotations were not insults.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: They were evidence, framed as objective data that Carol's own
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: experience of herself was wrong. The photographs remove moved from
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: the walls were not theft. They were the removal of
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: every surface that reflected Carroll back to herself. The membership
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: card was not vandalism. It was a thesis. Wade said
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: so himself. He had wanted her to understand that she
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: did not have a face without him. The recorded confession,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: delivered only after the second appeal failed, is described in
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: subsequent reporting as apparently withheld as leverage, which means that
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: for five years after his conviction, Wade Osborne held the
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: complete truth of what he had done and chose strategically
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: when to release it. That choice is its own data point.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: The control did not end with the arrest. Carrol Snyder
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: was forty eight years old when she joined Pinnacle Fitness
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: on a doctor's referral. She was a billing coordinator in
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a town in Ohio. She had a daughter, a sister.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: She visited every Wednesday, photographs on the wall of her bungalow.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: She was not a person without bearings. She was a
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: person a method was applied to She got her Wednesdays back.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: That is not a small thing. It is in the record,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: the last fact about Carol, and it is the one
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: that endures. This show is made by Obal Media.