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He Married My Identity: How a Stranger Stole Wade Moore's Life · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Before dawn on January fourteenth, twenty nineteen, Rachel Chambers was
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: running a snow plow east on Route nine through Delmore Township,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Fennick County, Illinois. The temperature was seventeen degrees. Her head
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: lights caught something at mile marker fourteen that stopped her cold.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: A filing cabinet, two drawers, institutional gray steel, sitting upright
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: on the shoulder of the road, not tipped, not scattered,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: upright level, as though someone had set it there carefully.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: The snow around it was undisturbed on all sides. Rachel
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: climbed down from the cab and pulled the drawers open.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Inside were documents originals, not copies. A loan application, refinancing paperwork,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: credit card applications, a male redirect confirmation, a deed modification,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: each one organized in hanging folders with typed labels arranged
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: in chronological order. Every document bore the same name, Wade
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: More Wadde More. Had no idea any of these documents existed.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Wade Moore was forty six years old in January of
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. He had lived in Prior, Illinois his
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: entire adult life. He had worked as a structural estimator
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: at Kettner Voss Construction for fourteen years. Not a flashy job,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: not a headline making career, but a steady one built
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: on precision and reliability, the kind of work where a
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: miscalculation cost some one a building. His personal finances reflected
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the same discipline. His credit score had stayed above seven
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: hundred fifty for a full decade. No criminal record, no
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: debt spirals, divorced, no children, no particular drama. Every Tuesday morning,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Wade walked into Pepper's Diner on Millvale Street in Prior
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: and sat at the same table. The seat had cracked
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: vinyl along the left edge. Greta Novak, who had been
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: waiting tables at Pepper's for nine years, had his order
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: moving before he sat down. Sausage, gravy, biscuits, coffee black.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: He never finished the gravy. Greta never asked why that
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: was the routine.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Wade More was not the kind of man things happened
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: to him. He was the kind of man who showed up,
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: did the work, and went home. That changed in February
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: of twenty seventeen, when a man named ross Berry walked
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: through the front door of Ketner Voss ross was forty one,
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: brought in as an IT consultant on a ninety day
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: contract to manage a system's migration compact. Neatly dressed, investigators
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: who later interviewed his colleagues described him as socially fluent,
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: someone who could calibrate his warmth to match whoever was
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: in the room. He identified wade More within two weeks
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: of arriving. What happened next took almost two years to
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: fully unravel, and when it did, the total documented loss
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: to wade More came to one hundred twenty three thousand dollars.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: The question that would occupy investigators, a financial fraud specialist,
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: and a forensic document examiner was not just how ross
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Berry did it. The question was how long he had
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: been doing it and to whom else. The ninety day
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: contract ended, ross.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Berry did not leave. By April of two thousand seventeen,
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: he had made himself useful dinners small repairs around the
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: house on Aldrich Lane, a presence that felt, by most accounts,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: like companionship. By June, he was effectively living there. He
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: still kept an apartment in Fenwick, he just wasn't paying
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: for it. A woman named Diane Pruitt, who believed Ross
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: was her long distance boyfriend, had been covering that rent
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: since two thousand fifteen. Wade did not know oh Diane
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Pruitt existed. On September fifth, twenty seventeen, someone filed a
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: United States Postal Service change of address form. The name
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: on the form was Wade More. The hand that filled
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: it out was not Mail from Aldrich. Lane was re
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: routed to a PO box in Fenwick, a box Wade
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: had never opened because he had never rented it. The
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: right direct ran for approximately four months before anyone noticed.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Wade was not among those who noticed. The statements that
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: would have told him what was happening were no longer
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: reaching his door. In October of twenty seventeen, a loan
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: application was submitted to First Fenix Savings forty two thousand
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: dollars in Wade's name, signed by Wade More. Terry Oakes,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: a forensic document examiner who would later testify its sentencing,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: concluded the signature was not Wade's. The loan was approved,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: the funds went to an account Wade did not control
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: the loan. Eventually he defaulted. Wade never made a single payment.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: He did not know the loan existed. That is the
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: image that stays a man signing documents. He never touched
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: for money. He never saw on a debt he would
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: spend years trying to explain. By November, Ross proposed By
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: December they had applied for a marriage license. On January third,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, a civil ceremony took place at the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: county Clerk's office. Two witnesses signed, Tim Vega and Sandra Mole,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: both acquaintances of Ross. Paula Ingram, Wade's sister was not invited.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: She did not find out until later. Within sixty days
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: of the marriage, Ross added his name to the deed
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: on Aldrich Lane as co owner. The summer of two
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: thousand eighteen moved quickly. Ross refinanced the house, pulling sixty
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars in equity. He liquidated Wade's mutual fund.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: By October, three credit cards had been opened in Wade's name,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: All three were maxed, all three were in collections. The total,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: when it was eventually tallied, came to one hundred twenty
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: three thousand dollars. In November of twenty eighteen, Ross left
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: no argument on record, no announced departure. He was simply gone.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Wade waited three weeks before calling Paula. Paula drove from
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Decatur the same day. There is something specific about the
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: week that followed Paula's arrival, not because the evidence came fast,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: but because of how Wade had to reconstruct the damage.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Every call to a creditor confirmed another account he hadn't opened.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Every credit report line was alone. He hadn't signed for
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: a card, he hadn't requested. The mail redirect explained why
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: none of the statements had ever reached him. He had
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: been blind for more than a year, not because he
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: wasn't paying attention, but because the information had been surgically
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: removed from his path. Deborah Sawyer, a financial fraud investigator
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and therapist contracted by the Fennick County State's Attorney's Office,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: entered the case four days after the filing cabinet was found.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Her role at sentencing was to document what she called
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: coercive financial tactics, not random theft, but a systematic dismantling
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: of someone's financial identity while maintaining their trust. She testified
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: that the pattern was consistent with premeditated long form fraud.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Identify the target, build access intercept information, execute exit, the
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: intercept phase, the mail redirect, the po box, the months
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: of re routed statements was what gave investigators the clearest
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: picture of intent. This was not opportunistic. Someone had to
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: plan it before the first document was signed. Then Rachel
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Chambers found the cabinet January fourteenth, two thousand nineteen, before dawn,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: seventeen degrees Route nine, Delmore Township, Fenick County. Chambers was
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: operating a snowplow and her headlights caught something at mile
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: marker fourteen, a two drawer institutional gray steel filing cabinet
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: standing upright level in the snow beside the highway. She stopped.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: The snow around the cabinet was undisturbed, no skid marks,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: no broken branches at tumbling height, no tire tracks on
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: the highway side, no footprints. The cabinet had not been
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: thrown from a vehicle. It had been placed inside. The
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: originals loan application refinancing documents, credit card applications, the mail redirect, conformation,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: the deed modification, every document organized by date in hanging
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: folders with typed labels. Ross Berry had kept them all.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Investigators spent considerable time on that fact a man who
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: had executed a fraud. This methodical had retained physical originals
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: of every incriminating document, organized, labeled, stored. The working theory
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: was leverage or insurance, evidence he could use, perhaps to negotiate,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: perhaps to control. The reason he moved it in January
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen was never fully explained before the confession,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: but the fact that he moved it at all told
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: investigators something important, Something had changed for Rossberry, and whatever
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: it was, it scared him enough to carry a filing
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: cabinet to the side of Route nine in seventeen degree cold.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: There was one more detail that Chambers noticed at the scene.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: The snow on the west side of the cabinet. The
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: logging road side away from the highway was packed on
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: the highway side it was undisturbed. Whoever placed the cabinet
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: had come from the trees, not from the road. Investigators
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: had two versions how this ended, and for a time
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: only one of them made sense. Picture ross Berry in
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: the weeks after he left Aldrich Lane. He has the documents.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: He has had them the entire time. Every forged signature,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: every redirected statement, every loan application in another man's name.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: He is in theory the only person who knows where
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: they are. If no one finds the cabinet, no one
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: finds the originals, and without the originals, the case is
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: harder to build. That version of events. Ross disposing of
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: the documents to eliminate the most direct physical evidence was
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the logical read it fit the behavior of someone covering tracks,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: It fit the timing, it fit the location a rural
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: stretch of highway in a county. He knew walk in
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: from the logging road, leave the cabinet, drive away, let
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: the snow do the rest. But that version collapses the
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: moment you look at what was inside the The documents
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: were not destroyed. They were organized typed labels, hanging folders,
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: chronological order. If Rossberry wanted to eliminate evidence, he had
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: years to do it. He had a storage unit in Fenwick.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Investigators found additional documents there after a first warrant. He
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: had access to shredders fire water. A man who forges
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: loan signatures and intercepts mail for four months is not
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: squeamish about destroying paper. He kept them, and then, under
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: circumstances that remained unexplained, he moved them to the side
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: of a Highway at seventeen degrees and left them standing
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: upright in the snow. The strongest reading, the one Deborah
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Sawyer's testimony pointed toward, and the one the confession ultimately
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: did not contradict, is that the cabinet was leverage. Ross
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: intended to retrieve, not disposal, temporary placement. The documents were
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: insurance proof of what had been done, held by the
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: person who did it, available if he needed to negotiate
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: or threat. The typed labels were not the work of
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: someone panicking. They were the work of someone who expected
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: to need to find a specific folder quickly. What disrupted
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: that plan was Rachel Chambers and her headlights at mile
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: marker fourteen before dawn. The first warrant gave investigators Ross's
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: phone records and access to his Fenwick storage unit, useful
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: but not sufficient. The forged signature was contested, the financial
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: trail was complex. Ross had not touched the fraudulent accounts
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: in any traceable way since leaving Aldrich Lane. Then a
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: second warrant reached Tim Vega's address. Investigators believed Vega had
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: little knowledge of what the laptop contained. What it contained
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: was a scanned PDF archive of every document in the
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: filing cabinet, organized identically, time stamped, carrying metadata with ross
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Berry's name attached. The digital mirror of the physical cabinet
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: a back up of the insurance. On a Wednesday morning
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: in April of twenty nineteen, investigators presented the laptop evidence.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: Before noon. Rossberry confessed he had kept two copies, one
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: in the snow, one on a hard drive. The man
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: who spent two years dismantling Wade Moore's financial reality had
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: documented every step of it twice and called it caution.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Ross Berry was sentenced to nine years. The number landed
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: in the court room after two witnesses, Terry Oakes, who
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: had reconstructed Wade's handwriting from a decade of records to
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: prove the lone signature was not his, and Deborah Sawyer,
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: who spent nearly two full days on the stand walking
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: the jury through each phase of the manipulation as a
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: clinical architecture, not an accident. The sentencing hearing contested the
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: degree and duration of premeditation. Both witnesses held twelve counts,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: all stemming from schemes targeting Wade Moore. Nine years, one
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: hundred twenty three thousand, dollars in documented financial loss. That
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: figure is what the records could prove. The Aldrich Lane
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: house gone, the mutual fund liquidated, three credit cards opened
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: without Wade's knowledge, maxed and in collections before he knew
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: they existed. The forty two thousand dollar loan in his
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: name alone, he never applied for, never signed for, never
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: made a single payment on, because he did not know
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: it was there until the damage was already permanent. The
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: sentencing did not restore any of it. Roughly three weeks
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: after the arrest, a woman named Cora Hendrix contacted the
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Fenwick County State's Attorney's office. She was calling from Bowling Green, Kentucky.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Investigators showed her a photograph of Rossberry. She identified him.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: She described a relationship from two thousand thirteen, based in
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Louisville that matched the pattern in method and sequence, the
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: rapid intimacy, the financial access, the unauthorized credit inquiry she
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: had noticed too late. She had filed no report in
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: two thy thirteen. Her statement was forwarded to Kentucky authorities.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Whether charges followed from that referral is not part of
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the public record. What her call confirmed is that Wade
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: More was not the Beginning in May of twenty nineteen,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Wade Moore sold the house on Aldrich Lane. He moved
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: to a rental in Prior, closer to his sister Paula.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: He went back to work at Kettner Voss, same title,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: same desk, Fourteen years of institutional knowledge still intact inside him,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: even when everything around it had been stripped away. His
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: credit score, built steadily over a decade, would take years
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: to recover. The financial loss is not something that gets
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: corrected by a conviction. A court finding someone guilty does
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: not write a check. What the case did give Wade
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: was a name for what had happened to him. Deborah
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Sawyer's testimony, the part that did not make the financial
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: exhibit Binders, was about something harder to quantify. She described
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: how coercive control operates by replacing a person's sense of
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: reality with a version constructed by someone else, gradually, incrementally
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: through small decisions that individually seem reasonable and collectively amount
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: to a complete erasure of autonomy. Wade had not lost
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: his judgment. His judgment had been systematically undermined by someone
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: who had spent weeks studying how it worked before attempting
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: to redirect it. That distinction matters. It matters for Wade specifically,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: and it matters for how cases like this are prosecuted.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Rossberry had operated with the filing cabinet as his ledger
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: and a hard drive as his back up. He had
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: maintained a second relationship in Fenwick for years, with Diane
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Pruitt paying his rent while he moved through the rooms
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: of ways Maid's house. He had filed a mail redirect
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: with the United States Postal Service under Wade's name and
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: intercepted four months of correspondence before anyone noticed. He had
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: forged a signature on a loan application so precisely that
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: it required a forensic document examiner to distinguish it from
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the genuine article. None of it was improvised, none of
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: it was opportunistic in the casual sense. Every document in
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: that filing cabinet was dated, Every folder was labeled. The
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: archive on the laptop was time stamped and organized to match.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Ross Berry was not someone who lost control and caused damage.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: He was someone who planned the damage, recorded it, and
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: filed it alphabetically. On Tuesdays, Wade Moore still goes to
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Pepper's Diner on Milvale Street, same table same cracked vinyl seat.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Gretenovak still has the order in before he sits, he
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: still doesn't finish the sausage gravy. That detail is not
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: offered as comfort. A man rebuilt a routine around a
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: diner counter because the other anchors in his life had
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: been methodically removed. The routine was there before Rossberry arrived,
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: and it was still there after. That is what survived.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: The question this case leaves in the record is not
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: whether ross Berry was guilty. He confessed, he is serving
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: his sentence. The question is how a person spends two
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: years inside someone's daily life, inside their house, their mailbox,
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: their credit history, their signature, and the person whose life
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: it is does not know until a filing cabinet turns
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: up on the side of a highway in January. The
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: answer involves trust. It involves the specific kind of trust
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: that forms between people who eat at the same table,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: who walk the same hallways, who choose the same person
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: as their emergency contact. It involves the fact that the
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: most effective way to take someone's reality apart is to
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: first make them believe eve you are part of it.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: Wide Moore believed that he was wrong about one thing
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: and everything else followed from it. This show is made
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media.