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He Stole Her Name: The Book Left In The Flooded Ditch · Dark Psychology Manipulation

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of March twelve, twenty nineteen, a runner
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: named Warren Bailey stopped at a drainage ditch on the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: eastern edge of Clover Falls, Ohio. The ditch had been
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: flooded for two days. The book sitting in it was
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: completely dry. That book had no business being there, its
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: spine faced up, hardcover intact, not a page whooked. The
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: ditch around it was muddy and wet. The book was not.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Bailey called the non emergency line. He described it as
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: a normal looking novel. He did not know it was evidence.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: He did not know someone had placed it there, believing
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: a flood would erase it forever. Someone had miscalculated the
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: drainage direction. That single miscalculation would unravel seven months of careful,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: methodical work, work that had been designed to steal a
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: woman's voice, her story, and her name and leave no trace.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: There are cases that are about what happened to a body.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: This is about what happened to a life. And there
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: is something in this case, something about the precision of it,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: the patience of it, that.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: Resists easy description. It stays with you after you set
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: it down.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: By the end of this episode, you will understand exactly
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: how one person spent seven months dismantling another person's reality.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: You will understand the invented editor, the two hundred thirty
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: seven edits, and the acknowledgments page that gave everything away.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: And you will understand what a twelve year old cat
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: with a strict medication schedule had to do with all
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: of it. Denise Boyd was thirty two years old and
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: living in clover Falls, a small city in central Alion
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: that most people pass through without stopping. She worked remotely
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: as a copy editor for a publisher based in Columbus.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: She was precise with language. She noticed when words were misused,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: She noticed when something was missing. She also wrote. For
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: four years, she had been working on a memoir about
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: growing up in clover Falls, about her mother, Helen, about
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: leaving and returning, about leaving and returning, about what it
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: means to choose a place when no one expects you to.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: The acknowledgments she drafted thanked Helen, and, in her own words,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the friends who made coming home feel like a choice.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: The memoir was personal in the way that only true
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: things are. She shared an apartment with a twelve year
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: old cat named Pepper, who had hyperthyroidism and required compounded
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: medication twice a day, seven in the morning, seven in
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: the evening. According to her veterinarian doctor Sandra Novatni, Denise
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: had not missed a single dose in the two years
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: prior until the night of March sixth, when Pepper missed
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: her evening dose for the first time. That level of
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: consistency is not accidental. It is the kind of discipline
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: that defines a person's baseline. In January of twenty eighteen,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Denise began querying literary agents. She sent forty one query
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: letters over six months, forty one rejections. Anyone who has
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: tried to publish a book understands what that process does
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: to a person. You begin to wonder whether the work
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: is the problem or whether you are. Denise kept writing.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: In July of twenty eighteen, a letter arrived from Keith Perry.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Perry was forty four years old and ran Lindngate Representation,
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: a literary agency based in Columbus. His letter was specific.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: It quoted passages from the pages she had submitted. It
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: said the voice was unlike anything he had read that year.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: It offered representation.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: She drove to Columbus and met him in person, and
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Perry was warm, attentive. He listened to the way that
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: people do when they have already decided they want something
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: from you.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: In a statement she gave after.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: The case concluded, Denise described that warmth as the kind
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: that has been calibrated, but she did not feel that
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: at the time. At the time, after forty one rejections,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: it felt like recognition. Harry called twice a week after
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: signing her. He emailed articles about the publishing market, about
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: memoir as a forum about her specific project.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: He told colleagues she was his most excited climate.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Between July of twenty eighteen and February of twenty nineteen,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: he built something that looked exactly like a professional relationship.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: In October of twenty eighteen, he asked for the full
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: manuscript for annotation. She sent it. What happened next would
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: not become clear for another five months. But the calendar
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: matters here because the Thursday evenings that followed quiet, unremarkable.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: While Denise was worked in clover Falls were not quiet
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: at all. The Thursday evenings mattered not because anything visible happened.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: In clover Falls.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Denise was at her desk editing someone else's words unaware,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: but because Perry was in Columbus and Perry was busy.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Building records later showed that in late January of twenty nineteen,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Perry had a conversation with Doug Cassidy, the property manager
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: for the building where Lynden Gate kept its offices. The
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: subject the rear's stairwell lock. Cassidy confirmed the conversation he
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: thought nothing of it at the time. The building's rear
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: stair camera had gaps, not equipment failures. The control panel
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: was accessible from Perry's suite. Investigators determined those gaps were
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: manually triggered, always on Thursday evenings. During those Thursday windows,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Perry accessed Lindingate's ISBN account and registered a book the
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: author name Claire Ashton, the title denisus two hundred thirty
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: seven edits that is the number that stops a person
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: cold two hundred thirty seven individual changes.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Made to a manuscript that was not his.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Perry stripped the place names, he changed the mother's name.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: He erased every reference to clover Falls.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: He was not editing.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: He was erasing a person from her own story, replacing
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: her with Claire Ashton, an invented name.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Attached to a real life. In February of.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Two thousand, nineteen, Perry arranged a three hundred copy print
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: on demand run and placed the book with a regional distributor.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: He had built something that looked at every level like
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: a legitimate publication, but he made one mistake. The acknowledgments
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: section still thanked Helen, Denise's mother, and it still carried
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the line the friends who made coming home feel like
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: a choice. Those words had survived two hundred thirty seven edits.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: They would eventually survive much more than that. On March third,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Denise found the listing online her book, her words,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: someone else's name. She called Perry. He told her it
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: was a miscommunication. He told her not to panic. She
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: did not panic, but she did not stop either. On
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: March sixth, Denise and her sister Patty drove to Columbus
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: and went to Lindingate's office.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: Parry was not there.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: His assistant, Bechstrom, told them Perry had called her that
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: morning and told her to take the week off.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: Denise drove home that evening.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Someone entered Denise's apartment.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: No forced entry.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: The door was unlocked from the outside with a key.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: The spare key Denise had left at Perry's office approximately
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: eight months earlier, during a period when she trusted him completely.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Pepper was in the apartment, the twelve year old cat
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: with hyperthyroidism, whose seven agis and seven PM medication scheduled
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Denise had never once broken. Doctor Sandra Novotni would later
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: confirm that on the record two years never a missed dose.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: That night, Pepper was found unfed and in distress. Denise
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: was found on the bathroom floor head laceration, unconscious. The
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: toxicology results would come back showing a sedative compound in
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: her system, a compound that matched the sleep medication prescribed
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: specifically to Keith Perry. A small fire had been set
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: in the kitchen waistebasket. The blood alcohol reading was inconsistent
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: with Denise's documented habits. Her physician confirmed it. The sedative
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: level was inconsistent with voluntary consumption. Perry's fingerprints were found
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: under the kitchen counter. His fingerprints were on the bathroom
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: door from when investigators searched Perry's car in her lawful search,
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: they found a partial blister pack, two tablets missing, and
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: then there was the book. On March twelfth, a runner
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: named Warren. Bailey found a hard cover spine out in
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: a drainage ditch he called the non emergency line. Denise
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: had recorded the copy missive The ditch had been under
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: water forty eight hours before Bailey found.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: The book was completely dry.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Investigators concluded Perry had placed it in the culvert's dry
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: channel the night of March sixth, believing the flood would
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: destroy it. He had misjudged the drainage direction. The book
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: survived the acknowledgments were intact. Perry was arrested March nineteenth,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, the charges identity fraud, theft of intellectual property,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: unauthorized entry, felony assault. At trial, Perry offered two explanations.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: The assault charge he said was a fabrication. The book registration,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: he said.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: Was a placeholder standard industry.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Practice, while he finalized submission strategy picture what a placeholder
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: actually requires A name, a title, a distributor, A three
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: hundred copy print run two hundred thirty seven edits removing
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: every identifying detail of the actual author. That version of
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: events collapsed against the physical record before it could stand.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: But there is a version of this.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Case worth walking could not because it holds but because
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: it almost looked like it could if the book registration
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: had been a legitimate mistake. Perry's call to Beckstrom on
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: March sixth makes no sense. An agent with nothing to
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: hide does not send his assistant home the morning a client.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Appears at his door.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: If the entry to Denise's apartment had been unauthorized by
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: someone unknown, there would need to be an explanation for
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Perry's fingerprints on the bathroom doorframe, not the front room,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: not the hall, the door frame of the room where
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Denise was found. And if the sedative had been self administered,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: the blister path would not have been in Parry's it
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: would have been in Denise's apartment. Each piece sits in
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: a different place. Together they only point one direction. Then
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: there is the book in the ditch. The detail Perry
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: could not have anticipated would survived. He removed two hundred
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: thirty seven details from that manuscript. He could not remove
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: the drainage channel's misjudged slope. The book came out dry,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Helen's name was still on the page. The line about
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: coming home was still there. Post conviction, detective Frank Varga
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: of Harwick County pulled a two thousand sixteen case from
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: the fines a writer named Stephen moy. His manuscript had
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: been registered under an unknown name via a shell address.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: The entity behind that shell address traced back to a
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: consulting firm Perry had operated before he founded lynden Gate
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: identical method, different victim three years earlier. The jury convicted
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: on all four counts in September of twenty nineteen. Perry
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: was sentenced to eleven years. What he had built, the
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: calls twice a week, the emailed articles, the praise calibrated
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: to feel like recognition had not been a professional relationship.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: It had been access, sustained, patient, carefully constructed, access to
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: a voice he intended to use as his own. Denise
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Boyd moved to Columbus in the fall of two thousand nineteen.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: She was still writing. That detail matters. It is the
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: one Perry could not take from her, regardless of what
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: he registered, edited, or placed in a drainage ditch. The
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: voice he spent seven months dismantling, calibrating access to, and
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: attempting to erase under a name that was not his own,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: That voice kept moving. Perry entered custody in September of
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen eleven. Years on four counts identity fraud, theft
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: of intellectual property, unauthorized entry, felony assault. His defense had
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: called the assault charge the fabrication and the book registration
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: a placeholder.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: The jury did not agree.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: They had the finger prints, they had the blister pack,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: they had two hundred thirty seven edits, and a book
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: that came out of a ditch dry Pepper recovered. The
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: twelve year old cat with hyperthyroidism, who had missed her
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: evening medication for the first time in two years, was
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: found distressed but alive. Doctor Sandra Novatni confirmed what Denis's
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: neighbors already knew. That animal had never gone unfed at
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: seven in the morning or seven at night, not once,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: not until the night of March sixth. There is something
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with in.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: That detail of everything.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Perry calculator, the key, the stare while count, the sedative dopes,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the drainage channel. The one bare he did not account
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: for was a cat. Pepper's distress is what drew a
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: neighbour's attention. Pepper's distress is what started the chain that
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: led to Patty Voss driving to Clover Falls, to Tammy Mills,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: pulling the ISBN records to Nancy dense name surfacing to
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the book in the ditch. He built a careful architecture
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: a twelve year old cat with a medication schedule dismantled
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: it post conviction. Detective Frank Varga of Harwick County revisited
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: a case from twenty sixteen. A writer named Stephen Moy
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: had seen his manuscript registered under an unknown name via
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: a shall address. The entity behind that address traced back
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: to a consulting firm Perry had operated before founding linden Gate.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: The method was identical sustained access to a writer's unpublished
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: work registration under a fabricated identity removal of identifying details.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Moy's case had gone cold. Perry had moved on and
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: built a more polished version of the same mechanism.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: That link is significant.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: It means the relationship Perry constructed with Denise. The twice
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: weekly calls, the emailed articles, the praise that arrived timed
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: and specific enough to feel like genuine recognition was not improvised.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: It was practiced.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: He had done it before and had refined it. The
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: acknowledgments section is the last detail worthholding. Perry made two
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: hundred thirty seven edits to that manuscript. He removed place names,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: he changed the mother's name, he erased clover falls from
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: every line it appeared in, and then he left the
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: acknowledgments section untouched. Helen's name the line about coming home
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: feeling like a choice. Investigators described it as an oversight
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: that is probably accurate, but it is also the reason
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: the book in the Ditch could be identified. The two
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: hundred thirty seventh edit would have been the one that
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: mattered most. He did not make it what Keith Payerry
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: attempted to do to denise Bode as a name. In
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: legal terms, identity fraud, theft of intellectual property. In human terms,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: it is something harder to categorize.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: He did not steal an object.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: He attempted to steal a perspective, the particular way one
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: person had found to describe her own life in her
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: own language, the acknowledgements she had written to the people
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: who had made her feel at home. That kind of
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: theft does not leave the same evidence as a broken
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: lock or a forced entry. It leaves a book in
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: a ditch with the wrong name on the cover and
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the right name still in the back pages. The systemic
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: concern Frank Varga raised after the moy connection was straightforward.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Literary representation requires a writer to hand over an unpublished manuscript,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: often their only copy, to someone whose institutional access is
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: nearly impossible for the writer to audit. The relationship depends
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: entirely on trust. Perry had understood that dependency precisely. He
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: had used it as the mechanism. Denise Boyd had queried
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: forty one agents before Perry wrote to her. Forty one
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: formed rejections across six months. When someone finally answered with
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: specific praise, with the names of the passages that had
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: moved them, with the offer to meet in person. That
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: is not a moment most writer's approach with suspicion. It
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: is the moment most writers have been waiting for. Perry
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: knew that he built his entire approach around it. There
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: is something in this case that stays difficult to resolve
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: even after the verdict. The sentences Denise wrote about her
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: mother about coming home, those were real. The recognition Perry
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: performed in response was fabricated. She was responding to something
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: that was not there. He had placed a mirror in
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: front of her that reflected what she needed to see,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: and she had trusted the reflection that is the architecture
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: of what happened, not a stranger in the dark, some
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: one she had spoken to twice a week for seven months,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: someone whose voice she recognized, someone who had told her
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: she was his most exciting client. The jury convicted Perry
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: is serving his sentence. Denise Boyd is in Columbus, and
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: she is still writing the story she was trying to
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: tell about her life did not disappear because someone spent
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: a winter trying to make it his.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: It is still hers. It was always hers.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: That is the one thing two hundred thirty seven edits
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: could not change. This show is made by Obo Media