Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Wrote "She Will Not Ask": How a Therapist Stole a Widower
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At six in the morning on January fourteenth, a County
- 0:07Speaker 1: Road Greater operator named Sarah Harris was running her usual
- 0:11Speaker 1: pass along mill Post Road when her head lights caught
- 0:14Speaker 1: something pale in the frozen grass at the shoulder. She
- 0:17Speaker 1: stopped the machine. She walked over. What she found was
- 0:21Speaker 1: a leather bound appointment ledger embossed on the cover with
- 0:26Speaker 1: a name and a professional license number. That ledger should
- 0:30Speaker 1: not have been there, and the man whose name was
- 0:32Speaker 1: on the cover had filed an insurance claim weeks earlier
- 0:36Speaker 1: saying it had been stolen. Those two facts, the ledger
- 0:39Speaker 1: in the grass and the lie told to collect on it,
- 0:43Speaker 1: would begin to unravel something that had been built with
- 0:46Speaker 1: extraordinary patience and almost no noise. A man had lost
- 0:50Speaker 1: his wife, and then in the months that followed, he
- 0:54Speaker 1: lost his house, his savings, and his own sense of
- 0:58Speaker 1: what was real. No one around him saw it happen.
- 1:02Speaker 1: That is the part that takes the longest to sit with.
- 1:04Speaker 1: There is something in this case that keeps pulling at
- 1:07Speaker 1: the edges of a simple explanation. The time line is
- 1:10Speaker 1: too precise, the preparation too calm, and one detail buried
- 1:15Speaker 1: in the middle of a single Ledger entry points back
- 1:18Speaker 1: to a calculation that was already in motion before Philip
- 1:21Speaker 1: Cole ever walked into a therapist's office. Philip Cole was
- 1:26Speaker 1: forty eight years old the summer his life came apart
- 1:29Speaker 1: the first time. He had lived on Elton Court in
- 1:32Speaker 1: Coepher for nineteen years. The house had four bedrooms, and
- 1:36Speaker 1: he and Margaret had filled it the way people do
- 1:38Speaker 1: over two decades, slowly without noticing, until the weight of
- 1:43Speaker 1: ordinary life is everywhere. Philip worked as a purchasing coordinator
- 1:48Speaker 1: for a regional hospital network, a job he had held
- 1:51Speaker 1: for twenty two years. He was the kind of person
- 1:54Speaker 1: whose reliability was so complete it became invisible. He showed up,
- 2:00Speaker 1: he followed through. He did not make scenes. On Wednesday evenings,
- 2:04Speaker 1: he volunteered at the food pantry connected to the Lutheran
- 2:07Speaker 1: Church on Corbin Avenue. He had done that for six years.
- 2:10Speaker 1: The coordinator there, a woman named Francis Duff, would later
- 2:15Speaker 1: describe him as someone who remembered which families preferred which
- 2:18Speaker 1: items without being asked. Margaret Cole died on August third
- 2:23Speaker 1: from a cerebral aneurysm. She was there and then she
- 2:27Speaker 1: was noted the obituary ran five days later in the
- 2:31Speaker 1: Coefer Courier register on August eighth. It listed Philip as
- 2:35Speaker 1: surviving spouse. It named the church, it named the address.
- 2:41Speaker 1: Philip's doctor referred him to a therapist in late August.
- 2:45Speaker 1: The referral was routine, a grieving widower, a trusted primary
- 2:50Speaker 1: care physician, a licensed clinical social worker with a private
- 2:54Speaker 1: practice in Coefer. The therapist's name was Roy Schmidt. He
- 2:58Speaker 1: was forty one years old and had been licensed in
- 3:01Speaker 1: two states. His practice in Koefer was six years old.
- 3:04Speaker 1: His licensing records showed no formal complaints. The first session
- 3:08Speaker 1: took place on a Monday in early September at Schmidt's office.
- 3:13Speaker 1: By the end of September, Philip was seeing Schmidt twice
- 3:16Speaker 1: a week. Those who knew Philip noticed changes, though nothing
- 3:20Speaker 1: they could name precisely at the time. His longtime friend
- 3:23Speaker 1: Karl Briggs called three times in October, each time Philip
- 3:28Speaker 1: told him he needed space. Briggs would later confirm he
- 3:32Speaker 1: took Philip at his word. There was no reason not to.
- 3:36Speaker 1: Philip had always been measured in what he said. His
- 3:38Speaker 1: estate attorney, Roger Asche, had handled Philip's affairs for years
- 3:43Speaker 1: At some point during this period, Philip stopped initiating contact.
- 3:47Speaker 1: Ashe would tell investigators, he had never once spoken to
- 3:50Speaker 1: Roy Schmidt, never received a call, a letter, or a message.
- 3:55Speaker 1: Schmidt's name, as far as ashe knew, did not exist
- 3:58Speaker 1: in Philip's life. Philip's daughter lived out of state. The
- 4:02Speaker 1: record does not establish the precise shape of their distance
- 4:05Speaker 1: during these months, but she was not in Coepher and
- 4:08Speaker 1: Schmidt was. What none of Philip's friends or colleagues could
- 4:11Speaker 1: have known. What Philip himself apparently did not know was
- 4:15Speaker 1: that the storage unit registered to his address on Elton
- 4:18Speaker 1: Court had already received Roy Schmidt's belongings, not in September,
- 4:24Speaker 1: not after the therapy relationship was established, on August sixth,
- 4:29Speaker 1: three days after Margaret died, two days before the obituary ran.
- 4:34Speaker 1: The ledger was a standard appointment book, black cover, spiral bound,
- 4:40Speaker 1: embossed with Schmidt's name and license number in gold. It
- 4:43Speaker 1: had been lying in the roadside grass along mill Post
- 4:47Speaker 1: Road since some time in November, three months in weather
- 4:51Speaker 1: pages swollen ink smeared in places, but the October fifth
- 4:55Speaker 1: entry still legible in clean ballpoint session p Cole four
- 5:00Speaker 1: p M Home visit confirmed key in usual place, move
- 5:05Speaker 1: remainder of boxes before Thursday. She will not ask, She
- 5:10Speaker 1: will not ask. Margaret Coal had been dead for sixty
- 5:14Speaker 1: three days. When Schmidt wrote that sentence. He was not
- 5:17Speaker 1: referring to a living woman. He was scheduling around her,
- 5:20Speaker 1: as if she were still capable of inconvenience, as if
- 5:23Speaker 1: the problem with Margaret was not her absence but her
- 5:26Speaker 1: potential interference. The ledger was in Gallagher's hands within two
- 5:30Speaker 1: days of Sarah Harris's call. Gallagher noted the entry, He
- 5:34Speaker 1: noted the date, and he noted that the equity line
- 5:37Speaker 1: withdrawls on Philip's account fourteen thousand dollars on October ninth,
- 5:42Speaker 1: eight thousand on October eighteenth, eleven thousand on October twenty
- 5:47Speaker 1: seventh formed a pattern that bracketed the October fifth entry
- 5:51Speaker 1: like parentheses thirty three thousand dollars three withdrawals, all authorized
- 5:57Speaker 1: on paper by Philip Cole. Philip had believed, according to
- 6:01Speaker 1: his later account, that Schmidt was his designated support contact,
- 6:06Speaker 1: that the estate attorney had arranged it Roger ashe The
- 6:09Speaker 1: estate attorney told Gallagher he had never spoken to Roy Schmidt,
- 6:14Speaker 1: not once on October eleventh, six days after the Ledger entry,
- 6:19Speaker 1: Roy Schmidt hosted a dinner party at the house on
- 6:22Speaker 1: Elton Court. Neighbours attended. Schmidt introduced himself. He used Philip's
- 6:28Speaker 1: name in association with the address. He poured wine, He
- 6:31Speaker 1: showed people the kitchen. Gallagher's report later described it as
- 6:35Speaker 1: a social credential manufactured in plain sight. Schmidt was not
- 6:39Speaker 1: breaking it. He was settling in. He was performing residency
- 6:43Speaker 1: for an audience that had no reason to question it.
- 6:46Speaker 1: Philip was not there. By late October, Schmidt had suggested
- 6:51Speaker 1: what he called a structured retreat, time away from the house,
- 6:55Speaker 1: from routine, from the specific weight of grief attached to
- 6:58Speaker 1: those rooms. Pillip left Elton Court with a single bag.
- 7:02Speaker 1: He checked into a residential motel on the east side
- 7:05Speaker 1: of Kofer in the first week of November. His automatic
- 7:08Speaker 1: mortgage transfer continued every month Philip paid to maintain a house.
- 7:13Speaker 1: He was no longer living in a house where some
- 7:16Speaker 1: one else was receiving mail, hosting dinners, and preparing to
- 7:19Speaker 1: call it home. There is a detail that resists easy categorization.
- 7:24Speaker 1: In the second therapy session, Schmidt had brought Philip a
- 7:27Speaker 1: small succulent in a clay pot. Something for the window sill,
- 7:31Speaker 1: he said, something alive. Philip kept it through October, through
- 7:36Speaker 1: the motel months through the winter. The plant sat on
- 7:39Speaker 1: the motel window sill, while Philip paid a mortgage on
- 7:42Speaker 1: an empty bedroom nineteen years his own. By late January,
- 7:47Speaker 1: when Gallagher drove to Elton Court to follow a ledger
- 7:50Speaker 1: entry back to its address, he found Schmidt's name on
- 7:53Speaker 1: the mail box, not Philip's. Schmidt's. No forced entry anywhere,
- 7:58Speaker 1: no broken locks, no shattered glass. The house had been transferred.
- 8:03Speaker 1: Not legally, not yet, but socially, logistically and practically. Philip
- 8:09Speaker 1: had been moved out of his own life. With a
- 8:11Speaker 1: single bag and a therapy session, Philip Cole walked into
- 8:15Speaker 1: the Mill Post County Sheriff's office a few days after
- 8:17Speaker 1: Gallagher's visit. He was pale. According to the intake record
- 8:21Speaker 1: beywildered is the word that appears in the notes. He
- 8:25Speaker 1: was forty eight years old, and he was describing a
- 8:29Speaker 1: reality that had been quietly disassembled around him while he
- 8:32Speaker 1: was grieving. When investigators began reconstructing the sequence, the first
- 8:37Speaker 1: assumption was simple. A therapist had exploited a grieving client
- 8:41Speaker 1: opportunism enabled by access and timing. Philip had been vulnerable.
- 8:46Speaker 1: Schmidt had recognized it and moved in picture the therapy
- 8:50Speaker 1: office in early September. A man carrying the weight of
- 8:54Speaker 1: twenty two years of marriage, suddenly alone, a licensed clinician
- 8:59Speaker 1: across for him, trained to read distress, trained to reflect
- 9:04Speaker 1: trust back toward the person sitting in the chair. The
- 9:08Speaker 1: relationship begins Legitimately, the financial extraction follows. That version is coherent.
- 9:15Speaker 1: It fits the pattern of exploitation cases built on therapeutic dependency.
- 9:21Speaker 1: But that version collapses the moment you look at August
- 9:24Speaker 1: sixth Schmidt did not register that storage unit after he
- 9:28Speaker 1: met Philip. He did not decide over weeks of sessions
- 9:32Speaker 1: that Philip could be useful. He moved his belongings into
- 9:36Speaker 1: a unit at Philip's address three days after Margaret died,
- 9:40Speaker 1: two days before the obituary appeared in the Coefer Courier register,
- 9:45Speaker 1: before the referral, before the first Monday session, before any
- 9:49Speaker 1: documented contact between the two men. Schmidt did not need
- 9:53Speaker 1: to read the obituary. He already knew. How he knew
- 9:56Speaker 1: is not established in the public record. The transfer tripped
- 10:00Speaker 1: does not confirm how Schmidt first identified Philip or Margaret's
- 10:04Speaker 1: death before the referral. That question has no clean answer yet,
- 10:09Speaker 1: but the storage unit registration is a fact. August sixth
- 10:13Speaker 1: is a fact, and what that date means is this,
- 10:17Speaker 1: the therapy relationship was not where the targeting began, It
- 10:21Speaker 1: was where it was formalized. There was a second victim.
- 10:25Speaker 1: His name was George Pavlik. He was sixty one years old,
- 10:30Speaker 1: a retired machinist from a neighboring county, and his wife
- 10:34Speaker 1: had died roughly two and a half years before Margaret Cole.
- 10:38Speaker 1: Schmidt had counseled him too, moved into his house, extracted
- 10:43Speaker 1: approximately sixty two thousand dollars over eight months. Pavlick never
- 10:48Speaker 1: reported it. When investigators eventually reached him through a social
- 10:51Speaker 1: worker named Diane Ostroff, who contacted Millpost County after a
- 10:56Speaker 1: regional license alert, Pavlik did not deny what had happened.
- 11:01Speaker 1: He confirmed it he had not reported it because he
- 11:04Speaker 1: was ashamed, not of being deceived, ashamed of how willing
- 11:08Speaker 1: he had been to believe that someone cared. Schmidt had
- 11:11Speaker 1: a forwarding address on file, a UPS store box. He
- 11:15Speaker 1: had done this before. He had done it cleanly enough
- 11:18Speaker 1: that his licensing record showed no formal complaints. Two men,
- 11:22Speaker 1: two houses, two dead wives, and a ledger that fell
- 11:26Speaker 1: from a vehicle somewhere on mill Post Road and spent
- 11:30Speaker 1: three months in the grass before a County road grader
- 11:33Speaker 1: operator found it at six in the morning on January fourteenth.
- 11:37Speaker 1: The ledger had an embossed cover, Schmidt's name, his license number.
- 11:42Speaker 1: He had filed an insurance claim on it in November,
- 11:45Speaker 1: listing it as stolen in a burglary. The replacement value,
- 11:48Speaker 1: he declared, approximately four thousand dollars. The ledger was not stolen.
- 11:53Speaker 1: He had removed it from Elton Court himself. It fell
- 11:56Speaker 1: from a vehicle, from a bag from somewhere in transit,
- 12:00Speaker 1: and it lay there in the cold until Sarah Harris
- 12:03Speaker 1: stopped her Greater and picked it up. The October fifth entry,
- 12:08Speaker 1: the August sixth registration, the mailbox with the wrong name,
- 12:13Speaker 1: the succulent on a motel window sill. None of it
- 12:17Speaker 1: required a break in. None of it required force. It
- 12:21Speaker 1: required grief and a man who had learned from at
- 12:24Speaker 1: least one prior attempt exactly how much space grief leaves opened.
- 12:29Speaker 1: Jerry Gallagher filed his arrest request on a Wednesday in March.
- 12:33Speaker 1: The warrant named Roy Schmidt, licensed clinical social worker, on
- 12:38Speaker 1: three counts financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, fraud, and
- 12:43Speaker 1: theft by deception. Investigators had located two accounts where the
- 12:48Speaker 1: transferred funds had been deposited. Schmidt knew they had located them.
- 12:53Speaker 1: He cooperated. That cooperation carried weight in the prosecutor's calculus.
- 12:58Speaker 1: The state declined to pursue UO the maximum sentence enhancement.
- 13:02Speaker 1: In exchange, Schmidt disclosed the accounts, confirmed the transfers, and
- 13:07Speaker 1: provided documentation that investigators used to trace the full scope
- 13:11Speaker 1: of both cases. Eight years parole eligibility at five Parallel
- 13:18Speaker 1: charges were pending in the neighboring jurisdiction. The Pavlick case
- 13:22Speaker 1: filed separately, moving through a different court. George Pavlik never
- 13:27Speaker 1: filed his own report. No charges came from him directly.
- 13:32Speaker 1: What came instead was a statement confirming what had happened,
- 13:36Speaker 1: given to Diane Ostroff, the social worker who had surfaced
- 13:40Speaker 1: his name after a regional license alert moved through the system.
- 13:45Speaker 1: Pavlik's silence had not protected him. It had simply made
- 13:48Speaker 1: him invisible until the ledger made invisibility impossible. Philip Cole
- 13:54Speaker 1: walked into the Millpost County Sheriff's office in late January.
- 13:57Speaker 1: He was pale. The word investigator used in their notes
- 14:01Speaker 1: was bewildered. He had been living in a residential motel
- 14:04Speaker 1: on the east side of Coefer for roughly three months,
- 14:08Speaker 1: paying the mortgage on Elton Court by automatic transfer. Unaware
- 14:12Speaker 1: in any functional sense that he had been removed from
- 14:14Speaker 1: his own life, He had left with a single bag.
- 14:18Speaker 1: Schmidt had called it a structured retreat. Three weeks after
- 14:22Speaker 1: that first visit to the Sheriff's office, Philip returned to
- 14:25Speaker 1: his Wednesday shift at the Corbin Avenue Lutheran food pantry.
- 14:29Speaker 1: Francis Duff, the coordinator, confirmed it he showed up. He
- 14:34Speaker 1: worked that was February. In April, after Schmid's arrest, Philip
- 14:39Speaker 1: moved back to Elton Court. The house had been his
- 14:42Speaker 1: for nineteen years. He had bought it with Margaret. He
- 14:46Speaker 1: had raised a family inside it, and for the better
- 14:49Speaker 1: part of a winter, a man whose name had appeared
- 14:51Speaker 1: on the mailbox in place of his had been hosting
- 14:55Speaker 1: dinners there. Withdrawing from its equity lines and scheduling logistics
- 15:00Speaker 1: around a woman who had been dead since August. Roger Ash,
- 15:04Speaker 1: Philip's estate attorney, told investigator Gallagher the same thing he
- 15:09Speaker 1: had told no one before, because no one had asked.
- 15:13Speaker 1: He had never spoken to Roy Schmidt, not once. The
- 15:16Speaker 1: authority Schmidt had used to authorize the equity withdrawals, the
- 15:20Speaker 1: designation as a support contact had no legal basis. Philip
- 15:25Speaker 1: had believed it because Schmidt had told him it was true.
- 15:28Speaker 1: That was sufficient, that was always sufficient. Carl Briggs, who
- 15:33Speaker 1: had called three times in October, learned only later what
- 15:38Speaker 1: those calls had cost Philip. Philip had told him he
- 15:41Speaker 1: needed space. Schmidt had scripted that answer. Briggs had respected
- 15:46Speaker 1: it the way any decent friend would. The isolation required
- 15:50Speaker 1: nothing dramatic. It required ordinary kindness redirected. Gallagher's report used
- 15:56Speaker 1: a specific phrase to describe what Schmidt had done at
- 15:59Speaker 1: the US the October dinner party, the one hosted at
- 16:02Speaker 1: Philip's house under Philip's name, with Philip's neighbors sitting at
- 16:05Speaker 1: Philip's table. The phrase was social credential manufactured in plain sight.
- 16:11Speaker 1: Schmidt had not hidden himself. He had replaced Philip slowly
- 16:15Speaker 1: enough that the replacement looked from the outside like continuity.
- 16:21Speaker 1: Total documented victims two Philip Cole and George Pavlick. Two men,
- 16:27Speaker 1: two dead wives, two houses. The number is what the
- 16:30Speaker 1: record shows. Whether it is the full number is a
- 16:34Speaker 1: different question, and the answer to that question lives somewhere
- 16:37Speaker 1: in the six years Schmidt spent in private practice in
- 16:41Speaker 1: Coufeur before anyone looked. There is something specific that stays
- 16:46Speaker 1: with this case, something that resists the usual categories. Roy
- 16:51Speaker 1: Schmidt did not break a window. He did not forge
- 16:54Speaker 1: a signature or steal a wallet. He entered Philip Cole's
- 16:58Speaker 1: life through a referral from a fiew position with a
- 17:01Speaker 1: license number embossed on a cover with a succulent plant,
- 17:04Speaker 1: delivered at a second session as a gesture of warmth.
- 17:08Speaker 1: He built trust the way trust is supposed to be built, incrementally, carefully,
- 17:13Speaker 1: with patience, and then he used that architecture to take
- 17:17Speaker 1: a man's house, his money, his friendships, and his sense
- 17:21Speaker 1: of where he was supposed to be standing in the world.
- 17:24Speaker 1: Philip kept the succulent through every week at the motel.
- 17:28Speaker 1: It sat on the window sill. He watered it when
- 17:31Speaker 1: he moved back to Elton Court in April he repotted it.
- 17:35Speaker 1: That detail is not incidental. It is the whole of
- 17:39Speaker 1: what this case is about. A man in the worst
- 17:42Speaker 1: year of his life accepted a small green plant from
- 17:46Speaker 1: someone who seemed to see him. Clearly, the plant was real,
- 17:50Speaker 1: the care that came with it was not, and yet
- 17:53Speaker 1: he kept it through the motel, through the bewilderment, through
- 17:58Speaker 1: the long winter of not fully known what had been
- 18:00Speaker 1: done to him, because even the false version of being
- 18:04Speaker 1: seen had felt for a while like something worth holding
- 18:08Speaker 1: on to. George Pavlick was sixty one years old and
- 18:13Speaker 1: had been alone for two and a half years before
- 18:15Speaker 1: Schmidt found him. He never reported what happened. Shame kept
- 18:19Speaker 1: him silent. But the shame was not about being foolish.
- 18:23Speaker 1: It was about how much he had wanted someone to care.
- 18:26Speaker 1: That is not weakness. That is what grief does to
- 18:29Speaker 1: a person. It makes the ordinary extraordinary. Someone showing up consistently,
- 18:35Speaker 1: someone asking the right questions, someone carrying boxes. That is
- 18:39Speaker 1: everything when everything else has gone quiet. Schmidt understood that
- 18:44Speaker 1: he had studied it professionally. Then he had weaponized it
- 18:48Speaker 1: across at least two households across at least four years,
- 18:52Speaker 1: leaving behind no formal complaints, no prior record, a licensing
- 18:57Speaker 1: file that looked clean until a ledger from a vehicle
- 19:01Speaker 1: on mill Post Road and spent ninety two days in
- 19:04Speaker 1: the grass. Sarah Harris founded at six in the morning
- 19:08Speaker 1: on January fourteenth. She had driven that route for eleven years.
- 19:13Speaker 1: She stopped, she picked it up. She called the non
- 19:17Speaker 1: emergency line at seven forty two. That call is the
- 19:21Speaker 1: reason Philip Cole is back on Elton Court. That call
- 19:25Speaker 1: is the reason Roy Schmidt is serving eight years instead
- 19:28Speaker 1: of building a forwarding address at a third ups store
- 19:32Speaker 1: box in a third county. The system that should have
- 19:35Speaker 1: caught Schmidt earlier, the licensing boards, the regional networks, the
- 19:39Speaker 1: referral chains did not catch him. A road grader operator did.
- 19:45Speaker 1: Philip Coole was fifty years old at the conclusion of
- 19:48Speaker 1: the trial. He had been a purchasing coordinator for twenty
- 19:52Speaker 1: two years, a food pantry volunteer for six, a husband
- 19:56Speaker 1: for longer than that. He is back in the house
- 19:59Speaker 1: where he lived with Margaret. He goes on Wednesdays, he
- 20:03Speaker 1: shows up, he works. That is not a small thing.
- 20:06Speaker 1: After everything that was taken, the money the months, the
- 20:10Speaker 1: sense of being held safely inside his own life. The
- 20:14Speaker 1: fact that he still shows up on Wednesdays is the
- 20:16Speaker 1: clearest possible evidence of who Philip Cole has always been
- 20:20Speaker 1: underneath everything Schmidt tried to overwrite. This show is made
- 20:26Speaker 1: by Obomedia.