Latest / Relationship Cheating Stories / She Reads His Texts Aloud: The Kimberly Simmons Case

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She Reads His Texts Aloud: The Kimberly Simmons Case · Relationship Cheating Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The welcome mat at 414 Sycamore Branch Drive was a
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: thick coir rectangle, the kind sold at every hardware store
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: in Ohio. The word printed on it was TOGETHER. On
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: a September morning in 2022, Alan Vogel, a lineman for
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Harwick Electric, found that mat pressed flat against the inside
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: of the storm door, the word facing inward. Nobody presses
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: a welcome mat against the inside of a door. Vogel
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: stood on the porch for a moment, knocked twice, heard nothing.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: and went back to his truck. That detail, one reversed mat,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: would travel from Vogel to a dispatcher named Sandra Pruitt,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: from Pruitt to a county sheriff's auxiliary contact, and from
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: there to a Kellerton detective's desk by the following Monday.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: What it pointed toward was a woman who had not
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: stepped outside in nine days sitting at a kitchen table
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: in front of a laptop, still reading messages from a
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: man who did not exist. This is the story of
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Kimberly Simmons, Kellerton, Ohio, is the kind of town where
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the elementary school parking lot empties in under four minutes
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: on a Friday afternoon because everyone knows the back way out.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Kimberly Simmons knew that parking lot for 22 years. She
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: taught fifth grade at Oakhurst Elementary, the same building her
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: mother had attended as a child. Former students described her
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: the way people describe a teacher who got it right.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: She remembered their handwriting. She kept the drawings they left
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: on her desk. She noticed when something was off. She
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: retired in spring 2021, at age 44, born 1976, not
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: early by design. Early because the years had stacked up
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: and the energy required to keep 23 10-year-olds believing that
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: fractions mattered had finally outpaced what she had left to give.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: She was not unhappy. She walked her neighborhood every morning.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: She had a Thursday ritual at the Copper Kettle Diner.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Two eggs scrambled, rye toast, black coffee. and a small
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: orange juice, and Becca Sorrell, the waitress who worked that shift,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: knew the order before Kimberly reached the table. She had
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: stopped expecting anything new to happen. That is how Kimberly
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: later described that period of her life in her own words.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Not bitter. Just settled. In February 2022, she created a
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: profile on Horizons Connect. a platform marketed to adults over
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: 40 looking for meaningful relationships. She was not impulsive about it.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: She set up the profile, looked at it for a
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: few days, and left it mostly dormant. The account sat
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: quiet for several weeks before a message arrived. The sender's
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: profile said his name was Norman Reed, 51 years old,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: an architect based in Portland, Oregon, deaf since age 7,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: text only. The photograph showed a man with a calm,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: open face, mid-forties, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: standing in what looked like a project site. He had written,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: I noticed you mentioned teaching in your profile. I always
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: found teachers interesting. They learn how to explain the same thing,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: twelve different ways, until one of them lands. I think
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: that takes more patience than most people have. It was
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: a specific observation. Not you seem nice. Not beautiful smile.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: a specific observation about a skill she had spent two
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: decades developing. She wrote back, Over the weeks that followed,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the messages from Norman Reed did something that very few
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: conversations do. They remembered. He referenced things she had mentioned
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: three weeks earlier. He asked follow-up questions she had not expected.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: In April 2022, he sent her a message that she
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: saved in a folder she named after him. It read,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: I spent so much of my life learning to read
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: what people meant because I couldn't hear how they said it.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: I think I know what you mean, even when you
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: don't say it all the way. She read that message
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: more than once. She read it aloud, according to her
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: own account. What she did not know, what no one
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: in Kellerton knew, what, was that the photograph of Norman
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Reed had been taken from a 2019 blog post written
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: by a Vermont architect named Scott Dero, who had never
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: been to Oregon, had never used Horizons Connect. and had
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: no knowledge that his image was being used. The name
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Norman Reed belonged to a retired postal worker in Spokane, Washington,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: who had equally no idea. The man writing those messages
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: was Vincent Haas, 38 years old, working from a two
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: bedroom apartment in a suburb of Atlanta, managing at least
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: seven simultaneous personas composing every word himself, and he had
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: been operating from about 2018 through 2022, roughly four years.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: The messages kept coming through spring and into summer. Norman
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: said he was managing a construction project. He was vague
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: about the details in a way that felt, at the time,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: like modesty. He asked about her garden. He remembered that
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: she preferred rye toast. In July 2022, the first request arrived.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: It was framed as embarrassment, according to the sequence of
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: communications later reconstructed for the court record. Norman explained that
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: a material supplier had issued an invoice he could not
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: settle remotely. His accounts were tied up in a project escrow.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: He hated asking. He had never asked anyone for anything
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: like this before. $ 12, 000. Two installments. He provided an account
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: number for what appeared to be a construction materials supplier.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Kimberly sent it. There is no record, she hesitated. There
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: is no message in the recovered exchange where she expressed doubt.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: The architecture of the request had been built over five
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: months of accumulating trust, and it held. August brought another request, $ 8, 000
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: this time, a contractor delay, a different account number. The
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: explanation arrived before she could form a question. She sent
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: that to what the wire transfer records would later show,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: know what ex-DOS records pulled by Detective Phil Caruso and
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: cross-referenced by State Investigator Donna Breck. was that each payment
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: moved through a payment processing intermediary and then dispersed through
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: a cluster and move pattern within 48 hours. The money
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: did not sit anywhere long enough to be traced in
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: real time. It was designed that way. September arrived. Norman's
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: project was in trouble. The message that came in early
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: September described a contractor who had walked off the job,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: a deadline, a penalty clause that would wipe out everything
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: he had built. He was not asking her to save him,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: he wrote. He was telling her, because she was the
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: only person he told things to anymore. He said that twice.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: The inherited brokerage account had been in Kimberly's family since
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: her father opened it in the 1980s. She liquidated it. $ 22, 000
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: moved in early September, directed to an account labeled as
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: a contractor's escrow. The total now stood at $ 42, 000 over
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: less than three months. After that transfer, something changed. The
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: messages from Norman slowed. He said the project was stabilizing.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: He said he would explain everything properly when he could
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: see her. He kept writing, but the texture had shifted,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and somewhere in that shift, without conscious recognition, Kimberly stopped
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: answering some of his questions, the way she used to.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: She did not leave the house for nine days. Cheryl
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Gray had been Kimberly's friend long enough to know when
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: something was wrong without being told. She stopped by 414
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Sycamore Branch Drive late in August, before the final transfer.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: The laptop was open on the kitchen table. Kimberly stepped
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: away for a moment, and Cheryl saw the screen. She
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: did not say anything that night, but she took a
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: screenshot of the profile photo with her phone before Kimberly
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: came back. That same night, at home, she ran a
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: reverse image search. The result did not take long. The
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: photograph of Norman Reed, mid-forties, reading glasses, pushed up on
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: his forehead, standing at what looked like a project site,
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: appeared in a 2019 blog post from an architecture firm
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: in Burlington, Vermont. The man in the photograph was named
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Scott Devereaux. He was a hearing architect. He had never
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: lived in Oregon. He had never heard of Horizons Connect.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Cheryl sat with that result for a week. She came
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: back the first Saturday of September. She showed Kimberly the
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: search result. What followed was a four-hour conversation that Kimberly
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: would later describe in fragments rather than as a continuous memory.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: At the end of it, they called the Kellerton Police Department,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Detective Phil Caruso answered. He called Kimberly three times over
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the following days before she picked up. She gave him
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: access to the message archive and the transfer records. He
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: traced the accounts as far as the payment processing intermediary,
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: and then he hit the cluster and move structure that
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: had been engineered specifically for that moment. He contacted Donna Breck.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: Breck worked in the state attorney's cyber fraud unit. When
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Caruso sent her the account routing pattern, she recognized it.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: She had seen the same downstream dispersal structure in two
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: other cases. Then she pulled the platform data for Horizons
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Connect and started looking at the conversational architecture across complaints
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: from the same window. Twelve victims were identified. Forensic analysis
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: showed the messages came from at least seven distinct personas,
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: with some personas used to target multiple victims, all women
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: between 40 and 60. all contacted on platforms similar to
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Horizons Connect. All of them had received the same sequence.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Remembered detail, personal disclosure, construction project, reluctance to ask, to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: installment pattern. The persona names were different. The photographs were different.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: but the voice, the rhythm, the specific cadence of emotional
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: disclosure was consistent enough that a forensic linguist hired by
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: the prosecution would later confirm it. One writer, across at
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: least seven simultaneous personas, the detail that sealed the federal
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: referral came from Lorraine Beck. Beck was 52, a dental
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: hygienist in Knoxville, Tennessee. Three years earlier, in 2019, she
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: had been contacted on a similar platform by a persona
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: named Daniel Morse, a deaf landscape architect. The courtship lasted
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: six weeks before her son found the reverse image of
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: the stock photo within an hour of looking. She had
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: reported it. To the platform. To local police. Neither followed up.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: When Vincent Haas' photograph appeared in news coverage three weeks
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: after his arrest, Lorraine Beck recognized the pattern she had lived.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: she came forward. Her statement was admitted at trial as
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: evidence of a knowing, repeated pattern, not a single mistake,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: not an experiment, but a system. Here is what the
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: evidence confirmed, and where its edges stopped holding. Vincent Haas
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: did not deny writing the messages. His proffer delivered within
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: six weeks of arrest, after his cellmate Bobby Strang alerted
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: the prosecution, described the operation, with a specificity that investigators
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: called in accounts from the period, something closer to professional
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: pride than remorse. He named his methods. He described the
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: deafness conceit he had deployed in four of the 12
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: courtships specifically to eliminate the expectation of a phone call.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: He explained the two-installment pattern as a calibration tool. The
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: first payment established the habit. The second tested its durability.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: He had been operating from about 2018 through 2022, roughly
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: four years from a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Atlanta.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: What the record does not establish is why, beyond money,
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: and what appears to have been genuine absorption in the
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: craft of the thing. No transcript surfaces a motive beyond
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: financial gain, and what Haas's own words implied about his
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: relationship to the work itself. That absence is not a gap.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: The evidence closes. Picture the operation at its center. One man,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: seven simultaneous voices, each with its own remembered details, each
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: with its own emotional register, each calibrated to a specific
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: woman's stated vulnerabilities on her dating profile. The forensic linguist's
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: report confirmed voice differentiation was consistent enough that the personas
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: would not have been recognizable as the same writer without
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: the metadata connecting them. And yet every persona made the
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: same structural choices. The early observation that was too specific
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: to be generic. The deafness or limitation that made the
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: voice text only. The construction project that arrived just as
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: trust peaked. The reluctance to ask, always stated twice. The
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: strongest version of what happened, the one that fits every
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: piece of the physical record, is not a story about
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: a woman who was naive. It is a story about
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: a system that was built to find the gap between
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: trust and verification, and live there, Haas had identified that
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: gap with precision. He operated inside it with patience that
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: the four-year timeline confirms. Kimberly had no reason to run
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: a reverse image search in April 2022 when the message
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: about deafness and reading people arrived. She had less reason
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: in July 2022 when the first request came framed as
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: embarrassment from someone who had spent months earning the right
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: to be embarrassed in front of her. Cheryl Gray found
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: the image in a single evening. That fact does not
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: reflect on Kimberly. It reflects on how long the system
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: had been running before anyone outside. It looked directly at it.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: The account numbers are gone. The money is largely gone.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: What the civil attachment recovered. $ 3, 100 against 42,000 cent is
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: the arithmetic of that gap. But Haas is in federal custody,
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Sandra Oh, who managed the accounts, and Curtis Fenn, who
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: handled the technical infrastructure were charged after Haas' confession. Haas
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: was convicted on 11 counts of wire fraud and two
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: counts of aggravated identity theft. He received a 14-year federal sentence.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: The trial opened in August 2023 in a federal courtroom
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: in Atlanta. Vincent Haas sat at the defense table and
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: said nothing. He had not already calculated. The silence was
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: not new. He had said nothing to investigators on the
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: morning of September 29th, 2022, when FBI Atlanta and the
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Georgia Bureau of Investigation executed the federal warrant at his
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: two-bedroom apartment in the Atlanta suburbs. The silence held through booking,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: through arraignment, through the first weeks of pre-trial detention. It
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: broke inside Fulton County Detention in a cell Haas shared
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: with a man named Bobby Strang. Over several nights, according
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: to Strang's account, Haas described the operation in full, not
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: as a confession of wrongdoing, as a description of craft.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Strang's attorney contacted the prosecution. Haas gave a formal proffer
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: within six weeks of his arrest, and the investigators who
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: heard it later described the tone as sounding like professional pride,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: not remorse. That detail is worth sitting with. 14 years
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: in federal prison, and the record does not show a
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: man who believed he had done something wrong. It shows
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: a man who believed he had done something well. The
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: jury returned 11 counts of wire fraud and 2 counts
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: of aggravated identity theft. The 14-year sentence followed. Sandra Oh,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: who had managed the accounts receivable for Haas's operation, and
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Curtis Fenn, who had handled the technical infrastructure, were charged
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: after the proffer identified them. Neither of them appears in
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Haas's messaging. They existed in the architecture beneath it, invisible
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: until the confession named them. Donna Breck, the state attorney
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: cyber fraud investigator who had traced Kimberly's wire transfers to
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: a cluster and move pattern, identified at least 12 victims
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: in the same operational window. Women between 40 and 60,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: platforms similar to Horizons Connect. Identical conversational architecture. The early
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: observation too specific to be casual. The limitation that made
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: the voice text only. The construction project deriving as trust peaked.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: The reluctance to ask stated twice before the request came.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Twelve documented. The true number is unknown. Lorraine Beck had
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: reported a version of this in 2019. Her son found
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: the stock photo in under an hour. She filed a
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: report with the platform and with local police. Neither followed up.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Three years later, When Haas's photo appeared in news coverage
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: of his arrest, Lorraine came forward. Her statement was admitted
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: at trial as evidence of a knowing, repeated pattern. The
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: jury heard it. The verdict reflected it. The platform's original
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: failure to act on that report is not a minor
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: procedural lapse. It is part of the timeline. The operation
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: ran for approximately four years. Lorraine's report exists inside those
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: four years. The arithmetic is not comfortable. Kimberly recovered $ 3, 100
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: through civil attachment against 42,000 cent. That is less than 8%.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: The inherited brokerage her parents left her, the $ 22, 000 liquidated
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: in early September, is largely unrecoverable. The accounts move the
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: money within 48 hours. By the time Caruso traced the wire,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: The downstream cluster had already dispersed it. The real Norman Reed,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: a retired postal worker in Spokane, Washington, had no knowledge
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: that his name had been used. Scott Devereaux, the actual
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: architect in Burlington, Vermont, whose 2019 blog photo Haas had stolen,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: had no connection to any of it. Two men whose
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: identities were borrowed without their knowledge dissolved into a fiction
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: that cost a woman in Kellerton, Ohio $ 42, 000 and nine
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: days she will not describe in detail. The case is closed.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Haas is serving his sentence. The question that does not
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: close is how many women between 2018 and 2020, two
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: created profiles on platforms similar to Horizons, Connect received messages
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: calibrated to what they had written about themselves and sent
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: money they never recovered and never reported it because they
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: were too ashamed to say that they had believed someone.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Donna Breck said 12. The Federal Trade Commission's broader data
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: on romance fraud suggests the documented cases represent a fraction
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of actual losses most victims do not report. The gap
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: between what is known and what happened is the same
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Gap Haas operated inside. It is still there. On a
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: Thursday morning in the spring of 2020, three Kimberly Simmons
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: walked four blocks to the Copper Kettle Diner. Becca Sorrell,
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: the waitress who had known her order before she reached
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the table for years, brought two eggs scrambled, rye toast,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: black coffee, and a small orange juice without being asked.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: At some point during that morning, Kimberly opened her laptop
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: and deleted the folder she had named Normans. The record
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: does not say what she felt in that moment. It
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: says she did it on a Thursday. It says she
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: was at the copper kettle. It says nearly a year
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: had passed since September 2022 when she was found sitting
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: at her kitchen table with the laptop open, having not
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: left her house in nine days. She had said, in
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: her own words, that she had stopped expecting anything new
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: to happen. The folder sat on her desktop for almost
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: a year because deleting it required deciding what it had been.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: One message survived the trial record. Haas wrote it in
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: April 2022, in the voice of a man named Norman,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: who had been deaf since age seven. It read, I
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: spent so much of my life learning to read what
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: people meant because I couldn't hear how they said it.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: I think I know what you mean, even when you
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: don't say it all the way. A forensic linguist hired
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: by the prosecution confirmed that Haas maintained consistent, differentiated voices
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: across at least seven simultaneous personas. The April message was
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: not a slip. it was constructed, every word chosen for
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: the specific woman reading it. What Kimberly felt when she
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: read it in April 2022, and what she felt when
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: she read it again as a prosecution exhibit in August 2023,
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: are not the same thing. Both of those feelings are real.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: The record does not ask her to choose between them.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story that focuses on
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: what Haas built, the personas, the architecture, the four-year patience,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: the professional pride, That version is accurate, and it matters
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: for prosecution and prevention. But it is not the whole story.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: The whole story includes Becca Sorrell already knowing the order,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: the welcome mat pulled inside word facing inward. A folder
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: kept for nearly a year because it held something that
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: had felt true, even when it wasn't. A woman who
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: had spent two decades teaching 10-year-olds how to read carefully,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: who read every message carefully, and who was targeted precisely
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: because she paid attention. She deleted the folder on a
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Thursday morning, then she finished her coffee. That is where
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the record ends. Not with resolution, exactly. With continuation. Which
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: may be the only honest place for a story like
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: this one to stop. This show is made by Obomedia.