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The Notebook in the Snow: How a Quiet Handyman Broke Lives · Why Humans Lie

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At six forty seven in the morning on February eighth,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, a snowplow operator named April Vickers was
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: clearing Bredel Road outside Canter, Ohio, when her headlights caught
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: something sitting upright in a snow bank. A spiral bound
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: ledger standing on its spine, pages fanned open in eleven
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: degree air, no footprints around it, no tire tracks in
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: the ditch. The ledger was completely dry. That last detail
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: is the one that doesn't let go. It had been
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: snowing for hours. Inside those pages were women's names, dollar amounts,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: home addresses, and next to several entries, two words written
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: in ballpoint closed out. This is the story of how
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: one man spent eight years dismantling the financial reality of
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: elderly people who trusted him, and how a single notebook,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: found standing upright in the snow storm, brought the whole
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: architecture down. To understand what Keith Cole found on Bredel Road,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: you have to understand what was already there before he arrived.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Bernard Snyder was eighty three years old, a life long
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: farmer in Pendall County, Ohio. He had lived on that
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: farm house his entire adult life. The property sat on
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: a rural stretch of Breadell Road, far enough from town
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: that a visitor had a reason to be there or
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: they didn't belong. Bernard's wife had died in the spring
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, and after that he lived alone
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: in the house where his daughter, Tammy had grown up.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Tammy Snyder was fifty one. She had worked as a
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: billing coordinator at a Pendall County orthopedic clinic for seventeen years,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the kind of job that requires precision pattern recognition and
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: an eye for anything that doesn't add up. She had
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: lived within forty miles of Kanter her whole life. Every
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Wednesday morning for nine years she drove to the Canter
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Area Resource Center on Pratt Avenue to volunteer. It was
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the one fixed absence in her week, and she never
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: missed it. She had two children, Meg and Ray. Her
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: sister Fran lived in Zanesville. The family stayed close. Tammy
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: checked on Bernard regularly, helped manage his affairs, and kept
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: her own records, a habit from her years in medical billing.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: When something didn't look right, she wrote it down. By
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: early twenty twenty one, Bernard had been diagnosed with moderate
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: vascular dementia. The doctors classified it as oversight level, meaning
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: he needed supervision and help with complex decisions. But he
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: was not in memory care. He still recognized his family,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: He still sat at his kitchen table. He still signed
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: things when some one put a pen in his hand.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: That last detail matters enormously. Keith Cole was thirty nine
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: years old and worked as a water softener technician for
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: a regional franchise. He also took handyman and general contractor
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: work on the side. Gutters, chimney repointing, porch posts. The
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: kind of jobs that give a man a legitimate reason
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: to be at a rural farmhouse multiple times a week
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: over several months. The kind of work where no one
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: questions why your truck is in the driveway again. He
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: arrived at Bredell Road in March of twenty twenty one
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: on a legitimate work order. The water softener needed service.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Bernard let him in. The job was done, Keith left
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: his card. Tammy called him back about the gutters. That
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: phone call was the door. What Keith Cole walked through next,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: and how methodically he walked through it is something that
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Pendall County aps investigator Lloyd Turner, a man with eleven
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: years in adult protective services and a background and insurance investigation,
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: would later discribe as unusually methodical. Turner had seen exploitation
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: cases before. What he hadn't often seen was this level
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: of patience, this level of planning, the kind of operation
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: that doesn't look like crime while it's happening, because every
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: individual step looks like help. By August of twenty twenty one,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Keith Cole had a standing arrangement to stop by the
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: farmhouse on the mornings Tammy was absent Wednesday mornings, the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: one fixed gap in her week. The first anomaly appeared
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: in September of twenty twenty one. A bank representative named
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Tom Whaley called Tammy at the orthopedic clinic where she
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: had worked for seventeen years. There had been a request.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: He told her to change Bernard's mailing address not to
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: the farmhouse on Bridell Road, to a post office box
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: in Ridgeway, twelve miles away. The signature on the form
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: was shaky, but consistent with Bernard's hand. Tammy reversed the
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: change the same afternoon. No she logged the date in
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: the small notebook she kept in her desk drawer. That
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: notebook would become one of the most important documents in
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: the case. The address change looked like a clerical mistake,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: an old man confused, maybe filling out a form he
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: didn't understand. Tammy told herself that, but she wrote it
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: down anyway. Something in her, some trained instinct from seventeen
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: years of watching numbers, made her write it down. Two
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: months later, Tammy's sister Fran drove out to the farmhouse
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: on a Sunday. She noticed something on the mailbox, a
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: strip of tape crossing out Bernard's name with the name
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: Coal written over it. Keith explained it when he appeared
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: from around the side of the house. It was for deliveries,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: he said, so packages would go to the right person.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Simple enough. Tammy logged that too, the mailbox, the date,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the explanation. She had two entries in her notebook now,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: two things that looked like nothing, two things that felt
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: separately like minor inconveniences, and together like something she couldn't
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: quite name. Here's what she didn't know yet. In October
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one, an annuity beneficiary change had been
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: submitted by facts Bernard's signature was on it. The confirmation
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: letter was mailed to Bridell Road. Keith retrieved the mail
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: that day. The letter never reached Bernard's kitchen table. Handwriting
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: analysts would later examine those signatures, the address change form,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: the annuity facts a joint account application. They found the
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: signatures consistent with Bernard's hand, but they found something else too.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: The pen pressure was uneven, the letter spacing showed hesitation
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: at consistent intervals. The analysts described it as guided or
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: copied execution. Someone had walked Bernard through the signing, someone
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: had placed the pen in his hand and directed its movement.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: Bernard's own physician, a geriatric specialist named doctor Anne Pruett,
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: would later state that Bernard lacked the cognitive capacity to
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: understand what those documents meant. He could hold a pen,
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: he could form letters, he could not comprehend what he
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: was authorizing. December arrived, and with it something Tammy could
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: not explain away. She was checking Bernard's bank account through
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: the online portal, something she did routinely to track his
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: utility payments and grocery deliveries. She found an at M
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: withdrawal she didn't recognize and a vender charge she had
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: never seen. She raised it with her children, Meg and Ray.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: They had explanations. Dad gets confused. Maybe he tried to
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: buy something online. Let it go, ma'am. Then Keith offered
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: to help. He came to the farmhouse when Tammy was there,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: sat down across the kitchen table and offered to walk
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: her through the bank's online portal. He was helpful, he
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: was patient. He leaned slightly forward as Tammy typed her
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: login credentials. He watched her hands. By the second week
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: of January twenty twenty two, Tammy's visible account had been
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: drained through a series of internal transfers. A second account,
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Bernard's account, with Keith listed as a joint holder, showed
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: a balance of sixty one thousand dollars. Neither Tammy nor
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Bernard had authorized Keith as a joint holder. The application
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: had been submitted with Bernard's signature. The guided kind eleven transfers,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: every single one of them executed within hours of a
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Wednesday morning, every one of them while Tammy was on
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Pratt Avenue. Nine years of Wednesday volunteer shifts, consistent and
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: predictable as sunrise. He had built his schedule around her absence.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Not once, eleven times. The morning of February eighth, twenty
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: twenty two was cold enough to make the roads dangerous
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: eleven degrees. A winter storm had been moving through Pendall
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: County since before midnight, and by early morning Bredell Road
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: was under several inches of fresh snow. April Vicers was
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: running her plow route before dawn. She knew the road,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: she had run it dozens of times. At six forty
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: seven in the morning, her head lights picked up something
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: in the snow bank at the road side. She slowed.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: She stopped. She got out in eleven degree air and
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: walked toward it. It was a spiral bound ledger, standing
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: upright on its spine, pages fanned slightly open. She picked
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: it up. It was dry, not damp, not frozen at
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: the edges, dry as though it had been placed there
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: moments ago, except the snow packed around its base. Showed
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: no footprints, no tire tracks in the ditch, no disturbance
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: of any kind. The storm had already laid down a
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: fresh layer over everything. Whatever put the ledger there had
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: done so before the heaviest snowfall, and yet the ledger
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: itself had not absorbed a single flake. April Vickers photographed him.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Then she called the sheriff at six fifty three in
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: the morning. The ledger's contents, when investigators opened it, were
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: precise and domestic in the worst possible way. Women's names,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: home addresses, dollar amounts, and next to several of the entries,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: and the same ball point hand two words closed out,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: four names, four sets of numbers, four dresses across three
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Ohio counties, a trail running from two thousand fourteen to
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: two thousand twenty. None of those women had filed charges.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: According to investigators, none of them had known how to
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: name what had happened to them. That afternoon, Tammy's colleague,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Steff Rains, covered part of her Wednesday shift. Tammy drove
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: out to the farmhouse. She wasn't supposed to go that evening.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: She had gone to retrieve her father's medication tray, which
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: she had forgotten. That morning. She found Keith Cole at
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: her father's roll top desk. He had a banker's box
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: open beside him. He was photographing documents. One of them
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: showed the header of an annuity statement, the same annuity
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: whose beneficiary designation had been changed by facts four months earlier.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: The letter Bernard had never seen Tammy did not confront him.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: She told him she had forgotten her glasses. She moved
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: through the house calmly, located the medication tray, took photographs
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: of the desk and the open box with her phone,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: and left. The next morning, she called Lloyd Turner at
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Pendell County Adult Protective Services. That phone call took fourteen minutes.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: In that fourteen minutes, Tammy read Turner entries from her notebook,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: the September address change, the mailbox tape in November, the
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: December bank portal session. Turner had spent eleven years in
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Adult Protective Services after a career in insurance investigation. He
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: would later describe the pattern Tammy laid out as unusually methodical.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: He opened a case the same day picture the Brede
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Road farmhouse. At two in the morning, two weeks before April,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Vickers found the ledger a storm building to the east,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: the roads empty, a truck moving without urgency through the dark,
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: its driver knowing exactly where everything in that house was kept.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: One version of events goes like this. Keith Cole had
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: been managing the documentation of his operation four years. The
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: ledger was his record names totals status. He kept it
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: because he needed it, the same way a contractor keeps
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: job files when the investigation began to close around him.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: He drove Bredell Road during the storm and dropped it
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: from the window, not carelessly with intention. A problem disposed
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: of in the dark. But this version has a problem.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: A dry ledge standing upright on its spine in a
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: snow bank does not behave like something thrown from a
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: moving truck. Something thrown lands flat or tumbles or disappears
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: into soft snow. This object was vertical, stable, dry in
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: conditions where moisture was everywhere. Lloyd Turner's working theory, stated
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: as probable not certain, is that the timing of the
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: storm explains the dryness. The heaviest snowfall on Bridell Road
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: fell between two and four in the morning. If Keith
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: drove the route earlier in the night, during the lighter
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: phase of the storm, the ledger could have landed upright
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: in a firmer snow base before the heavy accumulation covered
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: the surrounding tracks. Wind and fresh snow erased the evidence
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: of arrival. The ledger itself was sheltered by its own
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: vertical position against further moisture. It is the most coherent
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: explanation in the record. It is not a confirmed one.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: What the ledger's condition does firm is this, whoever lost
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: it did not intend to lose it. There the ledger
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: was a working document. The names inside it were not trophies.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: They were operational, closed out meant finished, managed, resolved. The
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: ledger was how Keith Cole tracked what he had taken
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: and from whom, across eight years and three counties. That
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: is the recontextualization. The ledger forces every repair job, every
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: legitimate work order, every Wednesday morning, visit to a farmhouse
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: where an elderly man sat alone. They were not random opportunities.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: They were entries in a system. Bernhard Schnyder was not
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: the beginning of something. He was the continuation of something
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: that had been running since twenty fourteen. The eleven transfer
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: timeline that forensic accountant Brian Holst presented on day four
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: of the November trial did not describe a man who
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: had seen a chance and taken. It described a man
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: who had built a schedule around another person's weekly absence
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: over months, with the precision of someone who had done
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: this before. Each transfer within hours of a Wednesday, each
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: one moving money through a joint account. Keith had placed
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: himself on using Bernard's guided hand. When Holst finished presenting
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: the timeline, Keith Cole entered an Alford plea. Then within
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: the same session he reversed it. Then he entered a
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: full guilty admission seven counts of financial exploitation of a
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: vulnerable adult, two counts of identity fraud. Six years. The
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: four women named in the ledger had never filed charges.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: They had lived for years with the particular confusion of
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: someone whose reality had been quietly re arranged, money gone,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: documents altered, a helpful man who had made himself essential
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: and then disappeared. They had not known what to call it.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: The Ledger gave investigators a name and a number for
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: each of them. Long after Keith Cole had moved on,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Tammy Snyder had kept a notebook. She had written down
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: the date of a suspicious phone call, a strip of
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: tape on a mailbox, a bank session. She couldn't explain
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: she had done this before she had any reason to
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: believe those notes would matter. That notebook, alongside her photographs
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: from the evening of February eighth, formed the connective tissue
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: of a case that might otherwise have looked like the
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: ordinary confusion of an old man's finances. Bernard Snyder had
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: led a man into his house because his daughter called
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: a number on a card, because the gutters needed cleaning,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: because someone had knocked and offered to help. The door
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: was ordinary. What walked through it had been planning for years.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: The case file on Keith Cole closed in November twenty
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: twenty two, but several things about it refused to stay
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: filed after the verdict. Lloyd Turner, the Adult Protective Services
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: investigator who had worked the case for nine months, described
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: the eleven transfer timeline as unusually methodical. That phrase carries
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: weight when you consider what it actually means. Keith Cole
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: had not acted impulsively or greedily or recklessly. He had
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: acted like someone who had solved the same problem before
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: and knew exactly where the friction points were. He built
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: a schedule around a woman's Wednesday volunteering routine, nine years
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: of Wednesdays, nine years of predictable absence, and he used
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: that window repeatedly to move money through accounts. He had
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: engineered his way onto. The handwriting analysis confirmed what the
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: timeline implied Bernard Snyder's signatures on the annuity beneficiary change
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: and the joint account application were consistent with his own hand,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: not forged, produced according to the consultant, under likely direction,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: pen pressure, and spacing, suggesting someone had walked him through
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: each line. Bernard had signed what he was shown to
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: sign by a man who had made himself welcome at
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: that table. Doctor Anne Pruitt, the geriatric physician who assessed
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Bernard after the investigation began ben concluded that he had
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: lacked the capacity to understand those transactions at the time
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: they occurred. He had not known what he was agreeing to.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: He had trusted the man in the room. Seven counts
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: of financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, two counts of
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: identity fraud six years. That sentence covers what happened to
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Tammy Bernard. It does not cover what happened before the ledger,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: found standing in a snow bank on Breadel Road at
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: six forty seven in the morning of February eighth, two
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: thousand twenty two, contained four additional names, women, addresses in
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: three Ohio counties, dollar amounts, and next to each name
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: in the same ball point hand closed out investigators traced
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the pattern back took two thousand, fourteen, eight years, three counties.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Keith had worked each area as a contractor, a utility technician,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: a delivery driver arriving with a legitimate reason, staying with
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: a manufactured one. None of those four women had filed charges.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: None had known at the time what to call what
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: had happened to them. They had experienced the confusion, the
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: missing money, the man who had seemed helpful and then
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: was simply gone. The ledger was the first time anyone
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: had assigned those losses a structure. After the conviction, two
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: of the four additional victims were contacted by investigators. According
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: to reports, both confirmed losses consistent with what the ledger recorded.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Whether any of those cases will yield further charges has
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: not been publicly confirmed. The sentence Keith call received six
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: years applies to the counts he admitted under the weight
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: of a forensic accountant's testimony on day four of trial.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: He did not come forward, He did not explain, He
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: reversed an alfred plea, and then, within the same court session,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: entered a full guilty admission. The admission came when there
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: was no other viable direction. There is something specific about
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: this case that stays with you. And it is not
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: the money. It is the note book. Tammy Snyder worked
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: a full time job for seventeen years at a billing
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: coordinator's desk. She drove to her father's farmhouse on Bredell Road,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: the house where she grew up, and she watched and
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: she wrote things down. The data bank representative called about
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: an address change, a strip of tape on a mailbox
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: with a stranger's name on it the date. She sat
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: at her father's table and typed her own login into
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: a bank portal while a man she had been taught
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: to trust as a helper watched from across the table.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: She wrote those things down before she knew they would matter.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: She did it because something felt wrong, and she was
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: the kind of person who records what feels wrong, even
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: when the people closest to her. Her daughter, her son
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: told her she was probably overthinking it. That note book,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: alongside the photographs she took on the evening of February eighth,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: formed the backbone of a case that might otherwise have
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: dissolved into the ordinary confusion of an old man's finances.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Keith Cole had counted on that confusion He had built
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: his entire method around the assumption that no one would
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: assemble the pieces, because the pieces were spread across months,
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: across institutions, across a family's ordinary blind spots. He was
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: nearly right. What he had not planned for was a
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: woman who trusted her own observations enough to date them.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Bernard Snyder is eighty three years old. He lost his
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: wife in the spring of two thousand nineteen. He led
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: a man into his farm house because his daughter called
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: a number on a card, and because the gutters needed work,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: and because some one had knocked and offered to help.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: He signed what he was shown to sign. He had
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: no way to know what he was agreeing to. He
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: had moderate vascular dementia and the ordinary trust of a
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: man who believed the person beside him was there to
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: assist him. That trust was the thing Keith Cole had
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: priced out and collected the prior victims for women whose
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: names appeared in a ledger recovered from a snow bank
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: lived for years with a particular kind of confusion. Money,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: missing documents altered a man who had made himself essential
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: and then wasn't there anymore. They had not known what
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to call it. They may still be working out how
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: to name it. This kind of harm is quiet by design.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: It leaves no visible mark. It dismantles a person's financial
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: reality so gradually, so plausibly, that the person being taken
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: from is often the last to believe it happened at all.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: Tammy Snyder believed it. She wrote it down, and then
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: she called This show is made by Oboe Media.