Latest / Why Humans Lie / The Mentor Who Made Her Disappear: Groomed, Trapped, Betrayed
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At six forty two in the morning on March fifth,
- 0:07Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a fourteen year old paper carrier named
- 0:12Speaker 1: Russell Carter noticed that the front door of forty one
- 0:15Speaker 1: Delwood Terrace was standing open. He knew the woman who
- 0:19Speaker 1: lived there. He had shoveled her front walk two winters
- 0:23Speaker 1: in a row. He stopped, looked and called his mother.
- 0:27Speaker 1: Her coat was on the hook, her keys were on
- 0:30Speaker 1: the counter, her bag sat untouched near the door, and
- 0:34Speaker 1: on the kitchen table under the pale overhead light lay
- 0:37Speaker 1: a laminated employee badge from a company called Callaway Systems Group.
- 0:42Speaker 1: Alice Powell's name was printed on it in clean black letters.
- 0:46Speaker 1: The problem was simple and absolute. Alice had told at
- 0:51Speaker 1: least two people that she had never received that badge,
- 0:54Speaker 1: not once, not ever. That badge would take four years
- 0:59Speaker 1: to explain, and the explanation would be worse than any
- 1:02Speaker 1: one first imagined. Alice Powell was thirty one years old
- 1:06Speaker 1: when she accepted the junior data analyst position at Callaway
- 1:10Speaker 1: Systems Group in January of two thousand fifteen. She had
- 1:14Speaker 1: driven to Prentice, Ohio from a smaller town two counties over,
- 1:19Speaker 1: signed a lease on a ground floor apartment at forty
- 1:22Speaker 1: one Delwood Terrace and started building something careful and deliberate.
- 1:27Speaker 1: People who worked near her described the same person in
- 1:30Speaker 1: almost the same words, punctual, methodical, the kind of colleague
- 1:35Speaker 1: who remembered what you mentioned in passing and followed up
- 1:38Speaker 1: a week later. Her morning routine was fixed and unhurried.
- 1:44Speaker 1: Every week day, at six ten, she left the apartment,
- 1:46Speaker 1: walked the length of Penfield Creek, crossed the Alcott Road bridge,
- 1:51Speaker 1: looped through the park, and was back inside before seven
- 1:55Speaker 1: forty minutes, the same path, the same order. It was
- 1:59Speaker 1: the a kind of routine that belongs to someone who
- 2:02Speaker 1: finds steadiness useful. She was good at her job from
- 2:06Speaker 1: the beginning. Her supervisor, Frank Ostrotsky, was stretched thin across
- 2:11Speaker 1: multiple teams and delegated much of her day to day
- 2:15Speaker 1: mentorship informally without much scrutiny. That informality would matter later.
- 2:21Speaker 1: What it created in the short term was an opening.
- 2:24Speaker 1: Dennis Wells filled it. Wells was fifty three years old
- 2:28Speaker 1: that January, a senior director of operations with eleven years
- 2:32Speaker 1: at Callaway. In the kind of institutional gravity that comes
- 2:35Speaker 1: from simply being the person everyone already knows He noticed
- 2:39Speaker 1: Alice within two weeks of her start date, not in
- 2:43Speaker 1: a way anyone flagged, in a way that looked from
- 2:46Speaker 1: every angle like professional interest. He introduced himself after a
- 2:51Speaker 1: departmental briefing. He asked about her background. He told her
- 2:55Speaker 1: she had good instincts for systems analysis and that he
- 2:58Speaker 1: wanted to make sure she had the support to develop them.
- 3:02Speaker 1: Over the following months, he became a reliable presence, available
- 3:05Speaker 1: before meetings, generous with context, quick to position her work
- 3:09Speaker 1: favorably in conversations. She was not part of what Alice experienced,
- 3:13Speaker 1: according to records later documented by her therapist, Teresa Zeller,
- 3:18Speaker 1: was the specific relief of feeling seen inside a large organization.
- 3:22Speaker 1: Wells was senior, He was connected. He seemed to understand
- 3:27Speaker 1: what she was trying to build before she had fully
- 3:29Speaker 1: articulated it herself. That feeling of being understood early and
- 3:34Speaker 1: completely is not a small thing. It shapes where a
- 3:37Speaker 1: person places their trust. By the autumn of twenty fifteen,
- 3:42Speaker 1: roughly eight months in, the relationship had taken on a
- 3:45Speaker 1: structure that looked from the outside like mentorship and felt
- 3:50Speaker 1: from the inside like belonging. Alice consulted Wells before major decisions.
- 3:55Speaker 1: She accepted his characterizations of colleagues without independently verifying them.
- 4:01Speaker 1: She began gradually, and without noticing it, to root her
- 4:05Speaker 1: professional world through his perspective. That autumn, Wells made his
- 4:10Speaker 1: first visible move. He told Alice that a colleague named
- 4:13Speaker 1: Brian Foot had been quietly positioning himself to claim credit
- 4:18Speaker 1: for a project that was hers. There was no evidence
- 4:21Speaker 1: this was true. Foot, by every account from people who
- 4:25Speaker 1: knew him, was a quiet man who ate lunch at
- 4:29Speaker 1: his own desk and had no particular ambition toward Alice's work.
- 4:33Speaker 1: But Wells described it as a pattern, as something he
- 4:36Speaker 1: had seen before, as something he was protecting her from.
- 4:40Speaker 1: Alice believed him. She pulled back from Foot, She stopped
- 4:44Speaker 1: sharing drafts with him, She stopped eating lunch near him.
- 4:48Speaker 1: It was one sentence from one trusted person, and it
- 4:51Speaker 1: worked completely. The mechanism Wells had built did not announce itself.
- 4:55Speaker 1: It never does. What Alice felt at every stage was
- 4:59Speaker 1: not control. What she felt was care. That distinction is
- 5:03Speaker 1: the center of everything that followed. The isolation of Alice
- 5:07Speaker 1: Powell did not happen in a single moment. It happened
- 5:10Speaker 1: in layers, each one arriving as something useful. In two
- 5:14Speaker 1: thousand sixteen, Wells proposed that Alice join a professional development
- 5:19Speaker 1: round table he was facilitating internally at Callaway Systems. It
- 5:23Speaker 1: met every other Thursday. It positioned her as some one
- 5:27Speaker 1: being groomed for advancement. She accepted. What the round table
- 5:32Speaker 1: actually did was structure her professional social time around Wells
- 5:35Speaker 1: himself in a setting where he controlled the agenda and
- 5:39Speaker 1: the conversation. Around the same time, a colleague named Nora
- 5:42Speaker 1: Pham tried to include Alice in a running club that
- 5:45Speaker 1: met on Friday mornings. FAM was warm, organized, well regarded,
- 5:51Speaker 1: but Wells had already told Alice that FAM was difficult
- 5:54Speaker 1: to work with someone whose friendliness masked competitive instincts. There
- 5:58Speaker 1: was no evidence of this, by every account from people
- 6:01Speaker 1: who knew her. Nora Pham was exactly what she appeared
- 6:05Speaker 1: to be. Alice declined the invitation. She later told her
- 6:09Speaker 1: therapist she had felt at the time like she was
- 6:13Speaker 1: protecting herself. That sentence took years to unpack. By the
- 6:17Speaker 1: end of two thousand sixteen, Alice's professional circle had contracted
- 6:22Speaker 1: almost entirely to Wells. He reviewed her projects, he framed
- 6:26Speaker 1: her performance reviews. He was the person she called when
- 6:30Speaker 1: something went wrong and the person she thanked when something
- 6:33Speaker 1: went right. Her supervisor, a tired man named Frank Ostrotski,
- 6:37Speaker 1: had long since delegated Alice's development to Wells without question.
- 6:42Speaker 1: There was no second set of eyes. In two thousand seventeen,
- 6:46Speaker 1: Wells introduced a financial arrangement. He told Alice he had
- 6:50Speaker 1: access to a private investment vehicle through a contact named
- 6:53Speaker 1: Todd Briggs, a licensed financial adviser. The returns Wells said
- 6:58Speaker 1: were consistent and reliable. He had used it himself. Alice,
- 7:03Speaker 1: who had been careful with money since her mid twenties,
- 7:06Speaker 1: moved forty thousand dollars into the account. What she did
- 7:09Speaker 1: not know, and what was never shown to her in writing,
- 7:13Speaker 1: was that the account operated under a tripartite arrangement that
- 7:17Speaker 1: gave Wells partial control over the funds. The returns Briggs
- 7:22Speaker 1: reported to Alice were fabricated from the beginning. Every statement
- 7:26Speaker 1: she received was a document designed to make her feel
- 7:28Speaker 1: financially stable and tied to the arrangement. Here is the
- 7:33Speaker 1: thing that does not register until you see the whole picture.
- 7:36Speaker 1: At this point, Wells held three things simultaneously. Alice's professional reputation,
- 7:42Speaker 1: her primary social network, and a significant portion of her savings.
- 7:47Speaker 1: She did not experience this as dependency. She experienced it
- 7:51Speaker 1: as a life that was working. Alice resigned from Callaway
- 7:55Speaker 1: Systems in July of two thousand eighteen. The reason, according
- 8:00Speaker 1: to records from her therapist, was the promotion. A senior
- 8:04Speaker 1: analyst position had opened and Alice had been the natural candidate.
- 8:08Speaker 1: She had the tenure, the performance record, the project history.
- 8:13Speaker 1: She did not get it. What she did not know
- 8:16Speaker 1: was that Wells had sat on the selection committee and
- 8:18Speaker 1: had the capacity to shape how her candidacy was presented.
- 8:22Speaker 1: She never learned the specifics. What she knew was that
- 8:26Speaker 1: the job went to someone else, and that Wells, when
- 8:28Speaker 1: she told him, was sympathetic and affirming and told her
- 8:32Speaker 1: the decision reflected badly on the organization, not on her.
- 8:36Speaker 1: She believed him, then she left. The off boarding was
- 8:40Speaker 1: handled informally managed by Wells rather than routed through human resources.
- 8:46Speaker 1: Her access badge was never formally deactivated. It stayed in
- 8:50Speaker 1: wells possession. He told no one. January of two thoy nineteen,
- 8:56Speaker 1: Alice sat in the office of a therapist named Teresa
- 8:59Speaker 1: Zele at a small non profit organization in Canton, Ohio.
- 9:04Speaker 1: Her primary care physician had referred her weeks earlier, noting insomnia,
- 9:09Speaker 1: loss of appetite, and what the clinical notes described as
- 9:13Speaker 1: a flat affect. Alice did not arrive with a theory
- 9:16Speaker 1: about what had happened to her. She arrived exhausted. Over
- 9:20Speaker 1: eleven sessions, Zeller documented something methodical. When Alice described her
- 9:26Speaker 1: years at Callaway, she described them in Wells's language. She
- 9:31Speaker 1: used his framings for colleagues. She repeated his explanations for
- 9:34Speaker 1: her own decisions. When Zeller asked Alice why she had
- 9:38Speaker 1: declined the running club in twenty sixteen, Alice gave an
- 9:42Speaker 1: answer she had carried for three years as her own.
- 9:46Speaker 1: When Zeller asked where that impression of Nora fam had
- 9:49Speaker 1: come from, Alice stopped. She could trace it to one conversation.
- 9:53Speaker 1: This is the moment that rewrites every previous scene. Not
- 9:56Speaker 1: a dramatic confrontation, not a discovered document. A pause in
- 10:01Speaker 1: a therapist's office in Canton, Ohio in early two thousand nineteen,
- 10:06Speaker 1: when Alice Powell began to notice that the map of
- 10:08Speaker 1: her professional world had been drawn by some one else.
- 10:11Speaker 1: Cellar documented a complete behavioral time line, and then she
- 10:15Speaker 1: did something that would become consequential. She contacted a victim's
- 10:20Speaker 1: advocacy organization, which connected her to Detective Margot Osay of
- 10:24Speaker 1: the Prentice Police Department. On February fourteenth of two thousand, nineteen,
- 10:29Speaker 1: eleven days before Alice disappeared, forty thousand dollars were withdrawn
- 10:34Speaker 1: from the Brigg's investment account. Osi would later note the
- 10:38Speaker 1: timing in her case fim the money moved first, then
- 10:42Speaker 1: the isolation was complete, then Alice vanished. There is something
- 10:47Speaker 1: about that sequence that requires sitting with The withdrawal did
- 10:51Speaker 1: not follow the disappearance, it preceded it. Whatever Wells was
- 10:55Speaker 1: planning in those eleven days, he moved the money before
- 10:59Speaker 1: he moved anything else. When investigators working with Detective Osia
- 11:04Speaker 1: executed the subpoena on Wells's personal files, they expected to
- 11:08Speaker 1: find evidence of the financial arrangement with Briggs. They found that,
- 11:12Speaker 1: but they also found something no one had anticipated. There
- 11:16Speaker 1: was a folder. It had been organized by year, starting
- 11:19Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. It was labeled with Alice's initials. Inside
- 11:24Speaker 1: were our schedules, her financial account information, her known relationships.
- 11:29Speaker 1: A subfolder contained the investment account records, including the fabricated
- 11:33Speaker 1: return statements going back to the beginning. Another section held
- 11:37Speaker 1: what appeared to be hand written notes on her daily routine,
- 11:40Speaker 1: including the six ten morning walk along Penfield Creek to
- 11:44Speaker 1: the Alcott Road bridge and back. Wells had been building
- 11:48Speaker 1: this for four years. Picture what that folder means for
- 11:52Speaker 1: everything that came before, every sympathetic conversation about her career,
- 11:57Speaker 1: every warning about a difficult colleague, every recommendation about money.
- 12:01Speaker 1: Each of those moments now sits inside a different architecture entirely.
- 12:06Speaker 1: The care was the system. The mentorship was the map.
- 12:09Speaker 1: The strongest version of what the evidence shows runs like this.
- 12:13Speaker 1: Wells identified Alice Powell within two weeks of her arrival
- 12:18Speaker 1: at Callaway in January of twenty fifteen. Over the following
- 12:22Speaker 1: four years, he constructed a controlled environment using the legitimate
- 12:26Speaker 1: vocabulary of professional support. The isolation was real, but invisible
- 12:31Speaker 1: because it arrived as protection. The financial dependency was real
- 12:36Speaker 1: but unrecognizable because it arrived as opportunity. When Alice left
- 12:40Speaker 1: Callaway in mid twenty eighteen, Wells did not lose his
- 12:45Speaker 1: position in her life. He had designed the relationship so
- 12:48Speaker 1: that leaving the job did not mean leaving him. But
- 12:52Speaker 1: that version of the story runs directly into a complication.
- 12:56Speaker 1: If the goal was control, why allow Alice to resign?
- 13:00Speaker 1: Why not intervene in the promotion committee in a way
- 13:03Speaker 1: that kept her inside the building where the access and
- 13:06Speaker 1: the oversight were easier. The folder existed, the financial arrangement existed,
- 13:12Speaker 1: and yet the outcome in mid two thousand eighteen was
- 13:16Speaker 1: that Alice was gone from the daily structure Wells had
- 13:20Speaker 1: spent years building around her. One reading is that Wells
- 13:24Speaker 1: miscalculated that his interference in the promotion process was intended
- 13:29Speaker 1: to fracture her confidence and renew her dependence, not to
- 13:33Speaker 1: push her out entirely, that her resignation was a variable.
- 13:36Speaker 1: He did not plan for the behavior that followed. The badge,
- 13:40Speaker 1: he kept, the money, he moved eleven days before March fifth.
- 13:43Speaker 1: Wonder fifth, The six fifty eight call he placed four
- 13:47Speaker 1: minutes before her usual departure time suggests some one improvising
- 13:51Speaker 1: around the situation that had gone in a direction he
- 13:54Speaker 1: did not choose. The other reading is colder, that the folder,
- 13:58Speaker 1: the badge, and the financial control were never about keeping
- 14:02Speaker 1: Alice at Callaway at all, That the workplace was always
- 14:06Speaker 1: just the first room. That what Wells documented in that
- 14:09Speaker 1: folder over four years was not a professional record, It
- 14:13Speaker 1: was a return address. Sandra Cho was found six days
- 14:17Speaker 1: after she disappeared, in a vacant property in Grover County.
- 14:21Speaker 1: That was twenty twelve. Wells was working a logistics firm
- 14:25Speaker 1: in Grover County at the time. Choe never identified her attacker.
- 14:30Speaker 1: The case sat unresolved for seven years until April of
- 14:34Speaker 1: twenty twenty, when a detective from Grover County called Margo
- 14:38Speaker 1: Ossay and asked if the name Dennis Wells meant anything
- 14:41Speaker 1: to her. It meant everything. Wells declined to speak about
- 14:45Speaker 1: Sandra Cho. That is officially where that thread ends. But
- 14:50Speaker 1: the folder, the badge, the walk route noted in handwriting,
- 14:55Speaker 1: the eleven day window between the money and the disappearance.
- 14:58Speaker 1: Each of those details sits differently now, not because Wells
- 15:03Speaker 1: confessed to anything involving Choe, because the evidence from the
- 15:06Speaker 1: Powell case shows with documented specificity that this was not
- 15:11Speaker 1: the first time Wells had built a map. On the
- 15:14Speaker 1: morning of March ninth, twenty nineteen, four days after Alice
- 15:18Speaker 1: Powell vanished from her home on Delwood Terrace, a responding
- 15:22Speaker 1: unit located a rented storage facility in Lyndon Township, eleven
- 15:26Speaker 1: miles outside Prentice. Alice was inside. She was alive. Her
- 15:31Speaker 1: left wrist had a hairline fracture. She was dehydrated and restrained.
- 15:36Speaker 1: That same afternoon, Detective Marca Asai drove to Denis Wells's
- 15:41Speaker 1: home in Prentice. He was arrested without incident. He was
- 15:45Speaker 1: held without bail. Wells said nothing of consequence for six months.
- 15:50Speaker 1: What broke the silence was not forensic pressure. It was
- 15:54Speaker 1: a conversation Wells chose to have inside Alderton County jail
- 15:59Speaker 1: awaiting trial. Wells described the Powell case in detail to
- 16:03Speaker 1: his cellmate Scott Varner, who was himself awaiting trial on
- 16:07Speaker 1: an unrelated fraud charge. Varner contacted his attorney. The monitoring
- 16:12Speaker 1: recording reached the prosecution. When Wells was informed the audio existed,
- 16:18Speaker 1: he confessed formally three days later, in September of two
- 16:21Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. The confession confirmed what the Subpoenodpiles had already shown.
- 16:27Speaker 1: The folder organized by year, labeled with Alice's initials, the
- 16:31Speaker 1: walk route recorded in handwriting, the fabricated investment returns, the
- 16:36Speaker 1: badge he had kept after her departure, which he described
- 16:39Speaker 1: in the confession as a contingency he had always wanted
- 16:43Speaker 1: a way back in. In March of two thousand twenty,
- 16:46Speaker 1: Dennis Wells was convicted on four counts kidnapping, unlawful restraint, theft,
- 16:52Speaker 1: and financial fraud. The sentence was twenty two years. The
- 16:57Speaker 1: forty thousand dollars Alice had invested through Todd Briggs's account
- 17:02Speaker 1: under an arrangement that gave Well's partial control and that
- 17:05Speaker 1: was never shown to Alice in writing, was gone. The
- 17:09Speaker 1: returns she had been shown for two years were fabricated
- 17:12Speaker 1: from the beginning. Teresa Zeller, the licensed therapist who had
- 17:16Speaker 1: worked with Alice through eleven sessions between January and March
- 17:19Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, had already done something before Alice
- 17:23Speaker 1: was found. She contacted a victim advocacy organization and asked
- 17:27Speaker 1: them to connect her to Prentice p D. That referral
- 17:31Speaker 1: reached Detective Assay. Zeller's documentation of Alice's behavioral time line,
- 17:36Speaker 1: the crew's sleeplessness, the flattened affect, the pattern of decisions
- 17:41Speaker 1: that looked inexplicable until they were mapped against what Wells
- 17:44Speaker 1: had done, became part of the evidentiary record. The case
- 17:48Speaker 1: did not end with the conviction. In April of twenty twenty,
- 17:53Speaker 1: a detective from Grover County contacted Margot Essay. Sandra Chou
- 17:58Speaker 1: had disappeared in two thousand twelve logistics firm in Grover County,
- 18:02Speaker 1: where Wells had worked between two thousand and nine and
- 18:05Speaker 1: twenty thirteen. Cho had been found six days after her
- 18:10Speaker 1: disappearance in a vacant property. She never identified her attacker.
- 18:14Speaker 1: The case had sat unresolved for seven years. The structural
- 18:18Speaker 1: similarities to the Powell case prompted Grover County to reopen
- 18:22Speaker 1: the file. Wells declined to speak about Sandrid Show. No
- 18:26Speaker 1: new charges have been publicly confirmed in connection with that case.
- 18:31Speaker 1: Alice Powell was thirty one years old when Dennis Wells
- 18:34Speaker 1: identified her in a conference room at Callaway Systems Group.
- 18:39Speaker 1: She was new competent, and she trusted the structure around
- 18:43Speaker 1: her to be what it appeared to be. That trust
- 18:46Speaker 1: was not a flaw, it was the quality Wells selected for.
- 18:50Speaker 1: What the evidence documents across four years of meticulous files
- 18:55Speaker 1: is not rage or impulsivity, It is patience. Wells built
- 18:59Speaker 1: the conditions of Alice's isolation, one relationship at a time,
- 19:04Speaker 1: one fabricated return statement at a time, one calendar entry
- 19:08Speaker 1: at a time. He was still building the morning he
- 19:10Speaker 1: called her at five fifty eight, four minutes before she
- 19:15Speaker 1: would have walked out her door. The badge on her
- 19:17Speaker 1: kitchen table was the last object a fourteen year old
- 19:21Speaker 1: paper carrier saw before he called his mother and changed
- 19:24Speaker 1: the course of the investigation. A badge Alice had told
- 19:28Speaker 1: people she never received, a badge Wells had kept for
- 19:31Speaker 1: eight months after she resigned, because he had always intended
- 19:35Speaker 1: there to be a way back in. There is something
- 19:37Speaker 1: in the specificity of this case that resists easy framing.
- 19:41Speaker 1: It is not a story about a monster who was invisible.
- 19:44Speaker 1: The people around Alice saw pieces of it. A supervisor
- 19:48Speaker 1: who deferred too easily, a colleague left confused by a
- 19:52Speaker 1: friendship that suddenly cooled. A therapist who recognized, in Alice's words,
- 19:57Speaker 1: a pattern she had documented before. The system did not
- 20:01Speaker 1: fail catastrophically in one moment. It failed incrementally in dozens
- 20:06Speaker 1: of small delegations and unasked questions across years Alice Powell survived.
- 20:13Speaker 1: That fact is not incidental to this story. It is
- 20:16Speaker 1: the story What she carried out of that storage unit
- 20:19Speaker 1: in Lyndon Township and what she has chosen to do
- 20:22Speaker 1: with it is not part of the public record. What
- 20:26Speaker 1: is on record is that eleven sessions with a therapist
- 20:30Speaker 1: who took her seriously, who mapped what she described against
- 20:34Speaker 1: what she could not yet name, led directly to the
- 20:37Speaker 1: call that reached the detective who found her. Sometimes the
- 20:40Speaker 1: intervention that matters is the one that happens eleven days,
- 20:44Speaker 1: too late to stop everything, but not too late to
- 20:47Speaker 1: stop the ending. Denis Wells will be eligible for consideration
- 20:51Speaker 1: in the mid two thousand forties. Sandracho's case remains open.
- 20:56Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia.