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The Mentor Who Stole Her Life: Warm Mug, Missing Key, Betrayal · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At six twenty in the morning on a Tuesday in
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: early April, a County snowplow operator named Teresa Holmes turned
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: on to Aldermore Road and saw something that made her
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: stop the truck. The front door of the house at
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: forty one fourteen was standing wide open. Interior lights lazed
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: into the dark. A thin column of warm air curled
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: out into the cold like breath. She radioed despatch inside.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: The coffee mug on the counter was still faintly warm.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: The toast sat half eaten on a plate. A coat
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: hung on its hook. Car keys rested on the counter.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: The reading glasses were on the chair arm, exactly where
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: someone sets them when they expect to come back. The
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: television murmured morning news at low volume. Everything in that
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: house said she just stepped away for a moment. But
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Deputy James Palto, who arrived within minutes, noticed something that
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: changed the shape of the morning entirely. A thin ryme
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: of ice had formed on the interior hardwood floor, right
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: at the threshold ice inside the house. Pelto understood what
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: that meant. The door had been opened long enough for
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: the temperature inside to drop below freezing. This was not
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: a moment this had been hours. Aaron Walsh, forty eight
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: years old, was nowhere. What followed would take nine days,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: two states of investigation, and the slow unraveling of something
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: far more calculated than a disappearance. Because the question was
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: never simply where Erin went. The question was how completely
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: one person can dismantle another's sense of their own reality,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: and how long that can go undetected. Aaron Walsh had
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: lived at forty one fourteen Aldemore Road for six years,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: long enough that the neighbors knew her car by sound,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: long enough that the sedan in the driveway with a
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: quarter inch of undisturbed snow on the roof told investigators
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: everything they needed to know. She had not driven anywhere.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: She was forty eight, a part time medical billing coordinator
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: at the Crestfield practice where she had worked for nine years.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Divorced from Dennis Walsh. Her daughter Meghan twenty two, lived
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: three hours away. Her sister, Janet Pryor called every Wednesday
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: without fail, and Erin always called back. She kept a
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: paper planner, She tended a vegetable garden in the backyard.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: She drove the same sedan for six years because she
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: saw no reason to change what worked. These are not
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: minor details. They are the portrait of a woman who
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: was organized, consistent, and grounded in her own routines. She
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: did not drink coffee. Her sister knew it, her coworkers
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: knew it. Marge Klein knew it. Marche Klein was the
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: reason Erin drove eleven miles every Tuesday to Birchwood Commons
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: for thirty one consecutive months. Erin made that drive. She
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: brought lemon Tea, a specific brand that Birchwood did not stock,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: and stayed two to three hours. The staff there recognized
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: her by name before she reached the front desk. They
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: recognized her car before she parked it. The last time
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Aerin visited was the Tuesday before she disappeared, the day
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: before the storm. Marge told investigators that Erin seemed off
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: that afternoon, tired, distracted, She asked about the weather forecast twice.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: She left twenty minutes early. Marge didn't think too much
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: of it at the time. People have bad days. Erin
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: always came back the following tuesday. Neil Ericsson entered Erin's
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: life about eighteen months before that last Tuesday. He was
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: fifty three, a self described financial consultant, and he was
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: introduced to her at a Crestfield Public Library fundraiser by
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: a mutual acquaintance named Susan Mack. He was attentive, he
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: was available. He had a quality that clinical psychologist Howard Osborne,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: retained by the County Prosecutor, would later describe with clinical precision.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: He made the person across from him feel understood. Within weeks,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: he was at Aldermore Road several evenings a week. By January,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Aaron's sister Janet noticed something she couldn't quite name. Erin
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: sounded different on their Wednesday calls, less certain of things.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: She would start a sentence and then qualify it, then
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: qualify the qualification. Janet assumed stress people have hard winters.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: What Janet did not know, what no one knew yet,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: was that Ericsson had already begun the work, not dramatically, quietly,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: He had started inserting memories that Erin did not have,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: and he had done it with a single sentence that
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: he repeated in variations across months. When Erin expressed uncertainty
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: about something she had supposedly decided, Ericson would pause, look concerned,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: and say, you seemed really certain. About it at the time.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: I remember because it surprised me that sentence is worth
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: holding for a moment. It does three things simultaneously. It
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: confirms the false memory as real. It adds a witness
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: him who claims to have been present for it. And
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: it frames Erin's uncertainty as the anomaly, not the memory itself.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: He used it to walk her out of a six
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: year book club she loved. He used it to restructure
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: her financial accounts under the cover of tax preparation. He
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: drove her to a medical appointment in February, then referenced
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: that favor repeatedly, tightening the bond of reliance. Howard Osborne's
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: assessment after working with Erin in the months following her
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: return was direct. By late March, Aaron Walsh was frightened.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: She sensed something was wrong, and she had stopped trusting
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: her own memory enough to act on that fear. That
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: is the condition she was in when the door at
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: forty one fourteen was left open to the cold, and
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: there was one more thing that house, something small, sitting
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: on the counter beside the half eaten toast, something that
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: had no business being there at all. The coffee mug
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: was sitting on the counter beside the half eaten toast,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: one mug faintly warm when Deputy Pelto logged it at
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: the scene. Aaron Walsh did not drink coffee. Everyone who
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: knew her confirmed it. Her sister, Janet marge Kline at Birchwood,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: commons the front desk at her work place, not occasionally,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: not rarely, never, so the mug had not been hers.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Detective Norah Aldridge of the Garner County Sheriff's Office noted
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: the discrepancy that same morning. One object in a house
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: full of ordinary things. Everything else in that kitchen told
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: a coherent story. A woman had started her morning, stopped abruptly,
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: and left without her coat, her keys, or her car.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The mug told a different story. It told the story
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of some one else who had been there. Aldridge sent
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: it to the lap. She had other threads to pull first.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: The ATM withdrawal was the second anomaly. Three seventeen, in
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: the afternoon, the day before the door was found open,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: four hundred dollars pulled from Erin's checking account at a
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Crestfield branch, routine transaction on its face, except that at
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: three seventeen Erin's phone records placed her at forty one
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: fourteen Aldermore Road, an eleven minute call to her daughter
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Megan originating from the house. She could not have been
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: at the at m and on that call. At the
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: same moment. Aldridge pulled both records and laid them side
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: by side. Someone had used Erin's card, and whoever had
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: done it knew her pin. That narrowed things considerably. Not
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: a stranger, someone with access to her financial information. Neil
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Erickson had been doing her taxes. He had entered her
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: life eighteen months earlier at a Crestfield Public Library fundraiser.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Introduced through a mutual acquaintance named Susan Mack. He called
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: himself a financial consultant. He was attentive, practically available. He
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: drove Erin to a medical appointment in February when her
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: car was in for service, then mentioned the favor so
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: often in subsequent weeks that it became a fixed point
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: in their shared history, a debt of gratitude that Erin
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: had not quite agreed to accumulate, but found herself caring.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: By January, he was at the Aldermoor Road house several
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: evenings a week, and he had found the back gate
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: a cedar fence ran along the rear of the property.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Built into it was a service gate, a utility access
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: point on an unpaved lane not visible from the street.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Within a month of meeting Erin, Ericsson had located it.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: He walked the access lane multiple times before Erin ever
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: invited him through the front door. A witness never publicly named,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: reported seeing an unfamiliar face on that lane in late October,
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: roughly six weeks after Ericsson and Aaron met. His year
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: five letter to his own attorney, disclosed later through a
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: record's request, confirmed it. He had clocked the timing, he
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: had studied the latch, He had made the gate a habit.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Erin eventually accepted his use of it as informal, comfortable safe.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: That letter is worth holding as a fact because it
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: changes the shape of everything before it. Ericsson had not
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: stumbled into Aaron Walsh's life. He had constructed his entry,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: tested it, and then made himself indispensable before he made
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: himself invisible. Aldridge contacted Diane Corbett on April fourteenth. Erin
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: had been missing for eight days. Corbett lived in Milhaven Township,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: roughly forty miles north of Garner County. Two years earlier,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: she had filed a complaint eighteen months of friendship with
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: a man she described as attentive and practical, a man
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: who restructured her finances, who told her she had agreed
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: to fags she had not agreed to, and who she
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: alleged had drugged her on at least two occasions. The
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: investigation produced no action. Portions of Corbett's complaint were later recanted.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: She would say afterward that the man had convinced her
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: she was misremembering. The physical description in the Millhaven file
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: matched Ericson. The photograph confirmed it. There is a specific
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: quality to the moment when two separate cases file two
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: years apart, forty miles apart, collapse into the same face.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Aldridge had been treating Eron's disappearance as a missing person investigation.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: The Corbett file reframed it this was not a first attempt,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: it was a practiced one. On day eight, Aldridge issued
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: a warrant for Ericsson's financial records. On day nine, a
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: County road crew supervisor in Printer called in a welfare concern.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: A woman at the Scenic Rest Motel, Room eleven had
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: not moved her curtains in three days staff found Aaron
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Walsh inside, alive, physically unharmed, sitting on the edge of
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: the bed. She did not know what day it was.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: She did not know how she had arrived. She believed
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: she had been in the room for approximately two days.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Medical examination indicated approximately five. She had no phone, no identification,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: no money. The water glass on the nightstand tested positive
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: for a sedative compound sufficient according to the toxicology report
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: to impair time perception and short term memory formation. Aaron
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Walsh had not lost nine days. Nine days had been
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: taken from her by the same mechanism in a different
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: form that had been taking smaller things from her for
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: eighteen months. Picture the car coffy mug again, one mug
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: left on the counter beside toast that Erin had not finished.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: The man who left it did not drink coffee either.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: That detail would only surface with the DNA results, but
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: when it did, it produced a specific question why leave
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: it at all. One version of events arranges itself around opportunity.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Erickson arrived through the back gate. He had the timing mapped,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the latch memorized, and something happened quickly before Aaron could
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: object or call out. The mug was incidental, a cup
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: he had poured, perhaps to create a pretense of an
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: ordinary visit, and then left behind in the speed of
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: whatever came next. Under this reading, the mug is an
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: accident of haste. But that version collapses the moment you
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: read his letter. He left it intentionally, He said so
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: himself to his own attorney, five years after his conviction.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: He left it believing no one would connect it to him,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: not because he was careless, because he had spent eighteen
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: months building a world in which his presence in that
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: house was unremarkable. A cup on the counter in Aaron
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: Walsh's kitchen was not evidence. It was furniture. That is
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: the inversion the letter produces. The mug was not a mistake.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: It was the final proof of how completely the manipulation
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: had worked. In his own assessment of it, he had
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: made himself so ordinary, so woven into the domestic texture
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: of her life, that he believed a trace of himself
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: would read as nothing. The object he thought would disappear
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: into the background is the object that put him in
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: a cell. Howard Osborne, the clinical psychologist retained by the
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: County Prosecutor, worked with erin beginning in May three weeks
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: after her return. His assessment, presented over two years of testimony,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: gave the jury a framework for what Ericson had built learned.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Helplessness a state in which the repeated experience of having
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: one's own persons corrected gently, patiently by someone whose authority
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: you have come to accept, produces a condition where the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: person stops trusting their own memory as a reliable guide
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: to action. By late March, Aaron knew something was wrong.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: She felt it. She simply could not trust the feeling
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: enough to act on it, because she had been trained,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: slowly and without drama, not to trust herself. Diane Corbett's
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: testimony was admitted at trial as pattern evidence. Two women,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: two counties, the same architecture of access, reliance, financial insertion,
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: and finally sedation and displacement. Corbett had recanted portions of
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: her original complaint. She said on the stand that she
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: had recanted because the man she was complaining about had
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: told her she was misremembering. The jury understood that sentence immediately.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Neil Erickson was convicted on six counts, two of unlawful restraint,
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: one of criminal imp personation, two of financial fraud, and
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: one of administering a controlled substance without consent. He filed
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: three appeals, all failed. The coffee mug he left on
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: the counter because he thought it proved how invisible he
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: had become, turned out to be the clearest proof of
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: who he was. The motel room in Printer was sixty
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: three miles southeast of Aldermore Road. Aaron Walsh was found
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: there nine days after Terresa Holmes radio dispatch from the
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: open doorway. She was alive and physically unharmed. The medical
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: report used the phrase acutely disoriented. Aaron did not know
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: the date, She did not know how she had arrived.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: She had no phone, no identification, no money. She believed
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: she had been in that room for approximately two days.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Medical evidence indicated it was closer to five. The water
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: glass on the motel night stand was sent to the lab.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Toxicology found a substance means consistent with the sedative compound sufficient,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: the report noted to impair time perception and short term recall,
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: enough to make five days feel like two, enough to
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: make a person unable to account for her own location,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: her own arrival, her own week. Detective Norah Aldridge had
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: issued a warrant for Neil Erickson's financial records on day
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: eight of the investigation. Erin was found on day nine.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: The warrant and the discovery arrived within hours of each other.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Those records would take months to untangle. Ericson was arrested
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: and charged. The prosecution built its case on four categories
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: of evidence. The toxicology from the motel, the at M
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: transaction that placed him in control of her account while
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Erin was on the phone with her daughter Megan at home,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: the DNA from the coffee mug she never would have touched,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: and the testimony of Howard Osborne about the psychological architecture
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Ericson had constructed over eighteen months. Diane Corbett, fifty one,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: from Milhaven Township, testified as well. Her complaint, filed two
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: years earlier, never prosecuted, described the same sequence an eighteen
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: month friendship, financial restructuring, sedation, displacement. She had recanted portions
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: of the original complaint. On the stand, she explained why
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: the man she had complained about had told her she
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: was misremembering. The jury did not need Osborne to explain
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: what that sentence meant. They understood it without translation. Ericsson
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: was convicted on six counts two counts of unlawful restraint,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: one count of criminal impersonation, two counts of financial fraud,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: one count of administering a controlled substance without consent. He
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: filed three appeals, all three failed. Five years after his conviction,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: a letter Erickson wrote to his own attorney was disclosed
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: through a record's request. In it confirmed that he had
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: studied the service gate at the back of Aaron Cedar fence,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: He had walked the access lane multiple times, he had
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: clocked the timing, he had studied the latch, and he
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: acknowledged the coffee mug. He had left it there deliberately.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: He wrote that he believed no one would connect it
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: to him. He had made himself so ordinary, so embedded
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: in the daily texture of her home, that he was
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: certain a trace of himself would be invisible. That was
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: his miscalculation. The one object he planted as proof of
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: his own invisibility became the proof of everything else. There
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: is a detail that does not appear in any forensic report,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: any appellate ruling, or any courtroom transcript. It is not evidence,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: it is not argued, but it is the detail that
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: holds the whole case in place. In June of the
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: recovery year, Aaron Walsh drove eleven miles to Birchwood Commons.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: She brought lemon Tea in the bran. Marge Klein could
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: not get there. He stayed two hours. She came back
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: the following Tuesday, thirty one consecutive months of Tuesday visits
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: had been interrupted for nine days by a man who
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: had spent eighteen months dismantling her ability to trust her
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: own mind. And when the interruption was over, when the
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: sedation had cleared, when the medical team had done what
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: they could, when the legal system had taken what it needed,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Aaron Walsh got in her car and went back to
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: the things she had always done. That matters not as
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: a recovery arc or a redemption note. It matters because
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: of what it reveals about what Ericsson could not actually take.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: He could restructure her finances. He could isolate her from
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: her book club. He could make her doubt her own
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: decisions about her work hours, her accounts, her social commitments.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: He could leave her in a motel room sixty three
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: miles from home, disoriented and unable to account for five
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: days of her own life. But he could not erase
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: the eleven mile drive. He could not make her forget
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Marge Climb. He could not reach whatever part of her
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: held the lemon Tea and the Tuesday ritual, the part
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: of a person that does not announce itself and does
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: not need to be remembered, because it has never been
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: in question. Neil Erickson studied Aaron Walsh for eighteen months.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: He clocked her routine, mapped her vulnerabilities, identified whom she
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: trusted and how trust operated in her. He built a
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: system for making her doubt herself. And somewhere in all
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: that study he missed the thing that was most essential
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: about who she was. The cases closed in the legal sense,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: the convictions stand, the appeals are exhausted. Erin's finances, according
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: to court records, were still being untangled as of the
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: trials close. Some accounts restructured in ways that may never
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: be fully reversed. The full scope of what Ericson did
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: to Diane Corbett across those earlier eighteen months was never
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: separately prosecuted. What Howard Osborne called learned helplessness, That carefully
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: engineered state in which a person stops trusting her own
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: perceptions is not listed as a crime on any of
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: Ericsson's six counts. It is the condition that made all
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: the other crimes possible, and it is no charge of
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: its own. Aaron Walsh is forty eight years old in
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: this record. She has a daughter named Megan. She has
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: a sister named Janet, whom she called every Wednesday. She
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: kept a paper planner and a vegetable garden and drove
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: the same sedan for six years. She visited Marche Kleine
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: every Tuesday for thirty one months without interruption. That is
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: who she was before Neil Erickson arrived at the library fundraiser.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: That is who she remained when he was done. This
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: show is made by Obomedia