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The Cedar Scented Purse: How Kelly Barrett Vanished Untouched · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The handbag sat inside a concrete drainage pipe, as if
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: someone had set it on a shelf, leather in perfect condition,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: bronze clask gleaming outward, no mud, no scratches. Despite the
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: fact that the culvert had been dry for more than
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: a decade, inside, $ 47 in cash, a library card, a
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: stick of lip balm, and a supermarket receipt dated the
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: 9th of June 2019. And one more thing that no
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: one could explain, the smell of cedar. Kelly Barrett had
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: not touched that bag since the night she disappeared. This
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: is the story of a four-year search, a retired woman
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: who never missed a Thursday at the food pantry, a
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: handbag left with almost surgical precision, and a cedar chest
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: that held the answer to everything, waiting inside a maintenance
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: worker's home for nearly a decade and a half while
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: the case sat in a filing cabinet collecting dust. Kelly
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Barrett was 62 years old, in the summer of 2019,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: and the word her neighbors used most was reliable. Not
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: remarkable in the way headlines demand, reliable in the way
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: a town comes to depend on, without ever saying so
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: out loud. She had worked for more than two decades
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: in records management at Calvert Hospital, handling the careful, unglamorous
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: work of keeping other people's information in order. When she retired,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: she did not slow down. she turned her energy toward
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: the Harmon County Food Pantry in Selby, where she volunteered
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: every Thursday afternoon. Not occasionally. Every Thursday. For 11 years,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Susan Farrow, the pantry's director, could not recall a single absence.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Kelly lived alone on Decker Road in Harmon County. Her husband, Dennis,
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: had died of a heart attack in 1998, more than
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: two decades before she disappeared. Her daughter, Renee, had moved
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: to Portland, Oregon. Her sister, Marie Cook, stayed in contact.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Beyond family, Kelly's world was built on the quiet rhythm
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: of routine. The pantry on Thursdays, her cats at the window,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: her reading glasses on the kitchen table beside whatever book
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: she was in the middle of. She had no history
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: of mental health crises, no financial disputes on record, no
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: romantic entanglements that investigators would later uncover. She was, by
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: every measure available to the people who knew her, exactly
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: who she appeared to be. Her neighbor Tom Hadley was
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: a retired electrician who noticed things. On the 11th of June, 2019,
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: he noticed that Kelly's truck had not moved in two days.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: He noticed her cats crying at the window. He walked over,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: tried the front door, and found it unlocked. Inside, nothing
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: was disturbed. Her reading glasses sat on the kitchen table.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Folded beside an open book, her truck sat in the driveway.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: a medical emergency, no sign of anything except the particular
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: stillness of a house whose owner had simply stopped coming home.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Tom Hadley called it in. Detective Paul Geary caught the case.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: He was experienced enough to recognize immediately that nothing fit
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: the obvious explanations. Kelly Barrett was not the kind of
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: woman who walked away. But without a body, without evidence
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: of violence, without anything he could point to as proof
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: that a crime had occurred, Geary was constrained. He documented
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: the scene, filed the case as a missing person, and
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: began working through the list of people who had known her.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Three days after Hadley's call, the case acquired its strangest artifact.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Sandra Fitch was walking her dog along the Vicki Burke
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Nature Trail, a path that had opened to the public.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Just 11 days earlier, When her dog pulled her toward
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: a culvert off the trail's eastern edge, the culvert was
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: part of the old Harmon Creek drainage basin, decommissioned in 2004.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: It had been dry since 2004. Inside it was Kelly
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Barrett's handbag. The condition of that bag is something that
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: stayed with everyone who saw the evidence. Photographs. No mud.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: No abrasions. The bronze clasp angled outward, toward the culvert's mouth,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: as if the bag had been placed there deliberately. the
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: way you might set a purse on a shelf before bed.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Investigators cataloged the contents. $ 47 in cash, a library card
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: bearing Kelly's name, a stick of lip balm, and a
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: grocery store receipt from the 9th of June, 2019 minutes,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the last day anyone had seen her alive. There was
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: also the smell. A distinct, clean smell of cedar, the
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: kind that clings to fabric stored in an old wooden chest.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Renee Barrett later confirmed, When asked that her mother's home
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: had no cedar closets, the smell had come from somewhere
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: else entirely. Paul Geary understood the bag changed things. He
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: said as much in his own notes. An abandoned purse
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: does not place itself inside a drainage pipe with its
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: clasp pointed outward. Someone had carried it there. Someone who
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: knew the trail, or who had crossed that terrain in
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: the dark after the trail existed only on a planning document.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: But knowing something changed and being able to prove how
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: it changed were two entirely different problems. Without a body.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Without a witness. Without physical evidence of violence at the
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: scene on Decker Road. The case stayed open as a
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: missing person file, and the cedar smell faded from the
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: evidence bag, and the years began to move. Six years passed.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: The missing person file stayed open on a server in
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Harmon County. The evidence bag stayed sealed in a storage room,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: and the cedar smell, which had once been the strangest
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: detail in the whole case, became just a notation in
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: a report that fewer and fewer people read. But the
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: image of that bag never quite left the people who
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: had seen it. A purse placed with its clasp facing outward,
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: dry and clean inside a culvert that had been waterless
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: since 2004. It did not land there. It did not fall.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Every investigator who looked at the photograph understood, at some
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: cellular level, that a specific human being had carried that
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: bag across dark terrain and set it down with care.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: The question was never whether. The question was who. And
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: underneath that question was a smaller one that nobody could
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: answer cleanly. Why take the bag at all and then
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: leave it? A person running from a scene does not
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: stop to arrange a purse. A person placing that bag
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: with the class pointed outward is doing something that looks
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: almost like housekeeping, almost like habit. Between 2010 and 2019,
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: 31 residential burglaries were reported across Harmon County. The number
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: itself is not remarkable. What is remarkable is the shape
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: of those 31 crimes. No broken windows, no forced locks,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Every single entry through a door or window already unsecured.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: At homes where their residents were reliably absent. The burglar
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: was not opportunistic. He was scheduled. Six of those burglaries
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: happened within four miles of Decker Road. Three of them
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: happened on Thursday afternoons. Kelly Barrett had volunteered at the
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Harmon County Food Pantry in Selby every Thursday afternoon for
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: 11 consecutive years. Susan Farrow. the pantry director, confirmed that
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: in 11 years Kelly had never missed a shift. That
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: kind of regularity is a comfort to a non-profit director.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: It is something else entirely to someone watching a neighborhood.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: In 2016, a neighbor on Decker Road named Paula Renner
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: had a brief conversation with a handyman working near her property.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: She mentioned the way neighbors do that if he ever
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: needed to return to finish work, Thursday afternoons were the
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: quietest time on the street. Kelly was always out. The
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: other residents tended to keep varied schedules but Kelly. Kelly
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: you could set a clock by. Renner later gave that
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: conversation to investigators in a written statement. At the time
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: it was filed, it connected to nothing. The database that
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: might have linked it to a patterns did not yet exist.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: That database came into existence through an administrative decision made
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: in 2033 when Harmon County migrated 14 years of incident
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: reports into a unified record system. The migration was routine.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: The software that indexed the new system was not thinking
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: about cold cases. It was designed to flag overlapping fields, names, addresses,
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: days of the week across reports that had previously lived
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: in separate annual folders Invisible to each other, Christine Poole,
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: an analyst working the migration project, noticed that the cross-referencing
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: had flagged 37 reports with overlapping data points. With overlapping
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: data points, she forwarded the list to the detective division
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: without any particular urgency. It was to her, a data
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: hygiene task. The list landed on the desk of Detective
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Jason Norris. He had joined the department in 2024, two
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: years after Paul Geary retired. He had no prior history
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: with the Barrett file. He looked at 37 reports the
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: way a person looks at something they have not already
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: decided to dismiss. It took him three weeks. One name
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: appeared in nine of the 37 flagged reports. Harvey Sawyer,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: 68 years old, an independent maintenance worker based in Caldwell.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: He had done documented work at properties connected to nine
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: of those incidents. He appeared in the Barrett file specifically.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Kelly's household expense ledger recorded two payments to Sawyer, one
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: in 2015 for porch steps, one in 2017 for gutter repair,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: both paid in cash. Norris mapped Sawyer's documented presence against
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: the day-of-week pattern. He cross-referenced it against the subset the
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: Thursday burglaries. Then he cross-referenced that against the names of
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: neighbors who had appeared as witness contacts in the original reports.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Kelly Barrett's name appeared in two of those witness contact fields.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: She had been the neighbor who answered the door, the
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: neighbor who confirmed she had seen nothing unusual, the neighbor
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: who was by the time of those reports already known
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: to be reliably away on Thursday afternoons. Sawyer had been
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: inside her home twice before the 9th of June, 2019.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Not to repair steps. Not to fix a gutter. According
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: to his later confession, he had entered both times during
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: her Thursday absences and taken small amounts of cash. Both
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: visits undetected. Both visits reinforcing the same conclusion. Thursday afternoon,
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Decker Road. The house was empty. He had a green
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Chevrolet pickup with a ladder rack. A mail carrier and
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: a teenager on a bicycle had both reported seeing that
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: truck near two different burglary scenes. Both sightings had been
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: filed as unverified and set aside. The 9th of June,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: 2019 was a Sunday. Sawyer arrived at Kelly's house on
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Decker Road during what should have been a predictable window.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: She was scheduled at the food pantry in Selby. The
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: pattern had held for 11 years. There was no reason
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: to expect it would break that evening. But the pantry
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: had closed early, a pipe had burst in the utility room,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: and Susan Farrow had sent the volunteers home before the
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: shift was halfway through. Kelly Barrett turned her truck around
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: and drove back to Decca Road. She arrived home at 7.15
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: in the evening. Sawyer was inside. What happened in the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: minutes after 7.15 is known now, because Sawyer eventually said,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: so himself. Across three days of recorded interviews with Norris,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: and the prosecutor David Holt. He cooperated, he answered questions.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: The cooperation was part of a negotiated arrangement that brought
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: his sentence down from the maximum possible term. He described
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: what happened with a flatness that investigators found both useful
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: and difficult to process. The detail that kept circling back,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: the one that recontextualized everything that had come before it,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: was the back. After that night, Sawyer left the property
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: on foot, moving through the dark terrain east of Decker Road.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: He was carrying Kelly's handbag. He did not know exactly
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: why he took it. He said it was reflex. The
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: same reflex that had governed every one of the 31 burglaries.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Take something small, leave no obvious trace. The bag was there.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: He took it. He crossed roughly two and a half
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: miles of terrain to reach the old Harmon Creek drainage basin.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: The culvert he found there was dry. It had been
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: dry since 2004, and he set the bag inside it.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: He set it down the way you set something down
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: when you are trying to be careful. Clasp facing out,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: flat on the floor of the pipe. Then he went home.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: The bag sat in that culvert for five days. When
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: Sandra Fitch's dog pulled her off the Vicki Burke Nature
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Trail on the 14th of June, the trail had been
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: open to the public for 11 days. The culvert was
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: 60 feet from the marked path. Nobody had walked that
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: particular line. Through the brush before the trail was inaugurated,
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: the bag had been placed in a location that was
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: at the moment of its placement, effectively invisible. Then, a
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: path was built 11 days away from it. That sequence,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the pipe burst, the early departure, the 7.15 arrival, the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: trail that opened 11 days later, was a chain of
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: contingencies that no one had engineered. Each link in it
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: was ordinary. Together, they had produced a silence that lasted years.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: The cedar smell on the bag came from Sawyer's chest.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: He stored the bag inside a cedar-lined wooden trunk in
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: his home. Before he moved it to the culvert, a
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: flannel cloth was wrapped around it. When Norris executed the
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: search warrant in April of 2033, the chest was still there.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Inside it, rings, watches, a single earring. a $ 20 bill
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: with a name written on it in ink, and Kelly
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Barrett's wristwatch. Renee Barrett identified the watch from a photograph
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: without hesitation. The question that had stayed open for years,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: where did Kelly go and why, had a complete answer
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: by the time Sawyer finished his third day of interviews.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: But before that answer existed, the case had generated two
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: coherent alternative readings of the evidence, and both had been
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: plausible enough that investigators returning to the file could not
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: rule either out. The first possible reading of the evidence
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: was this. Picture the scene at Decker Road on the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: evening of June 9th. A truck sits in the driveway.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: The front door is unlocked. Reading glasses rest on the
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: kitchen table next to an open book. The chapter is mid-sentence.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Nothing is overturned. Nothing is broken. The woman who lived
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: there is simply absent from a house that carries all
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: the evidence of her presence. If you walk through that
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: scene without the bag, the most natural conclusion was medical.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: A woman of 62, living alone, widowed. She stepped outside.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Something happened to her body. A cardiac event. A fall.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: A sudden incapacitation. And she did not come back. It
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: happened to people. It happened in Harmon County. Geary noted
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: in his file that he could not rule it out,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: and he was correct that he could not. The scene
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: offered nothing that definitively contradicted it. No blood, no signs
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: of struggle, only absence. The bag destroyed that reading, not
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: because a medical emergency was impossible, but because a medical
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: emergency does not produce a handbag inside a culvert with
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: its clasp facing outward. A woman who collapses in her
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: yard does not carry her purse. Two and a half
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: miles east, and set it down tidily in a drainage pipe,
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the bag introduced a second actor into the scene, someone
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: who had access to the bag after whatever happened to Kelly.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: But there was a second reading, more uncomfortable, so the
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: second reading built itself around that second actor. And for
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: a long time, the shape of that reading was wrong
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: in a specific way. The assumption, never stated as a
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: formal theory but embedded in the way the early investigation moved,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: was that the second actor was someone from Kelly's life.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: A person with motive, with access, with some prior relationship
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: to her that would explain why they were present on
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Decker Road that evening. Investigators reviewed her financial records. They
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: looked at her relationships. They found nothing. No disputes, no
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: estranged contacts, no one with a visible reason to be
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: in her house. That absence of motive was supposed to
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: close a door. Instead, it became the thing that kept
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: the case from moving. Finally, the third reading, the one
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: that proved accurate, required leaving the relationship frame behind. Because
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: the third reading, the one that turned out to be accurate,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: required letting go of the relationship frame entirely. Sawyer had
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: no relationship with Kelly beyond two cash transactions years earlier.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: He had no motive that was personal. He had a pattern,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: a method, a truck with a ladder rack. and a
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: habit of arriving at houses when their owners were elsewhere.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: He had been told, in a passing conversation in 2016,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: that Thursday afternoons on Decker Road were quiet, and on
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: the one Thursday in 11 years, when the pantry closed early,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: he was already inside. The chest in his home held
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: 32 years of other people's belongings, a single earring, a
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: $ 20 bill, with someone's name on it in ink. A
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: wristwatch that Renee Barrett identified without hesitation from a photograph
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: sitting in a detective's office years after her mother had
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: last worn it. That watch had been in a cedar
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: chest the entire time. Two and a half miles from
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: the culvert, five miles from Decker Road. In plain sight,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: in a locked trunk, in a house that nobody had searched,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: because nobody had known to look there until a software
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: index crossed 14 years of separate folders and and surfaced
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: a name nine times in a single afternoon. The search
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: for Kelly Barrett's remains took two days in May of 2033.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Investigators worked a dry stream bed two and a half
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: miles from the culvert on Vicki Burke Trail. Following coordinates
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: that Harvey Sawyer provided during his third day of recorded
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: interviews with Detective Jason Norris and Prosecutor David Holt, he
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: had cooperated from the beginning. He answered every question, the
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: arrest had come in April of that year, after Norris
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: executed the search warrant and opened the cedar chest. Inside, rings, watches,
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: a single earring, a $ 20 bill with a name written
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: on it in ink, and Kelly Barrett's wristwatch. Renee Barrett
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: identified that watch from a photograph, without hesitation, she had
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: last seen it on her mother's wrist in the spring
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: of 2019. Sawyer faced first-degree murder and 31 counts of
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: residential burglary. The maximum sentence for the murder charge was
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: suspended under the cooperation agreement. The court imposed 45 years
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: under the terms of that agreement. Harvey Sawyer will not
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: be eligible for parole until he is 113 years old.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: In January of 2034, the jury returned a guilty verdict
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: on all counts. Donna Kepler, the schoolteacher from Brantford, who
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: had found a stranger standing in her kitchen in the
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: summer of 2007, testified at trial. She had filed a
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: report that same week. It had been archived as an
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: unresolved attempted burglary. and never connected to anything. When she
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: saw Sawyer's photograph in the newspaper in May of 2033,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: she called the department the same afternoon. Her testimony corroborated
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: the pattern. It did not change the charges. The case
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: was already closed. Paul Geary, the detective who had kept
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: a photocopy of Kelly's file after his retirement in 2022,
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: learned about the arrest from a former colleague. He had
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: never stopped believing the case was a homicide. He had
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: simply lacked the mechanism to prove it. That mechanism turned
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: out to be a database migration and a software index that,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: in a single afternoon, did what 14 years of annual
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: folders could not. What stayed with this case long after
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: the verdict was not the technology. It was the conversation.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Paula Renner, standing in her driveway on Decker Road in 2016,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: telling a man with a ladder rack on his truck
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: that her neighbor always left on Thursday afternoons. A casual
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: neighborly remark. The kind of thing said a thousand times
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: a day. She could not have known what she was
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: giving him. And Kelly Barrett, who had volunteered every Thursday
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: for 11 years without a single absence, died on the
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: one Thursday when the pantry closed early. She came home
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: at 7.15 in the evening to a house she had
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: left unlocked. To a kitchen where a man was waiting,
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: who had no reason to be there. Beyond a pattern
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: he had been quietly studying, for years. She had spent
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: 11 years showing up for other people. That was who
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: she was. That was the life she had built, after
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: losing her husband, after retiring, after settling into the particular
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: steadiness of a person who has decided that her time
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: is best spent in service to her community. The cedar
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: smell on that purse, had no explanation anyone could reach
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: for years. Renee Barrett knew her mother's closets had no cedar.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: She held that detail and waited. Because there was nothing
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: else she could do. The answer was five miles away,
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: in a locked trunk, the entire time. Harvey Sawyer is
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: in custody. The case is closed. Kelly Barrett's family has
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: the answers they spent years without. What they cannot have
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: back is the time they lost. This show is made
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: by Oboe Media.