Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Sabotaged Her Home-She Left Secret Notes in the Sewers

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He Sabotaged Her Home-She Left Secret Notes in the Sewers · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: On July fourteenth, twenty sixteen, a municipal worker named Vernon
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Speaker 1: Jones climbed down eight feet into a septic access shaft
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Speaker 1: beneath the Fenwick Arms apartment building in Crestwood, Ohio. He
0:18
Speaker 1: was there for a routine inspection. What he found stopped
0:21
Speaker 1: him completely. A plain wire bird cage, clean and unrusted,
0:26
Speaker 1: sat at the bottom of the shaft, latched from the outside.
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Speaker 1: Inside it, sealed in a waterproof bag, was a laminated
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Speaker 1: card four words, then four more. She is not crazy.
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Speaker 1: Look at the dates. Jones photographed it before he touched anything.
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Speaker 1: That cage had been placed there deliberately by someone who
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Speaker 1: believed no one would listen to her any other way,
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Speaker 1: and she had been right for nearly a decade. This
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Speaker 1: is the story of how one person methodically dismantled another
0:57
Speaker 1: person's grip on reality, pieced by over ten years. It
1:02
Speaker 1: is also the story of how that person fought back
1:04
Speaker 1: with the only tools she had left, a spiral notebook,
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Speaker 1: a laminated card, and a Cocca shiel named Pepper. Rebecca
1:13
Speaker 1: Stein was twenty three years old in September of two
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Speaker 1: thousand and six when she moved into Apartment two Sea
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Speaker 1: at the Fenwick Arms, a four story brick building on
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Speaker 1: Fenwick Hill in Prestwood, Ohio. She had inherited the lease
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Speaker 1: from her aunt. The rent was six hundred forty dollars
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Speaker 1: a month, rent controlled in a city where comparable units
1:34
Speaker 1: were climbing past twelve hundred. She was a graduate student
1:38
Speaker 1: in archival library science and worked part time at a
1:41
Speaker 1: print shop downtown. She was, by every account methodical. Her
1:46
Speaker 1: birds sitting instructions to her neighbor, Douglas Fitch were always typed,
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Speaker 1: always dated, always signed. She kept paper records of every
1:55
Speaker 1: maintenance request she filed. Her lease renewal responses went out
2:00
Speaker 1: the same week they arrived, never late. She was the
2:04
Speaker 1: kind of person who underlined things in pencil, kept the
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Speaker 1: receipts pepper. Her cockashield was on a twice daily medication schedule,
2:13
Speaker 1: six in the morning, six in the evening. Rebecca maintained
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Speaker 1: it without exception. Her apartment faced west. She loved the
2:21
Speaker 1: afternoon light. She had no particular reason to be suspicious
2:24
Speaker 1: of James Patterson when he introduced himself that October. Patterson
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Speaker 1: was forty four, a real estate investor who had purchased
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Speaker 1: the Fenwick Arms nine months earlier, for two point one
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Speaker 1: million dollars. He came to her door with a potted succulent.
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Speaker 1: He knew she preferred the afternoon light. He offered to
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Speaker 1: have the ivy cleared from her west facing windows. It
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Speaker 1: was a small, specific kindness. What Rebecca did not know,
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Speaker 1: What no one outside Patterson's own records would know for
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Speaker 1: nearly a decade, was that cell towered data later placed
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Speaker 1: him driving past the Fenwick arm six times between midnight
3:02
Speaker 1: and two in the morning in the months before he
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Speaker 1: closed on the purchase. He had studied the building before
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Speaker 1: he owned it. He had studied its tenants. Rebecca's rent
3:12
Speaker 1: controlled lease was the most valuable liability on the property.
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Speaker 1: At six hundred forty dollars a month, she was costing
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Speaker 1: him the difference between what she paid and what the
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Speaker 1: market would bear. That gap, compounded over years, represented tens
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Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars in unrealized income. In the logic
3:32
Speaker 1: of a certain kind of real estate calculation, Rebecca Stein
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Speaker 1: was a problem to be solved. Patterson was, by every
3:40
Speaker 1: account patient. The succulent sat on her window sill through
3:45
Speaker 1: the fall and into winter. Nothing happened, no pressure, no friction,
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Speaker 1: no reason for concern. Rebecca continued her coursework, her print
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Speaker 1: shop shifts, her morning and evening victual with Pepper. She
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Speaker 1: renewed her lease, She paid her rent. The campaign would
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Speaker 1: not begin for another eighteen months, and when it did,
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Speaker 1: it would not look like a campaign at all. It
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Speaker 1: would look like bad luck, like a building getting old,
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Speaker 1: like a young woman living alone starting to misremember things.
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Speaker 1: The spring of two thousand and eight arrived quietly at
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Speaker 1: Fenwick Arms. Then the boiler stopped working. It happened on
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Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning in March. Rebecca woke to cold radiators
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Speaker 1: and filed a maintenance request before her first class. Within
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Speaker 1: forty eight hours, a man named Dave Kowalski appeared at
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Speaker 1: her door with a toolbox. He identified himself as Patterson's contractor.
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Speaker 1: He spent forty minutes in the mechanical room. He left,
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Speaker 1: the heat came back. That should have been the end
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Speaker 1: of it, but the repair Kowalski performed was not a repair.
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Speaker 1: Court records would later establish that Kowalski was Patterson's brother
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Speaker 1: in law and held no contractor's license in the state
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Speaker 1: of Ohio. What he did inside that mechanical room was
5:07
Speaker 1: reached behind the primary valve assembly and manually adjust a
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Speaker 1: pressure coupling, not to fix a fault, but to simulate one.
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Speaker 1: The boiler had not broken, it had been made to
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Speaker 1: appear broken, and the man who unmade it was the
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Speaker 1: same man who created it. No one told Rebecca any
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Speaker 1: of this. In two thousand eight. The odor started the
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Speaker 1: following summer. It arrived intermittently, sulfurous and low, the kind
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Speaker 1: of smell that makes a person check their shoes. It
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Speaker 1: was worse near the bathroom vent, and worse on warm evenings.
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Speaker 1: Rebecca mentioned it to Patterson. He sent Clearview Environmental. They
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Speaker 1: conducted what was described as a full air quality assessment
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Speaker 1: and found, in their words, no actionable hazard. Rebecca had
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Speaker 1: the windows open for the rest of that summer. What
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Speaker 1: she did not know was that the clearer View Environmental
6:01
Speaker 1: report was signed from an address that traced to a
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Speaker 1: shell company registered to a cousin of Dave Kowalski. The
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Speaker 1: hazard they found nothing of was a rubber plug removable
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Speaker 1: installed in the building's drain vent. Investigators would locate that
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Speaker 1: plug a decade later inside Patterson's private storage unit. Three
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Speaker 1: years of intermittent odor, one small piece of rubber, one
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Speaker 1: man who knew exactly where to find it and chose
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Speaker 1: not to. By two thousand ten, something had shifted in
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Speaker 1: the way Rebecca moved through the building. She had begun
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Speaker 1: to notice small things, maintenance log entries that referred to work.
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Speaker 1: She did not remember authorizing dates that did not match
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Speaker 1: her own records of when repairs had occurred. She started
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Speaker 1: writing things down, not because she suspected anything yet, but
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Speaker 1: because she was a library science student. Documentation was how
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Speaker 1: she thought. She bought a spiral notebook, then another, then
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Speaker 1: another after that. By the time she was done, she
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Speaker 1: had four of them, dated, indexed, cross referenced. Each entry
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Speaker 1: noted the date the discrepancy the maintenance log entry if contradicted.
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Speaker 1: But here is the thing about those logs. The discrepancies
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Speaker 1: were not errors. When forensic analysts later examined the metadata
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Speaker 1: on Patterson's personal laptop, they found fourteen maintenance log entries
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Speaker 1: that had been backdated using a desktop application. The time
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Speaker 1: stamps had been altered, the records had been rewritten, and
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Speaker 1: because the official maintenance logs were Patterson's documents, not Rebecca's,
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Speaker 1: every discrepancy made her look like the one who was confused.
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Speaker 1: She was not confused, she was the only person keeping
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Speaker 1: an accurate record. Twenty twelve brought the last of what
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Speaker 1: would later be called the isolation phase. Douglas, the retired
8:01
Speaker 1: mail carrier who lived two floors up, had been bird
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Speaker 1: sitting Pepper for seven years. At that point, Rebecca paid
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Speaker 1: him forty dollars a day. Her care instructions were always typed,
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Speaker 1: always dated, always signed. It was the same precision she
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Speaker 1: applied to everything. Then Patterson told Fitch that Rebecca had
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Speaker 1: complained about him. She had not. There is no evidence
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Speaker 1: she ever did, but Fitch believed it. He and Rebecca
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Speaker 1: stopped speaking. She lost the one neighbor she trusted. The
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Speaker 1: lease renewal notices arrived, as they always did, exactly two
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Speaker 1: days before the response deadline. Valerie Turner, the private investigator
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Speaker 1: Rebecca would eventually hire, identified this as deliberate, a pattern
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Speaker 1: designed to prevent any tenant from having enough time to
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Speaker 1: seek outside legal counsel before the window closed two days
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Speaker 1: every time for ten years. It was precise in the
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Speaker 1: way that only intention can be. The letter arrived in
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Speaker 1: the county file in twenty thirteen. Rebecca found it during
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Speaker 1: a routine review of her tenancy records. Something she had
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Speaker 1: started doing annually, the way a careful person audits their
9:14
Speaker 1: own history. The letter was dated April twenty eleven. It
9:19
Speaker 1: purported to be from Rebecca herself, requesting voluntary reclassification of
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Speaker 1: her lease to remove the rent control designation. She had
9:28
Speaker 1: never written it. Handwriting analysis conducted years later would identify
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Speaker 1: seven points of similarity between the letter and writing samples
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Speaker 1: from James Patterson. Zero points matched Rebecca's handwriting. The letter
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Speaker 1: had not taken effect. A procedural backlog at the county
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Speaker 1: office had stalled the reclassification before it was processed. Patterson's
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Speaker 1: timing or his patience had finally failed him. But in
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Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, Rebecca had no handwriting analyst. She had a
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Speaker 1: County di document bearing her name, describing the decision she
10:03
Speaker 1: had never made. That was the moment the architecture of
10:06
Speaker 1: the campaign became visible to her, not as harassment, not
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Speaker 1: yet as a structure. Someone had not only been making
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Speaker 1: her life uncomfortable. Someone had been building a paper version
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Speaker 1: of a Rebecca Stein who wanted to leave. She went home,
10:22
Speaker 1: she opened a spiral notebook, and then she did something
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Speaker 1: that no one else in the building could have done.
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Speaker 1: And that Patterson, in all his calculation apparently did not predict.
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Speaker 1: She built a counter archive. She typed a card. She
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Speaker 1: laminated it six words on one side and four on
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Speaker 1: the other. She is not crazy, look at the dates.
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Speaker 1: She placed the card inside a waterproof bag. She put
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Speaker 1: the bag inside a spare bird cage plane wire clean
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Speaker 1: latched from the outside. Then she carried it to the
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Speaker 1: utility corridor behind the mechanical room and lowered it eight
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Speaker 1: feet down into the crawl space shaft. No one would
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Speaker 1: find it by accident. That was the point. If they
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Speaker 1: found it at all, it would mean they had reason
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Speaker 1: to look picture the utility corridor at two in the morning.
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Speaker 1: Patterson's cell tower data places him at the north service
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Speaker 1: entrance of Fenwick Arms seventeen times over six years, always
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Speaker 1: between two and four in the morning, always outside the
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Speaker 1: range of the building's cameras. The cameras faced the front entrance.
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Speaker 1: The north service entrance, with its sight line to the
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Speaker 1: lobby mail slot through a propped fire door, was unwatched.
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Speaker 1: That was not an accident either. One possibility is that
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Speaker 1: the mail interception was all Patterson intended from those late visits.
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Speaker 1: He admitted as much at trial. Framing it characteristically as
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Speaker 1: a billing dispute. If that were the full picture, it
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Speaker 1: would still constitute a campaign of systematic document control spanning years.
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Speaker 1: The lease renewals arriving two days before deadline, with outgoing
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Speaker 1: correspondence never reaching its destination would explain why no outside
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Speaker 1: advocate ever learned of Rebecca's situation in time to act.
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Speaker 1: But the physical evidence does not stop at the mail slot.
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Speaker 1: The rubber plug in Patterson's storage unit was not a
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Speaker 1: piece of junk. It was a specific tool for a
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Speaker 1: specific vent in a specific building. The maintenance log entries
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Speaker 1: backdated on his personal laptop were not administrative sloppiness fourteen
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Speaker 1: entries do not accidentally acquire false time stamps. The forged
12:36
Speaker 1: letter bore his handwriting, not hers, and the clear View
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Speaker 1: environmental report came from an address connected to his family.
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Speaker 1: Each element, taken alone might accommodate a benign interpretation. Together
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Speaker 1: they describe something else, a man who maintained access to
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Speaker 1: a building's infrastructure, its documents, and its residents social connections,
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Speaker 1: and used each one over a decade to make one
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Speaker 1: woman doubt herself. Patterson denied every element he could not
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Speaker 1: explain away. He admitted the male interception and Kowalski's lack
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Speaker 1: of license. Everything else he said was coincidence or misinterpretation.
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Speaker 1: The jury deliberated and returned a verdict on all counts.
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Speaker 1: What the verdict could not address, what no verdict can praise,
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Speaker 1: is the decade Rebecca spent writing in those note books.
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Speaker 1: Not because she was documenting a crime, but because she
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Speaker 1: needed to trust her own memory. She needed to prove
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Speaker 1: to herself that what she was living was real. The
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Speaker 1: bird cage in the shaft was never meant to convict anyone.
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Speaker 1: It was meant to survive, to be found by someone
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Speaker 1: with a reason to look, when Rebecca herself might no
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Speaker 1: longer be in the apartment to explain it. It was
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Speaker 1: the act of a person who understood that the most
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Speaker 1: dangerous thing Patterson was trying to take from her her
14:00
Speaker 1: was not the least. It was her credibility, her grip
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Speaker 1: on what was true. She kept it, notebook by notebook,
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Speaker 1: date by date, six words laminated in waterproof plastic. She
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Speaker 1: kept it. Patterson was arrested on July seventeenth, twenty sixteen.
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Speaker 1: The charges were forgery, mail interference, fraudulent property assessment, and
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Speaker 1: criminal harassment. At trial, he admitted two things that he
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Speaker 1: had intercepted Rebecca's outgoing mail, which he characterized as a
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Speaker 1: billing dispute, and that Dave Kowalski had no contractor's license.
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Speaker 1: Everything else, the forged reclassification letter, the backdated maintenance logs,
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Speaker 1: the rubber plug, the intent behind any of it, he denied.
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Speaker 1: The jury convicted on all counts. He received four years
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Speaker 1: in prison. The court ordered restitution of two hundred thirty
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Speaker 1: thousand dollars, and the sentence included one specific provision that
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Speaker 1: no amount of legal language could make ordinary. Patterson was
15:03
Speaker 1: required to fund the maintenance of apartment to see for
15:06
Speaker 1: the duration of Rebecca's tenancy. The man who had spent
15:10
Speaker 1: a decade manufacturing false repairs was ordered to pay for
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Speaker 1: real ones in the building he had bought to empty.
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Speaker 1: Rebecca did not move out. She is still in Apartment
15:22
Speaker 1: to Sea at Fenwick Arms. After the conviction, investigators began
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Speaker 1: reviewing Patterson's prior property holdings. What they found closed a
15:32
Speaker 1: loop that had been open for twelve years. In two
15:35
Speaker 1: thousand four, a woman named Margaret Chu had surrendered a
15:39
Speaker 1: rent stabilized lease in Harwick County after two years of
15:43
Speaker 1: sustained pressure, utility disruptions, a persistent hallway odour, a forged
15:48
Speaker 1: letter purportedly from the local housing authority. The building owner
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Speaker 1: at that time was James Patterson. Margaret had left, the
15:57
Speaker 1: case had gone nowhere. Patterson had never been charged. After
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Speaker 1: his conviction in the Rebecca Stein case, the Harwick County
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Speaker 1: case was reopened. Margaret Chu had done nothing wrong. She
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Speaker 1: had simply been the version of the campaign that worked.
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Speaker 1: Rebecca was the version that didn't because Rebecca kept writing.
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Speaker 1: There is something in the Margaret Chew detail that the
16:19
Speaker 1: verdict alone cannot absorb. Patterson did not invent this method
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Speaker 1: for apartment to see. He had used it before, refined it,
16:28
Speaker 1: and by the time he arrived at Fenwick Arms with
16:31
Speaker 1: a potted succulent and a memory for afternoon light, he
16:34
Speaker 1: already knew which tools to reach for the fake environmental report,
16:39
Speaker 1: the forged letter, the managed isolation. He had already watched
16:43
Speaker 1: it succeed. Once Margaret left, the lease turned over, the
16:47
Speaker 1: money moved. What he had not encountered was some one
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Speaker 1: who understood at a cellular level that documentation was survival. Pepper,
16:56
Speaker 1: the Cocca seal, lived to age twenty two. Rebecca administered
17:01
Speaker 1: medication twice daily, six in the morning, six in the evening,
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Speaker 1: for the last years of his life. He died not
17:08
Speaker 1: because of anything Patterson did to the building. He died
17:12
Speaker 1: of old age and the apartment he had always lived in,
17:15
Speaker 1: cared for by the person who had always cared for him.
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Speaker 1: That fact is small. It is also not small at all.
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Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where the odor
17:25
Speaker 1: gets worse, where the lease renewal arrives two days before
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Speaker 1: the deadline one too many times, where Rebecca, exhausted, isolated,
17:35
Speaker 1: doubting herself, signs something she should not sign, and disappears
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Speaker 1: from the record. Margaret Chew is that version. She did
17:43
Speaker 1: not have a laminated card eight feet underground. She did
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Speaker 1: not have four spiral notebooks she left, and for twelve
17:52
Speaker 1: years no one connected the dots. What Rebecca built in
17:56
Speaker 1: those notebooks was not just a legal record. It was
17:59
Speaker 1: a counter archive to the one Patterson was assembling against her.
18:04
Speaker 1: He was creating documents that said she was unreliable, confused,
18:08
Speaker 1: voluntarily relinquishing what she had. She was creating documents that said,
18:13
Speaker 1: I was here, I saw this, I wrote it down,
18:17
Speaker 1: and the dates do not lie two competing versions of reality.
18:22
Speaker 1: One of them was underground in waterproof plastic waiting. Cases
18:27
Speaker 1: like this one do not announce themselves. They do not
18:30
Speaker 1: begin with a threat or a demand. They begin with
18:34
Speaker 1: a succulent on a doorstep and a landlord who remembers
18:37
Speaker 1: which windows get afternoon light. The machinery underneath that warmth,
18:43
Speaker 1: the forged letter, the fake contractor the intercepted mail is
18:48
Speaker 1: built slowly in the dark in the hours between two
18:51
Speaker 1: and four in the morning, when no camera is watching
18:54
Speaker 1: the mail slot. By the time it is visible, the
18:57
Speaker 1: target has often been living inside it for years. Rebecca
19:00
Speaker 1: Steyne spent a decade being told implicitly and systematically that
19:05
Speaker 1: her perception could not be trusted. She answered that every
19:09
Speaker 1: single time by opening a note book and writing down
19:13
Speaker 1: what she saw. She never left apartment to see. She
19:17
Speaker 1: is still there, and the note books are part of
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Speaker 1: the public record, now indexed, cross referenced, admissible, exactly as
19:24
Speaker 1: she always intended them to be. This show is made
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Speaker 1: by Obo Media.