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She Stole Her Past: The Year Someone Rewrote Janet's Life · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: At five forty in the morning on November ninth, two
0:07
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a woman named Heather Edwards was running through
0:10
Speaker 1: Morrol Park in Dunbar Falls, Wisconsin. The temperature was thirty
0:15
Speaker 1: one degrees. She slowed when her head lamp caught something
0:19
Speaker 1: on the chain link fence along the park's eastern edge.
0:23
Speaker 1: Fifteen picture frames wired to the fence in a row,
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Speaker 1: each one holding a photograph of people she did not recognize.
0:31
Speaker 1: Some one had driven here in the dark, attached to
0:34
Speaker 1: stranger's memories, to a public fence, and left before sunrise.
0:38
Speaker 1: The date printed on each photograph was November second, two
0:42
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, one week earlier. There was nothing stolen here,
0:47
Speaker 1: no body, no crime scene in any conventional sense. What
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Speaker 1: the police found instead when they traced those frames to
0:54
Speaker 1: a house on Fenwick Drive, no working, was something that
0:58
Speaker 1: takes longer to name. A year long effort by one
1:01
Speaker 1: person to convince another woman that her own pasted had
1:05
Speaker 1: not happened the way she remembered it. This is the
1:08
Speaker 1: story of Janet McCarthy, and of everything that was quietly
1:12
Speaker 1: taken from her, not in one night, but over many months,
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Speaker 1: one photograph at a time. Janet McCarthy was fifty five
1:20
Speaker 1: years old in the autumn of two thousand eighteen. She
1:24
Speaker 1: had lived in Dunbar Falls for four years, by then,
1:28
Speaker 1: long enough to know her neighbors by first name, short
1:31
Speaker 1: enough that she still sometimes drove past her own street
1:35
Speaker 1: before catching herself. She had moved there after her husband,
1:39
Speaker 1: Denis died a cardiac arrest in March of two thousand fourteen, sudden,
1:44
Speaker 1: no warning. They had been together for twenty six years.
1:48
Speaker 1: Denis had been a regional sales manager. Janet had been
1:51
Speaker 1: a dental hygienist, but she had stepped out of the
1:54
Speaker 1: work force eleven years before his death, and she had
1:58
Speaker 1: no pension of her own. After Dennis died, she sold
2:01
Speaker 1: the house they had shared, took what she had, and
2:04
Speaker 1: settled into a smaller place at four Fema Drive, a
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Speaker 1: brick two story on a quiet block, flower boxes on
2:12
Speaker 1: the porch. She maintained herself light on in the kitchen
2:16
Speaker 1: by six thirty every morning, dependable enough that her retired neighbor,
2:20
Speaker 1: Denis Quill, a former mail carrier, said he set his
2:23
Speaker 1: internal clock by it. She was not a recluse. She
2:27
Speaker 1: was careful. There is a difference. She grocery shopped On Tuesdays,
2:33
Speaker 1: she refilled Walt's insulin prescription at Fenwick Drive, where Greg
2:38
Speaker 1: Owens had been the pharmacist for years. Walt was her
2:41
Speaker 1: Orange tabby seventeen pounds Diabetic since twenty sixteen, he required
2:48
Speaker 1: an insulin injection every twelve hours, seven in the morning
2:53
Speaker 1: and seven at night, and Janet kept a composition notebook
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Speaker 1: on the kitchen counter to log his glucose readings after
2:59
Speaker 1: it every dose, two entries a day, every day. The
3:03
Speaker 1: notebook was a record she trusted completely because she had
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Speaker 1: written every word of it herself. She was still grieving.
3:12
Speaker 1: That is important to understand, not the acute grief of
3:16
Speaker 1: the first year, but the slower kind, the kind that
3:19
Speaker 1: makes you question your own perceptions on an ordinary Tuesday morning,
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Speaker 1: wonder whether you remembered a conversation correctly, whether you are
3:27
Speaker 1: thinking clearly. Grief does something to a person's confidence in
3:31
Speaker 1: their own mind. It creates a small, persistent doubt. And
3:36
Speaker 1: in September of twenty eighteen, a young woman named Connie
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Speaker 1: Zeller sat down next to Janet on a bench outside
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Speaker 1: Fenwick Drive and asked whether she needed help carrying her bags.
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Speaker 1: Connie was thirty one, she had grown up, and Racine
3:50
Speaker 1: had done some course work at a community college and
3:53
Speaker 1: had built a quiet professional history around older adults housekeeping,
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Speaker 1: personal shopping, companionship's services. She was warm, she was organized,
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Speaker 1: She remembered details. By November of twenty eighteen, Janet had
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Speaker 1: hired her as a domestic assistant, four mornings a week.
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Speaker 1: The arrangement made practical sense. Janet was managing a house alone.
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Speaker 1: Connie was exactly the kind of help that looked from
4:20
Speaker 1: every angle like a solution. By February of two thousand nineteen,
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Speaker 1: Connie had moved into the guest room. What happened next
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Speaker 1: did not happen all at once. That is the detail
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Speaker 1: that matters most. It began with a single photograph. In
4:35
Speaker 1: March of two thousand nineteen, Janet stood in the living
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Speaker 1: room and told Connie about the photograph on the mante
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Speaker 1: the one from the Oregon coast. She described Denis in
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Speaker 1: his blue jacket, the way the wind had come off
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Speaker 1: the water that afternoon. Connie listened, then she said gently
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Speaker 1: that the jacket was green, a polar fleece. Actually, did
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Speaker 1: Janet not remember. Janet looked at the photograph. She looked again.
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Speaker 1: She let The correction settle into her the way small
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Speaker 1: corrections do when you are already uncertain of yourself. She
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Speaker 1: assumed she had misremembered. Grief does that? Memory does that?
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Speaker 1: She moved on. That was March. By April, something else
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Speaker 1: had shifted. Greg Owens at Fenwick Drive noticed that Janet's
5:23
Speaker 1: insulin prescription had been refilled on a schedule that did
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Speaker 1: not match Walt's dosing. The numbers were off. He mentioned
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Speaker 1: it to Janet when she came in, quietly, the way
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Speaker 1: a pharmacist mentions something he isn't quite sure how to frame.
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Speaker 1: Janet said she would look into it. She went home.
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Speaker 1: She did not know at that point that a second
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Speaker 1: prescription had been written under her name, sent by Facts
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Speaker 1: to a different address for a different patient. Entirely, the
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Speaker 1: FACTS number traced to a business entity. That entity had
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Speaker 1: one registered agent. Her name was Connie Zeller. The business
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Speaker 1: had been dissolved in June of two thousand nineteen. By then,
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Speaker 1: approximately fourteen thousand dollars had already moved out of an
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Speaker 1: account belonging to a sixty three year old woman named
6:12
Speaker 1: Maureen Phelps, a resident of a care facility elsewhere in
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Speaker 1: Dunbar Falls Maureen had no close family. She had met
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Speaker 1: Connie the year before Janet did. Eleven frames on the
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Speaker 1: walls of Maureen's room had been replaced. Janet did not
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Speaker 1: know about Maureen. She did not know about the facts.
6:31
Speaker 1: She did not know about the dissolved entity. What she
6:34
Speaker 1: knew in August of twenty nineteen was that she opened
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Speaker 1: Walt's composition notebook one morning and found eleven consecutive days
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Speaker 1: of entries she did not write. The handwriting was close,
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Speaker 1: the format was correct, the glucose readings were plausible, but
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Speaker 1: the hand was not hers. She closed the notebook. She
6:56
Speaker 1: opened it again. She told herself she must have been
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Speaker 1: more tired than she realized. That is what the architecture
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Speaker 1: of the thing required, not force, not threat, just the steady,
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Speaker 1: patient replacement of one version of reality with another, until
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Speaker 1: the person living inside it could no longer tell which
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Speaker 1: version was original. On the first of November twenty nineteen,
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Speaker 1: Deborah Nolan drove to four Fenwick Drive without calling ahead.
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Speaker 1: She had been thinking about a phone call. Two weeks earlier,
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Speaker 1: Janet's therapist, Michelle Sullivan, had reached out to her. Sullivan
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Speaker 1: had twenty two years of clinical practice. She had sat
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Speaker 1: with people, through lass, through confusion, through the ordinary disorders
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Speaker 1: of the life. She told Deborah that Janet's account of
7:44
Speaker 1: her own daily experience did not cohere the way a
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Speaker 1: lived experience coheres. It felt curated, it felt edited. Sullivan
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Speaker 1: did not say more than that she did not need to.
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Speaker 1: Deborah knocked. Janet answered. They sat together in the living room,
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Speaker 1: and at some point Deborah looked at the photograph on
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Speaker 1: the mantel the Oregon coast. She said, that is not right.
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Speaker 1: Dennis wore the green fleece that trip. I remember because
8:14
Speaker 1: I helped him pack. Janet said, Connie told me it
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Speaker 1: was blue. Deborah stood up and took the frame off
8:22
Speaker 1: the wall. She turned it over. She worked the backing
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Speaker 1: loose with her thumb nail, the way you do when
8:28
Speaker 1: something is held together more recently than it looks. Behind
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Speaker 1: the print on commercial photo stock, pressed flat against the
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Speaker 1: cardboard was the original. Dennis McCarthy stood on the Oregon
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Speaker 1: coast in a green polar fleece, his arm around Janet,
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Speaker 1: the Pacific behind them both. The replacement photograph showed Connie
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Speaker 1: Zeller in a blue jacket. Dennis had been removed entirely.
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Speaker 1: Deborah called the police that night. By the next morning,
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Speaker 1: Connie was gone, but before she left, she took all
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Speaker 1: thirty one frames off the walls of four Fenwick Drive.
9:04
Speaker 1: She left the originals. She drove to Morrow Park in
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Speaker 1: the hours before dawn and wired fifteen of the frames
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Speaker 1: to the chain link fence along the perimeter. The date
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Speaker 1: stamp printed on those photographs read November second, two thousand nineteen.
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Speaker 1: She wanted them found. The question that took investigators several
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Speaker 1: days to answer was whether that was remorse or something else.
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Speaker 1: Entirely picture the guest room at two in the morning
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Speaker 1: on November second, Connie moving through the house she had
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Speaker 1: lived in for nine months, lifting frames off walls, stacking
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Speaker 1: them in the back of her car. She did not run,
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Speaker 1: She worked methodically, and when she was done, she drove
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Speaker 1: not away from Dunbar Falls, but tored a park inside it,
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Speaker 1: and she wired the frames to a fence in the dark,
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Speaker 1: and she left them there for the morning. Every version
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Speaker 1: of the evidence pointed toward one exp nation. She was fleeing,
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Speaker 1: she had been exposed, and she was destroying the record
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Speaker 1: of what she had done. But here is the thing.
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Speaker 1: She did not destroy anything. The thirty one replacement frames
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Speaker 1: she removed from four Fenwick Drive were wired to a
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Speaker 1: fence in a public park with the date printed on them.
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Speaker 1: The originals the photographs of Janet's actual life she left
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Speaker 1: on the walls when Heather Edwards found the frames at
10:25
Speaker 1: five forty in the morning on November ninth, running her
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Speaker 1: route through Morrow Park in thirty one degree air, and
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Speaker 1: when police traced them to the house at four Fenwick
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Speaker 1: Drive that afternoon. Janet came home at four in the
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Speaker 1: evening to find her own photographs exactly where they had
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Speaker 1: always been. Walt got his seven o'clock injection that night.
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Speaker 1: What Connie did in those early morning hours reads at
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Speaker 1: first like destruction, a person erasing evidence before vanishing. That
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Speaker 1: was the working assumption through the first seventy two hours
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Speaker 1: of the investigation. She had taken the frames, she had
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Speaker 1: fled she had something to hide. Then someone looked more
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Speaker 1: carefully at what she had taken versus what she had left.
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Speaker 1: She had taken every replacement, every fabricated image, She had
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Speaker 1: left every original. She had not taken a single thing
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Speaker 1: that belonged to Janet. She had removed only what she
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Speaker 1: had brought, and she had wired it to a fence
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Speaker 1: in a place where it would absolutely be found. Detective
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Speaker 1: Chris Haverford, when he reviewed that sequence, said that Connie
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Speaker 1: cooperated after her arrest in Sheboygen on approximately the thirteenth
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Speaker 1: of November in a way that was, in his words,
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Speaker 1: a form of performance in itself. She identified the storage
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Speaker 1: unit where she had kept the original photographs during the
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Speaker 1: months they had been removed. She handed over the financial
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Speaker 1: account credentials, She explained the facts and the prescription. She had,
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Speaker 1: in a sense already handed over the en evidence seven
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Speaker 1: days before she was found. Whether that was guilt or calculation,
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Speaker 1: the record does not say. What the record says is
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Speaker 1: that twenty two of the thirty one frames still contained
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Speaker 1: their originals behind the replacements. Nine did not. Connie had
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Speaker 1: taken those nine or destroyed them. Which ones they were
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Speaker 1: has not been made public. Some rooms in this case
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Speaker 1: have no floor. You look down, and the question just
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Speaker 1: keeps going. Connie Zeller was found on approximately the thirteenth
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Speaker 1: of November two thousand nineteen, in a short term rental
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Speaker 1: in Sheboygen, eleven days after she had vanished from Dunbar Falls,
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Speaker 1: eleven days after she had wired thirty one frames to
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Speaker 1: a chain link fence in the dark. When investigators presented
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Speaker 1: her with the evidence from Maureen Feltz's care facility and
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Speaker 1: the photographs from four Fenwick Drive, she did not deny anything.
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Speaker 1: She asked for a meeting with the district attorney. What
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Speaker 1: followed was cooperation so thorough and so precise that Detective
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Speaker 1: Chris Haverford noted it in his report with a specific qualifier.
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Speaker 1: She cooperated, he wrote, in a degree that was itself
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Speaker 1: a form of performance. She knew exactly what she had,
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Speaker 1: She knew exactly what it was worth. She identified the
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Speaker 1: storage unit where the original photographs had been kept during
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Speaker 1: the months they hung behind the replacements on Janet's walls.
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Speaker 1: She handed over the credentials for the financial accounts tied
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Speaker 1: to the dissolved commercial entity. She explained the fax machine,
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Speaker 1: She explained the prescription, every thread the investigation had been
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Speaker 1: pulling on. She handed over the spool. The charges were
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Speaker 1: precise identity fraud, financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, twice over,
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Speaker 1: once for Janet McCarthy, once for Maureene Felts falsification. The
13:55
Speaker 1: financial exploitation of Maureene Felts alone accounted for a proximately
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Speaker 1: fourteen thousand dollars redirected from an account belonging to a
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Speaker 1: sixty three year old woman with no close family, redirected
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Speaker 1: through an entity that had been dissolved months before anyone noticed.
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Speaker 1: The sentence was six years eligible for supervised release at four.
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Speaker 1: For a scheme of this duration and this architecture, that
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Speaker 1: number lands quietly. Six years measured against the two thousand
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Speaker 1: and fourteen death of Dennis McCarthy, against the months Connie
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Speaker 1: spent replicating photographs, against the eleven days of handwriting in
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Speaker 1: Walt's glucose log, Against Maureen Felts, whose walls were also wrong,
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Speaker 1: who also had no one checking until it was too late.
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Speaker 1: There is something the financial record cannot fully quantify. Connie
14:45
Speaker 1: had studied how Janet moved through her own home. She
14:49
Speaker 1: had learned the rhythm of Walt's injections well enough to
14:52
Speaker 1: replicate it in writing. She had sat across from Michelle
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Speaker 1: Sullivan's observations and redirected them. She had taken the shit
15:00
Speaker 1: of a life and worn it like a costume, not
15:03
Speaker 1: to destroy Janet, but to become adjacent to her, to
15:07
Speaker 1: be necessary, to be the person who knew where everything was,
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Speaker 1: because she had put everything there. That is not a crime.
15:15
Speaker 1: The sentencing guidelines have a clean line for but the
15:19
Speaker 1: record shows it clearly. Greg Owens at the pharmacy had
15:22
Speaker 1: noticed the insulin duplication in July of twenty nineteen. He
15:26
Speaker 1: had flagged it to Janet. Janet had mentioned it, and
15:29
Speaker 1: the thread had gone quiet. Dennis Quill, the retired mail
15:33
Speaker 1: carrier next door, had set his schedule by Janet's kitchen
15:37
Speaker 1: light for years. He noticed nothing wrong with it because
15:40
Speaker 1: the light was always on, because someone was always in
15:44
Speaker 1: the kitchen. Michelle Sullivan, twenty two years of clinical practice,
15:49
Speaker 1: had looked at Janet's account of her own life and
15:51
Speaker 1: felt that it did not cohere as a lived experience.
15:55
Speaker 1: She had stepped outside her normal limits to contact Deborah Nolano.
16:00
Speaker 1: Those were the pressure points with a scheme cracked not
16:02
Speaker 1: at the center, but at the edges from people paying
16:05
Speaker 1: oblique attention. Deborah Nolan pulling a frame from the wall
16:10
Speaker 1: on the first of November was not an investigation. It
16:15
Speaker 1: was an instinct. She had driven to Fenwick Drive without
16:18
Speaker 1: calling ahead because something Michelle had said would not leave
16:22
Speaker 1: her and under the replacement photograph Dennis McCarthy stood on
16:26
Speaker 1: the Oregon Coast in a green fleece pullover, exactly as
16:31
Speaker 1: Deborah remembered. Twenty two of the thirty one frames still
16:35
Speaker 1: held their originals behind the replacements when police processed the house.
16:39
Speaker 1: Nine did not. Connie had removed those nine before she
16:43
Speaker 1: left or destroyed them afterward, which nine has not been
16:48
Speaker 1: made public. The contents of those frames are not in
16:51
Speaker 1: the record. The storage unit held the rest. Janet McCarthy
16:57
Speaker 1: was fifty five years old when Connie Zeller moved into
17:00
Speaker 1: the guest room at four Fenwick Drive. She had spent
17:03
Speaker 1: eleven years away from the workforce. She had lost her
17:06
Speaker 1: husband without warning. She had done what people do. She
17:10
Speaker 1: had built a small, careful life around what remained a neighborhood.
17:14
Speaker 1: She knew a cat she kept alive twice a day
17:17
Speaker 1: with a needle and a notebook, a therapist she started
17:21
Speaker 1: seeing in May of twenty nineteen, at the suggestion of
17:25
Speaker 1: the person who was quietly rewriting the evidence of her
17:28
Speaker 1: own existence. The scheme did not require Janet to be weak.
17:33
Speaker 1: It required her to be alone. There is a moment
17:36
Speaker 1: in this case that does not appear in any charge sheet.
17:39
Speaker 1: It is not a crime. It is not evidence. It
17:42
Speaker 1: is the month of March two, thy nineteen, when Janet
17:45
Speaker 1: stood in front of the anniversary photograph from the Oregon
17:48
Speaker 1: Coast and said the word blue. She was describing a jacket.
17:53
Speaker 1: She was describing a jacket that was not in the
17:56
Speaker 1: original photograph because it had been placed there by someone else.
18:00
Speaker 1: And she said blue because that is what was in
18:03
Speaker 1: the frame. And when Deborah said green, both women let
18:07
Speaker 1: it go, because that is what you do when you
18:10
Speaker 1: trust the evidence in front of you more than the
18:12
Speaker 1: evidence inside you. That is the mechanism at the center
18:15
Speaker 1: of this case. Not the falsified prescription, not the facts
18:19
Speaker 1: traced to a dissolved company, not the fourteen thousand dollars
18:23
Speaker 1: moved from Maureen Felts. Those are the legal facts. The
18:27
Speaker 1: core mechanism is simpler and harder to prosecute. Connie Zeller
18:31
Speaker 1: made Janet McCarthy doubt what she remembered, and she did
18:35
Speaker 1: it by replacing the objects Janet used to confirm her
18:38
Speaker 1: own memories. It worked for eight months because grief had
18:42
Speaker 1: already loosened Janet's confidence in her own recall. Connie did
18:47
Speaker 1: not create that looseness. She found it, and she built
18:50
Speaker 1: a door in it. Michel Sullivan saw the door from
18:53
Speaker 1: the outside. She could not name it. She only knew
18:57
Speaker 1: that when Janet described her own life, it sounded composed
19:01
Speaker 1: rather than remembered. That distinction twenty two years of clinical
19:06
Speaker 1: practice and still it took months to locate is not
19:10
Speaker 1: a small thing. It is the reason this kind of
19:13
Speaker 1: harm is difficult to identify and difficult to prosecute, and
19:17
Speaker 1: easy to repeat. Maureen Felts was sixty three and had
19:21
Speaker 1: no close family. Eleven frames in her room at the
19:24
Speaker 1: care facility were replaced, fourteen thousand dollars was gone. Her
19:29
Speaker 1: case is part of the conviction record. Beyond that, the
19:33
Speaker 1: public record does not say much about her. She appears
19:36
Speaker 1: in the court documents and then recedes that absence is
19:40
Speaker 1: its own kind of fact. Walt continues to receive his
19:44
Speaker 1: injections at seven in the morning and at seven in
19:47
Speaker 1: the evening, the way he always has. Janet took the
19:51
Speaker 1: composition note book back after she returned home on the
19:55
Speaker 1: ninth of November. She drew a line under the last
19:58
Speaker 1: entry written in so someone else's handwriting. Then she continued
20:03
Speaker 1: in her own that line, the one she drew across
20:07
Speaker 1: the page under the final foreign entry is not a
20:11
Speaker 1: legal document, It is not evidence. It is a woman
20:14
Speaker 1: reclaiming the record of her own life, one small entry
20:18
Speaker 1: at a time, in the only handwriting that was ever
20:21
Speaker 1: supposed to be there. The frames are back on the walls,
20:24
Speaker 1: the ones that could be recovered. The nine that could
20:28
Speaker 1: not be are still missing and somewhere in a storage
20:31
Speaker 1: unit that has now been cataloged and documented and entered
20:34
Speaker 1: into evidence. The rest of what Connie took is accounted for.
20:38
Speaker 1: Every original in the end survived, almost every one. This
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Speaker 1: show is made by Obomedia.