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The Quiet Theft: How a Scholar Lost Her Life's Work Without Violence · Dark Psychology Manipulation

0:03
Speaker 1: At six thirty in the morning on July ninth, two
0:06
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a civil engineer named Donald Cooper was running
0:11
Speaker 1: his usual campus footpath when he saw something that made
0:14
Speaker 1: him stop. A cardboard box sat against the stone bench
0:18
Speaker 1: in the Humanity's Building alcove. The bench engraved with the
0:22
Speaker 1: name of Professor Ellison T. Marsh, dead fifteen years. The
0:27
Speaker 1: box was dry. It had rained over night. Someone had
0:31
Speaker 1: left it there before the rain started and never came
0:35
Speaker 1: back for it. The label on the box read Evans
0:38
Speaker 1: l Selected Works nineteen eighty nine two thousand eighteen, handwritten
0:46
Speaker 1: neat inside original interview recordings, decades of correspondence with the
0:51
Speaker 1: West Virginia Historical Society, and early drafts of four chapters
0:56
Speaker 1: that had taken years to gather. The life's work of
0:58
Speaker 1: a living woman sitting beside a dead man's name unclaimed.
1:02
Speaker 1: Cooper photographed it and called the campus non emergency line.
1:07
Speaker 1: He didn't know he had just found the one piece
1:09
Speaker 1: of evidence that a man named Keith Wagner had never
1:13
Speaker 1: managed to reach. This is the story of Laurie Evans
1:16
Speaker 1: and of how, over nearly three years, one person methodically
1:20
Speaker 1: dismantled another person's identity, her work, and her sense of
1:25
Speaker 1: what was real, not with violence, with patience, with access,
1:29
Speaker 1: and with the kind of calm that, in the end
1:32
Speaker 1: would be the thing he had finally broken. Laurie Evans
1:35
Speaker 1: had been at Alderton University for twenty six years. She
1:40
Speaker 1: was fifty four years old in twenty nineteen, a professor
1:44
Speaker 1: of folklore and cultural studies, and her specialty was Appellationian
1:49
Speaker 1: world tradition, the stories that communities carry in their mouths
1:53
Speaker 1: across generations, the ones that survived because someone thought.
1:57
Speaker 2: They were worth keeping.
1:59
Speaker 1: She had publicished three books, a fourth was in progress.
2:03
Speaker 1: Every morning for sixteen years, Laurie walked the same two
2:07
Speaker 1: point three mile loop around campus before dawn. The route
2:12
Speaker 1: never changed. It ended at a cast iron fountain, installed
2:15
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety four, and she touched it every time
2:19
Speaker 1: she passed, not for superstition, but for rhythm. According to
2:24
Speaker 1: people who knew her well, that fountain was where the
2:28
Speaker 1: thinking part of her walk ended and the deciding part began.
2:32
Speaker 1: The house on Clement Street was hers hers alone before
2:36
Speaker 1: October twenty sixteen. That was the month she met Keith
2:39
Speaker 1: Wagner at a departmental event. Wagner was forty eight, a
2:44
Speaker 1: visiting lecturer in the English Department on a short term appointment,
2:47
Speaker 1: the kind of position that exists on a semester by
2:50
Speaker 1: semester basis and rarely leads anywhere permanent.
2:53
Speaker 2: He was, by all accounts.
2:55
Speaker 1: Engaging, curious about her work, attentive in ways that felt
3:00
Speaker 1: at first like recognition. By December twenty sixteen, he had
3:04
Speaker 1: moved into the house on Clement Street. His visiting appointment
3:08
Speaker 1: was not renewed. He began describing himself as an independent writer,
3:13
Speaker 1: and because Laurie taught during the day and Wagner did not,
3:17
Speaker 1: he was alone in her house, at her desk, with
3:20
Speaker 1: access to her files for hours at a stretch for
3:24
Speaker 1: nearly three years. What her colleague Janet Prior would later
3:28
Speaker 1: tell investigators captured something that took everyone a long time
3:32
Speaker 1: to name. He reframed everything Prior said, not loudly, not
3:37
Speaker 1: through confrontation. He refrained it quietly, one conversation at a time,
3:43
Speaker 1: until Laurie's own understanding of her work, her relationships, and
3:47
Speaker 1: her judgment had been reconstructed around his version of events.
3:52
Speaker 1: The thing about a slow reframe is that there is
3:56
Speaker 1: no single moment it begins. There is no door that closes,
4:00
Speaker 1: no line that gets crossed in a way you can
4:03
Speaker 1: point to afterward and say there, that was it. There's
4:08
Speaker 1: only the accumulation. And by the summer of two thousand nineteen,
4:12
Speaker 1: Lorie Evans had accumulated enough to call her sister Patricia
4:16
Speaker 1: in Knoxville and say seven words that would set the
4:19
Speaker 1: rest of this story in motion.
4:21
Speaker 2: I think I need to leave, she said then, but
4:24
Speaker 2: I don't know where anything is anymore.
4:27
Speaker 1: She didn't mean her belongings, She meant herself. She called
4:32
Speaker 1: Patricia on July seventh, twenty nineteen. Patricia drove to Alderton
4:37
Speaker 1: the next day, July eighth. But what happened during those
4:41
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, and what was quietly sitting in an
4:45
Speaker 1: archive box on Clement Street, is where this story gets complicated.
4:50
Speaker 1: Patricia arrived on July eighth, while Wagner was out. She
4:55
Speaker 1: and Laurie packed the car. They moved fast and quietly,
4:58
Speaker 1: the way you do when you are not entirely sure
5:02
Speaker 1: what you are afraid of, but you are certain you
5:05
Speaker 1: need to go.
5:06
Speaker 2: Most of what mattered fit into two trips. Almost everything.
5:10
Speaker 1: One item did not make it to the car, A
5:13
Speaker 1: cardboard archive box labeled in Laurie's handwriting. Evans Hell selected
5:19
Speaker 1: works nineteen eighty nine two thousand eighteen inside the original
5:26
Speaker 1: cassette recordings of her Appalachian interviews, decades of correspondence with
5:31
Speaker 1: West Virginia historical societies, early chapter drafts, the raw material.
5:37
Speaker 2: Of her life's work.
5:38
Speaker 1: In the rush of leaving, the box stayed on Clement
5:42
Speaker 1: Street over night, a miscommunication between two women under enormous pressure.
5:48
Speaker 1: Moving as fast as they could, that box sat outside
5:51
Speaker 1: through the night of July eighth into July ninth. The
5:56
Speaker 1: next morning, July ninth, at six thirty a m. A
6:00
Speaker 1: civil engineer named Donald.
6:02
Speaker 2: Cooper ran his usual campus route.
6:05
Speaker 1: He spotted the box propped against a stone bench in
6:07
Speaker 1: the Humanities Building alcove, a bench with a brass nameplate
6:11
Speaker 1: reading Proth Ellison T.
6:13
Speaker 2: Marsh.
6:14
Speaker 1: Cooper was precise by profession.
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Speaker 2: He photographed the box.
6:19
Speaker 1: Noted the label, and called the campus non emergency line.
6:23
Speaker 2: He did not move it. The box was dry, it
6:26
Speaker 2: had rained that rate.
6:28
Speaker 1: Detective Phil Navarro arrived.
6:30
Speaker 2: Coola was locked as a welfare chair.
6:32
Speaker 1: He found the box where Cooper had left it. He
6:34
Speaker 1: also found something else when he began looking at the
6:37
Speaker 1: house on Clement Street, a financial picture that did not
6:41
Speaker 1: match the life Laurie Evans had built over twenty six years.
6:45
Speaker 1: Here's where the image Luke opens. Laurie's university salary had supported.
6:49
Speaker 2: A household for two and a half years. That was expected.
6:53
Speaker 1: What was not expected was the pattern beneath it. Wagner
6:57
Speaker 1: had not been drawing down her accounts in one one
7:00
Speaker 1: obvious withdrawal. He had been operating at the margins in
7:04
Speaker 1: amounts and categories that moved slowly enough not to alarm.
7:09
Speaker 1: The mortgage management account showed a signature authorization, a letter
7:14
Speaker 1: on paper that looked right, claiming Lourie had delegated management
7:19
Speaker 1: authority to Wagner. Rebecca Clark was the forensic accountant retained
7:23
Speaker 1: after a separate complaint arrived, one that had nothing to
7:27
Speaker 1: do with money. In late July two thousand nineteen, Christine Luo,
7:32
Speaker 1: an editor at Vernacular Studies Quarterly, filed a formal plagiarism complaint.
7:38
Speaker 1: A submission had arrived from Wagner's email address. When Luo
7:42
Speaker 1: compared it to a chapter draft Laurie had circulated eighteen
7:46
Speaker 1: months earlier, the structural architecture was identical. Two passages matched
7:51
Speaker 1: word for word. Clark was hired to look at the
7:54
Speaker 1: financial records, then her mandate expanded. Her eleven page reconstruction
7:59
Speaker 1: traced the pattern.
8:00
Speaker 2: Across thirty one months.
8:02
Speaker 1: Wagner had accessed Laurie's email using her password, one she
8:06
Speaker 1: had shared voluntarily, in the way you do when someone
8:09
Speaker 1: has moved into your house and your life. He had
8:12
Speaker 1: configured a forwarding rule on her account. Any correspondence from
8:17
Speaker 1: vernacular Studies quarterly was quietly redirected to a secondary address
8:21
Speaker 1: he controlled. Laurie never saw those emails. She didn't know
8:25
Speaker 1: the rule existed. That forwarding rule was invisible for nearly
8:29
Speaker 1: three years. Clark's phrase for what the timeline described was precise,
8:34
Speaker 1: not theft of individual assets, Not the theft of individual assets, but.
8:40
Speaker 2: On identity replacement.
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Speaker 1: The fellowship application submitted under Lourie's credentials, the institutional letter
8:47
Speaker 1: of support, the research narrative, the publication history presented as evidence.
8:51
Speaker 2: Of Laurie's scholarly trajectory. All of it had been built
8:55
Speaker 2: for her.
8:55
Speaker 1: Actual materials assembled by someone else, submitted without her note,
9:00
Speaker 1: and the authorization letter for the mortgage account, the document
9:04
Speaker 1: that made the financial access appear legitimate contained a technical
9:08
Speaker 1: error Wagner had not anticipated. Clark established that the letter
9:12
Speaker 1: had been composed on a computer Laurie had not accessed
9:16
Speaker 1: since early twenty eighteen. Wagner altered the file's creation date,
9:22
Speaker 1: but the software retained a separate modification timestamp. The two
9:26
Speaker 1: dates did not match. It was, Clark noted in her report,
9:30
Speaker 1: not a sophisticated forgery. It was a forgery made by
9:34
Speaker 1: someone who did not expect to be checked. There is
9:37
Speaker 1: a moment in most of these cases when the architecture
9:40
Speaker 1: of what happened becomes visible all at once, not one
9:43
Speaker 1: piece at a time, all of it suddenly in the
9:46
Speaker 1: same frame. For the people working on Lori's case, that
9:50
Speaker 1: moment came in September twenty nineteen, a colleague of Elaine
9:54
Speaker 1: Voss reached out to Detective Navarro. Voss was forty six,
9:59
Speaker 1: a former lie lecturer at a Vermont college, and between
10:02
Speaker 1: twenty twelve and twenty fourteen she had been in a
10:06
Speaker 1: relationship with Keith Wagner. During that time, Wagner had submitted
10:11
Speaker 1: her four year monograph under a joint byline without her consent.
10:16
Speaker 1: He had drained a research expense account while he had
10:19
Speaker 1: access to her home.
10:21
Speaker 2: Voss had not pursued criminal charges.
10:24
Speaker 1: She had simply tried to recover what she could and
10:27
Speaker 1: move on. She agreed to speak to investigators. She agreed
10:32
Speaker 1: to testify. The thing about Elaine Voss's testimony is what
10:36
Speaker 1: it did to the timeline. Because Wagner's method was not improvised.
10:41
Speaker 2: It was not a.
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Speaker 1: Response to Laurie's specific circumstances or her specific work.
10:47
Speaker 2: It was practiced.
10:48
Speaker 1: The reframe, the access, the slow financial redirection, the professional appropriation.
10:55
Speaker 1: Vos recognized all of them.
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Speaker 2: She had lived it seven years earlier.
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Speaker 1: The pattern had a history, and the history made the
11:02
Speaker 1: present legible in a way that a single case could not.
11:05
Speaker 1: Navarro had been building a financial fraud case, Clark had
11:08
Speaker 1: been building an intellectual property case. Voss's account connected them.
11:13
Speaker 1: What had looked like opportunism revealed itself as method. Wagner
11:17
Speaker 1: was arrested on October third, two thousand nineteen. The charges
11:22
Speaker 1: wirefram identity for financial fraud, theft of intellectual property.
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Speaker 2: He said nothing at the arrest.
11:29
Speaker 1: Walk through what the evidence actually shows, and two possible
11:33
Speaker 1: pictures emerge. Picture the house on Clement Street in the
11:36
Speaker 1: spring of two.
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Speaker 2: Thousand and seven.
11:39
Speaker 1: Wagner is at Lourie's desk. His visiting appointment has ended.
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Speaker 1: He is officially writing. What he is actually doing, if
11:48
Speaker 1: you accept the forensic timeline Clark produced, is building access points.
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Speaker 1: The email forwarding rule goes in quietly. The password was
11:58
Speaker 1: already his financial account takes longer. It requires the authorization letter,
12:04
Speaker 1: which requires access to institutional letterhead, which he has because
12:08
Speaker 1: he has access to everything in that house. Each step
12:12
Speaker 1: is discreet, none of it announces itself. That version of events,
12:17
Speaker 1: the methodical, premeditated version, is the one the prosecution argued,
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Speaker 1: and the one Clark's eleven page timeline supports with what
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Speaker 1: she called irreducible proof. The modification timestamp on the letter,
12:31
Speaker 1: the metadata from the fellowship submission, the forwarding rule law.
12:36
Speaker 1: Each piece confirms the others. But there is a second
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Speaker 1: picture that Wagner's defense raised before the plea, and it
12:43
Speaker 1: is worth examining against the same evidence. In that picture,
12:48
Speaker 1: Wagner genuinely believed he had contributed enough to Laurie's work
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Speaker 1: to have standing, that the collaboration was real, even if undocumented,
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Speaker 1: and that the financial arrangements reflected and understand between them
13:00
Speaker 1: that had never been formalized.
13:02
Speaker 2: The fellowship application in this version was not theft.
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Speaker 1: It was a miscalculation about where contribution ends and authorship begins.
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Speaker 1: That version collapses the moment you look at the forwarding rule.
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Speaker 1: A man who believes he has standing does not redirect
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Speaker 1: his partner's professional correspondence to a private address she doesn't
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Speaker 1: know about.
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Speaker 2: He does not need to.
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Speaker 1: If the collaboration is real, the communications arrive and are discussed.
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Speaker 1: The forwarding rule is not the act of someone who
13:33
Speaker 1: thinks he belongs there. It is the act of someone
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Speaker 1: who knows he doesn't and is managing the information to
13:40
Speaker 1: keep her from finding out. And then there is the
13:43
Speaker 1: fact that Elaine Voss existed. Wagner's defense could not account
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Speaker 1: for Voss the same method seven years earlier, with a
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Speaker 1: different woman, a different institution, a different body at work,
13:55
Speaker 1: the same quiet redirection, the same financial access, the same
14:00
Speaker 1: appropriation of a woman's scholarly identity. The overlap was not coincidental.
14:05
Speaker 1: It was a curriculum. Wagner changed his plea mid trial.
14:10
Speaker 1: His statement, read by his attorney in a voice his
14:13
Speaker 1: attorney confirmed was entirely calm, said that he had believed
14:17
Speaker 1: Laurie's work was better than it would have been without him.
14:20
Speaker 1: He did not say he was sorry. The plea changed
14:24
Speaker 1: nothing about what had already been documented. Rebecca Clark's eleven
14:28
Speaker 1: page timeline stood in the record regardless of how Wagner
14:32
Speaker 1: chose to end the trial. The modification time stamp on,
14:36
Speaker 1: the forged authorization letter, the metadata on the fellowships of mission,
14:41
Speaker 1: the forwarding rule lag that redirected Laurie's correspondence to an
14:46
Speaker 1: address she had never seen. Each piece of evidence confirmed
14:50
Speaker 1: the others, and together they produced what Clark called in
14:53
Speaker 1: her report irreducible proof.
14:56
Speaker 2: Wagner was convicted on all counts.
15:00
Speaker 1: The sentence was seven years, with three suspended. The fellowship
15:04
Speaker 1: was recovered and reissued in Laurie Evans's name. That last
15:09
Speaker 1: fact matters more than it might appear. The fellowship was
15:13
Speaker 1: not simply money. It represented the scholarly community's formal recognition
15:18
Speaker 1: of her fourth book, the book that documented Appalachian oral
15:21
Speaker 1: tradition through the words of people who had trusted her
15:24
Speaker 1: to record them faithfully. When the Fellowship was reissued, it
15:28
Speaker 1: meant the record now said what it should have said
15:31
Speaker 1: the first time. That this work belonged to Laurie Evans
15:34
Speaker 1: and to no one else. Elaine Voss testified during the trial.
15:39
Speaker 1: She was forty six years old and had carried the
15:42
Speaker 1: weight of what Wagner did to her.
15:44
Speaker 2: Since twenty twelve.
15:46
Speaker 1: She had not pursued charges then she testified. Now the
15:50
Speaker 1: jury heard that Wagner's method was not improvised in Alderton.
15:53
Speaker 1: It had been practiced, refined. The monograph he submitted under
15:58
Speaker 1: a joint by lay without Voss's consent, the research expense
16:03
Speaker 1: account he drained while he had access to her own.
16:06
Speaker 1: The architecture was identical, same redirection, same appropriation, same financial
16:12
Speaker 1: access obtained through proximity. The defense had no answer for Voss.
16:17
Speaker 1: There is no clinical term in the charging documents for
16:20
Speaker 1: what Wagner did to.
16:21
Speaker 2: Lord over three years.
16:23
Speaker 1: The charges were wire fraud, identity fraud, financial fraud, and
16:28
Speaker 1: theft of intellectual property. Those categories are accurate, and they
16:32
Speaker 1: are also in some ways insufficient. What Clark described as
16:38
Speaker 1: identity replacement was something more granular than fraud. It was
16:43
Speaker 1: the slow, moe, deliberate substitution of one person's intellectual presence
16:49
Speaker 1: with another's, conducted through access obtained by trust. Laurie gave
16:54
Speaker 1: Wagner her email password. She trusted him with her filing system,
16:59
Speaker 1: her financial accounts, her professional correspondence. He used every point
17:04
Speaker 1: of access to redirect information away from her and toward himself.
17:10
Speaker 1: By the time she called her sister Patricia on July seventh,
17:13
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, and said she didn't know where anything was anymore.
17:18
Speaker 1: She was describing something real, she had been systematically separated
17:23
Speaker 1: from her own professional record. The archive box survived because
17:27
Speaker 1: of a miscommunication. Laurie had packed it the night before
17:30
Speaker 1: with her sister and left it behind accidentally.
17:33
Speaker 2: Donald Cooper found it the.
17:34
Speaker 1: Next morning beside Professor Marsh's bench, dry after overnight rain,
17:39
Speaker 1: and called the campus line. The box held the original
17:43
Speaker 1: interview recordings, the West Virginia Historical Society correspondence, the early
17:48
Speaker 1: chapter drafts, everything Wagner had never been able to reach
17:52
Speaker 1: because it lived in physical form, labeled in Laurie's handwriting,
17:56
Speaker 1: too old and too analog for the forwarding war to talk.
18:00
Speaker 1: It was the one part of her identity he had
18:03
Speaker 1: not dismant, and it was sitting in plain sight. Laurie
18:07
Speaker 1: Evans returned to Alderton in the spring of twenty twenty one.
18:11
Speaker 1: Her fourth book, was published the following year. The dedication
18:15
Speaker 1: reads for the people who told me their.
18:18
Speaker 2: Stories, who trusted me to keep them. She wrote that
18:21
Speaker 2: line for the.
18:21
Speaker 1: Appalachian communities whose old histories she had spent decades preserving.
18:26
Speaker 1: She wrote it for the women and men who sat
18:28
Speaker 1: across from her recorder and said the things they had
18:31
Speaker 1: never said to anyone else, because they trusted her to
18:34
Speaker 1: hold those words carefully. There is something in that dedication
18:38
Speaker 1: that functions as a quiet answer to.
18:40
Speaker 2: Wagner's please statement.
18:42
Speaker 1: He had said, calmly through his attorney that he believed
18:46
Speaker 1: Laurie's work was better than it would have been without him.
18:50
Speaker 1: That sentence is worth sitting with. It is the logic
18:52
Speaker 1: of someone who decided that his belief in his own
18:55
Speaker 1: contribution was sufficient authorization, That proximity to someone's work was
19:00
Speaker 1: the same as ownership of it. That trust extended in
19:04
Speaker 1: good faith was permission. The dedication says the opposite. Trust
19:08
Speaker 1: is not permission. Trust is a responsibility. Laurie had held
19:13
Speaker 1: that responsibility for every person who gave her a story.
19:18
Speaker 1: Wagner had treated it as an opportunity. The case left
19:22
Speaker 1: several things unresolved in ways that matter beyond this single episode.
19:26
Speaker 1: Janet Prior told investigators that Wagner reframed everything, that his
19:31
Speaker 1: version of events was always present, always plausible, and always
19:35
Speaker 1: slightly ahead of Lourie's. Thomas Reyes noticed something was wrong
19:40
Speaker 1: at the Bridgeport's symposium in March of twenty eighteen and
19:43
Speaker 1: said so, and Laurie dismissed him, not because she was careless,
19:48
Speaker 1: because Wagner had spent more than a year making his
19:52
Speaker 1: presence feel like a natural extension of her work, and
19:55
Speaker 1: the mechanisms he used to do that were not visible
19:58
Speaker 1: from the outside. That is the part of this case
20:01
Speaker 1: that stays with you, Not the fraud, not the forgery,
20:05
Speaker 1: the fact that the process was invisible while it was happening,
20:08
Speaker 1: even to the people closest to Laurie. Elaine Voss was
20:12
Speaker 1: a prior victim who did not pursue charges at the time.
20:15
Speaker 2: She testified anywhere.
20:17
Speaker 1: Because of her testimony, the jury understood they were not
20:21
Speaker 1: looking at an isolated incident, They were looking at a method.
20:24
Speaker 1: What Laurie recovered she recovered in pieces her professional record,
20:29
Speaker 1: the fellowship, her position, the archived box that spent a
20:33
Speaker 1: single night beside a dead professor's named bench, and came
20:37
Speaker 1: through dry. She rebuilt the rest herself. That dedication for
20:42
Speaker 1: the people who trusted her to keep their stories is
20:45
Speaker 1: the most accurate measure of what Wagner tried to take
20:49
Speaker 1: and what he ultimately failed to destroy. This show is
20:53
Speaker 1: made by Obo Media