Latest / Narcisist Psychology / in kitchen cabinet), fish names/schedule, Brenda's isolation

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in kitchen cabinet), fish names/schedule, Brenda's isolation · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At six twelve in the morning on July fourteenth, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a fifteen year old newspaper delivery boy named
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Kenneth McCarthy stopped at the door of Unit four, three
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: hundred eighteen Birchwood Terrace and looked through the glass. The
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: aquarium was dark except for a thin strip of emergency
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: blue light. Eleven paper cranes floated on the surface of
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the water, arranged in a ring around a dead goldfish.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: The tenant was gone. No one knew where she was.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: What Kenneth had found was not a crime scene in
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the way most people picture won. There was no forced entry,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: no broken glass, no sign of a struggle, just a
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: fifty five year old woman who had vanished from an
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: apartment she had lived in for nearly a decade, and
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: a collection of paper cranes that should not have existed
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: at all. The question investigators would spend the next two
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: weeks answering was not who made those c It was
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: how one man had spent eight years quietly dismantling a
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: woman's sense of safety, one small move at a time,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: until the night she packed a bag and left everything
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: she knew behind. Brenda Peterson had moved into Unit four
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: in the autumn of two thousand nine. She was fifty
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: five years old in two thousand nineteen, a billing coordinator
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: recently divorced. When she first signed her lease, the apartment
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: was modest, forty gallon aquarium along the east wall, a
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: kitchen with enough counter space to cook a real meal,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: a window that looked out on to Birchwood Terrace, where
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: she could hear the neighborhood come to life each morning.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: The lease was the thing that mattered most. Rent controlled
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: at eight twenty dollars a month in a city where
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the market rate by two thousand nineteen had climbed to
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: two thousand, two hundred, that lease was not just affordable
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: housing for Brenda after a divorce and a fresh start,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: It was the condition that made everything else possible. Her
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: routines were exact. She fed her three goldfish Lisbon, Porto
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: and Farrow every morning at seven and every evening at seven.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Her colleague, Denise Farrow, confirmed both the schedule and the
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: specific brand of fish Fool, Brenda kept on the shelf
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: beside the tank. She had named the fish after Portuguese cities.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: She had kept them for years. The man who owned.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: The building was named Norman Phillips. He was sixty one
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: years old in twenty nineteen. He had purchased three hundred
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: eighteen Birchwood Terrace in two thousand four, five years before
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Brenda arrived. By outward measure, Norman was unremarkable in the
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: most reassuring way. He served on his church's finance committee.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: He attended neighborhood association meetings. People who knew him described
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: a steady, responsible presence. What those people did not know
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: was that Norman had been trying to re move Brenda
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: from Unit four since twenty eleven. His first move was procedural.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: He cited a subletting clause in her lease, a clause
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: that applied to a situation Brenda had never been in.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: The citation went nowhere legally, but it planted something. Brenda
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: paid unauthorized fee assessments the following year, in two thy twelve,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: without pushing back. The amounts were not enormous. The pattern, though,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: was already forming. Then Norman went quiet for two years,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: and when he reappeared, he did not come as a landlord.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: In the spring of twenty fourteen, he ran into Brenda
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: at a farmer's market According to the record, he initiated
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: the contact. They talked. He was warm, neighborly, the kind
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: of person who remembered small details. By two thousand fifteen,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: he had visited the apartment twice. He learned where Brenda
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: kept the spare key on a hook inside a kitchen cabinet.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: He learned the names of her fish and her feeding schedule.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: He learned, according to the social worker who would later
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: reconstruct these months, that Brenda was socially isolated after her divorce.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: He did not take the key, he memorized its location.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Glen Anderson, a licensed clinical social worker and coercive control
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: consultant brought in by colset PD on July sixteenth, two
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, described what Norman had been building as a
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: six week escalation riding an eight year foundation. The farmer's
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: market was not a coincidence. The apartment visits were not
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: social calls. Every piece of information Norman gathered, schedule, routine, vulnerability,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: key location was infrastructure. What he built with that infrastructure
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: is where this story turns. On July third, two thousand nineteen,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: a note appeared under Brenda Peterson's door. It was hand
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: written on yellow legal pad paper. Norman. Philip had signed it.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: The message was friendly, unhurried, take your time, no rush back.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: The foe end of month attached to it was a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: lease renewed. The monthly rent listed was two thousand, one
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars. Brenda's current rent was eight hundred twenty dollars.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: She did not sign. Instead, on July eighth, she called
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Connie Marsh, a tenant Wright's advocate. Brenda left a message.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: The following morning, Marsh called back. The voicemail was four
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: words that would matter enormously later, do not sign anything.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: On July tenth, Norman made one final social call. The
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: record does not detail what was said. What the record
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: does show is that Brenda packed a bag that night
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: and left the apartment. A neighbor saw her go. She
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: drove ninety miles east to her sister's house in Delport
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: and did not tell anyone where she was going. The
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: apartment on Birchwood Harris sat empty. The next morning, July eleventh,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Norman walked through the front door of unit four. He
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: did not use a key. The door was unlocked. Brenda
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: had left in a hurry. He stayed approximately twenty minutes.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Vincent Gage, a retired postal worker in unit two saw him.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Enter Gage did not report it immediately. Inside the apartment,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: the forty gallon aquarium hummed in the dark, lit only
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: by an emergency blue strip light along the base. One
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: of the three goldfish was dead. Lisbon, a comet type
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: fish that Brenda had kept for years, was floating near
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: the surface. The auto feeder had jammed two days earlier.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Norman did not cause this. He found it that way.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Porto and Farah, the other two moved slowly through the
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: water on either side of their dead companion. What Norman
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: did next is the image that stopped Investigator's cold. He
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: pulled pages from his jacket, draft pages of the fraudulent
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: lease he had prepared, and he folded them one by
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: one eleven times. He folded them into paper cranes. Then
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: he set them on the water. They floated in a
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: ring around Lisbon when he left. He left them there.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Three days later, on July fourteenth, at six twelve in
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the morning, Kenneth McCarthy arrived at the building. Kenneth was
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: fifteen years old and had been delivering newspapers to Brenda
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: for two summers. He saw the emergency light through the window.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: The front door was unlocked. He went in. Officers arrived
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: at seven forty five. What they found a dark tank,
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: a dead fish, eleven yellow paper cranes circling it on
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the surface, an unopened bag of fish food, a cheaper
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: brand not Brenda's, sitting three quarters full near the tank.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Brenda's brand was confirmed by her colleague Denise Farrow. Someone
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: had purchased a replacement and partially used it, and in
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the kitchen drawer unsigned a fraudulent lease renewal prepared by
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Norman's property attorney, pricing the apartment at market rate, voiding
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: every rent controlled term Brenda had held for a decade.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: The voicemail on her phone do not sign anything, Brenda
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: herself gone. The fish food was the detail that shifted
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: the investigation. First, it was not Brenda's brand, it had
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: been opened and used. That meant someone had entered the apartment,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: fed the fish at least once, and left. The auto
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: feeder had jammed before Brenda's departure, meaning the fish had
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: gone without food for at minimum two days before someone
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: stepped in. That someone had brought their own supply. Detective
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: hal Osgoode pulled purchase records from nearby stores one match.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: The paper cranes were the second shift, and this is
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: where the case stopped looking like a missing person file
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: and started looking like something investigators did not have. Clean language.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Four eleven cranes, yellow legal pad paper, the same legal
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: pad stock as Norman's July third note, which was already
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: in evidence. Forensic handwriting analysis of the note had already
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: established a match to Norman's hand. When investigators unfolded the cranes,
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: they found partial lines of lease language, the same fraudulent
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: lease sitting unsigned in Brenda's kitchen drawer. The cranes were
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: not decorative. They were shredded evidence draft pages, folded before disposal,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: left behind. Norman had walked into that apartment to destroy documents.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: He had not counted on leaving them. There is something
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with here. Norman had spent eight years building
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: toward this moment. He had been patient, methodical, invisible. He
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: had never taken the spare key, only memorized where it lived.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: He had learned Brenda's schedule down to the hour. He
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: had kept himself positioned as a neighbor, a church committee member,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: a familiar face at the farmer's market and at the
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: end of all that infrastructure. In twenty minutes alone in
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: her apartment, he left eleven folded pieces of evidence floating
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: in a fish tank. Whether he forgot them or felt finished,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: that question was never definitively answered. Glenn Anderson, the coercive
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: control consultant coulset PD, brought in on July sixteenth, gave
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: investigators a framework that re ordered how they read every
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: prior fact. What Anderson described was not opportunism, it was architecture.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: The subletting citation in twenty eleven was pressure. The fee
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: assessments in twenty twelve were conditioning, training Brenda to yield
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: without a fight. The farmer's Market in twenty fourteen was
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: re entry disguised as warmth. The apartment visits in twenty
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: fifteen were reconnaissance. And the July third note, with its
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: friendly tones and its suffocating rent figure, was the wall
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: at the end of a corridor that had been narrowing
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  Speaker 1: for eight years. Brenda had called Connie Marsh the moment
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: she felt it closing in. Investigators located Brenda on July
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: seventeenth at her sister's house in Delport. She was alive
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: and unharmed. She confirmed the spare Key's location. Confirmed she
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: had not given Norman access. Confirmed the fish food was
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: not her brand. Confirmed she had left after the final
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: visit because something felt wrong in a way she could
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: not name precisely. She had heard Marsh's voicemail. She had
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: not signed. She had run that decision, leaving before she
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: could be pressured into a signature. Is what made the
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: original lease defensible. Everything about the paper cranes pointed toward
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: a message that was the obvious read. A man enters
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: a woman's apartment, finds her fish dead, arranges origami birds
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: around it, Lee yeves. It reads as theater. It reads
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: as threat. Investigators in at least one early media account
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: treated the arrangement as deliberate intimidation. Norman sending a signal
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: to Brenda about what she stood to lose. Picture the
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: apartment at mid morning on July eleventh. Norman as the
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: draft pages. He knows the least scheme is in trouble.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Brenda hasn't signed. She has called someone. The note sits
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: untouched in the kitchen drawer. He needs those draft pages gone.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: He folds them quickly, one after another into shapes that
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: will hold together on water. He sets them in the
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: tank because the tank is there and the fish is
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: already dead, and he is moving fast. Then he walks out.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: He does not take them with him. But that version,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: the deliberate threat version, collapses against two facts. First, Brenda
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: was not there to receive any message. She had left
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: the night before. The cranes floated for three days before
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: a fifteen year old newspaper boy found them. If the
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: arrangement was meant to frighten Brenda, it was staged for
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: an empty room. Second, when investigators unfolded the cranes, they
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: found lease language inside document. Destruction was the operational purpose.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: The cranes were the method of disposal, but not the message.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: What Norman did not account for was forensic paper analysis.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: The strongest reading of those twenty minutes, the one consistent
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: with every piece of physical evidence, is that Norman entered
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: to eliminate the draft pages used the water surface because
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Lisbon was already dead and the tank was accessible, and
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: left without retrieving the cranes because he either forgot them
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: in the process or considered them sufficiently transformed to be unrecognizable.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: He had been meticulous for eight years. He was not meticulous.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: On July eleventh, that lapse closed the case. Vincent Gage
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: delayed eye witness account placed Norman inside the apartment that morning.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: The fish food purchase record placed him near by. The
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: handwriting on the cranes matched the handwriting on the July
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: third note, and the cranes unfolded matched the unsigned lease
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: in the kitchen drawer. Four independent threads, all of them
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: led to the same man. Norman held through the first interrogation,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: he did not hold through the second. On August fourth,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, after Gage's testimony was formalized and the
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: forensic handwriting report was placed in front of him, Norman
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Phillips confessed. Norman Phillips was arrested on July twenty ninth,
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: two thousand, nineteen, twelve days after Brenda was found at
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: her sister's house in Delport, fifteen days after a teenager
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: delivering newspapers walked into a scene that no one had
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: staged for him to find. The charges were criminal fraud
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: for the least substitution, unlawful entry for the July eleventh visit,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: and evidence tampering for the cranes. That last charge mattered
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: in ways that went beyond its legal weight. It meant
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: the cranes were not a mystery, they were a mistake.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: At sentencing in October twenty nineteen, the court had the
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: benefit of one more voice. Alice Drummond came forward. Her
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: experience between two thousand six and twenty ten followed the
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: same arc social cultivation, access to her apartment, a substituted lease,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: a departure. She later understood she had been engineered into.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: The statute of limitations had long expired. No charge could
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: be brought on her behalf, but her account entered the
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: record and the judge read it. Norman received eighteen months,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: six were served, the remainder were suspended in exchange for
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: supervised probation. He was permanently barred from holding a landlord
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: license in the state. The building at three hundred eighteen
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Birchwood Terrace passed out of his control. There is something
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with in that outcome. Eight years of documented effort,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: two confirmed victims, a method refined across subletting citations, unauthorized fees,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: manufactured trust, and finally a forged document, and the result
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: was six months served and a license revocation. Whether that
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: outcome or flex the full weight of what was done
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: to Brenda Peterson is a question the record raises but
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: does not answer. What the record does answer is this
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Brenda's original lease held. Connie Marsh confirmed it valid and
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: enforceable in writing the rent controlled agreement signed in autumn
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: two thousand nine, the one Norman had spent eight years
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: trying to displace, was still in force eight hundred twenty
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: dollars a month, the same figure that had made her
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: an obstacle in the first place. In late August twenty nineteen,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Brenda Peterson walked back into US Unit four at three
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: hundred eighteen Birchwood Terrace. She bought two new fish. She
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: named one of them Glen. Glen Anderson, the coercive control
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: consultant who reconstructed the six week strategy, had testified that
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: what Norman built was not a plan improvised under financial pressure.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: It was a system. Social access was gathered years before
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: it was used. Information about Brenda's schedule, her isolation, her
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: attachment to the fish, the location of the spare key.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: All of it was collected, patiently, filed, and deployed at
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a moment calculated to maximize disorientation. The least note arrived
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: on July third, with language specifically chosen to feel friendly,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: take your time, no rush back before end of month.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: That language, Andersen noted, was not careless. It was designed
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: to prevent Brenda from treating the document as urgent. She
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: called Connie Marsh on July eighth. She reached her the
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: next morning. Connie's message was five words, do not sign anything.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Those five words arrived hours before the system would have
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: closed around Brenda completely. She did not sign. She left instead,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: which was exactly what Norman needed, but not on terms
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: he controlled. He had not anticipated Connie Marsh. He had
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: not anticipated Vincent Gage watching from the hallway. He had
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: not anticipated that the paper he used to fold eleven
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: cranes would hold his handwriting under a forensic lamp. What
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: this case documents is not a moment of violence. There
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: is no moment in this record where Norman Phillips raised
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: his hand or raised his voice. What he did was quieter,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: and in some ways harder to name. He spent years
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: learning how to be trusted by a woman he intended
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: to displace. He learned her habits so he could use
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: them against her. He built a version of friendship that
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: existed entirely as infraciy structure for harm. When it was time,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: he used all of it. Brenda Peterson named a fish
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: after the consultant who helped investigators understand what had been
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: done to her. That detail does not resolve anything about
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: the eight years that preceded it, but it says something
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: about where she landed. She went back to the apartment,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: She went back to the water. She kept going. That
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: is where the record ends, not with a court room
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: door closing, and not with a clean reckoning, but with
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: a woman tending a tank of fish in a rent
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: controlled apartment. She refused to leave. This show is made
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: by Obomedia.