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The Perfect Shoe: How a Stranger Stole Her Reality and Money · Dark Psychology Manipulation

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of May seventh, twenty nineteen, a meter
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: reader named Eric Bell walked through the back gate at
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: four to four one to Larkin Street in Dunstan, Ohio,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and found a single cream colored flat shoe sitting perfectly
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: centered on the utility meter pad, no mud on it,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: no scuff dry despite a day of rain, and no
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: matching shoe anywhere in the yard. The back gate was
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: latched from the inside. The inner front door stood open
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: behind the screen. A cat was pacing the kitchen floor.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: The woman who lived there was simply gone. What made
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: investigators stop cold was not the absence. It was that shoe,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: clean and dry and centered, like someone had placed it
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: there deliberately. A detail that small should not have mattered.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It mattered enormously. There was a man on the other
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: end of a phone who had spent four months dismantling
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Cynthia Burntness's sense of what was real, and when investigators
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: finally understood what he had built inside her mind, the
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: shoe would explain itself. Cynthia Burns was fifty four years old,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: recently retired from twenty six years as a dental hygienist.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: She had worked steadily, saved carefully, and by early two
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, her checking account held just over forty thousand,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: six hundred dollars. She lived alone at four four one
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: two Larkin Street, a house she kept with the same
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: attention she brought to everything. The front beds were tidy,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: the back yard had raised garden plots with hand labeled
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: wooden steaks. She grew kale, tomatoes, and herbs. She gave
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: to her neighbor, Jean Falkner when the season ran ahead
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: of her. Renee, her daughter lived in Columbus, about forty
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: miles away.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: They talked regularly.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Cynthia's closest friend, Brenda Wick, described her as grounded and deliberate,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: not impulsive, not naive some.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: One who read the fine point.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: She also had a cat ruined mila and a garden
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: that was her primary project in retirement. In late January
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, she posted a photograph of her kale
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: seedlings to a regional Facebook gardening group. The photo was ordinary,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: a few people liked it. One man left a comment.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: That comment came from a profile presenting itself as Daniel Marsh,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: a civil engineer and widower based in Pittsburgh. He noted
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: the variety of kale she had chosen, and asked about
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: her soil amendment strategy. It was a specific question, the
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: kind a gardener would find worth answering. What followed over
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: the next two to three weeks was a steady, calibrated
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: flood of attention messages every morning long evening calls. He
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: asked about Renee, about the house, about what retirement felt
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: like after decades of structured work. He described his own loss,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: a wife who had died of cancer three years earlier,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: a grown son he rarely saw. He said he had
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: not felt close to any one since the persona had
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: a name, a professional biography, a grief history, and a
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: way of making Cynthia feel that what she said mattered
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: to him. There was no face she could verify in person.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: By February, she had downloaded an application called secure Link
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: at his request. Video calls ran through a rotating server
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: platform that left no stable metadata.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: She saw a face on those calls. That face was
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: never recovered or confirmed.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: By the time February became March, Cynthia Burns had allowed
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: some one she had never met in person to become
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: the organizing presence in her daily life. That was not
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: a failure of intelligence.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: It was the result of a method one.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: That, according to forensic social worker PAULA Simmons, had been
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: refined across in at least three years and multiple targets.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: The person running it had no prior criminal record. He
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: was patient, technically, careful, and he had.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: Done this before. What Cynthia did not know and could
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: not have known, was.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: That somewhere in a storage unit in Huber Heights, Ohio,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: there was a handwritten notebook with her name on a tab,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: nine pages of notes, organized by date in a category.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: She was not a person he had fallen for. She
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: was a five and assisted.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: In March of twenty nineteen, a man appeared in Cynthia
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Burns's backyard. Jean Faulkner, her neighbor, watched him from across
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: the fence. The man wore a utility vest and carried
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: a clipboard. He spent roughly forty minutes moving along the
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: raised garden beds, studying the labeled stakes, making notes. He
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: looked exactly like someone who was supposed to be there.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: No gas company in Dunstan had any record of a
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: service call to four four one two Larkin Street, that month.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Not that day, not that week not at all.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: That visit was not about the garden, but understanding what
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: it was about requires first understanding what had already been
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: built inside Cynthia's phone. Sometime in February, at the instruction
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: of the man she knew as Daniel Marsh, Cynthia had
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: downloaded a banking application. It sat on her home screen,
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: ordinary looking functional. By April first, her checking account held
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: just over forty thousand, six hundred dollars savings accumulated across
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: a working life set aside with the discipline of someone
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: who had spent decades managing her own finances. That balance
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: would not survive the spring. Between April first and May seventh,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: seven transfers left that account. They averaged about five thousand,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: seven hundred fifty seven dollars each. The stated reason relayed
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: to Cynthia by Daniel was to avoid triggering IRS reporting thresholds.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: The transfers went to a single external account.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Seven transactions, six weeks, forty thousand, three hundred dollars gone.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: There is something precise about that number that stops the eye.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Not forty thousand, not a round figure, forty thousand, three hundred,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: the kind of total that comes from careful calibration not impulse.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: The phone records confirmed the volume of contact hundreds of
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: texts calls to prepaid numbers registered to a UPS store
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: address in Kettering, Ohio. Zero video calls in the phone
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: ms Because the video calls ran through securely off network,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: leaving nothing traceable. The face Cynthia had seen on those
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: calls was never recovered. It was never confirmed to be
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: any specific person. Whatever she believed she had seen, the
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: record could not verify. Late March brought a new pressure.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Daniel told Cynthia she was being monitored, that her ex
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: husband's attorney had placed her under surveillance. There was no
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: evidence this was true, no legal filing, no process server, nothing,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: But the claim did not need to be true to
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: do its work. It needed only to redirect her attention,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: to make her feel watched and vulnerable in her own home,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: to give Daniel Marsh, a man who did not exist,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: the role of the only person she could trust. Paula Simmons,
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: the forensic social worker who later reviewed the case, identified
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: this moment as a structural turn. The surveillance claim was
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: not a random lie. It was a specific coercive control
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: mechanism isolate the target from their own judgment by introducing
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: a threat, only the operator can protect them from. Simmons
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: had seen the architecture before, so had the evidence. Inside
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: a storage unit in Huber Heights, detectives eventually found a
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: handwritten notebook. The tabs were organized by name. Margaret Cole
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: twelve pages, is Cynthia Burns nine pages, Patricia Noel four
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: pages incomplete.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: Each entry tracked dates.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Responses, emotional registers, financial details, not a diary, a system.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: The notebook told investigator something the phone records could not,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: how much preparation had gone into each relationship.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: Before a single transfer was requested.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: That is the image that should sit with you. Nine
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: pages of notes on a woman who thought she was
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: in a private correspondence.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: May sixth began like the weeks before it.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Cynthia was in her yard in a late afternoon, working
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: near the raised beds she had tended since before retirement.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Her phone rang Daniel.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: He told her to stop what she was doing. He
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: said the situation had escalated, that surveillance was active, that she.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: Needed to leave the house within the hour.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: She was to take only cash. She was to check
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: into a motel who'd go silent for seven Indy two
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: hours beginning immediately. She was not to contact Renee. She
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: was not to call Brenda.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: She was to trust him and move it.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Cynthia pulled her left foot from the soft sword. The shoe,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: a cream colored flat with a small bow size seven
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: and a half, came free from the wet ground but
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: stayed behind. She was holding it when Daniel told her
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: not to go back for anything. She walked inside on
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: one bare foot. She did not return for the shoe.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: At eight forty in the morning on May seventh, meter
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: reader Eric Bell found it. The shoe was centered on
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: the metal pad, dry despite a day of rain that
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: had fallen since Cynthia left. There was no mate, no
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: mud on the sole, no scuff marks suggesting a fall
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: or a struggle. Just a single cream flat placed or
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: landed at the exact center of the meter pad, as
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: though someone had set it there deliberately, then thought better
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: of picking it up. Bell called it in because something
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: about it was wrong. He could not have explained precisely
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: what it read like a sentence that had been interrupted midward.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: The back gate was latched from the inside. The inner
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: front door stood open behind the screen. Milo The cap
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: was pacing Renee reported her mother missing that afternoon. When
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: the call reached Detective Mike Hargrove at Dunstan p D.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: His first frame was a medical event. A woman living alone,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: mid fifties here this morning and not answering now. The
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: shoe was odd, but odd things happen. By May eleventh,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: when Cynthia's phone was recovered from a bus station locker
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: placed there at Daniel's instruction so that its location could
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: not be traced to her, the medical frame collapsed entirely.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: This was not a disappearance. It was an evacuation. Someone
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: had needed Cynthia Burns to vanish from her own life
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: on very short notice, and that someone had been building
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the architecture for that evacuation since January. Hargrove contacted Paula
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Simmons on May twelfth. What she saw in the file
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: change the direction of the investigation. Picture Cynthia's house in
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: early May, with forty thousand, three hundred dollars already moved,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: and a woman who has no reason to doubt the
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: man she has spoken to every day for three months.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: If you believed what she had been.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Told, that surveillance was active, that her ex husband's legal
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: team was watching that the one person she could trust
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: was asking her to move now than leaving made sense,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: The whole design made sense from the inside. That is
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: the first thing to hold. The departure was not irrational
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: given the reality she had been given. The question is
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: how that reality was constructed and how it was maintained
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: long enough to survive her own judgment. There is a
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: version of events where the operation unravels at the utility visit.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: In March, A man who does not exist in any
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: gas company record spends forty minutes in a woman's yard.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Jean Faulkner sees him.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: The labeled stakes in the raised beds are photographed or sketched,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and Cynthia never knows it happened. That visit was reconnaissance.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Read later confirmed it he had used Cynthia's own public
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: social media, her garden photos, her posts in the regional
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Facebook group, to build a persona that matched her interests precisely.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: The Kle comment in January was not the beginning of
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: a conversation. It was the end of a research phase.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: But the version that felt certain to investigators and to
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Hargrove specifically, was the fraud angle bank transfers prepaid phones,
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: a fake identity, a financial crime with a method and
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: a target. The notebook in Huber Heights felt like confirmation.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Here was the evidence of a professional operation, money at
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: the center. The note book, though, was not organized by
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: financial data. It was organized by emotional data, dates and responses.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: What Cynthia said when he mentioned his son, what made
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: her go quiet, what made her open up. The financial
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: extractions were not the architecture.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: They were the outlet.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: The architecture was what Paula Simmons described in her second
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: meeting with Hargrove as a coercive control sequence that preceded
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: any money movement.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: By months.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Reed had not defrauded Cynthia Burns in the way the wire.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: Fraud charges described it, not exactly.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: He had dismantled her ability to evaluate what was happening
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: to her before.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: He touched a doll.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: The surveillance's claim in late March was not a lie
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: and to a financial scheme.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: It was the.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Point where he needed her not to think clearly, and
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: he had spent two months ensuring she trusted him more
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: than she trusted her own read of a situation. The
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: charges that eventually stuck two counts wire fraud, one count
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: aggravated identity theft were the legal language available, They were accurate.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: They were also, according to Simmons, a partial description of
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: what Reed had done. The identity he had stolen was
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: not only the alias he had registered to the up
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: S store address in Kettering. It was the role of
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: a trustworthy person in a woman's inner life. That theft
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: had no specific charge. It had only a consequence. A
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: shoe on a meter pad, a woman in a motel
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: room with cash and no phone, a garden no one
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: was watering. Patricia Noel later said she was not stupid.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: She wanted that on the record. What the record shows
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: is that Reed had been building toward her transfer phase
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: when the warrant hit. She never lost a dollar, She
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: lost three months and something she called foundational. That word
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: foundational is precise in a way legal language is not.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: It names what Reed had actually targeted in each of
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: these women, not their accounts, their baseline sense of what
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: was real. Reed was arrested on May twenty eighth, two
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, at a short term rental in Dayton, Ohio.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: He was still.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Messaging Patricia Knowell on a third prepaid phone when investigators
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: came through the door, He was forty one years old.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: He had no prior criminal record. That fact is not exculpatory.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: According to PAULA. Simmons, it is typical men who run
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: this kind of operation rarely have priors, because the crime
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: leaves so little physical evidence, and because victims, exhausted, ashamed,
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: uncertain what exactly happened to him, often do not report it.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: The absence of a record was not innocence, it was
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: operational cover. The storage unit in Huber Heights told the
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: clearest story. Inside it, detectives found a handwritten notebook organized
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: by target. Margaret Cold twelve pages, Cynthia Burns nine pages,
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Patricia Noah four pages, still incomplete. Those page counts are
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: not just evidence of a fraud. They are a record
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: of attention of how long Reed had studied each woman,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: what she cared about, what she had lost, what she
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: still wanted. Cynthia was nine pages of a person. Red
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: had read every line and written the sequel himself. In
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: December twenty nineteen, Reid pleaded guilty in federal court two
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: counts of wire fraud one count of aggravated identity theft.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: His cooperation was credited, and his maximum sentence was avoided.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: The legal disposition was clean and narrow. Paula Simmons had
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: a different accounting. The identity theft charge covered the alias
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: registered to the UPS store address in Kettering. It did
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: not cover the other identity read had stolen the role
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: of a trustworthy person inside a woman's inner life. There
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: was no charge for that. There was only the consequence
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: of it. Cynthia Burns returned home by the end of
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: May twenty nineteen. Her garden was two weeks behind. That
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: is the phrase in the record, two weeks behind, not unrecoverable.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: She submitted a victim impact statement in writing. Its contents
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: are not public. What is public is that she chose
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: to submit one, that she put her name to the
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: record of what had been done to her. Margaret Cole's
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: adult son gave the victim impact statement at sentencing. He
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: stood in that courtroom for a woman who had transferred
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: thirty seven thousand dollars to an account structure she believed
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: was protecting the future of a man she loved. The
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: money was gone. The money was gone. His statement is sealed,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: his presence is not. Patricia Knowle never lost a dollar.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: She said so herself, And then she said the rest
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: of it. She had lost three months and something she
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: called foundation. That word appears in the case record exactly
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: as she used it. She wanted the distinction noted, not stupid,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: not naive, not a cautionary tale. A person who had
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: trusted someone had been systematically taught to trust him more
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: than herself. That is what the record shows. That is
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: what she wanted on the record. There is something precise
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: about the way this case ends and does not end.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Paul Reid is in the system. The plea is on file,
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the notebook is in evidence, the prepaid phones registered to
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: a UPS store address or catalog. The legal architecture of
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: what he did has been named, charged, and adjudicated by
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: every formal measure. The case closed in December twenty nineteen,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: but Cynthia Burns walked out of her house on May sixth,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: with one shoe on and did not look back. She
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: left milo pacing in an empty kitchen. She left a
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: garden she had spent the winter planning. She left because
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: a voice she had trusted for four months told her
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: the threat was real, and her own judgment, the judgment.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Reid had spent two months carefully dismantling, could no longer
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: tell her otherwise. The charges described a wire fraud. What
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: happened to Cynthia Burns was something PAULA. Simmons called a
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: coercive control sequence, and it does not fully fit inside
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: a federal statute. That gap is not Reed's acquittal. It
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: is a limit in the language we have for what
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: he did. The shoe stayed dry through a day of rain.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Eric Bell found it centered on the meter pad on
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: the morning of May seventh, not dropped, not kicked off
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: in a hurry, but placed. Reed later explained it in
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: his account. He had told Cynthia to leave immediately, to
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: leave everything to trust him. She had paused long enough
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: to set the shoe down rather than carry it. That pause,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: the small automatic courtesy of not tracking mud, is the
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: most human.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Detail in this entire file.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: She was leaving her life at someone else's instruction, and
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: she still stopped to be tidy about it. That is
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: who Cynthia Burns was. Not a victim profile, not a
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: cautionary statistic. A woman who grew kale and labeled her
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: garden stakes and loved her cat, and one afternoon in
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: May set a shoe down gently on a concrete path
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: and walked inside on one bare foot because someone she
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: trusted told her she had to. The garden came back
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: two weeks behind. The record says, but not unrecoverable.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: That phrase is doing more work than it knows. This
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: show is made by Oboe Medium