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He Taught Him to Trust: How a Dating Profile Disappeared a Man · Why Humans Lie

0:03
Speaker 1: At seven eighteen in the morning on January ninth, twenty twenty,
0:07
Speaker 1: a meter reader named Laura Hensley pushed open the gate
0:11
Speaker 1: at forty four Caldwell Street and stopped.
0:14
Speaker 2: The temperature was.
0:15
Speaker 1: Eleven degrees fahrenheit on the frozen soil beside the cinderblock
0:19
Speaker 1: garden wall. Someone had placed a framed photograph upright, facing outward,
0:24
Speaker 1: as though it were waiting to be found. The glass
0:27
Speaker 1: was intact. The image inside showed two boys at a lake,
0:31
Speaker 1: grinning at a camera, neither of them was holding. Hensley
0:34
Speaker 1: had been reading meters on this route for nine years.
0:37
Speaker 2: She knew the house.
0:39
Speaker 1: She knew the man who lived there, grew tomatoes against
0:42
Speaker 1: the south wall every summer and kept the gate latched
0:45
Speaker 1: without fail. The gate was open. The photograph was not
0:50
Speaker 1: something she had ever seen outside. She called it in.
0:54
Speaker 1: Officer Dennis Merritt arrived minutes later. The back door of
0:58
Speaker 1: the house was open. Inside the kitchen, Carl Edwards was
1:01
Speaker 1: unconscious on the floor. That photograph did not blow out
1:05
Speaker 1: of a window. Someone carried it outside and set it
1:08
Speaker 1: down deliberately in the frozen dark before leaving. What nobody
1:13
Speaker 1: could say that morning, and what would take investigators weeks
1:16
Speaker 1: to untangle was whether it was left as a message
1:19
Speaker 1: or something else entirely. Carl Edwards had spent most of
1:23
Speaker 1: his adult life inside the same three quarter mile radius
1:27
Speaker 1: of Marrow Falls, Ohio. He grew up there, went away
1:30
Speaker 1: for college, and came back. He taught history for several
1:34
Speaker 1: years at Morrow Falls Regional High School, then moved into administration,
1:39
Speaker 1: then all the way to principle, a job.
1:41
Speaker 2: He held for over a decade.
1:43
Speaker 1: He retired in the spring of two thousand nineteen, at
1:46
Speaker 1: fifty three years old, early by any measure, but Carl
1:51
Speaker 1: had the savings to do it and the garden to
1:54
Speaker 1: justify it. He had lived at forty four Caldwell Streets
1:57
Speaker 1: since nineteen ninety one.
1:58
Speaker 2: He had never married. He owned the house outright.
2:01
Speaker 1: His finances at the time of his retirement were stable
2:04
Speaker 1: by any measure, roughly two hundred forty thousand dollars a
2:08
Speaker 1: cross checking savings, a pension and investment accounts at First
2:13
Speaker 1: Meridian Bank of Ohio. The house itself carried no mortgage.
2:18
Speaker 1: For a man who had spent thirty years managing a
2:21
Speaker 1: public school budget. The discipline showed his life was not lonely.
2:26
Speaker 1: It was structured Thursday evenings, Karl had dinner with Ted Sutton,
2:31
Speaker 1: a retired plumber who lived four blocks away and had
2:35
Speaker 1: been his closest friend for years. His sister, Marlene Goss,
2:39
Speaker 1: drove in from Pittsburgh several times a year. He kept
2:42
Speaker 1: in touch with Debby Strand, a woman from Columbus he
2:46
Speaker 1: had once almost married. The neighbors knew him, the mail
2:49
Speaker 1: carrier knew him, the meter reader knew The gate was
2:52
Speaker 1: always latched. The garden was the center of it. Karl
2:56
Speaker 1: had rebuilt the soil in that back yard for years.
3:00
Speaker 1: The cinder block retaining wall along the south edge was
3:03
Speaker 1: his work. The raised beds were his work. In Moral Falls,
3:07
Speaker 1: if you knew Carl Edwards, you knew about the garden.
3:10
Speaker 1: It was the thing he had been saving his retirement for,
3:14
Speaker 1: the long project he had deferred while running a school
3:16
Speaker 1: of eleven hundred students. By the spring of twenty nineteen,
3:20
Speaker 1: he finally had the time. There is something specific about
3:24
Speaker 1: what it means to reach a moment like that. Not drama,
3:28
Speaker 1: not a sudden change, just the quiet arrival of a
3:31
Speaker 1: life you had been planning toward for years. Carl Edwards
3:35
Speaker 1: had that briefly before someone calculated exactly how to take
3:40
Speaker 1: it from him. In March of twenty twenty, a man
3:43
Speaker 1: knocked on the front door of forty four Caldwell Street,
3:46
Speaker 1: carrying a six pack of beer and a story about
3:48
Speaker 1: the old neighborhood.
3:50
Speaker 2: He said his.
3:50
Speaker 1: Name was Curtis Cole. He said they had been friends
3:54
Speaker 1: as kids. He said it had been too long. He
3:57
Speaker 1: was not wrong about the friendship. Curtis Cole and Carl
4:00
Speaker 1: Edwards had known each other between the ages of nine
4:03
Speaker 1: and fourteen, before Coal's family moved away.
4:07
Speaker 2: That was real.
4:08
Speaker 1: What Coal did with it, how he spent the next
4:10
Speaker 1: twenty two months building on those five years of childhood.
4:14
Speaker 1: Trust is the part that will not let go of
4:17
Speaker 1: anyone who looked closely at this case. Coal was fifty
4:21
Speaker 1: one years old when he knocked on that door. There
4:23
Speaker 1: had been no contact between the two men for approximately
4:27
Speaker 1: thirty seven years. Within three weeks of that first knock,
4:31
Speaker 1: Coal was visiting twice a week. Within two months, he
4:35
Speaker 1: was borrowing Carl's truck. That is the first image worth holding,
4:39
Speaker 1: not a forged document, not a bank transfer, a truck.
4:44
Speaker 1: Carl Edwards handing over his keys to a man he
4:48
Speaker 1: had not seen in thirty seven years because the man
4:51
Speaker 1: reminded him of being nine years old on a summer
4:54
Speaker 1: afternoon at a lake. The keys changed hands before a
4:57
Speaker 1: single dollar moved. By July twenty twenty four months in,
5:03
Speaker 1: Carl co signed a forty five thousand dollars business loan.
5:06
Speaker 1: His home equity at forty four Caldwell Street was listed
5:10
Speaker 1: as secondary collateral. Coal had a story about a contracting business.
5:15
Speaker 1: He had enthusiasm, He had the weight of a shared
5:18
Speaker 1: childhood behind every sentence he spoke. Carl signed. But here's
5:23
Speaker 1: the thing. The loan was never used as represented. That
5:27
Speaker 1: is not a suspicion. That is what Cole eventually admitted
5:30
Speaker 1: an interview. The money moved, and then the information started
5:34
Speaker 1: moving too. In March of twenty twenty one, a PO
5:38
Speaker 1: box opened in Delwood, Ohio. The application carried a forged
5:42
Speaker 1: utility bill printed on an inkjet printer recovered later from
5:47
Speaker 1: Cole's possession, and a forged ID. The name on the
5:51
Speaker 1: application was not Curtis Cole. The address for redirected mail
5:56
Speaker 1: from First Meridian Bank of Ohio was that box. Carl.
6:00
Speaker 1: ARL's paper bank statements stopped arriving at forty four Caldwell Street.
6:04
Speaker 1: He never asked why he had been told not to look.
6:08
Speaker 1: That persuasion campaign is the second image. Cole did not
6:11
Speaker 1: simply redirect the mail and hope. Over the preceding months,
6:16
Speaker 1: he had run what a forensic accountant later described as
6:19
Speaker 1: a sustained influence operation against Carl's banking habits. He arrived
6:24
Speaker 1: with printed articles. He told stories about people he knew
6:28
Speaker 1: who had been ruined by online account breaches. He made
6:31
Speaker 1: paper feel like safety, in screens feel like danger. By
6:36
Speaker 1: the time the statement stopped coming to the house, Carl
6:39
Speaker 1: had already stopped wanting them. Ted Sutton, Carl's closest friend,
6:43
Speaker 1: noticed something small around that same period. Carl was collecting
6:48
Speaker 1: his mail in the evenings instead of the mornings, the
6:51
Speaker 1: way he always had. Carl said he was sleeping later
6:54
Speaker 1: these days retirement.
6:56
Speaker 2: He said, that was all. It was not all.
7:00
Speaker 1: Between March and December of twenty twenty one, approximately one
7:04
Speaker 1: hundred twelve thousand dollars moved out of Karl's accounts. It
7:08
Speaker 1: moved in small increments, structured carefully into a Delaware LC
7:13
Speaker 1: The company's name included Karl's own initials. It was designed
7:18
Speaker 1: to look at a glance at a statement like one
7:21
Speaker 1: of Karl's own investment accounts. Karl never saw a statement.
7:25
Speaker 1: There is a number that keeps surfacing when you map
7:27
Speaker 1: this nine months from the p O box in March
7:31
Speaker 1: to the service door in December, nine months of undetected extraction,
7:35
Speaker 1: moving in amounts too small to trigger automatic flags into
7:39
Speaker 1: an account built to resemble Karl's own name. During that
7:43
Speaker 1: same nine month window, Coal was doing something else set
7:47
Speaker 1: forty four Caldwell Street that had nothing to do with
7:50
Speaker 1: the bank accounts. The service door on the south side
7:53
Speaker 1: of the house is a nineteen fifty steel door. Its
7:57
Speaker 1: frame had widened slightly over decades, leaving a gap larger
8:01
Speaker 1: than standard. Coal had noticed it. A neighbor named Pat
8:05
Speaker 1: Olan saw Coal at that door one Saturday morning in
8:09
Speaker 1: December of twenty twenty one, standing there for about fifteen minutes.
8:13
Speaker 1: Olan assumed maintenance Cole was practicing. Investigators later confirmed through
8:20
Speaker 1: locksmith testimony that the door's push bar latch could be
8:23
Speaker 1: defeated using a wire threaded through that frame gap. Coal
8:27
Speaker 1: had rehearsed it. He had been inside the house as
8:30
Speaker 1: a welcome guest for twenty two months. He chose to
8:33
Speaker 1: practice the wire. That is the contradiction that stopped Detective
8:37
Speaker 1: Rob Cassidy when he first laid it out. A man
8:41
Speaker 1: with a key, or at least with the standing to
8:44
Speaker 1: ask for one, spent weeks learning how to enter without asking.
8:48
Speaker 1: December twenty eighth, two thousand twenty one, Karl's sister, Marlene Goss,
8:54
Speaker 1: drove in from Pittsburgh for a visit. She sat with
8:58
Speaker 1: him in the living room. Before she left, she noticed
9:01
Speaker 1: the framed photograph on the bookshelf, Two Boys at a Lake,
9:06
Speaker 1: an old snapshot from the years when Karl and Curtis
9:09
Speaker 1: Cole had been children together. It was there, she remembered
9:13
Speaker 1: it clearly. She would later confirm it to investigators. Twelve
9:17
Speaker 1: days later. That photograph was outside, propped against the cinder
9:22
Speaker 1: block retaining wall in the frozen garden at forty four
9:26
Speaker 1: Caldwell Street, facing outward glass intact, temperature eleven degrees fahrenheit.
9:33
Speaker 1: Laura Hensley found it at seven eighteen in the morning
9:37
Speaker 1: on January ninth, twenty twenty two. She had been reading
9:41
Speaker 1: meters on that route for nine years. She knew the
9:44
Speaker 1: gate was always latched.
9:46
Speaker 2: It was open.
9:47
Speaker 1: She saw the photograph standing upright on the frozen soil
9:51
Speaker 1: and stopped.
9:52
Speaker 2: She called it in.
9:53
Speaker 1: Officer Dennis Merritt arrived and found the back door open.
9:57
Speaker 1: Carl Edwards was unconscious on the kitchen floor. He was
10:00
Speaker 1: transported by ambulance. The diagnosis was a subdural hematoma. What
10:06
Speaker 1: had been taken was not immediately clear. What was clear
10:09
Speaker 1: was the service door. It had been opened with the
10:12
Speaker 1: wire technique. Coal had been practicing through that gap, and
10:16
Speaker 1: Carl's palm, or rather a partial palm print on the
10:20
Speaker 1: cinder block retaining wall in the garden.
10:23
Speaker 2: Was not Carl's.
10:24
Speaker 1: It matched Curtis Cole. Cole's phone placed him within two
10:28
Speaker 1: blocks of forty four Caldwell Street between eleven p m.
10:32
Speaker 1: On January eighth and one thirty a m. On January ninth.
10:37
Speaker 1: Cell tower records confirmed. Forensic social worker Francis Green was
10:43
Speaker 1: brought in by morro Falls PD in late January. She
10:47
Speaker 1: reviewed the full sequence, the loan, the banking campaign, the
10:51
Speaker 1: redirected statements, the practiced entry. She used a specific phrase
10:55
Speaker 1: when she described Cole's use of the Childhood Friendship. She
10:59
Speaker 1: said he had treated it as infrastructure. The decades of goodwill,
11:03
Speaker 1: the boyhood's summers, the lake the photograph were not sentiment
11:07
Speaker 1: to Coal.
11:08
Speaker 2: They were an access point.
11:11
Speaker 1: He had built on them the way you build on
11:13
Speaker 1: a foundation. There is something about that characterization that requires
11:18
Speaker 1: you to sit with it, because it means the friendship
11:21
Speaker 1: was real. Karl's memory of it was real. Coal simply
11:25
Speaker 1: saw it differently from the beginning or at some point
11:28
Speaker 1: started to and that question of when exactly the calculation
11:32
Speaker 1: began has no clean answer in the record. Detective Cassidy
11:36
Speaker 1: received a call on January nineteenth, twenty twenty two. It
11:40
Speaker 1: came from Harmon County. A woman named Sylvia Park, sixty
11:44
Speaker 1: three years old, widowed, had filed a fraud complaint in November.
11:49
Speaker 2: Of twenty twenty one.
11:51
Speaker 1: A man had come to her door presenting himself as
11:53
Speaker 1: a childhood acquaintance, different name, same method. Her complaint had
11:58
Speaker 1: been sitting and processing when Karl Edwards was found unconscious
12:02
Speaker 1: in his kitchen. The moment Cassidy connected those two cases,
12:06
Speaker 1: the shape of what Curtis Coal was became something different
12:10
Speaker 1: than a grievance or an opportunist.
12:12
Speaker 2: It became a system.
12:14
Speaker 1: Picture the service door at two in the morning, the
12:17
Speaker 1: gap in the frame, the wire already threaded through once
12:20
Speaker 1: twice in practice runs Coal made while Carl was inside
12:24
Speaker 1: the house, treating him as a friend. If the plan
12:27
Speaker 1: was only financial, if Coal had already taken what he
12:30
Speaker 1: came for, then there is no logical reason to come back.
12:34
Speaker 2: In January.
12:35
Speaker 1: The one hundred twelve thousand dollars had been moving for
12:39
Speaker 1: nine months without detection. Karl had no online banking, The
12:44
Speaker 1: statements were going to a po box in Delwood. Coal was,
12:48
Speaker 1: by every financial measure, already finished, and yet he came back.
12:53
Speaker 1: One version of the night of January eighth rests on
12:56
Speaker 1: Coal's own partial admission that Karl confronted him. Coal claimed
13:02
Speaker 1: in his second interview that Karl came at him, that
13:05
Speaker 1: something happened in the kitchen that was not planned, that
13:08
Speaker 1: the injury was reactive, not intended. Walk that version against
13:12
Speaker 1: the physical evidence. The service door opened by wire practiced entry,
13:17
Speaker 1: not a panicked break in the cell tower, placing Coal
13:21
Speaker 1: in the area for over two hours. The framed photograph
13:25
Speaker 1: set upright in the garden with its glass intact facing
13:28
Speaker 1: outward in eleven degree cold. That photograph does not get
13:32
Speaker 1: placed that way in a moment of panic. Something deliberate
13:35
Speaker 1: carried it outside, something deliberate stood it up against the wall.
13:40
Speaker 1: Coal's version collapses at the photograph. The alternative Coal came
13:44
Speaker 1: back with a specific purpose. Green noted in her assessment
13:48
Speaker 1: that the photograph's placement remained genuinely unresolved. Whether it was
13:53
Speaker 1: a taunt, a signal, or something else she could not
13:56
Speaker 1: determine with certainty, but the physical facts narrow the possibility.
14:01
Speaker 1: The photograph was on the shelf when Marlene Goss visited
14:04
Speaker 1: on December twenty eighth. Karl lived alone between that date
14:08
Speaker 1: and January ninth. The only person the evidence places at
14:12
Speaker 1: that house in the middle of the night is Curtis Cole.
14:15
Speaker 1: The strongest reading of the record, and the one the
14:18
Speaker 1: jury ultimately credited through the felonious assault conviction, is that
14:23
Speaker 1: Coal returned with intent. The practiced entry points to premeditation.
14:28
Speaker 1: The structured wire technique points to premeditation. The photograph placed
14:33
Speaker 1: with care in frozen soil in the dark points to
14:36
Speaker 1: something deliberate that the record does not fully name. What
14:40
Speaker 1: the evidence does name is this Curtis Cole was fifty
14:44
Speaker 1: one years old when he knocked on Karl's door in
14:47
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. Sylvia Parks's testimony described an identical sequence, the
14:52
Speaker 1: presented name the childhood claim, the slow financial entanglement, a
14:57
Speaker 1: different name, the same architecture. The record does not confirm
15:02
Speaker 1: how many times Coal had done this before park That
15:05
Speaker 1: number remains open. What the record confirms is that by
15:09
Speaker 1: the time he stood at Karl's door with a six
15:12
Speaker 1: pack of beer, the sequence was already practiced. The nostalgia
15:17
Speaker 1: was already a tool, The childhood memory was already infrastructure.
15:21
Speaker 1: Carl Edwards kept the photograph after the trial, he placed
15:24
Speaker 1: it back on the bookshelf. That detail has stayed with
15:27
Speaker 1: every one who documented this case, not because it resolves anything,
15:32
Speaker 1: but because it holds two things at once, the loss
15:36
Speaker 1: of one hundred twelve thousand dollars and a friendship that
15:39
Speaker 1: was real, even if only one of them knew it.
15:42
Speaker 1: Curtis Cole was arrested on February third, two thousand twenty two,
15:47
Speaker 1: at a rental property in Delwood, Ohio. He offered no resistance.
15:51
Speaker 1: Detective Rob Cassidy described the arrest as quiet, a man
15:55
Speaker 1: sitting in a rented room, the same methodical stillness he
15:59
Speaker 1: had brought everything else. The charges one count of aggravated burglary,
16:04
Speaker 1: one count of felonious assault, two counts of theft by deception,
16:09
Speaker 1: and one count of identity fraud corresponded to the incidents
16:13
Speaker 1: involving Carl Edwards and Sylvia Park. The jury convicted on
16:17
Speaker 1: all counts. The sentence was nineteen years for Sylvia Park,
16:22
Speaker 1: the widow from Harmon County, who had filed her complaint
16:25
Speaker 1: in November twenty twenty one. The verdict carried weight she
16:29
Speaker 1: had not anticipated. She had spent months wondering whether anyone
16:33
Speaker 1: would connect what had happened to her with anything larger.
16:37
Speaker 1: When Cassidy called after receiving the Harmon County tip on
16:40
Speaker 1: January nineteenth, twenty twenty two, her complaint moved from a
16:44
Speaker 1: pending file to the center of a criminal case. At trial,
16:49
Speaker 1: she described the same sequence, the presented name, the childhood claim,
16:54
Speaker 1: the slow entanglement, a different name used by Coal, the
16:58
Speaker 1: same architecture, step by step. Her testimony made visible what
17:02
Speaker 1: the financial records alone could not. It showed a pattern
17:06
Speaker 1: with a body of practice behind it. The record does
17:09
Speaker 1: not confirm how many times Coal had run this sequence
17:12
Speaker 1: before Park. That number remains open. What closed is the
17:16
Speaker 1: count that mattered to the jury. Every charge brought against him.
17:20
Speaker 1: One hundred twelve thousand dollars had moved from Carl's accounts
17:24
Speaker 1: to a Delaware LLC in the nine months between March
17:28
Speaker 1: and December twenty twenty one. Civil proceedings to recover those
17:33
Speaker 1: funds began after the criminal conviction. As of the record available,
17:37
Speaker 1: recovery was partial. The full amount has not been returned.
17:41
Speaker 1: Carl's house on Caldwell Street paid off thirty years His
17:44
Speaker 1: buck was listed as secondary collateral on the forty five
17:48
Speaker 1: thousand dollars business loan Coal had persuaded him to co
17:51
Speaker 1: sign in July two, thy twenty. That exposure was addressed
17:55
Speaker 1: through legal proceedings, though the transcript does not confirm the
17:59
Speaker 1: fund outcome on that specific instrument. Francis Green, the forensic
18:04
Speaker 1: social worker brought in by Moro Falls PD in late
18:07
Speaker 1: January twenty twenty two, documented something in her assessment that
18:12
Speaker 1: went beyond the financial losses. She noted that Cole had
18:16
Speaker 1: not simply stolen money. He had spent nearly two years
18:20
Speaker 1: dismantling Carl's access to his own financial reality, redirecting statements,
18:25
Speaker 1: discouraging online verification, discouraging online verification, creating a structure that
18:33
Speaker 1: mimicked Carl's own accounts. By the time Carl had any
18:37
Speaker 1: reason to suspect something was wrong, the mechanisms of detection
18:41
Speaker 1: had already been removed. Green called it a sustained information environment.
18:47
Speaker 1: The phrase is clinical. What it describes is a man
18:51
Speaker 1: being quietly separated from the ability to see what was
18:55
Speaker 1: happening to him. Carl Edwards was discharged from the hospital
18:59
Speaker 1: in late febusu wherey twenty twenty two. The subdural hematoma
19:03
Speaker 1: he had sustained on the kitchen floor of his own
19:05
Speaker 1: home required weeks of recovery. By late March, he was
19:10
Speaker 1: back in his garden on Caldwell Street. The garden had
19:13
Speaker 1: been his project since before he retired. He had spent
19:17
Speaker 1: the spring of two thousand nineteen building out raised beds
19:20
Speaker 1: along the south fence, the same fence where two years
19:24
Speaker 1: later a partial palm print belonging to Curtis Coal was
19:28
Speaker 1: lifted from the cinder block retaining wall.
19:31
Speaker 2: He went back to it anyway.
19:33
Speaker 1: There is a particular cruelty in what Coal built, and
19:36
Speaker 1: it lives in a detail. The evidence cannot fully explain.
19:39
Speaker 1: The framed photograph and eight by ten of two boys
19:43
Speaker 1: at a lake taken some time in the nineteen seventies,
19:46
Speaker 1: was placed upright against the cinder block wall on frozen
19:50
Speaker 1: soil at seven eighteen in the morning on January ninth,
19:54
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, glass intact, facing outward deliver. Francis Green
20:01
Speaker 1: said she genuinely could not determine whether that placement was
20:05
Speaker 1: a taunt, a confession, or something else. Entirely, she held
20:09
Speaker 1: that open. The record holds it open. The photograph was
20:13
Speaker 1: on Carl's bookshelf when his sister Marlene visited on December
20:17
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, between that date and January ninth. Between that
20:21
Speaker 1: date and January ninth, the only person the physical evidence
20:26
Speaker 1: places at that house in the middle of the night
20:28
Speaker 1: is Curtis Cole. What a person does with an object
20:31
Speaker 1: at two in the morning in eleven degree cold after
20:34
Speaker 1: committing an assault is a question the legal record answers
20:37
Speaker 1: only partially. The conviction answers the what the photograph answers
20:42
Speaker 1: something the law does not have a category for. Carl
20:46
Speaker 1: kept it after the trial. He placed it back on
20:49
Speaker 1: the bookshelf.
20:50
Speaker 2: That is not a.
20:51
Speaker 1: Simple thing to sick with a man who lost one
20:54
Speaker 1: hundred twelve thousand dollars, who spent weeks in a hospital
20:58
Speaker 1: recovering from a blow he sustained in his own kitchen,
21:01
Speaker 1: chose to keep the one object that tied him to
21:04
Speaker 1: the person who did it, because the photograph also tied
21:07
Speaker 1: him to something else, a summer at a lake, two boys,
21:12
Speaker 1: an age before any of this was possible. Coal understood
21:15
Speaker 1: that he used it first, Carl reclaimed it last. What
21:20
Speaker 1: this case makes plain is that the method Coal used
21:23
Speaker 1: requires no lock to pick, no door to force. Until
21:27
Speaker 1: the very end. It requires only time, a plausible history,
21:31
Speaker 1: and the ordinary human willingness to trust someone from before.
21:35
Speaker 1: Carl Edwards was a retired school principal who had spent
21:39
Speaker 1: thirty years helping young people navigate the world. He was
21:43
Speaker 1: not naive, he was not careless. He was targeted precisely
21:48
Speaker 1: because he was the kind of person who would give
21:50
Speaker 1: an old acquaintance the benefit of the doubt. Sylvia Park
21:54
Speaker 1: was targeted for the same reason. So, according to the
21:57
Speaker 1: pattern Green identified or other whose names the record does
22:01
Speaker 1: not confirm, the mechanism Green described, sustained replacement of a
22:05
Speaker 1: person's access to their own reality does not leave visible
22:09
Speaker 1: bruises until it is too late. The mail arrives at
22:12
Speaker 1: a different address. The bank statements go somewhere else. The
22:16
Speaker 1: person you trusted most is the one who moved them.
22:19
Speaker 1: By late March twenty twenty two, Carl Edwards was in
22:23
Speaker 1: his garden, the raised beds along the south fence, the
22:26
Speaker 1: soil beginning to soften. The photograph was on the shelf
22:30
Speaker 1: behind him, inside the house where he put it. Some
22:33
Speaker 1: things are lost and do not come back. Some things
22:37
Speaker 1: a person reclaims anyway, on their own terms, for reasons
22:41
Speaker 1: that belong only to them. Carl Edwards went back to
22:44
Speaker 1: his garden. That is where this record leaves him, and
22:48
Speaker 1: it is the right place to leave him. This show
22:51
Speaker 1: is made by Obomedia.