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How He Quietly Took Her Life: The Theft That Disappeared Sharon · Why Humans Lie

0:03
Speaker 1: At six forty seven in the morning on January ninth,
0:07
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, a runner named Tammy Bell stopped on the
0:10
Speaker 1: Ashford Creek footbridge and smelt something wrong. It was the
0:14
Speaker 1: kind of cold that makes breath visible and keeps most
0:17
Speaker 1: people indoors. What stopped her was not a sound. It
0:21
Speaker 1: was perfume, faint floral, the kind you might recognize from
0:26
Speaker 1: a grandmother at church. The wallet was wedged into the
0:29
Speaker 1: footbridge's steel lattice at shoulder height, as though someone had
0:33
Speaker 1: placed it there deliberately, not dropped it inside every credit card, intact,
0:39
Speaker 1: a driver's license, thirty seven dollars in cash, not a
0:43
Speaker 1: single thing missing from the wallet. The name on that
0:46
Speaker 1: license was Sharon Taylor. Sharon had been gone for thirty
0:50
Speaker 1: two days. Her phone was on her kitchen counter, Her
0:53
Speaker 1: silver Honda Civic sat in the driveway. Her charcoal wool coat,
0:58
Speaker 1: the good one, the wa worm one, was gone from
1:01
Speaker 1: its hook by the door, and Sharon Taylor, fifty four
1:05
Speaker 1: years old billing coordinator choir alto creature of unbroken routine,
1:11
Speaker 1: had vanished from fourteen Pinehurst Circle, Grover Mills, Ohio, without
1:16
Speaker 1: a word to anyone. The wallet told a story. The
1:20
Speaker 1: problem was it told the wrong one. What investigators would
1:24
Speaker 1: uncover over the next six weeks was not a disappearance
1:28
Speaker 1: in any ordinary sense. It was the systematic dismantling of
1:33
Speaker 1: one woman's reality, her finances, her relationships, her sense of
1:38
Speaker 1: what was true, executed by someone she had trusted completely,
1:43
Speaker 1: someone who had been building toward this moment for nearly
1:46
Speaker 1: two years. That story begins long before the bridge. Sharon
1:51
Speaker 1: Taylor had lived at fourteen Pinehurst Circle for eleven years.
1:56
Speaker 1: The house was small and deliberate, a place she had
1:58
Speaker 1: organized exactly to her preferences, right down to the perennial
2:02
Speaker 1: garden she maintained along the front walk. Arthur Novak, a
2:06
Speaker 1: retired postal worker who lived directly across the street, told
2:10
Speaker 1: investigators he could set a calendar by that garden every
2:15
Speaker 1: spring without fail. Sharon was out there with her trowel
2:18
Speaker 1: before the last frost had fully lifted. She had worked
2:22
Speaker 1: at Millhaven Regional Hospital for sixteen years as a billing coordinator.
2:26
Speaker 1: Connie Hess, her supervisor, who described Sharon as the kind
2:30
Speaker 1: of employee a department quietly depends on many the one
2:34
Speaker 1: who remembers the procedure nobody else has memorized who catches
2:39
Speaker 1: the error before it becomes a problem. For six years,
2:42
Speaker 1: Sharon had also sung alto in a choir at Calvary
2:46
Speaker 1: United Methodist, where Pastor Lenn Whitfield would later describe her
2:50
Speaker 1: as someone who arrived early, stayed late to fold the chairs,
2:55
Speaker 1: and never asked for recognition. This is a portrait of
2:58
Speaker 1: a person whose life had very clear architecture. She was
3:01
Speaker 1: not rigid, but she was consistent that consistency is important
3:06
Speaker 1: because it is precisely what made the deviations invisible until
3:10
Speaker 1: they had already done their damage. Sharon had no children.
3:14
Speaker 1: Her closest family was her sister, Deborah Crane, who lived
3:18
Speaker 1: in Columbus, roughly two hours south. They spoke regularly. Deborah
3:22
Speaker 1: would later tell Detective Frank Bauer in a recorded interview
3:26
Speaker 1: in late January twenty nineteen that she had watched something
3:30
Speaker 1: shift in Sharon over the course of about eighteen months,
3:34
Speaker 1: a gradual withdrawal calls that grew shorter, invitations that went unanswered.
3:40
Speaker 1: Deborah had raised her concerns directly with Sharon. Sharon dismissed them.
3:45
Speaker 1: The reason for that withdrawal had a name. Kevin Lawson
3:48
Speaker 1: fifty six years old, was a childhood friend Sharon had
3:52
Speaker 1: not seen in decades. They reconnected in the summer of
3:55
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen at a high school reunion. By October of
3:59
Speaker 1: the Lawson had taken a temporary administrative position at Milhaven
4:04
Speaker 1: Regional through a staffing agency called Breightpath's Solutions, he had
4:09
Speaker 1: badge access to the hallways where Sharon worked. To everyone
4:13
Speaker 1: who encountered them together, the reunion looked like exactly what
4:17
Speaker 1: it appeared to be, two old friends picking up where
4:20
Speaker 1: they had left off. Lawson attended choir rehearsals. He sat
4:25
Speaker 1: beside Sharon. He drove her home. Afterward. Pastor Whitfield was
4:29
Speaker 1: introduced to him as Sharon's oldest friend. But by the
4:32
Speaker 1: spring of twenty eighteen, Arthur Novak noticed something he had
4:36
Speaker 1: never seen before. Sharon's garden went unplanted. The trowel stayed inside,
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Speaker 1: the front walk stayed bare. Novak, who held a spare
4:45
Speaker 1: key to Sharon's house, mentioned it to a neighbor. He
4:49
Speaker 1: thought maybe she had been sick. She had not been sick.
4:52
Speaker 1: Something else entirely was happening, something that was already fourteen
4:56
Speaker 1: months under way and had left almost no visible tree
5:00
Speaker 1: almost The transfers began in March of twenty eighteen. Not
5:05
Speaker 1: one large withdrawal, not a single alarming number. Instead a quiet,
5:11
Speaker 1: patient series of movements, each one landing just beneath the
5:15
Speaker 1: threshold that would flag an automatic review. Forty nine hundred
5:20
Speaker 1: dollars forty seven hundred forty two hundred over ten months,
5:25
Speaker 1: roughly fifty two thousand dollars left Sharon Taylor's savings account
5:29
Speaker 1: and did not come back. The money moved into a
5:32
Speaker 1: joint account. Kevin Lawson held it as co signer. Sharon
5:36
Speaker 1: had agreed to open it in April of twenty eighteen.
5:39
Speaker 1: What she understood about that agreement, what she was told,
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Speaker 1: what she believed, would become one of the central questions
5:47
Speaker 1: of the investigation, but the transfers were only part of it.
5:50
Speaker 1: In June of twenty eighteen, someone submitted a form to
5:54
Speaker 1: Millhaven Regional's Human resources department. The form updated Sharon's direct
5:58
Speaker 1: deposit instructions. Forty percent of her bi weekly paycheck would
6:02
Speaker 1: now root to the joint account. The HR form bore
6:06
Speaker 1: Charon's signature, it bore her employee I D number. It
6:09
Speaker 1: went through without a flag. Connie Hess, Charon's supervisor noticed
6:15
Speaker 1: something that summer. She would later describe Charon as quieter
6:19
Speaker 1: than usual, more prone to small errors in billing reconciliations
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Speaker 1: she had handled without incident for sixteen years. Hess did
6:27
Speaker 1: not connect it to anything specific. At the time, she
6:30
Speaker 1: assumed stress. She did not ask. Meanwhile, Lawson was at
6:35
Speaker 1: choir rehearsals. He sat in the same pew as Sharon.
6:38
Speaker 1: He drove her home. He attended a church potluck in October.
6:42
Speaker 1: Pastor Len Whitfield mentioned to the congregation at some point
6:46
Speaker 1: that fall how good it was to see old friendships renewed.
6:50
Speaker 1: In November of two thousand eighteen, Charon stopped attending choir.
6:54
Speaker 1: No explanation on record. Arthur Novak, across the street watched
6:59
Speaker 1: the autumn path us and the garden stay bare. He
7:02
Speaker 1: had watched Sharon plant that garden every spring for close
7:05
Speaker 1: to twenty years. He held her spare key. He had
7:08
Speaker 1: seen her through bad winters before. This felt different, but
7:12
Speaker 1: he could not name why. Then January arrived. On the
7:16
Speaker 1: morning of January third, two thousy nineteen, Kevin Lawson drove
7:21
Speaker 1: Sharon Taylor away from fourteen Pinehurst Circle. She left without
7:26
Speaker 1: her phone, which stayed on the kitchen counter. She left
7:29
Speaker 1: without her charcoal wool coat, which Lawson took from the
7:32
Speaker 1: hook by the door. She left without her car, a
7:35
Speaker 1: silver two thousand fifteen Honda Civic that sat in the
7:39
Speaker 1: driveway untouched. Lawson drove her approximately forty miles north to
7:44
Speaker 1: a residential motel in Birch Landing. He told her to wait.
7:48
Speaker 1: He told her that people were going to try to
7:51
Speaker 1: take things from her. He told her to stay quietly
7:55
Speaker 1: and wait for him to return. He did not return
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Speaker 1: that same evening. On his route between Grover Mills and
8:01
Speaker 1: the motel, Lawson stopped at the Ashford Creek footbridge. He
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Speaker 1: pressed Sharon's wallet leather, closed every credit card inside thirty
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Speaker 1: seven dollars cash into the steel lattice of the bridge,
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Speaker 1: railing at shoulder height. He left it there and drove away.
8:20
Speaker 1: Six days later, on the morning of January ninth, at
8:24
Speaker 1: six forty seven, a runner named Tammy Bell crossed the
8:27
Speaker 1: Ashford Creek footbridge. She saw the wallet wedged in the lattice.
8:31
Speaker 1: She reported it. Detective Frank Bauer, eleven years in Missing
8:36
Speaker 1: Persons and financial crimes with the Grover Mills Police Department,
8:40
Speaker 1: responded to the report. He stood on that bridge and
8:43
Speaker 1: looked at what had been left there. The wallet was closed,
8:47
Speaker 1: the cards were inside, the cash was intact. There were
8:51
Speaker 1: no signs of struggle on the bridge deck, no footprints
8:54
Speaker 1: on the ice below. Bower would later say it was
8:57
Speaker 1: the perfume that stopped him. The wallet carried a faint scent,
9:02
Speaker 1: something floral, transferred from a coat pocket, the kind of
9:05
Speaker 1: smell you notice and cannot quite place. It matched the
9:09
Speaker 1: perfume found in Sharon's coat closet at Pinehurst Circle. The
9:13
Speaker 1: coat itself was gone. A wallet at a bridge no
9:16
Speaker 1: one could place Sharon near, a coat taken from a hook,
9:20
Speaker 1: a phone left on a counter, a car sitting unmoved
9:24
Speaker 1: in a driveway. Four objects, each one pointed the same direction.
9:29
Speaker 1: Every card inside that wallet said this was not a robbery.
9:33
Speaker 1: Bower knew it, and, knowing it, did not tell him
9:37
Speaker 1: where Sharon was. He went to Deborah Crane in late January.
9:41
Speaker 1: She sat across from him in a recorded interview and
9:44
Speaker 1: described eighteen months of watching her sister recede, the phone
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Speaker 1: calls that shortened, the invitations that went unanswered, Sharon's repeated
9:53
Speaker 1: insistence that everything was fine, that Kevin was an old
9:56
Speaker 1: friend that Deborah was worrying over. Nothing. Ebrah had pushed,
10:01
Speaker 1: Sharon had pulled back. Bower ran the financials. The picture
10:05
Speaker 1: that assembled itself was methodical and precise. Sub threshold transfers
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Speaker 1: from savings beginning March twenty eighteen, a joint account, a
10:15
Speaker 1: redirected paycheck, a HR form that had moved through the
10:18
Speaker 1: system without a second look because it carried the right
10:22
Speaker 1: signature and the right ID number. Fifty two thousand dollars gone.
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Speaker 1: The money trail was clear. What it told him about
10:32
Speaker 1: Sharon's present location was nothing at all. Everything pointed toward
10:37
Speaker 1: a deliberate disappearance. The wallet at the bridge, the cleared accounts,
10:42
Speaker 1: the woman who had grown quieter and more isolated over
10:46
Speaker 1: eighteen months. It assembled into a portrait that investigators working
10:50
Speaker 1: the case were prepared to accept reluctantly as a voluntary exit.
10:55
Speaker 1: Someone who had been struggling, someone who had perhaps planned
10:59
Speaker 1: a departure her family had not seen coming. That was
11:02
Speaker 1: the version the evidence seemed to support. But here is
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Speaker 1: the thing about that version. It collapses the moment you
11:10
Speaker 1: look at the coat hook. Sharon Taylor left without her phone,
11:14
Speaker 1: she left without her car, She left without her car.
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Speaker 1: She left without thirty seven dollars in cash that were
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Speaker 1: sitting in her own wallet at a bridge she had
11:25
Speaker 1: never in her life visited. A woman choosing to walk
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Speaker 1: away from her life does not leave her money at
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Speaker 1: a bridge she cannot be placed at. She takes it.
11:34
Speaker 1: Bower ran Kevin Lawson's name through the National Crime Information
11:39
Speaker 1: Centered Database and cross referenced civil filings. What came back
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Speaker 1: was a case from Allegheny County, Ohio, two thousand twelve.
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Speaker 1: A woman named Lisa Gorman, forty nine years old, had
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Speaker 1: filed a civil suit against Lawson alleging financial fraud and
11:56
Speaker 1: psychological manipulation. The case settled out of court. No police
12:00
Speaker 1: report was ever filed, no criminal record attached to Lawson's name,
12:06
Speaker 1: no criminal record, but a pattern one woman methodically isolated finances, redirected,
12:13
Speaker 1: a civil suit that disappeared quietly, and now a second
12:17
Speaker 1: woman missing whose accounts had been drained in the same
12:20
Speaker 1: careful sub threshold rhythm. On February fourth, two thousand, nineteen thirty,
12:25
Speaker 1: two days after January third, investigators located her at a
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Speaker 1: residential motel in birch Landing, forty miles from home. She
12:34
Speaker 1: had been in that room since the night Lawson dropped
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Speaker 1: her there. She had no coat, she had no phone,
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Speaker 1: she had no money. She had waited in a room
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Speaker 1: she could not pay for indefinitely for someone who was
12:48
Speaker 1: never coming back. She was alive. Kevin Lawson was arrested
12:53
Speaker 1: on February eighteenth, initially charged on three counts financial exploitation,
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Speaker 1: identity fraud, and unlawful restraint. Investigators later expanded the charges,
13:04
Speaker 1: and the indictment proceeded to trial. In the weeks after
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Speaker 1: his arrest, a fellow detainee named Marcus Webb reported statements
13:11
Speaker 1: Lawson had made inside the facility. Lawson had described his
13:16
Speaker 1: plan calmly. He had expected Charon to eventually leave the motel, confused,
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Speaker 1: coatless in January cold, and to not survive that exit.
13:26
Speaker 1: Webb's account was specific. Lawson intended, in his own words,
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Speaker 1: relayed through Webb, to remove the problem entirely. That testimony
13:36
Speaker 1: recontextualized the coat. The coat was not taken because Lawson
13:40
Speaker 1: wanted it. The coat was taken because, without it, in January,
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Speaker 1: forty miles from any one who knew her name, Sharon
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Speaker 1: Taylor was supposed to die. The wallet at the bridge
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Speaker 1: was not a clue left behind. It was stage dressing,
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Speaker 1: placed to suggest she had already gone one way or
13:58
Speaker 1: another before anyone thought to look for her. The financial
14:02
Speaker 1: exploitation charge covered what he had taken. The attempted felony
14:06
Speaker 1: murder count covered what he had planned to take next.
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Speaker 1: In June of twenty nineteen, a jury convicted Kevin Lawson
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Speaker 1: on eleven counts. The sentence was twenty two years. He
14:18
Speaker 1: had confessed formally in Nay, four months before the verdict
14:22
Speaker 1: made it irrelevant. Sharon returned to fourteen Pinehurst Circle in
14:27
Speaker 1: March of twenty nineteen. The house was exactly as she
14:31
Speaker 1: had left it on January third. Her phone was still
14:34
Speaker 1: on the kitchen counter, her charcoal wool coat was gone.
14:38
Speaker 1: Lawson still had it, but the hook by the door
14:40
Speaker 1: was there, the same hook in the same spot. She
14:44
Speaker 1: had spent thirty two days in a motel room forty
14:47
Speaker 1: miles from everything she had built, and then she came
14:50
Speaker 1: home in April. She replanted the garden. Arthur Novak, the
14:54
Speaker 1: retired postal worker across the street, had watched that garden
14:58
Speaker 1: sit empty through an entire spring and summer. He had
15:01
Speaker 1: watched it go unplanted for the first time in twenty years,
15:05
Speaker 1: and filed it away as one of those quiet neighborhood
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Speaker 1: changes that nobody talks about. When Sharon knelt in that
15:11
Speaker 1: dirt in April and put seeds back into the ground,
15:15
Speaker 1: he understood later what he had actually been watching in
15:19
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. He had been watching the evidence. In June,
15:23
Speaker 1: Sharon returned to the choir at Calvary United Methodist. Pastor
15:27
Speaker 1: Lynn Whitfield, who had been introduced to Kevin Lawson as
15:31
Speaker 1: Sharon's oldest friend, and who had watched that man sit
15:35
Speaker 1: beside her in the pews for months before she disappeared,
15:39
Speaker 1: entirely welcomed her back without ceremony. She took her seat
15:44
Speaker 1: in the alto section she sang The following Monday, she
15:48
Speaker 1: returned to work at Millhaven Regional as a billing coordinator.
15:53
Speaker 1: Sixteen years in that building. She had worked there, through
15:56
Speaker 1: management changes and budget cuts and system over hauls. She
16:00
Speaker 1: walked back through those doors the same way she had
16:03
Speaker 1: always walked through them. None of those returns were simple.
16:06
Speaker 1: That is not the claim. The claim is only that
16:09
Speaker 1: she made them. The criminal case moved on its own
16:12
Speaker 1: schedule alongside her recovery. Kevin Lawson confessed formally in May
16:17
Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen. He had been arrested in February,
16:21
Speaker 1: initially charged on three counts, and by May he had
16:24
Speaker 1: given investigators to confend what the evidence had already shown.
16:28
Speaker 1: The formal admission changed nothing about what he had done.
16:31
Speaker 1: It changed everything about how the record would read. In
16:35
Speaker 1: June of two thousand nineteen, the trial concluded. The jury
16:39
Speaker 1: convicted Lawson on eleven counts. The financial exploitation charge accounted
16:44
Speaker 1: for roughly fifty two thousand dollars moved in careful sub
16:49
Speaker 1: threshold transfers over ten months. The identity fraud charge covered
16:54
Speaker 1: the HR form, the one bearing Sharon's signature and employee ID,
16:59
Speaker 1: the one that he routed forty percent of her paycheck
17:02
Speaker 1: into a joint account Lawson controlled. The unlawful restraint charge
17:07
Speaker 1: covered January third and everything that followed it. The attempted
17:11
Speaker 1: felony murder count covered the coat. The sentence was twenty
17:15
Speaker 1: two years. Detective Frank Bauer, who had spent eleven years
17:19
Speaker 1: working missing persons and financial crimes for Grover Mills PD,
17:25
Speaker 1: later described the Lisa Gorman connection as the turn that
17:28
Speaker 1: clarified the architecture of the case. Gorman's civil suit in
17:32
Speaker 1: Allegheny County in twenty twelve had never produced a police report.
17:37
Speaker 1: Lawson had no criminal record at the time he approached
17:40
Speaker 1: Sharon at that reunion in the summer of twenty seventeen.
17:45
Speaker 1: The system that should have flagged him had no flag
17:48
Speaker 1: to find. What Bower found instead was a pattern, the
17:53
Speaker 1: same patience, the same financial precision, the same manufactured isolation,
17:58
Speaker 1: applied to a different woman seven years earlier. Gorman had
18:02
Speaker 1: survived it. She had paid a lawyer, settled the suit,
18:06
Speaker 1: and moved on. She had never imagined in twenty twelve
18:10
Speaker 1: that her silence would have a cost. She couldn't calculate.
18:13
Speaker 1: Yet that fact is not Gorman's burden to carry. It
18:17
Speaker 1: belongs to Lawson. There is a detail from this case
18:21
Speaker 1: that does not appear in the financial records or the
18:24
Speaker 1: forensic time line, but that sits in the record. Nonetheless.
18:27
Speaker 1: When investigators located Scharon at the Birch Landing Motel on
18:31
Speaker 1: February fourth, she had been waiting for thirty two days,
18:35
Speaker 1: waiting for Kevin Lawson to return the way he said
18:39
Speaker 1: he would. She had no coat, no phone, no money
18:43
Speaker 1: beyond whatever she had managed to arrange in that room.
18:47
Speaker 1: She had been told by someone she had known since
18:49
Speaker 1: childhood that people were going to try to take things
18:52
Speaker 1: from her and that she should wait quietly, and she
18:55
Speaker 1: had believed him. That is what eighteen months of careful
18:59
Speaker 1: patient dismantling looks like at its end point. Not a confrontation,
19:04
Speaker 1: not a dramatic break. A woman in a motel room
19:08
Speaker 1: waiting for a man who was never coming back because
19:11
Speaker 1: he had spent a year and a half making sure
19:14
Speaker 1: she would. The question this case leaves open is not
19:17
Speaker 1: whether Kevin Lawson understood what he was doing. The confession
19:21
Speaker 1: answered that, The eleven counts answered that. The twenty two
19:25
Speaker 1: year sentence answered that. The question is smaller and harder
19:29
Speaker 1: to sit with. How many people were close enough to
19:32
Speaker 1: see it and didn't know what they were looking at.
19:35
Speaker 1: Deborah Crane saw the phone calls getting shorter. Connie Hess
19:38
Speaker 1: saw the errors accumulating at Charon's desk. Arthur Novak saw
19:42
Speaker 1: the garden empty. Pastor Whitfield introduced a predator to his
19:46
Speaker 1: congregation as a trusted friend. None of them had a
19:50
Speaker 1: frame for what was happening, because the thing that was
19:53
Speaker 1: happening had been designed to be invisible. That is the
19:57
Speaker 1: specific skill Kevin Lawson reed from Allegheny County to Grover Mills.
20:02
Speaker 1: Not violence, not force, the skill of making a person's
20:07
Speaker 1: slow erasure look from every angle like a personal choice.
20:11
Speaker 1: Sharon Taylor replanted her garden in April. She returned to choir.
20:16
Speaker 1: In June, she went back to work. She did those
20:19
Speaker 1: things not because the case had a clean resolution, but
20:23
Speaker 1: because she was still there to do them. The wallet
20:25
Speaker 1: at Ashford Creek Bridge was meant to close her story
20:28
Speaker 1: before it could continue. It opened the investigation instead. The
20:33
Speaker 1: garden is growing. This show is made by Obamedia.