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The Wallet in the Meter: How Quiet Control Broke a Family · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: On the morning of February seventh, two thousand nineteen, a
0:08
Speaker 1: meter reader named Dean Fleming reached into a utility housing
0:12
Speaker 1: on Milbrook Road and pulled out a leather wallet. It
0:15
Speaker 1: was zip tied to the interior bracket. The leather had
0:19
Speaker 1: deformed from weeks of cold. Inside seven hundred forty dollars
0:24
Speaker 1: in cash, folded neatly, and a driver's license belonging to
0:28
Speaker 1: a twenty two year old woman named Darlene Whitley. Darlene
0:33
Speaker 1: was not missing. She was inside the house thirty feet away.
0:37
Speaker 1: That detail is the entire story. A young woman who
0:40
Speaker 1: had spent most of her life in that house had
0:43
Speaker 1: hidden her own identity documents and her own money in
0:47
Speaker 1: a shoe box sized metal compartment outside in the winter
0:51
Speaker 1: and waited.
0:52
Speaker 2: The question is not where she was.
0:54
Speaker 1: The question is what had been built around her, carefully, quietly,
0:59
Speaker 1: over a proximately ten months that made the meter housing
1:03
Speaker 1: the safest place she could think of. There is something
1:06
Speaker 1: in this case that resists easy categories. No room was locked,
1:11
Speaker 1: no threats were written down. What happened to Darlene Whitley
1:15
Speaker 1: and her mother, Loretta happened in plain sight on a
1:18
Speaker 1: residential Street in Grover County, Missouri, while a neighbor watched
1:22
Speaker 1: a truck park across from the food bank, and a
1:24
Speaker 1: brother's phone calls went nowhere, and a food bank coordinator
1:28
Speaker 1: held a Wednesday volunteer slot open for seven months, each
1:31
Speaker 1: person saw one piece. Nobody saw the whole thing until
1:35
Speaker 1: Fleming reached into that housing. What follows is a reconstruction
1:40
Speaker 1: of how one man dismantled two people's reality from the inside,
1:44
Speaker 1: and how a leather wallet became the one piece he
1:47
Speaker 1: could not control. Harwick Township sits in the western edge
1:51
Speaker 1: of Grover County, the kind of place where mortgage paid
1:55
Speaker 1: houses and thirty year neighbors exist in quiet, unremarkable stab
1:59
Speaker 1: bild Loretta Whitley had lived on Milbrook Road since nineteen
2:04
Speaker 1: eighty one. She had raised two children in that house,
2:08
Speaker 1: worked until retirement in twenty fourteen, and kept a savings
2:12
Speaker 1: account that had peaked at around sixty one thousand dollars.
2:15
Speaker 1: Her pension covered her expenses.
2:17
Speaker 2: Her mortgage was gone.
2:19
Speaker 1: By any measure, she had built something solid. By twenty seventeen,
2:24
Speaker 1: that solidity had a fracture. Loretta was diagnosed with early
2:28
Speaker 1: stage vascular dementia.
2:31
Speaker 2: She remained in her home.
2:32
Speaker 1: She recognized faces, remembered names, followed conversations, but her capacity
2:38
Speaker 1: to track documents, account activity, and the passage of time
2:41
Speaker 1: had begun to quietly erode. Her daughter, Darlene knew this.
2:46
Speaker 1: Darlene had organized her life around it. Darlene Whitley was
2:50
Speaker 1: twenty two years old in the spring of twenty eighteen.
2:53
Speaker 1: She worked the morning shift at Patsy's Diner, which gave
2:57
Speaker 1: her afternoons free. Every Wednesday, without an exception, she drove
3:01
Speaker 1: to the Clement Street Food Bank and worked a four
3:04
Speaker 1: hour volunteer shift under the co ordination of Joyce Pratt
3:08
Speaker 1: three years, zero absences. Joyce would later describe Darlene as methodical,
3:14
Speaker 1: the kind of person who called ahead if she was
3:16
Speaker 1: running five minutes late, who remembered which clients preferred which items,
3:21
Speaker 1: who stayed past her shift when the line ran long.
3:25
Speaker 1: That consistency was not incidental, It was the visible architecture
3:31
Speaker 1: of who Darlene was. Someone who showed up, who kept
3:34
Speaker 1: her word, who built her life around reliability. Her brother Kevin,
3:39
Speaker 1: had moved to Indiana in twenty eleven, but the siblings
3:42
Speaker 1: stayed close. Darlene checked on her mother she paid.
3:46
Speaker 2: The small bills.
3:48
Speaker 1: She was, by every account in the case file, the
3:51
Speaker 1: person holding the household together. Then in the spring of
3:55
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, she met a man at a home improvement store.
4:00
Speaker 1: Russell Whittaker was thirty eight. He drove a white van
4:04
Speaker 1: labeled Midwest Comfort Solutions and described himself as an h
4:08
Speaker 1: v a C contractor. He was friendly, he was interested.
4:13
Speaker 1: He began visiting Millbrook Road in April of two thousand eighteen,
4:17
Speaker 1: first for repairs, then for dinner, then simply because he
4:21
Speaker 1: was there. Within roughly six weeks, Loretta was calling him Russell.
4:26
Speaker 1: Within six weeks, Darlene had introduced him to her mother,
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Speaker 1: her schedule, her routines, and, without knowing it, the precise
4:35
Speaker 1: shape of everything that made her life stable. By September
4:40
Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen, Darlene had stopped going to the
4:44
Speaker 1: food bank. Joyce Pratt held the Wednesday slot open anyway.
4:48
Speaker 1: She would hold it for about twelve months. What changed
4:52
Speaker 1: between April and September is not a mystery. The records
4:56
Speaker 1: documented in granular detail Foam Records Bank record a mailbox
5:01
Speaker 1: account opened in Grover City under the name R. Whittaker,
5:05
Speaker 1: a carrier court executed using a pin and Loretta's Medicare documents.
5:11
Speaker 1: Each step came after the previous one had been absorbed.
5:15
Speaker 1: Each step made the next one harder to see. Dennis
5:19
Speaker 1: O'Connor had been consulting for adult protective services in Grover
5:22
Speaker 1: County since twenty fourteen. He was a licensed clinical social worker,
5:27
Speaker 1: not a detective. When Fleming's discovery reached his desk on
5:31
Speaker 1: February seventh, O'Connor had not yet seen the house or
5:36
Speaker 1: spoken to Darlene. He had only heard the description of
5:39
Speaker 1: the wallet, leather ziptide cash, driver's license, and he wrote
5:45
Speaker 1: three words in his notes before making the call, displacement
5:49
Speaker 1: of self. He would explain later that the wallet told
5:53
Speaker 1: him what kind of case this was, before.
5:56
Speaker 2: Any other fact.
5:57
Speaker 1: Did a person hides their identity documents outside their own
6:01
Speaker 1: home for one reason, the home has stopped being theirs.
6:05
Speaker 1: O'Connor drove to Millbrook Road the morning of February seventh.
6:09
Speaker 1: He did not go alone. He brought a sheriff's deputy,
6:13
Speaker 1: but he went first through the front door because this
6:16
Speaker 1: was not a crime scene yet, it was someone's home.
6:19
Speaker 1: What he found inside was a house that looked almost right,
6:24
Speaker 1: almost the refrigerator had food.
6:27
Speaker 2: The mail was stacked.
6:28
Speaker 1: Loretta Whitley seventy three, sat in the living room in
6:32
Speaker 1: a house coat and recognized O'Connor within a few seconds
6:36
Speaker 1: of introduction. She was calm, She answered questions. She called
6:40
Speaker 1: Russell a good man. She said he helped with the yard.
6:44
Speaker 1: Darlene was in the kitchen. O'Connor described her later as
6:48
Speaker 1: someone who had learned to measure her words before releasing them.
6:51
Speaker 1: Not frightened, exactly careful.
6:54
Speaker 2: She was twenty two.
6:55
Speaker 1: Years old, and she spoke the way a person speaks
6:58
Speaker 1: when they have rehearsed which version of the truth is
7:01
Speaker 1: safe to tell. She said she had been busy. She
7:04
Speaker 1: said she had not been to the food bank because
7:06
Speaker 1: of scheduling.
7:07
Speaker 2: She said everything was fine.
7:10
Speaker 1: O'Connor set a photograph on the kitchen table. It was
7:12
Speaker 1: a photograph of the wallet. Darlene looked at it for
7:16
Speaker 1: a long moment. Then she looked at the window. Then
7:19
Speaker 1: she looked back. Something shifted. She began to talk. What
7:25
Speaker 1: she described across roughly two hours at the sheriff's office
7:28
Speaker 1: that afternoon was not a sudden rupture. It was a sequence,
7:33
Speaker 1: and the sequence had started long before she noticed it
7:36
Speaker 1: was happening. Russell Whittaker had been at Millbrook Road nearly
7:40
Speaker 1: every day since April of twenty eighteen. He brought groceries,
7:45
Speaker 1: He fixed a loose gutter.
7:47
Speaker 2: He made Loretta laugh.
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Speaker 1: He was the kind of present that doesn't look like
7:51
Speaker 1: control because it looks like help. By summer, Darlene's phone
7:55
Speaker 1: was the one Russell charged at night. By August, her
7:59
Speaker 1: brother Kevin had called twice, and she had not called
8:02
Speaker 1: back because Russell had told her Kevin was stirring up
8:05
Speaker 1: family trouble, trying to get power of attorney over Loretta
8:09
Speaker 1: making calls to adult Protective Services out of spite none
8:12
Speaker 1: of it was true. The records would later confirm Kevin
8:16
Speaker 1: had made no such calls, but Darlene did not know that.
8:20
Speaker 1: Then she knew what Russell told her. That same month,
8:24
Speaker 1: Joyce Pratt called Darlene about the Wednesday's shift. Russell answered.
8:29
Speaker 1: He told Joyce that Darlene wasn't feeling well. He said
8:32
Speaker 1: it pleasantly. He handed the phone back and told Darlene
8:36
Speaker 1: that Joyce had seemed relieved, probably because Darlene had been
8:40
Speaker 1: making things harder for the other volunteers. Darlene knew that
8:43
Speaker 1: wasn't right, but Russell said it with the particular confidence
8:47
Speaker 1: of someone who had been in the room, and you
8:49
Speaker 1: had not. By September, she stopped going. The financial architecture
8:53
Speaker 1: was being built in parallel, and Darlene could not see
8:56
Speaker 1: it because the documents were no longer in the house.
8:59
Speaker 1: Whittaker had located her Social Security card, her birth certificate,
9:04
Speaker 1: and her car title in a filing cabinet in Loretta's bedroom.
9:07
Speaker 1: He moved them to a lock box in his truck,
9:10
Speaker 1: telling Darlen he was keeping them safe while Loretta was
9:13
Speaker 1: having a difficult stretch with her memory. Loretta's bank account
9:17
Speaker 1: was restructured. Whittaker was added as a joint account holder.
9:21
Speaker 1: In September of two thousand eighteen. The mail was forwarded
9:25
Speaker 1: to his post office box. A separate mailbox account in Grover.
9:29
Speaker 2: City, opened under the name R.
9:31
Speaker 1: Whittaker, began receiving Darlene's bank statements. In October, Darlene's phone
9:36
Speaker 1: number was ported without her request. The carrier records showed
9:41
Speaker 1: the port was authorized using a pin and Loretta's mother's
9:44
Speaker 1: maiden name. Information Whittaker had retrieved from a Medicare document
9:49
Speaker 1: inside the house After that, Kevin's calls came in and
9:53
Speaker 1: went somewhere else, eleven of them.
9:56
Speaker 2: Between October and January.
9:58
Speaker 1: Kevin believed dark Aileen had chosen not to answer. Darlene
10:03
Speaker 1: did not know the calls were coming. She knew something
10:06
Speaker 1: was wrong. The sensation was precise, but had no clear object.
10:11
Speaker 1: She felt at most on Wednesday mornings, when the food
10:14
Speaker 1: bank shift would have started. She had volunteered there for
10:17
Speaker 1: three years without missing once. Methodical warm, That was how
10:21
Speaker 1: Joyce Pratt described her Now. She stood in the kitchen
10:24
Speaker 1: on Wednesday mornings and made coffee.
10:26
Speaker 2: And said nothing.
10:28
Speaker 1: She started saving in November. The wallet had been assembled
10:31
Speaker 1: over approximately two months. Darlene worked at Patsy's Diner, and
10:36
Speaker 1: the cash seven forty dollars came from shifts where she
10:41
Speaker 1: pocketed her tips before returning home. She could not put
10:45
Speaker 1: money in a bank account. Whittaker monitored both accounts. She
10:50
Speaker 1: could not hide it in the house. She had watched
10:53
Speaker 1: him find the filing cabinet. The meter housing was her idea.
10:57
Speaker 1: It was twelve feet from the front door at eye level,
11:00
Speaker 1: large enough for a slim object if you remove the
11:04
Speaker 1: access panel. She had noticed the housing years before. The
11:08
Speaker 1: way a person notices something without storing the reason. She
11:12
Speaker 1: put the wallet inside during a nineteen minute window in January,
11:16
Speaker 1: Whittaker had taken Loretta to the pharmacy. Darlene zip tied
11:20
Speaker 1: the wallet to the interior brackets so it would not shift.
11:24
Speaker 1: She replaced the panel, she went back inside.
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Speaker 2: She did not run.
11:29
Speaker 1: That detail stopped O'Connor. He returned to it more than
11:33
Speaker 1: once in his consultation notes, because it was the detail
11:36
Speaker 1: that most people needed. Explained, she did not leave. O'Connor's
11:41
Speaker 1: notes use clinical language, but the meaning is not clinical.
11:45
Speaker 1: Leaving requires a destination. It requires a phone that works,
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Speaker 1: a person who knows you are coming, and the belief
11:53
Speaker 1: that the place you leave will be safe for the
11:57
Speaker 1: person you leave behind. Darlene had none of those things.
12:01
Speaker 1: Loretta was in the house. Loretta had vascular dementia and
12:05
Speaker 1: believed Russell was a good man. If Darlene left, there
12:09
Speaker 1: was no one who understood what Russell was. The wallet
12:12
Speaker 1: was not an escape kit. It was a distress signal
12:16
Speaker 1: designed for the moment she could use it, which had
12:19
Speaker 1: not yet arrived. What she could not control was who
12:23
Speaker 1: found it first. Dean Fleming was a meter reader, he
12:27
Speaker 1: found the wallet on February seventh, on a routine check
12:31
Speaker 1: of the housing on Millbrook Road. He opened the access panel,
12:35
Speaker 1: He saw leather, then the zip tie, then cash. He
12:39
Speaker 1: called it in because he did not know what else
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Speaker 1: to do with something that precise and out of place.
12:44
Speaker 1: It reached O'Connor the same day. By February ninth, O'Connor
12:49
Speaker 1: was sitting across from Darlene in a sheriff's.
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Speaker 2: Office interview room.
12:52
Speaker 1: By February eleventh, Russell Whittaker was arrested. After the arrest,
12:57
Speaker 1: Alan Bright, Whittaker's public defender, argued that the financial transfers
13:02
Speaker 1: were consensual. His position was that Loretta had added Whittaker.
13:06
Speaker 2: To her accounts willingly, that the.
13:08
Speaker 1: Male forwarding was a practical arrangement during a period of
13:12
Speaker 1: family tension, and that Darlene's withdrawal from her social life
13:16
Speaker 1: was her own decision, not the result of coercion.
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Speaker 2: Picture the cork, or more.
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Speaker 1: Precisely, the co operation hearing room in April of two
13:25
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, walk through that version. If every transfer was consensual,
13:32
Speaker 1: then Loretta, a woman with documented early stage vascular dementia,
13:37
Speaker 1: had agreed to rout thirty eight thousand dollars through an
13:40
Speaker 1: account held jointly with the man she had known for
13:43
Speaker 1: less than a year. If the phone port was routine,
13:46
Speaker 1: it had been executed using identity information taken from a
13:49
Speaker 1: Medicare document inside the house and processed without Darlene's knowledge
13:54
Speaker 1: or presence at the carrier office. If the isolation was voluntary,
14:00
Speaker 1: it had been accomplished through a sequence of false reports
14:03
Speaker 1: about her brother, her colleague, and her own behavior, reports
14:08
Speaker 1: that were contradicted by phone records, carrier records, and testimony
14:12
Speaker 1: from Joyce Pratt and Kevin Whitley. The defense version required
14:16
Speaker 1: every individual element to be innocent on its own, and
14:20
Speaker 1: each one, viewed alone almost was. But here's the thing,
14:26
Speaker 1: the records did not cooperate with individual viewing. The carrier
14:31
Speaker 1: port happened the same month the bank mail was re routed.
14:35
Speaker 1: The mail re routing happened the same month Darlene's documents
14:38
Speaker 1: were removed to the lock box. The lock box was
14:42
Speaker 1: in the truck of a man who, according to documents
14:45
Speaker 1: filed in June of two thousand nineteen by Brockett County
14:49
Speaker 1: Detective Sandra Fuqua, had operated under the name Robert Wick
14:53
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen, the year a sixty eight year
14:57
Speaker 1: old woman named Vera Tomlin died of a stroke, after
15:01
Speaker 1: which her estate was partially redirected via a power of
15:05
Speaker 1: attorney document whose signature a forensic examiner assessed as a
15:09
Speaker 1: probable match to Whittaker's handwriting. No charges were filed in
15:13
Speaker 1: the Brackett County matter. The evidence was too old, the
15:16
Speaker 1: documents too degraded, but the connection was formally documented. What
15:22
Speaker 1: the Via Tomlin file added was not a charge.
15:25
Speaker 2: It added a.
15:26
Speaker 1: Shape, a pattern that made the Grover County evidence stop
15:31
Speaker 1: looking like coincidence and start looking like method. Whittaker had
15:36
Speaker 1: not invented this in two thousand eighteen. He had done
15:40
Speaker 1: something like this before to some one who had not
15:43
Speaker 1: left a wallet in a meter housing Darlene had. The
15:47
Speaker 1: co operation agreement came in April of two thousand nineteen.
15:50
Speaker 1: Whittaker provided a full accounting of the thirty eight thousand
15:53
Speaker 1: dollars and identified the location of the lock box containing
15:58
Speaker 1: Darlene's documents. In AUFE, he was sentenced to six years,
16:02
Speaker 1: with parole eligibility after four. There is something in the
16:06
Speaker 1: Fuqua documentation that resists easy summary. Via Tomlin had no Darlene.
16:12
Speaker 1: There was no wallet, no meter housing, no signal that
16:16
Speaker 1: reached anyone in time. The forensic connection between the two
16:19
Speaker 1: cases exists in a file that produced no additional charges
16:23
Speaker 1: and may produce none vera Tomlin's name appears in a
16:27
Speaker 1: court document and then recedes. What survives is the pattern
16:32
Speaker 1: and the question the pattern leaves open, how many times
16:35
Speaker 1: does a method have to work before someone finds the wallet?
16:39
Speaker 1: In September of two thousand nineteen, a few weeks after
16:43
Speaker 1: Russell Whittaker was led out of a Grover County court
16:45
Speaker 1: room with six years attached to his name, Darlene Whitley
16:49
Speaker 1: walked back into the Clement Street Food Bank on a
16:52
Speaker 1: Wednesday morning. Joyce Pratt had held the slot open for
16:56
Speaker 1: seven months. That detail, seven months a Wednesday ship kept
17:00
Speaker 1: warm for someone who had simply stopped showing up says
17:03
Speaker 1: something about what ordinary loyalty looks like when it has
17:06
Speaker 1: nowhere to put itself. Joyce did not know Darlene was
17:10
Speaker 1: in danger. She only knew that someone reliable had disappeared,
17:14
Speaker 1: and that the disappearance did not feel like a choice.
17:18
Speaker 1: Whittaker's sentence carried parole eligibility after four years. The charges
17:23
Speaker 1: against him in Grover County were financial exploitation of a
17:26
Speaker 1: vulnerable adult, identity, fraud, unlawful account access, and coercive control
17:32
Speaker 1: under Missouri's statute. The cooperation agreement in April of twenty
17:37
Speaker 1: nineteen reduced his exposure on the financial exploitation charge. In
17:41
Speaker 1: exchange for a full accounting of the thirty eight thousand
17:44
Speaker 1: dollars and the location of the lock box. He gave
17:48
Speaker 1: both The lock box contained Darlene's Social Security card, her
17:53
Speaker 1: birth certificate, and the title to her car, documents that,
17:57
Speaker 1: in a different outcome, could have been used to sustain
18:00
Speaker 1: the fiction of a life she no longer controlled. The
18:04
Speaker 1: Sondra Fuqua documentation from Brackett County remained what it had
18:08
Speaker 1: always been, formally recorded prosecutorially inert.
18:13
Speaker 2: VERA.
18:13
Speaker 1: Tomlin's estate had been partially redirected via a power of
18:17
Speaker 1: attorney document that a forensic examiner assessed as a probable
18:21
Speaker 1: match to Whittaker's handwriting.
18:23
Speaker 2: No charges were.
18:24
Speaker 1: Filed, the evidence was too old. The file closed without
18:28
Speaker 1: consequence for anyone except the woman whose name was in it.
18:32
Speaker 1: Dennis O'Connor, the APS consultant who had recognized the shape
18:36
Speaker 1: of the case from the wallet description alone. Later noted
18:39
Speaker 1: in his consultation records that the Grover County matter represented
18:44
Speaker 1: one of the more complete evidentiary pictures he had encountered,
18:47
Speaker 1: not because the harm was smaller, but because someone had
18:51
Speaker 1: built a signal before the window closed. Most cases that
18:55
Speaker 1: reach him do not have a wallet. Most cases that
18:58
Speaker 1: reach him do not have a Darlene Loretta Whitley's savings,
19:02
Speaker 1: which had peaked near sixty one thousand dollars, were reduced
19:06
Speaker 1: by thirty eight thousand over five months. Her pension and
19:11
Speaker 1: paid mortgage kept her housed. What the money represented a
19:15
Speaker 1: retirement assembled over decades on Millbrook Road, a house she
19:19
Speaker 1: had lived in since nineteen eighty one, could not be
19:23
Speaker 1: recovered by any cooperation agreement. The coercive control statute under
19:27
Speaker 1: which Whittaker was charged is relatively recent in Missouri law.
19:31
Speaker 1: Its application here required demonstrating a pattern the phone port,
19:35
Speaker 1: the mail redirect, the false accounts of Joyce Pratt's behavior,
19:39
Speaker 1: the eleven redirected calls from Kevin Whitley. The six Wednesday evenings,
19:44
Speaker 1: pad Greer documented a truck parked across from a food
19:47
Speaker 1: bank Darlene had stopped attending. No single item in that
19:51
Speaker 1: list is the crime. The crime is what they add
19:53
Speaker 1: up to. Darlene Whitley was twenty two years old when
19:57
Speaker 1: she met Russell Whittaker at a home improvement store in
20:01
Speaker 1: the spring of twenty eighteen. She was methodical and warm,
20:06
Speaker 1: the kind of person who volunteers every Wednesday for three
20:09
Speaker 1: years without missing a shift. By October of that year,
20:13
Speaker 1: her phone was ported, her mail was re routed, her
20:16
Speaker 1: mother's bank account had a new joint holder, and her
20:20
Speaker 1: brother's calls were going somewhere she.
20:22
Speaker 2: Could not reach.
20:23
Speaker 1: She did not have a way out, so she built
20:25
Speaker 1: one slowly over two months. Seventy dollars here, forty there,
20:31
Speaker 1: tucked into a leather wallet, zip tied inside a meter
20:35
Speaker 1: housing the size of a shoe box, seven hundred forty dollars,
20:39
Speaker 1: a driver's license, a hiding place no one would check.
20:43
Speaker 2: The case does not end with a dramatic escape.
20:46
Speaker 1: It ends with a meter reader named Dean Fleming doing
20:49
Speaker 1: his route on a February morning, stopping at an odd
20:52
Speaker 1: shape behind a housing panel, and making a phone call.
20:56
Speaker 1: It ends with a social worker recognizing a pattern from
20:59
Speaker 1: a day description of a wallet. It ends with a
21:02
Speaker 1: woman walking back into a food bank seven months after
21:06
Speaker 1: she disappeared from it. There is a version of this
21:09
Speaker 1: story where Whittaker's method continued, where Loretta's remaining savings followed
21:14
Speaker 1: the first thirty eight thousand, where Darlene's documents stayed in
21:18
Speaker 1: that lock box long enough to become someone else's identity,
21:22
Speaker 1: where Vera Tomlin's file was the only file. The difference
21:26
Speaker 1: between that version and this one is a leather wallet,
21:30
Speaker 1: a February route, and the fact that someone held a
21:33
Speaker 1: Wednesday shift open just in case. That is not a
21:37
Speaker 1: small thing in the architecture of what Whittaker built. The
21:40
Speaker 1: smallest possible signal, an object a few inches across, hidden
21:45
Speaker 1: behind a utility panel, was the one thing he had
21:48
Speaker 1: not anticipated. He had controlled the phone, he had controlled
21:53
Speaker 1: the mail. He had controlled what Loretta believed about her
21:56
Speaker 1: daughter and what Kevin believed about his sister. He had
22:00
Speaker 1: not controlled the meter housing on Milbrook Road. Vera Tomlin
22:05
Speaker 1: did not have a meter housing. She did not have
22:07
Speaker 1: a Wednesday shift some one kept open. She did not
22:10
Speaker 1: have a Dean Fleming walking a route at the right moment.
22:14
Speaker 1: What she had was a forged signature and a closed
22:17
Speaker 1: file and her name in a court document that produced
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Speaker 1: no charges and will produce none. The question that her
22:24
Speaker 1: file leaves behind is not answerable in a court room.
22:27
Speaker 1: It is only answerable in the small, ordinary acts of
22:31
Speaker 1: people who notice when something is wrong.
22:34
Speaker 2: And do not look away.
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Speaker 1: This show is made by Oboe Media