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The Book in the River: How an Agent Stole Her Memory · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: On the eleventh of March two thousand nineteen, a fisherman
0:07
Speaker 1: named Kevin Wallace pulled a waterproof bag from the Sutter
0:11
Speaker 1: branch outside Molein, Illinois. Inside the bag, sealed tight with
0:15
Speaker 1: a rubber band, was a published book. The book had
0:19
Speaker 1: a name on the cover, it was not the name
0:22
Speaker 1: of the person who wrote it. That single fact, a
0:25
Speaker 1: book in a river the wrong author's name printed on
0:29
Speaker 1: the front would eventually unravel three years of calculated deception.
0:33
Speaker 1: It would expose a man who had built a career
0:36
Speaker 1: on making writers feel chosen, and it would force a
0:39
Speaker 1: fifty four year old retired school teacher to reckon with
0:43
Speaker 1: something more disorienting than theft, the possibility that someone had
0:47
Speaker 1: spent years making her doubt her own mind. This is
0:51
Speaker 1: the story of Megan Wright and the memoir she spent
0:54
Speaker 1: a lifetime writing, and the agent who took it word
0:57
Speaker 1: by word. To understand what was stolen from Megan Wright,
1:01
Speaker 1: you have to understand what it cost her to write it.
1:04
Speaker 1: Megan had spent twenty six years teaching English at a
1:07
Speaker 1: public school in Peoria, Illinois. She was the kind of
1:11
Speaker 1: teacher students remembered by name decades later. The one who
1:15
Speaker 1: marked up their essays in red and then handed them
1:18
Speaker 1: back with a note in the margin that said, you
1:21
Speaker 1: have something real here. Keep going. She believed in the
1:25
Speaker 1: sentence as a unit of meaning. She believed that precise
1:29
Speaker 1: language was a form of respect. In two thousand nine,
1:33
Speaker 1: her marriage ended. She moved into a house on Canfield Road,
1:37
Speaker 1: a semi rural stretch on the edge of Peoria, and
1:40
Speaker 1: she built a quiet life there. Two cats, Hazel and Porter,
1:45
Speaker 1: a kitchen light that came on every morning at five
1:48
Speaker 1: twenty and went dark by six ten without variation. A
1:52
Speaker 1: sister Diane in Rockford. She drove to visit on week
1:56
Speaker 1: ends when her back allowed. The back was the other thing.
2:01
Speaker 1: A degenerative disccondition forced her out of teaching at fifty one.
2:05
Speaker 1: The career that had organized her life, the lesson plans,
2:09
Speaker 1: the classroom, the students, was simply over. What remained was
2:14
Speaker 1: the book. She had been writing it for years, a
2:17
Speaker 1: memoir roughly ninety thousand words about the parts of her
2:21
Speaker 1: life she had never found language four in the classroom.
2:24
Speaker 1: The marriage, the grief, the discipline of solitude, the strange
2:28
Speaker 1: relief of pain that at least you understand, she called
2:32
Speaker 1: it a borrowed life. By the spring of twenty sixteen,
2:36
Speaker 1: it was done. She sent thirty two query letters to
2:41
Speaker 1: literary agents form letters careful but hopeful. Most came back
2:46
Speaker 1: as rejections. A few came back as silence. Agent Number
2:50
Speaker 1: fourteen was a man named Neil Simpson, based in Chicago's
2:54
Speaker 1: West Loop, who ran a boutique agency called Simpson Literary.
2:58
Speaker 1: He responded in four days. That was unusual. He asked
3:02
Speaker 1: to see the full manuscript immediately. That felt, Megan later said,
3:06
Speaker 1: like being seen. Simpson was forty seven at the time,
3:11
Speaker 1: two divorces, no prior criminal record. By all visible measures,
3:16
Speaker 1: he was a legitimate industry professional with a small but
3:20
Speaker 1: credible client list. People who worked with him at writing
3:23
Speaker 1: conferences described a particular quality he had. According to one
3:27
Speaker 1: conference organizer, Simpson made you feel like the most interesting
3:31
Speaker 1: person in the room exactly while he needed something from you.
3:36
Speaker 1: In August of twenty sixteen, he drove to Peoria and
3:40
Speaker 1: took Megan to dinner. That same night, he offered her representation.
3:44
Speaker 1: She signed a standard agency contract before the evening was over.
3:48
Speaker 1: What Megan did not know. What she could not have known,
3:52
Speaker 1: was that by the time Simpson arrived at that dinner.
3:55
Speaker 1: He had already been studying her manuscript for weeks, and
3:59
Speaker 1: he had already begun to understand what it was worth.
4:02
Speaker 1: Over the following year, Simpson would submit a borrowed Life
4:07
Speaker 1: to eight publishing houses. He submitted it under his own
4:10
Speaker 1: name as co author, without Meghan's knowledge and without her consent.
4:15
Speaker 1: According to court records, he altered the title slightly. The
4:20
Speaker 1: rejection letters he forwarded to Megan were real, but according
4:23
Speaker 1: to investigators, they responded to a different submission than the
4:27
Speaker 1: one he described to her. Meghan received the letters, she
4:31
Speaker 1: read them. She trusted her agent to tell her what
4:34
Speaker 1: they meant, and slowly she began to wonder whether her
4:38
Speaker 1: book was as good as she had believed. That erosion
4:42
Speaker 1: Quiet Patient Invisible was not an accident. It was the method.
4:49
Speaker 1: But before any of it could unravel, a retired school
4:52
Speaker 1: teacher would have to reckon with something stranger than betrayal.
4:56
Speaker 1: The handwriting inside a water sealing bag on a book
4:59
Speaker 1: she did not remember inscribing that read in her own hand,
5:04
Speaker 1: this is mine. Every word of the inscription was written
5:09
Speaker 1: in Meghan's hand. A forensic handwriting analyst confirmed it matched
5:14
Speaker 1: her known writing samples without qualification, but Megan had no
5:18
Speaker 1: memory of writing it. She told her therapist Amy Osborne
5:23
Speaker 1: that she believed she had written it when something in
5:26
Speaker 1: me already knew what that something new and when would
5:31
Speaker 1: take investigators months to reconstruct, start with what was visible
5:36
Speaker 1: on the surface. A borrowed life memoir appeared in bookstores
5:40
Speaker 1: in November of twenty eighteen. The author listed on the
5:44
Speaker 1: cover was Neil Simpson. The book received modest but favorable notices.
5:50
Speaker 1: A trade publication described it as quietly devastating. Whitmore and
5:55
Speaker 1: Lark Press had paid an advance of eleven thousand dollars.
5:59
Speaker 1: Simpson elected it. Megan received nothing because, as far as
6:03
Speaker 1: the published record showed, the book was not hers. But
6:07
Speaker 1: here is the thing. Ninety one percent of the published
6:10
Speaker 1: text matched Meghan's original manuscript at the sentence level. According
6:15
Speaker 1: to a state forensic literary analyst. That figure came from
6:19
Speaker 1: a systematic comparison of the published book against the manuscript
6:23
Speaker 1: Megan had saved on a personal hard drive and in
6:26
Speaker 1: a physical archif ire in her home office. Names had
6:30
Speaker 1: been changed, one geographic location had been altered, a single
6:35
Speaker 1: chapter had been reordered. That was the entirety of the revision.
6:39
Speaker 1: The analyst's conclusion was unambiguous. The published text derived directly
6:45
Speaker 1: and exclusively from Megan's manuscript and could not have been
6:49
Speaker 1: produced independently. Someone had read every word she wrote, then
6:54
Speaker 1: published every word as their own. The contract was the instrument.
6:59
Speaker 1: In March of twenty eighteen, Simpson had presented Megan with
7:03
Speaker 1: what he described as a revised standard agency agreement. The
7:08
Speaker 1: call lasted forty minutes. Buried inside the language was a
7:12
Speaker 1: clause assigning Simpson's co ownership of the intellectual property in
7:16
Speaker 1: the event of joint publication. Megan signed. She had no
7:20
Speaker 1: reason to believe the document was anything other than what
7:23
Speaker 1: he told her it was. That contract was later described
7:27
Speaker 1: by prosecutors as the legal architecture of the fraud. Everything
7:31
Speaker 1: else was scaffolded. The scaffolding included the visits to Canfield Road.
7:37
Speaker 1: Simpson came to Meghan's home four times each under the
7:40
Speaker 1: pretense of working sessions. During one of those visits, he
7:44
Speaker 1: helped repair a latch on the mud room door. The
7:47
Speaker 1: door used a simple lever lock, the frame around it
7:51
Speaker 1: had deteriorated. Investigators determined that the mechanism could be manipulated
7:55
Speaker 1: from outside using a thin implement passed through the gap
7:59
Speaker 1: in the deterior rated frame. There were no signs of
8:02
Speaker 1: forced entry. There never were. On October fourteenth, twenty eighteen,
8:08
Speaker 1: Bob Terrell was outside near his property, two lots north
8:13
Speaker 1: on Canfield Road. Terrell was a retired machinist. He had
8:17
Speaker 1: a habit, developed over decades of shift work, of noting
8:20
Speaker 1: unusual things. A car he did not recognize was sitting
8:24
Speaker 1: in Megan's gravel drive. He wrote down the plate number,
8:28
Speaker 1: not because anything alarmed him, just because that was what
8:32
Speaker 1: he did. Megan was not home. She was in Rockford
8:35
Speaker 1: visiting her sister Dian. There was no meeting scheduled. The
8:40
Speaker 1: plate number Terrell recorded matched a rental car registered to
8:44
Speaker 1: an agency in Chicago. The rental had been charged to
8:47
Speaker 1: Neil Simpson's credit card, and Simpson's cell phone, according to
8:51
Speaker 1: tower records, had pinged a cell site on Interstate seventy
8:56
Speaker 1: four that placed him within four miles of the Sutter Branch.
9:00
Speaker 1: That same afternoon, he was in Meghan's house. He was
9:03
Speaker 1: near the river, both on the same day. According to
9:07
Speaker 1: Simpson's later confession and the written statement of Marcus coble.
9:10
Speaker 1: Simpson entered Meghan's home that afternoon and located the physical
9:15
Speaker 1: manuscript in her filing cabinet. He removed it, took it
9:19
Speaker 1: somewhere the confession did not specify where, then returned it
9:23
Speaker 1: slightly re ordered to a different drawer. What he wanted
9:27
Speaker 1: was not the paper itself. He wanted to know whether
9:30
Speaker 1: Megan had documentation organized enough to prove priority. He wanted
9:34
Speaker 1: to understand what she could produce if challenged. The re
9:38
Speaker 1: ordered pages were a small thing. Meghan noticed them. She
9:41
Speaker 1: mentioned it to Osborne as one of several incidents that
9:44
Speaker 1: had made her distrust her own memory. She thought she
9:48
Speaker 1: had misfiled something. She spent an afternoon trying to reconstruct
9:52
Speaker 1: her own filing logic. She could not that was the
9:56
Speaker 1: method in practice. The book arrived in the mail on
10:00
Speaker 1: a Tuesday in December of twenty eighteen. Megan had not
10:04
Speaker 1: ordered it. There was no return address. The package contained
10:09
Speaker 1: a single copy of a borrowed life memoir by Neil Simpson.
10:14
Speaker 1: She opened the cover. She read the dedication for the
10:18
Speaker 1: women who wrote the hard parts and were never asked.
10:21
Speaker 1: That line did not appear in any draft of Megan's manuscript.
10:26
Speaker 1: She had never written it, but she told Osborne later
10:29
Speaker 1: that it sounded like her own voice, like something she
10:32
Speaker 1: might have written on a different day, in a different mood,
10:36
Speaker 1: for a book she had imagined but never quite reached.
10:39
Speaker 1: She read further, then she stopped. The prose was hers,
10:44
Speaker 1: The rhythm was hers. The specific memory of her father's
10:47
Speaker 1: reading chair, a detail she had spent two weeks getting right,
10:51
Speaker 1: was there, slightly rephrased, attributed to a narrator named Neil.
10:56
Speaker 1: She called Simpson. He told her the book incorporated elements
11:00
Speaker 1: of their collaborative development. He told her the contract she
11:05
Speaker 1: had signed in March covered exactly this kind of joint
11:08
Speaker 1: creative work. He told her this was a misunderstanding. She
11:12
Speaker 1: believed him for six days. Then she called Whitmore and
11:16
Speaker 1: lark directly. The editor who answered did not know who
11:20
Speaker 1: Megan write was. That was the moment the ground shifted.
11:24
Speaker 1: Not the book, not the dedication, the voice of a
11:28
Speaker 1: stranger at a publishing house saying a name, her name,
11:32
Speaker 1: with no recognition at all. She contacted Osborne that same afternoon.
11:36
Speaker 1: She had not slept. Osborne would later note in case
11:40
Speaker 1: records that when Megan arrived, she described something she struggled
11:44
Speaker 1: to articulate precisely the feeling that she had been watching
11:47
Speaker 1: her own life from a distance for months without understanding why,
11:51
Speaker 1: and that the distance now had a name. The State
11:54
Speaker 1: Police received the referral from moleen Field office in mid
11:57
Speaker 1: March of two thousand nineteen. The book recovered from the
12:01
Speaker 1: Sutter Branch had been logged as evidence three days after
12:05
Speaker 1: Kevin Wallace called it in. When investigators matched the author
12:08
Speaker 1: named to an active complaint from a woman in Peoria,
12:12
Speaker 1: the case changed shape entirely. Two separate lines, a fishing
12:17
Speaker 1: rod in a frozen tributary and a therapist's intake notes
12:20
Speaker 1: from eighteen months earlier had just converged. Investigators subpoenaed email
12:26
Speaker 1: records from three publishing houses. What they found confirmed the
12:30
Speaker 1: submission pattern Simpson had submitted under his name as co author.
12:34
Speaker 1: The rejection letters he forwarded to Megan were authentic, but
12:38
Speaker 1: they replied to a different version of the manuscript than
12:41
Speaker 1: he described to her. The submissions he made and the
12:44
Speaker 1: story he told her ran in parallel, never touching. Then
12:48
Speaker 1: came Barbara Fitch picture of filing cabinet in Springfield, Illinois.
12:53
Speaker 1: Barbara Fitch, sixty one years old, a retired nurse had
12:57
Speaker 1: written a memoir about caring for her disabled husband across
13:01
Speaker 1: eleven years of illness. She had signed with Simpson in
13:05
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen. He told her in twenty fourteen that the
13:09
Speaker 1: manuscript was unsaleable. She believed him, She moved on. The
13:14
Speaker 1: manuscript stayed in the cabinet. In two thousand fifteen, an
13:19
Speaker 1: e book appeared under a pseudonym. Investigators examining the text
13:24
Speaker 1: against Fitch's manuscript found what they described as significant structural
13:29
Speaker 1: and thematic similarity. The same emotional architecture, the same sequencing
13:34
Speaker 1: of grief. Not identical. Fitch's book had been altered far
13:38
Speaker 1: more aggressively than Meggin's, but the pattern was the same.
13:42
Speaker 1: A woman writes a memoir from the hardest material of
13:45
Speaker 1: her life, Simpson takes it, tells her it cannot sell,
13:49
Speaker 1: then sells it under a different name. That version of events,
13:52
Speaker 1: two victims, same method spanning years, pointed towards something systematic.
13:58
Speaker 1: If the pattern held in, investigators reasoned there might be
14:02
Speaker 1: more names, more filing cabinets, more manuscripts told they were unsaleable,
14:08
Speaker 1: But the investigation did not expand to additional victims. The
14:12
Speaker 1: record as it stands confirms too. Megan Wright and Barbara
14:17
Speaker 1: Fitch now picture a jail cell in Cook County. Marcus
14:22
Speaker 1: Koebl was awaiting sentencing on an unrelated charge. He had
14:26
Speaker 1: spoken to Simpson through the ordinary proximity of detention, and Simpson,
14:31
Speaker 1: according to Koebl's written statement delivered to a correctional officer
14:35
Speaker 1: on May twenty ninth of twenty nineteen, had described the
14:39
Speaker 1: fraud with what Koebel called a kind of mocking pride.
14:43
Speaker 1: He described how he accessed Meghan's home. He described what
14:47
Speaker 1: he had taken and what he had returned. He described
14:51
Speaker 1: the contract clause as elegant. Koebel had no relationship with
14:55
Speaker 1: investigators before that statement. He had no documented motive to
14:59
Speaker 1: fa fabricated. The statement went to the field office, and
15:03
Speaker 1: on June third of twenty nineteen, investigators sat down with
15:07
Speaker 1: Simpson and put it in front of him. He confessed
15:10
Speaker 1: the following day. The recording ran complete. The strongest theory
15:15
Speaker 1: and the one, the physical evidence, the cell data, the
15:19
Speaker 1: forensic literary analysis, and the confession. All support is not complicated.
15:25
Speaker 1: Simpson identified writers who were isolated, working alone without industry contacts,
15:30
Speaker 1: whose manuscripts had genuine commercial potential. He used the legitimacy
15:35
Speaker 1: of a standard agency relationship to gain access, trust, and
15:39
Speaker 1: eventually legal cover. The contract clause was not an afterthought,
15:44
Speaker 1: It was prepared. The forty minute phone call in March
15:47
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen was not a conversation. It was a
15:51
Speaker 1: delivery mechanism. What remains open is narrower but stranger. The
15:56
Speaker 1: book in the river sealed in a ziploc bag with
15:59
Speaker 1: a rubber band, preserved, not destroyed. Simpson never explained why
16:04
Speaker 1: he sealed it and dropped it rather than burning it
16:07
Speaker 1: or shredding it, Not to Cobal, not in his confession.
16:11
Speaker 1: The how of the river has never been definitively established.
16:15
Speaker 1: One reading is practical disposal without destruction, leaves no ash,
16:21
Speaker 1: no fragment, no forensic trace at a fixed location. A
16:25
Speaker 1: river moves. Whatever Simpson believed about rivers and evidence, the
16:29
Speaker 1: book survived anyway, found by a retired machinist's neighbor's habit
16:34
Speaker 1: kept intact by a rubber band and a plastic bag
16:39
Speaker 1: recovered three miles downstream in March ice. But there is
16:44
Speaker 1: another reading, and it does not resolve cleanly. The inscription
16:48
Speaker 1: this is mine every word is in Meghan's hand. The
16:52
Speaker 1: analyst confirmed it. Meghan does not remember writing it. If
16:56
Speaker 1: Simpson took the manuscript from her filing cabinet on October fourteenth,
17:00
Speaker 1: if he handled her papers and returned them re ordered,
17:04
Speaker 1: he had access to documents in her handwriting, he could
17:07
Speaker 1: have carried something out that already bore her inscription. He
17:11
Speaker 1: could have placed the book in the river himself, already
17:14
Speaker 1: marked as insurance against a future he was calculating. Or
17:18
Speaker 1: Megan wrote that line on a night she cannot account for,
17:21
Speaker 1: sealed it herself and placed it somewhere Simpson later found,
17:26
Speaker 1: and Simpson, recognizing what it meant, put it where he
17:29
Speaker 1: thought no one would. The record does not say which
17:33
Speaker 1: The book spent months in the Sutter Branch. It arrived
17:36
Speaker 1: in a court room in February of twenty twenty one
17:39
Speaker 1: as exhibit evidence, and when a borrowed Life was reissued
17:44
Speaker 1: by Whitmore and Lark in the fall of twenty twenty
17:47
Speaker 1: under Megan Write's name, the dedication page was left blank.
17:52
Speaker 1: She chose not to replace the line that had sounded
17:55
Speaker 1: like her voice because it was not hers to reclaim.
17:59
Speaker 1: On the fourth of June twenty nineteen, Neil Simpson sat
18:03
Speaker 1: across from investigators and spoke into a recording device. The
18:06
Speaker 1: confession was complete, every mechanism he had used, the buried
18:11
Speaker 1: contract clause, the re ordered manuscript, the name on the cover.
18:16
Speaker 1: He confirmed in his own voice. He was convicted in
18:19
Speaker 1: February of twenty twenty one on all charges, both the
18:23
Speaker 1: Right case and the Fish case. The court sentenced him
18:27
Speaker 1: to six years in federal custody. Barbara Fitch had been
18:30
Speaker 1: waiting for that verdict longer than Megan. She had signed
18:34
Speaker 1: with Simpson in twenty thirteen. Her manuscript, the one she
18:39
Speaker 1: wrote about caring for a disabled spouse, the one Simpson
18:43
Speaker 1: told her was unsellable, had appeared in structural form as
18:46
Speaker 1: a self published e book under a pseudonym in two
18:50
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. She sat in the same court room she
18:54
Speaker 1: heard the same sentence read aloud. There is a detail
18:58
Speaker 1: from the pre trial record that is worth holding. When
19:01
Speaker 1: investigators confronted Simpson on the third of June with Marcus
19:04
Speaker 1: Coebl's written declaration, Simpson did not immediately collapse. He asked
19:10
Speaker 1: how Cobyl could possibly know those specifics, The investigators told him,
19:14
Speaker 1: because you described it with and Here is Coebol's exact phrasing,
19:19
Speaker 1: mocking pride. Simpson had told the story like it was clever.
19:24
Speaker 1: He had told it to the wrong person. The recovered
19:27
Speaker 1: copy of A Borrowed Life remained in evident storage throughout
19:31
Speaker 1: the entire trial. The ziplock bag, the rubber band, the
19:36
Speaker 1: inscription in Meghan's handwriting that she does not remember writing,
19:40
Speaker 1: All of it cataloged, preserved, presented to a jury. The
19:45
Speaker 1: book that was supposed to disappear became the artifact that
19:49
Speaker 1: could not be ignored. In the fall of twenty twenty,
19:52
Speaker 1: Whitmore and Lark reissued the memoir under Megan Wright's name.
19:57
Speaker 1: The text was hers, the authorship was hers, the cover
20:01
Speaker 1: bore her name for the first time, and the dedication page,
20:05
Speaker 1: the one that had read for the women who wrote
20:07
Speaker 1: the hard parts and were never asked, was left blank.
20:11
Speaker 1: Megan chose not to replace it, not because she had
20:14
Speaker 1: nothing to say, because that space was the only part
20:17
Speaker 1: of the book that no one had touched yet. There
20:21
Speaker 1: is something that resists easy resolution in this case, and
20:24
Speaker 1: it is not the legal outcome. The conviction is clear
20:28
Speaker 1: the sentences on record. What resists is a smaller question
20:33
Speaker 1: and it may be the more honest one. For nearly
20:36
Speaker 1: two years, Megan Wright doubted her own memory. She sat
20:40
Speaker 1: in sessions with Amy Osborne and described a creeping sense
20:44
Speaker 1: that she could not trust her own perception of events.
20:47
Speaker 1: She had written a book, she knew she had written it,
20:51
Speaker 1: and the world was offering her a published version that
20:54
Speaker 1: said someone else had The dissonance between those two realities,
20:58
Speaker 1: one internal, one external, both claiming to be true is
21:03
Speaker 1: what manipulation of this kind is designed to produce. It
21:07
Speaker 1: does not need a locked room, It does not need
21:11
Speaker 1: physical force. It only needs someone willing to occupy the
21:14
Speaker 1: gap between what a person knows and what they can prove.
21:18
Speaker 1: Meghan spent twenty six years teaching other people how language works,
21:22
Speaker 1: how a sentence carries meaning, how a voice on a
21:25
Speaker 1: page is a signature no one else can forge. And
21:29
Speaker 1: then someone took that signature and put their name beneath it.
21:33
Speaker 1: She got the name back. That is not nothing. The
21:37
Speaker 1: question that the record cannot answer why Simpson sealed that
21:40
Speaker 1: book and placed it in a river rather than simply
21:43
Speaker 1: destroying it, will stay open. He never explained it, not
21:47
Speaker 1: to Cobal, not in his confession. Whatever he believed about
21:51
Speaker 1: water and distance, and evidence the Sutter branch did not cooperate.
21:56
Speaker 1: Kevin Wallace pulled the book from the ice on the
21:59
Speaker 1: eleventh of March, three days before he thought to call
22:02
Speaker 1: any one about it, because something about a sealed bag
22:05
Speaker 1: with a rubber band did not belong in that river.
22:09
Speaker 1: He was right. It did not belong there. It belonged
22:12
Speaker 1: to Megan Wright. The dedication page is still blank. That
22:16
Speaker 1: silence is hers. This show is made by Oboe Media.