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He Hid Her Prenup, Then Erased Her Life: The Quiet Predator · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of October fifteenth, a county surveyor named
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Monica Rice pulled up to four to fourteen Corrigan Road
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: for a routine property line check. She almost didn't notice it.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: A small white receipt pressed against the surveyor's stake by
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: the wind, fluttering at her feet. She picked it up
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: because it was litter. What it said on that slip
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: of paper made no sense at all. The receipt was
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: for a moving truck rented on the ninth of October,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: returned with Colorado plates and a name. She didn't recognize
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the address on the rental four fourteen Corrigan Road. The
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: house in front of her belonged to a woman named
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Peggy Hamilton, and Peggy Hamilton had no idea any of
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: this had happened. That slip of paper was the only
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: honest document Gordon Brooks produced in nearly a year of planning.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: He didn't mean to leave it behind, and that's single accident.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: A receipt caught by the wind is what stopped him.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: There is something about this case that goes beyond fraud.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Gordon Brooks did not simply steal eleven thousand dollars. He
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: spent months dismantling another person's grip on reality, her home,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: her trust, her sense of what was actually happening around her.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: He almost made her believe she had invited him in,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: and by the time Peggy understood what had been done,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: the paperwork was already signed. This is the story of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: how one man nearly took everything from a woman he
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: met at a grief support group, and how the plan
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: he documented in forty one photographs became the evidence that
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: destroyed him. Peggy Hamilton had lived at four fourteen Corrigan
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Road for twenty two years. The house was not remarkable
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: from the street, a pale yellow split level with a
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: wooden glider on the porch, sage green cushions she had
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: replaced twice. The garden on the south side ran wild
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: every summer, zuk kinni crowding out everything she tried to
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: plant near it. She had given up trying to contain
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: it and started leaving bags of zucchini on the neighbour's
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: porches instead. For twenty two years, Peggy worked as a
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: medical billing administrator at Adele Regional Hospital. She was not
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: the kind of person who described herself as precise, but
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: her colleagues did She reconciled accounts that other people had
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: given up on. She remembered policy numbers the way other
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: people remember faces. When she retired, the department threw her
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: a lunch that ran two hours over schedule because no
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: one wanted to leave her. Thursday evenings belonged to the
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Hadel food pantry. She had volunteered there for nine consecutive
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: years Thursdays from six to nine. She sordied, she stacked,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: she showed up. The coordinator once said Peggy was the
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: only volunteer she had never had to remind about anything.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Her daughter, Christine, lived in Portland and called twice a week,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: usually Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. They talked about the garden,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: about Peggy's investments, about whether Peggy had gotten a downstairs
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: faucet fixed. Christine had the particular attentiveness of a child
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: who lives too far away and knows it. For fourteen,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Corrigan Road was not just where Peggy lived. It was
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: what she had built with twenty two years of work,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: a pension, an inheritance from her father, and roughly two
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: hundred forty thousand dollars in home equity. The house was
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: financial security and emotional ground in the same structure. She
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: had not thought of it as something that could be taken.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Most people don't. Gordon Brooks arrived in January, not at
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: her door, at the grief support group that met every
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: second Tuesday at Hadel Methodist Fellowship Hall, folding chairs in
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: a circle, bad coffee, people who had recently lost some
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: one and didn't know where else to put it. Gordon
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: had lost his wife, Sandra in December to pancreatic cancer.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: He sat quietly in the first session. The second week,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: he brought coffee cake. He was sixty one years old,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: silver haired, with what multiple people at the group described
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: as a deliberate, calming way of speaking. He didn't rush sentences,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: He listened in a way that felt complete. Within a
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: few weeks, he knew the names of Peggy's mother, the
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: hospital where her mother had worked, the specific reasons Peggy
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: felt guilty about things she could not have control. He
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: remembered details that people discard in the first conversation. Peggy noticed,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: of course, that was the point. What she did not know,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: and what would only become clear much later, was that
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Gordon Brooks's real address was not anywhere near Hadel Township.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: His mail went to a box rental service on Dunbar Street.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: He had been staying at a motel and periodically at
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: a cousin's house in Carrigan County. Grief was real enough.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Sandra Brooks had died, but Gordon had arrived at that
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: fellowship hall with something beyond grief. The forty one photographs
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: on his phone would eventually prove it. Those photographs existed
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: before he ever spoke to Peggy about a future. By April,
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Gordon was having dinner at four fourteen Corrigan Road three
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: nights a week. Peggy cooked, he stayed late. He talked
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: about Sandra the way you talk about someone you genuinely miss,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: and Peggy, who had lost her own mother two years
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: earlier and still kept a photograph of her on the
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: kitchen window. Sill understood that kind of weight that was real,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: what surrounded it was not. In June, Gordon used a
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: word that should have been too soon, but wasn't because
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: he had been building toward it for five months with
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: the patience of someone who knew exactly how long these
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: things take. The word was consolidate, not merge, not combine.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Consolidate a word from offices from administer decisions from forms
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: signed without much ceremony. He suggested they consolidate their finances.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: It would be simpler, he said, for practical reasons. Peggy
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: signed the paperwork for a joint account. In July, Gordon
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: set up the online access, his credentials, his password. Eleven
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars would move from that account to a separate
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: account in his name before anyone noticed the account existed
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: at all. But there is something else in that timeline
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: that matters more than the money. Sometime in late September,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Gordon photographed the north side of for fourteen Corrigan Road,
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: not the front, the north side the utility room door,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: the one without a lock that worked properly, the one
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: with no sight line from Corrigan Road or from either
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: neighbor's window. He had taken similar photographs before, many times.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The time stamps on his phone would later show. The
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: first image of that door was captured six weeks before
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: he ever said the word few to Peggy Hamilton, six
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: weeks before any conversation about what they might build together.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: He had already decided what he was going to take.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Frank Ogle, the retired mail carrier who lived two houses east,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: saw Gordon, in late September, standing at that north door
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: with his phone raised, Gordon said he was checking the
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: dryer vent. Frank thought nothing of it. Why would he.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The man had been coming and going for months. He
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: knew Peggy's name, her schedule, her car. He belonged there
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: as far as Frank could tell. That assumption, so ordinary,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: so reasonable is the hinge. The entire plan turned on.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Peggy was at the food pantry every Thursday from six
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: to nine in the evening nine years without exception. Gordon
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: knew he had asked, listened, remembered at some point in September,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: and then again in the weeks that followed. Investigators determined
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: he entered the house through that utility door on at
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: least four separate Thursday evenings. He moved things in small increments.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: A photograph shifted on the hallway wall, A tote bin
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: repositioned in the spare room. The Santa Fe painting, a
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: large canvas Peggy had bought fifteen years earlier and kept
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: in the living room, was moved to the hallway. Later,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Christine Hamilton would describe walking into that house in early
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: October and feeling that something had been re arranged toward
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: a purpose she could not name. The pictures were different,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the painting was in the wrong room. Christine did not
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: know what she was seeing. She knew something, she couldn't
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: call it anything yet. On the ninth of October, Gordon
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: rented a moving truck Colorado plates. He drove it to
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Corrigan Road and unloaded boxes, office files, books, items that
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: looked like the ordinary cargo of a life being relocated.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: He stacked them in the garag Two days later, the
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: receipt from that rental fell from somewhere on the truck
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: and came to rest against a property marker on the
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: eastern edge of the lot. The receipt, dated October ninth,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: lay there for six days until Monica found it on
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: October fifteen. Monica Rice arrived at four to fourteen Corrigan
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Road at approximately eight fifteen in the morning on the
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: fifteenth of October. She was there to restake a property boundary,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: a fence dispute with a neighbour. Routine work, the kind
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: of job that generates paperwork, and not much else. She
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: was not looking for anything unusual. She was looking at
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the ground. The receipt was there against the marker. She
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: picked it up because she was methodical by habit and
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: because it was litter and because she noted the date
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: on it. The ninth of October, she looked at the garage.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: The door was not fully latched. Through the gap, she
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: could see cardboard boxes the kind used for office moved
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: stacked in rows. On the side of the boxes a
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: name written in black marker G. Brooks. Inside the garage,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: alongside those boxes was a printed funeral announcement Sandra Brooks
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Services to be held on the fourteenth of October, one
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: day earlier. The moving truck had arrived five days before
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: the memorial. The boxes were already in the house before
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Sandra Brooks was buried. Monica Rice called the Hadel County
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department from the driveway. By the time investigators arrived,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: they had a receipt, a name on boxes, and an obituary.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: What they did not yet have was the document Peggy
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: had signed in September. Peggy herself did not fully understand
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: what that document was. She had believed she was signing
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: something related to a lease modification paperwork connected to a
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: rental property arrangement. Gordon had described in general terms. The
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: document she had signed was an agreement giving Gored Brooks
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: joint tenancy rights at four fourteen Corrigan Road. He had
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: not moved in yet. By the letter of that document,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: he was about to. On the seventeenth of October, Gordon
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: Brooks was arrested on charges of fraud, financial exploitation of
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: a vulnerable adult and unlawful entry. He answered no questions.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: He would answer no questions for nine months. There is
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: something almost architectural about what he had built, the way
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: each piece supported the next, the way the grief group
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: led to the dinners, the dinners to the account, the
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: account to the document, the document to the boxes in
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the garage. It had the feel of something constructed, not improvised.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: And then the phone unlocked in evidence, and the photographs
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: were there, and it became impossible to argue otherwise. Forty
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: one images the north door, the lock mechanism, sight lines
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: mapped from multiple angles. A small notebook visible in three
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: of the FI photographs, open to a page of handwritten measurements.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: The first image was time stamped six weeks before Gordon
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: first suggested to Peggy that they had a future. He
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: had been studying the house before he had asked her
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: a single meaningful question. Picture Gordon at the door on
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: a Thursday evening in late September. Phone raised the neighborhood quiet,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: the light already thin. He is sixty one years old.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: He has a calming voice. He brought coffee cake to
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: a grief support group. He remembered the name of a
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: dead woman's mother from the outside, from any angle visible
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: from the street. Nothing about this looks like what it is.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: That is the first version of events that presents itself,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: and it is seductive because it is the one Gordon
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: implied throughout nine months of hearings, a man in grief
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: who had perhaps moved too fast, who had misunderstood what
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: was agreed upon, who had made poor decisions under emotional duress.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Cohabitation agreement, by this reading, was a miscommunication. The joint
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: account was generosity gone wrong. The boxes in the garage
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: were optimism, not calculation. That version collapses the moment you
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: look at the photographs. Not one of those forty one
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: images is accidental. They are systematic. They document entry points,
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: visibility gaps, and the geometry of a space being prepared
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: for occupation. The notebook with handwritten measurements appears in three
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: of them. You do not carry a measuring notebook to
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: a grief support group dinner. You carry it to a
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: job site. That is what four fourteen Corrigan Road was
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: to Gordon Brooks. A job site, and the timestamps tell
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: you the job began before the relationship did, or at
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: least before any version of the relationship Peggy would have
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: recognized as one. The account and the document fit the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: same frame. The online credentials Gordon held for the joint
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: account gave him so Old functional control of eleven thousand
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: dollars before Peggy registered that the account's balance had changed.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: The cohabitation agreement was presented to her as something administrative,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: a formality connected to a rental arrangement. She thought she understood.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: She signed it. Signing is what you do with forms
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: presented by someone you trust, in a context you believe
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: you understand. But then there is Susan Tanner, fifty eight
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: years old, Whitfield County, three hours south. She called the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Hadell County Sheriff's Department three weeks after Gordon's arrest. She
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: had met Gordon four years earlier, also at a grief
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: support group, also as a homeowner, also as a woman
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: who had recently lost someone. She had also signed a
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: document she did not fully understand. She had not reported
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: it because until she heard about Peggy Hamilton, she had
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: not known what to call it. Her sister had arrived
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: unannounced one afternoon and had said and done an enough
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: to make Gordon leave. She had survived the same mechanism,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: slightly different materials the same construction investigator Valerie Davis took
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Susan Tanner's statement. No prior charges existed against Gordon Brooks,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: no formal report from Whitfield County, no record that would
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: have surfaced in any background search Christine Hamilton could have
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: run in August when she typed his name into a
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: search engine and found almost nothing. Almost nothing was not
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: an accident either. What Susan Tanner's account confirmed, and what
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: the forty one photographs had already suggested, was that Peggy
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Hamilton was not the beginning of a story. She was
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: a continuation of one. The grief group, the coffee cake,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: the calming voice, the remembered details, the account, the document,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: the door that was invisible from the street. These were
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: not the improvisations of a desperate man. They were a method,
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: and a method implies repetition. The question that remained after
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: the confession and after the sentencing was a simple one
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: with no clean answer. How many times had it worked
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: well enough that no one called a sheriff at all?
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Gordon Brooks refused to confess for nine months, two postponements
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: hearing after hearing, His position maintained with the same deliberate
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: calm that had made people in a Methodist fellowship hall
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: describe him as soothing. Was that everything had been consensual,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: The account was joint, the document had been signed. He
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: had simply been building a life with some one who
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: cared about him. Then the prosecutor placed forty one photographs
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: in front of the jury. They were organized by time stamp.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: The first image dated back six weeks before Gordon had
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: ever spoken to Peggy Hamilton about a future together. He
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: was standing outside the utility room on the north side
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: of the house. The lateral door, the one with no
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: sight line from the street. He had photographed the latch,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: the frame, the angle of a approach from the sidewalk.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: In three of the images, a notebook was visible, small
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: spiral bound with dimensions written in ink on the open page.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: The love had come after the survey. The relationship had
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: been constructed around the entry point, not the other way around.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: On the third day of trial, Gordon asked to speak
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: privately with the prosecutor. The following morning, in open court
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: with the jury present, he confessed to all charges. The
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: cohabitation agreement was voided. The account was unwound. Eleven thousand
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: dollars had moved from Peggy's account into one she could
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: not access. A civil judgment recovered a portion of it.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: The record does not specify how much the rest was gone.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: He was convicted on every count fraud, financial exploitation of
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: a vulnerable adult, criminal trespass. The sentence is a matter
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: of public record and was delivered by the court. What
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: it cannot restore is the nine months Peggy Hamilton spent
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: waiting for a verdict while the man who had surveyed
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: her home moved into it without permission and drained her account.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Maintained in the language of formal proceedings that none of
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: it had happened. In November, Peggy Hamilton returned to four
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: fourteen Corrigan Road. She repainted the hallway, though one Gordon
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: had suggested, repainting in the color he had suggested for
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: reasons that now carried a different meaning than they had
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: when she'd first agreed. She re hung the Santa Fe
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: painting in the living room, where it had been for
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: fifteen years before he moved it to the hall. She
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: went to the food pantry the following Thursday. Nine years
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: of thursdays, she did not skip one. There is something
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: in that return that resists easy framing, not heroism. Peggy
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Hamilton would likely refuse that word, not recovery, because recovery
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: implies the damages behind you, and some of it isn't.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: What she did in November was more specific than either
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: of those. She went back to the things that had
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: always been hers, the painting, the schedule, the people who
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: expected her at six o'clock on a Thursday. Gordon had
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: built his plan around her routines. He had used her
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: predictability as infrastructure. The Thursday absence, the side door, the
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: trust she extended to people in shared grief. What the
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: record shows in the end is that the same routines
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: he mapped and exploited were the ones she returned too
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: when it was over. He had tried to hollow out
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: her life using the shape of it. The shape was
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: still there. Susan Tanner, three hours south in Whitfield County
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: had not known what to call her experience for four years,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: she called it something. Finally, when she heard Peggy's name,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: the Hadel County Sheriff's Department took her statement. No charges
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: were filed in Whitfield County. There was no prior report,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: no evidence trailed, no path to prosecution, but her statement existed.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Now it was in the record. That is not justice,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: but it is something that did not exist before. The
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: grief support groups where Gordon found both women have no
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: protocol for this. There is no vetting system for people
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: who attend because they are in pain and people who
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: attend because that is where people in pain can be found.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: That gap is still open. There is a question this
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: case does not answer. How many times in how many
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: counties do someone sign a document they do not fully
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: understand and then decide afterward that they have no name
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: for what happened to them. Susan Tanner waited four years.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: The number of people still waiting is not in any
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: record that exists. Peggy Hamilton's Santa Fe painting is back
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: on the wall in the living room. She bought it
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: fifteen years ago. Before any of this, it was always
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: hers thish Oh is made by Oboe Media.