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He Kept Track: The Foster Dad Who Accounted Human Lives · Dark Psychology: The Control Game

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The book was sitting on a folding table in a
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: storage unit on Kessler Road. One copy, no box, no wrapping,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: just a hardcover spine.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Up on bare concrete.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: The cover showed a woman's face, a real face, recognizable
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: beneath a name that was not hers. That face belonged
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: to Sherry Christiansen. The name printed above it was Meredith Voss.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Meredith Voss did not exist. What happened between the moment
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Sherry first sent her manuscript out into the world and
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: the moment a stranger found her face on someone else's
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: book is a story about how a person's own words, memories,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: and identity can be dismantled so gradually that the person
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: inside it barely notices, until almost nothing is left. This
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: is the story of Sherry Christensen, and it starts not
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: with a crime scene, but with a box of documents
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: and a retired postal worker who wrecked recognized something that
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: should not have been there. Sherry Christensen was thirty eight
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: years old and lived on Orford Street in Delmore, Ohio.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: She had grown up in the town the daughter of
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a librarian, which meant she had been surrounded by other
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: people's words.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Her entire life.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: At some point she decided she had words of her
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: own worth putting down. She kept two holland lop rabbits
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: named Biscuit and Margo. Her neighbor on Orford Street, Patrice Owens,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: later told investigators that Sherry fed them at seven in
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the morning and seven in the evening every day without exception.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Owens said she could set her watch by it. That
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: detail matters because when a person builds their life around
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: that kind of regularity, any deviation becomes immediately visible to
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: the people around them. The manuscript Sherry had been writing
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: was called The Long Forgetting. It was a memoir. Its
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: subject was memory, specifically the way memory bends and softens
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: around painful things, and the way certain rooms in a
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: family home seemed to hold the past more stubbornly than
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: people do. The original dedication, hand written in the draft
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: she would later keep in a cardboard box, read for
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: my mother, Elaine, you knew me even when you didn't.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: She spent years on it. In spring two thousand fifteen,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: she submitted it to literary agents. Within forty eight hours,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Webber called her. Weber was forty six years old.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: He ran in operation called Weber Literary out of a
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: post office box in Columbus and a home office in
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Granville Heights, Ohio. According to court records, his professional history
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: was thin, a loosely assembled resume with few verifiable credits.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: He was described by people who encountered him in person
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: as heavy set, mid forties, wearing glasses and usually a
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: dark coat.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: He spoke well.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: He was persuasive in the specific way that people are
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: persuasive when they have thought carefully about what the other
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: person most needs to hear. What Sherry needed to hear
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: in spring two thousand fifteen was that her manuscript was extraordinary.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Phone records confirmed the first call lasted two hours and
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: forty minutes. There is something worth sitting with in that number.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Two hours and forty minutes on a first call with
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: a writer who had been working in isolation for years,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: who had just sent her most personal work out into
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: an indifferent market. Whatever Weber said in those one hundred
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: sixty minutes, it was enough. Within three months, Sherry signed
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: a representation agreement. The agreement ran to several pages. One
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: clause buried in section seven, granted Weber co authorship rights
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: over any derivative work arising from the manuscript. It also
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: granted him the right to revise the title and the
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: by line. According to publishing attorney Mark Everley, who later
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: reviewed the document for the investigation, the language was unusually broad.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: It was also unusually specific, as though it had been
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: drafted with a particular outcome already in mind. Within six
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: months of signing, Sherry gave Weber access to her email account.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: She trusted him. The record makes that plane, and the
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: record also shows with equal plainness that Weber began using
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: that trust almost immediately to learn things about Sherry that
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: a literary agent has no business knowing, where she stored
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: her documents, what her note books contained, what locke Brand
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: secured her storage unit on Kessler Road. In two thousand sixteen,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: he arranged electrical work at her Orford Street house through
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: a handyman, and according to investigators, he used that access
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: to observe her filing habits and the physical layout of
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: her space. That same year, he asked her to send
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: a photograph. He said it was for internal promotional use
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: to help editors visualize the author.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: She sent three.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: One of them, taken on her back porch, showed her
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: face clearly in afternoon light. She had no reason not
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: to send it. She had no reason not to trust
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: any of this. That is the part that makes this
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: story so difficult to look at directly. The machinery of
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: what Weber built against Sherry Christiansen was constructed almost entirely
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: out of her own openness. And by the time the
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: book appeared in the world, her book, her words, her
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: face on the cover, her name was nowhere on it.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: What that book said about who wrote it and where
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: the investigation started is where this story goes next. The
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: book appeared in a cardboard box at the Calvary Lutheran
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: food pantry in Delmore, Ohio. Ross Porter, fifty three, a
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: retired postal worker who volunteered there on Tuesday mornings, was
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: sorting donations when he pulled it from the stack. The
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: cover showed a woman's face in afternoon life. He recognized
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: that face. He had seen it on Orford Street. The
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: book was called Forty Years in the Room. The author
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: listed was Meredith Voss. Ross Porter knew no one by
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: that name, but he knew the woman in the photograph,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and he knew she had not told any one she
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: was leaving. He set the book on the table and
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: looked at it for a long moment, then he called
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: the non emergency line. That single hard cover sitting on
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: a folding table in a storage unit on Kessler Road
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: before it ended up in a donation box is what
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: broke the case open. Not a tip, not a confession,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: A book in a cardboard box with a face that
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: did not match the name printed beneath it. Detective Duaye
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Donnelly signed it out as evidence the same afternoon. What
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: he found when he opened it did not immediately make sense.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The author's bio described Meredith Voss as a writer from
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: the Midwest with a background in education and personal essay.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: It was thin, it was generic, and it was attached
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: to a photograph of a woman Donnelly would confirm within
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: twenty four hours was Sherry Christensen thirty eight, a librarian's
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: daughter from Delmore who had been writing about her mother's
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: illness for most of a decade. The dedication page read
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: j W. Who saw what I couldn't. Donnelly photographed it.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: He flagged it. He did not yet know what it meant,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: but he knew it was wrong. The publisher was Breckinridge
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: and Hale. Donnelly called them PAULA Renner, an editor there
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: confirmed that the manuscript had been submitted by a literary
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: agent named Jeffrey Weber, operating out of Weber Literary, with
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: a mailing address listed as a PO box in Columbus.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Weber had represented the work as belonging to Meredith Voss.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: He had not named a real author. He had not
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: disclosed that Meredith Voss was a pen name. He had
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: not mentioned Sherry Christensen. Once the advance was four two
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars, Donnelly asked where it had been routed. The
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: answer came back a business account he had never heard of.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Sherry Christensen had no record of it. Financial crimes investigator
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Ray Kimball traced that account in the second week of April.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: It led to a home office.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: In Granville Heights, Ohio. It led to Jeffrey Webber. Donnelly
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: pulled the representation agreement Sherry had signed in the months
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: after Weber first called her. That call, confirmed by phone records,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: had lasted two hours and forty minutes. Sherry had been unknown, unagented,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and working in isolation. The call had felt, by her
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: own account, like being discovered, like someone finally.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: Seeing the work clearly.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: She signed within three months the agreement looked standard publishing.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: Attorney Mark Everley reviewed it for the investigation and noted
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: that most of it was boilerplate, but Barry made in
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: section seven was a clause that was not standard at all.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: It granted Weber co authorship rights over any derivative work
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: produced from the manuscript. It also granted him the right
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: to revise the title and the byline. Everley described the
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: language as unusually broad and unusually specific, as though it
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: had been written with a destination already in mind. Within
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: six months of signing, Sherry had given Weber access to
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: her email account. In twenty sixteen, Weber arranged for electrical
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: work at her Orford Street house through a handyman. According
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: to investigators, that access gave him time to observe how
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: she organized her documents, where she stored her research materials,
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: and what kind of locke secured her storage unit on
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Kessler Road. That same year, he asked her for a photograph.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: He said it was.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: For internal use to help editors visualize the author. She
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: sent three, One taken on her back porch, showed her
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: face in clear afternoon light. By twenty eighteen, the manuscript
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Sherry had titled The Long forgetting had been revised substantially.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: The revisions happened under pressure Weber applied over.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: More than eighteen months.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: He proposed the pen name Meredith Voss, claiming it tested
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: better with focus groups. He told her that her real
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: name would appear in the author's note.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: It did not, not.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: In the published edition, not once. The dedication that appeared
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: in print read j W who saw what I couldn't.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Donnelly found the original dedication in Sherry's cardboard box of documents.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: It read for my mother, Elaine, you knew me even
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: when you didn't. Two dedications, one manuscript, two entirely different
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: people claiming to stand at the center of it. And
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: then there was unit forty four on Kessler Road. Storage
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: facility manager Ted Grau told investigators that unit forty four
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: had been rented in January of twenty eighteen in Sherry
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Christiansen's name, using her checking account, but Grau said the
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: person who came in person to set it up was
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: not Shery. The person who stood at his desk showed
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: a copy of Sherry's driver's license and signed a notarized
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: authorization was a heavy set man in his mid forties
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: wearing glasses and a dark coat. He had known the
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Loche brand, he had known the specific model. He had
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: known exactly what he needed to get inside. Later, without
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: forcing anything, Grau picked Weber out of a photo array
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: without hesitation. That is the moment the shape of everything changed.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: When Donnelly executed the search warrant on Weber's Granville Heights
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: home office, he expected financial records. He found those, But
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: what he also found was a desk notebook, and what
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: was inside it stopped the search for several minutes. The
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: notebook contained Sherry's email credentials, username, password, written out in
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Weber's handwriting. Below those a list. The list contained the
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: titles of Sherry's composition notebooks and their physical locations inside
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: her Orford Street house. He had mapped her interior world literally,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: the filing habits he had observed through the handyman's access,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the photograph he had requested for editorial purposes, the email
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: account she had handed over because agents sometimes needed to
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: communicate directly with publishers. Every piece of trust she had
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: extended to him had been cataloged, cross referenced, and stored.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Donnelly later described what he was looking at as a
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: clinic in something he had seen before, but rarely this constructed.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: The notebook was not a record of a relationship that
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: had gone wrong. It was a document of a relationship
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: that had been designed to produce exactly this outcome. But
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: here is the thing that the notebook did not answer
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: on its own. It showed the mechanism, it did not
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: yet show the scope. Ray Kimball, running the financial thread
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: in parallel, pulled Weber's corresponden's archive from the seized hard drives.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: What he found there expanded the frame considerably. Connie Albrecht
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: sixty one, a retired teacher from Findlay, Ohio, had first
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: queried Weber in two thousand twelve. She had a manuscript
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Webber had signed her. Her representation agreement contained section seven
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: language that was identical word for word to the clause
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: in Sherry's contract. Her manuscript had never been published. Her
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: email credentials were also in Weber's note book. Kimball kept pulling.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: David Pruitt, an Akron man, had submitted a family history
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: manuscript to Weber in two thousand eight. Prwitt had died
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: before the book reached publication. The published version listed Webber.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: As the sole author.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: The pattern crossed four states, spanned fifteen years. Multiple writers
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: had been strung along or stripped of their work. Sherry
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Christiansen was not an anomaly. She was the one that
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: got found because a retired postal worker recognized a face
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: on a book cover in a donation box.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: There is something specific.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: About that detail that does not let go. Sherry's face
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: was on the cover because Weber needed a face. He
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: had the manuscript, he had the pen name, he had
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: the publishing deal, and the advance routed to his own account.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: What he needed was a photograph that looked like a
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: real person had written this book. So he used the
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: one Sherry had sent him three years earlier. He put
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: her face on the cover of a book that bore
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: someone else's name, and if ross Porter had not happened
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: to volunteer on that particular Tuesday morning, the cover and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: the name might have remained the only version of this
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: story anyone ever saw. At his preliminary hearing, Weber said
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the pen name arrangement.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: Had been mutually understood.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: He said the dedication change was a last minute editorial
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: decision he had intended to discuss with Sherry.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: He said the storage.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Unit had been set up to protect her documents. He
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: used the word misunderstanding multiple times. Donnelly, who attended the hearing,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: described watching it as sitting through a constructed performance, each
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: answer designed to reframe an act of deliberate control as
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: an act of care. The documents did not agree picture
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: the first week after Donnelly signs out the book. He
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: knows a photograph was used without consent. He knows a
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: dedication was replaced. He knows a name does not appear
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: on a work that appears to be hers. What he
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: does not yet know is how much of what happened
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: was agreed to and how much was engineered without Sherry's knowledge.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: The obvious reading in those.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: First days is that this might be a dispute, a
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: badly written contract, a misunderstanding about pen names and bylines that.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: Went too far.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Maybe Sherry had agreed to more than she remembered. Maybe
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Weber had overstepped, but not criminally. That reading collapses the
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: moment you open the notebook. A literary agent does not
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: need the physical locations of a client's composition notebooks. A
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: literary agent does not need to know the lock brand
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: on a client's storage unit. A literary agent does not
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: write down a client's email password in a desk notebook,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: alongside a map of where her private documents are kept.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: There is no version of that list that belongs in
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: a professional relationship. There is no editorial reason for any
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: of it to exist. The section seven clause moves from
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: aggressive to something else entirely when you place it beside
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: the notebook alone. The clause is exploitative. Placed next to
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: a written record of where Sherry kept her work, what
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: she kept in her email account, and how to access
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: the unit where her documents were restored, the clause becomes
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: the legal scaffold around a structure that.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: Was already built.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Weber had not waited for the contract to give him
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: access to her work. He had used the contract to
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: make permanent what he had already taken. Consider the storage unit.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Weber rented it in Sherry's name using her checking account
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: in January of twenty eighteen, months before the book went
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: to press. The unit held a copy of the late
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: stage manuscript. He used Sherry's driver's license and a notarized
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: authorization to set it up. He knew the Locke brand.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: He did not need to force anything because he had
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: never needed to force anything. The whole operation depended on
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: access that looked legitimate from every angle. That is the structure,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: not impulsive theft, not a moment of opportunism. A system
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: built over three years, starting with a two hour, forty
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: minute phone call to wik a woman who had been
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: writing alone and waiting to be read, designed to transfer
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: ownership of her work while leaving her face on the
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: cover and her name off the page. The dedication is
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: where the architecture becomes impossible to look away from j W.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Who saw what I couldn't. He replaced her mother's name
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: with his own initials. He replaced the line about being known,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: about being seen across years of illness and forgetting, with
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: a tribute to himself That was not an editorial decision,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: that was a signature. He put his mark on the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: center of her book and removed hers from the cover entirely. Sherry,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: when she spoke about what had happened, said the money
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: was not what stayed with her. Four thousand, two hundred
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: dollars routed to an account she had never seen that
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: was real. But what she returned to in interview after
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: interview was the dedication. Her mother had died. The book
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: had been written for her, and the only monument left
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: in the published text was his inns in a line
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: he had written himself. The conviction in October of twenty
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: nineteen covered wire fraud, theft by deception, identity fraud, and
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: copyright infringement multiple counts across multiple victims. The sentence was
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: seven years minimum security, Central Ohio.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: The book was recalled from.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Distribution in May of twenty nineteen. In the fall of
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty, the Long Forgetting was reissued by Breckinridge and Hale.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: The author's name on the cover was Sherry Christensen. The
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: dedication read for my mother, Elaine, you knew me even
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: when you didn't. Jeffrey Webber was arrested at his Granville
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Heights home on April twenty second, twenty nineteen. Investigators found
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: him there at the address where the royalty account had
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: finally led them. The po box in Columbus was affront
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: but the money had.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: To go somewhere real.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: The search of his own office produced what the case
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: had been missing. Volume, not one victim, not one scheme.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Weber's records connected him to writers across four states over
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: fifteen years, multiple representation agreements with identical Section seven language
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: multiple email accounts, harvested multiple manuscripts, some stranded, some stripped,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: at least one belonging to a man named David Pruitt,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: who had submitted a family history manuscript in two thousand
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: and eight and died before he could see what happened
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: to it. The published version listed Weber as sole author.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Connie Albrecht sixty one, a retired teacher from Finlay, had
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: queried Weber in twenty twelve. Her manuscript was never published,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Her email credentials were in the notebook. Her representation agreement
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: carried the same buried.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: Clause word for word.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: The notebook was the piece that changed the texture of everything.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Investigators already knew. It was not a list of contacts.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: It was a map Sherry's e mail login, the titles
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: of her composition notebooks, their locations inside the Orford Street house.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Weber had walked through that house through the handyman access
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen, and he had written down where she.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: Kept her words.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: PAULA Renner, the editor at Breckinridge in Hale, testified that
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Weber had submitted the manuscript under the name Meredith Voss
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: and had never disclosed a real author behind it. Mark Everley,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: the publishing attorney who reviewed the representation agreement for Detective Donnelly,
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: confirmed that section seven was not standard language. It was
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: constructed to transfer writes while appearing routine to anyone who
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: was not looking for it. Weber spoke at his preliminary hearing.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: He said the pen name arrangement was mutually understood. He
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: said the dedication change was a last minute editorial decision
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: he had intended to discuss. He said the storage unit
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: was set up to protect ter documents. He used the
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: word misunderstanding more than once. Detective Donnelly, who sat through
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: the hearing, described it afterward as a clinic in minimization.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: The jury did not find it minimizable. Weber was convicted
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: on all counts in October of twenty nineteen, wire fraud,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: theft by deception, identity fraud, copyright infringement across multiple victims.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: The sentence was seven years minimum security, Central Ohio. There
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: is something about the notebook that does not leave easily.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Not the crimes enumerated in the conviction, not the royalty
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: account or the forged storage authorization.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: The notebook.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Weber sat in that house in twenty sixteen, moving through
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: Sherry's rooms under the cover of an electrical job, and
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: he cataloged where she kept the private record of her
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: own mind. He knew which shelf, he knew which titles.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: He had gone looking for the the architecture of her
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: inner life, and he had written it down. Sherry Christiansen
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: did not disappear.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: She drove to her sister's home in.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Perrysburg on March twenty first, twenty nineteen, and stayed there.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: She had left voluntarily, quietly, in the way that people
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: leave when they have run out of a particular kind
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: of endurance. When she spoke afterward, she did not leave
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: with the money four thousand, two hundred dollars, an account
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: she had never seen. That was real, and it mattered.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: But what she came back to was the dedication. Her
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: mother's name removed, her mother's line replaced. The book that
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: was supposed to carry a laying Christensen's memory into the world,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: had for nearly two years carried only his initials instead.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Forty years in the Room was recalled from distribution in
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: May of twenty nineteen. In the fall of twenty twenty,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Breckinridge and Hale reissued them. The title on the cover
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: was the long forgetting Sherry's original title restored. The author's
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: name was Sherri Christensen. The dedication read for my mother, Elaine,
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: you knew me even when you didn't. That line had
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: existed from the beginning. It had survived every revision, every
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: pressure call, every rewrite Weber pushed through. It was in
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: the photocopy Sherry kept in her cardboard box, the one
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: that gave Donnelly something to trace. The dedication had outlasted,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: the scheme built to a rash. What Jeffrey Webber understood,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: and what made him dangerous across fifteen years and four states,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: was that a writer's relationship to their own work is
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: not purely legal.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: It is identity.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: It is the place where a person has been most
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: honestly themselves. He did not steal a manuscript. He dismantled
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: the boundary between a person and their own voice, and
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: he did it slowly enough that each step felt like collaboration.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: The book is on shells now under her name. Biscuit
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: and Margot still needed feeding. At seven in the morning
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: and seven at night, the ordinary structure of a life
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: quietly resumed. This show is made by Obomedia