Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Took Her Documents, Then Her Life: The Quiet Theft of Sherry

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He Took Her Documents, Then Her Life: The Quiet Theft of Sherry · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: It was a Tuesday morning in the second week of
0:06
Speaker 1: September two thousand nineteen, before six a m when a
0:10
Speaker 1: bird watcher crouched at the edge of Garnet Marsh and
0:13
Speaker 1: found a freezer bag wedged inside a levee culvert. The
0:16
Speaker 1: mud around it was wet and cold, The bag itself
0:20
Speaker 1: was dry inside and cold. Rubber Banded together were a
0:24
Speaker 1: laminated Social Security card, a debit card, and a notarized
0:28
Speaker 1: signature authorization form, all belonging to a woman named Sherri Ericsson,
0:34
Speaker 1: who was at that exact moment a sleep two miles
0:38
Speaker 1: away in her house on Morroll Lane. She had no
0:41
Speaker 1: idea any of it was missing. The bird watcher photographed
0:45
Speaker 1: the bag without touching it, walked back to her car
0:48
Speaker 1: and called the Renner County Sheriff's office at six forty
0:52
Speaker 1: one in the morning. Within two weeks, a financial crimes
0:55
Speaker 1: investigator would reconstruct fourteen months of transactions totaling one hundred
1:00
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars money that had left Sherry's accounts in small,
1:05
Speaker 1: careful increments, moving so slowly that no single withdrawal ever
1:09
Speaker 1: triggered an alert. What investigators would find at the end
1:13
Speaker 1: of that trail was not a random theft. It was
1:16
Speaker 1: a system, and the person who built that system had
1:19
Speaker 1: been sitting at Sherry's kitchen table. There is something specific
1:23
Speaker 1: about this case that resists easy categorization. No lock was broken,
1:28
Speaker 1: no threat was ever made. What happened to Sherry Ericsson
1:32
Speaker 1: happened in plain sight, in broad daylight, across nearly two years,
1:37
Speaker 1: and it worked in part because she was exactly who
1:41
Speaker 1: she had always been. Sherry Ericsson was fifty four years
1:45
Speaker 1: old in the fall of two thoy nineteen. She had
1:48
Speaker 1: spent twenty two years teaching fourth grade at Kessler Elementary
1:52
Speaker 1: in Braddock Flats, Renner County, a career she described in
1:57
Speaker 1: terms of routines and responsibilities accomplishments. She retired in twenty sixteen.
2:04
Speaker 1: She was divorced. She lived alone on Morrow Lane. Her
2:08
Speaker 1: garden was the center of her life after retirement. Eight
2:11
Speaker 1: raised beds ran along the south fence, planted in a
2:15
Speaker 1: rotation she had planned the previous winter. She was out
2:18
Speaker 1: there every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday from seven to nine
2:23
Speaker 1: in the morning without exception. Neighbors knew her schedule the
2:27
Speaker 1: way they knew the mail route. On Thursday evenings, she
2:31
Speaker 1: sang Alto with the community choir at seven thirty. For
2:35
Speaker 1: weeks moved in a structure she had built carefully and
2:38
Speaker 1: maintained with the same consistency she had brought to twenty
2:41
Speaker 1: two years of classroom mornings. She had a phrase she
2:45
Speaker 1: used often when she was uncertain about something, a memory,
2:49
Speaker 1: a date, something she thought she might have overlooked. She
2:52
Speaker 1: would say, before anything else, I might be wrong about this.
2:57
Speaker 1: But people who knew her discot ri as humility. It
3:02
Speaker 1: was also, by the time investigators met her, something else. Entirely.
3:07
Speaker 1: It was the residue of two years of being told
3:10
Speaker 1: quietly and persistently that her memory could not be trusted.
3:15
Speaker 1: Sherry had a fraternal twin sister named Donna. They had
3:19
Speaker 1: grown up together, but Donna had moved to the Pacific
3:22
Speaker 1: Northwest sometime in the nineteen nineties and built her own
3:25
Speaker 1: life as a property manager. The sisters stayed in touch,
3:29
Speaker 1: though not closely. They did not look identical, fraternal twins
3:34
Speaker 1: rarely do, but the resemblance was strong enough that people
3:38
Speaker 1: who knew one sometimes confused her for the other. That
3:41
Speaker 1: resemblance would matter, It would matter more than either of
3:44
Speaker 1: them understood. In Spring, twenty seventeen, a mutual acquaintance named
3:49
Speaker 1: Tom Belk introduced Sherry to a man named Russell Richardson.
3:53
Speaker 1: Russell was sixty one, a semi retired contractor from Kidderiche,
3:57
Speaker 1: about forty minutes south of Braddock Flat. He was attentive,
4:01
Speaker 1: he was present, He found reasons to be helpful. By
4:05
Speaker 1: the summer of that year, he had moved into the neighborhood,
4:07
Speaker 1: taking a residence on Morrow Lane, the same street where
4:11
Speaker 1: Sherry's garden was planted, the same street where she walked
4:14
Speaker 1: out every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at seven in the morning.
4:19
Speaker 1: Multiple neighbors later told investigators they had seen Russell's truck
4:23
Speaker 1: parked on the street during those hours. He was always
4:26
Speaker 1: gone before she came back inside. He was learning her
4:29
Speaker 1: schedule the way she had learned her students, methodically, patiently
4:35
Speaker 1: from observation. What no one on Morrow Lane knew yet
4:39
Speaker 1: was that Russell Richardson had done something like this before.
4:43
Speaker 1: In two thousand fifteen, a woman named Brenda Colton, sixty three,
4:48
Speaker 1: from Kidderidge, had filed a complaint about unauthorized account access
4:53
Speaker 1: by a former domestic partner. The complaint named Russell. The
4:57
Speaker 1: case was closed when Brenda did not pursue. The file
5:01
Speaker 1: sat in a drawer. Russell moved forty minutes north and
5:05
Speaker 1: met a retired school teacher with eight garden beds and
5:08
Speaker 1: a fixed weekly schedule. He brought flowers, He asked questions.
5:13
Speaker 1: He was, by every account, very easy to talk to.
5:17
Speaker 1: The first image that did not fit arrived in February
5:21
Speaker 1: of two thousand eighteen. It was a letter Midwest Federal
5:25
Speaker 1: Bank addressed to Sherry Ericsson at morro Lane, notifying her
5:29
Speaker 1: that a home equity line of credit had been accessed
5:32
Speaker 1: thirty eight thousand dollars. She had not applied for any
5:35
Speaker 1: such line. She had not signed anything. She brought the
5:39
Speaker 1: letter to Russell. He listened, he nodded. Then he reminded
5:43
Speaker 1: her about September September two thousand seventeen, the respiratory infection,
5:49
Speaker 1: the medication, the days she had spent in bed and
5:53
Speaker 1: mostly asleep. He suggested gently that she might have signed
5:58
Speaker 1: something during that period and simply not remembered. He said
6:02
Speaker 1: it with patience. He said it the way someone who
6:05
Speaker 1: cares about you says the difficult thing. Sherry had a
6:08
Speaker 1: phrase she used when she was uncertain I might be
6:12
Speaker 1: wrong about this, but she used it a great deal
6:15
Speaker 1: in the months that followed. What Russell did not mention
6:18
Speaker 1: was what had happened. In November of that same year,
6:22
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, Donna had flown in from the Pacific Northwest.
6:26
Speaker 1: It was not an unusual visit, but this one had
6:29
Speaker 1: been arranged with a particular purpose. Russell told Donna that
6:33
Speaker 1: Sherry needed help with a legal authorization form at the
6:36
Speaker 1: Recorder's office, something involving accounts. He said, something Sherry had
6:42
Speaker 1: asked him to handle but could not do herself that week.
6:46
Speaker 1: Donna believed him. She flew in on the day of
6:49
Speaker 1: the visit. Sherry was at choir practice Thursday evening seven thirty.
6:54
Speaker 1: Russell drove Donna to the Recorder's office. Donna signed the
6:58
Speaker 1: authorization form as Sherry Ericsson. A part time notary named
7:03
Speaker 1: Paula Ferris stamped it. Paula did not check a state
7:06
Speaker 1: issued ID. She accepted a library card and a signature.
7:11
Speaker 1: The authorization form was now legally valid. The Twins resemblance
7:16
Speaker 1: was strong enough no one flagged it. A retired postal
7:19
Speaker 1: worker named Frank Adler lived on Morrow Lane in spring
7:24
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, He told Sherry something that stopped her.
7:28
Speaker 1: He had seen her, he said, or thought he had
7:31
Speaker 1: seen her at the Recorder's office in November. She had
7:34
Speaker 1: been with a man. Sherry had no memory of going
7:37
Speaker 1: to the Recorder's office in November. She had been at quiet.
7:42
Speaker 1: She told Frank. She thought he must be mistaken. She
7:45
Speaker 1: used her phrase she let it go. But here is
7:48
Speaker 1: the thing about that authorization form. It did not simply
7:51
Speaker 1: open an account. It gave a named party the legal
7:55
Speaker 1: ability to act on Sherry's behalf across multiple financial instruments.
8:00
Speaker 1: What followed over the next fourteen months was not a
8:03
Speaker 1: single large withdrawal. It was a series of small ones
8:08
Speaker 1: home equity retirement funds an inherited account, each transaction in
8:13
Speaker 1: an amount low enough to avoid automatic flags. By the
8:18
Speaker 1: time the pattern was visible in aggregate, one hundred twelve
8:22
Speaker 1: thousand dollars had moved out of Sherry Ericsson's financial life
8:26
Speaker 1: in increments she had not authorized and could not fully explain.
8:30
Speaker 1: She kept going to the garden Monday, Wednesday Saturday seven
8:36
Speaker 1: in the morning. Russell's truck kept appearing on the street
8:39
Speaker 1: during those windows. Neighbors would later recall it to investigators
8:42
Speaker 1: without being asked. He was always gone by the time
8:46
Speaker 1: she came back inside the freezer. Bag was found on
8:49
Speaker 1: a Tuesday in the second week of September two thousand nineteen.
8:54
Speaker 1: Angela Parker was at Garnet Marsh before sunrise, binoculars around
8:58
Speaker 1: her neck, moving along the levee path. She was there
9:02
Speaker 1: for birds. What she found instead, wedged inside a culvert
9:07
Speaker 1: was a sealed plastic bag coated in mud. She photographed
9:11
Speaker 1: it before she touched it. Then she called the Renner
9:14
Speaker 1: County Sheriff's office at six forty one in the morning.
9:17
Speaker 1: Inside the bag a laminated Social Security card, a Midwest
9:22
Speaker 1: Federal debit card, a notarized signature authorization form, rubber banded.
9:28
Speaker 1: All of it dry. The mud was wet, the contents
9:32
Speaker 1: were not. Someone had placed that bag there deliberately, not
9:36
Speaker 1: dropped it, not lost it. The documents belonged to Sherry Ericsson.
9:41
Speaker 1: A financial crimes investigator from the Renner County DA's office
9:45
Speaker 1: named Dale Callahan contacted Sherry on September seventeenth, ten days
9:50
Speaker 1: after the bag was found. He sat across from a
9:53
Speaker 1: fifty four year old retired school teacher and began asking
9:57
Speaker 1: questions she had been trained over too years to doubt
10:01
Speaker 1: herself about. Within two weeks of contacting her, Callahan had
10:05
Speaker 1: reconstructed the full transaction record one hundred twelve thousand dollars
10:10
Speaker 1: moved in small increments across fourteen months from three separate accounts,
10:16
Speaker 1: and then Callahan pulled something else. A prior case filed
10:20
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen, a woman named Brenda Colton, sixty
10:24
Speaker 1: three from Kitteridge, had reported unauthorized account access by a
10:30
Speaker 1: former domestic partner. The complaint named Russell richards It had
10:35
Speaker 1: been closed when Brenda did not pursue it. Russell had
10:39
Speaker 1: a type, he had a method, and he had left
10:42
Speaker 1: a paper trail he apparently believed was safely hidden. It
10:46
Speaker 1: was not. On September twenty ninth, Callahan showed Richardson's attorney
10:50
Speaker 1: the Colton file. Russell agreed to a proffer the same day.
10:55
Speaker 1: There was a second location, a storage unit in Kitteridge
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Speaker 1: rented under a dissat business name, held a fireproof lock
11:02
Speaker 1: box inside a second copy of the authorization form, a
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Speaker 1: handwritten ledger cataloging the transactions, and a photograph. The photograph
11:13
Speaker 1: showed Sherry's garden beds. It had been taken from inside
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Speaker 1: her house. Sherry had never seen it. She had never
11:21
Speaker 1: taken it. That photograph stopped the investigation cold for a moment,
11:25
Speaker 1: not because it proved anything new, but because of what
11:29
Speaker 1: it meant. Someone had stood inside Sherry Ericsson's home, looked
11:33
Speaker 1: out at the eight raised beds she had planted, and
11:36
Speaker 1: recorded them. It was not evidence of damage, It was
11:40
Speaker 1: evidence of possession. Picture the Recorder's office in November of
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Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. A woman walks in with a man. She
11:48
Speaker 1: looks like Sherry Ericsson, same build, similar features, the kind
11:53
Speaker 1: of resemblance that makes a stranger certain. She signs a form,
11:57
Speaker 1: A notary stamps it without checking a statusha id. The
12:01
Speaker 1: authorization becomes legal. If you had been watching from across
12:05
Speaker 1: the room, you would have seen nothing wrong. That version
12:08
Speaker 1: of events is internally consistent. It has a logic, but
12:13
Speaker 1: it collapses the moment you look at what Russell did
12:15
Speaker 1: with Donna before she ever reached that office. He had
12:18
Speaker 1: contacted Donna separately months before the visit, without Cherry's knowledge.
12:24
Speaker 1: He cultivated her trust the same way he had cultivated
12:26
Speaker 1: Cherry's attentiveness patients, small kindnesses, The gradual construction of a
12:31
Speaker 1: person who seemed reliable. When he finally needed Donna to
12:35
Speaker 1: sign a form, believing she was helping her sister, she
12:38
Speaker 1: was already disposed to trust his account of events. Donna
12:42
Speaker 1: was not a co conspirator. She was a variable he
12:44
Speaker 1: had already solved. The investigators reached the same conclusion. She
12:49
Speaker 1: was not charged. Now. Picture the lock box, that handwritten
12:53
Speaker 1: ledger is not the record of someone operating impulsively. It
12:57
Speaker 1: is the record of someone who tracked every transaction, every increment,
13:01
Speaker 1: every account. The photograph of Sherry's garden, taken from inside
13:06
Speaker 1: her home is not a trophy in the conventional sense.
13:09
Speaker 1: It is orientation. It tells you where the subject is
13:13
Speaker 1: going to be and when Russell already knew her schedule
13:17
Speaker 1: from the street. The photograph from inside the house suggests
13:21
Speaker 1: he had been inside. It suggests the surveillance ran deeper
13:25
Speaker 1: than anyone on mar Lane could have seen from the curb.
13:29
Speaker 1: When investigators asked Russell why the documents were in the culvert,
13:32
Speaker 1: he said he was trying to make things manageable. That
13:37
Speaker 1: phrase has a bureaucratic sound to it, the language of
13:40
Speaker 1: a man tidying files. But the bag was sealed. The
13:45
Speaker 1: contents were dry. He had not discarded them carelessly. He
13:48
Speaker 1: had stored them at the levee the way he had
13:51
Speaker 1: stored them in the lock box, deliberately, in a place
13:54
Speaker 1: he controlled. The colt and file from two thousand fifteen
13:57
Speaker 1: recontextualizes everything that came before. Russell Richardson did not improvise this.
14:03
Speaker 1: He had done a version of it already. He had
14:05
Speaker 1: learned from the earlier case what a closed complaint looked like,
14:09
Speaker 1: what it required, what made a woman decide not to
14:12
Speaker 1: pursue it. He moved to Braddock Flats and found a
14:15
Speaker 1: woman who was methodical, trusting, and alone, and he brought flowers.
14:20
Speaker 1: He pleaded guilty in February of twenty twenty two counts
14:24
Speaker 1: of identity fraud, two counts of financial exploitation of a
14:28
Speaker 1: vulnerable adult, one count of notarization fraud as principal. He
14:33
Speaker 1: did not receive the maximum sentence. The documents recovered from
14:37
Speaker 1: the levee were returned to Sherry. After processing. She cut
14:41
Speaker 1: them up and requested replacements. The following Monday, at seven
14:45
Speaker 1: in the morning, she was back in her garden. The
14:48
Speaker 1: plea agreement was entered in February of twenty twenty, Russell
14:52
Speaker 1: Richardson stood before a judge and admitted to two counts
14:56
Speaker 1: of identity fraud, two counts of financial exploitation of a
14:59
Speaker 1: vuln monerable adult naming both Sherri Ericsson and Brenda Coulton,
15:04
Speaker 1: maiming both Sherri Ericsson, and one count of notarization fraud
15:08
Speaker 1: as principal. He did not go to trial. He did
15:11
Speaker 1: not make Sherry sit in a court room and explain
15:14
Speaker 1: to a jury why she had trusted the man who
15:17
Speaker 1: brought her tomato seedlings and moved on to her street.
15:20
Speaker 1: He did not receive the maximum sentence. The record does
15:24
Speaker 1: not specify what he did receive. That gap is its
15:27
Speaker 1: own kind of answer. Donna was not charged. The evidence
15:31
Speaker 1: was consistent with what she had told investigators. She believed
15:34
Speaker 1: she was signing on her sister's behalf at her sister's request,
15:38
Speaker 1: co ordinated by a man she had come to trust
15:41
Speaker 1: because Russell had spent months making sure she would. The
15:44
Speaker 1: notary Paula Feris, was not identified as a co conspirator.
15:48
Speaker 1: Her failure was procedural. She accepted a library card instead
15:53
Speaker 1: of a state issued ID. She did not verify the
15:56
Speaker 1: woman in front of her was who the form said
15:59
Speaker 1: she was. That procedural failure was the hinge. The entire
16:02
Speaker 1: scheme turned on. Donna flew to Braddock Flats in October
16:07
Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen. She stayed for four days. Whatever
16:11
Speaker 1: those four days held, whatever those four days held, whatever.
16:16
Speaker 1: Sherry and her twin sister said to each other across
16:19
Speaker 1: the kitchen table about what had been done, and how
16:22
Speaker 1: it had been done, and who had done it, while
16:24
Speaker 1: both of them trusted him. None of that is in
16:27
Speaker 1: the record. Some reckonings happened in private. The documents Angela
16:31
Speaker 1: Parker found at Garnet Marsh were returned to Sherry after
16:35
Speaker 1: processing the Social Security card, the Midwest Federal Debit Card,
16:41
Speaker 1: the notarized authorization form with Donna's signature on the line
16:45
Speaker 1: where Sherry's name was printed. Sherry cut them up and
16:49
Speaker 1: requested replacements. That detail is worth sitting with. She did
16:53
Speaker 1: not frame them. She did not keep them as evidence
16:57
Speaker 1: of what had been done to her. She destroyed them
16:59
Speaker 1: the way you destroy something that has been used against
17:02
Speaker 1: you and has no further use at all. The lock
17:05
Speaker 1: box and the Kidderidge storage unit held two things that
17:08
Speaker 1: do not appear in any legal summary. The handwritten ledger,
17:13
Speaker 1: every transaction, every account, every increment of the one hundred
17:18
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars was the document of a man who
17:21
Speaker 1: tracked his work the way an accountant tracks a portfolio.
17:25
Speaker 1: And then there was the photograph of Sherry's eight raised
17:29
Speaker 1: garden beds, taken from inside her house. Sherry had never
17:33
Speaker 1: taken that photograph, She had never seen it before. The
17:36
Speaker 1: ledger said I knew what I was taking. The photograph
17:40
Speaker 1: said I knew where you were going to be. What
17:43
Speaker 1: Russell Richardson dismantled was not just a financial record. It
17:48
Speaker 1: was Sherry Ericsson's relationship with her own memory. For more
17:51
Speaker 1: than a year, every time she reached for certainty about
17:55
Speaker 1: a notice she had received, about a signature she did
17:58
Speaker 1: not remember signing, about a conversation she could not quite reconstruct,
18:03
Speaker 1: there was Russell, patient and calm, pointing back to the
18:06
Speaker 1: September she had been sick, to the medication, to the fog.
18:10
Speaker 1: He did not need to shout, He only needed her
18:14
Speaker 1: to keep saying, I might be wrong about this, but
18:18
Speaker 1: that phrase did not belong to her. It was the
18:21
Speaker 1: residue of what he had built. The financial crimes investigator
18:25
Speaker 1: d O'Callahan reconstructed the full transaction record in two weeks
18:29
Speaker 1: fourteen months of withdrawals in small enough increments that no
18:33
Speaker 1: single transfer would trigger an automatic review. Over a hundred
18:38
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars. Moved with the patience of someone who
18:41
Speaker 1: understood that the greatest risk was not the money. It
18:45
Speaker 1: was a moment of clarity. Russell's entire operation depended on
18:49
Speaker 1: Sherry never getting won. Angela Parker gave her that moment.
18:54
Speaker 1: A bird watcher at a levee culvert before six in
18:57
Speaker 1: the morning in the second week of September twenty nineteen,
19:01
Speaker 1: who looked at a sealed freezer bag in wet mud
19:04
Speaker 1: and understood that something was wrong. She photographed it. She
19:07
Speaker 1: called the county at six forty one. She did not
19:11
Speaker 1: assume it was nothing. The systemic failure this case exposed
19:15
Speaker 1: is not complex. A notary accepted a library card. A
19:18
Speaker 1: prior complaint in twenty fifteen was closed when the victim
19:22
Speaker 1: did not pursue it. Two procedural gaps years apart in
19:26
Speaker 1: different counties, and Russell moved between them like a man
19:30
Speaker 1: who had already measured the space. Financial exploitation of older adults,
19:35
Speaker 1: particularly those living alone, does not usually arrive with obvious force.
19:40
Speaker 1: It arrives with flowers. It arrives with patience. It arrives
19:44
Speaker 1: with the steady, practiced work of making someone doubt the
19:47
Speaker 1: one thing that could protect them their own judgment. Sherry
19:51
Speaker 1: Erickson taught fourth grade at Kessler Elementary for twenty two years.
19:56
Speaker 1: She retired in two thousand sixteen. She kept a choir
20:00
Speaker 1: practice every Thursday at seven thirty in the evening. She
20:05
Speaker 1: kept a garden on Morrow Lane with eight raised beds,
20:09
Speaker 1: and she kept a schedule so reliable that a man
20:12
Speaker 1: parked his truck on her street to memorize it. That reliability,
20:16
Speaker 1: that faithfulness to her own life, was the thing he
20:19
Speaker 1: mapped and used. It was also the thing he could
20:22
Speaker 1: not take. The following Monday, after the documents were returned
20:26
Speaker 1: and cut to pieces, at seven in the morning in
20:28
Speaker 1: October of twenty nineteen, Sherry Ericsson was back in her garden,
20:33
Speaker 1: not because nothing had happened, because she had decided what
20:36
Speaker 1: came next. This show is made by oh BO Media