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The Friend Who Rewrote His Will: How Friendship Became Theft · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At six forty in the morning on April ninth, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, a man named Gregory Simmons was running his
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: usual route along Creel Road when he spotted a cardboard
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: box on the loading dock of a shuttered flooring distributor.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: The box was sealed with tape.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: It had a name and a home address written on
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: the outside. Someone else's name, someone else's address. That detail
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: alone should not have stopped him, but it did. The
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: box contained eight years of tax returns, a property deed,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: a notarized power of attorney, two savings pass books, a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: life insurance policy worth three hundred ten thousand dollars and
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars, and a hand written will, all of
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: it belonging to a sixty two year old man named
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz, who was at home on Crestfield Lane in
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Dunmore Township, and who had no idea any of it
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: was gone. There is something civic about that gap, the
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: distance between what had already been done and what Scott
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Schultz knew, that makes this case so difficult to set
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: down once you pick it up. Because Scott was not
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: a confused man, he was not easily led. His neighbors
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: described him as someone who thinks things through, and yet
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: by the time Gregory Simmons crouched down on that loading dock,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: a person Scott trusted completely, had spent about a year
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: and a half quietly dismantling everything Scott thought.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: He knew about his own decisions.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: What follows is an account of how that happened, not
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: in the sudden way of a break in or a
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: fraud detected by a bank alert, but slowly, carefully through friendship.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz had worked for thirty years as a technical
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: engineer with the County Road Authority. He retired in twenty sixteen.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: The work had required precision tolerances, load calculations, infrastructure that
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: either held or failed. His colleagues described a man who
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: did not guess he measured twice. His wife, Mary Anne,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: had been beside him for thirty one years in the marriage.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: In the spring of two thousand fifteen, she died of
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: a cardiac event.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: There were no children.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: The house on Crestfield Lane, which they had shared, was
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: suddenly very quiet. By the time he retired, Scott had
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: built what most people would consider a stable foundation. His penshion,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: combined with social security and personal savings left him with
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: roughly two hundred forty thousand dollars across his accounts. He
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: was not wealthy in any dramatic sense, but he was secure.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: He had earned that security over decades of careful, methodical work.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: His sister Phyllis lived forty minutes away in Graver Falls.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Every Wednesday, without exception, they met for lunch sandwiches a
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: diner on Route nine, the same booth when it was available.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: It was the kind of ritual that accumulates its own.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: Weight over years.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Four years of Wednesdays, Scott never missed one. People who
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: knew him described a man who had absorbed the loss
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: of Marianne without becoming brittle. He continued his routine, He
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: maintained the house. He was not some one who performed
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: grief publicly, but those close to him understood the adjustment.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: He was making.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: A man who had shared every significant decision for three
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: decades now making them alone. That is the version of
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz that existed in August of two thousand seventeen,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: when a man named Leon Tucker walked into a Tuesday
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: grief support meeting at the community Center in Dunmore Township.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Tucker was fifty four years old. He carried two previous
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: addresses in other states, a string of short term commercial registrations,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: and a civil judgment from two thousand eleven in a
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: separate jurisdiction involving an inheritance to dispute. He had no criminal record,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: nothing that would flag on a background check, nothing that
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: would make a cautious man pause. What Tucker did have
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: was an uncommon ability to listen. He arrived at the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: grief meeting as someone who had also experienced loss. He
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: was steady, warm, present. Within weeks, he and Scott were
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: meeting for dinner. By October of twenty seventeen, those dinners
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: were weekly. Scott later told investigators that in Tucker he
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: had found someone who understood the specific disorientation of losing
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: a long term partner, not just grief, but the structural absence,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: the missing second opinion, the empty chair at decisions that
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: used to be shared. Tucker seemed to understand that without
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: being told. Clinical social worker Wendy Myers, who spent fourteen
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: months reconstructing the sequence of this case for the civil proceedings,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: identified what she called targeted mirroring. Tucker was not simply
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: being friendly. He was locating Scott's specific emotional architecture and
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: reflecting it back. The loneliness of competence without an audience,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the discomfort of having money and no one to consult
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: about it. The slow fear common among people who lose
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: a spouse late in life, that their own judgment might
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: be slipping, that without Mary Anne to check him, Scott
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: might miss something important. Tucker did not create that fear.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: He found it, and then very patiently, he began to
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: water it. By January of twenty eighteen, Tucker had been
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: in Scott's life for about five months. That was when
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: a new kind of conversation began. It did not start
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: with numbers. It started with a question. Had Scott ever
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: thought about what would happen to his savings if something
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: went wrong with the bank. Not the bank failing, just
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a processing error, a clerical mistake, the kind of thing Scott,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: as a former technical engineer who had spent thirty years
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: watching infrastructure fail in small, unpredictable ways, would have thought
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: about at least once he had, of course he had.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Tucker did not push further that night. He let the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: question sit. This was what Wendy Meyers identified as competence erosion.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Not a single assault on Scott's judgment, but a slow
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: series of small redirections, each one just plausible enough to launch,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: each one just uncertain enough to require Tucker's reassurance to resolve.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Myers noted in.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Her fourteen month reconstruction that the pattern had a specific architecture.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Introduced doubt, let it incubate, arrive with the answer. The
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: person receiving the answer does not remember the original doubt.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: They remember feeling better. Scott told investigators, I remember being
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: confused about something. Leon explained it, and afterward I felt fine.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: That sentence is worth stopping off.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: Not confused anymore. Fine.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: The confusion itself had been replaced, not clarified, replaced. By
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: March of twenty eighteen, Tucker introduced Scott to a man
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: named Paul Breer. The meeting took place in a hotel
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: conference room in Graver Falls, forty minutes from Dunmore Township.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Greer presented himself as a financial adviser. His name did
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: not appear in any state licensing registry. His business cards
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: listed a suite number in a building where no such
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: suite existed. Scott sat across from him at a laminate
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: table and signed documents he later told investigators he could
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: not recall the terms.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Of He was sixty two years old.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: He had managed his own finances for decades without incident.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: He was, as his neighbors consistently described him, a man
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: who thought things through. He signed anyway. The documents he
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: signed that afternoon connected his accounts to an entity called
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Meridian Asset Partners. Three months later, in June of twenty eighteen,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: forty two thousand dollars moved from Scott's personal account into
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: a joint account associated with Meridian. When investigators later showed
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Scott the transfer authorization, he looked at it for a
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: long time. Then he said, I must have signed it.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Must have not did must have. That distinction was not
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: lost on the investigators who reviewed the case. There is
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: something else worth noting about that forty two thousand dollars.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: It did not vanish immediately. Some of it moved in increments.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Some of it moved through accounts that briefly held other
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: people's money. Accounts that, after Tucker began cooperating with prosecutors,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: were traced back to a structure Greer had built over
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: at least three years. Scott's money was not stolen in
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: a single moment. It was walked out, one transaction at
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: a time, in amounts designed to stay below the thresholds
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the trigger automatic review. Tucker knew how those thresholds worked.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Then came September of twenty eighteen, Scott's sister Phyllis, drove
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: forty minutes from Graver Falls for their regular Wednesday lunch
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: sandwiches Route nine, the same place they had been meeting
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: for years. She arrived at Scott's house on Crestfield Lane
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: to pick him up, and there on the kitchen counter,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: in plain sight, was a document. It was a notarized
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: power of attorney. Scott's name was on it, Tucker's name
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: was on it. Phyllis asked about it. Scott said Tucker
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: had explained it was a precaution, something about managing paperwork
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: if Scott ever had a health event and couldn't act quickly.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Tucker had suggested it It made sense at the time.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Phyllis did not feel reassured, but she also did not
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: yet know what she was looking at. That is the
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: thing about this kind of document. It is perfectly legal.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: It is frequently used for ex exactly the benign purpose
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Tucker described. There is no alarm attached to it. You
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: see it on a kitchen counter and you think, perhaps
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: this is fine. Simmons found the box on April ninth,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, at six forty in the morning. The second
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: week of April two thoy nineteen, specifically on April fourteenth,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: five days later, Scott missed lunch with Phyllis. This had
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: not happened in four years. She drove to Crestfield Lane
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: found him home.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: The house was.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Dark at two in the afternoon. He had been with
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Tucker the previous evening. Phyllis would later describe Scott that
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: day as present but absent.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: He answered her questions.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: He recognized her, but something in his affect had flattened.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: He did not ask why she had come. He did
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: not seem surprised she had found him in the dark.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: This was five days after Gregory Simmons found the cardboard box.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: The box had been sitting in the loading dock of
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: a shuttered flooring distributor on Creole Road since before six
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: forty in the morning on April ninth. Simmons ran that
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: route every day. He had run it for eleven years.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: He noticed the box because it was sealed and labeled
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: someone's name and address printed neatly on the side, and
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: it was sitting in a place where boxes were not left.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: The building had been closed for two years. There was
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: no mail service, there was no delivery scheduled. He called
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: it in. When officers opened the box, they found eight
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: years of Scott Schultz's tax returns, the deed to his
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: house on Prestfield Lane, a notarized power of attorney, two
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: savings pass books, a life insurance policy worth three hundred
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars, and a handwritten will. The will named
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Leon Tucker as sole beneficiary. Phyllis had seen the power
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: of attorney on the kitchen counter six months earlier. Now
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: it was in a sealed box in a loading dock
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: a mile from Scott's home, alongside documents Scott did not
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: know were missing. Detective Ray Solano was assigned to the
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: case the morning the box was opened. He ran Tucker's
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: background immediately. Two previous addresses in other states, short term
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: commercial registrations, a civil judgment from twenty eleven in a
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: separate jurisdiction and inheritance dispute, no criminal record, nothing that
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: made Tucker dangerous on.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Paper, everything that made him mobile.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: When officers called Scott at seven twenty that morning to
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: ask about the documents. He had no idea they were gone.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: That moment, Scott's standing in his house on Crestfield Lane,
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: being told that the deed to his home and his
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: handwritten will had been found in an abandoned loading dock
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: is when the shape of what had happened began to
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: be visible. Not to Scott, not yet, but to the
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: people around him. Tucker was brought in for questioning in
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: late April of twenty nineteen. He had an explanation for
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: the box. There had been a leak in his basement.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: The documents had been stored there for safe keeping.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Scott had asked him to hold them.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: He had moved them temporarily to a cousin's storage space.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: He was going to retrieve them the next day. The
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: explanation was composed. It had a logic to it. Then
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: the detective asked one question. If Tucker already knew where
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: the box was, why did it have Scott Schultz's name
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: and address on the outside. Tucker had no answer for that.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: The label was the flaw in the architecture. If the
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: box was simply in transit between Tucker's basement and a
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: cousin's storage. There was no reason to identify it as
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: belonging to Scott. The label served one purpose. If the
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: box was found before Tucker could act on its contents,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: it could be explained as a lost delivery, a mistake,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: an error with no owner. Tucker had thought through the contingency.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: He had not thought through the question. He began cooperating.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Within days.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: He identified additional accounts connected to Meridian Asset Partners he
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: named Paul Greer. He confirmed the structure Greer had used
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: and the timeline of transfers. According to prosecution records, Tucker
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: stated that the plan had been to wait until the
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: power of attorney gave him sufficient authority to liquidate Scott's
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: remaining assets, at which point Tucker intended to leave the area.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: He had done this before.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Not in Dunmore Township, three states away. In twenty twelve,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: a woman named Sandra Pool, sixty one years old from
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: a town called Farwell. Tucker had entered her life through
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: a grief support group at her church after she lost
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: her husband. He had introduced doubt. He had introduced a
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: financial contact, a document she later could not remember signing,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: had moved money from her home equity line into an
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: account she did not control. When she confronted Tucker, he
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: was gone the next morning. She did not report it
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: for seven years. She told herself she must have been confused.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: When a regional news outlet ran a brief item about
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Tucker's arrest in Dunmore Township, Sandra Poole recognized his photograph.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: She contacted the Dunmore Police department six weeks after the arrest.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Her account matched the pattern Myers had identified. Targeted mirroring, competence, erosion, isolation, installation,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: two victims, seven years apart, the same architecture picture. What
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: that timeline means Tucker had used this sequence at least twice.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: He had refined it between twenty twelve and twenty seventeen.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The grief support group was not coincidence. The patience months
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: of dinners before any financial conversation was not personality. The
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: way he introduced Paul Rear only after Sky's confidence in
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: his own judgment had been methodically lowered was not improvisation.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: The handwritten will is the detail that recontextualizes everything before it.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Scott did not remember writing it. He remembered Whine an
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: evening at Tucker's apartment, a sensation he described as clarity.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: A handwriting expert confirmed the signature was Scott's. His hand
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: had made those letters, some part of his mind had
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: formed those words. The question Myers kept returning to across
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: fourteen months of reconstruction was not whether Scott had signed
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: he had. The question was what conditions had to be
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: in place for a man described by every neighbor as
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: someone who thinks things through to write a will he
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: would not remember writing, and to feel in the moment clear.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Tucker's explanation for the box collapsed in the interrogation room
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: before the second hour was over. The story about a
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: flood basement, a cousin's storage unit, a planned retrieval. Each
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: piece fell apart the moment Detective Solano asked one question,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: why was the box marked with Scott Schultz's name and
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: address if Tucker already knew where it was going. Tucker
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: went quiet. Then he began to cooperate. What he gave
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: prosecutors was more than a confession. He disclosed additional accounts.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: He identified Paul Greer by his real name. Greer had
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: operated under a false name in the commercial registries, holding
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: himself out as a licensed financial adviser while possessing no
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: state license whatsoever. Greer was charged separately. The civil process
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: that followed took fourteen months. When Demeyers spent that time
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: tracing every transfer, every signature, every document date against the
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: timeline she had reconstructed. Roughly one hundred sixty thousand dollars
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: of the approximately two hundred forty thousand that had passed
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: through Meridian Asset Partners was recovered. Approximately eighty thousand dollars
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: was not. Those funds have not been located. In the
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: autumn of two thousand nineteen, Leon Tucker was sentenced to
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: seven years. He became eligible for parole consideration after four
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: The fraudulent will was annulled, the power of attorney was rescinded.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: On paper.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: The legal architecture Tucker had spent two years building around
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz was dismantled. What cannot be dismantled is the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: time line of what Tucker knew before he walked into
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: that grief support meeting in August of two thousand seventeen.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: The two thousand eleven civil judgment in a separate jurisdiction
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: a dispute over an inheritance that never resulted in criminal charges.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Tucker had no criminal record at the time of his arrest.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: That fact is part of why Sandra Pool's call to
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: the Dunmore Police Department six weeks after the arrest carried
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: the weight it did. Sandra Pool was sixty one years
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: old and lived in Farwell, three states away. In two
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: thousand twelve, she had been a widow attending a grief
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: support group at her church. A man had entered that group,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: spent weeks mirroring her interests, introduced financial doubts, brought in
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: a contact a document she could not remember signing, had
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: moved money from her home equity line into an account
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: she did not control. When she confronted Tucker, he was
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: gone by the following morning. She did not report it
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: for seven years. She told herself she must have been confused.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: She saw his photograph in a regional news item about
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: the arrest in Dunmore Township. She recognized him immediately. Her
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: account matched every phase Myers had identified. Targeted mirroring competants, erosion, isolation, installation.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Tucker had not improvised this, he had practiced it. There
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: is something in this case that resists easy framing. Scott
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Schultz was not described by any one who knew him
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: as a man who could be easily misled. His neighbors
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: called him some one who thinks things through. He spent
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: thirty years as a technical engineer, cross checking specifications, catching
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: errors before they became failures. The person Tucker chose was
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: not a person with obvious vulnerabilities. That is the thing
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: this case keeps insisting on. The method Tucker used, the mirroring,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: the slow erosion of competence, the introduction of a third
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: party at exactly the right moment. The social isolation achieved
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: not through threats, but through time, did not depend on
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Scott being weak. It depended on Scott being human, grieving,
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: careful enough that a patient explanation felt like information, trusting
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: enough that genuine warmth sustained over months, rewired what felt safe.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz did not remember writing the will. He remembered
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: a feeling of clarity. That gap between the act and
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: the memory of the act is what Wendy Myers spent
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: fourteen months document not to prove Scott had been foolish,
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: to prove that a specific sequence of conditions applied by
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: someone who had used them before can move a competent
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: adult's hand across a page while leaving no trace in
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: his conscious recollection.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: That is not a failure of character.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: It is a documented psychological mechanism.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: It has a name, and it is not rare.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Sandra Pool spent seven years believing her own confusion was
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: the explanation. She was not confused. The week after Tucker's sentencing,
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Scott Schultz resumed his Wednesday lunches with his sister Phyllis
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Sandwich's Route nine, the same table according to those who
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: knew them, that they had used for years before Tucker arrived.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Approximately eighty thousand dollars remains unaccounted for. That number does
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: not close. Scott got his Wednesdays back, some things do
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: not come back with them. This show is made made
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media.