The Man Who Loved Her Books - Then Took $22,000 and Vanished

Heart-sinking and intimate: a twelve-page, blue-ink letter signed only "Kenneth" arrives on a porch, and a woman loses $22,000 to a man she never met. Who was Kenneth, how did a closed farm stand on Route 250 help unravel the scheme, and what made Julie Myers believe a stranger enough to send him thousands?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from May 2019 back through Julie's first contacts with an online rare-book account, the development of an emotional bond, the money transfers and the small detail that cracked the story open. What connection between a library, a storage unit and a roadside farm stand finally led investigators to a man in Augusta County?

Person: Julie Myers
Date: May 14, 2019
Amount: $22,000
Location: Sycamore Trace, Dunmore, Virginia
Case: Kenneth Hughes / KHughes_Rare

- The letter left on Julie's porch was twelve pages, both sides, written in blue ink and sealed in a plastic sleeve.
- Julie began corresponding with the account KHughes_Rare in February 2018 and moved from forum posts to direct messages, email, then phone calls by August 2018.
- Julie was 32 years old in spring 2018 when she inherited her mother's house and library and started cataloging the collection.
- In late March 2019 Kenneth reported being stranded on Route 250 east of Charlottesville and mentioned a farm stand opposite the road.
- Investigators eventually located a man sitting in a storage unit in Augusta County connected to the scheme.

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This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

God Loves Earl: How a Fake Missionary Emptied His Life Savings

Fear that your good faith could be weaponized: a photo in a plastic bag led investigators to uncover a faith-based romance that turned into a meticulous financial scam, and one man lost everything to carefully dated requests. How did a stranger on a faith platform convince a diligent 53-year-old to send steady donations for fourteen months?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from the day a photo was found on Sycamore Trail through the months Earl Price sent money to a supposed mission in Honduras. We recount the messages, the spreadsheet of donations, and the moment friends realized something was wrong - and ask how identity and grief were used to build trust.

Person: Earl Price
Date: April 9, 2019
Location: Sycamore Trail, Bredenton, Ohio
Occupation: Calibration technician at Halloran Precision Components
Platform: PurposeMatch

- Earl Price was 53 years old and had lived in the same duplex on Comstock Lane for eleven years.
- The first requested donation was $400 in February 2018 for roof materials.
- Earl kept a manila folder spreadsheet recording each donation beginning February 2018, with dates, amounts, and notes.
- Earl regularly attended Millbrook Community Fellowship and sat three rows from the back on the left.
- Friends noticed his distraction at trivia in March 2019, after fourteen months of sending money.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The Roses on Whitmore Lane: How They Stole My Heart and $8,000

Cold roses left against a gas meter on a thirty-one degree March morning were the first clue that something engineered and intimate was unfolding on Whitmore Lane; why did freshly cut long-stemmed red roses appear at an empty rental and who arranged the trust that followed? The suspicion: a romance built to extract $8,000 - but who constructed the face and voice that convinced a careful man to send it?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events that led Gordon Reynolds from casual coffees to transfers totaling thousands, and how a borrowed identity and staged intimacy moved him to act; what part did the recorded voice memo, the river walk, and the roses play in persuading him?

Person: Gordon Reynolds
Date: March 9, 2019
Location: Whitmore Lane, Columbus, Ohio
Amount: $8,000
Introducer: Dave Henning

- The roses were found pressed against the gas meter of a rental property that had been empty for six weeks.
- The morning temperature was thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit and the roses' water had not frozen, indicating they were placed recently.
- Gordon Reynolds transferred an initial $6,000 after a Sunday walk and a phone call about a stalled real estate deal.
- Ten days after the first transfer, a second request arrived asking for $4,500.
- The man Gordon met used the name Gregory Sanders but the photograph belonged to Wade Purcell taken from a 2016 travel blogger's Instagram.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The ring from Lagos: how a stolen face cost her forty-one thousand dollars

A padded envelope arrived at a church in Denton, Ohio on February ninth, postmarked from Lagos with a return address on a Houston street that did not exist. Inside was a ring in a velvet pouch, sent by a man Janet Lane had never met but believed she was about to marry. How did a photograph stolen from a Brazilian fitness influencer become the face of a romance that would drain her savings, her personal loan, and six weeks of silence from her mother?

In this episode, we trace Janet Lane's descent from a wellness app questionnaire to forty-one thousand dollars sent across three continents, examining the padded envelope that arrived before the financial crisis began, the recorded confession from a cellmate that broke the case open, and the DNA match that connected Dale Osei to an unsolved attack four years earlier.

Person: Janet Lane
Location: Denton, Ohio
Perpetrator: Dale Osei, age 31, originally from Ghana
Amount stolen: $41,000
Event: Romance fraud via Cornerstone Health app, February to March 2019
Conviction: Four counts of wire fraud, two counts of aggravated identity theft, October 2019

- Janet downloaded Cornerstone Health in November 2018 and was matched with a wellness coach named Dale Wells, whose profile used a stolen photograph of Marco Alves, a Brazilian fitness influencer.
- The first crisis call came on February 14, 2019, when Dale Wells claimed his passport and laptop were stolen in Lisbon and requested eighteen hundred dollars.
- A padded envelope from Lagos arrived on February 9, 2019, containing a ring and a return address on a Houston street that does not exist; Wade Riley, the retired church volunteer who received it, noticed the address was wrong but said nothing.
- Between mid-February and late March 2019, Janet transferred forty-one thousand dollars across four separate bank accounts spanning three continents while ignoring her mother Beverly's calls for six weeks.
- Dale Osei was arrested in April 2019 over a rent dispute, spent six days in a shared cell with Henry Pryor, confessed the details of his operation, and received a seven-year sentence in October 2019 with no restitution order recorded.

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This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

Her owner, Angela Casey, looked where the dog was looking

Fear and fascination collide: a sealed Valentine’s card wedged four feet up in a dead juniper led to a theft of $263,000 and a fabricated lover - but how did a man track certificate of deposit dates to steal from a grieving widow? What was hidden in that stamped envelope addressed to “Amy”?

In this episode, we follow the discovery that started everything and the steps investigators took to connect a single physical card to a pattern of timed withdrawals and identity theft, asking how someone engineered trust from a distance and targeted financial milestones to take everything.

Date: January 9, 2019
Person: Angela Casey
Person: Amy Sawyer
Person: Kimberly Baker
Amount: $263,000

- The sealed, stamped envelope was wedged four feet up in a dead juniper on the Pinebluff Nature Loop.
- The card inside was addressed to “Amy” and signed “- R.” with the message “I will be with you soon, my love.”
- Amy’s first wire transfer of $41,000 left eleven days after a certificate of deposit matured in July 2017.
- The transfers continued with amounts including $38,000 in October and repeated timing within eleven days of CD maturity through 2018.
- The profile photo used by “Russell O’Brien” belonged to Howard Lind, a 61-year-old retired engineer who had not met Amy.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The laptop at Packer Creek: what Jennifer Lewis meant to say

A sealed freezer bag loops to a trotline in gray December light, a Dell laptop dry inside, an index card folded against the keys: She was real to me. That is not nothing. Jennifer Lewis had just been arrested for defrauding a twenty-two-year-old chess player out of eighteen hundred dollars using a stolen face and a fabricated crisis. So why did she return to the creek where her victim had once sent a photograph, seal her equipment in plastic, and leave it where a fisherman would certainly find it?

In this episode, we trace the six-week hunt that built Miriam Voss from stolen research, the carefully structured financial asks that arrived after warmth rather than before, and the single detail in small talk-a regional cable broadcast mentioned by someone claiming to live eight hundred miles away-that unraveled everything. We follow Detective Roy Vance's evidence laid on a table, Lewis's deflection and silence, and the inexplicable decision to preserve rather than destroy. But the question that survives the guilty plea is whether the note represents a final manipulation or the only honest moment in four months of contact.

Person: Kelly Pruitt
Perpetrator: Jennifer Lewis
Location: Brackett, Indiana; Carmel, Indiana; Packer Creek
Amount: Eighteen hundred dollars
Event: Laptop discovery at Packer Creek, December eleventh
Date: September to December, same year

- Kelly Pruitt, age twenty-two, worked as a claims processor at an insurance adjuster's office in Brackett, Indiana.
- Jennifer Lewis studied Kelly's public game history on Boardroom for six weeks before sending a message as Miriam Voss on a harvested LinkedIn photo of Amber Coles, a dental hygienist in Raleigh, North Carolina.
- Kelly sent four hundred dollars on November nineteenth for a fake rental car deposit and fourteen hundred dollars on December first for a fake eviction notice.
- Detective Roy Vance identified Lewis using Zelle account metadata, Signal phone records, and a regional cable broadcast mention in an Indiana-Purdue game message that revealed Cleveland residence was false.
- Lewis was arrested December ninth, drove to Packer Creek the night of December eighth, sealed a Dell laptop in a freezer bag with copper wire and an index card reading She was real to me. That is not nothing.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The envelope under the oak: how Jean documented her own deception

In this episode, we follow Jean's journey from a cancer support group on Facebook to 112 thousand dollars sent to UK bank accounts, through Henry Brock's reverse image search revealing the stolen identity of Craig Decker, and into the six-week period when Jean built her case on a kitchen table in Pennsylvania. We trace the moment when a retired mail carrier's four printed pages, a co-administrator's metadata report, and an insurance examiner's complaint converged-all while an oak tree held the most consequential evidence none of them knew existed.

Person: Jean Keller
Perpetrator: Ronald Simmons (constructed identity)
Actual identity: Craig Decker (Portland engineer, photo stolen)
Amount stolen: $112,000
Location: Elderton, Pennsylvania
Event: Romance fraud through fake cancer support group

- Jean Keller was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer two years before joining the Beyond the Bell Facebook group in January.
- The perpetrator used Craig Decker's photograph from a LinkedIn profile; Decker was a licensed civil engineer in Portland, Oregon, entirely unaware his image was being used.
- The Beyond the Bell group was created twenty-two months before Jean joined, not four years as "Ronald Simmons" claimed.
- Between April and October, Jean wired eight thousand dollars, six thousand dollars, four thousand dollars, and nine thousand dollars across multiple transfers to UK bank accounts.
- Thomas Stein, an Armstrong County surveyor walking a disputed property line on Alderton Pike in November, found the sealed envelope containing Jean's forty-three-page dossier buried under an oak tree's roots.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The patient interval: how forty-one letters built a six-year fraud

A septic inspector found forty-one envelopes under a house in Portsmith, Ohio in October 2022, each one postmarked from Greece and addressed in careful handwriting. But the woman who hid them couldn't throw them away-and investigators discovered she had been sending wire transfers to a man who didn't exist. How did Derek Osei maintain the same letter-writing rhythm for twenty-seven months without breaking pattern, and what did the acoustic signature in two voice recordings reveal about where he really was?

In this episode, we trace how a system built on perfectly timed letters and fabricated customs documents extracted sixty-three thousand dollars from Marcia Bell, a widow who volunteered at a food pantry and believed she was helping a civil engineer in a Greek refugee camp. We examine the HVAC hum embedded in voice recordings, the IP address that traced back to Atlanta, and the plagiarized grief copied from a published essay and mailed as personal memory.

Person: Marcia Bell
Perpetrator: Derek Osei, age 39
Location: Portsmith, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia; Thessaloniki, Greece
Amount stolen: $63,000
Event: Letters discovered October 2022; arrest March 2023; trial January 2024
Program: Open Letter Exchange

- Marcia Bell, age 62, lived alone in Portsmith after her husband Dennis died in spring 2016; she worked part-time in accounting and volunteered at the food pantry every Tuesday and Friday for nearly five years without missing a shift.
- Scott Crawford's first letter arrived in February 2020, postmarked from a transit camp near Thessaloniki; correspondence continued every fourteen to twenty-two days for twenty-seven months until September 2022.
- Derek Osei, a thirty-nine-year-old dual Ghanaian-American citizen with a prior fraud conviction in Florida from 2015, applied for a rental property in Marcia's name from an Atlanta IP address while she paid monthly rent on a house she never entered.
- Two of seven voice recordings contained a low-frequency HVAC hum matching southeastern United States commercial air conditioning systems, appearing in call four and call six separated by several months, proving Osei was in Atlanta not Greece.
- Osei's notebook contained forty-two entries documenting at least eleven victims across six years; he received a nine-year federal prison sentence in January 2024 on charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, with appeal denied in spring 2027.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The postcard from a man who never existed

In this episode, we follow Marilyn Duncan from her consistent life in Orviston, Indiana, through four months of carefully engineered emotional manipulation by a man named Carl White, to the moment a reverse image search took less than three minutes to collapse the entire fiction. We explore the whiteboards that tracked relationship timelines, the co-signer variant designed specifically for her financial caution, and the mystery of how a postcard with her own words printed on it arrived eleven days after Carl Gould's arrest.

Person: Marilyn Duncan
Perpetrator: Carl Gould, age 39
Location: Haskett Avenue, Bridgeport, Ohio; Orviston, Indiana
Amount stolen: $42,000 (from Evelyn Marsh)
Event: Postcard arrival, eleven days after Gould's arrest
Platform: ReachBoard professional networking site

- Marilyn joined ReachBoard in June and was contacted within one week by a user named Carl White claiming to be a 44-year-old deaf architect from Portland, Oregon.
- Carl White's photograph belonged to Owen Pressley, a licensed architect from Asheville, North Carolina, who had been dead for approximately two years.
- The operation at Haskett Avenue maintained detailed relationship timelines on whiteboards tracking the pace of emotional development and optimal windows for financial requests.
- A postcard arrived at the Hendricks County Sheriff's Office addressed to Marilyn at her apartment with four lines from a Pablo Neruda poem she had quoted privately to Carl White in July.
- Evelyn Marsh, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher from Akron, wired $42,000 in six installments over seven months after being managed by the same operation using an identical profile architecture.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].

The dry newspaper: what Troy Porter couldn't stop himself from doing

Four uncollected papers lay on Pamela Taylor's porch on August 7, 2022, but one placed there after 2 a.m. was bone dry while the others held the weight of dew. That pristine newspaper, dated August 4th, was left by the man who had just stolen $22,000 from her across six carefully orchestrated wire transfers-a man who drove 210 miles in the dark to place it there, then drove back, leaving behind the one piece of evidence that would eventually lead detectives to his door.

In this episode, we trace how Troy Porter assembled a fictional civil engineer named Daniel Mercer from the faces, professional history, and published words of three real strangers who never knew each other, then used that fabricated identity to extract $22,000 from a divorced dental hygienist over four months. We follow Detective David Becker's investigation from the uncollected newspapers to the encrypted chat logs, the fake bank screenshots, and the printed spreadsheet with twelve names-each one marked with notes like "recently divorced, lonely, trusts fast"-and we confront the mystery the verdict never resolved: why did Porter drive to her house at 2 a.m., and what was he actually standing in the dark to do?

Person: Pamela Taylor
Person: Troy Porter
Perpetrator: Troy Porter, age 36
Location: Moline, Illinois; Roseland, Chicago
Amount stolen: $22,000
Event: Romance fraud scheme, April-August 2022

- Pamela Taylor downloaded a dating app in April 2022, three years after her divorce was finalized in 2019.
- Troy Porter's fake profile, Daniel Mercer, claimed to be a civil engineer working on a bridge project near Chicago, originally from Portland.
- Daniel's photographs were the face of Philip Moran, a real civil engineer in Bend, Oregon who had no knowledge of the fraud.
- Between July 19 and August 3, 2022, Pamela sent $22,000 across six transactions in response to fabricated emergencies involving contractor disputes and frozen funds.
- On August 4, 2022 at 2 a.m., Troy Porter drove 210 miles from Chicago to Pamela's house and left a newspaper on her porch before driving back.
- Porter was arrested September 14, 2022 and sentenced to seven years federal prison on charges of wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

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© 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].