『The photograph in the hymnal: how three strangers became one man』のカバーアート

The photograph in the hymnal: how three strangers became one man

The photograph in the hymnal: how three strangers became one man

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The photograph in the hymnal: how three strangers became one man

A retired postal worker finds a drugstore print tucked inside a hymnal at Grace Fellowship Church on a Tuesday morning in August 2019: two men grinning in front of a restaurant, one of them Roger Callahan in a shirt he never owned, at a place he never went. Roger had been calling this man four times a week for eighteen months, believing him to be a widowed civil engineer named Jeffrey Fitzgerald. But how could a friendship built on six months of genuine connection turn out to be assembled from three separate people who never met each other?

In this episode, we trace the architecture of a romance scam that borrowed a real man's face, another real man's grief over a dead wife, and a third man's voice to construct someone who never existed. We follow the moment Frank Schmidt laid down a printed split-screen showing Ted Nowak's photograph and Jeffrey Fitzgerald's profile side by side, the roadside encounter on Route 40 that never went according to plan, and the laptop that revealed three active identities organized by victim name-each one a carefully documented deception.

Person: Roger Callahan
Perpetrator: Warren Pruett, age 44
Event: Photography discovered in hymnal, August 14, 2019
Amount: $4,000
Location: Alderton, Indiana; Dayton, Ohio
Date: Spring 2018 to August 2019

- Roger Callahan, age 62, a property manager with twelve rental units in Alderton, Indiana, connected with Jeffrey Fitzgerald on ConnectCircle in spring 2018 through a Purdue football comment thread.
- Jeffrey Fitzgerald was constructed from three sources: the face of Ted Nowak, a retired firefighter in Spokane, Washington; the biography of Alan Voss, a real civil engineer and widower; and the voice of Warren Pruett, 44, renting a room in Dayton, Ohio.
- Roger wired $4,000 to Jeffrey Fitzgerald in early August 2019 after being told of a temporary overseas bank transfer problem; his daughter Melissa noticed the transfer and alerted Frank Schmidt.
- On August 13, 2019, Pruett drove to Grace Fellowship Church and placed a digitally composited photograph inside a hymnal on the third pew, left side-showing Roger and Pruett arm in arm at a restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina where Roger had never been.
- Warren Pruett was arrested on August 26, 2019 at the Dayton property after police executed a search warrant; his laptop contained three active ConnectCircle identities organized by victim name, including evidence of at least one other victim, Lorraine Capps from Terre Haute, dating back to 2014.

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