EVIDENCE - A True Crime Podcast Transcript

[AD BREAK - PRE-ROLL]

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Therapy is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist online, on your schedule, starting at sixty-five dollars a week. Use code EVIDENCE for ten percent off your first month.

We want to say something we don't usually say in a pre-roll. This episode is difficult. Not in the way true crime is usually difficult — not crime scene photos, not forensic detail. Difficult in the way that people you will come to know are going to be treated as evidence of something rather than as themselves. We are going to try not to do that. We are going to ask you to hold us to it.

Link in the show notes. Okay.

[INTRO MUSIC]

MARA: Welcome back to Evidence. I'm Mara Chen.

JOEL: I'm Joel Vasquez.

MARA: Before we start. Two things. First — for listeners who wrote in after Episode 2 about the intake form: we're reading everything. There's a conversation happening in the community right now about the familiar question and it is genuinely the most substantive discussion we've had in this space. If you haven't been in there, the link is in the show notes.

JOEL: Second thing. I want to say upfront that this episode contains information about a person named Robert Claes, who died, and a child named Anna, who was seven years old. We are going to try to handle both of them the way they deserve — which is to say, as people. Not as data points in someone's framework. Not as evidence of anything. As people.

MARA: That's all we want to say before we start. Okay.

Robert Claes was forty-four years old. He had been a diabetic since the age of eleven. For eleven years he kept a blood sugar log — a small spiral notebook, the kind you find in the dollar bin near the checkout register. Numbers and times. What he'd eaten. Whether he'd exercised. He kept it the way a careful person keeps a careful record: not because he was afraid, but because this was what managing the body required and he was, by all accounts, someone who managed what he had to manage.

He joined the Fellowship of Evident Truth in the fall of 2021, two years after it began. By summer of 2022 he had stopped taking insulin. The Fellowship called it a chosen act. A completion of what they called his visibility. He died of diabetic ketoacidosis on September 3rd, 2022. The last entry in his blood sugar log is dated September 1st.

He has a sister named Diane. She drove six hours to talk to us.

MARA: Diane Claes agreed to be recorded. She wanted to be recorded. She said she was tired of being a secondary source. She wanted to be in the room.

[AUDIO CLIP — DIANE CLAES INTERVIEW]

DIANE: Everyone who calls me wants to know what he believed. At the end. They want to know if he knew what was happening, if he chose it, if the choice was real. They want the psychology of it. I've talked to two researchers and a documentary crew and I say the same thing every time: I don't know. I wasn't there. I can't tell you what was in his head.

What I can tell you is that he ate oatmeal every morning. Steel-cut, not instant, he thought instant was a personal failure. He called me every Sunday at eleven. He owned three pairs of the exact same shoes because he found a pair he liked in 2015 and bought backups. He had a rule about movies: if a film was longer than two and a half hours it had to have a thirty-minute break in the middle or he would not watch it. He applied this rule to films he loved. He applied this rule to films he had already seen.

(pause)

Everyone wants to know what he believed. I want to know what he ate for breakfast the morning he stopped taking his insulin. I want to know if he was cold. I want to know if he was afraid and didn't show it — because not showing it would have meant something he couldn't afford it to mean.

MARA: Did he talk to you about the Fellowship?

DIANE: He talked about it the way he talked about anything he was interested in. Carefully. He didn't try to bring me in, if that's what you're asking. He said there was a group of people asking questions he found interesting and he was going to see where the questions went. He said it like he was describing a class he'd enrolled in.

MARA: When did that change?

DIANE: The Sunday calls stopped being every Sunday. Then they started being every other Sunday. Then every few weeks. I told myself he was busy. People get busy. (pause) I told myself a lot of things.

I have his blood sugar log here. Do you mind if I — I'd like to read some of it. He would hate that I'm doing this. He was private about his health. But I want you to understand who kept this log.

MARA: Please.

DIANE: (pages turning)

October 14th, 2021. 6:15am. 98. Steel-cut oats, black coffee. Walk, thirty minutes. Target range maintained.

October 15th. 6:20am. 103. Eggs and toast. Sedentary day. Will walk tomorrow.

October 19th. 6:10am. 94. Oatmeal. Coffee. Walk. Good day.

(pause)

That's who he was. Eleven years. Not a single day missed, not even when he had the flu, not even when our mother died. He kept the log the morning of the funeral. He kept the log on every vacation he ever took. And I have to sit here and tell you that the last entry is September 1st and there are two empty pages after it and then nothing.

(long pause)

Whatever came after wasn't him choosing. It was him being chosen.

[END CLIP]

[SILENCE]

JOEL: (quietly) Thank you, Diane.

[PAUSE]

There is a theory in trauma research, developed by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, about the relationship between the body and what the mind has decided. The theory's central argument is that the body does not accept the revisions the mind makes to its own history. That what you have been trained to believe and what the nervous system has encoded are not always the same thing. That the gap between them is where a great deal of human suffering lives.

We are not using this framework to diagnose Robert Claes. We are not qualified to do that. We are noting it because the Fellowship's doctrine had a position on the body that is worth examining. Daniel Marsh taught that the physical body was a set of habits formed without choosing — that illness, need, hunger, fear were the body's unexamined assumptions, its unthought thoughts. That visibility meant choosing to stand on something the body hadn't chosen for you.

Robert Claes had managed his body carefully for eleven years. He had eleven years of evidence about what his body needed and what happened when it didn't get it. What the Fellowship's doctrine asked him to do was apply the method to that evidence. What is that knowledge resting on? What is the body's certainty resting on?

He was forty-four years old. He owned three pairs of the same shoes. He called his sister every Sunday.

MARA: We need to talk about Anna.

JOEL: We do.

MARA: The Fellowship's archive mentions her forty-three times. She is described consistently and specifically: she asks the best questions in the children's sessions, her thinking is unusually precise for her age, she is interested in the word resting and uses it correctly in discussion. She is seven years old in every mention because she is always seven years old in the archive.

JOEL: The children's sessions were twice weekly. They ran parallel to the adult meetings. The records are detailed. There's a specific account from a member describing a particular exchange that I want to read because I think it needs to be heard.

(reading)

Anna asked: if you decide to stand on something, does that mean the thing you're standing on is real? D. didn't answer right away. He looked at her for what felt like a long time. Then he asked what she thought. She said she didn't know yet. He said that was exactly the right answer. She seemed pleased. She was very good at being pleased by the right answer.

MARA: She was seven years old.

JOEL: She was seven years old and she was being asked to evaluate the epistemic foundations of her own beliefs before she had beliefs in any meaningful sense. Before she had been given the tools to build them or examine them. She was being taught to distrust the ground before she had ever stood on it.

MARA: That is the Hitchens argument. That is the foundational immorality. Not that adults choose to believe. Adults can choose. That children are installed with doubt before they can meaningfully consent to the doubt any more than they could consent to a faith.

JOEL: The drawing in the farmhouse was hers.

[PAUSE]

MARA: We know it was hers because a member confirmed it. She drew it during a children's session approximately three weeks before the end. A man in a room full of people, all of them facing him, all of them without eyes. She brought it and left it in the center of the chairs. Nobody asked her to.

JOEL: Nobody asked her to.

[LONG PAUSE]

MARA: We're not going to say anything else about Anna right now. I don't think we should. I think she should just be — here. In the episode. And then we move on.

JOEL: Yeah.

[MID-ROLL AD]

This episode is supported by our Patreon community. We want to say something plainly: a significant portion of Patreon revenue for this series is going directly to the Legal Aid organization that has been working with Robert Claes's family. We'll have more information in the show notes and in the community about how to contribute directly if you'd like to do that.

Standard tiers and links are in the show notes. We're grateful for everyone who makes this work possible.

The Fellowship's branding records — the signed requests, the written statements of wanting — are among the most studied documents in the archive. Researchers have used them to argue both sides of the consent question: that the documentation is evidence of genuine agency, and that the documentation is itself part of the architecture, that the act of signing a request in Daniel Marsh's system was not the completion of a decision but the performance of one, a ritual whose function was to make the choice feel more like a choice than it had any right to feel.

We have read all thirty-eight requests. Most of them are articulate. Some of them are moving. Several are written in the second-person address — the grammar Daniel Marsh used in his private journals from month four onward — which is an interesting detail that we are noting without comment.

Three of them contain spelling errors. One misspells the word visible. One misspells the word chosen. The archive records them without correction. Daniel Marsh did not correct them.

Whatever that room was, it was human enough to contain typos.

MARA: The branding records are where the consent architecture is most visible — and most contested. We've been careful in this series not to reduce the members' choices to the effects of the method. They were adults. They signed documents. They described, in writing, what they wanted and why.

JOEL: And the question we keep returning to — and I don't think we've said this cleanly enough yet — is whether consent that was constructed over three years of systematic epistemological erosion is consent in the sense the word is meant to carry. Not: were they deceived. The method was never hidden. They knew what he was doing. The question is whether knowing what's being done to you is sufficient protection against it being done.

MARA: We have documentation. We have corroboration. We have thirty-eight signed requests and thirty-five written statements.

JOEL: How do you know the wanting was theirs?

MARA: (pause) We have the documentation I just —

JOEL: What is that documentation resting on?

MARA: The documentation is corroborated by testimony, by —

JOEL: What is that testimony resting on?

[SILENCE]

[LONG PAUSE]

MARA: (carefully, not quickly) It's resting on the accounts of people who were present and who have no apparent motive to misrepresent what they witnessed.

JOEL: (a beat, then quietly) Okay.

[PAUSE]

JOEL: I don't — I didn't mean to do that.

MARA: (evenly) I know.

[SILENCE]

He didn't do it a fourth time. He didn't need to.

What the method requires is not infinite recursion. It requires only enough to find the place where the answer runs out — the foundational assumption that cannot be proven, only chosen. The place Daniel Marsh called the ground that goes all the way through. Once you've been to that place, you know it. The shape of it is specific. And you cannot unfeel it.

Joel Vasquez had been to that place with Daniel Marsh's question three times in thirty seconds. The third time, Mara Chen answered more carefully than the first two. Not more defensively. More carefully. There is a difference. A careful listener will hear it. She has been asked this question before. She knows where it goes.

MARA: We received a written response from the unnamed survivor this week. She agreed to a second contact. Not an interview — she doesn't want to be recorded. A written exchange, which I'm going to read in full.

We sent her four questions. She answered one. She wrote:

You've been very thorough about the consent architecture around what happened to the members. The documentation, the corroboration, the signed requests. You're asking whether the wanting was really theirs. I think that's the right question. I want to ask you a different version of it: when you talk about consent in the Fellowship — when you talk about whether the members freely chose what happened to them — are you talking about the members? Or are you talking about yourselves?

[PAUSE]

MARA: That's what we're trying to figure out.

JOEL: (a long pause, then nothing)

[SILENCE]

MARA: One more thing before we close. We've been talking internally about something for later in the series. I want to mention it now, not because it's ready, but because it feels like you should know it's coming.

We're considering an event. Not a tour. Not a panel. Not the kind of podcast live show where you watch people record an episode on stage. Something more suited to what this particular story is about. We'll say more when we know more.

JOEL: What do you mean, suited to this particular story?

MARA: (pause) You'll see.

JOEL: Mara —

MARA: We'll be back next week.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

[POST-ROLL]

Evidence is an independent podcast. We exist because listeners share it with people they care about.

Robert Claes kept a blood sugar log for eleven years. The last entry is September 1st, 2022. His sister has the log. She keeps it in a drawer in her kitchen. She said she doesn't know why she keeps it there specifically. She said it just seems like it should be somewhere she passes every day.

Anna's drawing is in an evidence box in the Carbon Hill Sheriff's Office. Deputy Estes requested it not be destroyed. Nobody has asked him to explain why. He wouldn't be able to, anyway.

The intake form is still available in the subscriber archive. Several hundred of you have completed it. We're reading everything.

Joel has been asking Mara a question for three weeks. A different version of it each time. He doesn't know he's been asking it. We are not certain Mara knows either.

The live event form is on the website. It's not explained yet. You can submit your name. Several of you already have.

Next episode: the chain.

If you know someone who is ready for this, send it to them directly. You know who they are.

END OF EPISODE THREE