The letters under the oak tree: how a pen pal wasn't real

The letters under the oak tree: how a pen pal wasn't real A birdwatcher found forty-three opened letters stacked under a white oak tree outside Galton, North Carolina, weighted down with a creek stone. Alice Chambers had spent two years writing to Paul Carlson, a refugee in a Greek transit camp, sharing her love of literature and her quiet retirement life. But Paul had never read a single word she sent. In this episode, we trace how a carefully constructed literary romance was engineered months before the first letter arrived, revealing nine forged postmarks hidden beneath foreign stamps and a ledger that reduced two years of correspondence to operational shorthand. We follow the reverse-image search that exposed the real face, the man who appeared at Alice's door asking her to sign paperwork, and the ghostwriter whose words Alice kept in a box-a voice that was never actually anyone's. Person: Alice Chambers Location: Galton, North Carolina Event: Romance scam via pen-pal letters Perpetrator: Bruce Yoder, age 49 Date: 2019-2021 Amount: Four to eight thousand dollars (estimated; no transfer completed) - Alice Chambers, 62, received 43 letters over two years from a pen pal named Paul Carlson in a Greek refugee camp. - Nine of the 43 letters bore domestic cancellation marks from Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina, hidden under foreign stamps. - Paul's photograph belonged to a real comparative literature professor at a university in Accra, Ghana, who had never heard of Alice Chambers. - A spiral-bound ledger found in Bruce Yoder's storage unit in Concord, North Carolina listed Alice on page 23 as "lit angle, slow build, package play, est, yield four to eight thousand." - Bruce Yoder was arrested six days after appearing at Alice's door requesting her signature on fraudulent paperwork; he carried a prior federal wire fraud conviction from Florida. To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com. © 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].