She called herself “stupid” in the testimony, a self-characterization that most observers found unwarranted and that she herself seemed to offer as a kind of self-critical explanation for something she was still, years later, working to understand. She was not stupid. She was targeted by someone who was very good at targeting people like her, in environments like hers, through methods refined over twenty-five years of practice before he met her.
The experience of deception at the scale she experienced it is not simply a matter of having made a bad judgment call. It involves years of relationship-building that create genuine bonds, genuine shared history, and a genuine (if ultimately false) understanding of a person. The revelation that the person you understood was never there is not simply the discovery that you were wrong. It is the discovery that the time and the relationship and the shared experience were structured around a fiction — that your memories of a life are memories of events that happened in a reality that was, from one participant’s perspective, not real.
That is a different experience from having been fooled. It is the specific experience that skilled, sustained, intimate deception produces. And Sandra Boss is among the people who know it most clearly.
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## Reigh: The Child at the Center
The daughter known publicly as Reigh was seven years old when she was taken during the July 2008 supervised visit. She was recovered six days later in Baltimore, having lost weight and appearing distressed. Her mother flew to be with her. In the immediate aftermath, Sandra Boss described herself as “completely traumatized” by the kidnapping.