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New · A Marriage on the Record

Part Two: Who Speaks for Russell

Russell Bingaman had a court-appointed lawyer whose only job was him. She never called his wife.

Part Two is the courtroom: Emily Cooper’s own words, her own emails, her own bill, Lisa Nice on what she found on Monday mornings, Patty under oath on why she cleaned her husband, and the morning the court cut Patty to thirty minutes a week with Russell’s lawyer not in the room. Russell died on January 29, 2025, the morning Patty’s petition was set to be heard. It never was.

A podcast by Levi Bakke · 19 min · Narration generated with ElevenLabs, using an AI clone of the author’s voice. The recordings and the documents on screen are real.

Start here · A Marriage on the Record

Part One: The Locked Door

His court-appointed lawyer told the court he could no longer make his wishes known. Patty recorded her visits with her husband of 58 years: 389 recordings. Russell asked for her at least 236 times. When she asked who he wanted taking care of him, he answered with one word: “You.” Then they locked the door.

27 min · Narration generated with ElevenLabs, using an AI clone of the author’s voice. The recordings and the documents on screen are real.

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I mirrored Union County Board records spanning 2008–2026 and all 79 monthly reports published for January 2020 through July 2026. The local corpus now holds 1,016 evidence files and 17,051 parsed payment lines, supporting 150 machine-verified findings. The District Attorney issued a fee-review order on August 6; this fund supports the next targeted records, publication, and any warranted access enforcement.

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Page 21 of Oregon DHS's redline of OAR 411-020-0030, filed July 28, 2026: the struck-through line reading "Redacted copies of investigations involving APD-licensed facilities may be made available to the general public upon request or by operational procedures," outlined in red
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