Breaking the Rules, story 1: Statute of Limitations

When a group of students stumbles upon a mysterious plaque hidden beneath an oak tree, a late-night discovery turns into a real-time detective story. Their search for answers uncovers a decades-old secret, and a story that’s both forgotten and unforgettable. 

 

Producers Arun Chhetri: Host, producer, sound design With Will Briger & Henry Segal   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Guests   Gloria Gatlin: Stanford Alumni and Wife of Thane Plambeck. Gloria was the first person to respond to our email and put us on the right track. Christopher Wright: Key conspirator of the Wright K. Sexton Memorial Park. Chris runs a nonprofit organization called EarlyFamilyMath.com. https://www.earlyfamilymath.org/  Harlan Sexton: Key conspirator and placer of the Wright K. Sexton Memorial Park.  References 99% Invisible, Always Read the Plaque

• https://99percentinvisible.org/article/always-read-plaque-mapping-10000-global-markers-memorials/ 

Music   Temperance by <a href="https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/236965">Blue Dot Sessions</a> Sunday Lights by <a href="https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/224308">Blue Dot Sessions</a> Delicates by <a href="https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/315806">Blue Dot Sessions</a> La Naranja Borriana by <a href="https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/315809">Blue Dot Sessions</a> Underground River - opening version: https://open.spotify.com/track/0tcYwM7XS8TFVXJTSEtAnZ?si=2a722c801c7048a9  Fedora Shadow: https://open.spotify.com/track/21DCkITafCkCY5Jhg4UoL0?si=4247e1ae23a945d5  I was only temporary: https://open.spotify.com/track/4XAilWzhZM0uyR4vtERfHi?si=9b66f4dc7fda4280  Nothing Burns Like the Cold: https://open.spotify.com/track/6G0KITyDe4EQREYyuVQmOn?si=61c253d1f8844efe   Private Investigator: https://open.spotify.com/track/7zHhpvu59OKXDG51LsXLTq?si=e88ac5ca10bb4af3  Night on the Docks: https://open.spotify.com/track/0obm7Lz78514LAWNm3hpOd?si=9251d9ccfeb24835  Swing on Her Shoes Movement II: https://open.spotify.com/track/41WpQ6DMoSIn8SpNyAE1xq?si=78f02c1335b245ed  Midna’s Theme: https://open.spotify.com/track/0PQLT15vJCcGdNpnSqcmj1?si=310819f23ec44d48   China Town Suite: https://open.spotify.com/track/0cUfeQ0khjHHqQmUI5cVHr?si=f17eb431ea25426e  Gumshoe Blues: https://open.spotify.com/track/6A7pxkpK5rCvFVDs855z4Q?si=66e586f7d11e4213  Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Remastered: https://open.spotify.com/track/72IhFCBLDSHmcW64vN2FTH?si=9c2a027ebd3e4e77  Turning Pages: 
theme of breaking the rules.
This series on breaking the rules is allabout the stories that bend boundaries.

(00:24):
They're the moments where you dare to askWhat happens if I don't follow the script?
We will explore the rebellious artof graffiti, investigate a mysterious
plaque, sneak onto Stanford's rooftopsand get an inside look on life in prison.
These stories reveal what can happenwhen we color outside the lines and
redefine the limits on how we can change.

(00:46):
In today's episode, we're invitedinto a story straight out of film
noir when my friends will Henry and Istumbled upon a mysterious plaque and
do detective work to uncover the cluesto a mystery no one has ever solved.
Here's Will and Henryand me with that story.

(01:08):
It was a dark and storm unit at
Stanford, a campus that knowshow to keep its secrets.
We were walking around main quad atStanford, just casually moving within
the lanes of the beautiful sandstonearches when all of a sudden we
stumbled upon a giant treasure chest.
No, I'm just kidding.
We came to the math corner, a placewe'd walked through hundreds of times.

(01:31):
And that's when we saw it poking outof the dirt beneath one of the oak
trees was an old weathered plaque.
It was about the size of a briefcaseand there was an inscription
with the words, right?
K Sexton Memorial Park, rightunder it said June, 1977.
It also looked like there was some Latin

(01:53):
oromo.
There are plaques all overthe place on Sanford's campus.
But this one seemed different.
For one thing, it wasn't clearwhat the plaque was commemorating.
We didn't know Latin.
So like any good detectives,we looked to Google Translate.
But what we found only made usmore confused or Nanda Enum as

(02:13):
dignity Tomo translates to thedignity of a house is to be adorned.
But the plaque wasn't anywhere near ahouse, and it certainly wasn't adorned.
So we set out to Green Library to seeif we could find a record of the plaque.
Yet in all of those pages, there'snot one mention of Wright Case
Sexton, let alone his Memorial Park.

(02:37):
Stanford documents
its history.
Well,
if you were to print it out, the Stanfordarchives would be over 30,000 feet long.
So a plaque with a strange inscriptionand a name that was nowhere to be found
in the Stanford archives wasn't just odd.
It was exceptional.

(02:58):
We ventured to the deep web, even thethird page of Google, and we found one
online clue, a flicker post with only260 views, one that was posted in 2012.
The guy who posted the photo was aStanford PhD back in the eighties.
His
name was Thain Beck.
Was he our guy?
Our DB Cooper?

(03:18):
We tracked down Thain's email andasked if he knew anything about the
plaque, and we got an email back.
But the message we got back wasn't fromThayne, it was from Thain's wife Gloria.
Hi, Henry.
I'm
Gloria
Ga
Gatlin, thain's wife.
He is not right.
Kay Sexton.
Nor is he the installer of the plaque.

(03:38):
There's more to the story other than whoinstalled it, namely why they did, but
they no longer remembers the details.
Gloria said Tha couldn't talkto us, but she could, and she
confirmed our suspicions that
there was something off about the plaque.
Everything that I know about theplaque has come from my husband, Thae.

(04:02):
I had known about the plaque and Ihad seen it, and I knew that it was
not a real official Stanford plaque,
which explained why we couldn'tfind it in the Stanford archives.
Gloria was a code term studentat Stanford back in the eighties.
Her husband Thayne was getting his PhDin computer science around the same time.

(04:22):
I knew that somebody from one ofthe grad schools had put it in.
Gloria said it wasn't Thayne.
She was sure he would've told herif it had been, but she remembered
one student in particular who shesuspected was connected to the plaque.
Harlan Sexton, who was gettinghis PhD in math at the same time,

(04:43):
thain's undergrad degree,was in mathematics.
I suspect that he may have known Harlan.
The name Sexton was on the plaque,
but Harlan wasn't, which got us thinkingwas the name on the plaque, right?
K Sexton.
Not one name, but three.

(05:05):
We asked Gloria about this and shesaid she didn't know anything about
the W right K part of Wright K Sexton.
Either way, Harlan Sexton seemedlike the logical place to start, but
Gloria didn't know him personally.
I didn't know anything about him.
I suppose I could have Googled him though.
I don't think Google existed back then.

(05:26):
So we did what Gloria couldn't back then.
After sifting through several falseleads, dozens of alumni resources,
city council filings, and evensigning up for a free trial on
LinkedIn premium, we finally found him
or Nanda Enum Omo.
That's Harlan Sexton.
Remember the Latin on the plaque?

(05:48):
Harlan knows what itmeans because he wrote it
in,
which means roughly speaking a man's.
Dignity is enhanced by his homeor a man of dignity should live in
a fine home, something like that.
Harlan said that he and his fellowgrad student friends pulled a quote
from Cicero as a private joke.

(06:10):
It was an homage to all thecountless hours they spent working.
They were pulling so many latenights that it didn't make sense
to go home to an apartment.
So they started sleeping in theirmath offices and after a while
they weren't just sleeping there,they were living in their offices.
They said a lot of grad studentsdid back then to save money and
maximize their research time.

(06:32):
The Latin that had puzzled us somuch was their own private joke.
A man of dignity shouldlive in a fine home.
The joke was, of course, that wehad no home and we didn't have much
dignity, so it seemed appropriate.
Harlan also confirmed our theoryabout the names on the plaque.

(06:53):
That Wright k Sextonwasn't one name, but three.
They were the names of two ofthe other students who had helped
dream up The idea of the plaque,
the class, the class I was in wasquite small and I was the first
one of them to arrive by weeks.
Chris Wright had also come early.

(07:14):
That's Wright with a w. Thesame spelling as on the plaque.
They have these, uh, PhD qualifyingexams that you have to take.
He seemed to be the least frantic ofthe, uh, graduate students, and we
got to be friends almost immediately
while I continued talking withHarlan, will and Henry began

(07:34):
looking for a trail to Chris Wright.
Harlan had lost touch with him,so they went back to the library.
We went through every math, PhDthesis and dissertation that was
published between 1970 and 1985,
and luckily for us, it
was a math
dissertation.
There weren't that many.
The plaque said 77.
Sexton graduated in 81, so it wasprobably gonna be in that range.

(07:57):
We did a good old Command F and aname came up on a fateful night.
The stars aligned and a man whogoes by the name Christopher Wright.
Warmly responded to our cold email.
Hi Henry.
I know the complete story of theWright case, Sexton Memorial Park.
Harland Sexton and I created it,but it's a longer story than I want
to commit to email at the moment.

(08:20):
So we met Chris Wright in an abandonedwarehouse with broken windows.
Just kidding.
We talked with him over video chat.
The story he told us was this.
He and Harlan got to be friends,just like Harlan told us.
He has a lot of goodmemories from those years.
They played foosball and racedchairs in the hallways once they got

(08:41):
in trouble for rewiring elevators.
But being a math PhD studentat Stanford was hard.
They were working a lot and withso many long nights and merciless
deadlines, they often felt like theirwhole lives were in their offices.
But all that work was mostlyinvisible to the outside world.

(09:03):
Harlan recalls a conversationhe and Chris had.
He was sitting out in this grassyarea behind the math building,
enjoying the evening and talking.
And he mentioned the idea of having
a plaque.
I said to him, wouldn't it benice if we had something that
would memorialize our time here?
That's Chris Wright.

(09:23):
And I said, well, that, that soundsgreat, but I would like to be involved
in that if I could put my name on it too.
And thus, the idea of the w rightcase, Sexton Memorial Park was born,
it just became a thingthat we were going to do.
We wanted to commemorate the fact that we.
We were living in our officesand we had been for months.

(09:45):
At that point,
when I first heard this story, it justseemed like a prank, but the more I
thought about my own experience atStanford, the more it made sense to me.
Stanford's campus is beautiful.
Lots of sandstone, arches, outdoorspaces, and a row of palm trees
that stretches for nearly a mile.

(10:07):
There's a tangible sense of grander.
You get the sense that many great mindshave come here before you, but it's also
a place where it's easy to feel invisible.
I often think about how Stanford isleaving its mark on me, but when I
leave, I'll be quickly forgotten.
No, I have us took ourselvesseriously enough to think that
Stanford, Otis a memorial.

(10:31):
You know, it's more like a mementoof times passed when people could
actually live in their office.
'cause we certainlyweren't the only people.
Chris told Will
and Henry something similar.
I thought it would be just fun tohave since, as I said, it was our own.
And uh, it seemed a shameto come and go and not.
Have something left behind.
It was pretty obscure.
How would anybody know?

(10:52):
Especially after our names were lost,which wouldn't have taken very long.
So
they created a name,
a name out of our names to put on theplaque, and then hope that people wouldn't
really notice it, or if they did, wouldassume that it had always been there.
There's still one missingname on the plaque.

(11:13):
You know Wright k Sexton, ChristopherWright, Harlan Sexton, and there's
a K. Did Harlan tell you aboutthe K He, he told, he told me
there was a Mr. K He didn't want,he, he, Dr. K, of course Dr. K.
Dr. K was another friend of theirswho lived with them in their offices.

(11:33):
And while he had the same impulse tocreate something that would last beyond
them, he wanted to remain anonymous,known only to Chris Wright and Harlan
Sexton, who wouldn't break his cover.
He told me that, uh, the Dr. K, thatDr. K likes to bring his kids by it
and tell them it's a lesson to lay low.

(11:53):
Is that right?
I think that's unlikely.
I'm surprised he said that.
I mean, Dr. K doesn'tlive anywhere near there.
But in any event, what I recall was thatDr. K, as he will be known, I guess, felt
like he was going to stay in math researchcommunity and didn't want his last
name so visible as part of this prank.

(12:14):
So he asked to be initialized and we did.
Mm-hmm.
And he did stay in academics, soI guess if he cares, that's it.
Worked out the way he wanted.
I think we're past thestatute of limitations,
I suppose.
Well, it's never too late to have your,uh, reputations besmirched, but I,

(12:34):
I don't know if thiswould even be besmirched.
This would be like, like,
wow.
They knew their plaque would only surviveif it couldn't be traced back to them.
A brand new plaque wouldimmediately be noticed.
So they had to create somethingthat looked like it had
already been there for a while.
They chose a date a few yearsbefore they'd arrived at Sanford,

(12:56):
1977, so it would seem likethe plaque had predated them.
Here's Harlan again.
Mr. K put the thing on his balcony,Berkeley, so that it would age so that by
the time I put it in, it looked like ithad been outside for a year, which it had.
I think what impressed me mostabout the plaque is how dedicated

(13:17):
they were and just how long theyhad to wait to complete their plan.
Chris shares more.
Yeah, but it was quite a long time betweenthe various steps of having the idea
of doing that and where would it go.
We ended up putting it in the dirt.
Next in the tree planter, next to themat department, but to ensure its, um,

(13:39):
lack of mobility, Harlan dug about athree foot hole there and filled it
with concrete, which we sunk rods into.
The more we learned about the plaque,the more incredible it seemed that it
had remained there all these years.
How well known do you think the, thestory of this was, if at all, after?

(14:00):
Because it, it was putafter you graduated, right?
I.
I, I don't know how manypeople know about it.
I think it's one of those things thatwas sort of a rumor that some people
found out about and others didn't.
The same rumor we'd heard fromGloria that it started us on
this case over 50 years later.
People still talk about it, but itturns out that the people, Chris

(14:22):
Wright, Dr. K and Harlan Sexton caredmost about seeing the plaque were
people they hadn't even been able toimagine back when they installed it.
I used to bring my kids there withme, and then once every year or two
it was, it was a thing to do with Dad.
We would do it
every year.
I'd never been into plaques,although I was strangely moved
when my daughter went to Stanford.

(14:44):
Some 20 years later.
I was on the campus withher being a freshman.
And it was strangely, um.
Moving to see the right case.
Sexton Memorial Park was still there.
I have a picture of a couple yearsworth of those students being sh
shown the plaque by my daughter,
which brings us back towhere we started with Gloria.

(15:04):
There's just something so thin aboutit that he shared it with the kids
and you know, this stuck in theirmemories like they thought it was cool.
And so they've probablytold friends, right?
Check out
what my dad told me, right?
There was one more piece
of this mystery that felt unsolved.

(15:25):
We never would've learned thetrue story about the black if
we hadn't found that picture.
Gloria's husband, Thayne took of itthat first time we reached out to her.
She said Thayne couldn't talk to us.
But she didn't say why.
It seemed a little mysterious though.
We didn't wanna pry, but when wereached out to her to share an early

(15:46):
draft of this podcast episode, thelast puzzle piece fell into place,
but it wasn't what we expected.
Thain plan back couldn't talk tous because he has Alzheimer's.
He's living in memory care in general.
I think that diseases like.
Alzheimer's and the myriad ofreasons why people are in memory care

(16:10):
should not be hidden and should notbe something we don't talk about.
But still, it was hard for her totalk about moving Thayne to memory
care has been its own kind of grief.
She didn't know if Thayne wouldremember anything about the plaque, but
when she played our episode for him.

(16:31):
It seemed to ignite something in him
when I played theoriginal podcast for him.
I mean, he, he got a kick outof the cover photo of him being
displayed next to DB Cooper.
He really laughed at that, andthen he listened to the podcast
and at the very end when it wasdedicated to him, he, he just smiled.

(16:59):
Thayne may not have rememberedthis plaque exactly, but the
story of it still moved him.
The Wright k Sexton Memorial Park plaqueis a memento of times passed, but its
legacy has become far more than that.
I think there are probably several,maybe many Stanford connected families

(17:20):
out there who this plaque is part ofthe stories that their families tell.
I'm really happy that.
It's still there.
So many people
have passed through Stanford'sstone, arches, and courtyards.
The student experienceis carefully curated.

(17:41):
It can be easy to feel insignificantamong all the great minds that have
come before and after, but the plaqueis a monument to something different.
I hope Henry's right that we're past thestatute of limitations for removing it.
It reminds students like me that legacycan look a lot of different ways.

(18:01):
It doesn't have to be impressive.
The choices I'm making while I'mhere might outlast me, and who knows?
Maybe 50 years from now, some Stanfordstudent will listen to this podcast and
find their way to the small inconspicuous
plaque in the math corner.

(18:23):
This episode is dedicated to Thayne Beck.
Christopher Wright runs a nonprofitorganization called Early family math.com.
You've been listening to Stateof the Human, the podcast of the
Stanford Storytelling Project.
This was statute of Limitationsproduced by Arun Chetry,

(18:43):
Wil Brier, and Henry Siegel.
With support from Laura Joyce Davis.
Don Jay Frazier, Megan Kalfus,Melissa Dural, and Jonah Willand for
their generous financial support.
We'd like to thank the Vice Provostfor Undergraduate Education, the
program and Writing and Rhetoric.
The office for the Vice Presidentfor the Arts, and Bruce Braden.
You can learn about the StanfordStorytelling Project and our

(19:05):
podcast workshops, live events, [e-mail].
You can find this in every episode ofState of the Human, on our website,
or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
For State of the Human and the StanfordStorytelling Project, I'm Arun,
and thank you for listening.

(19:26):
Anyway, I hope there remains somemystery around it so that the powers
that be at the university let it remain.
Let it remain.