Criminal - Who's There

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Crime Blotter: “The Learning Center on Hanson Street reports a man across the way stands at his window for hours watching the center, making parents nervous. Police ID the subject as a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Today, we’re looking at mistakes and misunderstandings. Like when Nate Roman returned home one evening to find his Marlborough, Massachusetts home mysteriously clean, and when 82-year-old Willie Murphy dealt with a home intruder in her own way. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Police. And what is going on? I think there's an intruder in one of the bathrooms. But the bathroom door is locked. We see a shadow moving around. And the door is closed. How many people inside the house? There are two people inside, plus the intruder. In April of 2019, two men were house-sitting for their nephew in Washington County, Oregon.

When they returned from walking the dog, they heard someone else in the house and called 911. Deputy Brian Rogers, a patrol deputy with the sheriff's office, got the call. The report that I received from our dispatch was a burglary in progress with information that the suspect was still inside the house and that the two gentlemen were standing outside of the house waiting for police to arrive. They believe someone's inside the bathroom. The bathroom door is locked and they can see a shadow under the door. We're entering right now.

What is the protocol in a situation when it's a burglary, not that it's already happened, but a burglary in progress? What is your protocol? Well, first of all, I mean, immediately we want to make sure that there's nobody else in the house. And then from there, we're going to get what we call containment on the house. So essentially, we get the house surrounded with deputies and officers to contain the suspect, to keep him in the house at that point. When you arrive at the house, how many different patrol cars were dispatched? How many of you were there? Were you the first on the scene?

Actually, there was two of us that arrived at the same time. So it was myself, another district deputy. There happened to be a plainclothes detective with our sheriff's office in the area. He arrived as well. And then a Beaverton police officer arrived with his tracking canine. What do you do first? Walk me through the scene once you've arrived. Once we have the house contained, we approach the front door, open the front door, and then we make announcements, letting the suspect know who we are, why we're there, and then we know they're inside.

And could you hear something going on in the bathroom? Yeah, so once we got the front portion of the house, which would be the living room, dining room, kitchen, once we have that area cleared, and by cleared I mean we physically walk through it to make sure there's nobody else in the house. Now we're stacked up on the end of the long hallway that goes towards the back of the house where the bedrooms are,

and we could very clearly hear noises and what sounded like coming from the master bedroom. And it sounded like, like almost like a, like glass kind of clanking. Initially what it sounded like was somebody was trying to get through that small window after we had made our announcements. So I advised the deputy on the back of the house to keep an eye on that window because it sounded like the suspect was trying to possibly get out that small bathroom window. And at this point, in this type of a situation, is protocol call for weapons to be drawn? Yes, absolutely. Yes. So, the weapon that I have is my duty-issued patrol rifle.

And then the other officers have their duty-issued handguns displayed. Were you wearing a body cam? No, I was not. Was anyone there on the scene? Yes, the Beaverton K-9 officer had a body cam. Last chance, Beaverton Police, search in the building with the canine. As we moved down the hallway, that's really when things kind of started feeling different for us. Prior to that, the noises coming from that area were random. And then as we went down the hallway, it was more of like this repetitive noise.

And it was almost a slight pause, like, what's happening here? Something's not right. Something's different from our normal type of call. And what happens next? So we pushed into the master bedroom, and we're letting the canine do his job. And really, it was at that point we all kind of realized something was amiss because the canine was not giving any indication whatsoever that there was a person in there. But we could still hear the noise.

So that's when we kind of paused and really we all looked at each other like, what's going on here? And then it was at that point we pushed the bathroom door open and it was a robot vacuum cleaner vacuuming or trying to find its way back to its home base, really, is what it was doing. We can clear the signal, too. It is a robot vacuum cleaner. Hi, honey, it's a robot vacuum cleaner. A Roomba. A Roomba. A Roomba.

What was everyone's reaction? Laughter. It was, there was, I mean, between the four of us, there was, you know, experience levels from five years up to 15 years of experience. And it was, that was a career first for all of us. It was, it was, it was funny. I mean, what that was a career first for all of us. It was funny. I mean, what else can you do? We had to laugh. So four officers, a police dog, weapons drawn, body cams for a Roomba.

Yep, for a Roomba. What did the homeowners say? Did they apologize? Yes, they were embarrassed. They felt really bad. But like we told them, if you have any doubt or any thoughts that somebody's in your house and you don't know, let us come do our job. We'll figure it out for you. Well, I have heard reports that a Roomba can be incredibly annoying. I suppose. That's the first time I've ever experienced a Roomba. Today we're looking at mistakes. Those times when the police are called, but maybe they didn't need to be.

There's the story of a man in Grand Rapids who called the police to report that someone had broken into his home in the middle of the night and stolen five pounds of bacon from the refrigerator. Police investigated and determined that the perpetrator had actually been the man's wife. She'd eaten the bacon in the middle of the night and wouldn't admit it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. A few years ago, a crime blotter in a Rochester newspaper read, The Learning Center on Hanson Street reports that a man across the way stands at his window for hours watching the center, making parents nervous.

Police identified the subject as a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And then, there's the story from earlier this year of a tour group in Iceland with a missing member. The tour group was coming back from a hike. They got on the bus and realized that one of the members of the group wasn't with them anymore. They all went out and searched and searched for hours. When they got back on the bus after 3 a.m.,

they realized that the missing woman had been there all along, in the search party. She'd changed clothes earlier in the day, and someone thought she didn't return. She hadn't recognized the police description of herself. Or the time a woman in Minnesota called the police upset that her neighbor across the street refused to take down her Christmas decorations. Police advised the caller to close her curtains. Sometimes these cases are cleared up pretty quickly.

It's obvious that no crime occurred. But other times, the case isn't that simple, and the police don't know what to think. That's what happened to Nate Roman on May 15, 2019. That was a day that I woke up early to get to work. You know, typical, like there's nothing. It was a nice May day. Weather was fine. And, you know, I had picked up my son from his grandfather's after, you know, a long day of work.

We'd go into the grocery store, you know, just typical stuff. And we didn't get home until just a little after sunset. Most days, Nate Roman wakes up very early in the morning and commutes a long way to work and back. He lives in Marlborough, Massachusetts with his six-year-old son, Seamus. And he always thought it was a lot of fun for me to just hand him the key to the house and open the door up himself. And so I do that, and I'm in the driveway trying to struggle with all the groceries and all that, trying to make it all one trip like everybody does. And I hear him from around the corner yelling to me, Dad, Dad, the door's open. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, I guess, you know, occasionally I would forget to lock the door when I went to work. You know,

it's early in the morning. Sometimes I'm a little out of it. It's not totally unheard of for me to do something like that. I'm like, okay, okay. So, as soon as I walked in the door, it was immediately obvious to me that something wasn't quite right. We all know the smell of our home. We all sort of have an expectation for what our home is going to smell like and kind of feel like when we walk in the door at the end of the day. And to have that be off is a pretty jarring experience. And I could smell like bleach and cleaning chemicals and that type of thing. And I was trying to remember if I had like, you know, done some cleaning or something before I left for the day, and I didn't remember doing that at all. And so, it just, it sort of set off this alarm in my mind, and I walk in my house, and I see that this door to a side room that I never ever close was closed.

And I'm just sort of like looking around. Now I'm alarmed that something's up. And I just tell him, well, like, stay right next to me. And we go upstairs and I look into his bedroom and I see that everything is completely stacked neatly. Everything's put away. All the stuffed animals are lined up on his bed. And that is definitely not how I left it that morning. I mean, he's a normal five-year-old boy. His room looked like a tornado went through it and now it's all neat and clean. So immediately, now I know for sure that somebody's been in the house. I'm in a state of emergency, and I'm looking around. And by the time we get upstairs and then I see his room, then it just hits me that definitely

somebody has been in my house. So I immediately pick up the phone and I call the police. They phrased it differently, but essentially they said, okay, dummy, get out of your house. Don't stay there. Like we'll send someone right down. So I grabbed Seamus. We just go right outside and just hang out in the driveway while I've got ice cream melting on the kitchen floor and wait for the police. highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

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And, you know, having, but as soon as like, you're just hit with that revelation that yes, someone has definitely been in your house touching your stuff, touching your children's things, stacking them up and arranging them, immediately my mind goes to, there is a serial killer in this house. They've prepared the house for some kind of, you know, sinister ritual or something. And so when the police were just like, yeah, get out. I was like, yes, of course. And I'm an idiot for not doing this sooner. I just get Seamus right outside and two officers came right down and they go in, they clear the house. And then they start asking me, you know, what's missing. And, you know, I'm looking around and it's occurring to me that I don't see anything missing. Like they start, they go in the house with me and I'm looking around, I'm trying to find something that was maybe stolen or vandalized or something like that. And there's nothing.

And I'm realizing that the bathrooms are spotlessly clean and that my son's room is spotlessly clean and my bedroom is spotlessly clean, even the living room. But the kitchen is not of all this stuff. So they got every room except the kitchen is not of all this stuff. So they got every room except the kitchen, which is ironic in a way, because that's the room they came through. That was the first room they entered when they came in the house. And I know this because I actually do have an alarm. But up until that day, I was very bad about remembering to arm it during the day. I would arm it at night, but not typically during the day.

But there was a log of when the door was opened or closed. So I know they were in the house for about 90 minutes. And so the police go through, they start asking me questions. They're like, okay, so let me get this straight. So somebody came in and you're saying that they just cleaned your house. I'm like, yes. And for weeks after that, every time I'd open up a cabinet, I'd be waiting to find like a decapitated animal head or something in there. Some like gory surprise or some like note or something. And the only thing that I did find, and this actually made me feel a lot better about the whole thing, is that that evening after the police had been there and they'd run through,

you know, every possible idea of who might've done this, that evening when I went to use the bathroom, I noticed that on my toilet paper rolls next to my toilets, there were two absolutely perfect toilet paper roses formed out of the toilet paper sitting on the rolls, which I kept, by the way. And I was like, wait a minute, this is the work of a professional. It's got to be. You know, I would be thinking to myself, well, that's what they want me to think. Oh, yeah, that went through my mind. Because these toilet paper roses have the cameras in them

that they have implanted. I mean, that's where I'd be like, oh, well, I'm on to you now. I mean, did you, that night after you put Seamus to bed, and I know that the police had searched the house, but did you then go and do your own search? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, after, I got, I didn't want to freak him out, you know. And it was, his room is very easy to, you know, for it to be very clear that there's nobody hiding in there. So, you know, he went to bed and then I spent hours just combing over the house every square inch trying to look for anything or any evidence.

I mean, I don't really know. I never got an answer. Nate posted about it on Facebook. It was like a two paragraph synopsis of what happened. And it just said, hey, so I came home and someone cleaned my house. This is insane. It's super creepy, super weird. And I put a picture of the toilet paper rose. A journalist friend asked if she could write about it for the Boston Globe. And within probably an hour, I had five, six, seven phone calls

from like every local news station around here. It was, I had, I think, I think six or seven news crews in my house that day. It got picked up by CNN, BBC. There were Japanese journalists. I got interviewed from someone in Germany and the Netherlands and all this stuff. Apparently, I was a big hit in Norway. There were a lot of Norwegians that were very interested in my story, which I thought was really, really funny. And yeah, it just sort of blew up.

As the story got bigger, strangers began commenting on Nate's Facebook post, offering theories and sometimes advice. The most prominent was, this is totally a prank. right on par with that was somebody you have a secret admirer that's in love with you and this is their way of expressing their love to you which i can tell you is a terrible way to do that is to terrify someone and their child is not a good way to get with somebody um and the third was um somebody's definitely going to murder you at any minute. Get out of your house now. There are cameras everywhere.

This is, you know, like you are in imminent danger. Did you change your locks? Oh, that day. Are you kidding me? Yeah. I gave my kids some food and then we went to Home Depot immediately. And I just changed every lock. I'm reading the comments on your Facebook page. And one man in Chili's said, I've seen this before.

You need to get out immediately. Yeah, Chili guy. I remember him. I've seen this before. Yeah. I've seen that rose before. You know, I'm looking at a picture of the toilet paper rose. I had no idea such a thing could be done with toilet paper.

Oh, me either. It was my first experience with that as well. But apparently, that is a service provided by some cleaning companies. That's what people do. I've never actually hired a housekeeper and a maid or anybody to clean my house at all. I do all that myself. So, it was definitely my first experience with it. It was a heck of a first experience. Can I just be devil's advocate for one second? shows up at a random house that they're not supposed to clean with no key, but goes through the back door and decides,

oh, okay, I guess this one must seem right for us to clean. Cleans most of the house, but not the kitchen. And then sends no bill. And when this is all over the news, never reaches out to say, our mistake, forgive us. I was hoping for a bill. I really was. It sounds weird to hope for a bill, but I really was hoping for that, just so I would know for sure. I've gotten some feedback from people who have done this for a living. And what they have said and what they've suggested is that

perhaps the previous owners had requested some housekeeping services from someone they had dealt with before. Now, of course, I never even met, even when I purchased this house, I never met the previous owners of this house. I have no idea who they are. I have no contact with them. They never reached out either if they heard about this. And what has been suggested is that they may have gone to an old address. If that's something that, I mean, I'll look for any plausible scenario and try to consider it all. I'm never really going to know though. And that's sort of what's in my mind as sort of how this could have possibly unfolded was that, you know, previous owner requests cleaning from a cleaning service they'd worked with. They go to the old house, find a door unlocked, start working,

realize after a while that it's the wrong place and move on. But it could have been something else. Nate says he called cleaning companies in the area to ask if his address rang a bell and to see if maybe someone had come by mistake. But no one knew what he was talking about. But then, a woman came to his house and knocked on the door. Nate says that the woman only spoke Portuguese, and that they were passing phones back and forth

to try to communicate using Google Translate. The woman said she knew what had happened. She was like, I'm so sorry. I sent my daughter here by accident. And then she just sort of took off. And I was like, okay. So for a moment, I was like, maybe put at ease. I'm like, okay, well, she said she sent her daughter. Maybe she doesn't have all the facts straight, whatever. And I was like, oh, I think your mother was here earlier. And she was like, no, no, my mother wasn't here. So, I never got contact info. I never heard anything more from either of them. So, I was like, okay, you know, I think there may have been, if one of them was responsible, I think there was some concern that they were going to be charged with trespassing or, you know, getting some kind of trouble. If somebody made a mistake, I certainly don't want trouble for them.

I don't want that kind of trouble for them. So, you know, very unlikely things happen all the time. You know, there are things that happen every day that are one in a billion, one in a trillion. And you just, you never know what they're going to be. And I think that this was just, just an unusual set of coincidences. You know, I think that the wisdom is that you should always lock your doors.

But in your case, maybe don't lock your door sometimes and see if something nice happens. I'll just take all my stuff out first. Here's one more story to end the year. A young man is in my home, broke the door. And you know what? It's kind of semi-dark, and I'm alone, and I'm old. But guess what? I'm tough.

In November, an 82-year-old woman in Rochester, New York, was getting ready for bed. It was just after 11 p.m. when a man began pounding on her door, yelling. He broke open the front door and came inside. And you want to know what happens? He picked the wrong house to break into. I took that table and I went to working on him. And guess what? The table broke and it had metal legs and I'm juggling him, juggling him, juggling him. And when he's down, I'm jumping on him. And the telephone is still on for 911. Her name is Willie Murphy. She's about five feet tall and weighs 105 pounds. But she works out a lot, especially for an 82-year-old. She's won bodybuilding competitions. We're hearing her tell the story to her friends at the Maplewood YMCA,

where she works out every single day. I'm running in the kitchen. There's a bottle of baby shampoo on the table. I grab the shampoo, and guess what? He's still on the ground in his face, all over, the whole thing. And he's trying to get up, and he's pulling. And I got the broom, and he's pulling the broom. And I'm hitting him. I'm hitting him with the broom, hitting him.

She said she was thinking to herself, if it's my time to go to hell, I'm taking him with me. The police arrive on the porch, and the house is already open, so they come in. He's laying down already, because I had really did a number on that man. I'm serious. I'm serious. Oh, oh, oh.

Yeah. Willie Murphy has decided not to press charges against the man. She says she thinks he's been through enough. A lot of women who are seniors are not into powerlifting, she said, which makes me, I guess, appear very strange to a lot of people. I can shovel my own snow, which is a fabulous thing. My grandchildren, I can lift them up without any problem. And the best of all, I don't need any help when I'm carrying my groceries.

You see, that's what it's about. It's about life. L-I-F-E. Life. Thanks very much for listening this year. And we're very excited for what we have in store for you next year. Happy holidays. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer.

Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Until next year, I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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