MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - No Way Out

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Today’s podcast features 3 stories that involve people who were trapped - with “no way out.” The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.Story names, previews & links to original YouTube videos:#3 -- "Deep Sea" -- The one place no saturation diver wants to end up (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Nwh9sq7DI)#2 -- "The Escape" -- Behind the door lies a series of deep holes (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6apkM24DhGI)#1 -- "The Chute" -- A legally blind person goes looking for their phone in an extremely hazardous place (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErNOKNxoHQ8)For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast features three stories that all involve people who got trapped. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Deep Sea, and it's about the one place no saturation diver wants to end up. The second story you'll hear is called The Escape, and it's about a series of deep holes that lie behind a door. And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Shoot, and it's about a legally blind person who went looking for their phone in an extremely hazardous place. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please replace the Amazon

Music Follow Button's eye drops with acid. Okay, let's get into our first story called Deep Sea. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race. Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also, tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it.

He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy.

OK, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? OK, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil.

George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Something most people don't know is you can't just put scuba tanks on and then dive down to any depth and come right back up again. The compressed air inside of those scuba tanks would be a mixture of oxygen as well as most likely helium and nitrogen. And when you're breathing that compressed air, the oxygen would get breathed up and then not linger inside of your body. But the other inert gases, the helium and the nitrogen, they would be breathed up and then not linger inside of your body. But the other inert gases, the helium and the nitrogen, they would be breathed up and then absorbed into your bloodstream and they would stay

there until you resurfaced. Now it's completely harmless as long as you understand how it works getting those gases out of your body. In a nutshell, as you ascend, these inert gases will leave your body on their own, but it's a gradual process. If you rock it to the surface before this takes place, these inert gases will not leave your body and they'll expand inside of you and your body will become the equivalent of a shaken up soda can. And so at best, having all these bubbles inside of you is very painful. At worst, it's lethal. The term for this condition is decompression sickness, but it's better known as the bends. The way divers protect themselves from getting the bends is on their ascent, they do what's called a decompression stop. This is something that is planned into the dive, where they stop at a certain depth for a certain amount of time, and that guarantees the inert gases have diffused out of their body before

they reach the surface. Now, the deeper you go, the more decompression stops you'll have to do, and the longer they will take. For example, ascending from 2,000 feet would take over 33 hours to do safely. But luckily, none of us are trying to dive down to 2,000 feet. Well, unless you're trying to be an oil and gas saturation diver. Saturation divers, or sat divers, do construction and demolition at depths of up to 2,000 feet below the surface. But they don't spend 33 hours ascending after every single dive. Instead, after their dives, they're artificially kept at their working depth. The way this works is the sat diver climbs inside of a pressure chamber on board a ship or on board an oil rig, and this chamber also doubles as their living quarters. There's beds,

and there's a bathroom, but it's laughably small and uncomfortable. It looks like a small submarine. And once they go inside, they seal the door, and then they pressurize it to match the depth that they're going to be working at at the bottom of the ocean. And then also there's another pressure chamber called the dive bell that's connected directly onto the side of the chamber. And that's also pressurized to match the working depth. When it was time for the sat diver to go to work, they would put their dive gear on inside of the chamber. They would crawl directly into the dive bell they would shut the door behind them and seal it and then people outside of the dive bell would physically disconnect it from the chamber and then using a crane they would place it in the water and then lower it down to their working depth and once

they get down there because the pressure inside the bell is equal to the pressure outside the bell they can just slide open a door on the bottom and the water does not come inside. And so the divers do slip through this hole and they do the work they need to do. And when they're done, they come back inside the dive belt, they shut it up. And then using the radio, they communicate with the people up on the boat or up on the rig and they raise the bell back up. They reattach them to the chamber. They go inside, they take their stuff off. There's bunk beds and there's a bathroom inside of the chamber, and that's what they hang out until their next dive. This process is repeated for days and days and days, keeping them saturated with these gases, and then at the end of their shift, which is

usually about a month long, they will have one long decompression they do inside of the chamber. While this system is highly efficient, it does not change the fact that saturation diving is extremely dangerous and terrifying. The sun doesn't reach below 700 feet, so most of the time these divers are in complete and total darkness. And it's unbelievably cold down there, and so their suits have hot water pumped into them through a tether that's connected to the dive bell. But if that were to fail, hypothermia would kick in almost immediately. They have flashlights, but the water is so full of sediment around the areas that they work, that shining the light is basically

like shining it into fog. You can't really see very far besides right in front of your face. Sat divers also report that sometimes the water around them will suddenly move violently and they'll look around, but their crummy light and lack of visibility means they can't see what it was, but they know it's a large animal that's checking them out. Other times, these fairly large fish will swim right up to them and come right under their

light. It's almost like they're being affectionate with the diver, but they're not being affectionate. They're trying to hide behind the sat diver from some large predator that's out there watching them. Experienced sat divers have learned to just accept their harsh environment down there and don't easily get scared. But there is one thing that all sat divers are afraid of and that is a lost bell. When sat divers are down at their working depth, the dive bell that's brought them down there is usually situated right next to them, just kind of floating in the water. And this dive bell is connected to the ship or the oil rig above by a cable. And if that cable were to snap, the dive bell would fall to the bottom and it would take with it the divers because they're always tethered to the dive bell.

If the divers survived the crash to the ocean floor, they would then just be trapped and have to hope that someone comes down to get them at some point before they run out of air or they succumb to hypothermia. While a lost bell scenario is incredibly rare, it has happened before. On August 7th, 1979, Richard Walker was inside of a pressure chamber on board a ship in the North Sea. He was a saturation diver who for the past 10 days had been in saturation and honestly was just over it. He wanted to go home to his wife and his 15-month old daughter. That evening before his scheduled dive, he wrote in his journal, Dear God, I just want to get out. Soon after writing this entry, he and his partner, Victor Geel, put on their dive gear and hopped into the dive bell. The bell was detached from the chamber and then brought over to the side of the ship. And right before they

lowered it into the water, somebody noticed the location transponder that basically beamed up where it was down below had become loose. And so the decision was made to just remove it. And so after they pulled it off, they lowered the dive bell onto the water and then slowly lowered it down to their working depth, which was 485 feet. Once they got down there, they opened up the hole at the bottom of the bell, and then they began taking turns exiting the bell to go work on this underwater structure. A few hours later at 2.45 in the morning, Richard was the one outside of the dive bell, and he heard something behind him.

He turned around, and he saw the dive bell had slightly tilted on its side. Right as he noticed this, the radio in his helmet kicked on and told him he needed to go back inside the dive bell immediately, and they were going to try to pull them back up. And so Richard went inside the bell, he closed the hole behind him, and then he and Victor listened to the radio as they told them that the main cable holding the dive bell had slipped out. Now this main cable was not the only thing connecting the dive bell up to the ship. There was also another clump of wires and tubes that was called the umbilical that ran all their power and hot water and their comms down to the dive bell. But this umbilical was not meant to be load-bearing. But as it stood with this main cable gone, the umbilical was holding the dive bell from

slipping to the bottom of the ocean. And so the crew up on the ship decided their only choice was to use the umbilical to reel this dive bell back in. And so they began pulling them up by the umbilical and almost immediately it completely snapped and the dive bell fell to the bottom of the ocean about 50 feet below. Now normally a dive bell would have what's called a clump weight hanging off the bottom of it. And in an emergency, you could detach this clump weight and the dive bell is buoyant enough it would go up to the surface.

But Richard and Victor's company had cut corners and not used a clump weight and instead attached weights directly to the dive bell, which meant when they hit the ocean floor, the actual dive bell was sitting on the ocean floor, where that hole they would normally escape from was pressed into the seabed, so they could not get out of their dive bell. Whereas if there had been a clump weight, the clump weight would have hit the ground and the dive bell would have hovered slightly over it. And so worst case scenario, they could have gotten out and done a wet transfer into another dive bell. So with the umbilical cut, they had no radio communication, they had no heat, they had no light, and they had very little remaining oxygen. And so all they could do was just sit in darkness and hope somebody rescues them. Less than 30 minutes later, another dive ship arrived and offered to

help. Now they were not expecting to dive that night, so it took about three hours before they actually had their rescue divers in the water. unfortunately because the location transponder had been removed from the dive bell before richard and victor went under it made it almost impossible for these rescue divers to find it but after an hour of looking around they finally found it it was 7 a.m and they went right down to the porthole and they shined a light inside of the dive bell and inside richard and victor are giving a thumbs up, like, hey, we're okay, we're just ready to get rescued. The fact that Richard and Victor were okay was communicated back up to the surface

and everybody on top was so excited, so relieved. And in fact, they called Richard's wife and they told her that, hey, there's been an accident, but your husband's just fine, he'll be out very soon. But despite these rescue divers locating the dive bell, because the ship up above that they were attached to kept moving around, it was proving to be extremely difficult for them to stay over the dive bell. And so for the next two hours, these rescue divers desperately tried to thread a new wire through the top of the dive bell, but it was going so poorly and they kept going around and shining their light into the porthole to check on Richard and Victor. And it was very clear that their situation was getting worse and worse by the second. They were not giving thumbs up and smiling.

They looked panicked and desperate and they'd been without heat now for hours and it was obvious they were running out of oxygen. Finally at 9am, so six hours after Richard and Victor had first hit the sea floor, the rescue divers managed to get a new cable through the top of the dive bell. And before they signaled to have it brought back up again, they shined a light through the porthole to check on them one more time. And they saw that Richard and Victor were just sitting there with their head in their hands. They were clearly still alive and lucid, but it was like they understood they have very little time left. And if this doesn't work, they're doomed. At this point, the rescue divers called up and said it was ready. They got pulled up to the surface, and then the ship began pulling up the dive bell,

and almost immediately, the cable snapped. And everybody up on the surface knew that at this point, it was almost impossible for them to survive. But nonetheless, rescue divers went down, and it took a while to find the dive bell because it had moved. But when they did, they shined the light through the porthole, and Richard and Victor were still very much alive, but they were not looking to interact with the divers at the window anymore. They were just sitting there looking down they were despondent it was like they were making peace with what they understood was going to happen. They were not going to get out of there. And over the course of the next several hours as

these rescue divers tried desperately to get a new cable to the top of the dive bell they kept checking on Richard and Victor and each time they, they would slouch lower and lower in their seats until both of them were laying on their side. And then finally, the rescue divers got a cable to the top, and then afterwards, they went back up to the ship, and then the ship was able this time to pull the dive bell up and back on board, but when they opened the door, both Richard and Victor had passed away. both Richard and Victor, had passed away.

I'm Peter Frankopan. And I'm Afua Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle,

that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hey, Mr. Ballin fans. Did you know you can listen to episodes of this very show ad-free and one month early on Amazon Music with your Prime membership?

That's right. All your favorite Mr. Ballin episodes can be heard on Amazon Music ad-free, and you'll always be the first one to catch our new episodes. But that's not all. You get access to other amazing shows like Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Morbid, 48 Hours, and 2020, all ad-free too. And you know what that means. Uninterrupted listening, so no more cliffhangers. Amazon Music is your home for all things true crime and offers the most ad-free top podcasts,

so we definitely have something for you. And it's already included in your Prime membership. To listen now, all you need to do is go to amazon.com slash ballin. That's amazon.com slash ballin, or download the free Amazon Music app. It's just that easy. Our next story is called The Escape. On August 6th, 2018, a manager at a grocery store in Lancaster, California, which is a town about an hour north of Los Angeles,

started getting complaints from his staff and from customers about a terrible smell coming from the front of the building. The manager, who had come in the back door that day and so hadn't smelled anything, began walking through the store towards the front in order to investigate. He only made it to the cash registers before he had to throw his arm over his mouth and his nose because the whole front half of the store reeked. The manager's first thought was that food must have somehow fallen somewhere out of view and it was rotting and that was causing the smell. But when he went past the cash registers and went out the front doors, the smell got exponentially worse and he noticed the smell was predominantly coming from this brown liquid on the ground that seemed to be leaking out of the base of one of the pillars that lined

the front of the store. And so the manager thought, well, it can't be food that's causing the smell. It's got to be a sewer pipe leak that's happened right underneath this pillar and it's seeping up through the cement and that's what's causing the smell. And so the manager went back inside the store and he called a plumber. And then a couple of hours later, the plumber showed up. The manager pointed at the brown liquid out on the front and explained what he thought was going on. And the plumber showed up. The manager pointed at the brown liquid out on the front and explained what he thought was going on. And the plumber looked at it and then looked at the manager and said, there's no sewer pipe underneath here. So whatever that liquid is, it's coming from inside the pillar. And so the manager was stumped because this pillar and all the others in the front of the store were purely decorative. There's no reason anything would be leaking out from inside

of them. There was nothing inside of them. And so the manager asked the plumber to pull off one of the bricks around the area where this liquid was coming from so they could see what was on the other side and so the plumber got his crow bar and he began prying off one of the bricks and then once it was loose enough he pulled the brick away revealing an opening into the pillar and the two men got down and they looked inside and what they saw horrified them and they immediately backed up and they called the police. Five days earlier, a 35-year-old man named Ray Rivera was pulled over by Lancaster, California police on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. As soon as the officer got out of their cruiser and began approaching Ray's vehicle,

Ray peeled off down the road, turned the corner, and was gone. The officer immediately got back in their cruiser and took off after Ray, but he had gotten a huge jump start and he had fled into a highly populated and busy area where it would be relatively easy to blend in and disappear. The officer called for backup and before long there were dozens of other cop cars in the area looking for Ray but no one could find him. A little while later the police heard over the radio that a car matching the description of the one Ray had been driving had just crashed into a local grocery store and so the police head over to the grocery store and sure enough there's Ray's white pickup truck crashed into the side of the building, but Ray is nowhere to be found.

The police began asking witnesses at the store if they had seen the man driving the white pickup truck, and a few said they had. They said after he crashed, he leapt out of the vehicle and he ran inside the grocery store and then went up a flight of stairs to the staff-only area. The police went inside the grocery store and searched the staff-only area, and they searched the rest of the grocery store, but he wasn't there. And so they assumed at some point after going inside, he managed to slip back out again and had escaped on foot. And so the police, just as a precaution, stayed outside of this grocery store for several more hours in case if Ray was

in there, they would catch him trying to leave. But after a couple of hours, he never did. And so they put out a warrant for his arrest and they left. Well, it would turn out Ray had run inside the grocery store, but he had never left. After running up to that staff-only area, he found a crawlspace and he hid inside of it for several hours until the police left. And then at some point that evening, he decided he wanted to find a better hiding spot. And so he made his way onto the roof. Now Now it's not entirely clear how he did that. Either the crawl space he was in directly connected to the roof or he got out of the crawl space and then found his way onto the roof another way. But regardless he found his way onto the roof and when he got up there he realized

the roof was totally flat until you got to the very front edge of the building, the part that looked down into the parking lot. There on the roof was this small structure that was built up just on the front end of the roof that gave the impression from the parking lot looking up that this building was a lot bigger than it really was. On the backside of this phony structure was a door that was accessible from the roof. Ray saw this access door and ran over to it. He tried the handle and it was unlocked. And so he opened it up and he went inside. Now this attic like space that sat on the front of the building really didn't have that much of a purpose to it. However, it did provide access to the insides of all of the pillars that line the front of the

store. And so it's believed that Ray, as soon as he walked inside, saw these openings and believed one of them would be the perfect hiding place. And so he lowered himself feet first into one of these hollow chutes. He got his feet and his legs, his hips, and most of his torso into this tight 9 inch by 17 inch space, but his shoulders were too broad. They would not fit into the pillar. And so he raised one arm over his head and he kept his other arm pinned by his side in order to make himself as narrow as possible. And this worked. Inch by inch, he began sliding deeper and deeper into this two-story tall pillar until he was completely out of sight. But as soon as his shoulders had gone down into that pillar,

he would have realized he had made a grave mistake. With one arm pinned above his head and the other pinned by his side, he would not have been able to pull himself back up out of this narrow space. He was stuck. And so he probably began squirming and trying to use his feet to try to get back up into the attic space, but all of that movement only made him slip farther and farther down into this pillar until his feet touched the ground at the absolute bottom. And so not only is he already in this totally compromised position that would have made it hard to breathe, he was also in such a narrow space that the walls of this pillar literally were crushing his chest, making it nearly impossible to get a full breath of air. And when he screamed out for help, nobody would have heard him because he was entombed

inside of multiple layers of cement and brick. Also, making an already horrible situation that much worse, Lancaster, California was experiencing a very significant heat wave that month. And so all day long, the sun would have been blazing down on the outside of that pillar, heating up the inside like an oven. Five days after Ray got trapped, the plumber removed that brick on the pillar,

and he and the store manager bent down and looked, and they saw Ray's leg. The smelly brown liquid that had been coming out of the pillar that had alerted everyone to this in the first place was purge fluid, which is something that comes out of a decomposing body. The next and final story of today's episode is called The Shoot. On July 30th, 2013, 56-year-old Roger Miro grabbed a bag of trash from his apartment and then walked out into the hall. He turned right and walked down the hall until he reached the trash chute, which was right on the side of the wall. He opened it up. It was like a mailbox. He opened it up.

He dropped his trash bag inside. He closed the trash chute and then walked back to his apartment. When he got back inside, he instinctively reached down to his right pocket to grab his cell phone, but it wasn't there. So he grabbed his left pocket, wasn't there either. He checked his back pockets, he's fishing around, and he realizes he doesn't have his phone. So he figures, okay, I must have put it down somewhere in my apartment. Now, Roger was legally blind, so it made looking for small things in his apartment quite difficult. But nonetheless, he began looking all over his apartment for his phone.

He started in the kitchen, he looked all over the place, checked all the surfaces, no cell phone. He went to the living room, to the bedroom, to the bathroom, but there was no cell phone. And so Roger thought maybe when he walked to the trash chute, he might have dropped the phone in the hallway. maybe when he walked to the trash chute, he might have dropped the phone in the hallway. And so he left his apartment and turned right and he walked along retracing his footsteps all the way to the trash chute. But all along the way, there was no phone on the ground. And so as he's standing in front of the opening to this trash chute, he thinks to himself, you know, maybe I accidentally put my phone in the trash bag that I have now just dropped down this trash chute. And so as Roger is standing there wondering what he's supposed to do, one of his neighbors walked

out into the hall and looked down and saw Roger standing there kind of inquisitively looking at this opening to the trash chute. And they asked Roger, you know, what's going on? And Roger explained the whole phone situation. And the neighbor said, well, you know, hey, why don't you go down to the first floor and ask the manager if you can get the key to the trash room on the first floor where all the trash goes. And so Roger said, thank you very much. He turned and made his way to the elevator and the neighbor went back inside of his apartment. Roger went down to the first floor. He went to the manager's office.

He knocked on the door. And when the door opened, the manager was obviously very busy with something and Roger would say, hey, you know, I'm just looking to get into the trash room. I think I might have accidentally thrown my phone away and I just want to have a look in the trash to see if I can find it. Now, this manager knew he was not allowed to let anybody who lived in the apartment complex go into that trash room on their own. It was a dangerous space and so the manager was supposed to go in there with them if they needed to go in and look around in the trash. But right when Roger went up to the manager's office, the manager was waiting for a very important phone call and so

couldn't really leave his office. But the manager kind of empathized with Roger and felt bad for him and said, okay, you know what? I'll just give you the key. You can go in there on your own and go looking for your cell phone i hope you find it and when you're done just bring the key back here and so roger said thank you very much he took the key he left the office and he made his way down the hall to the trash room when he got there he unlocked the lock and went inside a few hours later roger's wife came home from work and when she got to the apartment roger wasn't in there she tried calling his cell phone but he didn't pick, and when she got to the apartment, Roger wasn't in there. She tried calling his cell phone, but he didn't pick up. And so she walked around the apartment, hoping there would be some indication of where he might have gone, like a letter or something, but there was nothing.

And so Roger's wife was really concerned about this, because this was totally out of character for her husband to go out at night on his own. And so she, operating on a gut instinct called the police and reported him missing and so a few minutes later two police officers show up at this apartment building they go up to roger's apartment they speak to roger's wife and then they go into the hall and they knock on some doors of other neighbors in the area and after speaking with them one of the neighbors who had seen roger earlier, you know, hey, he lost his phone. And the last I spoke to him, he was going to go down to the trash room to try to see if he could

find his phone down there. And so the officers go down to the first floor, they go to the trash room and they try the door and it's unlocked. And when they open up the door and they look inside, right in the middle of this totally nondescript windowless room that basically looked like a basement was this huge green dumpster and above the green dumpster high up on the ceiling was this round opening and that was the bottom of the trash chute so when people like roger and the other people who lived in this apartment building dropped their trash down their respective trash chute on each floor the trash would come tumbling down and literally fall out of the ceiling into the dumpster

now this dumpster was unique it was not like other dumpsters where the top was just wide open and anyone could lob a bag of trash in now this dumpster only the left side of the dumpster had an opening for trash the rest of the dumpster was completely welded shut there was no way into it and so on the left side where this dumpster opened up to allow trash to come in, it was positioned right underneath that opening in the ceiling where the trash came tumbling down. And it wasn't just an opening.

It was like this near vertical tunnel that was welded on to the top of this dumpster. And it went straight up and it had this big open mouth at the top, almost like a funnel. And it was there to catch the trash as it fell down. And it would go down this tunnel, down into the dumpster. And so the gap between the ceiling and the top of this near vertical tunnel, this chute, was maybe three or four feet. And so when these officers looked into this room and they saw this

dumpster and the chute and this hole in the ceiling, they also saw a ladder had been propped up on the left side of the dumpster right up against that near vertical tunnel as if someone was trying to look down into the dumpster itself. And so one of the officers walked over, they climbed up the ladder, and when they looked down into this tunnel down into the dumpster, they found Roger. After a lengthy investigation, this is what is believed to have happened to him. After Roger got that key from the manager, he went to the trash room, he opened it up, and then he went inside and found this huge dumpster. And he would have quickly realized the only way to look into the dumpster, and so to go looking for his phone, was to look down

into this tunnel. There was a ladder nearby. So he grabbed it and he propped it up against the side of the dumpster. And he climbed up on top and he looked down into the tunnel, down into the dumpster. And as he was looking, either some trash from the ceiling fell down and struck him, causing him to lose his balance. Or he just slipped somehow. But either way, he lost his balance and he tumbled into the tunnel down into the dumpster. And what Roger didn't know is as soon as that happened, he was doomed. Because this was not some ordinary dumpster.

This was a trash compactor. And as soon as Roger fell down that tunnel, his body triggered an electronic sensor that activated the trash compactor. So the way this worked is there was this big metal ram inside the dumpster. There's a ram on one side and once it gets activated it will press. There's a hydraulic press that pushes it all the way to the other side. So any of the trash in this dumpster will get compressed against the other side of the dumpster. And then at that point the ram comes all the way back. And so every time trash would come down that chute, it would trigger that sensor. The trash compactor would start. It would flatten the trash and so on and so forth. So Roger has fallen down into the dumpster. He's

triggered this compactor, but he's legally blind. He's probably dazed from the fall. And so by the time he realizes what's going on and he's kind of looking around there is a hydraulic press bearing down on him and so he probably tried to jump up the tunnel to try to escape the dumpster but there was no ladder inside this tunnel and it was nearly vertical so there was no way to climb up and out of it and inside of the dumpster itself there was no emergency shutoff switch and there was no emergency exit and so at some point it's assumed that Roger realized he was not going to be able to climb up the tunnel and so he only had one direction he could go which was to retreat to the far side of the dumpster as far away from the press as he

possibly could be. But once he got over there there was nowhere for him to go and so he was forced to just wait as this hydraulic press slowly moved across until it finally reached him and crushed him. Now we don't know if that very first hydraulic press actually killed Roger. All we know is Roger was trapped inside of this dumpster for several hours and over that period of time more and more trash was dropped down the chute, activating the press over and over and over again. And so by the time the police actually looked down into the dumpster, they saw a part of Roger's body and immediately they could tell there was nothing they could do. Roger was definitely deceased. Roger's wife would sue the manager of the apartment building,

as well as the company that owned the apartment building for their negligence. But the outcomes of that case have not been made public. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast. If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already, please replace the Amazon Music Follow Button's eyedrops with acid. This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning, but in the meantime, you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our main YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. We have a registered 501c3 charitable organization called the Mr. Ballin Foundation that honors and supports victims of violent crime as well as their families. Monthly donors to the Mr. Ballin Foundation Honor Them Society will receive free gifts and exclusive invites to special live events. Go to mrballin.foundation and click Get Involved to join the Honor Them Society today. and click Get Involved to join the Honor Them Society today.

If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform and then send me a direct message. My username is just at Mr. Ballin, and I really do read the majority of my DMs. Lastly, be sure to check out our brand new website, ballinstudios.com, to buy merch, to join our Discord server, to learn about upcoming events. Basically, anything we're doing, we're going to put it on ballinstudios.com to buy merch, to join our Discord server, to learn about upcoming events.

Basically anything we're doing, we're going to put it on ballinstudios.com. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate to go. Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. In May of 1980, near Anaheim, California, Dorothy Jane Scott noticed her friend had an inflamed red wound on his arm and he seemed really unwell. So she wound up taking him to the hospital right away so he could get treatment. While Dorothy's friend waited for his prescription, Dorothy went to grab her car to pick him up at the exit. But she would never be seen alive again, leaving us to wonder, decades later, what really happened to Dorothy Jane Scott?

From Wondery, Generation Y is a podcast that covers notable true crime cases like this one and so many more. Every week, hosts Aaron and Justin sit down to discuss a new case covering every angle and theory, walking through the forensic evidence, and interviewing those close to the case to try and discover what really happened. And with over 450 episodes, there's a case for every true crime listener. Follow the Generation Y podcast on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.