Radio Rental - Episode 10

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

On today’s tapes… >> Security Guard > I’m the Stalker?

Thank you. stories we tackle next. Plus, you could win a nice prize just for sharing your thoughts. Head over to tenderfoot.tv slash survey and let your voice be heard, and you'll be entered to win a $100 Amazon gift card plus a Tenderfoot merch pack. It only takes a few minutes, and it makes a big difference. Thank you for being part of our community. We can't wait to hear from you. Let me see here. Devilishly handsome public figure. Radio celebrity. Hoarder. Well, slight hoarder, is seeking woman with big personality, who is a moderate drinker, morally adventurous, must like horror movies, enjoys walks on the beach, well, enjoys very short walks on the beach,

and being designated driver on weekends. Will put up with hoarding. Well, slight hoarding. Well, more like collecting, yes. Slight collecting. Collecting behavior of an award-winning celebrity. Boom. Oh, hello, didn't see you there. Perfect timing. Malachi and I are setting up my very

first online dating profile. I'm excited, but also cautious. I'm ex-cautious. Trademark Terry Carnation. I have been blessed slash cursed by having had many admiring fans throw themselves at me daily, but what I really want is an equal. Malachi is a wonderful companion, but like most cats, he lacks the empathy gene. Quite frankly, he's aloof. And were I to suddenly die at my home, he would probably feast on my corpse. Jerk. So I'm in the middle of setting up an account right now. The site I joined, well, it's right in my arousal

wheelhouse. I've always thought there should be a dating service geared towards the wooing of much taller women, and this site I've found is called amazon.com. Yes, so wish me good luck in the pursuit of my six-foot-four sweetheart of my dreams. Well, more about my love life later. I know why you're really here. Time for another tape. Oh, this one's very creepy. I say that all the time, don't I? Well, this time, I really mean it.

I didn't mean it all those other times. This time, I mean it. Oh, could it be my very first online dating message? Has someone slid into my BMs? Well, let's take a look. Okay. Hmm. That's odd. Seems to be a communication from a man named Dale with a job in customer support asking me for a five-star rating? We haven't even gone out yet. And I'm not attracted to tall men. Very, very short ones. Hmm. I'm open.

Anyway, I will let Amazon Security know about this Dale. And speaking of security, why don't I play you this next tape while I figure this out? Well, I was 18, six months out of high school, and I had taken a job working security. There's a city about an hour east of here called Rocky Mount, and they have a factory called Ilko Unican. Make keys, locks, and stuff like that. The hours weren't great, but the money was pretty good.

Usually, I worked evening and overnight security. It was usually myself and one other guard. We had an office, we monitored security cameras. 15 minutes in is when you usually did your first round, which was a long one, which went throughout the entire factory and the perimeter. That kind of round would take you, if you did it properly, about 35 to 40 minutes. Early 1999, I want to say around the end of March, early April, I had told my supervisor I'm going to be leaving. At that point, I had put in my notice. Within probably two days, they had hired a replacement for me. They came in one night and told myself and one of the other guards that

worked there that there was going to be a gentleman named Calvin coming in. He's supposed to be coming in around nine o'clock. He's going to start his training. They said he was a good worker, thought that he would do well at the new location. So just to take him in, give him the rundown, have him follow you on your rounds, see what the procedure's like. My primary co-worker was Amira. She was right around my age. She was 18, very self-assured and confident and pretty outgoing. We would joke a lot, almost like brother and sister. We got along really well, though. She was typically very, very strong-willed and very self-assured. Most of his training fell to me and then Amira. She and I were around 18 at the time, and he was

around 32, 33, somewhere in there. So he was a little bit older. He just seemed really quiet. Once I get settled in around somebody, I'm very talkative, so I was telling him my situation. I was planning on moving. He would not reciprocate. We noticed he had a wedding ring on, and I remember, I think the second night he was there, I'd asked him, hey, how long have you been married? Just trying to get him to open up a little bit. He didn't say a word, flipped the light off, came out and closed the door because I knew he had heard me. You know, I was still expecting him to answer. He just completely shrugged it off. Okay, well, he's quiet. He doesn't want to come in here and

talk. He doesn't know me. You know, maybe I've offended him. Well, if he wants to talk about it, he'll approach me and he'll talk talk about it he was a lot more open and a lot more talkative to her the first time the two of them went on around together you could hear them coming down the hallway he would be talking and he was a complete 180 of what i had seen not only was he a lot more talkative around her but you could tell a change in his tone of voice there was a lot more excitement in it. If anybody else got any attention from or around him, you could kind of see he didn't like it a whole lot.

Toward the end of the first week that we were training with him, I had gone on a round, and he opted not to go. At first, he said he had a stomach cramp, something like that. He didn't want to be out in the middle of the plant where there's not a restroom nearby if he had an emergency. So he wanted to stay in the office with her. I asked her, I said, is that fine with you? She's like, yeah, we'll be all right. So I went, did rounds.

I was 95% through when I heard the buzzer go off at the front door indicating that somebody had left the office and locked the outer door so that somebody couldn't get in around. And that's kind of strange since the both of them were up there. So I went back to the front. She was coming back from the cafeteria with a cup of coffee. We got to the office and there was nobody up there. She started sipping her coffee. She's like, well, I told him I would only be gone for a few minutes to get the cup of

coffee just to watch everything. And if he felt uncomfortable, go ahead and lock the door because he knew how to operate it. She's like, when I heard the buzzer, I started walking back up here. The closest restroom to the guard's office was in the nurse's office. So I went to check. There was nobody in there. And it stayed that way right up until she was about to go on her next round. At this point, he had been pretty much missing for close to an hour.

His car was still in the parking lot, so we knew that he hadn't left. We just didn't know where he'd went. We knew he had to be inside because you can't lock the door and then get outside without setting off an alarm. So she left to do her rounds. So at that point, he had been gone for 45 minutes at the least. She got just barely into the opening of the factory, which when you walk in at that hour, it's dark except for security lights.

There was nobody working in that area. She kind of heard him call her name off from the side. She turned around and saw Calvin standing there. She kind of heard him call her name off from the side. She turned around and saw Calvin standing there. Where have you been? It's been almost an hour. You just disappeared. We didn't know where you were at. He's like, well, I'm sorry, but I'm here now. I'll help you finish the round. She would ask him, are you okay? Where were you at?

He's like, well, I was in the bathroom at the nurse's station. But she knew I'd already gone there and checked when we couldn't find him and there was nobody in there. She knew that something was off, that he wasn't being honest with her. She's got to be thinking, he's out here in the dark, in the middle of the floor, knows that I'm getting ready to be doing my rounds, calls my name out, surprises me, and then when he's questioned where he's been this entire time, it's a lie. So she's already a little bit on edge.

She said that she wasn't feeling well. She came back to the office and asked me to finish her round. She also, when she asked me that, asked him to go with me. She said, I'm going to be back and forth to the bathroom. I'm going to go ahead and lock the door. You two go ahead and take care of the rounds. He went on the round with me. We would get maybe a quarter of the way through, and he would be, she didn't look so well,

should I take her a drink, a water, something like that, and go back, trying to separate himself from me on the round to go back to where he thought she was going to be. You can tell when somebody's got genuine concern about a person or situation. You can hear the tone of their voice. With him, it was more of an assertive statement. I need to go check on her. Every three or four minutes, he would ask. She didn't look good. I need to go take

her a drink. I need to go see how she's doing. Once we got back from the other round, I didn't really have any time to really convey to her what was going on. I pretended to file a report and I wrote something down to her where he wouldn't be able to see it. He's acting strange. He did leave to go to the restroom, which was probably about a half an hour after our round. So I told her I'm uncomfortable around him now because he was asking about you nonstop, wanted to come back here by himself. It just seemed like he wanted to get back here to where you were. She kind of got a little pale and she told me what happened when he appeared when she was on her previous round that she had cut short, he had popped out around the corner that's why she came back she went on for a couple minutes

and just decided i'm not doing this i'm going back to the office the next time there's a round i'll take him with me and she's like no she's like i'll do the work that i'm supposed to he's just being a creep if he tries anything i can take care of myself. And we kind of debated that until we could hear him coming back. When she went to do her last round of the night, she took him with her. We did have closed-circuit cameras in certain areas, so I would try and follow to see where they're going to make sure that he doesn't look like he's about to try anything to make sure that he's not being aggressive. They left the office to do their rounds and I was able to watch the first 15 minutes

of the round that they were on. Camera by camera watching, making sure, okay they go up, they do this, he's right there beside her the last camera angle that you see is a key station at the outer edge of the tool shop just beyond that you just see a black rectangle which is basically the hallway that leads into the brass mill it's no man's land you're not going to see a thing once they go out of sight toward the back of the facility is when you start to really wonder what's going on. Do I need to lock the door? Do I need to go back there? This is an area of the plant where there is nobody.

There are no workers in this place after 6 o'clock, just the two of them. I was standing outside the office basically watching my watch. They should be here by this point. They should be here by this point. outside of the office, basically watching my watch. They should be here by this point. They should be here by this point. That time of night, the one sound that you would always hear almost constantly grinding a key against a whetstone. It's kind of like a high-pitched scrape, almost like a buzzing sound.

That stopped. Inundated in silence. Something's not right. Something bad has gone on. And that's about the time that the phone went off. It jars you. Almost to the point where you wonder if you actually heard the phone ring. Okay, well, the light's going off, so the phone is ringing.

I'm not completely out of my head. You just hear her almost close to sobbing, really heavy breathing. You could hear her breath hitch every so often. And she said my name loud enough that you almost want to just pull the phone away from you. She's like, you need to come back here. You need to come back here. You need to come back here She sounded terrified That level of fear her voice. It told me that something something serious had gone on I Shot out of the door. I saw him come around the far corner of the hallway headed back toward the front

He's walking back past me. His clothes are not messed up. There's no blood or anything on him. Is he coming up here to look for me? Is he going to the nurse's office to get something for her? Didn't say a word, didn't really break stride, and kept going. I said, okay, well, to hell with this. I'm going to go back and see what's going on.

I found her still close to hysterics and tried to get her calm down so she could explain to me what had happened. They were actually in an area of the plant called the Brass Mill, which is where they have a furnace in each corner that they use to melt brass. To get up there, there's steel work steps, then a grading. You turn 180, you go up another flight of stairs. She got on the first flight, and there's actually a key check on that first landing. She went to turn around and go to the steps and as soon as she turned around, he was right in her face.

Less than an inch, his face from her face. He leaned in with his left hand and put it against the grading beside her her face. At that point, he started to make suggestive comments about her appearance. From what she had told me, there was a lot of sexually explicit comments coming from him about what he wanted to do to her. The first thought that came to her mind was to point out his wedding band. He said that's about to be over. She said that he just kind of smiled at her, kept his hand there, would just look at her, just eyeballing her. She pushed her way past him, and she did the smartest thing that she could have done at the time, which was to go to the

office for the brass mill, which is actually at the top of the next flight of stairs. She picked up the phone, and she hit the button to call the front desk, which is where I was at. She's like, I don't know where he went. I was like, well, he passed me. He was walking back up toward the office. I helped her up. I said, well, what we'll do is we'll go into the cafeteria and see if there's anybody that's on break so you can sit with them. I'm not going to take her back to the office if he's still sitting up there. There were two or three people that were eating, so I left her with them, went up the office. The magnetic lock had been turned off.

He was gone. Looked outside to where his car was parked. Wasn't there. When he took the job as security guard, he probably never expected the biggest threat to security to be his co-worker. But maybe it's no big deal. Maybe it's just a creep. Right?

The next shift that I had was the following night after that, which was actually my last shift before my notice was up. Got there about 7.15 that night, and Amira, the same guard, was working that night. She was in a frenzy to the point where she was at the door when she saw me pull in, waving me to come inside. I'm just like, Jesus, what in the hell is going on? You go up there, and she starts talking, and she's like, you're not going to believe what's going on. He had been arrested. There were police cars all over his house. He had actually been under investigation by, I believe, the State Bureau of Investigation

since before any of this even happened because his wife had disappeared. They found bloody clothes in a burn barrel on their property. There's a pond, and it's at the plant where I was working security. It's less than 50, 75 feet away. They found human remains in there that they were able to tie back to his wife. They found a burn barrel on a property that somebody else in his family owned that had other parts of her body in it where he had cut her up and tried to burn her to get rid of the evidence.

I don't think I really absorbed it when it happened. You shook hands with the guy. You were working in close proximity with this person. By the point that we were working with him, he was already several months removed from having done this. He not only killed his wife, but he mutilated her body, he cut it into pieces, he completely dismembered her. It was just so, it was so big, I couldn't completely process it. You really think about what might have happened.

If one of us had said something that kind of pushed him a little too far the wrong way, what might have happened. If one of us had said something that kind of pushed him a little too far the wrong way, what might have happened? It's kind of hard to really get a sense of something like that because you don't ever think that you're going to be in that type of situation. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas-drift excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BidMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Crime Writers On is the podcast where authors and journalists talk about the latest true crime series, documentaries, and podcasts. Talk about what's on the charts and find those up-and-coming podcasts you'll be talking about. It's like a fun and smart book club discussing what makes good storytelling

and teaching how to become a critical listener. Or not. And stick around for the Crime Writers Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down reviews. It's the original True Crime Review podcast. Crime Writers On, wherever you get your podcasts. Like probably right here. Terrible, dreadful, and to think that man was almost a licensed security guard. Talk about hiding in plain sight.

Well, let's take a quick break while I choose the next story. Not interested right now, but thank you for thinking of me. And send. It is the weirdest thing, dear listeners. Someone sent me another strange message on my new dating profile for exceptionally tall women, amazon.com. But this one is just a list that says tech gifts for daddy. None of these items have anything to do with romance or even fantasy. I mean, who gets off with a fax machine or a label maker? I don't understand these new kinds of dating paraphernalia. Am I missing something here? Oh, oh, that's a very nice printer. Look at that, great price too. Oh, that is really nice.

Bluetooth enabled. Okay, I'm gonna put on the next tape for you while I take a little look at this mechanical beauty. Yeah, it was around 2016, so I would have been 46 at the time. I do video production, and at the time I was a one-man band so I had a lot of gear and I thought it would be a good idea to buy a production van. The van I happened to choose to

buy was a 1994 Dodge Ram 250 cargo van with windows on it but it happens to meet the exact criteria or the Hollywood stereotype of what a kidnapper's van would look like. If you ever see anyone in any show being shoved into a van or kidnapped or if there's some black ops team or someone spying on you or something, it's always this type of van. It just meets the profile of what apparently a kidnapper or some sort of burglar or criminal of general kind would want. As I was driving home one evening from work in my van, I was driving, it was still sunny outside, and there was a woman pushing a stroller, staring at me very intently. It actually made me feel a little uncomfortable. She had sunglasses on so I couldn't see her eyes,

but she kind of had her mouth hanging open and her head was just kind of on a swivel. She was walking one way and then staring into the street at me driving by. My road also happens to have speed bumps and I had a lot of equipment and fragile gear in the back of the van, so I was driving very slowly over these speed bumps. I was just going through my daily life just trying to work my job and go home. About a week later after the incident that I had already mostly forgotten about, we have a group email thread for the HOA in the homeowners association that I live within. The email list for the HOA

started heating up with emails flying back and forth. One guy got on there and mentioned that a white van was stalking his wife. That's pretty serious because there are parents with children in there. I have my own children. I have two little girls. And then he went on to describe it as a white van. And that's when I was like, uh-oh, okay. I didn't know that that man was somehow connected to the woman that I had seen, but I replied to all, to everyone in the email list and told them, there is a resident that lives there with a white van, so don't come after me with your pitchfork and mob mentality. I told them my address. I told them the plate number on my van. I just wanted my neighbors to feel safe,

and I don't want to have the police called on me in my own neighborhood or area. Since the topic of the email thread that was going around was all the suspicious things that people had seen in the neighborhood, I joked at the end of my email and said, by the way, I saw a very suspicious woman that stared at me very inappropriately, and it made me a little uncomfortable. And it was the very last sentence in my email, I was like, oh by the way, I was driving by

in my white van, I stated the time of day, what day it was, so they could figure out on their own whether it was me that they saw or whether it was an actual stalker. And he didn't need to reply, I mean once he realized that that was me and I'm a resident there and he now knows who I am and we could be cool, he said, I can read between the lines and see who you really are or there's something about you that you're not sharing. Reading in between the lines of my email that I didn't like him or like his wife or that I was trying to cast doubt or belittle their version of events,

he was so angry to the point that other neighbors that are normally really quiet and docile on the email thread started getting on and saying, this email is making me really uncomfortable. So I stopped replying to all, and after a while his emails stopped coming to me. Shortly after that, I have a small dog as well that I would walk through my neighborhood. And walking by a particular house, suddenly this girl would come out and be extra

friendly with us and chat about our dog. And it was every time we walked by, she would come out from her home. I estimate her to have been about 10 years old. She would tell me things like, oh, my family's really poor. I remember her saying this and thinking it was really strange that she would say something like this. She would always follow it up with, I'd do almost anything for some money. She would bring up something like,

my family's really poor. I wish we could afford a dog, but we can barely afford to feed ourselves. I'd do anything for some money. The girl didn't look hungry or poor or anything like that. And she just said she wanted to say hello to my dog. And then one day, she shows up at our front door. Said that she wanted to come over and play with our dog,

and that her dad would never let her have a dog, and she would just like to spend time at our house and hang out with the dog. Can I play with your dog? Can I come in and play with your dog? That would be very inappropriate, because I don't even know her parents, and I don't want my kids going to some stranger's house, I wouldn't want any other kid having coming over to my house and I told her no you and I need to talk to your parents before you ever come here again and I want to talk to them anyway now so please I need to talk to your parents. About a week later there's another girl in the neighborhood that we hang out with, my two daughters, my two kids. It's kind of like a play date. So I'll take them over to her place for a play date or she'll come over to ours.

We were over visiting at her place and she was about seven at the time. She told me she had an older friend who was about 10 and said that that girl had confided in her that her dad was telling her to talk to me. She told her that her dad was making her be friendly to us. This little girl had told her friend that the dad was inside the house taking pictures of us talking whenever I walked by with my dog and was compiling some sort of attack fodder for accusing me of something. Taking pictures of us. That's when it kind of clicked for me what was going on. So he was so convinced reading in between the lines of my email

or seeing me drive by that one day that I was some sort of child abductor, child molester, kidnapper, that he was trying to use his child as bait. I had never met the husband face-to-face. I had only seen the wife in the incident where she was staring at us in a way that I later found out was very accusatory. He's been taking pictures of us,

not just me talking to his child, but my kids and my dog and everything. I was violated and shocked to the point where I didn't react to it for maybe a full day. Started just making my own guesses as to what he was planning on doing. Judging from the initial incident with his wife and the tone of his emails and then this additional information, I just felt like he was generating some sort of campaign against me. They seem to be doing what any good parent would do. Mysterious white vans in the neighborhood.

We've all seen that TV special. But when the same loved ones you were trying to protect become a part of your scheme, maybe you've gone too far. He eventually contacted the family and brought up what their daughter had revealed, but they never admitted to anything. The email stopped, and the little girl wasn't seen again. Maybe it was a coincidence.

I don't think so. She stopped coming over, she stopped approaching us, and I've never heard from them again, and it's been four years now. My conclusion from the ordeal was maybe this is a wife who was in that sort of stir-crazy mode, had seen maybe too many movies, and told her husband. He probably got excited and thought they were on to something, and perhaps they genuinely were concerned that there was a danger to the neighborhood which is why he brought it up to the HOA and then might

have felt that I was belittling his position on the matter. My kind of take is that assuming everyone is out to get you kind of creates a confrontational situation in itself. If he really felt like I was a stalker, why would he put his child in danger like that? I mean, as a dad, you constantly have to be aware of your surroundings and who your children are in contact with. And not only that, you kind of have to imagine the different possibilities of scenarios that can happen. Me putting my daughter in a scenario like that

is just something that could never cross my mind. All of my interactions involving the safety of my children have revolved around a sort of defensive, whereas he was just at the equivalent of putting his child on the front lines. I guess another take would be, I'm a lot less suspicious of people now judging judging them by their appearance now that I've tasted a little bit of what it what it feels like

I feel also a little bit angry at the dad for pretending that that they're victims when there are real victims out there I feel like they're kind of belittling the people that have really been affected by kidnappers or by by child molesters or abductors or anything like that. Pretending to be a victim of something that you're not, it's insulting to those victims, to real victims. Unnerving. That one's not for the faint of heart. But I guess I should have warned you earlier. Oh well. Strike up one more reason to stay inside and be a recluse. Fortunately, I've been practicing that for years. Well, I think that about wraps it up for today,

but we'll be back next week with another lineup to keep you teetering on the edge of your seat. Until then, keep calm and radio rental on. Wait, no. Keep calm and listen along. No. Okay. Keep calm and carnation on. Rental.com. Okay, I'm terrible at these things. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, please at me on your Twitter mobile or at Terry Carnation or at Radio Rental USA or, if you prefer, on Instagram, at Terry Carnation or at Radio Rental. All serious tagline suggestions welcome.

Thank you for joining me, Terry Carnation. Me, the person you've joined. Until next time, Terry Carnation. Produced by Payne Lindsey, Mike Rooney, and me, Meredith Stedman. Written by Meredith Stedman with additional writing by Mark Laughlin. Sound design by Cooper Skinner. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Additional production by Christina Dana and Mason Lindsey. Cover art by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

Voice acting by Ryan Jones, Casey Willis, and the Tenderfoot TV team. Shout out to Tiny Doors ATL for the creation of our real-life miniature radio rental store. You can check that out and more on their Instagram at tinydoorsatl. Special links to Grace Royer and Oren Rosenbaum at UTA, as well as support from the Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, and the team at Cadence 13. If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, RadioRentalUSA.com. Follow us on Instagram at Radio Rental and on Twitter at Radio Rental USA. You can also follow the beloved Terry Carnation on social media.

Just search at Terry Carnation. On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. And don't forget to share our show with a friend of the genre. Thanks for listening. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for 20 years and have taken people into haunted places to uncover macabre tales

and dark secrets. On my podcast, Haunted Canada, I share bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Then join me if you dare.