Radio Rental - Episode 30
Episode Date: June 17, 2022On today’s tapes… >> Bicycle Bandit > Water Tunnel ...
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we have an extra episode for you hosted by one of our favorite Radio Rental. To show our appreciation, we have an extra episode for you, hosted by one
of our favorite Radio Rental shop dwellers. Enjoy! Träning av I was probably 16 or 17.
So this would have been 1999, maybe even 2000.
We lived in central California, just like on a little farm, a little 20 acres.
We had 20 acres of grapes and our closest neighbor would have been, I guess, 10 acres away.
I guess it would be the equivalent of like half a block away probably.
We had cities kind of close to us, but we were kind of far out there.
It was kind of nice because it was quiet.
You know, me and my siblings, we would run around outside all the time.
It was just kind of quiet country life, I guess you would call it.
I have two older sisters and one younger brother.
My oldest sister, she did not live at the house anymore.
She had already moved out.
So this was summertime.
She came home for her birthday, and we were just going to have a birthday celebration
for her.
My cousin had come to visit, so she was there also.
And we were just all kind of there,
going to have a little birthday party for my sister.
My cousin and I were just hanging out outside.
We had gotten another piece of cake.
This was probably 11.30 at night.
We went and sat outside on the tailgate of my dad's truck.
As we were sitting there, you know, you could kind of see the road,
but, you know, out in the middle of the country, there's no street lights.
It was pretty dark.
We see what looks like a person on a bike just ride by real slow, just right in front of us.
And it did seem like they were riding a little bit slower than, you know, if they were trying to get somewhere in a hurry.
They were just going a little bit slower than you would expect.
We could see the spokes of the tires go by.
We could kind of hear the noise of a bike,
but we couldn't really see the person on it.
And they went by kind of slow, and it was strange
because it was 1130 at night,
and it's the middle of nowhere.
Traffic wasn't too common on our street,
and people riding by on their bikes was even less common.
As soon as this person rode by on the bike, we kind of just looked at each other.
It kind of scared us a little bit.
We weren't expecting to see anybody out there.
We knew that it wasn't anybody in our family.
I think we kind of just looked at each other and we might have screamed or we might have just kind of gotten wide-eyed and gasped and went inside and we said,
oh my gosh, we just saw somebody ride by on a bike outside.
It wasn't really that big of a deal to anybody. It just kind of scared us a little bit.
It was just kind of the rest of a normal night.
My parents went to bed. I think, in fact, everybody else
ended up going to bed, and me and my oldest sister that we had had the birthday party for,
her and I, we stayed up late. We were watching movies in the living room.
We were up until probably like three in the morning, just kind of watching movies. About that time, we decide, you know, time to go to bed.
And because my sister was there visiting and she didn't live there anymore,
she didn't have a bedroom anymore.
So she was going to sleep in my room with me.
I let her sleep in my bed and I kind of just made a little bed.
I think I had a sleeping bag that I just put on the floor
with my pillow and blankets in that.
It would have been in front of a window that was in my room.
It was summertime, so we had the windows open.
We didn't have an air conditioner in the house.
All the windows were open.
Where we lived, when we did have the windows open at night, you'd hear a train
go by in the distance. In the summertime, we could hear the bullfrogs at the pond across
the street. But other than that, it was pretty quiet out there. It's not like you could hear
traffic and sirens and things like that.
Outside the window, I heard kind of a rustling of, you know, leaves, branches.
It did sound like maybe it was an animal walking around outside.
I didn't really think too much of it.
For some reason, I told my sister, you know, I hear something outside. I'm going to turn the radio on just so we can go to sleep so I don't hear whatever that is outside.
As soon as I turned the radio on, we fell asleep.
It was probably no more than 30 minutes later when we suddenly woke up to the sound of my other sister screaming from the other room. Her screaming in the other room kind of jolted us awake. It was kind of chaos
for a few minutes. We didn't really know what was going on. We just heard my sister screaming. She yelled, there's someone in my room.
My dad got out of bed and came in to check on her.
She said that there had been someone in her room, but they had jumped out the window.
My dad went into the other room. He called the police. He was on the phone with them just real quick. Went
outside and kind of walked around the house to see if he could see anybody out there.
Got in his truck and went up and down the road just to see if anybody was there, if
he could see anybody. He wasn't gone more than a few minutes, and when he got back, the sheriff's department
was actually already at our house.
They had just pulled in, kind of all at the same time, and this was all within just two
or three minutes, it seemed like.
Once the police showed up, they looked around the property to see what they could find. The police stayed there for a few hours doing their investigation.
When they talked to my sister, she told them that she had been asleep.
She had a pet bird in her room.
She had a cockatiel bird in a cage in her room.
She said that she woke up
because the bird was just going nuts. It was just squawking and chirping and going nuts.
The moon must have been out that night because she could kind of see someone standing in
her room. She actually said that she thought that it was one of us in her room, either me or my cousin or my brother.
She said something like, get out of my room.
This person that was in her room actually
crouched down a little bit.
She could just see their silhouette,
but she saw they crouched down and kind of started
moving towards her a little bit.
When the person did that, he reached out and grabbed her by the leg.
And that's when she realized that this was not one of us playing a joke on her,
trying to be funny, trying to scare her.
Once she started screaming, the man immediately jumped back out the window and gone pretty quickly.
The police were there for quite a few hours, it seemed.
They were looking for footprints outside of my sister's window.
They were taking pictures outside of her window,
in her room.
The man actually left a scuff mark on the wall when he was jumping back out.
We had like a flower bed that went around
a good portion of the house.
It didn't have anything planted in it at the time,
so it was just dirt.
They did find shoe prints in front of every window to
where it just seemed like somebody walked up to the window looked inside
and then maybe went on to the next window looked inside the next window.
Outside my sister's window they found the screen for the window had been taken
off. It was bent a little bit and just kind of sat down on the ground.
Outside my window they found footprints. They found evidence of someone being out
in the grapes. About three or four rows in they found evidence that someone had
been sitting there, standing there for
quite a while. They found human feces, so he must have been there long enough to, you
know. What they thought was that this was the person that rode by on the bike, and that
they had been sitting there waiting for everybody to go to sleep from probably about the time my
cousin and I saw this person on the bike to when he broke into my sister's window.
When I got to the window that I had been sleeping under, we noticed that the screen had been
cut. It was just slit down across the bottom and then back up about halfway through
the screen. Made us think that if we hadn't been talking right before we went to bed,
he probably would have come in through my window. I feel like he heard us talking and he realized
that someone was maybe sleeping right under that window and decided not to go in that window.
In front of my sister's window, where he actually
came into the house from, there was just a white five-gallon
bucket.
My dad had them all around the house for various things
that he was working on outside.
But there was a five-gallon bucket just kind of placed under the window.
He would have had to step up on the bucket
to see into the window and actually to even be able
to get into the window.
When they first responded to the call,
they did not find him.
We were just in shock that this had happened.
As they were doing their investigation,
the sheriff's department did tell us
that they had had similar break-ins like this before in our area,
and so they were actually staked out in the area that night
waiting to see if a call would come in like this.
That's why they were able to respond so quickly
when my dad called the police.
They said that they had had these types of break-ins
before they thought that it was all
the same person doing it.
One of the instances that they told us about was a woman had
woken up in the middle of the night because she smelled smoke, like cigar
smoke, cigarette smoke, and when she woke up she saw someone sitting in the
corner of her room just smoking a cigar. It was kind of the same type of thing,
you know, she screamed and the man kind of fled the house. This was just kind of the same type of thing. You know, she screamed and the man kind of fled the house.
This was just kind of his thing.
He'd break into people's houses.
He didn't really steal anything.
I think he might have taken a few dollars out of my sister's room.
He would break into the rooms where women were sleeping
and just kind of watch them sleep, I guess.
I remember seeing an article in the paper.
They dubbed him the bicycle bandit.
It was either a few months or a few weeks that they were tracking him.
What they told us at the time was that they believed it was someone that had escaped from a facility that helps people with their mental issues.
They thought that he was someone that had found a man that had hung himself.
I believe he hung himself from a tree just out kind of in the middle of nowhere.
And they thought that this was the guy that had been breaking into houses.
And I don't think that it happened again after that,
so they must have had reason to believe that it was him.
It was a little surreal.
This was the most exposure to any of this type
of criminal activity.
This was the most exposure to that that I had ever had.
It was pretty scary, and it shook us up for quite a while.
My sister, for a long time, she slept with a baseball bat in her bed.
It's such a violation to just have somebody in your house that's not supposed to be there.
Especially when they're breaking in because they know that people are home and people are sleeping.
Something about that just seems worse than if somebody wanted to break into a house and steal from you.
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Hello? Hello? Is anybody there? Hello? Hello?
I can hear you in the background.
Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?
Hello? Well, this was 1981, and I lived in rural northern California.
Just graduated high school.
You know, it's a small town, a very beautiful area up in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
There was a ton of lakes in the area, but we also had these beautiful rivers and these big, deep-cut canyons
surrounded by beautiful pine trees and oak trees,
crystal-clear water.
In the summer, it was warm.
It was a lot of fun.
A group of friends and I decided to go to the river for the day.
The weather just started to get nice, springtime weather.
We headed there.
There was probably a group of about six or eight of us that went.
You would park on the side of the road,
or they have little parking areas for it,
and then you would, you know, grab your things and hike up a little ways.
The further you got away, the more secluded it was.
Families typically were really close,
and we didn't want to deal with a bunch of little kids and things like that.
So we would hike up a little ways, and that's where this one pool area that had a little bit of
a naturally occurring beach, which you'd kind of camp out for the day. And we'd listen to music,
have drinks, you know, bring snacks and whatnot, and just spend the day swimming.
There would be other, you know, groups of people or, you know, individuals setting up their little
camps, you know, either side of the river, people would set up, claim their little spot.
And there was quite a few times
that I would see this out-of-place guy.
He was probably about 30,
very thin, tall, lanky kind of guy.
Being that this was the early 80s,
we're all wearing, like, cut-off jeans and stuff like that.
He was wearing a Speedo, and he would always wear a Speedo.
You know, people swim in Speedos, sure, but it was just weird.
You know, especially at that time, you know, that era in our history, if you will.
It just seemed strange.
I remember talking with my circle of friends,
oh, there's that same creepy, I'll call him the creepy Speedo guy.
He was there just in his Speedo and himself,
always seemed to be by himself, never with another group.
He was always dirty.
He would just always kind of be near other groups,
just there and kind of just scanning the surroundings,
I guess would be, for lack of a better term, was what he would be doing.
He seemed harmless, but he would also show his state of arousal occasionally to people.
That was just like, wow, just stay across the river from us, thanks.
Especially, we're all like teenage boys and we're like, oh God, this guy's going to, you
know, attack us or something. But I didn't think much of him other, oh, God, this guy's going to, you know, attack us or something.
But I didn't think much of him other than he was just weird, you know,
just strange, strange man, always there.
I mean, it's like, does he know when I'm coming?
Because he would be there.
Maybe he was homeless. I don't know.
He just was very, very strange.
And, I mean, just dirty.
Just looked like, dude, just dive in the river.
You're right there.
Just dive in and clean off yourself.
So we get to the river, and we kind of set up our little spot,
spread out some blankets, and we had drinks in a cooler and whatnot.
I kind of went in for a quick dip, and so did some of the other guys.
The water in that area was probably 20, 30 feet deep.
It's a very deep pool.
There was this one spot that I loved. It was this underwater tunnel,
basically formed by these rocks, these boulders, you know, very, very large rocks.
And this was off to the side, kind of like the wall of the pool. And so you would dive down this
one little area, you go down about six feet and then you go into this tunnel cave thing
and you're surrounded by rocks on all sides
and then you would just swim through and it was, you know, you're swimming
with your eyes open underwater, we didn't have, you know, masks or anything
we're just using our, you know, naked eyes underwater
but there was enough ambient light between the rocks and the crevices
that you could see your path and then you would go
a certain distance, probably 10, 12 feet, and then there was this
opening between these rocks, and you would swim up until you reached the surface, and
then you just crawled out between the rocks.
As you got up to the opening, it was pretty tight.
It was barely enough to squeeze through, you know, for the average-sized teenage kid.
I had done that 20 times probably in, you know, several years.
It was just fun.
You know, you're kids, it's adventurous, it's fun.
I said to my one friend, Jeff, I think he was about 16.
I said, hey, do you want to check out the underwater tunnel?
And he was intrigued.
He's like, sure.
And that's when I explained to him the process.
You know, you dive down six, eight feet deep.
You got to hold your breath for a good two minutes. And he's like, okay. You know, you dive down six, eight feet deep. You got to hold your breath for, you know, a good two minutes,
and he's like, okay.
You know, he was ready for it,
and then we decided that we were going to do it.
Water was nice and warm.
He and I swam because it was across the little pool area
from where we were, so we swam across,
and that's when I noticed the creepy guy
kind of took notice of us.
My friend Jeff was kind of a pretty boy, and I think this guy was, like, intrigued by that.
I don't know. I mean, I'm speculating, of course.
But Jeff was a very good-looking kid and a swim team-type kid, all-American athlete.
You know, I didn't say anything to Jeff, but I did notice that the, you know, the creepy Speedo dude was kind of checking us out, so to speak.
Didn't think much of it.
You know, he's just the weird guy that's always there.
We get ready to do the dive into the tunnel.
And I'm like, you know, you ready for this?
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's excited.
I'm, you know, I'm excited.
You know, I checked the exit.
We always check our surroundings just to be safe.
These are big boulders, but these rivers are raging rivers in the wintertime.
They're 10 feet higher than what they are in the summer because of the snow melt off.
And things do, even the big rocks will shift or a tree will fall.
It's underwater, you don't see it.
That's why we always check.
We carefully swim out to where we would normally jump or dive in, declaring it safe for, you
know, for use.
We would always do that that we would always check that
i mean that was instilled in me by my family as a young kid and so i checked the first exit which
is the closer one and make sure everything was good nothing had shifted in the winter
it looked fine and then i also just happened to check the other exit, the further one, just as a backup.
We get ready, take the deep breaths.
Okay, here we go.
We're going to do this.
And so we dive down.
He follows me.
So he's right on my...
There's a couple of times that his shoulder bumped my foot as we're swimming along.
There's no way to really communicate at that point.
Obviously we're underwater. So he's just following me. And I said, it's only a couple of minutes. It's pretty quick to really communicate at that point. Obviously, we're underwater.
So he's just following me. And I said, it's only a couple minutes. It's pretty quick,
but it said it's fun. And he was definitely excited. So we're swimming along. And I see the first exit there on the right. You can see the rays of light streaming it through the water.
You can see it very clearly. You push off the bottom of the cave or the tunnel, whatever you
want to call it. You push off the bottom,
give yourself a little bit of momentum.
And as I swim up, my head gets wedged
between a rock and this branch.
And this branch is kind of, I wouldn't say thorny,
but it's got some sharp edges to it.
And it slices into the side of my head.
I can feel that I'm bleeding and and I'm stuck. Oh, my God.
I am stuck between this rock and this branch.
I can't get out of the exit, and it's, I mean, it's terrifying.
And I have no way to communicate with Jeff.
In fact, he runs into me.
I'm like, what the hell are we gonna do?
So I push back, and then it slices me more.
I mean, I had all these cuts, you know,
and I can see a little bit of blood floating in the water.
Of course, your adrenaline just goes out of whack right then.
You can't breathe because you're still underwater.
So I push backwards.
I bump into Jeff.
He's probably disoriented at this point.
I'm like, we've got to go.
You know, it's too far back to the first exit.
We've hit the point of no return.
I motioned for him.
He's obviously seen the blood, you know, from me.
You know, you can still see pretty well down here
because there's lots of screaming little crevices and whatnot.
Not that you could swim out of them.
They're too small.
You can see what's going on.
So I'm sure that terrified him.
I thought to myself, this is how I'm going to die.
This is it because it's just, it's too far.
I seriously thought this was it.
And so we just make it to the other exit,
gasping for air when we get there.
We both get out of the water.
He's like, what the fuck happened?
I'm like, oh my God. And he sees me and I have like these lacerations
on the side of my head
there's just blood trickling down you know the side of my head
you know onto my shoulder
and he's like what happened
and I said there was a tree or something
or a limb or I don't know what but it was blocking
the entrance and he's like mad at me
and I'm like no dude I checked it before we got in the water. His first reaction was anger towards me.
What the fuck, dude? Why did you do that? And then he sees the blood. I didn't do it on purpose. I
meant to go through there, but it was blocked. He's like, what? You know, yeah, I said, dude,
it was blocked. His first reaction was anger. And then he realized, you know, it wasn't my fault,
because he knew I had checked the exit. We're both just thankful to be alive. I have never appreciated breathing so much until that moment. We walk over, and there was a branch wedged into
that exit from up top. It wasn't there.
It was not there when I checked five minutes prior.
And I mean, the branch had like green leaves still on it.
So I mean, it was not, it wasn't there for the winter
or it didn't, you know, float downstream
and land there and wedged in.
It was put there.
It couldn't have fallen and then been wedged in there.
There's no way.
There's just, it's not possible.
There's just, it was wedged.
It was stuck in that little opening between the rocks
and created a small enough space that, you know,
there's no way I could have fit through it.
And I'm still a little disoriented and catching my breath.
And I see Mr. Creepy Guy, still in his ugly Speedo.
Now he's not dirty.
He's been in the water.
He's across the way from where we were, and it looks like he's pissed.
At first I thought, how did this happen?
But then when I saw him clean, he was always dirty.
Always dirty.
I stared down that guy.
I was like, why would you do that?
What pleasure do you get out of potentially killing two kids?
You know, what's wrong with you?
I know this guy.
I don't think he maybe wanted to kill us, but he got pleasure out of potentially hurting us or causing us distress. Something's
wrong with him. Something's definitely wrong with him. Would there be a chance that the branch
just happened to fall and land right there at that precise two minutes while we were underwater,
I guess it's theoretically possible.
And the guy just happened to have been in the water
because he was across the way.
Only way that he could have got there that quickly
is to have to have swum over there.
There's no other way because he was on the other side of the river
from where this little tunnel was.
When we finally get out, he's back to where he was, but now he's clean.
He had to have gone in the water.
And I just think there was just something sick about him.
He just saw what we were doing, and he wanted to mess with us.
And if it goes really bad, oh well.
This guy was, there was something wrong with him.
Definitely something wrong. Help! I'm sorry. Thank you. Additional production by Eric Quintana. Written by Meredith Stedman. Additional writing by Mark Laughlin.
Sound design by Cooper Skinner.
Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set.
Cover art by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.
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