RedHanded - The Murder of Sydney Loofe: Aubrey Trial and Bailey Boswell | #472

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Cursing the courtroom and then slashing his own throat with a contraband shiv, Aubrey Trail had lived up to his promise, turning the trial of Bailey Boswell and himself into a complete circus. Although the pair’s bizarre relationship, full of kinks, vampires and witches, had already seen to that.Boswell and Trail had murdered 24-year-old Sydney Loofe six months previously before dismembering her and draining her body entirely of its blood. Why? According to Boswell, her partner in crime, Trail, was an ageless vampire who controlled a coven of witches. Killing Loofe and “breathing in her last breath” was all Boswell needed to do to become the sacred 13th witch, before being granted the magical ability to turn into a cat.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

When Sydney Luth was swiping through Tinder on the 11th of November 2017, she felt like life had been pretty rough on her recently. The woman she loved had left her for a man and then almost immediately got pregnant. Sydney was working at Menards, a homeware shop in Lincoln, Nebraska. And the monotony, loneliness and money worries were all getting on top of her. Earlier that year, she'd taken a month off on mental health leave. Just days before, she told her manager

that she was thinking about checking into a hospital for depression and that she couldn't remember the last time she'd woken up without crying. So, when Sydney matched on Tinder with a new woman named Audrey, it felt like life might have finally thrown her a bone. Audrey was a 25-year-old, beautiful, flirty blonde, and they clicked instantly. So when Audrey invited Sydney to go for a drive and a smoke around Lincoln, It was just too exciting to pass up.

They cruised around the outskirts of the city, smoking weed, holding hands and listening to music for hours. Then Audrey dropped Sydney off at home and kissed her good night. They arranged to meet up again the very next night. They sent each other more than 140 messages in the few days after they matched. Sydney texted her friends. Things are finally looking up. I had a good day at work yesterday.

Didn't feel like crying. She had no reason. to notice the man in the leather jacket who brushed past her on his way into the store where she worked, a man who called himself the vampire. He left having purchased a bottle of Drano and a length of nylon rope. Earlier that day, he had also bought a hacksaw, utility knives, plastic dropcloths, and two hand-cranked meat grinders. After work, Sydney posted a picture.

of her outfit on Snapchat with the caption, Ready for my date? And then a heart eyes emoji. And Sydney would never be seen alive again. So far this story might seem tragically familiar. The sad case of a young girl who had the bad luck to fall into the crosshairs of some sort of crazed killer.

But this being October, there is so much more darkness to come. In fact, if this case was a horror film, it would probably be from dusk till dawn. And that's because much of it is rooted in the everyday. Sex, weed. When's Selma Hyatt getting here? I'm bored. Maybe later, in the form of a witch. Okay.

And yeah, it fits that movie because much of this story is very rooted in the every day. Sex, weed and small-time cons in small-town America. But then, halfway through, bam, vampires and witches. By the time this case reached trial, it had exploded into a frenzy of occult rituals, violent sex and lunar magic. And it reached a very bizarre climax when the man who called himself the vampire shouted out to a Nebraska courtroom, I curse you all before slashing at his own throat with a razor blade. This man, said vampire, claimed to be a thousand-year-old immortal being. that could walk through walls, read minds, and obviously, fly.

He told his coven of 13 adoring witches that they were destined to be together. The witches could even develop special powers, from healing to sensing danger, and even conversing with animals. But buried inside the vampire's supernatural mythology and sexual fantasy was something much darker. Murder. He told his followers that there was only one way for them to take their place. at his side and gain their full powers, and that was by torturing a person to death and breathing in their final breath.

19 days after Sydney lives disappearance, human remains were found in a ditch. Her body had been cut into 14 pieces. Most of the internal organs were missing and every drop of blood had been drained. A tattoo on a disembodied arm confirmed it was Sydney. In curling text it read, everything will be wonderful someday. I'm Hannah. I'm Sruti. This is red-handed. I'm sad on the inside already. My God. Oh, it's going to get fucking bonkers. And it's not going to get less sad, but it is going to get absolutely fucking batshit crazy. Because first off, let's see. Let's see. Let's start with the fact that the woman that Sydney had been texting and meeting up with the woman that she had met on Tinder was not in fact somebody called Audrey. Her name was actually Bailey Boswell.

But it gets even more confusing as we'll find out because she's chosen the name Audrey because she's in cahoots with someone called Aubrey to do all of this. It's very confusing. And going through the research, the script for this, I was just like, what's happening? So you're going to have to follow along. But what you need to know is she does meet up with Bailey. That is the woman that she goes on the date with. That's the woman she smokes weed with, listens to music with, and starts to like get feelings for. But Bailey Boswell is pretending her name is Audrey. But later on, we're going to introduce you to Aubrey. So let's get on board. It's a regular name. Not making it easy, are we?

So yes, let's talk about Bailey Boswell first, though. Firstly, she's a real, she's a real piece of something. But great name. Bailey Boswell, great name, starting off there. And other than the great name, she doesn't get off to a great start in life, I do have to say. Her father was a drug addict who had been killed by a meth head on a shooting spree when Bailey was just 18 months old. And later, she's kicked out of college after a teacher saw her smoking weed on Instagram. and shortly after that, she met a guy named Freddy.

Freddie was an American football player and, has to be said, total sack of shit. It started with domestic abuse and soon enough, Freddie was using Bailey's image to run scams on Tinder. Before long, he also started selling her for sex work. Author Chet Hardin spoke to Bailey in a lot of detail for his fantastic book on this case, which is called The Vampire's Cult. And Bailey tells Hardin that after she had a baby girl in 2015, she remembers a brief period of absolute bliss. As blissful as I suppose you can get with an abusive drug-addicted pimp as your husband. But when she and Freddie were arrested for drug possession, child services took the baby into care.

Still though, she stayed with him. And one day, Freddie sent Bailey into a hotel room to give a massage to a man about 25 years her senior. And the man looked grotesque. His two front teeth had rotted down to stubs. His hair was wild and unkempt, but unlike most of her clients, this man actually spoke to her. And, despite herself, Bailey spoke back. She told him all about her abusive, cheating, drug-addicted pimp husband.

And the man offered to go outside and shoot him, right there and then. When Bailey declined, the man put $400 into her hand and said, said, one day you're going to be mine. Now this man kept in touch, wiring Bailey money whenever she needed it, hundreds of dollars at a time. And he introduced himself as Aubrey Trail. Yes. Okay.

Okay. It's all coming together now. After Bailey finally separated from Freddie, Aubrey Trail bought her a car. He paid a year's rent up front for a new apartment. so that Bailey could regain custody of her daughter. Aubrey even bought her furniture and paid for the floor in this apartment to be replaced.

Once, Bailey even noticed a sharp-dressed man following her around everywhere she went. Aubrey later explained that he was paying this man to protect her from his enemies. So from the outside, Bailey was starting to turn her life around. She had regular work as a waitress, she had her young daughter back, and she had a shiny new apartment of her very very.

own. But it was all very much in the shadow of Mystery Man, Aubrey Trail. And of course, we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch or free floors. If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff and they said maybe she'll find out where this girl is i've saw him violent backhanded a and that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it the clock is ticking down and the woods are calling there are a lot of demons in putnam county but i've met the devil and he's real I'm Paul Solitarev, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry.

Listen to The Devil's Quarry Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear The Devil's Quarry Season 2 add free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Aubrey pulled Bailey into his weird world. The pair would drive up and down the country, doing what trail called antique shopping. But what you and I would call stealing. I love antiquing. I just love antiquing.

It's just like him just going around with Bailey using her as a distraction so he can steal shit from antique shops. That's basically what he's calling antique king. And he loves it. It's literally other than being an immortal being a thousand-year-old vampire. where Antiquing is his favourite thing. I would love to write a Tinder profile for him because he's definitely going to appeal to certain subset of women out there.

So these two on their Antiquing missions would pay for expensive treasures with bad checks, they'd stuffed jewelry into their pockets, and distract staff, while the other one were ransacked the whole place. One investigator has estimated that they may have made up to up to half a million dollars over this time. You're not going to make that one, invented.

And to Aubrey Trail, this was as good as life could get. He said later, I still dream about it. That would be my heaven, stranded in an antique mall for all eternity, stealing from them. We were living hard, we were living fast, and we were having a blast. I love that. Even in death, he's not just like, I would love a home fully furnished with beautiful antiques that I love. He's like, I would love to be in an antique malt stealing from them. Like, why?

It must be stolen, the ultimate bargain. It's as cheap as it can get, isn't it? Can't get much cheaper, it's free. Oh my God. The secret ingredient is crime. Absolutely. Delicious. That's where the satisfaction comes from. Well, Aubrey Trail was having a blast.

That is certain. And that is because Aubrey Trail was always totally in control. Bailey Boswell had to ask his permission before doing anything, before she smoked a cigarette, before she called her daughter, before she got a drink of water, before she even went to the toilet. And if he called her, Bailey had to answer immediately. And if she stepped out of line, he'd spank her with a belt.

Complicating this dynamic was the fact that his total dominance in the outside world was, as we often see in cases like this, flipped on its head when it came to the bedroom. Because, as we'll be coming back to, nauseatingly often in this episode, and I can only apologise, Aubrey Trail liked it rough. And most of the time, this involved things being done to him and things being put in him.

Before long, Aubrey Trail introduced Bailey to his extensive collection of whips, dildos, vibrators, and strap-ons for this very purpose. Occasionally, Aubrey would even want to be incapacitated with tranquilizers first. And the other thing Bailey also had to accept from Aubrey was that she was not the only woman in his life. He was clear from the very start. If Bailey wanted to be with him, she had to share him with his coven. Aubrey told Bailey that he was a vampire,

who had been alive, centuries. He could fly, he could walk through walls, and most importantly, read minds, especially hers. And his coven of 13 witches was bound to him for all eternity. Unlike him, the witches were mere mortals, but they were reincarnated over and over again. It was his responsibility to seek them out in every lifetime and bring them back into the circle. Yeah, as we'll see with Orbury Trail, it's really just like an amalgamation mashup fan fiction of all of the different like fantasy novels and movies that have ever existed. So yes, very much like playing on that like Dracula, like Dracula and his lover and how they have to find each other in every single lifetime and how they're drawn to each other. That's what he's going with here.

as far as I know, but maybe my fantasy novel, fantasy law isn't like as good as other people. Maybe there's a better analogy. But yeah, that's very much what he's saying. It's like, I have to find them in every lifetime. But there's not just one, not just one like love of his eternity. There's 13 of them. And they're bound to him. And if that circle was broken, which presumably it would have to be if they keep dying,

all of them were vulnerable to dark, malignant, forces. So it was Bailey's destiny to reclaim her place at Albury Trails of Vimperic side. The only thing was, claiming back your witchy powers wasn't easy. In fact, like we said, there was only one way to get back to full witch. At a very specific stage of the moon, you have to go into the woods, torture a person to death, and breathe in. their last breath. The longer and more agonising the torture, the more powerful the witch became. And once she was a witch, Aubrey explained, Bailey herself would be much harder to kill. And according to Aubrey, the only way to kill a witch is to tie her between two trees

and cut her down the middle all the way. I feel like he got that from terror fire. Or bone tomahawk. Oh, yes, quite. Aubrey said that there were already 12 witches in his coven, and Bailey, well, luckily, she would complete the set of 13. The FBI later found a handwritten note in Bailey's bag that listed 12 names, and below each of the names were notes on each of the witches, including their superpowers. There was Carly, aka Boots, a deaf lawyer with the power to sense danger. Then there was Brooke, who was uninhibited and sexually adventurous,

and would constantly end sentences with the word bitches, even if it didn't make any sense. Then there was Emily, who would send people to sleep by simply snapping her fingers. And Michelle, who was well-spoken and formal and called Bailey, dear. She could heal people with just her thoughts. Ariana was just 14. She could talk to animals. Amy was a hard drinker, and no doubt, thanks to her superhuman strength, was never afraid of a scrap.

Aubrey told Bailey that she would be the queen witch, and that the others would call her mummy. Whenever Aubrey told Bailey about a new witch, he'd show her a picture on his phone of a young, attractive girl, usually staring seductively at the camera without much on. And then one day, Aubrey gave Bailey an old-fashioned flip phone, so that she could finally speak to the other witches and they all texted Bailey constantly. But did Bailey ever actually meet the other 12 members of this coven? Well, in a way.

Out of those powers, which one do you want the most? I can already sense danger. That's just being a woman. That one doesn't count. Healing people, eh. Maybe it's not that. superhuman strength how often that's how often is that going to come up maybe if i could just maybe i feel like i'll take a a less obvious one making people fall asleep by snapping my fingers that would be

quite fun enough of you or yourself or myself no more insomnia for you problem is i don't have a problem going to sleep but maybe i could become like a wicked hot like nanny people just bring me their babies and I just snap my fingers and then take all their money because the babies are just fast asleep. Smart, smart, smart, smart. What you take in? Oh, I want to be able to talk to Mabel. Okay.

Obviously. Shut. Shoot the shit. I want her to reply when I say, how was your day? Which I do all the time. How was school? What did you do? She just looks at me like I'm stupid.

Maybe you need to change a question. I see that all the time on Instagram, and they're like, stop asking your teenager. How school was? No wonder they don't reply. Here's what you should say instead. I saw one of those. this morning. Well, apparently, like, when they're, like, really little, they genuinely can't

remember. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I remember my mum asking me how we're school and genuinely not having an answer. And it's not because kids are, like, being insubordinate. Like, I think there's, like, a age where you just genuinely don't know. And that's nice of them to be like, it was fine, rather than more worryingly, I don't know. At least they recognize that. I don't know. This woman was there. She clicked her fingers. And I don't remember anything else. Sometimes it happened out in town. Sometimes the two of them would be driving and then suddenly without warning, Aubrey would take a huge dramatic inhalation of breath.

And for that moment on, he was someone else. He introduced himself as one of the witches, inhabiting Aubrey's body. Each witch had a different voice and a very specific vocabulary. Sometimes Aubrey would talk to Bailey for hours inhabited by the spirit of a member of his coven. I did think it was strange that he already managed to get 12 women on board. It makes much more sense that they don't actually exist. Not so much, not so much. The pictures he's showing her is like, oh, this is Michelle, this is whoever.

It's just like, it's just pictures he's got off the internet and he's just made up all of these quirks and these names. But it does make it sound so much more convincing. like, oh yeah, come join my coven. There's already 12 other women who have signed up to this. Like, it's not just you. And it also explains why Bailey is the 13th, why Bailey is the Queen Witch. And yeah, she never fucking meets any of them,

other than through his, like, weird DID trances. I see. With one particular witch, it got physical. Bailey started to confide in Michelle, using Aubrey's body as a big, fleshy, walkie-talkie, even telling her things that she didn't want Aubrey to know. And soon, Bailey started to think of Michelle as her girlfriend, even though she'd only actually slept with her when she was inside Aubrey's body. Sometimes the witches, via Aubrey Trail, would

commiserate with Bailey about how mean Aubrey was. They'd suggest ways that Bailey could get her revenge next time they had sex. Once they, as Aubrey, suggested that she should penetrate him with her fist. So she did. And afterwards, he stumbled to the bathroom and collapsed. When he came to, Aubrey's eyes were bloodshot red. He started speaking in a low, growling voice in a language that Bailey couldn't understand. When she asked who she was speaking to, Aubrey Trail growled, Satan. And yes, to Bailey, this was all 100% real. She believed completely in the Coven, their powers, their ability to take over Aubrey's body, all of it. She explains all this to the author that we mentioned earlier, who wrote the book The Vampire's Cult, Chect Hardin.

And I do believe her. I do believe her that she believed all this. And she believed all this, despite the fact that Bailey never actually met any of these 12 women in the flesh. But just because the women in the Coven who Aubrey had told her had come before Bailey hadn't actually existed, it wasn't long before the pair of them did actually. pick up some very real recruits. And the stories about torture and murder in the woods started to come screaming into reality. But first, let's find out a bit more about the gross, stubby-toothed maniac that is Aubrey Trail. Trail was born and raised in the deep south and got into trouble early on. One particularly relevant example of this childhood miscreants

is the time he stabbed his grandmother's chickens to death with a stick. And when he was asked why, he said that they were vampire chickens. His grandfather's favourite pearl of wisdom was, It's not illegal if you don't get caught. And Pappy Trail saw absolutely no problem passing down that saying to the younger generation. Aubrey Trail clearly took this to heart, and by the age of 13, he had decided he was going to be a robber. Just before his 18th birthday, he and two friends broke into a moment.

motel with a BB gun. Afterwards, Aubrey hid in his grandfather's attic, but was caught within hours. He was sentenced to 10 years, beginning a cycle of crime, prison and release that would dominate much of his adult life. But Aubrey's real talent wasn't violence, or theft. It was bullshit. He became a prolific thief and con man, particularly when it came to antiques. He constructed elaborate scams, inventing identities and stories. and coaching accomplices from scripts like they were actors, which is an important detail. Because by the time Aubrey Trail met Bailey Boswell,

he had already spent decades learning how to make people believe things that simply were not true. In 2017, 20-year-old Ashley Hills matched on Tinder with a woman named Jenna. They exchanged a flurry of exciting messages, with Jenna telling Ashley, that she had a sugar daddy who paid all of her bills. And that if Ashley was lucky, he might just take care of her too.

Ashley took a punt and agreed to meet. But when she turned up, instead of a date with a beautiful woman, Ashley got a one-on-one interview with a vampire. At one point, during this evening, Aubrey Trail asked Ashley what she wanted more than anything in the world, and Ashley said she wanted her adoptive dad dead. He was in prison for abusing her as a child. but it only got five years

and Ashley was desperate for revenge. Aubrey said he could make that happen. Soon Aubrey was paying Ashley's rent, car payments and her tuition and giving her a $200 a week allowance. She also joined in with the shagging and Aubrey Ashley and Bailey started having a gay old time with that vast collection of aforementioned sex toys.

And within weeks Aubrey showed Ashley the pictures of his naked witches. She was, of course, destined to be a witch, and Ashley's power would be healing. At first, Ashley was sceptical. She was fine with the whole Sugar Daddy situation, but witches, covens and vampires seemed a bit much.

What was this guy on about? So how would Aubrey possibly convince her? A sexy little mind reading, of course. One day, Aubrey asked Ashley what she liked in bed and she didn't tell him. But thought to herself that she quite liked being slapped. Next time they had sex,

Aubrey slapped her, and from then on, Ashley didn't need any more convincing that everything Aubrey had told her was true. It's a low bar. Well, it's hard out here. And this is when Aubrey was able to ramp things up

about ten more gears. Aubrey promised Ashley that one of the witches would kill her adopted father, and she would get to watch, but only if she followed the rules. Naturally, Ashley had already been roped into, as we said, sleeping with Aubrey and carrying out petty cons on local antique dealers. But now, these new rules included the fact that Ashley would have to come and stay at Audrey and Bailey's rancid windowless apartment at least two days a week. and while there she had to be naked at all times.

And there were chores to do, including Aubrey's compulsory two-hour nightly massage. Ashley was not allowed to speak to or even look at another man. In private she was to call Aubrey Daddy, and in public she had to call him Sir. When not in his presence, Ashley had to check in every three hours. And of course she couldn't tell anyone what was going on. If she did, he'd know. Because Aubrey told Ashley that he knew every thought that passed through her head.

After a while, Aubrey showed Ashley a transparent plastic sauna suit. And these are essentially, like you might have seen them before, they were like on shark tank and stuff. They're essentially like big zip-up waterproof suits that people wear while they're exercising to trap in more body heat and basically make you sweat more, make you burn more calories. But the suit that Aubrey Trail shows Ashley was not being used for late-night hit classes. He said that these suits were his and Bailey's killed suits. It's also such a scam, just wear a bin bag like Maradonna. I know.

These are not cheap. These are not cheap. But then I guess he's, you know, rolling in it from all of his antique wheeling and dealing and stealing. And then Aubrey also shows Ashley some pliers and a hammer. and he basically says that this together with this plastic suit is Bailey's kill kit, and that one day, if Ashley plays her cards right, that she could have her very own.

Now, none of this did anything to put Ashley off. And one day soon after, Aubrey showed Ashley a picture of a young woman on Tinder and asked her, could this be her first victim? Did Ashley want to take this girl into the woods and torture her for hours? Ashley, full of rage about her adopted father and what he had done to her, said yes. She said she was looking forward to torturing this woman.

By this point, Ashley was in deep with Aubrey and all of his vampireship, and that had not gone unnoticed. When Ashley started spending more and more time out of town, three of her friends went to the police station in Lincoln, Nebraska. They said that their friend had fallen under the spell of a cult leader, and she was living with him in Wilbur. They also told police that Ashley was being groomed for sex trafficking, that she was expected to be naked at all times

and contact this man every few hours. Ashley's friends even knew and recounted to police that the man, Ashley called Daddy, claimed to be 1,000 years old and a vampire who asked his witches to kill for him. And the police did absolutely nothing. Whether they didn't have enough to go on or they just didn't care about the freaky sounding stories of three 20-year-old girls, we don't know. We do know that three months later, Sydney Loof would be dead.

Also, I think this is really interesting, that Ashley believed in, or at least said she believed in, Aubrey's like omnipotent supernatural powers, that she, you know, he's telling her, I can read your every thought, I can do all of this, I know everything's going on. but she never questioned how he had no clue that she had clearly been spilling all of the beans to her friends about literally everything. And she was still seeing him every single week. And he was never like, hey, why have you told all of your friends about me being an immortal vampire and all the things I make you do which was meant to be top secret? Like, he's expressly warned her not to and she has done it. But she never brings it up with him.

She never brings it up with him. So skipping ahead to August 2017, the Coven, Gain. another member. Anastasia Golakova had moved to the US from Russia a few years earlier, and she had only just left high school. She had a huge falling out with her stepdad,

and she'd been forced to leave home, and she'd quickly found herself with nowhere to go. And Anastasia's introduction to the crazy world of Aubrey Trail followed a very similar pattern to Ashley's. Matched on Tinder with a quote-unquote woman named Jenna, showered with cash in exchange for joining their creepy, sex weed crime club, and then slowly introduced to more and more batshit ideas about witches and covens and vampires. And soon, thanks to Anastasia's youth and naivety, she became Aubrey Trail's

new favourite girl. He called her princess. And when Anastasia decided that she didn't want to have sex with Aubrey anymore, he surprisingly agreed. But behind her back, Aubrey was discussing having Anastasia killed. She had too much of a moral compass. he said. She doesn't have the evil in her. So, he suggested to Bailey and Ashley, they should throw on their sauna suits, take Anastasia down to the woods, and torture her to death.

He even volunteered to clean up. Getting rid of the body was easy, he said. Most of it just goes in a blender, which should tell you more than anything else that he has never, ever, ever done it before. Yeah, I'm like, the getting rid of the body part, the cleanup part is... I'm going to guess, because I've never done it before, I'm going to guess it's the hottest part.

I think we know enough to make an assessment. You know, looking at a human being while you murder them. Other than that part, if you're fine with that bit, the clean-ups are the worst bit. Maybe that's what I'd want is I could click my fingers and things would just be cleaned. That would be delightful. Nah, you love cleaning. That's true. That is true. It's pretty much my only cardio these days.

The group would you to take a road trip to Pennsylvania for one of Bailey's court, hearings due to one of his many scams. But Aubrey told Anastasia they were actually going to Montana. He knew that Anastasia would tell her mother where they were going. And when Anastasia disappeared, Aubrey wanted police to look thousands of miles away, not for a shallow grave in the Appalachians. Anastasia thought that this was just going to be another one of their rituals. But the others knew it was a mission to capture her final breath. But right before they're meant to set off, Ashley broke down and said she couldn't go through with it,

so the plan was shelved. Not that this deterred Aubrey Trail for long. With Anastasia still very much alive, he suggested a new creative outlet. He told Ashley that people would pay good money to watch sexy young women torturing bad people in the woods. He promised her six figures just to shoot someone in the head. She said she'd think about it,

but soon afterwards Ashley ran. She went to her mother's house in Omaha and never saw them ever again. Anastasia also made her escape at this point, leaving Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell, looking for another witch. The last one to join Aubrey Trail's coven was 21-year-old Katie Brandel. Katie had recently gone through a bad breakup and moved in with her mum. One evening, scrolling through Tinder, she matched with another one of Bailey's fake accounts.

Soon, Katie had been invited to join Bailey and Aubrey's sub-dom relationship. Katie was curious. She joined the fold just like the other girls had. But this time, it was Bailey laying down the rules. Katie would call her mommy. Ask permission to do anything and obey Bailey completely. Katie agreed, and she was very, very into it. She brushed off any invitations to get involved with any of the scams, though.

she was just there for Bailey Boswell. In fact, Katie felt such a strong connection that she found the magic stuff pretty easy to swallow. Katie was an incredibly lucid dreamer, and since she was a teenager, she had dreamt about a specific girl called Alex. She could picture Alex vividly, and she swore that Bailey looked exactly like her.

Aubrey explained that Bailey had clearly been Alex in a former life and was reaching out to join her across worlds to complete their destiny. And when Aubrey also told Katie that he could grant any wish, she asked for the ability to turn into a cat. And Aubrey said, abracadabra no problem, emu. Alicat-Zam. Yeah.

I mean, I just, I don't know if that ever happened. I don't know if it's just like, oh, we'll get to it. It's going to take a little while. You're going to have to talk to somebody to death before I can do that. Maybe that's part of the agreement. But a few weeks in, it all kind of falls apart. Katie accidentally left a weed pipe in Bailey's car. Bailey at the time was under investigation for cashing a bad check

and freaked out that if the police had found this weed pipe in her car, it would have brought more heat on her. She told Katie that she had broken the rules, and Bailey gave her a choice. Never see them ever again. Or come back to Wilbur and accept a punishment. Katie agreed to go back with them, but she'd soon regret it. The punishment Bailey doled out was so painful that Katie had an asthma attack hyperventilated

and ended up passing out. After this, it wasn't long before the topic of murder was brought up. Bailey kept talking about a crazy stalker ex who wouldn't leave her alone. During sex, Bailey forced Katie to describe how she would torture this supposed stalker. Katie played along. half remembering medieval torture methods she'd heard about at school. Bailey couldn't get enough. Another time Katie remembers Bailey describing how she wanted to rape a woman and mutilate her body,

tear out her tonsils, break her fingers, and cut off her breasts. Katie was later asked in court what Bailey fantasised about doing to someone. And this is going to get rough because Katie testified. Bailey said she wanted to pour acid down them and, like her. them on fire. She wanted to cut a hole in someone's stomach and fuck them vaginally with a strap on and watch it come through their stomach. And when asked what Bailey's demeanour was like when describing these scenes, Katie responded that she was joyful. Yeah. So I think while Aubrey Trail definitely is like the main perpetrator of all of this, like Bailey Boswell is not a reluctant

participant. She is loving all of the sexual depravity, the murder, the torture, conversations, like she is fully into it. And the fact that she wants to talk about these things while they're having sex is quite unusual because it seems like she is sexually getting off on these discussions. So before long, a plan started to coalesce. At a casino one day, Bailey brought up her crazy stalker ex again and said, We're going to do it Sunday. On hearing this, Katie freaked out. Maybe this wasn't just a fantasy anymore.

Maybe they were really going to do something. Maybe they really were going to kill somebody. Aubrey claimed to have already killed 14 people. And he threatened to kill Katie's cats and her entire family if she told anyone what they were up to. Then, Aubrey offered Katie $25,000 to help Bailey kill someone. And eventually, Katie agreed. with two conditions, no children and no old people.

Aubrey suggested that they kidnap a homeless person, or since it was Thanksgiving, head to the college campuses, where only a few exchange students would be left. Or maybe they could even stage a car breakdown and wait for some good Samaritan to stop by. In the end, they didn't choose any of these victims. And then, Bailey Boswell matched with Sydney Luth. The weight was over

The vampire had to feed Because whether Aubrey and Bailey Really believed in the bullshit they were spouting About vampires and witches We know that the thirst for blood was very real On Thursday morning Sydney Loof didn't turn up for work Two of Sydney's colleagues contacted her friends

And even went down to her apartment But Sydney was gone They had all seen her date selfie on Snapchat and she had even texted her friend saying things are finally looking up. There was nothing to suggest that Sydney had run away. In fact, when police searched her apartment, her purse was still on the counter,

her makeup bag was open on her unmade bed and her beloved cat's food bowl was empty. It was clear that Sydney Loof had left her apartment intending to return. As the police search got underway, Sydney's parents made pleas on the news. And initially, apart from a phone tower pinging in the town of Wilbur, the place Sydney had no known connection to, progress was slow. But a breakthrough did come, thanks to the dogged investigative work of Sydney's best friend, Brooklyn McChrystal. No, it isn't,

that's not your name. It sounds like such a fakedy, fake, fake name. But Brooklyn is great, So I'll let her rabbit, whatever she's hiding from with this fake name. We all deserve a best friend like Brooklyn McChrystal. After Sydney's first date with the mystery, Audrey, not Aubrey, Sydney had sent a screenshot of Audrey's Tinder profile to her friends. So with the information that she had, Brooklyn McChrystal got to Brooklyn at work. She set up a fake Tinder profile with a picture of herself from a few years before. She narrowed her preferences to exactly the details of the profile she had seen, age 24 to 26, 40-mile radius, and she set her sexual preference to women only.

And then she started swiping. Left, left, left, left, left for hours until Bingo. There was the same picture that Sydney had sent her, this Audrey character, who was really Bailey and Aubrey Trail. And Brooklyn swiped right. The next morning, she woke up to a notification. She had a match. Brooklyn flirted with the Audrey account, led her on and opened up. And after a while, she said,

wouldn't it just be easier to text? So, Audrey sent over her number. And Brooklyn sent this number straight to the police. The number eventually led police to Wilbur, Nebraska, where Sydney's phone had last pinged. to a basement apartment belonging to Bailey Boswell and Aubrey Trail. Investigators opened the door and the apartment stank of bleach. They could also see that parts of the wall had been scrubbed.

And inside they found 20 sex toys, five bottles of lube, furry handcuffs, a leather whip, a fake beard, 56 Beanie Baby Babies, Mace Viagra, and ammunition. But the couple and Sydney were, nowhere to be found. Police tracked down Katie and Anastasia. Suddenly, they were hearing the same extraordinary story over and over again, witches, torture, murder, beanie babies. And it all led back to Aubrey Trail. And despite the neck closing in, Aubrey decided to go public. Any ideas the police might have started forming of a suave, vampiric, smooth talker flew straight out the window. Just weeks after Sydney went missing, Bailey started a Facebook live.

In another video, Aubrey monologues straight down the barrel of the camera, rambling that he had never hurt anyone and accused the police of trying to crucify them. Bailey admitted that she had dated Sydney but claimed she had just dropped her off at her friend's house. The comments flooded in, nobody believed a word, it was clear as day that these two were completely full of shit. and that this creepy, controlling, older guy was clearly involved in Sydney's disappearance. It didn't take the police long to track the pair down to a hotel outside Branson, Missouri. They still had Katie's car, which was parked outside with the bumper sticker, honk for love. But the search for Sydney was still on. They looked across rural Nebraska through woods, creeks and abandoned cabins.

Police dredged ponds and painstakingly map Sydney's phone data, against miles and miles of empty countryside. And then, 19 days after she disappeared, they found Sydney Loof, on the edge of a country road in a black rubbish bag. The bag had been gnawed open by animals, and bloodless human remains had been dragged into the dirt. And as we told you at the start,

nearby was a handless human arm. With a tattoo reading, everything will be wonderful someday. Confirming. that this was Sydney. In an interrogation room, Aubrey Trail was giving nothing away. The only time he engaged

was when the investigator likened the stories he was hearing to Charles Manson. Aubrey said, I live a freaky fucking lifestyle. I've got some beliefs that will warp your fucking mind, but I've never hurt, killed or abused anyone in my life. And when the investigator asked

how an entire body's worth of blood could be drained without making a mess, Aubrey smirked, gulped down his coffee and said, What am I doing now? To which the investigator said, You're drinking coffee. And Aubrey replied,

Let's say we were very thirsty that day. And then, Aubrey Trail, The Vampire, started talking hypothetically. He asked the detective to imagine a group of women who believe their witches and have to take a life. He said, let's say the newspapers are full of missing people all over the country and that some of these witches might have made a mistake one day and took the wrong person.

And it blew so far out of proportion that someone has to be sacrificed to keep them safe. And that is about as far as the police got. Once Aubrey was inside, he immediately started crafting a new story. He smuggled coded messages to Bailey, who was in a different part of the same jail. In one of these messages, Aubrey told her exactly what she needed to do. explaining, we have got to make you look like a victim in this. We have got to make it look like I brainwashed you. We have to make people hate me and feel sorry for you.

And how do we know what these letters said? Because, well, they were all found, and the cipher that Aubrey had used was very easily cracked. Bailey, for her part, was still 100% a believer. She sat in her cell, muttering, I love you, Daddy, into thin air. She'd also have out loud one-sided conversations with Aubrey and the other witches throughout the day. Aubrey still tried to wrestle some kind of control out of the situation and made one last bargain. He said two investigators that he would plead guilty to murder as well as six other killings

if they left Bailey alone. Otherwise he said, we'll turn this motherfucker into the biggest fucking circus you've ever seen. Prosecutors declined. and Aubrey Trail, he was as good as his word. The media went into a frenzy with stories of a murderous cult leader who drank human blood. And Aubrey Trail did everything he could to whip up the situation, even more.

He called a local TV station and confessed to the murder live on the air. He also claimed to have committed a string of other murders, including other victims of his dark magic rituals. And by the time, Aubrey Trail went on trial in 2019. he had admitted to disposing of Sydney's body. But now he denied murdering her. He said that his basement apartment was a place where people could live out their wildest fantasies. He painted Sydney as a drug addict who needed money

and agreed to be strangled with an extension cord during sex in exchange for cash, and that her death had just been a tragic accident. That didn't do too much to help his image. In fact, Aubrey's own defence attorney, Joe, Murray opened his arguments with the words, Orbri Trail is not a particularly nice man. But Murray went on to argue that it was still very possible that Sydney had died during one of this man's freaky sex capades.

And I don't feel like we should have to remind you about the sex game gone wrong argument, but maybe some of you are new. No, that's the argument. No, it isn't. It isn't a sex game gone wrong ever. And on top of all of that, Murray's assertion that, and this is a quote, the asphyxiation was designed to heighten the sexual pleasure of Sydney Loof

is a gross thing to say, and I don't like it. Yeah, and the prosecution didn't either. They said that there was obvious premeditation of what they called an overarching conspiracy to kill. The police had heard from Anastasia and Ashley that Aubrey and Bailey often talked about their strong murderous impulses All in all, on the day of Sydney's second date, Aubrey and Bailey had also bought the following. Duck tape, utility knives, bin bags, a hacksaw, drop cloths, a nylon cord,

a bottle of draino and, as we told you earlier, two hand-cranked meat grinders. Doesn't really feel like a sex game gone wrong. Feels like something that was planned very carefully. And all of the vampire witch coven stuff, well, obviously the prosecution brought it in because, well, it's not going to hurt them to add a little bit of crazy colour to this. So the story of Aubrey Trail, the thousand-year-old vampire, cast its creepy shadow over the Nebraska courtroom. The jury heard from the women that Aubrey and Bailey had recruited,

including Katie and Anastasia. They painted a picture of a man who bragged about his coven of obedient witches, who killed at his command to restore their supernatural powers. They heard about the kill suits, the body drained of all its blood, the whole chilling story. and in the second week of the trial, Aubrey Trail decided to give them one final flourish. One morning, Aubrey arrived at court unusually well-groomed,

wearing a crisp white shirt. He reportedly joked to the guards, you know why I'm wearing this white shirt today. That way, you'll see the blood all over it. Later in the day, a police investigator was routinely describing some early search techniques, when Aubrey's voice suddenly boomed through the courthouse. He shouted,

Bailey is innocent, and I curse you all. Then he slashed at his own throat four times with a contraband razor blade. It was instant pandemonium. Even his own defence attorney leapt away after he saw exposed muscle protruding from Aubrey's neck. Blood poured down over Aubrey's white shirt just like he said as he was rushed to hospital.

But he somehow survived. And the jury found Aubrey Trail guilty. Yeah, I think it is weird, isn't it? Like, it's not weird to me that he cuts his own throat or that he does that in court. I think he knows the jig is up, like he's going to be found guilty. There's no way he can get out of this, I don't think. And we know he's a very theatrical person.

And I think he's like, yeah, fuck it, I'm on trial. Let's get some more infamy. Let's draw some more attention to myself. Let's go out with a bang. But it is weird to me that he's so obsessed with trying to get Bailey off. Like I don't really understand the dynamic there because throughout the relationship, he is obviously the one that sort of lures her in and then he's, he's, for want of a better word, I guess, grooming her, though she seems very, very, like, open to the whole situation,

to the murder, to the torture, all of that sort of stuff. And she plays a very, like, instrumental role in the murder of Sydney Loof. But it's weird to me that he never, because really the picture that they have is the Tinder profile, although it's called Audrey, is a picture of Bailey Boswell. And they know that Bailey and Sydney met up. He doesn't try throw Bailey under the bus to get away with it himself saying, I had nothing to do with this. He's like, yeah, I did it. I'm guilty, like Bailey's innocent. It's strange to me. It's not something I expected from Aubrey Trail and I don't really know why he's doing it. I think it just adds another like fantasy layer of the like Star Cross. lovers together through all eternity, reaching through the dimensions to be together forever.

I think it's just another flourish. Yeah, sure. Like maybe he's like, again, just like romanticising the whole situation of how he's like, in this life, I'll take the fall for you and I'll go to prison and whatever. Like, yeah, it's just all so weird and theatrical and dramatic. But yeah, I guess it fits then with the whole razor thing. So what about Bailey Boswell? her defense portrayed her as another young woman who had fallen under Aubrey's spell

and was simply terrified of speaking out. No thanks, Paley. I'm not buying that. I don't. I don't have much room for that. There's so much evidence of her recruiting women enforcing her own rules. Look at what she did to Katie. She was very much in charge. Katie had to follow all of her rules. Had to call her mummy, had to obey her completely. And then also she's making a lot of the purchases like the various things that they needed that were involved in the murder and the body disposal of Sydney Loof. That wasn't just something that Albury Trail was doing. And also, hers was the Tinder account that Sydney Loof had matched with. And also Bailey Boswell, like we said, was the one who had gone

on that first date with Sydney and secured the second date, which is when Sydney was murdered. And she did all that, like all that flirting and smoking weed and driving around, listening to music, chatting to Sydney, luring her in. She did all that knowing, what was in store, like what Aubrey and her were going to do. And it was also during Bailey's trial that Ashley testified about Bailey's worst fantasies. We don't need to hear them again. You've already heard Hannah telling us all about the horrible things that Bailey had fantasized about doing to women. And in the end, Bailey Boswell was also convicted a first-degree murder. Good. It seems that Bailey did believe pretty much all of the Aubrey Trail vampire story,

but she also willingly played a crucial role in Sydney Luf's death. Years later, Bailey told author Chet Hardin that eventually, something shifted. Sitting in her cell, she realised all at once. Aubrey was never able to read her mind or fly or walk through walls. He'd never had a brain-tuber. He'd never been in the mafia. He was just a murderous conman. And I'm glad for her sake that she does realise all of this later. Yeah.

But like, even if she had genuinely believed all those things before, I still am like, but you were willing to murder an innocent woman in order to get your powers. That's still murder. Yes. You didn't think that Sydney was some evil, like, I don't know. I don't know. And she never explains, she never says that Aubrey told her that Sydney was some, you know, bad person that they had to kill or was one of their enemies and he manipulated her into thinking. that she still willingly went along and killed an innocent woman as far as she knew, even if she thought he was a fucking thousand-year-old vampire. Who cares? So I don't know that

this realisation later that Aubrey was lying to her really absolves her of any of the guilt of what she did to Sydney. And as for where all this very complex mythology came from, that's even more disappointing, I'm afraid. It's right there in Stephen King's Stock to Sleep. group of immortal vampires go around torturing and killing people. One of them's got a really stupid hat. Yeah. And they feed on the psychic steam released from their victim's final breaths, which is, yeah, pretty familiar. But if you want more details of Bailey's account of what actually happened between her and Aubrey Trail, go and read Chet Hardin's book The Vampire's cult. There is so much more in there than you need. But even Bayesian,

couldn't bring herself to describe exactly what Sydney endured at the hands of Aubrey Trail. She told Chet Hardin, I don't know if I will ever be able to talk about that. Whatever you are imagining he did to her, it's worse. And because Sidney's body was found cut into multiple pieces and also drained of all the blood and left decomposing for 19 days, I've not seen like a very clear autopsy report suggesting what actually did happen to her. and the fact that Bailey won't say it, Aubrey won't say it, like we really don't know what happened. So for years, Aubrey Trail had built himself a supernatural world,

a world of vampires and witches, reincarnation, possession, portals, blood rituals, and supernatural powers. And eventually, even Bailey Boswell says she understood, the vampire wasn't real. But by then, that didn't really matter, because Albury Trail had managed to do something much more frightening. He had taken a fantasy about a murderous coven and convinced real people to live inside it. And Sidney Loof paid for that fantasy with her life.

Ugh. It is a weird one because it's one of those cases where, yes, absolutely, Aubrey Trail does pick women that he thinks are vulnerable, and correctly so. Like, yes, like we said, Bailey Boswell was in this abusive relationship with that guy, Freddie. She was stuck. He offers her this sort of show. her relationship pulls her out of that, slowly convinced her. And also I think with Bailey there was that predisposition there to do something like this because she goes along with it so like

enthusiastically. But with Katie and Anastasia and the other women that they sort of cross paths with that he tries to pull in and only manages it for a while, it is surprising to me how quickly they like believe the witch coven bullshit. But then I guess ultimately he's not really that successful because they don't stay. They all do flee from Bailey left by the end. But there's not like the level of abuse and coercive control. I'm not saying that Albury Trail isn't a bad man. Of course he is. He's awful. He's fucking disgusting human being. But there isn't the level of like breakdown of psyche, the breakdown of another human being and then rebuilding as we normally see with cult leaders. He's kind of a bit lazy in that regard. He's just like, oh, you're not buying it.

Okay, like, fine, you can leave. Like, whatever. Like, do you know what I mean? He really only has Bailey at the end. I don't think he puts in the hours to really get them fully on board. No, and I suppose he, like, he's also not going after the people that cults are going after. Like, successful, happy people, you know? Like, he's going after really, really, really vulnerable, broken people.

Yeah. So you don't have to convince them so much, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, lazy, lazy cult leader. And it ends up just the two of them at the end. But yeah, that's it, guys. That is the story of the vampire's cult, quote unquote. He's not a vampire and is it really even a cult?

Cult of two. I don't know. How many people do you need for it to be a cult? Probably more than two, I'd say. Then it just feels like a folly a joke. I would say more than two. Okay, that's our verdict on it. That's red-handed definition.

We'll leave it there. That is week three of Halloween. Next week we'll be jumping into the traditional story swap. So join us, right? One will be sharing some of the creeper stories that Hannah and I have found over the year and kept under wraps for this moment. So we'll see you then. Choping up more bodies.

Exactly. Goodbye. Goodbye.