Solved Murders - True Crime Stories - A Fatal Obsession The Secret Affair That Shattered a Los Angeles Neighborhood PART3 #75

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

#horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #ScaryStories #creepypasta #horrortales #crimeaftermath #darktruths #fatalobsession #tragiccrime #LosAngelesdrama  “A Fatal Obsession: The Secret Affair That Shattered a Los Angeles Neighborhood (Part 3)” dives into the aftermath of the shocking betrayal and its devastating consequences. As investigations unfold, buried secrets and painful truths come to light, revealing just how far obsession and deception can push people. This chapter explores the unraveling of lives, the collapse of trust, and the haunting legacy left behind in a once-quiet Los Angeles neighborhood.  horrorstories, reddithorrorstories, scarystories, horrorstory, creepypasta, horrortales, crimeaftermath, tragicconsequences, darktruths, shockingbetrayal, obsessiongonewrong, secretsuncovered, neighborhoodtragedy, justiceandlies, unravelinglives, betrayalaftermath, deadlyromance, chillingcrime, LosAngelesstory, hauntinglegacy

The Fall of Garrett Marlove, a story of obsession, betrayal, and blood. It didn't take Garrett long to make sure the hallways were clear. He stood there, hidden in the shadow of a dim stairwell, waiting, listening, holding his breath like some predator sizing up the perfect moment to strike. The timing had to be exact, no neighbors walking their dog, no curious tenant deciding to grab a midnight snack from the vending machine downstairs, no chance of anyone spotting him slip inside. The risk wasn't just about getting caught, it was about control. If he was going to do this, it had to unfold on his terms. When he was absolutely convinced the coast was clear,

Garrett finally moved. He wore gloves, thick enough to keep fingerprints off every surface, thin enough not to slow down his fingers when he needed precision. The gloves weren't the kind you'd wear in winter, they were tactical, carefully chosen, a detail that showed he'd been thinking about this night for a while. He stepped toward the door of the apartment, key in hand. Not the official key, of course. This was a copy, one he'd obtained weeks earlier in a way that no one would ever trace. A friend of a friend who worked in building maintenance owed him a favor.

Garrett had made sure of that, slipping money into the right palm at the right time. Now that investment was about to pay off. The door clicked open. Inside, the air was still, heavy with the kind of silence that makes your ears ring. Garrett slid in like a shadow, pulling the door shut behind him without a sound. The Confrontation Collette was sitting at the edge of the bed, her voice low as she spoke to the young man who had stolen her attention for months. Linden, just 18, too young to understand the full weight of her.

of what he'd gotten himself into, looked nervous, almost guilty. He wasn't ready for what was about to happen, not even close. The moment Garrett stepped into the room, Colette froze. Her lips parted, but no words came out. She had only seconds, barely even that, to process the sight of her husband standing there with a gun already drawn. Lyndon looked up, startled, eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. He tried to speak, but the words never formed. Garrett's hand was steady, the gun aimed straight at the boy's chest. Don't, Garrett said, his voice sharp, low, dangerous. Collette stumbled to her feet, panic written all over her face. She begged, pleaded,

her voice trembling, breaking apart. She knew what was about to happen, and she knew she couldn't stop it. But Garrett wasn't listening. His anger had hardened into something sharper than rage, something colder. Betrayal had eaten away at him, hollowed him out, left nothing but fury and determination. Two shots. The sound was deafening in the cramped apartment. The smell of gunpowder filled the air instantly, acrid, unmistakable. Linden staggered back, his eyes filled with shock more than pain. He collapsed to the floor, blood spreading across his shirt. Collette screamed, a sound raw and animal, but it was useless. The neighborhood was quiet, tucked far enough from the busier streets that gunfire didn't immediately draw attention. No one came

running. No one even stirred. Garrett's choice. What happened next was the part Collette could never wrap her mind around. Garrett turned, looked at her. For a moment, she thought she was next. She braced herself, her heart pounding so hard she could barely breathe. But he didn't pull the trigger again. Instead, he lowered the gun, though his eyes never softened. He leaned in close enough that she could see every line of rage etched into his face.

You get to live with this, he whispered. Every single day. And then, without another word, he walked out. Calm. Almost casual. He didn't run, didn't slam the door, didn't leave in panic. He disappeared into the night, leaving behind a blood-soaked scene and a wife whose world had just collapsed. The aftermath.

For a few long minutes, Collette couldn't move. She stood frozen, staring at her. Linden's body as if her brain couldn't accept what her eyes were showing her. Finally, the shock cracked just enough for her to fumble for her phone. Her hands shook so violently she almost dropped it. She dialed 911, her voice stumbling, incoherent, words tumbling out in fragments. By the time the police arrived, Collette was a mess. Her hair tangled, her face streaked with tears, her body trembling.

She sat slumped against the wall, unable to stop crying, unable to put together a clear sentence. Lyndon, of course, was beyond saving. The crime scene looked clean, too clean, like something ripped straight out of a crime show. Two bullets. No signs of forced entry. No robbery. No random chaos. Whoever had pulled the trigger had done it with intention. And one name kept coming up through Colette Sobs. Garrett Marlove The investigation begins.

Detectives weren't surprised by the name. Garrett was a known figure in Los Angeles circles, a wealthy businessman with connections, a man used to controlling the narrative in every room he walked into. He had the money, the charm, and the reputation that made people want to believe in him. But that didn't mean he was innocent. Detective Paul Landon, a seasoned investigator who'd seen too many messy domestic crimes to count, took the lead. From the start, he smelled the stench of jealousy and revenge. Colette's testimony was shaky, scattered, drenched in trauma.

She kept repeating the same details, Garrett, a gun, Lyndon collapsing. Beyond that, everything blurred together. Still, it was enough to point the finger. Garrett's alibi Of course, Garrett wasn't stupid. When detectives tried to track him down, his home was empty. His phone turned off. No sign of him at his office either.

It looked like he had vanished. But Garrett had a story ready. A business trip. trip. Meetings out of town. Documents, receipts, reservations, pieces carefully laid out to create a trail. On paper, he wasn't even in Los Angeles when the shots rang out. For a moment, it almost worked. But almost only carries you so far. Cracks in the story. Investigators started digging. They combed through phone records, bank transactions, surveillance footage. Slowly, the polished surface of Garrett's alibi started to crack.

The first big clue came from the private investigator. Turns out Garrett had hired one weeks before the murder, paying him to dig into Colette's habits. The PI had snapped dozens of photos, all damning, Collette and Lyndon together, laughing, touching, kissing. Proof that Garrett had known. Proof that the betrayal wasn't a rumor but a fact shoved right in his face. Then came the forensic evidence. Garrett had worn gloves, but perfection doesn't exist. Partial prints smudged onto the doorframe, tiny traces of gunpowder where they shouldn't have been. Enough to raise suspicion. And then the cameras. Not inside the building, but nearby. A rented car, quietly obtained under Garrett's name, caught driving down the street

at exactly the wrong time. Finally, the cherry on top, a burner phone. Supposedly, Garrett had been out of town. But cell towers pinged a secondary number just blocks from the crime scene at the very moment the murder went down. His carefully built story crumbled. The Net Titans Detectives knew they had him. The motive was clear, jealousy, rage, betrayal. The planning was obvious, gloves, a spare key, a rented car. The execution was deliberate, two bullets, clean, efficient, personal. A judge signed off on an arrest warrant.

Garrett, of course, wasn't waiting around. He knew the walls were closing in. He kept moving, kept trying to stay one step ahead. For hours, the city buzzed with alerts, roadblocks, surveillance, teams moving to track him down. By the time they caught him, he was driving north, heading toward Canada. Maybe he thought he could vanish across the border, start fresh, reinvent himself. Maybe he just panicked and drove, no plan at all. Either way, it didn't matter.

The law caught up with him. The media storm. News travels fast in Los Angeles, but scandal travels faster. By the next morning, the murder wasn't just another tragic police blotter entry, it was a headline plastered across every local paper and looping endlessly on TV. Respected businessman accused in Love Triangle Murder Garrett Marlove, from boardroom to bloodshed. Teenager slain in jealous rage

The details were sensational, a wealthy entrepreneur, a much younger lover, an affair, and a cold-blooded execution inside a quiet apartment complex. Reporters swarmed the building, sticking microphones in the faces of neighbors who hadn't even known the victim's name until last night. Everyone suddenly had a memory, a suspicion, a story to tell. One tenant insisted they'd always known something was off about Garrett. Another claim they'd heard muffled arguments through the walls for weeks, though nobody had ever complained before. Whether the memories were true or conveniently reshaped by hindsight didn't matter. What mattered was the spectacle. For Collette, the media circus was a nightmare layered on top of grief.

She couldn't walk out her front door without flashes blinding her, without reporters barking questions she couldn't answer. Did you know he was going to kill him? Were you in love with Lyndon? Do you feel responsible? The only answer she ever gave was silence. Lyndon's story Amid all the noise, the focus on Lyndon himself got lost.

To most, he became just the lover, a footnote in the drama of Garrett and Colette's collapsing marriage. but Lyndon had been more than that. He was 18, barely stepping into adulthood, still figuring out who he wanted to be. Friends described him as bright, a little reckless, someone who laughed loudly and dreamed big but didn't always think before acting. He worked part-time at a bookstore, saved money for community college, and had plans to study graphic design. Meeting Collette had been intoxicating. She was older, sophisticated, beautiful in a way that made him feel like he'd stumbled into a movie scene.

What started as casual flirtation snowballed into something deeper, something he wasn't equipped to handle. To him, it felt like love. To her, maybe it was an escape. Either way, Lyndon hadn't signed up for tragedy. He didn't imagine their stolen moments would end with a gun in his chest. Garrett's mindset. To understand how Garrett got here, you have to understand who he was before the crime. Garrett Marlove had spent decades building an empire. He wasn't just rich, he was respected. He moved in circles where reputation was currency, and his reputation was gold.

Smart, confident, decisive, he knew how to walk into a room and make people listen. But underneath the polished exterior was a man who couldn't stand loose. losing control. Business, marriage, social standing, everything had to orbit him. When Colette strayed, it wasn't just betrayal, it was humiliation. To him, it wasn't just about losing her affection. It was about losing face, losing dominance, losing the carefully curated image he had worked so hard to project. The photographs from the private investigator had been the breaking point. Each image stabbed deeper, each grainy shot of Collette with Lyndon felt like a direct assault on his manhood. In his mind, the affair wasn't

just personal, it was public, even if nobody else knew yet. The idea of people whispering behind his back, laughing at him, was unbearable. That's why, when he pulled the trigger, it wasn't just murder. It was about reclaiming power. About proving, at least to himself, that nobody made a fool out of Garrett Marlove. Colette's spiral. Colette, meanwhile, was unraveling. She had loved Lyndon, or at least thought she did. He made her feel alive in a way her marriage hadn't in years.

With him, she could forget the suffocating expectations of being Mrs. Marlove, forget the dinners, the events, the endless performance of perfection. But love comes with consequences, and now she was drowning in them. The guilt was unbearable. If she hadn't let the affair happen, if she'd ended it sooner, if she'd chosen differently, Lyndon might still be alive. She replayed the night in her head again and again, each time wishing she'd jumped in front of the bullets, taken the shots herself.

Instead, she was left behind, alive but hollow, her lover buried. her husband a fugitive-turned-criminal, and her own name dragged through every headline. The case builds. Back in the LAPD's homicide division, Detective Landon and his team pieced the puzzle together. The forensic team worked overtime, cataloging every trace Garrett had left behind. Gunshot residue, partial prints, surveillance footage, they didn't have a single smoking gun, but they had a mountain of circumstantial evidence that, when stacked together, painted a damning picture. The DA didn't hesitate. First-degree murder. Premeditated. Cold, calculated, deliberate.

Garrett's legal team, of course, was ready to fight. They were expensive, ruthless, the kind of lawyers who could turn a mountain into a molehill if given the chance. They pushed the narrative of a grieving husband framed by circumstance, a man too conveniently blamed in the heat of tragedy. But the facts kept piling up against him. The arrest. Garrett's arrest wasn't cinematic. No helicopters, no dramatic standoffs. Instead, it was quiet, almost anticlimactic.

Highway Patrol spotted his rented car near Bakersfield, heading north. He didn't resist when they boxed him in, didn't shout, didn't fight, just sat there behind the wheel, staring straight ahead as if he'd already accepted the inevitable. When they cuffed him, he didn't say a word. The Court of Public Opinion By the time Garrett was booked, the public had already decided his fate. Talk shows dissected every angle, from the psychology of jealousy to the day. of May December romances.

Tabloids ran with salacious headlines, painting Colette as a femme fatale who lured an innocent teenager into disaster. Conspiracy forums popped up online, spinning wild theories about secret debts, hidden enemies, even suggesting that the murder was staged. In truth, the story didn't need embellishment. It already had everything,

love, betrayal, wealth, power, and death. Preparing for trial. The prosecutors knew they had a strong case, but they also knew Garrett's money could buy endless delays, endless motions, endless strategies to muddy the waters. So they doubled down. They built timelines. They reconstructed Garrett's movements minute by minute. They tracked every dollar he spent in the weeks leading up to the crime. They interviewed the private investigator, subpoenaed his records,

and lined up experts ready to testify about gunshot residue, fingerprints, and cell tower pings. Meanwhile, Garrett's lawyers tried to poke holes. They argued the prints were too partial, the phone records too vague, the PI's photos too invasive to prove anything. They painted Collette as unreliable, hysterical, traumatized, someone whose testimony couldn't be trusted. The trial hadn't even started yet, and already the battle. lines were drawn. Colette's dilemma. Colette dreaded the trial more than anything. She knew she'd be dragged onto the witness stand, forced to relive every second of that night in front of strangers, lawyers, and cameras. Part of her wanted to vanish, to leave Los Angeles

behind, to disappear into anonymity. But she couldn't. Linden deserved justice. And deep down, she knew she was the only one who could give the jury the raw truth of what happened. Even if it destroyed her in the process. Garrett in jail For the first time in his life, Garrett wasn't in control. Gone were the suits, the luxury cars, the penthouse views. Now he wore an orange jumpsuit, ate bland food on metal trays, and slept under fluorescent lights that never fully dimmed.

Other inmates knew who he was. Some respected him, others mocked him. But Garrett stayed silent, stoic, unflinching. To them, he wasn't just another prisoner, he was a man who had fallen hard, proof that money couldn't buy everything. Behind that silence, though, Garrett's mind churned. He replayed the crime over and over, not with guilt but with calculation. He wondered where he'd slipped, where he'd left cracks big enough for detectives to crawl through.

The waiting game. The trial date loomed. Weeks turned into months. Reporters camped outside the courthouse, hungry for updates. Speculation swirled, would Garrett take a plea deal? Would Colette flip against him? Would the jury sympathize with a man scorned or condemn him as a cold-blooded killer. Nobody knew. All they knew was that when the doors of the courtroom finally opened,

the whole city would be watching. To be continued.