The Lets Read Podcast - 132: INSANE COLLEGE WEIRDO STORIES | 19 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 120

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Crazy College Weirdos, Private Investigators & Cop Killers... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: Simon de Beer https://www.instagram.com/simon_db98/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead Update Description

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Ben MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The End 19-year-old Faith Hedgepeth was just as pure a spirit as one can expect to find in such a grim, dark world and a member of the Native American Sapani tribe. Ever since she was a young girl, she had wanted to work with children to help the most vulnerable members of her society grow into happy, healthy, responsible people who could help make the world a better place. Faith knew that there were two career paths that she could take in order to make that a reality, being a pediatrician or a teacher. So she enrolled herself at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was in the third year of her undergraduate studies in the year 2012. During the spring of that year,

Faith took a break from her academic studies and took up residence in an off-campus apartment near the borders between Orange and Durham counties. Her roommates in this particular apartment complex were a girl by the name of Karina Rosario, who Faith had been very close friends with since the middle of her freshman year, and Karina's boyfriend, Eric Takoi Jones. Karina and Eric's relationship was a tumultuous one at best, one that had a deep running history of tension, violence, and abuse. In the end, Karina had to move out in order to escape the relationship, with Eric also moving out shortly afterward. However, it seems that Eric was violent and paranoid and attempted

to break into the apartment twice after Karina had changed the locks, apparently having convinced himself that the whole thing was a ploy and that Karina had moved back in. But even though this was not the case and Karina had not moved back in, she and Faith continued to spend a great deal of time together, as one might expect from two close friends who had been through so much together Faith had even driven Karina down to the county courthouse in order to get a restraining order against Eric Who was apparently enraged by the positive influence she had in his ex's life And had threatened to harm her because of this on more than one occasion Months later during September of 2012, when Faith was living back on the college's campus,

she attended a sorority rush at Alpha Pi Omega, a traditionally Native American sorority. Given that she had a paper to busy herself with that night, she departed the event just after 7pm, heading over to David Library with Karina and making sure to text her dad to let him know her whereabouts. The pair then left the library at around 11.30 that night, heading back to their campus apartment together before walking down to a dance club in downtown Chapel Hill called The Thrill. Security footage from the dance club shows the girls leaving at around 2 in the morning, with a neighbor of the girls reporting that she heard noises coming from their apartment at around 3,

leading us to believe that they did in fact make it home safe. But what happened after that is very, very unclear. Records show that someone logged into Faith's Facebook at around 3am, with a text being sent from her phone to her former boyfriend around 40 minutes later. Hey B, can you come over here please? Rosario needs you more, haha, you know, please let her know you care. The ex-boyfriend, a boy named Brandon, read the message just after 4 am and replied questioning who sent the message. Karina's phone records show that Karina

was trying to call Brandon at around the same time and when he failed to answer, she attempted to call another boy named Jordan, who arrived at the apartment at around 4.30 in the morning to drive Karina to a friend's place where she stayed overnight. The following morning, Karina returned to the apartment with a friend, expecting to find Faith home alone but in good health. Yet when she walked through the door, the apartment was deathly quiet. She called out to Faith but received no reply, assuming her roommate had gone off to lectures or to the library. But Karina had a bad feeling in her gut. She hadn't heard from Faith all morning and so just to be certain, she slid open her roommate's bedroom door and peered inside.

What she saw next would haunt her for the rest of her life. Karina found Faith's dead body partially naked and wrapped in a quilt. Neighbors would report hearing an ear-splitting scream around that time before 911 police dispatchers received an urgent call to attend the address in question. When the police arrived to investigate the scene, they found a large amount of blood splatter in the bedroom where Faith's body was located, along with an empty bottle of rum that also had a significant amount of blood on it, indicating that it was the murder weapon.

Aside from the blunt force trauma to her head, Faith had all manners of cuts and bruises to other areas of her body, as well as dried blood under her fingernails. These were deemed to be defensive wounds from when she tried and failed to fight off her attacker. Horrifyingly, there was evidence of indecent assault, with a sizable amount of male DNA being found at the scene. After a distraught Karina was interviewed by police in the immediate aftermath of the body's discovery, her abusive ex-boyfriend Eric was considered the number one suspect in Faith's murder. Police seized his cell phone, finding texts that he had sent to a friend that very same evening that seemed to ask for forgiveness for what he was about to do. He also tweeted out a similar sentiment to his followers, implying he was about to do something terrible.

The tweet read, sins and the sins I may commit today. Protect me from the girls who don't deserve me and the ones who wish me dead today. It seems the Coffs had bagged their man, an abuser whose social media status was tantamount to a confession. But shockingly, when Eric's DNA was compared to that which was found at the scene of the crime, it didn't match. Local police also compared the DNA to many of them who were found to be present at the dance club that Faith and Karina had attended that evening, but again, all samples came back as negative matches. A GoFundMe page was set up, crowdfunding a reward for information that peaked at 39,000, but still no usable leads or information was forthcoming. Interestingly, the 911 call made by Karina after she found the body has some under a considerable amount of scrutiny, with some

suggesting that the call didn't come from Karina at all, but actually from the friend who accompanied her to the apartment that day, a girl named Marisol. Not only does the voice on the recording not sound like Karina, but the caller never once mentions Faith by name, only ever referring to the victim as my friend. Whoever made the phone call also lied to the dispatcher, telling them that she touched the body to check if Faith was still breathing. But when the body was analyzed for fingerprints, none matching Karina's or Marisols came back, almost as if they were afraid to implicate themselves in Faith's murder. Police also recovered a handwritten note from the crime scene, one written in black ink on a piece of paper torn from a fast food takeout joint. The handwriting is scrawled and barely

legible, so law enforcement aren't entirely sure if the note says, I'm not stupid, jealous witch, or I'm not jealous, stupid witch. The sloppy writing could be the result of two things, either whoever wrote it was drunk or they had used their non-dominant hand in order to throw off handwriting analysis who might have been able to use it to identify the killer. It was also left at a crime scene where the victim's blood was splattered almost everywhere, yet the note showed no traces of having blood on it, proof that it was written somewhere else before being dropped near her body. The handwritten note has been something that has confused professional and amateur sleuths

time and time again, and it has even been suggested that it's a complete red herring, left by the killer to simply confuse those that wish to get to the bottom of Faith's murder. Perhaps the most important piece of evidence we have from this case is taken from a butt dial made from Faith's phone at just past 1am. The recording is around 3 minutes long and details a conversation made between Faith, another girl and another guy. Audio experts were hired to enhance the audio. They claim that it clearly records Faith crying for help. It also records a male voice saying, I think she's dying, while a female voice is saying, do it anyhow. An intense discussion that seems to commence which ends in the unknown female becoming enraged.

The unknown male and the unknown female can also apparently be heard using the names Eric and Rosie and if that is true, there is no doubt that this is Karina Rosario and her abusive ex-boyfriend Eric. Faith's father is convinced that the recording is of his daughter's death, yet the model of phone that she had used at the time of her death is incapable of time-stamping phone calls accurately, meaning that the recording could have been made at any point during the night. Four years later, in an effort to definitively identify a suspect, local police released a phenotype of the killer, constructed using the sample of DNA left at the scene. The profile shows that the murderer is of mixed Native American and European ancestry,

specifically a mix of Mexican, Colombian, and Iberian heritage, with small amounts of other South American and African ancestry. It is very likely that he would have been considered Latino and would have olive or tan skin, black hair, and few freckles. Despite the original pool of suspects numbering in the thousands, police have managed to whittle it down to just 10 potentially guilty parties. As has been previously stated, the obvious suspect, Eric Tocoy Jones, was not a DNA match, but local law enforcement confirmed that the murderer was almost definitely someone that Faith knew, even if he wasn't someone particularly close, a mutual friend or a classmate, for example. It also remains unclear if it was the work of a lone killer or if such a person had an accomplice. Karina Rosario, on the other hand, remains one of

the most interesting and intriguing figures in this case. What would possess her to text or call two people so late in the night with such urgency? Why would she leave one of her best friends in the world, one that had been so good to her throughout her rocky relationship all alone in an apartment that had been the target of repeated break-ins by a psycho ex-boyfriend? And what was going on with that bizarre 911 call she did or perhaps didn't make? As of 2019, Chapel Hill police were still in contact with her, despite the fact that she's attempted to escape the situation by moving out of North Carolina. According to them, Karina is still cooperative and answers all their queries to the best of her abilities. Yet, in the words of local reporter Tom Gasparali, it's true that the cops still believe that there's more Rosario can tell them, and it sounds to me like Karina has long been in their crosshairs as a key figure

who knows much, much more than she says she does. Firstly, I'd like to begin with a little bit of background to explain why this particular case is so personal to me. For the past six years I've worked as a college campus police officer. We're a branch of law enforcement that doesn't get very much publicity or attention from the general public, but we're just as much law enforcement as any other branch. Policing college campuses is pretty much all I've ever known too, because before I trained to be a regular cop, I worked as a campus security officer which, trust me, was considerably easier than doing any actual police work. But it was also considerably

more boring too. If I'm being honest, I thought it would consist of breaking up crazy parties, rescuing hot sorority girls from whatever jam they'd gotten themselves into, maybe even getting a few compliments that are usually directed at a guy in uniform, but nope. All my job consisted of was walking around campus for like 8 hours a day, just making sure buildings were secure and that the right doors were locked. On top of that, I had very little training and basically no means of defending myself whatsoever. I was constantly worrying about what I'd do if I'd actually ran into any serious criminal activity, but luckily I never did. But I can't say the same for some other campus security guards, and that's pretty much the whole reason I'm writing this up.

Okay, so Virginia Wesleyan University is a small Methodist college in Norfolk, Virginia, with a total population of less than 1,500 students, and back in 2006, it was even smaller than it is now. It's located near Virginia Beach in the Hampton Roads area of the state, which actually has a relatively high crime rate, but the college itself is pretty safe, and historically there's been very little in the way of trouble there. It's kind of like a little green island of bliss in the middle of an urban concrete sea, and the students that attend it rarely say anything bad about it except around exam times. Back in 2006, it didn't have anything resembling a campus police force. Now, almost all American colleges have an attachment of uniformed police to keep them safe,

but back then, Wesleyan only employed a small number of unarmed security officials to keep the peace. And one of these was a guy named Walter Zokshevsky, known as Wally or Officer Wally among his colleagues in the student body. Wally was actually from Chicago to begin with, but after joining the US Navy and spending a good chunk of his military career down in Norfolk, it became kind of a home away from home. I know his wife is from the area and the pair moved back to Chicago after he got out of the military, but at 57 when Wally got laid off from a steel industry job in the Windy City and got sick to death of the weather, the couple moved back down to Virginia and Wally took up a job as a campus security officer at Wesleyan University. Wally has absolutely no experience in security or law enforcement but I'm guessing the college didn't

mind that since he was ex-military and was therefore seen as being disciplined and reliable. He started in July of 2006 and what followed was basically three months of on-the-job training in which Wally came to love his new job. His only real complaint was how hot and humid the campus could be in the summer months but he grew to love the student population who viewed him as a kind of warm, friendly guardian type figure, someone they could trust and rely on in their time of need. Then, on October 11th of that same year, Wally was getting ready for his evening shift patrolling the campus. He was wearing his regular uniform consisting of a blue dress shirt, black pants,

and a duty belt containing the usual security-type tools and gadgets,cuffs, baton, flashlight, radio, but most certainly no firearm. Many of the other security staff at the college carried pepper spray, but Wally wasn't authorized to carry any because of how new on the job he was. It had recently been his and his wife's 34th wedding anniversary, so the pair were particularly in love around that time, so he made sure to give her hugs and kisses before he headed off to work that evening. According to the records from that night, everything seemed pretty uneventful. It was just a regular shift on the sleepy college campus. Just before 10pm, Wally apparently made a radio call to the campus security headquarters, informing them that he was

about to undertake a routine building check. Security staff regularly checked in with headquarters so that clerks working there could make notes on their movements and activities, but after that call, Wally didn't check in again. This was undoubtedly unusual. It certainly wasn't like Wally to miss a radio check, so officials back at headquarters assumed that there had been some kind of radio malfunction, such as a loss of signal. This was their final conclusion too, not that something bad might have happened, so no police were called, and no other members of the security team were sent to check anything out. Wally's evening shift was due to end at 11pm and he usually arrived back

at headquarters for a debrief shortly before his shift was due to end so he could properly hand over to the next guy on duty. But that night, Wally never arrived back at headquarters. Almost a half hour went by and there were still no signs of Wally and it still proved impossible to get in touch with him via the radio network. Naturally, his colleagues began to worry and a handful of security officers took off around campus to try and find him. One of these officers was the shift commander, a guy called Vic Dorsey. Dorsey was checking out the Boy Dining Center at around 11.30pm when a grisly sight greeted him near the entrance. Wally was unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood having received multiple stab wounds around his arms and torso.

Someone had evidently violently attacked him, and while Wally seemed to have attempted to pull out his baton to defend himself, he simply didn't stand a chance. Head of campus security said that when he got the call shortly after Dorsey had found Wally's body, all he needed to hear was the man's tone of voice to know the worst had occurred. Dorsey only managed to get out one word out before he burst into tears. Wally. Virginia Beach police were called in who immediately took over the investigation into Wally's murder. One of the first things they did was to confiscate knives from anyone on campus who happened to be carrying on for whatever reason.

Even the head of campus security was considered a suspect for the time being and was made to hand over the small utility knife he kept on his key ring despite the fact that he wasn't actually present on campus at the time of the murder. Virginia Beach Police Department also demanded at the time of the murder. Virginia Beach Police Department also demanded that every member of the security team, as well as all other employees on campus, get down to the local department for interviews and polygraph tests. Every single member of the security team seemed only too keen to cooperate with the investigation, all except one, who apparently turned down the polygraph tests out of medical and religious reasons. As a result of lack of witnesses, clues, and CCTV footage, the investigation came up short pretty soon after it was opened up. But I'm hoping my own little

analysis will be able to jog someone's memory or convince someone to come forward. Someone must know something. Someone must have seen something. Heck, even if it's the person that actually killed Wally, they should just man up, do the right thing and admit what they did so we can all get a little closure. I mean, I did Wally's job and that legit could have been me out there that night, stabbed to death securing a building from someone that just shouldn't have been there. That thought alone is enough to give me chills. Personally, I have one main theory that I think explains what happened to Wally that night. Given that the encounter was outside of the dining center where students spend a fair amount of cash on their lunches and other sweet treats, a thief may have believed that there might well have been

a great deal of cash left in the building overnight. He probably saw Wally, recognized the uniform, then attacked in the knowledge that Wally probably wouldn't be carrying any kind of firearm. The college itself might have been considered an easy target for any kind of serious criminal, who might have known that there was very little in the way of security presence there. Yet there was absolutely no sign of any kind of break-in or an attempt at forced entry, nor had the college been the target of any organized burglaries before that time. This has given rise to other theories that some kind of grudge or dispute between co-workers led to Wally's death. After all, there was one member of the security team that refused to take a

polygraph test, and if you ask me, that's probably the most suspicious thing about this entire case. It's also really curious that there was no CCTV footage of the attack. Another member of the security team would have known where the cameras were at and therefore where the best place to attack Wally would be. Yet Wally was a very popular member of the team, so what could he have done to incur someone's anger in such a way is almost totally beyond me. In the words of Marianne Zarkshevsky, Wally's widow, I just want to ask them why. Why didn't you just leave? Why did you have to hurt him? And perhaps the most tragic thing I've learned about the events

surrounding Wally's death is that just a few months before he was murdered, the head of campus security had been asking the college to pony up the cash to hire some actual trained armed police officers. Leo Tarian, head of security, has pretty much openly admitted that it was hideously unfair to put untrained and unprepared people in a situation that might lead to encounters with armed and violent criminals. But he also puts it out there that the college was vehemently against the hiring of armed off-duty officers, on the grounds that it would create a negative atmosphere on campus by frightening the students. After Wally's death, Wesleyan College not only hired an off-duty officer But offered a $25,000 reward out of their own pocket

For any information leading to the identification and arrest of Officer Wally's killer A shadow box containing a photo of Wally, his now-retired badge And a medal now hangs in the Wesleyan security office With the box bearing the inscription for the ultimate sacrifice. But as sad and tragic as the whole thing is, it pales in comparison to the terrifying idea that a man could be killed in such a brutal fashion while at work, with one of his own colleagues as perhaps the main suspect, and that still, to this day, not a single person has been charged or convicted over his murder. We can only hope that Wally and his widow manage to find some measure of peace. It is the morning of March 22nd, 1975.

Helen Tobolsky, a 62-year-old custodian at the University of Notre Dame, arrives at 7 a.m. sharp to begin her day's work. She punches her time clock, collects her cleaning supplies from a storage closet, fills up a mop bucket full of warm, soapy water, and then walks over to the Aerospace Engineering Building. Unlike today, there were no closed-circuit television cameras on the Notre Dame campus, so we can only make really educated guesses on Helen's movements. It also means we have no definitive record of who else was on the

campus or who might have followed Helen into the aerospace engineering facility. But what we do know for certain is that around two hours later, at roughly 9am, Dr. Hugh Ackert, an engineering professor who had been lecturing at Notre Dame for many years, arrives on campus. After fetching a morning coffee from the staff lounge, Hugh makes his way over to the aerospace building. He intends to head into the machine shop to ensure everything is in order for the students who will be arriving shortly to begin their practical lessons. He was exhausted and bleary-eyed. Last night he'd been up late working on lesson plans for the week to come, but as he enters the machine shop, he sees something

that sends his heart racing and his adrenaline pumping. Lying on the machine shop floor is Helen Tobolsky. She is leaking half-clotted blood from a small gunshot wound to her skull, and written on a nearby blackboard is a date, along with four words. She is leaking half-clotted blood from a small gunshot wound to her skull, and written on a nearby blackboard is a date, along with four words. February 21st, 1975. The day I died. Helen's body was taken to a local coroner's office to be examined by a mortician. Her autopsy revealed that she had been dead shortly after 7am, meaning she had barely begun her cleaning duties when her killer had struck. In all likelihood, he had been following her around campus from the moment she arrived and picked the first available opportunity to murder

her, apparently by shooting her just below her left ear with a small caliber pistol. Police discovered that a door close to where Helen was found had been forced open, with a small glass window having been broken. This means that it is probably the case that the killer was not a member of University staff. If they were, they would have had the opportunity to get hold of the keys to the aerospace center. Interestingly enough, there were no signs of a struggle or a chase. If the killer had broken into the building after Helen was inside it, chances are she would have heard and become startled by the break-in. We can then safely assume that she'd gone to alert campus

security and that some kind of pursuit would have ensued. But no, it was an ambush, plain and simple. Therefore, we can safely assume that whoever killed Helen had opted to break into the building before she arrived for work. Most of the other cleaning staff at Notre Dame arrived at 8am to begin their shifts, but Helen was dedicated to her work and used to arrive an hour earlier in order to earn a little extra pay and get a head start on her duties. The killer knew this, and it shows an alarming degree of premeditation, with the killer having made the effort to learn of Helen's movements and habits before choosing the most opportune time and place to kill her.

Surprisingly, police initially speculated that Helen had indeed heard the break-in, investigating it to surprise a burglar and was killed to ensure she couldn't give an accurate description of them to law enforcement. Yet the building this supposed burglar was trying to break into was one that was full of heavy machinery and large unwieldy equipment such as wind tunnels and engines. Hardly the ideal target for a single thief, so unless they were wildly incompetent, we can safely assume the killer was not there to steal. Besides, a golden rule of burglary is never to harm anyone you come across as the police will investigate murder or assault far more aggressively than

simple thievery. Therefore, the likelihood of the incident being a simple robbery gone wrong is very very slim, especially in light of the strange cryptic message robbery gone wrong is very, very slim, especially in light of the strange cryptic message that was scrawled on the blackboard near Helen's dead body. The blackboard message was analyzed by handwriting experts in the hopes that it could be confirmed as Helen's, but the results of their investigation were never conclusive. This may well have been because the handwriting on the blackboard drastically differed from that of pen on paper, and that she had possibly been forced to write the message under duress. But even then, handwriting experts are trained to be able to work around such differences, and if there indeed had been any major similarities with shape or style of the lettering, they'd have surely mentioned it. Other handwriting samples

were taken from other members of university staff, but none were matched to the writing on the blackboard itself. Therefore, we have every reason to believe that it was in fact the killer themselves who wrote the message. However, there is also the issue of the date that was written on the blackboard. The message referenced the date of February 21st, while Helen was killed just over a month later on March 22nd. There was again some rather bizarre speculation that Helen had been forced to write the date herself and had been so afraid of her impending fate that she had simply gotten it wrong. But I believe that it makes much more sense that whoever killed her was trying to reference some kind of perceived slight or insult from Helen that occurred on February 21st.

This would have meant that the killer had been planning the murder for up to 32 days prior to the event itself, plenty of time to track Helen's movements and habits in preparation for her murder. But who could Helen have offended so badly that they'd have been driven to do something as drastic and terrible as take her life? During the course of an extensive police investigation, it was discovered that Helen had no known enemies. She had worked at Notre Dame in her role as custodian for twelve years, seeming to enjoy her job while each of her co-workers attested that she was very well liked, a popular figure among the teaching staff and student body alike. However, there is the possibility that Helen had

recently broken it off with a boyfriend or lover, one that had taken it so badly that they considered the day she finished the relationship as the day she died. Helen's husband John had suddenly passed away from an aggressive form of cancer in 1962 and Helen had never remarried. But that doesn't mean she didn't have some kind of male acquaintance at some point, perhaps even more than one. Only one thing is clear regarding Helen's murder that whoever killed her did so out of some twisted desire for revenge. Revenge for something that occurred on February 21st, maybe even of that very same year. Her slaying was the first ever homicide reported on the Notre Dame University campus, and a $5,000 reward was offered by the dean for any information that

would lead to the arrest of Helen's killer. But not a soul came forward, as one thing the investigation had established for certain is that no one saw or heard anything suspicious of that fateful morning back in 1975, not even the gunshot that killed poor Helen. Forty-five years later, Helen's murder remains unsolved, and it's become a piece of forgotten history for Notre Dame. Even in the aftermath of the murder, word of the reward involved, for any information, occupied only the smallest area of the local

newspaper, almost as if no one really cared about the lowly campus custodian who so tragically lost her life. And perhaps this is the scariest thing about Helen's case. Not that she could be stalked, cornered, and killed in such a mysterious and brutal manner, but that her life and death was just a mere footnote to a community that was only too willing to forget and move on. I go to uni here in Leicester in the UK and like most students, I'm out clubbing every weekend that I can afford it. I've had some of the best nights of my life with the girls in Leicester City Centre but I'm not gonna lie, I've seen some really horrid things too. From girls weeing themselves while they're too drunk to stand to bar fights where rabid lads were whipping bottles at each

other. I think alcohol has the ability to bring out the absolute worst in people. And it was on a night out in Leicester that one of the scariest things I'd ever been part of or witnessed to happened right in front of me. So we're leaving a club one Saturday night, planning on stumbling over the road to the kebab house to get ourselves some cheesy chips when we see this girl sitting outside the club looking absolutely rotten drunk. The poor thing can barely keep her eyes open and it doesn't look like anyone there is looking after her which was honestly a little bit concerning. But the kebab place we ended up sitting down in had these big glass windows that looked out into the street so from

my window seat I could still keep my eyes on her. I got my cheesy chips and I'm sitting there eating them when I see this lad walk up to her who takes her by the hand and then starts trying to get her to stand up. I was really relieved at first because I thought her boyfriend had showed up to take her home but the longer I looked the more I just got this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not only was this girl just refusing to go with this guy when she had every reason to want to get home and out of the cold but the guy was like looking over his shoulder and looking around like he didn't want people to see what he was doing. You know, making sure the coast was clear or something. It was such an obvious sign of guilt and I could just tell that something wasn't quite right.

Eventually the guy just pulls the girl up to her feet while she weakly struggles and fails to shake him off. Then he starts dragging her away from the club and into the middle of the street. I start alerting my mates to this and immediately we all get up from the table we're at, grabbing our boxes of chips and heading out into the street to confront the guy. We rush over, intending to give it our best British passive-aggressive, uh, excuse me, do you know her? When out of like nowhere, this car rushes up and brakes violently next to the pair of them. But in doing so, one of the front wheels like runs over the girl's foot and she lets out this kind of dull wail of them. But in doing so, one of the front wheels like runs over the girl's foot and she lets out

this kind of dull wail of pain. Then as the guy drags her around the side of the car that we're approaching, we see her foot like flopping around in this really unnatural way where her ankle is really obviously broken. The guy then starts to basically bundle the girl into the back of the seat that had at least three other guys in it, and we only just catch him in time to try to stop it. We're asking if he knows her and asking if the girl is alright, insisting he needs to call an ambulance for her right that instant. He starts trying to tell us that everything is okay and that he knows her,

and he's going to take her to an accident and emergency to have her foot looked at. One of my mates asks him what her name is and he sort of freezes, hesitates and pulls some random name out of his butt in a way that made it painfully obvious that he didn't know her before he walked up to her just a few minutes before. We start going mad like telling him we're going to call the police if he doesn't let her go and this gets the other lads in the car really agitated who start barking at him to get the girl in the car which he does almost violently before the car starts to drive away. I'm trying to get the car's number plate while one of my mates is on the phone to the police but I can't make it out properly. So for one horrible moment I thought that was it, that something terrible was going to happen to that girl and we'd totally just failed to stop it. But I turn around and my other two friends are

piling into a hackney cab screaming, get in Chloe. Then what followed was legit like a movie. My mate is all like, follow that car and then we're off, whizzing around Leicester city center following this black Volvo with the lads and the injured girl inside. As we're following it, it's just chaos in the back of the cab. One of my mates is still on the phone to the police telling them what's going on, another one of my mates is giving the cab driver the lowdown on the situation, all the while I'm noting the fact that the lads don't seem to be driving anywhere near the local A&E. They're actually headed out of the city center towards the suburbs which, to me,

was a pretty good indicator that we're trying to take her somewhere dark and secluded to do only god knows what to her. My maid got off the phone with the police and told us that they told her that they had a unit in the area and they weren't messing about either. It was like a minute or two before we saw blue flashing lights and the cab driver pulled his cab back away from the Volvo to let the police slip in to pull them over. When they finally do pull over, we all pile out of the cab while the driver waits for us, watching what was going on and shouting over and over, liar, liar, when the guy starts telling the policeman that the girl is their friend and

that they're taking her home. The other policeman who was there then comes over to us and starts getting our side of the story, which basically involved me telling him everything I'd seen and how I said it was incredibly suspicious. What happened next all unfolded over the course of like an hour, with more police cars turning up to keep an eye on the lads while one set of policemen got the girl out of the car and drove her to the hospital. I'm not sure if the lads got arrested or not, but I know they got their details taken down and no matter what happened after that, I know the girl ended up being taken away from the obvious danger and getting her foot seen to. My only real concern then was that the

cab driver was going to charge us like an arm and a leg for keeping him occupied for so long. But he actually refused to take any money off of us and in the end, saying it was just nice to see some people doing some good in the world. And that when his daughter is our age and gets into any trouble, that he'd hope there'd be some good Samaritans like us to help her out. My name is Jamila, and I'm a medical student at Barts, a medical and dental school here at Queen Mary's University in London. I want to specialize and become a consultant in obstetrics and gynecology and that requires a very particular area of study but for almost every medical student in the UK the first year of study is pretty much the same. And one of the things we all do at some point during that first year is something called

prosection. Prosection is sort of like dissection in that you're dealing with dead bodies and stuff only instead of dissection, where you're chopping up an entire body, prosection is when the dead body has already been chopped up by an experienced anatomist so that medical students can study its anatomical structure. About three times a year, we'll put on our white coats, along with a pair of goggles and latex gloves, and then we'll head down into the basement where all the cadavers are kept and study specific parts that are laid out on those big metal tables. This is basically like a circuit of looking at each organ or body part for about 10 minutes before moving on to the next. It's definitely one of the grimmer things we do during the first

year of medical school, and if you've even got an ounce of squeamishness in you, one or two prosection sessions are enough to squash that out of you. So a couple of days after my second prosection session in first year, I received a generic email from a department head stating that all prosections would be cancelled for the foreseeable future. I didn't really take much notice of it. My next session probably wasn't going to be for another few months so I figured it wouldn't apply to me. But that wasn't exactly the case because a few days after I got the email, I got a knock on my room in the halls of residence and when I opened it up, there was a female police officer stood in the threshold.

She very politely explained that the halls of residence had given the Met Police permission to search my room, but she wanted to be polite and asked if I minded if a few other officers called by in the next half hour or so to have a little look around my room. Obviously I had nothing to hide, and my room was like the size of a cupboard, so of course I consented. She thanked me and moved on before two other officers called by a short while later, only this pair had a sniffer dog with them. Like I said, I had absolutely nothing to hide so I just stood there politely while the officers ran the dog around the small interior of my room. It had a little sniff around, I mean for like 10 seconds tops, then

they too thanked me for my cooperation and then moved on. But not before I asked them if they could tell me what was going on. One of the officers apologized and told me they weren't allowed to talk about it, but they were sure the university would mention something to us soon enough. Only, they didn't. Weeks went by, and we were pretty much left to just assume that since there was a sniffer dog involved, that the whole police search was because someone in the halls was suspected of drug dealing or at least having drugs in their room. Students and drugs go together like a horse and carriage so assuming it was something drug related it seemed perfectly logical.

But we were wrong. Because the real reason the rooms were searched was far darker, and considerably more disturbing than just a few bags of weed or something. Now I can't actually confirm this, and I don't have any solid evidence for what were essentially rumors that went around, but someone apparently high up in the anatomy department went off the record and told a student that the cancellations of the pro-section sessions and the sniffer dog search were linked. Apparently someone had stolen a specimen from the basement during the session I was in. It was something that had happened once or twice over the years. Someone had pilfered a

preserved heart or a skull but in this case, an entire head had gone missing from the basement and the potential for scandal was phenomenal. None of this ever ended up in the papers or in the news, so many of it was just rumors that couldn't be confirmed. But I also heard that Bartz was forced to make a huge out-of-court settlement with someone that same year, and that a non-disclosure agreement and high court injunction had been put in place. Honestly, that could have been over literally anything, student misconduct or some other kind of scandal, yet I can't help but connect the dots from the rumors and the search for the payout and the injunction. I really do

think someone stole a human head from the basement somehow, but whether or not it was a student or a member of staff, I'm not sure. And why ever anyone would want to do that is just beyond me. I'm really not sure I want to know why someone would want to steal a preserved head from an anatomy lab, or what they'd do with it once they did. It's also pretty frightening that Bartz seemed more concerned in covering things up and sweeping things under the rug than really getting to the bottom of what happened or keeping us informed. I'd consider doing more digging if the whole thing didn't leave such a bad taste in my mouth and like I said, the whole thing raises questions that, if I'm honest, I'm not sure I really want to know the answers to. And so I just

have to live with it. Live with the fact that one of my fellow students could have stolen a human head, hid it away somewhere, and are now using it for some truly sickening, perverse things. To be continued... here at the National University of Singapore. I originally trained to be a lab assistant which here can lead to some very well paid jobs but I hated the boring stale environment of working in a lab all day so I was in a kind of crisis after my first round of university because I just couldn't see myself working in that kind of environment. So I took some time off from my lab assistant job to volunteer with a children's cancer charity, which was one of the most enriching, rewarding, and meaningful experiences of my entire life. I won't say too much about it because I think I might start to cry and mess up my keyboard, but

working with those kids meant I had found my calling. And so I went back to university to train to be a nurse and a pediatric nurse in particular. Obviously a huge part of learning to become a nurse isn't just sitting in a lecture hall or burying your nose in a book. It's learning practically by actually working in a ward under the supervision of a qualified member of staff. I remember my first time on a pediatric floor. It was honestly hellish. I'm still not quite over the sounds of kids screaming and I don't think it's something I would ever get used to. It's a sound that absolutely makes my skin crawl, like I tense up and I just can't relax when I hear it. After that first shift I got home and just didn't sleep a wink because every time I nodded off I would hear the sounds

of those children's screams just clawing at the inside of my skull. You never get over it but you do adjust and after a while you get so tired from the long night shifts that even if you see some horrific things you still manage to get some sleep. By far the most memorable time during my university training was the code yellow we got on the floor one day. Myself and my supervising nurse were doing our rounds, checking temperatures, administering meds, and going about doing our general checks on the floor when a voice over the hospital's public address system announced a code yellow. I remember the look of pure terror that appeared on my supervisor's face, like you'd think that she'd just been told that a meteor was about to crash into the hospital or something. Her eyes turned big and wide and her breathing quickened and she

immediately stopped what she was doing before calmly ushering me off the floor with her. No code yellow, that doesn't sound too serious, does it? I mean, it can't be any worse than a code orange or a code red, maybe even a code black could sound more alarming. But you see, that's just the idea of using a code like that. It kind of works in reverse. Your average civilian hears code yellow and doesn't freak out. But us nurses know what it means and we know how serious it is. At the time, I didn't know what it meant and it took until the supervising nurse told me for me to really understand how horrifying it was. Because you see, in our hospital wing, a code yellow means that a child has gone missing from one of the floors and that all non-essential nursing staff should

immediately help in locking down the exits to ensure that the child can't leave. Or rather, in a lot of cases, that the person attempting to take the child away is properly apprehended. It was like a mad rush to secure the floor but at the same time we couldn't let anyone know how panicked we were and how serious the nature of a code yellow is. All I wanted to do was run around like a headless chicken locking all the exits as I had this horrible image of some predator sneaking into one of the floors to kidnap helpless innocent children to do something unspeakable with. Every single person I saw carrying a child that wasn't wearing scrubs got pulled aside by either nursing staff or hospital

security and were thoroughly questioned as to where they were going, what they were doing, their visitor's badges were scrutinized and the patient tag on the child's wrist was inspected too. If I wasn't under the watchful eye of my supervisor I think I'd have lost my mind with panic. Eventually it was discovered that the person that had taken the child off the floor without permission was the divorced parent of one of the kids who hadn't got to see them in a while and had opted to basically steal them out of the hospital as it looked like they were going to miss their allotted time looking after them. So it wasn't anyone looking to do any harm but I'm telling you, the incident scared the absolute

life out of me and was by far one of the most terrifying moments of my entire nursing career. I just had no idea what was going on. Things went from zero to a hundred in seconds for me. I'm just glad it wasn't the thing that I feared the most. To be continued... I was a homicide detective with the NYPD for just over 16 years. 16 years of misery, pain, and death on a daily basis. I wish I could say that getting a conviction for a suspect I'd put the cuffs on could be satisfying, but it wasn't. In my first year of the job, we bagged a guy who'd killed two tourists just to take a few dollars out of their wallets. That same guy took a plea deal, did just 14 years and was out in the second to last year of my time working for the detective's bureau. I think that's when I decided I just about had enough. As a homicide detective, you want to get murderers off the street for good,

not to just delay the whole cycle of violence by just a decade or so. I felt useless, like I was just a cog in a machine that didn't even work properly. Then, about a year before I put my papers in, I spoke to an old partner of mine who'd left the job to become an independent private investigator down in Miami. He said it was the best decision he'd ever made, that he was raking in three times the salary without having to do any of the serious dirty work that made being a homicide detective almost unbearable. He also mentioned that if you get a good reputation for delivering on investigations, or if people hear you're an ex-cop, that the job offers come so thick and fast

that you can pretty much just cherry pick the jobs you want while naming your price. By that time I was divorced, had grown up kids in college across the country, so there really wasn't anything tying me to New York City. And so, once I worked my notice period, I picked out an apartment in Miami, caught a flight down to Florida, and started my new life in the Sunshine State. I started off getting the overflow of the jobs my ex-partner couldn't find the time for. He'd get a call, have to turn the person away, but would give them the old, I can't do it but I know a guy, ex-NYPD like me, solid worker, smart and diligent. Time after time, this got me well-paid PI work that mostly consisted of insurance and personal liability stuff. Basically, if someone made a personal injury claim against an individual or company,

I'd follow them around a little to make sure that their injury was genuine, and that they weren't hitting up the gym or whatever in their spare time. But there was another kind of job that accounted for a great deal of the work we did, and that was suspected infidelity. A husband or wife would get in touch with us saying that they believed that their spouse was having an affair. We'd then follow the subject around for a while, tracking their movements whenever they weren't at the family home, to see if they were in fact seeing someone else on the side. And, depressingly, more often than not, the suspicious party's gut feeling was

correct. We'd catch them sneaking into some apartment complex with a bottle of wine, only to leave the next morning with a certain glow about them, if you catch my meaning. Sometimes it was more brazen than that, and more often than not, attaining a sufficient evidence of the affair required some serious tailing and stakeout work, and it was this kind of call that accounted for what turned out to be one of the most disturbing and terrifying cases I've ever worked. One morning, my ex-partner gives me a call and tells me that he'd passed my contact details on to a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair. When she called,

she gave me the usual spiel about him disappearing for inordinate amounts of time, how his accounts of his whereabouts were inconsistent, and how their intimate life had dropped off almost entirely over the previous few months. To me, it seemed like an open and shut case. All I'd have to do was obtain the necessary photographic evidence, maybe snag some audio from a call the husband made to his mysterious side piece, and then collect my fee. Whilst on the phone with the woman in question, who I'll keep anonymous for reasons that will become clear, I made a note of all the pertinent information on her husband's hobbies, habits, and whereabouts before I got to work tailing him. One of the woman's main complaints was that her husband was coming home particularly late

on certain nights of the week, then disappearing on weekends. He claimed to be at a certain place, like a bar for example, and then the wife would call only to find out that he wasn't there. It was a Sunday afternoon when I tailed him from his home out to the Glenvar Heights area of the city. I thought I had him dead to rights with the way he was acting when he pulled up outside a house, peering around like a rabbit peeking out of its den, looking guilty as anything. When he rang the front doorbell I got my camera ready to snap pictures of whoever was about to answer, assuming it would be his paramour. Only it wasn't a woman at all, it was a man that he appeared to be rather friendly with.

It wouldn't be the first time that I discovered that a husband or wife was yet to come out of the closet, so to speak. Affairs didn't always happen with members of the opposite sex. But when I passed my finding on to his wife and showed her the pictures I'd taken, she told me that the guy he'd been visiting was a close friend of his. This all added up, given that to my knowledge, all they'd done was watch a Dolphins game on TV. I mean, I couldn't see the husband outright, but I could see the friend drinking beer and talking to someone who I assumed was our suspected cheater, so naturally I figured this was a dead lead. I carried on tailing the husband for about three weeks and aside from a handful

of occasions where he'd visit relatives or go drinking with work colleagues, he'd only ever visit this one particular friend during these unexplained absences. From what I could tell from spying through a crack in the curtains, the pair would drink a few beers, watch a game together, nothing remotely objectionable. I tried to explain this to the guy's wife, how it was all seemingly innocent and that I hadn't caught him going anywhere remotely sleazy. But she wasn't buying it. She told me her husband had been acting weirder and weirder recently, that he'd started saying some pretty gross things in his sleep as if he were talking to a lover or something. When I told her I'd come to a pretty solid conclusion, one which didn't involve him

actually cheating at all, and that I couldn't continue the investigation in good conscience, she offered me 50% extra for two more weeks of searching for evidence of infidelity. At the time, I didn't want to take her money. It would be morally unsound of me to keep mining her for cash and I could end up ruining my good reputation in the process. But something about her pleas made me take pity on her. That and she didn't exactly strike me as the paranoid type. She insisted that there was something to her suspicions and either she could keep paying me or she'd try someone else. That about sealed it. I told her I'd work the case for two more weeks but after that, she'd be on her own. The next time I tailed him, it was a weeknight, one in which I'd followed him from his downtown

office job out to the residence in Glenbar. I figured it would be yet another night of watching silent sports on someone else's TV through a crack in the curtains. Only this time, the guy hadn't quite closed them all the way, so I had a much better view of the room they were supposedly in. I say supposedly because after the husband was welcomed into the home, he only joined his friend in the TV room for like a minute or two tops before heading off to another part of the house. At least I'm assuming that's what he did because he didn't reappear in the TV room for another two hours. That's when I realized that on each of these visits, he'd been following the same pattern of behavior.

I'd assumed that he was watching TV with his buddy, only he wasn't. The buddy was talking to someone on speakerphone. I'd made a huge error of judgment. Something weird was going on in that house, and it was something that was essentially confirmed to be seedy when the husband exited the house at one point in a state of undress. His tie was off, his shirt was untucked, and like something out of a bad movie, he'd actually forgotten to zip his flyback up. The next time I followed the husband to his friend's house, I brought along what's known as a parabolic microphone that had an attached recorder. This is a special kind of mic that

basically uses a kind of small satellite dish to collect and focus sound waves. They don't always produce the best quality audio, even expensive ones like mine, but they can be very effective at eavesdropping on distant conversations. I paid almost $1500 for the model I use, but trust me, the thing has ended up paying for itself and I've used it on more than one occasion to secure hard audio evidence in an insurance fraud or infidelity investigation. So after the husband arrives at the friend's place, I turn in the parabolic mic to the window of the TV room, then listen in for anything incriminating. That's when the plot really started to thicken, as they say. From what I could gather, the husband arrives, he and his friend make a little small talk, then there's a cash amount exchanged, with the husband giving his friend a sizable amount of money before heading off into another room.

Again, after a few hours, the husband reappears, sounding pretty well blissed out. The two guys make small talk again, then the husband leaves. My first thought is that it was some kind of narcotic situation, that the husband was using his friend's place to use heroin or something along those lines. The only thing I could do to confirm my suspicions was stake the place out to see who else came and went, that way I'd know for certain if there was some kind of drug dealing situation occurring or if it was something more insidious. Lo and behold, the house was receiving visitors multiple times during all hours of the day and night. Each time there'd be an exchange of cash before the visitor would disappear into another part of the house for varying amounts of time. From the kind of

conversation that was going on before and afterward, there was no way of me knowing exactly what was being sold or if the gentleman callers were paying for time stayed, the amount of narcotics, or both. But during one visit I overheard something that might prove to be my ticket finding out what was going on in that house. One of the visitors tells the homeowner, through a series of implications and innuendos, that they have a friend who's interested in stopping by to patronize whatever services the guy was offering. The homeowner tells him to pass on his address, but not to use any cell phones, ever, then gives him a code word to use when stopping by so he'd know it wasn't the cops.

Bingo. I had my way in, and all it would take would be a little look around the house and I'd be able to know for certain what it was that my client's husband was doing when he was over there. I thought it was something shameful, something sleazy, but I don't think I ever could have prepared myself for what I was about to find. I waited a couple of hours before I made my move, ensuring no one else was visiting but also so that there was enough time elapsed between the visits so the homeowner wouldn't be too suspicious about me pretending to be the previous caller's referral. So I walk up to the house, ring the doorbell, then give the homeowner the story about having been referred by the previous visitor, along with the agreed upon code word.

He seems a little cautious at first, but he lets me into the house, showing me into the TV room, then asks for $300 in cash before telling me to wait there while he got stuff ready for me. I'm still under the impression that the place was some kind of drug house, that maybe he was going to clean up some puke in the other room, perhaps get some clean needles or something. In my mind, these suspicions are pretty much confirmed when he comes back into the TV room a few minutes later, then asks me if I'm ready while taking off a pair of rubber gloves. I follow him down a hallway and pick up on the smell of cleaning products on the air around him, but when he showed me into the room that I presumed all the other visitors had paid to be inside, my jaw almost hit the floor.

The interior looked like a slaughterhouse. One wall was floor-to-ceiling animal cages, and inside them were all kinds of smaller household pets and other similarly sized animals. Cats, smaller breeds of dogs, guinea pigs, chickens, rodent-like creatures that I only later learn were named chinchillas, and there must have been at least twenty to thirty different animals locked away in there. Then in the center of the room there was this large wooden table stained with blood, and on it sat all manners of tools and kitchen utensils. Like I said, I had assumed it was a drug house, even toyed with the idea that it was some kind of brothel, but never in a million years did I suspect that the place was some kind of snuff

related venture on the part of the owner. The fact that my client had suspected their husband of infidelity given the strong sensual overtones, only to find out that the cause of his long absences was that he seemed to be getting off when killing small animals, was one of the most disturbing, relevatory moments of my life, even during my time with NYPD homicide. People killing people was bad enough, but human beings taking the lives of small innocent animals for what was apparently some kind of twisted gratification was something I have struggled to get out of my mind. I took some pictures of the interior of the room then immediately left the house to call the police. As far as I know, the homeowner was arrested on animal cruelty charges

and is looking at time in prison for his crimes. Unfortunately this was all before the previous administration signed a bill making animal cruelty a federal offense so the guy isn't going to get as much time as I'd like him to. I showed the pictures of the kill room to my client with the strong recommendation that she move out of the house and file for a divorce as soon as possible. I explained that more often than not, people that harm animals graduate to hurting human beings at some point and that I strongly suspected that her life would be in danger if she chose to stay with him. Daniel John Morgan was born on November 3rd, 1949 in Singapore, the son of a British Army officer. He and his siblings then spent the majority of their youth in Monmouthshire, Wales,

where Daniel attended agricultural college in the small town of Usk. He undertook more agricultural training over in Denmark, but after a number of years working various farms back in the UK, he came to realize that agriculture was not his calling. You see, Daniel had an exceptional memory for details, with fellow farm workers noting that he could accurately remember long serial numbers and car registration plates after having had merely a glimpse of them. Daniel eventually left farming for good, moving to London with his wife and two children, and it was there that he set up his own private investigations company, Southern Investigations, in Thornton Heath. In early 1987, Daniel had been hired by a client

to investigate alleged police corruption that was apparently rampant in London's metropolitan police. Daniel had conducted extensive interviews with a man named Detective Constable Alan Holmes, a member of the police force who had supposedly grown extremely jaded with the constant vice and venality of his fellow officers, and was ready to collaborate with Daniel Morgan in order to shed light on their misdeeds. Daniel had also enlisted the help of Detective Sergeant Sid Fillory, an officer who was based at Capford Police Station, and one who was passing Daniel information under the table, so to speak. By March of 1987, Daniel had accumulated a rather extensive collection of

files on police corruption, and it was only a matter of time before he could run a thread through his findings to blow the lid on what would undoubtedly be a huge corruption scandal, one that would rock the very foundations of British law enforcement. On March 10th of that same year, Danny was relaxing after a long day at work at the Golden Lion Pub in Sydenham. He was accompanied by his long-time partner Jonathan Rees, who also had an extensive list of police contacts whom he had milked for information regarding the alleged corruption. The pair had been swapping information on their extensive findings together, with Daniel making notes in a small journal he kept on him at all times. Once their business had concluded, 37-year-old Daniel made his way out to the pub car park with the intention of driving home to his family. It is there that he was confronted by a larger man who demanded that

Daniel hand over his wristwatch, a rather expensive collector's item that would no doubt fetch a tidy sum on London's stolen goods market. Daniel knew better than to try to resist, taking off his wristwatch and handing it over to the man, who he believed would simply flee once he had gotten what he was after. Compliant but still angry and defiant, Daniel then turned his back on the robber and attempted to climb into the driver's seat of his car. But then the robber took out a small hand axe and plunged the blade into the back of Daniel's head, watching as he collapsed to the tarmac ground, bleeding profusely from the huge gash to his skull. The murder seemed to be an open-encased shut of armed robbery gone horribly wrong. But on their arrival, investigating homicide

detectives began to notice a series of inconsistencies in rather telling clues. Although his watch had been stolen, the robber hadn't bothered to take Daniel's wallet and had also left him with a large amount of cash in his jacket pocket. Now, it might seem obvious that the killer had panicked and then wished to flee the scene as quickly as possible to avoid being arrested on murder charges instead of simple robbery. However, further investigation revealed that the killer had in fact hung around the crime scene in order to relieve Daniel of another of his possessions. Daniel's trousers had been torn open around one of the pockets, and his notebook, the one in which he kept his wealth of information regarding police corruption, had been stolen. Police initially sought to arrest a single suspect in connection with the armed robbery and murder,

but the more information that came to light, the more they realized something far more sinister was going on. A month later, in April of 1987, six suspects were arrested in connection with Daniel's murder. Shockingly, these suspects included none other than Sid Fillory, one of Daniel's police contacts, as well as his longtime business partner, Jonathan Rees. Two more of the suspects were Metropolitan police officers who were arrested specifically on suspicion of murder. However, all six suspects were eventually released without charge since homicide detectives were completely unable to make any of the charges stick. Then a few months later, during the summer of 87, the other police officer that Danny was working closely with,

Detective Constable Alan Holmes, was found dead under extremely suspicious and mysterious circumstances. It was initially believed that he had ended his own life, possibly as a result of the depression and alienation he felt when police colleagues asserted that his collaboration with private investigators made him a traitor and a snitch. But the coroner noted that there were a number of inconsistencies regarding the injuries to be found on Alan Holmes' body, some of which were more consistent with assault or involuntary detainment than a straight-up taking of their own life. There have been many allegations and suspicions regarding this,

and unfortunately, no concrete conclusions have been reached, and we can only really speculate on what happened to him. A year later, in April of 1988, an inquest into Daniel Morgan's death discovered that all was not well regarding professional relationships at Southern Investigations. A handful of company insiders claimed that Daniel Morgan and his partner, Jonathan Rees, the very same man who was arrested in connection with his death, had been arguing extensively in the run-up to the former's murder. Apparently, Rees had told the company accountant that police officers he knew well were either going to kill Morgan themselves or have it arranged using various shady underworld connections. He also told Lennon that in the aftermath of Morgan's death, that none other than Sid Fillory, the officer who had been feeding them information, would replace him as Reese' partner at Southern Investigations. Although Reeves straight up denied murdering his former partner, or having anything to do with the planning of it,

he was held dead to rights over the Sid Fillory comment, who had indeed joined the PI company after a medical retirement from the Metropolitan Police. Former Detective Sergeant Fillory was also alleged by witnesses to have tampered with evidence during the inquest into Daniel Morgan's death, as well as apparently having coached witnesses to give statements that would absolve him and Rees of any involvement in the murder. As a result, Jonathan Rees was once again arrested, only this time it wasn't just for an abstract involvement in the murder, it was for the actual murder itself.

But not only was he released, again due to lack of evidence, but the results of the ongoing inquest and Daniel's death concluded that there had been no criminal involvement whatsoever of any of the members of the Metropolitan Police. This is despite numerous arrests on top of the highly suspicious taking of their own life of the former Detective Inspector Alan Holmes. It seems a conclusion that suited many, but it certainly doesn't seem to suit the truth. From 1998 to 2011, a series of inquiries shed more and more light on what was to become a black stain on the collar of the Metropolitan Police. Jonathan Rees was also proven to be no stranger to corruption, as in the year 2000, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for conspiring to plant cocaine on an innocent woman to discredit her in a child custody battle. It was a damning connection and

showed the general public that Rees was a man who could stoop very low indeed to get what he needed. Police also used surveillance devices on a number of occasions in an attempt to covertly obtain yet more information for use in another prosecution. More than once, these bugs recorded audio that linked a number of police officers to Daniel Morgan's murder, but a judge dismissed the recordings as mere hearsay, asserting that they were not substantial enough to be considered serious evidence during any prospective trial. Then, a number of years after Reese was sent to prison, another inquiry was mounted, with this one being kept a closely guarded secret.

Detective Superintendent David Cook was appointed to head an inquiry to review the evidence, a man who once described the murder as one of the worst kept secrets in southeast London. Superintendent David Cook was appointed to head an inquiry to review the evidence, a man who once described the murder as one of the worst kept secrets in southeast London, and that a great number of civilians and law enforcement personnel knew the identity of at least some of those involved in Daniel's murder. Detective Superintendent Cook also said that serious and persistent efforts had been made to tarnish Daniel's character and passionately dismiss claims that Daniel had been targeted for assassination after he had been found to be investigating a ring of Colombian drug dealers. Cook said he was certain that those responsible were white British and almost certainly involved with the police force in some capacity.

The secret inquiry resulted in the 2009 trial of a number of suspects, including Reese, but once again the case fell apart when it was decided that almost a decade of public attention meant that none of the suspects could be guaranteed a fair trial. Incredibly, Reese had once again escaped the justice that Morgan and his family so richly deserved. Yet amazingly, since his release from prison for attempting to pervert the course of justice, Reese has made no effort to hide his criminal dealings. It has become painfully obvious that he has a network of contacts with corrupt police officers who obtain confidential records for him. In order to get a job with the British tabloid newspaper News of the World, he claimed that his extensive contacts provided him with confidential information from banks and government organizations,

and he was routinely able to obtain confidential data from bank accounts, telephone records, car registration details, and computers. He was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists. In his own investigation into Rees, Guardian journalist Nick Davies described what he observed as a devastating pattern of illegal behavior, and commented on the empire of corruption that Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillory built in the years following Daniel Morgan's murder, after Fillory replaced Morgan as Ree's partner. What seems terrifyingly obvious at this stage is how one man was capable of manipulating the British justice system for more than 20 years simply to suit his own financial gain. And although he did indeed see the inside of a jail cell for perverting the course of justice, Jonathan Reeves has managed to escape punishment

for the most serious crime he seems to have committed, that of planning and executing the murder of his former partner, Daniel Morgan. We as citizens are supposed to be capable of putting faith in the criminal justice system. Without it, all we have is a sense of chaos and lawlessness, a world where we must take justice into our own hands when the state refuses to help us. What is undeniably more terrifying than any ghost or ghoul or monster is that we may well live in a society where those we trust to be our guardians are actually those who silence us, oppress us, and ultimately kill us. Shortly after my retirement from the LAPD, I managed to land a job as a private investigator. It was only supposed to be as a change of pace to wean myself off the high-paced lifestyle,

one that had the added bonus of padding out my retirement account until I was ready to just sit on my butt to play golf for the rest of my life. This is the story of one of the few cases I didn't take. One that was this weird mix of scary and upsetting for me. One that really made me glad I was making the move to step away from the general public because as you probably know, they can be absolutely insane. So the company I ended up getting hired by had an office on the ground floor of a building right across from the county courthouse, with a pair of automatic double doors that opened up right onto the street outside. This meant that we got a lot of people just walking in right from the sidewalk, sometimes apparently out of total spontaneity.

Now if the day was pretty quiet, I'd clock out and go home around 4 in the afternoon, which on this particular day I was very much looking forward to doing. But just 15 minutes before I was planning on getting out of there, I get a call from the secretary asking if I'm free to see a prospective client. I didn't figure that it'd take all that long, so I agree to see them, then get a knock on my office door from a guy with a briefcase, who walks in, sits down, and then starts asking me all the usual financial and logistical questions, my hourly rates, my experience, that kind of thing. The guy seemed real agitated over something, which is pretty standard, given that by the time someone is willing to actually hire a private

detective over something, things tend to have gotten pretty bad for them. After this barrage of questions, I politely ask him if there's anything I can do to help, to which he replies that a group of people have stolen his intellectual property. He then tried to take legal action and the organization basically responded by gang-stalking him. IP cases, as we call them, tend to be nice and basic, get a hold of the company's copyright, compare it to the original, which is hopefully dated and trademarked, then boom, I take my fee from the damages awarded. I then ask the guy to tell me, in as much detail as possible, what ideas have been stolen. Then to my confusion, he starts talking about how a year ago, he ended up having a vasectomy performed at a local doctor's surgery center

He starts giving me names, dates, how much the operation cost That's when I politely interrupt him and inquire as to why he's telling me all of that He stops, his eyes narrow, and he gives me this look as if I just said something rude about his mother. He takes a deep breath, evidently tries to calm himself a little then in a whispered voice he starts telling me something I didn't expect to hear in a million years. In hushed tones, he starts telling me that he's been bugged. Again, this seemed like a complete tangent, or at least that he'd started to explain how exactly his ideas had been stolen.

But how wrong I was. The two points, the bugging and the vasectomy, were explicitly linked. He then tells me with a totally straight face that while he was under general anesthetic, that the doctor implanted a listening device in his balls. I didn't say a word, but I'm guessing the look on my face completely betrayed what I was thinking because he takes extreme offense and starts babbling on about how no one believes him, that he's not a liar, and that he has proof. The claim about the proof piqued my interest, so I entertained his notions for a minute while he opens up the briefcase he was carrying and pulls out what appeared to be an x-ray of his pelvic region. He starts pointing to

what were very obviously his family jewels and more specifically to a little white dot in one of them. Now I'm certainly no medical expert but unless he'd managed to make additions to what was obviously a genuine x-ray, it looked pretty convincing to me. I took the picture off of him, studied it, and for one of the first times in my entire investigative career, I was genuinely flummoxed by what I was looking at. Still I opted for a conservative approach, telling him that I was no doctor but that the chances of the little white dot being some kind of listening device were very slim indeed. I recommended he get a second opinion

on the x-ray, on the off chance that it was some kind of tumor, and it would be really tragic if he was wasting his time over such spurious ideas when his health could genuinely be at stake. But to my surprise, instead of taking what I'd said to heart, he seems completely to ignore what I said and goes on to tell me that some shadowy organization is using the listening device to steal ideas he's having for inventions before selling them on to big companies. He then tells me that he's owed millions upon millions of dollars because he invented airpods and the idea was stolen from him. Now I know the chances of this are extremely slim, not because it was out of the question,

but because, well, let's just say by this point I was beginning to get a sense of this guy's character, shall we say. But I'm not looking to offend him, so I decide I'll just give him a highball quote that'll put him off enlisting my services, which will surely get him out of my office so I can be home by 4.30. I give him a quote for a $100,000 retainer, giving him some bull about how my fee would be proportionate to the dollar amount he was rewarded and that, as he put it, he was owed millions upon millions of dollars. To my amazement, he accepts, but tells me I'd have to wait until he won the court case before I could get my fee. But here's the thing, in the state

of California, only lawyers can work on contingency. This means that their fee is contingent on them winning the case for their client. Private investigators and all the individuals that might work alongside these lawyers still have to be paid paid win or lose. I tell the guy this, explaining that I can't break the law, but if they found an attorney willing to take the case I'd be more than willing to work for them to obtain any potential evidence they needed to win the court case. The guy goes quiet, and there are a few moments of awkward silence. I then asked the guy if he has a doctor he can trust that would be willing to take a look at the x-ray he showed me. Like I'm serious when I say I was generally concerned for this person's health and not just because he seemed like he

wasn't playing with a full deck. His face changes, his head kind of drops a little and he starts looking at me from under his brow. I'd done more than enough in the LAPD to know what was coming next so I back up in my chair a little and ask him if there's a problem. I'll never forget what he said next. I made a huge mistake here, haven't I? His voice was monotone, like I was talking to a robot all of a sudden. I replied as politely as I could, telling him I just thought that he might need a second opinion, but he interjects with, You're one of them, aren't you?

Back when I was with the department, we'd arranged our interview room so that the cop was always closest to the door. This served two purposes. One, if the suspects tried to make a run for it, we could cut them off at the door. This served two purposes. One, if the suspects tried to make a run for it, we could cut them off at the door. And two, if the suspect decided to attack the questioning officer, they had a much better chance of making it out safely if they were the closest person to the exit. Now for the first time since I'd become a PI, I was regretting now setting my office up in the same layout. Anyway, he makes his accusation and I obviously deny it, but this guy isn't taking no for an answer. He starts calling me a plant, getting more and more aggressive by the second.

Again, I start backing up in my chair, silently cursing that my concealed carry permit hadn't been granted yet because I knew I was in trouble. I knew this guy was about to attack me. And he did. He got up out of the chair he was sitting in and suddenly he seemed much, much larger than he did when he walked in. He put one foot up on my desk, climbs up on it, jumps off onto me, immediately knocking me over. Then in seconds, he has me in a chokehold. I was honestly incredibly lucky that he decided to make so much noise in the process of attacking me. If he'd have gotten the drop on me and gotten me in that chokehold without alerting the company secretary, I'm pretty sure that I'd be six feet under right now. He was faster than me, bigger than me, stronger than me, and considerably younger than me. I had no chance in a man-to-man fight. I just thank god that the secretary alerted

one of the other PIs who was on site, who managed to taser the guy to get him off of me. I got a little secondary shock since his arm was wrapped around my throat, but I wasn't about to complain too much. It was either take a jolt or never feel anything ever again. The guy was arrested, charged with assault, and from a few old buddies I had that still worked in the department, I found out that he's now held at the Atascadero State Hospital, an all-male maximum security facility that houses violent, mentally ill patients from all over California. I do feel exceptionally sorry for the guy. I can't imagine what it must be like to live and have to live with a brain that plays such horrible tricks on you.

But I won't lie, I do feel like it's the best place for him. Because it really was only a matter of time before he took out all of that self-righteous anger on someone, before he really put the hurt on an innocent person, and they might not have been nearly as lucky as me. On September 8th, 2017, 33-year-old Taylor Wright, a divorced private investigator, was enjoying life with her girlfriend, Cassandra Waller. The two had just moved in together and everything was going well, despite the stressful divorce proceedings that Taylor was going through with her ex-husband. That day, Taylor went out with a friend, Ashley McArthur, in the hopes of relieving some of the stress. But it was a decision that proved to change not only her life, but also the lives of everyone around her. As the day progressed, Cassandra lost contact with Taylor when she stopped responding to her text messages.

She contacted Ashley who said that Taylor had been stressed and crying throughout the day and needed time to herself. Things got even stranger when Taylor cancelled dinner plans with Cassandra, texting to say she needed a few days to clear her head. Cassandra knew that Taylor, as a private investigator, had the means and skills to disappear and she grew worried. Taylor's loved ones were also concerned because it was out of character for her to just disappear, especially without first contacting her young son. Cassandra then went to the police, who suggested that she reach out to Taylor's ex-husband, Jeff Wright, to investigate further on her own. Jeff told Cassandra that their son had also been trying to reach out to Taylor, but he had not gotten any response. He then issued a startling

warning, telling Waller that Taylor may get angry with her for involving the police in her business and that she should be careful. Disturbed, Waller continued to search for her girlfriend and began calling hospitals in the area. After a week passed with no sign of Taylor, Cassandra filed a missing persons report and authorities began an investigation. They wasted no time in reaching out to Ashley who was the last person among Taylor's friends to see her before she vanished. Speaking with the authorities, Ashley recalled that Taylor still seemed stressed at the end of their meeting and that she had gotten into an Uber to go get a drink. She also however revealed new information. Weeks earlier, Taylor had taken $34,000 out of a joint account that she shared with her ex-husband and had given it to Ashley to keep safe during the divorce proceedings.

Even more shockingly, she said that on the day of their meeting, Taylor had picked up the money, put it in a duffel bag, and had taken it with her. While Ashley denied having anything to do with Taylor's disappearance, a search team combed the farm where phone records showed Ashley and Taylor had been together on the day that she went missing. They initially turned up empty-handed and investigators were forced to release Ashley. Those who continued to search the farm in question however soon came across a disturbing discovery. A human skull with a bullet hole. Investigators began extracting the body and found a necklace that they had seen Taylor wearing in a photo.

The police were extremely suspicious that this was the missing private investigator and that their suspicions were correct. Dental records later proved it was Taylor's body. Around a month after her disappearance, Taylor had finally been found, and Ashley, who still denied any wrongdoing, was arrested for first-degree premeditated murder. In the end, Ashley was convicted for murdering her private investigator friend over an amount as small as $34,000. It may seem like a lot of money to some, but in comparison with the value of a human life, it's a paltry sum of money to go to prison for the rest of your life. And that's what's so terrifying about this particular case. It wasn't revenge that was

the motive in this murder, nor sadism or gratification. Taylor's life was taken away over nothing more than your average person's year's salary. It seems that human greed can extend so deeply sometimes that it can cause us to become bloodthirsty, callous, and murderous, which is most definitely a thought that'll keep some of us up at night. On the 3rd of May 2007, three-year-old Madeline McCann disappeared from her bed in a vacation apartment at a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal. More commonly known as Maddie in the media and to those close to her, she had been taken on vacation by her parents, Kate and Jerry, along with her younger twin siblings. One night, the McCanns left their children to sleep in the

ground floor apartment that they were staying in while they ate at a nearby restaurant. Kate and Jerry had assumed that it would be safe to leave their children alone for the duration, since the aforementioned restaurant was just 180 feet away, which would allow them to momentarily check on them from time to time. But when Kate went to check up on the children at around 10pm, she discovered Maddie was missing. Over the next few weeks, Portuguese police managed to misinterpret some of the DNA evidence collected from the crime scene. This led them to suspecting that Maddy had died in some kind of tragic accident at the apartment,

with her parents covering up their own involvement by faking a kidnapping. The McCanns were formally declared suspects in the case by Portuguese police in September 2007, but were essentially absolved of any suspicion in July of 2008 when Portugal's Attorney General archived the case on the grounds that there was too little evidence to take a case against them to trial. Britain's own Scotland Yard Law Enforcement Agency then began its own investigation, Operation Grange, in mid-2011. After a fair amount of research, the senior investigating officer declared that he was treating the disappearance as a criminal act by a stranger, most likely a planned abduction or burglary that had turned violent when the perpetrators believed themselves discovered.

In 2013, Scotland Yard released composite images of local men they wanted to talk to regarding Maddy's disappearance, including one of a man seen carrying a child toward the beach that same night she disappeared. Shortly after this, in light of new local suspects being identified, the Portuguese police reopened their inquiry into her disappearance. This caused Britain's Operation Grange to be scaled back in 2015 to allow Portuguese authorities more control over the investigation. But some of the detectives who worked on the case continued to pursue a small number of inquiries that seemed worthy of following up. A prominent British newspaper described the disappearance as the most heavily reported missing person case in modern history, and to this day, her whereabouts remain a complete

mystery. Despite the fact that police in multiple countries were involved in trying to locate their daughter, the McCanns took it upon themselves to hire a company of private investigators to dig up information that might help regular police agencies in their search. The PI company known as Oakley International was based in Washington, D.C. in the United States, and was initially awarded a six-month contract worth more than half a million dollars that was raised mostly by charitable donations made by members of the public. Oakley International began to interview potential witnesses, delve through security footage, and trace clues all over Europe. But in 2008, the McCanns leveled a serious accusation at the firm's 56-year-old Irish CEO,

Kevin Halligan, which meant they reneged on the contract, handing over only half of what the firm was apparently owed. Halligan was said to be missing resources meant solely for the purpose of finding Maddy, allegedly using them to fund a lavish lifestyle of travel and leisure. Halligan fiercely denied the claims, but it appears the man was no stranger to fraud. In 2012, he was extradited to the US to face charges over an unrelated 1.3 million pound fraud to which he pled guilty the following year. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison, but was deported from the United States soon after his court appearances because of the time

he had already spent behind bars. Halligan had escaped the possibility of a lengthy jail term in the US, probably because he was wealthy enough to afford the best defense attorneys that money could buy. But because he had become central to the floundering, and apparently corrupt efforts to locate young Maddie, he had angered a lot of people along the way, and made himself many enemies, some of which vowed to seek revenge on a man that apparently used the little girl's abduction for his own financial gain. Which is why it's so suspicious that he died suddenly at his home in Guilford, Surrey in January of 2018. Adrian Gatton, a TV director and investigative journalist who made a documentary

with Halligan in 2014, confirmed his death to the Press Association, saying he had not been in good health. There was blood around the house, probably caused by previous falls when he was either drunk or blacking out, he said. His house was full of empty drink bottles. A lot of people wished him ill, but his death is almost certainly related to alcoholism. But following his death, a Surrey police spokesman said that we were called to an address in Cobbett Hill Road, Normandy, following a report of a man in his fifties having been taken unwell who subsequently died. The death is being treated as unexplained and a file will be passed to the

coroner's office in due course. Unexplained, certainly not a word we might expect to hear following the death of a man who, as Adrian Gatton had phrased it, was certainly related to alcoholism. The fact remains that when the police broke into Halligan's home, they found bloodstains all over the house. There is of course the possibility that Halligan's corruptly wicked ways had finally caught up with him, that the people who were furious and vengeful regarding Maddie's disappearance heard of his apparent corruption and then channeled their anger toward him. But Halligan always insisted

the media reports were a gross distortion of what actually happened. The print media in particular took this line that really nothing was being done. I was living the high life on the proceeds of the McCann case, he once said. Trust me, I didn't so much as buy a new suit. The money, all of it, is fully accountable. It's provable. It seems that Halligan was very keen on proving his innocence with regards to the Finding Maddie fund that he was accused of misusing. Perhaps the alcoholism he was said to suffer from was a direct result of the ire he had incurred and was a manifestation of the pain that any innocent man would suffer under that kind of undue scrutiny.

And maybe, just maybe, he believed that finding Maddie would vindicate him. Did Halligan die a natural death? Did he even die an unexplainable one due to his heavy drinking? No. Unexplained. That's how Surrey police described his death. There's every possibility he was murdered, and if indeed he was murdered, could it possibly be he had gotten so close to the truth behind Matty's disappearance that someone, somewhere, felt that he must be silenced? The actual disappearance took place in Portugal. Halligan's death occurred in Surrey, England, and in June of 2020, a public prosecutor in Germany ordered an inquiry regarding a possible involvement of a 43-year-old man, believed to have been living in a borrowed VW camper in the Algarve at the time of McCann's disappearance.

The suspect's car, an expensive Jaguar XJR6, was registered to a new owner the day after McCann disappeared. These international connections suggested a coordinated network of child kidnappers, complete with a system of support and logistics that could prove deadly under the right circumstances. Yet regardless, it seems the case that we will never truly know how and why Madeline McCain was abducted, where she is now, or if she is alive or dead. But if we ever do uncover the truth, we may just lift the lid on a terrifyingly well-organized conspiracy that has been responsible for the disappearances of children all over Europe, time and time again. And frankly, I'm not sure the general public is ready for that kind of information, nor are they ready to find out just how far the tendrils with an old friend, Nathan.

We rented a two-bedroom, basement-level apartment for a year together and at first things were great. It was like having a long-term sleep over with your best friend and we were able to have our own alone time in the apartment because we worked opposite schedules. I worked a retail job during the day and Nathan worked overnights. For a month or two we had a good thing going. He'd work and I'd be home and vice versa. We'd stay up late playing video games when our schedules aligned. The first thing I noticed that was odd was my closet in my bedroom. In the master bedroom, there was a small walk-in closet and I noticed the carpet in the corners looked as if it had been dug out by an animal. There were also several gaps in the walls along the edges of the carpet. At first, this seemed no different, really, from the general cheap apartment disarray and maintenance issues. This didn't scare me at first.

I figured someone had an overexcited pup and left it alone. It started off with little things at first. I'd think I'd hear Nathan calling my name and I'd respond only to hear that he'd already been at work for hours. Leading to our bedrooms was a long hallway that seemed to make us both uncomfortable. The hallway light would be left on as often as possible and we laughed it off as the childhood fear of the dark. I think we were both too skeptical to talk about how we'd occasionally think we'd seen the other person walk out of the hallway only to realize that we're alone. On more than one occasion,

I'd had a friend sleep over who'd complained that they were kept awake at night by the constant flickering of the hallway light. My roommate and I tried our best to be respectful of each other's schedules. If I knew that he'd just come home in the morning and was sleeping, I'd try my best to stay quiet when heading to work. One morning, Nathan told me that while he'd been relaxing in his room after work getting ready for sleep, he'd heard footsteps in the hallway and the door to my room being shaken. At first he thought it was me rushing around getting ready for work, but he was concerned because I was being much louder than normal. He looked over at his alarm clock and realized that I

should have been at work by this time and says he decided to check on me. He opened his door and looked down the hall towards my room. He says he froze when he saw a dark figure standing outside my door. In that moment, he said he rationalized it by saying he thought I was just running late for work. I'd gotten embarrassed at being caught and ducked into my room. He retreated back to his room and said that he hadn't heard anything else for the rest of the day. He never heard me say anything or leave and opted to forget about it even when I came home later and confirmed I hadn't been late that morning. As time progressed in that apartment we both constantly were irritable and tired. It felt impossible to rest in that apartment, we both constantly were irritable and tired. It felt impossible to rest in that apartment, especially when I was alone.

Nathan would sometimes chalk this up to me being nervous as a woman alone in an apartment at night. I'd spend my nights huddled on the end of the couch furthest from the hallway, tucked in a blanket under the lamp. On more than one occasion, this is where I slept as it felt more secure than walking down that hallway to my room. I'm awoken one morning in my bed by the sound of someone trying to beat down my bedroom door. I jolt awake and ice settles in my veins. The banging on the door is desperate and I can see the door shaking under the weight of the hits. Immediately I'm concerned that our apartment's flooded, we've been robbed, or something happened to Nathan.

I bolt out of bed and rip open my door, and once again I'm met with sudden silence in an empty hallway. Fearful I've misheard where the knocks were, I go down the hallway to our main door and check outside, and there's no one yet again. I sit down on the couch in the living room, unable to go back to sleep even if I wanted to. When I realized Nathan had been home I chalked it up to him sleepwalking and he confesses later that he'd had repetitive nightmares that morning but doesn't believe that he'd been able to walk in his sleep. His room was small and he'd taken

up most of the main space with a weight set that he'd have to crawl over to enter and leave. I later had to reason as well that in the time that it had taken me to open the door, he would have had to sprint back to his room and slam the door shut to avoid me seeing or hearing it. As weird as this was, the worst was yet to come. We've had a disagreement before Nathan went to work and I had been laying in my bed, still a little angry and watching videos on my phone until I could doze off. When he worked overnights, his job was close enough to our apartment that he'd come home for lunch almost every night. So, when I heard the door creak open at 3am, I wasn't uneasy at first. I heard the various sounds of him in the apartment, opening cabinets and walking around. I roll over,

upset because he is being much louder than normal and immediately I feel my heart drop into my stomach. Nathan would always turn the lights on when he came home. It was reassuring on the nights I was in my room to see the hallway lights seep through the door frame to let me know I wasn't alone in the apartment anymore. But this night, when I rolled back over, there was no reassuring light coming from around the closed door. It's pitch black. My heartbeat quickened immediately and I messaged Nathan to ask if he'd come home but I got no response. I strain my ears to listen and what I hear sounds nothing like normal. There's footsteps running around the apartment and coming down the hall to my door then running away. Doors opening and closing and cabinets creaking.

In that moment I was so absolutely sure we were being robbed and I began to cry. I didn't know how to deal with this and what I'd heard sounded so angry and chaotic outside my door. Tearfully, I grabbed a knife that I kept under my pillow. Because the apartment walls and doors were so thin, I couldn't have called 911 quietly enough to save myself. My instinct in that moment was to fight and deal with the consequences later. I stood just behind my door, listened to the footsteps run towards me, braced myself, and when I heard them start to fade down the hall I ripped open the door to surprise my attacker.

I met with absolutely nothing but silence and darkness. I stared down the black empty hallway, adamant that they're hiding from me I'm frozen in place, staring down the hall, waiting to hear anything The front door is in clear view from my position and it's still closed Whoever it was, has to still be here I scan the room at the end of the hall I feel a lump in my throat as I lock my eyes on a large, dark figure Peering around the corner at the end of the hall. I take off down the hall and whip around the corner, ready again to fight, but there's no one in my apartment.

When I turn on all the lights and check the door was shut and locked. All the windows are locked, Nathan's room is empty and there's nothing out of place. All the cabinets and drawers I'd heard being ripped open or closed, all the tables still upright. My body in this moment reacts in a way I wouldn't expect. I go from overwhelming fear to complete calm. I shove what's happened to the back of my mind, walk in my room, lock the door and go to bed, dead asleep within seconds. To cope, my brain shoved this memory to the depths and it only resurfaced months later after I had moved out when Nathan and I finally divulged all of our experiences together.

For the remainder of my time in the apartment, the tiredness and irritability continues. Even my sanctuary of the living room is compromised as I would awake many times in the middle of the night to see a dark figure walking out of the hallway towards the couch, disappearing when I turned my head to look. Things would fall over, I'd hear knocks on my bedroom door and more and more I was questioning my own sanity. Eventually when I couldn't take it anymore and things financially weren't well with the apartment, I decided to move back home. Within a month, I was back to feeling like myself again. We're still not entirely sure what was in that apartment, but

we have some theories. I feel it's important to preface our theory with this. Not too long after moving into this apartment, I had taken to practicing Wicca and paganism. I don't say this to add horror, but rather to explain what we believe happened. In my early practicing, I would fill my room with cleansing materials like court stones and sage to cleanse before spells and maintain an energy in my room. We suspected whatever was in our apartment had originated in my closet, and that whoever was in my room before had done something sinister in there. The rips in the carpet, and the gaps in the walls with small objects just had a view of the flashlight. We were too scared of fines that we

would get for destroying the closet to lift up the carpet and check what may have been underneath. It's been theorized that I had unknowingly driven whatever darkness lived in that closet out and had spent the rest of the time I lived there desperate to come back in. The longer it was kept out the angrier it got and the more we took it out on each other. Later when I moved out things continued to worsen for my roommate who remained. He was constantly tired and angry and fell into a dark headspace. The spirit was able to get back in my room after I left and the girl who lived in my room after me said she was plagued with nightmares and had been locked out of the

room on many occasions even though the door locked from inside. She'd try it and the door would be locked then later she'd try it again and the door would somehow open. Nathan would send me videos of doors opening in the apartment on her own, and the TV suddenly showing black and white cable static in the middle of DVDs and YouTube videos. My roommate was able to move out of the apartment a while ago and we've both been doing better. Slowly as time has gone on we've shared a lot of our experiences we've had in that apartment with each other and both are glad that we came out of it okay. It made quite the believer out of my roommates as well who remain reluctant to

acknowledge it until his final few months there. Apartments are funny places. You never really know how many people have lived their lives in that exact same space. What they may have left behind or done in the room where you lay your head at night. Maybe there was something in that apartment. Something left over from whoever came before. Or maybe it can all be chalked up to late nights, bad dreams and miscommunication. In the end, what you choose to believe is a long one. I moved back to Santa Cruz at the end of 2012 after completing culinary school in Sacramento.

I landed a job at a local bakery and coffee shop in a nearby town called Aptos. I was the morning baker which meant that days started at 2.30am and finished around 10.30am. I both loved and hated that kind of shift. I loved being alone until the morning barista came in at 6am. I could listen to music as loud as I wanted while getting the morning baking done. I didn't have anyone around to share the radio with and no one to breathe down my neck. It was actually really nice. Having to go to bed by 4pm was the part that I hated. You miss a lot when you're on a shift like that, but I digress. The owner of the bakery also had a small coffee shop in the Santa Cruz harbor,

so it wasn't abnormal for the baristas to work at the harbor one day and Aptos the next. In January of 2013, the owner hired a new barista who worked at the bakery one day a week and the harbor the rest of his shifts, from what I can remember. I know he wasn't at the bakery very often. I remember the first time I saw him. He was kind of cute, but there was something in his eyes that was creepy and unnerving. Thankfully, we didn't talk much, but the next month or so, work went on as usual. Toward the end of February, everything would change. On February 26th 2013 that really creepy albeit sort of cute barista would kill two cops and then die in the line of fire half an hour later.

We were all shocked. The owner was a mess. We didn't know what to do or think. And that's not the end of the story however. Finding out what happened in this incident as well as his past was just as shocking and surreal as hearing that he had murdered two police officers. In the days following the shooting, a lot about him would come to light. This is really where the convoluted nature of the story comes into play because so much had happened leading up to the shooting but it all came out in bits and pieces. A few days before the shooting, Jeremy Goulet, then 35 years old, had been hanging out with some work friends from The Kind Grind. While at his female co-worker's house, the group had been drinking. After everyone left for the evening, Goulet waited until the female co-worker had

gone to sleep. He then broke into her house and attempted to assault her. She awoke and screamed, prompting Goulet to flee. A short time later, Goulet was picked up for public intoxication and spent the rest of the night in jail. Sergeants Lauren Baker and Detective Elizabeth Butler went to Goulet's residence on February 26th to ask him some questions regarding the police report filed by the female co-worker. The officer spoke with Goulet for a few minutes through his door before attempting to detain him. It's unclear exactly what happened next, but Goulet shot and killed both officers before taking Sergeant Baker's bulletproof vest and gun and fleeing in the unmarked police vehicle. Within minutes he was

surrounded by other officers in an alley behind his residence. A short gun battle ensued before Goulet was shot and killed. Within half an hour three people were dead. But this isn't the end of the story either. There would be a lot more to learn about Goulet and what led him to that fateful day. Over the following week, the chips would fall and the following timeline of Jeremy Goulet would come to light. He joined the Marines in 1998. In 2000, he was cited in a Peeping Tom case while stationed in San Diego. He discharged from the Marines in 2002.

In 2004, he enlisted in the Army as a Black Hawk pilot. In 2006, while stationed in Hawaii, he was court-martialed on successive charges of assault against women. The Army exchanged dropping the charges for an other-than- than honorable discharge, which is nonsense to me. He was officially discharged from the army in February 2007. He moved to Portland in March of 2007. And in late 2007, he was found peeping in a woman's apartment window and filming her. After being confronted three times by the woman's boyfriend, the man got into a physical fight and Goulet brandished a concealed weapon that he fired multiple times at the boyfriend.

The boyfriend was not injured. Goulet was charged with invasion of privacy, concealed weapons charges, and attempted murder. He served three years and was released in April 2010. Goulet moved to Berkeley in September 2011 where he was again arrested on charges of peeping. This time Goulet took a plea deal for 20 days in jail and 3 years of probation. At the end of 2012, Goulet moved to Santa Cruz and began working at the kind grind where the rest of the circle comes around to a close. To say we were all shocked and awed by how this all unraveled is an understatement. The bakery and coffee shop are both now permanently closed, but I don't know if that has anything to do with the story.

The owner was always a little off her rocker to begin with. I've learned a few things from all this. The first thing is to be careful of who you have to spend a few hours alone with in the early and dark mornings because you never truly know what someone is capable of. The second thing is to absolutely never take someone's face value for granted. And finally, never be upset for not being someone's type. It might just have saved me from being assaulted and sparking murderous intent. Let me start off by saying I'm not attractive. I'm not saying that for clout or simply to put myself down. It's just a fact of my life that I'm not all that appealing to look at. I'm okay with it and it's not really a big deal.

I was born female and happen to have a curvy body so I sometimes get catcalled before people see my face. It's not often so I never put myself down as someone to be targeted for harassment, assault, stalking and so on. And I'm telling this story to remind all of you to be on your guard. Not only do pretty people get targeted, everyone needs to be wary of their surroundings. This morning I was on my usual bus route to work, on schedule to arrive 45 minutes early, the joys of a small town bus system. I just got off my second bus when I noticed someone walking behind me. I keep my mask on from when I leave the house to when I get home because, spoiler alert, we're still in a pandemic. I notice the shadow of someone wearing a hood walking up behind me.

They got very close to me, so thinking they were trying to pass me, I slowed down and stepped to the side. They also slowed down and turned to look at the road, like they were looking to cross. I kept walking down the road but pulled out my earbuds and hid them in my pocket. No, I don't work in that great of a neighborhood. I work for a good company, it just happens to be in a shady area of my town. When I saw the guy pause, all my alarms went on alert, so I tried to listen for him and hide my phone and earbuds, thinking he might try and make a grab for them. I often assumed the worst as a gut reaction. I ducked into a small driveway surrounded by a fence as a way to gauge if he was still following me or trying to pass me. He then walked into the

driveway after me and stopped near me, then turned his head down the road as though he was distracted by the traffic. Needless to say, it spooked me to see he actually was following me. I said, You can pass me at any time, to try and urge him to go away. I quickly went back to walking down the road, speedwalking to just try and get away. I was close to my work, which has a keypad locked door,

so I thought if I could walk quickly enough I could be safe. I felt like if I tried to run he'd catch up to me and try something. I made it to my work's driveway and was happy to see he was a distance away. I made my way to the front door punching the door key and looked over my shoulder. I saw him running at me. I tried to get the door open and go inside but he stood right in front of me before I could get inside. I slammed the door closed, for some reason thinking that he'd try to push his way in. I didn't want him to hurt my co-workers as well. Trying to force myself to give him the benefit of the doubt, initially trying to rationalize that he might

be a new employee, I asked if I could help him. The stalker was staring dead into my eyes, standing about five or six inches away from me. He was wearing a mask, but it was so tattered that I could see his mouth and nose clearly. I, uh, I was just wondering if I could get your name. I'm not that much of an idiot. I wasn't about to give this guy any information about myself. I hesitated, then mumbled that I wasn't available. I just wanted to know your name, is how he responded.

I'd like you to back up. That's what I said next. I was too spooked to think of much else other than he was standing way too close. He didn't budge, so I repeated myself, but he didn't seem phased. Finally, I said with force, you need to back off. He finally complied, backing away slowly. I yelled at him that it's not nice to stalk people. When he was about 20 feet away, I turned my back on him, punched in the key code, and flew into my work building. Everyone was staring at me because of how frazzled I looked and how fast I ran in the building and slammed the door. I managed to talk to my co-workers and a friend let me borrow her

pepper spray in case he decided to follow me again. My boss said that he'd look into what he can find on the security cameras in case we need to file a police report. So to the odd guy who chased and stalked me, I'm not giving him my full name, and I hope that we any girl that feels stuck in a relationship. This was unfortunately a pretty long relationship that has stuck with me in bad ways. I'm gonna call him C. I wasn't looking for a relationship when I met C. He was so sweet when I met him, very gentlemanly and very handsome.

The honeymoon of our relationship was fantastic as they always are but when it was over, boy it was over. I didn't have a job when we met and received one later down the road. It's a full time job full time college student now. He would ask when my shift started and ended. I had to text him throughout my time in class or at work or he would freak. I would tell him I couldn't text but it didn't matter. He actually came up to my college when the class had a break, sat next to me in class because I wasn't answering his texts. He didn't want me to give any attention to my friends,

especially my male friends. One of my male friends I'd known since I was four, I actually blocked him and quit talking to him because she asked. He had succeeded in isolating me from everyone. If he came and visited me at work, it was always bad. A customer would smile at me or be too nice and it would be a massive fight when we got home. Yelling, I mean yelling. The type you can't understand the person they are so angry. I receive that every day. I remember him shoving me, pushing me down, hitting something I was

sitting by, even him punching holes in walls. I was horrified at this guy. I was always fiercely loyal to him, yet he always accused me of cheating. I couldn't interact with a man of any age at all. I was terrified to leave him. He had made threats against me before. I remember a time during a fight where he stopped, walked up to me quickly, and yanked me into a hug. The way he did it and looked at me made me burst into sobs of fear as soon as he touched me. Mind you, this man was my dream guy. He held doors open for me, always surprised me with thoughtful gifts, and was incredibly affectionate and shared interests I had. I went from loving him to fearing him with every fiber of my being. I lived by my folks. They never

heard us fight. I have no idea how. If they came over during a fight, he would flip a switch and become that old guy I loved. I felt alone. If I tried to bring it up with anyone, they'd mention he was so sweet, I must have just done something wrong. My own father stood up for him so much. Eventually the evil shown through my dad helped me kick him out. It was awful. He texted me telling I never loved him. I wouldn't have done this to him if I loved him. When the text almost vanished, I thought it was awful. He texted me telling I never loved him. I wouldn't have done this to him if I loved

him. When the text almost vanished I thought it was over. I was again very wrong. This man would drive by my house twice a day. If I was gone he'd tell me so, ask me where I was, and even try to find me a few times. As I know this is a very long post and it's very short to describe all the things I've experienced I'll wrap this situation up. I met a man that was wonderful. C stalked and threatened him as well. With this man's help I ended that situation. He told me how nothing I did made him treat me that way. It was C that was in the wrong. He told me I wasn't alone in this and I didn't have to just take the abuse and I was still receiving that there was always a way out. All I had to do was

reach out. C really changed me in many ways. I'm not the same anymore. If anyone shows any aggression towards me, I don't cower. I become stronger. This man put me through absolute hell and I made it out to the other side. Please, please ladies, do not let yourselves be stuck in this. There is a man out there that will love you for the beautiful woman you are and won't try to cage you. Stay free. Never change the beautiful person you were meant to be. So this happened in 2011 in Tacoma, Washington. I was 7 at the time and just coming out of a really trash marriage, meaning I was getting back into the dating world after years away. I met this guy, we'll call him Y on a now popular website for meeting others,

whatever. That matters very little in the scheme of what I'm about to tell you. We matched on the site and exchanged numbers and began texting throughout the day. Y was educated, funny, and devilishly handsome. Naturally, I wanted to meet him. He told me the feeling was mutual, so we agreed to meet at the local mall for coffee. The flirtatious conversation was flowing. Smiles and giggles abound, and before I knew it, I realized my time with him was up. I had to pick up my son by a certain time, and I was risking being late. No big deal, Y said.

But how about we hang out again tomorrow? He asked. Yeah, sure, I'd love that. I told him as he walked me to my car. I was excited, not gonna lie. Do you know where the beach is in DuPont? We could walk around there. He said as he grinned at me. I told him to text me that I really had to get going to get my son and he apologized for keeping me. The whole drive home I couldn't shake this weird feeling. DuPont Beach? It wasn't exactly a stroll on the beach type beach, it was rocky and studded with driftwood. There was a small road leading down to the beach but it seemed like a real ankle breaker to actually walk on the rocks. Y texted

me almost as soon as I got home and told me how much he was looking forward to our beach date tomorrow. I responded because I didn't want to be rude but in my mind I was freaking out. Something was not okay about this but I couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't that Y was a creep or even gave off any inklings of being a creep. For all intents and purposes, he seemed like a decent, friendly guy. When that nagging feeling just wouldn't go away, I made the snap choice to block him. No warning, no it's just not working for me text, just done and done. Instantly I felt relief knowing that because I lived on the south side of the town and why I

lived on the north we most likely wouldn't be running into each other. I settled back into my normal life and routine and opted out of dating for a while. Fast forward about six months and one of my friends calls me and is all but screaming when I picked up the phone. You need to turn on the news now. What? What's going on? I said as I fumbled for the remote. It's the guy you went out with once. Why? I flicked on the news and sat in awe and Y's picture flashed across the screen and a description of his crimes were aired. Kidnapping. Indecent assault. He was being held with half a million dollar bond. Apparently, Y had met a woman outside of a local DuPont restaurant around 1am,

where she asked him if he had a cigarette lighter. He told her no, but that he had one in his car that was parked around the corner. She followed him to the car and when he opened the back door to get the supposed lighter, he proceeded to push her in and slam the door and leapt in the front seat himself. The woman was trapped due to the child locks being pre-locked in the car. He proceeded to drive her to the beach and assault her and then leave her there. My blood ran cold at the thought of how why I had wanted him and I to go to that same area and how I couldn't get rid of the feeling of impending doom surrounding it. Thank God I listened to my instincts. For some background, I'm a 13 year old female. I'm very athletic and aware of my surroundings and I think that's what

saved me yesterday. About three months ago I was out skateboarding like I do every weekend and I was just going around my neighborhood. My neighborhood is a long street with many courts on each side. Three of the streets however you can drive through. I was going in and out of each court and I noticed a black car following me and going in and out of each court behind me. I went to one of the courts that looped around and went out the other end, then onto the main road and back into my neighborhood where I was able to escape the car and get home. Fast forward to yesterday and I was out skating to go get candy from a store near to my house and then go hang out in a mossy parking lot that was in an alley. I go out every weekend and get boba next to this alley and then come sit in this parking lot to drink and read. This time I just went into the store, got a drink, candy and then skated over to the secluded parking lot, popping my board up once I hit the gravel road. You can

go through the alley to the boba place and a lot of cars do that so it's not unusual to see one or two pass by the small parking lot every once in a while. One of the things that may have saved me is my grandma. Since I was a child she taught me to be overly aware of my surroundings and be smart about what I do. I sat down first with my back open and then decided to move to where I was sitting with my back to a fence so no one could come up behind me. As I was reading I saw a car pass by and looked up. I have this man's face stuck in my head as it's truly petrifying. I saw a man in the same car that followed me three months ago except this time he had his window down

and I saw his face. He was at least 350 pounds and had short black hair and a black beard. He had brown beady eyes that stared at me as he passed by way slower than a normal car would have. I didn't pick up on the fact that this was the car that followed me three months ago at first so I just thought he wanted to see what I was doing as I am a teenager in a random secluded parking lot with two bags by me. I put what happened in the back of my mind and kept reading. A few minutes later I heard a car coming up and looked up. To my horror it was the same exact car. He went by this time in his black van slower than he did the first time. He stared at me the whole time and I saw someone move on the passenger side. They seemed to be hiding. They were hiding on the floor and I saw their head pop up as they drove

by. Who knows how many people were in that car. After what seemed like hours he drove away. As soon as he did I got out of my trance, packing everything up and booking it out of there. I went through a very small alley between the pet shop and the rehabilitation center I was behind which led to the main road. I threw my board down and went as fast as I could home. I saw his car go out onto the main road and then turn into a school parking lot. He was either going to turn around following me or he was going to go through the alley once more hoping I was still there. Luckily he went to the alley again leaving me time to get away and I made it home safe. I'm scared because I worry that this will happen again and maybe time, I won't see them coming. This is something that happens constantly to me and I'm actually at work at typing this out

because it just happened again. Three months ago I started working at a packing warehouse. I'm the youngest one here being only 19 and it's barely any other females here. The women's bathroom literally has only one stall and since the and it's barely any other females here. The woman's bathroom literally has only one stall and since the virus it's supposed to be one person in the bathroom at a time. This wasn't a problem for a while until one of my co-workers, we'll call her Jane, started following me into the bathroom. At first I didn't care as sometimes she would come in while I was in there and I would see her feet by the door. I just assumed she was waiting to go. Then I started to notice that she would only go as soon as I went in. I gave her the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks, up until recently when I

would see her standing right in front of the stall while I was there. I could see her through the cracks and she would just stand there still with a blank expression. I thought she was just a creep. Other people started to notice when she would literally just leave the bathroom and I would go in after her and she would just go right back in. She only did this with me. And when I left, she would leave without using the bathroom. All around the factory I see her staring at me. This weirds me out so bad but she hasn't really done anything else. I mean we've never even spoke to each other. Up until five minutes ago. She came in again while I was in the stall.

She walked closer to the stall door and started to tap on it. She kept whispering, I want to come in with you. I'm freaked out so I yelled at her no. She started to raise her voice, still saying that she wanted to come in. I screamed at her to leave. I was scared for my life thinking that she would slide under at the bottom. She just laughed and said she'll get me tonight. I'm getting off super late tonight and I go home alone. I honestly don't know what to do. I'm still in the stall pretty shaken up writing this now.

I'm unsure of what she's capable of but clearly this lady is nuts. To be continued... bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit r slash let's read official and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear all these stories in long compilation form and save huge on data. Look at it anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends. And remember, fish oil sometimes spoils in the capsule. you