The Lets Read Podcast - 147: I STUDIED ABROAD...IN HELL | 18 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 135

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Zoom Calls, Studying Abroad, and LinkedIn... 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

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Over, under, money, line, same game, parlays, it's all fine. You'll put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook. Take a chance. We'll be right back. To be continued... I didn't have all that many prospects when I left school. I'd fallen in with a bad crowd during my teenage years and these lads didn't exactly hold academia in high esteem. We burned away our chance at a decent university by drinking, smoking, and chasing girls when we should have been studying, which would have been all well and good if we didn't mind working minimum wage service jobs, but as you can imagine, that didn't have much of an appeal. Me and my mates were basically just jobless layouts for a year or two, until one of them showed up to our little hangout spot and told us he was applying for an SIA badge.

The SIA stands for the Security Industry Authority, and if you fill out a few forms and pass a few checks, you can quite easily get a license to work as a security guard, bouncer, all sorts of jobs that essentially just need a bit of hired muscle. From what our mate told us, it was relatively well paid, considerably more exciting than other low-skilled jobs, and working nightclub doors actually had an element of glamour to it. So, I applied, waited a while, then Bob's your uncle. I get my badge, I've been given the green light to work with one of my closest friends and a job where the flexibility really, really suited me. I was living the dream, right up until the job that made me quit the security industry forever. The one single job that made me decide that my health and safety was far more important than any payslip and that there were things out there, hidden in plain sight,

that are enough to give nightmares to even the toughest of blokes. The whole story starts with that LinkedIn thing. I was on the payroll of a company that was basically dissolved overnight after the owner was arrested as part of a massive drug smuggling operation. I know, it caught me off guard too. It turns out the company was little more than a front for it so in the space of about 24 hours I went from gainfully employed to jobless and skint. A work coach at the local job center suggested I sign up to a LinkedIn account, a social network for professionals seeking better prospects or to just get that first foot on the rung of the employment ladder. At first, I didn't think LinkedIn would actually help as it seemed to be geared much more towards

office and entrepreneurial types but I could screenshot my account and show it to my work coach to keep her quiet for another two weeks so I made one. A couple of weeks go by, I have zero luck finding a security job, a decent one anyway, so I was content to just sit on my butt and soak up the universal credit until one came along. Then one afternoon, I find that I've gotten an email notification from LinkedIn. I didn't really think anything of it at first, but when I got home, I found a company called Universal Security Services had sent me a message asking if I was interested in a security job. Interested was an understatement.

I mean, it was alright sitting around getting paid to do nothing, but I was just about going insane from the sheer boredom of unemployment. I read a reply inquiring about the wages and when I see what they're offering, my jaw just about hits the floor. USS was offering me $700 for a couple of hours of work. 7 ton, what I used to make in a week and a half when I was working for the old firm. The job was to provide security for a pair of county court bailiffs whose task was to confiscate property to pay council tax debts.

I knew some of those jobs could get quite leery but who's turning down 700 quid when they're out of work? Not me anyway. I messaged the company back and once they'd confirmed my badge number I was given more details on the time and place of the job. I have to admit I was so excited to get some proper cash in my pocket that I completely failed to consider that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And it was only when another member of the old door team got in touch that I realized something was amiss. I remember I was settling down for the night when I get a text from Nas saying, did you get offered that bailiff's job in South Shields? I text back telling him yes and that I took it too. I thought he might have

gotten the same LinkedIn message and if he did, he probably accepted just like I did. Then right when I was about to follow the message up by asking him for a lift down there, he starts typing some long message that I ended up just waiting for him to finish. When it comes through, I can't quite believe what I'm reading. Noss already seemed like he had a good head on his shoulders, but the message he sent me read like one of those daft old chain emails. Mate, I was going to take the job myself, but there's a Scottish bloke that works with Lammy who says there's a reason why USS are reaching out. None of their local lads will take the job because something evil is going on in that house.

Even the local coppers want nothing to do with it. I'm telling you, don't take that job. It's bad news all the way through. Something evil? Seriously? I sent him back a laughing emoji and a, Kurt, cheers for the heads up, mate. Then just put my phone down with a chuckle and I shake at the head.

Evil. What a load of bollocks. I then got it into my head that Nos only wanted to put me off so he could either take the job himself or get one of his mates involved. After that I wasn't just amused. I was a bit angry, a bit livid. The job was mine. I mean, who needs enemies when you got friends like that, eh? When the day finally arrived, I had to meet up the rest of the blokes at 6am on an industrial

estate in South Shields for what ended up being a bit of a mission briefing. The plan was to load in the two minivans that would follow the bailiff's vehicle out to the house in question. Now, I'd pictured this place as being on a council estate or in a block of flats or something, but as it turned out, the house was this big old Victorian looking place in the middle of bloody nowhere. And the plan wasn't just to recover valuables, it was to evict a gang of squatters too, some of whom had a violent criminal history as long as your arm. I started to realize that not only had I been somewhat misled over the details of the job, but Nos hadn't been making anything up. He might have exaggerated

a few things here and there, but he wasn't trying to kid me on. He was genuinely trying to warn me. But there I was, stood in a port-a-cabin on a freezing Tuesday morning, ready to go. It was far, far too late to back out by then, and besides, by lunchtime, if all went to plan, I'd be 700 quid richer. All we had to do was clear the property using reasonable force, seize and secure anything of value, yet the locks changed and the windows shuttered up and then we were done. Only thing was, there were about nine or ten of us all in all, and were expected to be at it for a solid four hours, which raised the question, if it was just a few squatters, what was going to take so long? It goes without saying that I was a bit nervous by the time I loaded up into the minivan to set off for the target property, and you could tell some of the other lads were too.

It was coming up to half six in the morning, the sun hadn't risen yet, and it's so cold that there's still frost on some of the minibus windows. And the fact that no one said a word as we drove down these winding country lanes only added to the tension we were all feeling. After about 30 minutes, we pull into this long driveway flanked by trees, heading down it until the path opened up onto this impressive three-story home. Well, it would have been impressive if it wasn't falling apart. Like I imagined it would have been right grand at one point, but by then, it looked like a cobweb and black mold

infested death trap. The fact that anyone was living there at all was enough to make your skin crawl, but the fact that they were apparently not leaving. Jesus. We'd been told the squatters had been offered temporary sheltered accommodation until the council found somewhere more permanent for them to live, and still they refused to budge. But why? Why stay in such a horrible old place? It was a question I'd struggled to find an answer to, even after having seen inside the house. First thing we did was pile out of the vans while the two bailiffs advanced forward to bang on the door. There was no answer at first, until after the third instance of knocking and announcing themselves, we heard a voice from the other side of the door bark, F off. Now, you would think we

would just kick the door in at that point, but part of the bailiff's writ is to ensure as minimal property damage as possible. In which case, they generally bring a locksmith along to either unlock the door of the foreclosed property, or simply take the bloody thing right off of its hinges. So, our locksmith gets to work drilling the lockout or whatever he was doing, and all the while this bloke inside the house is screaming, you do anything to our home and I'll kill you, you hear me? I'll kill the lot of you. Nothing any of us hadn't heard before. We deal with threats like that all the time, but this bloke, dear god. there was something vicious in his voice. I can't quite put my finger on it but even the more experienced guys there were starting to look a bit anxious.

There were two lads covering the locksmith and the bailiffs up near the doorway, just in case anyone tries to burst out and have a go at the locksmith. And it's a bloody good thing they were there too because all of a sudden, the front door opens and this bloke starts swinging at the locksmith and the security lads with what look like an old mallet. They back off, he slams the door again and we're left having to think of a plan B. What ends up happening is a few lads went around the back to gain entry to the house, with a few of us holding the front door closed so the soft lad inside can't swing at us. All the while the locksmith cracks on with his job of drilling the lock. All goes to plan, and within about ten minutes we're all piling into the house.

We're gripping anyone who puts up a fight while going room to room and telling everyone to pack up and leave. A few of us took a few punches in the process and one fella nearly had his head cracked open by a blow from that mallet. But aside from that, we all got out unscathed. Now, I only saw the living room of this house and I can assure you it was bad enough in there. Filth and drug paraphernalia all over the show. There was also some pretty creepy looking graffiti daubed all over the walls, those satanic stars and upside down crosses and the like. We only realized how bad it was when things had calmed down a bit and we were inventorying items for seizure. Like it wasn't until the adrenaline had stopped coursing that

I realized just how bad the place smelled. Granted, there was the smell of rot and mold everywhere but right around the staircase was the most awful, putrid, rotting smell. So bad that we were actually quite hesitant to clear the second and third floors at first. Then a few minutes in, we hear a bit of commotion coming from one of the upstairs rooms. Then all of a sudden, one of the lads comes running back down the stairs and out into the driveway, where they just started puking their guts up. This obviously got the attention of quite a few of the lads, even the ones playing crowd control with the evicted squatters, and when someone approaches him to see if he's alright, this bloke just starts shouting, I'm not going back in that house,

no chance, don't even ask. We had to swap him out for one of the other guys outside, not that any of us fared any better. Because what freaked that fella out so much was honestly one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. One of the upstairs rooms had been decked out like a kind of nursery. Whoever had been living there had drawn all over the walls in different colored pens. There were kids toys dotted around the filthy wooden floor. In the corner of a room was a single child's cot. I can barely even bring myself to type what was in it. It was the saddest and most horrifying thing I'd ever seen in my life, and I'm sure

you can all guess what it was. Surrounded by dead flowers and grimy stuffed toys. As you can imagine, the police were down there in force before you could say act of crime scene, and we were all questioned on what we'd seen and heard as we entered the property. One of the blokes that had seen the nursery was crying his eyes out. I heard he had kids of himself, so I suppose seeing something like that hit him quite hard. Obviously, I could only tell the officers what I'd seen Which was all bad enough But from what I heard It got so much worse the further towards the attic you got

One bloke said that When he poked his head up there And seen all sorts of creepy stuff Little shrines and things made of twigs Basically every bloke there had some horror story From what he'd seen in one of the rooms And you know it's a bad one When hard cases like that are shaken up Basically every bloke there had some horror story from what he'd seen in one of the rooms. And you know it's a bad one when hard cases like that are shaken up.

The squatters were arrested. We were given a lift back into town and paid in cash. And then that was that. We went from a pure horror show to back to normal life in the space of a minibus ride. And to say we were shaken up would have been the understatement of the century. Some of us ended up in Wetherspoons around 11 and we had a heavy liquid lunch to decompress and drown out what we'd all just seen. I remember checking the local newspapers for news about the arrests and there was nothing, not even a small mention. And I ended up having to check the website of the local magistrate's court to find out any charges. Rest assured, the squatters were charged with a

variety of things, including wrongful death of a child or something. And since two of them were the parents, the whole thing was basically a case of neglect. After that, I decided on a serious career change. I worked in a Primark for a few months, enjoying the change of pace, but after a while I just couldn't bring myself to put on the security jacket. After what I saw in that house, after the nightmares, and worrying if I'd been pricked with some HIV-ridden needle or something, I just didn't have it in me anymore. I went back to college, got a diploma in web design, and now I do okay working freelance for different clients.

Mostly small business who need the hands-on services that the likes of Squarespace just can't provide. I can't say I ever really tried to forget what I saw that day. The memories ebb and flow as they see fit. Sometimes I'll go for months without thinking about it, then seeing a kid in a supermarket just sort of sets me off. I suppose some things you just never forget, they're always with you, and they become a part of you. And just like I've always carried a piece of that dead kid with me, a piece of me remains in that filthy old cot, surrounded by dead flowers,

forever. When you think LinkedIn, it's probably the last place you expect guys to be sending creepy DMs to girls. But sadly, and sometimes scarily, it happens with alarming frequency. It's a problem that me and many other girls have experienced while using the platform. So for a couple of years, me and a group of like-minded people have been campaigning for social media platforms to improve their privacy systems, including blocking and reporting methods to ensure the safety of women and girls online. But all my campaigning has been promoted by a very close call of my own. I work in photography. It's been my passion ever since I was a little girl and I managed to get

my hands on my mom and dad's old Polaroid camera. The digital revolution only made it even easier for me to practice my vocation, and by the time you get to the Galaxy S21 Ultra, mine's charging on my desk next to me, you can do almost everything a professional photographer can do with a device that can fit into your pocket. But there's something very authentic and gratifying about the old school darkroom processes, and it feels like you're birthing something special instead of just capturing a passing image. And although it's more expensive, I pride myself on offering my clients a choice of both, and a great way of me meeting new clients and potential employers is LinkedIn. It's honestly a great app, and I really do recommend it, but like I said,

its userbase contains just as many creeps as every other kind of social media. It might be a comment about what you're wearing in your profile picture, or asking would you relocate for the right role, or the right man, winky face. Or in my case, it might be considerably more insidious and dangerous. Because one day I get a connect from a seemingly normal guy asking me if I'm interested in doing a photoshoot for him. I'm naturally a little bit skeptical as he's being quite cagey about what the shoot entails and the last time that happened it turned out to be a couple wanting to take pictures of, you know. I give him my rate and I tell him

no nudity whatsoever. He then sheepishly mentions that some of the pictures would be topless, as they're for his wife, but promises no nudity or anything remotely sleazy. Handsome, but wholesome, I remember him saying. And I don't know, the effort he was going into making his wife happy, that did seem super wholesome to me. I guess I let my feelings speak for me, but I accepted his offer and told him that we could meet at some studio space I had a share in downtown. Public, neutral ground, on-site security. Safe. At least I figured it would be, because if I'd had any inkling of what would be in store for me in that studio, I'd never have met that guy there that day. So, on the day in question, I met the guy at the studio space I mentioned.

He looked kinda nerdy, curly brown hair, glasses, looking rather unassuming in his poorly fitted navy blue suit. He seemed really anxious too, like almost verging on innocent. He told me he'd never done anything like this before and I really did believe him on that. Taking your clothes off for any reason can be very, very nerve-wracking, especially when the opposite gender is involved, which is half the reason I tend to avoid shoots like that. People's nerves are frayed around the edges and it can make for a really bad atmosphere between you and the subject, which is the polar opposite of what makes a good photo shoot. But like I said, the fact this guy was really putting himself out there

just to make his wife happy, God, I suppose that hit me right in the feels. I plug the door code in, welcome the guy inside the studio, and then ask him how he'd like to start. For example, if he might like a few professional looking shots since he appeared to be in his work clothes. He says sure and I try my usual technique of just chatting with the subjects while I'm shooting This tends to make them feel at ease and if you can coax a natural smile out of them and capture that on film Pure gold They'll buy that shot every single time without fail

The shoot is going rather well I'm getting absolutely no bad vibes off the guy so I initiate a conversation about his wife that'll hopefully lead into some topless shots. At this point I should really add that it was pure altruism that had me gunning for shirtless pictures as I'm entitled to charge a premium for such shots and the guy had agreed to that. If he turned out to be a creep I could just avoid those kind of shots entirely but since he'd yet to start acting weird, well, go figure. At first the way he was talking about her was as sweet as I could imagine it would be. He was talking about how there was no one else in the world for him, that he'd known her for

years before he'd finally decided to pluck up the courage to ask her out. He said she was everything to him, the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night. The only thing was, he didn't feel like he was man enough for her. He didn't feel like he projected the kind of masculinity she needed to stay interested in him. He'd said he'd been working out, watching his diet. He wanted her to find him sexy, not just cute as he put it. And weirdly enough, I knew exactly what he was talking about, as it's something I feel like I've struggled with throughout my dating years.

Sometimes you don't want to be mousy or adorable, you want to feel hot. You want people to burn for you. And with that in mind, I invited my subject to take his shirt off. The first thing I noticed was how true to his word he was about working out. I was shocked, but not entirely surprised, I mean, he had told me. But the thing that made me gasp was how his upper arms and torso were almost completely covered in tattoos, many of which looked like he'd done them himself. There was a handful of crudely inked pictograms depicting religious iconography from a variety of different Christian sects, but most of the tattoos were just short verses with markings underneath,

and it was only when I looked through the lens of my camera that I realized that they were Bible verses. I'm almost completely stunned by what I'm looking at, but I do at least try throwing out a compliment, saying what you like about the presentation, the dedication to covering himself was admirable to say the least. When I asked him which tattoos were his favorites, and that maybe I can work them into the composition, he pointed to one in particular. I had to look it up to get it exactly right, but it was this one. Genesis 2.24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. He told me that's how he felt about his wife, that they were of one body and one flesh.

But unlike before, when all of his romanticisms just came across as sweet and wholesome, I started to find his philosophy deeply disturbing. He started to flex, showing off his muscles, and trembling with raw power as he did so. I mean he was ripped, frighteningly cut, only it wasn't attractive. It was starting to get scary. I started to get really nervous by the time he started to show off some rather weird looking scars over where his heart was. At first, I thought it might have been chicken pox scars or something, albeit in a very localized place, I guess you could say. But he went on to tell me that he'd traveled over to Italy a few years prior to take part in a kind of religious flagellation ceremony where he and around 30 other men repeatedly stabbed themselves in the chest with a kind of needle comb.

I don't have anything against organized religion as such. People are free to practice whatever they want in my mind. But someone who hurts themselves because of how much they love God? I don't know, that just doesn't sit right with me. If there is a God, I don't think they'd want their children hurting themselves. Yet the thing that actually terrified me of the guy, not just nervous or cautious or whatever, was what he said towards the end of the photoshoot. I decided to ask him about his wife a bit more, just to kind of get him out of such an aggressive macho headspace.

And that's when he started to giggle. I can barely describe how horrifying it was to hear such a childish, infantile giggle come out of such a monstrous form. And the more he talked, the more I realized something about his wife and that's that he didn't seem to know all that much about her, only that he was counting on her being impressed by his topless photos, which by that point were far creepier than they were alluring. I wrapped the photo shoot up as quickly as I could after that. As much as they'd come on slowly, I never

felt such a threatening aura come off of a subject in all the years as a photographer. He paid on time, left me a positive recommendation, and after that, I told myself I'd never have to deal with him ever again. But it was only later that I realized something truly terrifying about the guy, or rather, called it less of a realization and more of a theory. The way I see it, he didn't know much about his wife because they hadn't met. All he did know could have been Glean from watching her, stalking her, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach thinking he might have used my pictures to like, make a move on her or whatever. At least that's the nightmare scenario that plays itself out every time I think about it. I just pray that, or maybe in this case, pray would be the wrong word to use. I just hope

that I don't read about my subject in the paper or online, and a story about the latest young woman to fall victim to obsessive male violence. After years of hard work, I graduated from a Pennsylvania college with a degree in biochemical engineering. Biology had fascinated me ever since I was a little kid. All the natural processes that give rise to life, the daily chemical miracles that somehow continue to allow the world to go around. People worry about the shipping industry, how it's the lifeblood of the world, and we'd be screwed if some big old ship decides to sink the Suez Canal. But a minor altercation in the body's production of adenosine triphosphate, and we'll be wishing a sunken ship was the biggest problem facing the world population. Anyway, biochemistry is fun. Well, to me it is. But it can be quite difficult to find a well-paying

laboratory job in your chosen specialty. So, after graduation, I signed up with a professional social media network known as LinkedIn. You probably heard about it. In the hopes that it would help me find my dream job, I sent out a few applications, had my hopes of working in some of the top bio labs on the east coast, dashed by a few polite rejection messages, and as the weeks went by, I felt my frustrations grow. Then right as I was about to throw in the towel and get myself a job at Arby's, just so I could pay the rent, I get a message from a company out on the West Coast asking if I was open to relocating for the right position. I replied that it depended entirely on the rate of

pay as the West Coast was a long long way away from my loved ones back home and when they gave me a ballpark figure that was six digits long my mind was made up. Now this brings me to my next important point regarding high paying science jobs, ethics. I heard that Robert Oppenheimer was paid a salary of $10,000 in the 1940s for overseeing the creation of the most destructive weapon in human history, the equivalent of about $210,000 today. I know real estate agents that are on more money than that from just flipping houses, while those with 10 or 20 years experience on the front lines of the cancer cure effort are on less than half that amount. So, the question persisted. Exactly what did this company want me so handsomely to do? Their extra vague biotechnician job title certainly wasn't giving me any clues.

What with its long list of duties so generic that it wouldn't have looked out of place on a janitor's application. The company assured me I'd be given a full brief and training period should I be selected for the position, and that my interview could be conducted via Skype. But due to company policy, they weren't at liberty to discuss the details of the project I was being hired for. All that mystery, the intrigue, the possibility of working on a project that might actually change the world for the better, it was intoxicating. Was it a breakthrough malaria treatment? Perhaps a radical kind of vector therapy? Something to do with stem cells? The whole thing threw my imagination into overdrive

and I arranged an interview as soon as I could. I think that was my one big mistake, getting so wrapped up in the glamour of how clandestine it all was that I didn't stop to wonder if it was all just too good to be true. Despite being fairly uninformative, the interview went really well and I was invited out to the coast to sign an initial 6 month contract with the company that, for obvious reasons, will remain unnamed. I managed to talk an Airbnb owner into giving me a cool 20% discount on a 6 month stay, but honestly, money didn't matter at that point. That paycheck was 10 times more than anything I'd ever made in my life, and almost far more than I'd ever hoped to. I think you also need to appreciate just how much the west coast seemed like a paradise compared to back home. The idea of making a life there clouded my judgment almost as much as the pay. So, within the space of about ten days, I'd gone from living in a crummy downtown apartment to renting in a fully serviced

oceanside condo. I was on the top of the world. But that feeling of elation wasn't to last, as a tour of the facility I'd be working in for the first time caused all that to come crashing down. I met up with the company's HR manager in what had to be the flashiest reception area I'd ever seen. We went over the contracts, then I followed her into a sterile area where we gowned up before our facility tour. Gowning up, as they say, involves putting on some medically sterile overalls that help maintain the integrity of the laboratory environment. Minor detail, sure, but now you know. We then met with one of the department's heads, a woman I'd be working with who explained that the research that they were doing was at the very cutting edge of cancer research,

and that they strongly believed that they were the world's brightest hope for producing a preventative cancer treatment within our lifetime. The research centered around studying the cell structure of organisms that are, for all intents and purposes, invulnerable to cancer. That was the first thing that caught my attention, and I immediately asked if the facility portook in animal testing. The department head sighed, nodded, and told me I was free to burn out my contract working in a different department, but that I'd be missing out on potentially saving hundreds of millions of lives around the globe. What would you do? Honest question.

Those of us that have held a dying relative's hand as the cancer burned through them, if you had a chance to stop others from suffering like that, would you take it? Were those kinds of thoughts in my mind I carried on the tour? Most of what I saw was just standard lab stuff, if there is such a thing. Nothing I hadn't seen outside of college. But the deeper we got into restricted areas, the more I started to see equipment that was probably worth more money than I'd make in a lifetime. And it wasn't just pretty gadgets I saw, I started to see some pretty disturbing things too. Lab technicians were dissecting small, bloody animal corpses, while others appeared to collect samples from various internal organs. These animals looked newborn too, hairless and still covered in what I assumed was amniotic fluid.

When I asked what they were, I was told that they were naked mole rats. I should have guessed really, as I knew that naked mole rats, yes, the same kind from the Fallout series, are resistant to cancer, with leading scientists concluding that it's due to interactions with their natural environment. But then after being told to steal myself, I was shown the test samples I'd be working with. Whatever were vacuum sealed in that freezer unit were not naked mole rats. I don't know what they were, but I know for sure that they weren't what I was being told they were. They sure did look like some kind of rodent, that they were something slightly simian about the shape and the eyes and the arrangement of the creature's infantile limbs. I was told a lot of new team members found themselves going through a period of acclimatization

when it came to the test subjects and that I still had the chance to work in another department. One question really swung it for me, and that was me asking where they got their samples from. When I was told that was confidential information, I told them I wasn't interested in working for that department. I told them that I was a squeamish vegetarian and that I'd be happy to run out my rather lucrative contract elsewhere. I was assured it wouldn't be renewed if that was the case, but I didn't care. I didn't even think I've got the words to describe how creeped out I was. But not just creeped out, disgusted. I went back east after my contract ran out,

considerably richer in some ways, considerably poorer in others. I'm much more careful when it comes to what jobs I take now, at least I try to be. I have to be after what I've seen, what I know, because like I said, ethics, ethics are important. A few years ago, my office manager started recruiting through that LinkedIn thing. I imagine it was just much more convenient than the old school system of paper resumes, but myself and my colleagues noticed a considerable dip in the quality of the applicants. Mike, my manager, said one kid showed up to interview for the position of office assistant and literally

laid on the couch like he'd just finished a full body workout before greeting him with, what's good bruh? We had a good laugh about that one. But there was one other incident that proves tragedy plus time doesn't always equal comedy. Anyway, Mike found someone he liked for the office assistant job, so he gave them a trial shift to see how they gelled with the rest of the office. They turned out to be this college-age girl, kind of shy, kind of ditzy, but friendly enough. Her trial day went okay, I guess, so Mike offered her her a full time job that included a month's probationary period. I'm not sure what it's like in other jobs, but the probation period is something that all of our employees are subject to. Just in case they turn out to be crazy or whatever.

So cut to this girl's first full day on the job, and Mike is showing her around the office a little more. Going through some more of the stuff that'll be expected from her. He leaves her in the break room with a come get me when you're done we'll move on to the next thing and the morning passes uneventfully. After lunch everyone comes back and a few of us go to the break room to grab a coffee. First sip and I almost spit it out. I mean the office coffee was bad at the best of times but on that day it tasted even more bitter than it usually did. I ended up just tossing mine out and getting a water from the vending machine and on the way back to my desk I ask a coffee drinking co-worker, Craig, what the deal was with the coffee. He admits that it's gross but hits me with a

better than falling asleep at the keyboard while he carries on sipping his bitter coffee. Craig gets up a few more times to get more coffee and by that point almost the entire office is wondering A. What is wrong with the coffee? And B. If the machine is dirty why isn't it cleaned regularly? One of my coworkers ends up going to see Mike in his office to put question B to him, but they return to the desk telling me, Mike says he asked the new OA to clean the machine this morning, so it can't be that. I think the machine's just old, we need a new one.

I don't think it was even five minutes after that little exchange that coffee drinking Craig starts acting funny. Like the way our office is positioned, he pretty much permanently has his back to me, but even from that point of view, I can tell something is wrong. He's sweating so hard that the back of his shirt is soaking up the perspiration. He's breathing so heavy that I can actually literally see his back rising and falling. Then right as I'm like, Craig, buddy, you okay over there? Craig slowly spins in his chair, then proceeds to unleash a torrent of puke all over the carpeted floor.

And with the carpet being a kind of beige color, we can all quite clearly see the streaks of red in Craig's vomit, streaks of red that were quite obviously blood. Complete and utter panic ensues in the office as Craig eventually falls out of his chair, continuing to wretch up all kinds of mess until the EMTs arrive to stretcher him away. He has his stomach pumped, spends the night in the hospital, and the word eventually gets back to us that his stomach had contained high concentrations of caustic cleaning fluid. Office management opened up an investigation, but the answer was in plain sight the whole time.

For those of you that haven't figured it out already, the cleaning fluid had been in Craig's coffee. Obviously not in high enough concentrations to kill him, but after three cups, the contents of his stomach had become seriously toxic and was bursting blood vessels in his stomach lining, hence where the blood came from. Apologies to any doctors out there that have gotten that wrong and the blood came from somewhere else, but all my info is right off of the grapevine. I never actually talked to Craig about it. He ended up quitting and suing the company, actually. And as for the office assistant, the one who actually left cleaning fluid in the coffee machine's water tank before filling it up again, I think they only narrowly dodged criminal charges after they were fired. But yeah, that's definitely the scariest thing that's ever happened to me on the job, with losing a month's worth of work due to a server crash coming in a bar in Leeds for two weeks after finding the advert on LinkedIn. Two weeks working full time there felt longer than months in other jobs, honestly.

Working with drunk people is the absolute worst and I don't recommend it to anyone, ever. The last shift I worked was a Sunday night, perhaps the one night of the week you might expect people to be taking it easy, especially after a heavy weekend. But it made sense to me when I turned up to work and there was a skeleton crew of only two other people serving drinks. With me being so new, I was still just a glass collector. I had no idea how to make any of the fancy cocktails or anything and honestly, I had no desire to learn. So I was content to dander about collecting glasses and chatting with the regulars. Come midnight, it's been a really quiet shift, and I expected the last two hours to be more of the same,

followed by an uneasy clean down and then home time. But all of a sudden, we get a little rush on, maybe 15 to 20 people turned up at once. No problem, unusual sure, but not a problem by any stretch. Then on something of a hunch, I head outside into the street to check how busy the town center is and I see a bloody legion of drunks ambling down the street towards us. And not just any drunks, proper rowdy ones. There had been a gig on at

some venue around the corner, quite a big one too, and since we were one of the only places left open, it seemed almost all of the people that spilled out into the street were headed for us. I'm not sure who was playing that night, but I do know that their gig attracted some of the worst people I ever had the displeasure of being around. I appreciate drugs and alcohol don't always make the politest people, but honestly, this lot was making absolute mockery of everything. And because we only had one bouncer on, it wasn't long before the inmates were running the asylum. Because we were so understaffed, we were having trouble getting drinks out to people who went from patient to nasty really bloody quickly. There were so many people packed into the bar that I could barely move around, and there came a point where I had to just give up on collecting

glasses altogether and just help serve drinks. This really bad vibe in the air just got worse and worse over the next two hours. A couple of fights broke out. I caught one guy peeing around the side of the bar. But it all culminated when, out of nowhere, as we're bartending, an empty bottle of Carlsberg just comes flying over our heads and smashes into the premium spirits on the back bar. There was at least a couple of hundred quid lost in sales in one swing of an arm. The last was the last thing on my mind at the time. If it had hit us, God knows what kind of damage it could have done. But when they heard the smash over the thumping music, all anyone in the bar did was cheer, like this rolling, way chant.

They didn't give a toss if we were hurt. As one charming bloke put it, if you worked harder, people wouldn't throw bottles at you, would they? Note I said bottles, plural, because it wasn't just one beer bottle that made its way through the air in our direction, and each time one landed, that same satisfied roar could be heard from the crowd. It was scary enough nearby getting brain by a flying bottle, and finding glass splinters in my hair after this shift was definitely a sign of what a close call I'd had. But honestly, the really scary thing was just how indifferent and horrible people were, how they actually found the whole thing entertaining. I've had people tell me that alcohol turns people

into things they aren't, but I'm much more of a fan of in vino veritas or in wine there is truth. I think that filthy, lecherous, violent mob is actually what we'd all act like if we thought we could get away with it. And even then, I think we sort of got off lightly because at the end of the night, when I was brushing and sweeping the floor, I ended up sort of got off lightly because at the end of the night, when I was brushing and sweeping the floor, I ended up mopping up blood in not one, not two, but three different patches. God knows what happened there. I know I didn't see any ambulances or anything turn up but in one patch, there was so much of it that whoever was bleeding couldn't have walked far without passing out. The next morning, I was courteous enough to at least call to say I wasn't going back.

I just couldn't, not if there was another chance of that whole thing happening again. Management tried to assure me that it was a once in a blue moon thing but still, just knowing whatever people are like when the powder and the pilsner are going around was enough to put me off service jobs forever. I got an offer to be a commie chef at a garden festival in Frotschum, which is basically a really posh, rural part of Scheschir. The gig was offering posh nosh with all of the mobility of a burger van and since the company involved was offering a rather generous rate of pay for just a weekend's work, I couldn't exactly afford to turn it down. So on the day in question,

I drive out to Frudge and park my car up and start looking around for the food service facilities. They look quite nice from the outside and the guys on the line looked like they were having a right good laugh. But when I actually got to grips with the service, I started to see how this catering company had tried to cut as many corners as possible to maximize profits. I honestly couldn't go into it without boring the life out of all of you with chef speak so I'll just tell you one thing that really mattered. Most of the kitchens I've worked in lay grip mats down in places that can get particularly slippery, a basic health and safety measure that's become bog standard across the catering industry. But not only was there not a single grip mat in that entire kitchen, but whatever they used for

flooring was extremely slippery once it came in contact with even the smallest amount of liquid. And it wasn't long until the entire place became a great big bloody death trap. The whole thing came to a head when there was a horrendous accident involving a plate of hot duck fat. I didn't see what happened, but god did I hear it. It was this clattering of pots and pans followed by this absolutely blood curdling scream. I'd honestly never heard anything like it in all my years of professional cooking. From what I understand, someone slipped and fell into something. Both guys then went down with one grabbing the handle of a saucepan on the way. This saucepan happened to be full of

hot duck fat that was being used to make the confit ham hock. Boiling, burning, sticky duck fat that clung to that poor guy's face. The wounds were absolutely horrendous, like his skin was peeling and blistering in sections, and I think some of the fat got into one of his eyes because he kept saying, I can't see, I can't bloody see. Actually, you know what? It looked like a horror movie makeup, like the practical effects you see from 80s and 90s gore fests. And the fact that it was real, it was his actual skin. Christ, it makes me queasy thinking about it even all these years later. That was Saturday afternoon, only about 4 or 5 hours into

service. I'd never walked out on a job before ever but I walked off of that one. All it took was the head chef telling me to bloody get on with it when I told him about how dire it was in the kitchen. If I was just some novice having a flap about nothing, fair dues, but this was serious. That guy was carted off to a hospital in an ambulance with the words skin and graft being thrown around, and there's the head chef telling me to just crack on with it. Nice chance, mate. Someone had suffered life-changing injuries on that line, and nobody gave a toss because all they were thinking about was their wallets.

But I'll tell you what, that means it hurt all the more when that bloke took them to court and got a Brewster's settlement from it. But seeing how little anyone cared, that was the scary part. People really are their worst, whenever money's involved. I've been hugely into online gaming for as long as I can remember. As many others might testify, beating your friends on split-screen Mario Kart was fun. But beating some faceless stranger on Age of Empires 2 was a legit rush. Like I always imagined it was some super smart older kid getting their butt handed to them by me, the 10 year old tactical genius. And the whole thing kicked off a love affair with online games that stayed strong ever since.

For the past 8 years or so, my game of choice has been Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Being a sweaty FPS veteran, I played the first game a whole bunch and was super excited to get to grips with its successor. When I got my hands on it, I was hooked. And over the years I moved from clan to clan, playing with an ever-shifting, international group of people until I settled on the clan I'm in now. It's run by this husband and wife pair in their 40s and they generally keep the whole operation running smoothly and drama free. Hence why it's been my steady clan for the past couple of years. I say generally because there was one quite significant incident involving another clan member that had a significantly negative impact on my life. So, there's this one particular girl that I used to play with quite regularly who had the username K9.

Disclaimer, not her exact username. I just don't want her to hear about me telling this story so she can find me again. At first, K actually seemed really cool and, judging from her profile picture, pretty cute too. She was exactly the kind of girl I'd have been crushing on back before I was married, but since I was with Lena, all that kind of stuff was totally off the cards. Any relationship we had was entirely platonic. My whole life was going swimmingly for a while, and I was very happy. Right up until my wife decided that she wasn't so happy, and that she was going to file for a divorce. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

I had no idea she was so unhappy with our marriage and as much as she insisted it wasn't me, that she had her own issues going on, I still blame myself. Add on to that the fact that she would be seeking full custody of our three-year-old daughter, I was broken. I sank into this pit of drinking and staying up super late, losing myself in single player stuff because I just couldn't face interacting with people. I did make an effort to keep the clan updated, like I didn't want them thinking that I died or ghosted or whatever, so I told them about the divorce and how I wasn't feeling so hot. They were super supportive, and I'll always remember that, and they had the presence of mind to give me the time and space that I needed to get myself together again. All but one. K-9. Like I said, K was just my type, and I know that there was a slight chemistry

between us. But in the aftermath of getting such horrible news, I was in no mood to contemplate dating again and I knew I wouldn't be getting back on that horse anytime soon. But Kay didn't see it that way apparently and over the following weeks showed herself to be anything but the friend that I needed right now, as she once put it. It started off all innocent, getting my real name off a mutual friend so she could wish me well on Facebook. It was an unexpected intrusion, but not an entirely unwelcome one. She was worried, I got that, so I let her know I was in a bad place, but that I was dealing with it. The conversation was amicable, she sent me a friend request that I had no problem

accepting, then that was that. Or so I thought, anyway. What started as a few gentle inquiries quickly turned into something totally overwhelming. After a week or so of getting messages from K-9, the tone had gone from kind and understanding to weirdly accusatory. A perfect example of this is when she messaged me something like, I need to hear more from you. Not hearing from you is only making me feel worse. You need to understand that your actions have an effect on those around you. Now this is like one of the lowest points in my life,

and she's sending me messages like that. It didn't just make a depressing situation all the more draining, it actually turned a switch in me, and I started to feel anxious and angry towards her. This is about the time I just started ducking her messages entirely. I didn't need that kind of drama in my life, I had enough on my plate as it was. The next escalation came when my soon-to-be ex-wife called one morning, presumably to talk about some depressingly tedious aspect of our upcoming divorce. Only it wasn't the divorce

that had prompted her call. It was something else entirely. She started off the call by asking, who in God's name is, insert canine's real name, and she sounded livid. I remember just sitting there in shocked silence for a moment, neurons firing my brain as I pieced it all together in a matter of seconds. Accepting canine's friend request meant that she had access to every one of my Facebook's contacts, a type of privacy I never really thought of previously, which obviously included all my close friends and family along with my soon-to-be ex-wife. I tried to explain that Kay was just someone I played CSGO with, some innocent explanation, but I knew it was happening. Kay had obviously been in touch with my wife and whatever messages she'd sent had definitely not been friendly. But far from being unfriendly, Kay's messages

had been downright abusive and, from what my wife described, straight up threatening in several places. She said she'd be in touch with the police to file a complaint, but how that wouldn't be necessary if I'd just kept my freaking mouth shut. So now, not only is Kay not helping things, she's actively making things worse. And what's more, her behavior is reflecting badly on me too, as my ex's divorce lawyer would most definitely use her messages in any kind of custody battle. So, for the first time in about a week, I reached out to Kay to ask her to stop what she was doing. It was a well-worded polite message which I actually redrafted to make it sound as non-confrontational as possible. But still, she took it terribly.

She tries calling using that messenger feature and I won't pick up and she's just bombarding me with apologies at first. Confessing her love and till her mood switched and her tone got decidedly nasty. I don't want to go into too many details about what she said. It was long-winded, drawn out and thoroughly upsetting, but let's just say a lot of it involved my crumbling marriage and my ability as a father, something that really hit home at the time. I was heartbroken, but I had the wherewithal to do the right thing and just cut Kay out of my life. I block her on Facebook, Discord, and Steam and foolishly think she's gone for good and that I can do my grieving in peace

and get back to online gaming when I feel good and ready. Literally about a month later, boom, the pandemic happens. I don't mean to make light of a horrible situation, but the whole working from home thing was exactly what I needed. I could do my own work in my own space and I didn't have to suffer through having to go into public during my post-divorce stubble and hangovers period. Naturally, working from home meant Zoom calls galore. I don't think many people have even heard of Zoom before the pandemic, but now I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't. Just imagine owning stocks in Zoom pre-COVID. You'd be Scrooge McDuck-style rich right now. But anyway, one afternoon I'm in a Zoom meeting with my head

of department and a few of my co-workers. There's no real agenda, we're just kind of rambling about a new project we were working on, doing it more for the social contact than anything. It's a chill meeting, but I am psyched about the project. Upper management eyes will be all over it when it's completed, and given it's my brainchild, my name's going will be all over it when it's completed and given it's my brainchild, my name's going to be all over it. When all's said and done, I can be in line for a shift up the company ladder and you can only imagine what that prospect is doing for my self-esteem and confidence post-divorce. I'm drinking less, I'm focused for the first time in months. You get the idea. So I'm not sure if you know how Zoom works, but unless the host sets a password,

pretty much any Zoom user can jump into the call to either participate or in some cases disrupt it. But this is late April, and the fad of moronic YouTube kids hacking Zoom calls hadn't quite taken off yet. So generally speaking, anyone who jumped into the call was a company employee a little box pops up stating someone's name they can then switch their camera on and participate at will so right in the middle of the zoom call same old thing happens a little box pops up and and we think it's like Adam from another branch popping in to talk numbers or something. Only the name isn't anything we recognize. In fact, it's not even a name at all. It's just a series of letters and numbers that has us all like, uh, hi, who just joined?

This new user isn't saying or doing anything, but we know they can hear us. I just assume we're waiting for them to load in or switch their webcam on or something. We're left waiting in an uncomfortable silence for the longest time, and only when my head of department threatened to kick them from the call did they actually stream any video. I didn't recognize who it was at first, but when I did, the sinking feeling of pure dread was indescribable. It was K-9, only she didn't quite look how I remembered her. Instead of the cute bubbly features and shock of blonde hair, K looked like she'd lost a ton of weight and the once glossy long hair had looked thin and greasy. My boss says something like, I'm sorry, may I ask who just

joined? He's trying to remain polite, but you can see how shocked and creeped out he is by what he's seeing. I mean, Kay looked awful, almost like she was dying. I should have acted quicker. I know that. I should have just manned up and told my boss to kick her that she was going to cause trouble. But on some level I still cared about Kay, and seeing her in such a bad way was as upsetting as it was morbidly curious and horrifying. Where you been? She asked, using my real name. There was no denying it now. I have missed you so much. I haven't eaten. I haven't slept. I just need to know you're okay. You know this girl? One of my co-workers asked, but it was barely a question. It was more like

an indictment, like he was saying something must be wrong with me that I'd know a girl like that and that somehow it was my fault she was in such a state in the first place. I don't think I have long left, Kay then went on to say, following up with, I just wanted to say goodbye, but I wanted to show you something before I go. She backs off from the camera a little. At this point, I know that I should have just hung up or screamed something, but we all just couldn't stop staring, and honestly,

I felt like I was in some kind of dream. Raising up her arm, we could all see that she had cut four letters into her arm. The cuts looked like they were scabbing over but still looked incredibly painful, swollen and possibly infected. But despite the grainy webcam footage, we could all clearly see what the letter spelled. My name. Then poof. She's gone.

She hangs up. There's a stunned silence for a moment before my boss says something along the lines of, I think you should go check on your friend. Next thing you know, I'm kicked from the call. At this stage, she might have just messed up probably the most important meeting in a long time, but I'm honestly too angry and in some ways worried about her. I jump back into my Facebook account, only it's my turn to dig up as much information on her as I can.

I send a message over to a guy that happened to be tagged in a lot of her pictures, asking if he's seen or spoken to Kay in the past couple of days. And this is where things get really weird, because I find out that this guy is actually her boyfriend. Yep, her actual long-term boyfriend of two years, who tells me that Kay is fine, and that she looked terrible because she's shooting a short horror movie for a community college course she's taking, one in which she's playing some kind of victim. By that time, I'm just stunned at how manipulative Kay is capable of being. She is willing to take a shot at ruining my career because I won't give her any attention, and she's actually unavailable. I'm so angry that I just think,

screw it, and tell her boyfriend about everything she's doing. He legit knew nothing of all the harassment and confessions of love, actually thanks me, and tells me he'll be confronting her about it as soon as she's home from college. I still have her block, but I figured I can check in with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend to see how the whole thing went down. But get this, next time I talk to the guy, he's in the hospital. Apparently what I told him caused an argument that ended their relationship. Only the next morning, as they're leaving for work, she drives over him in her car. He rode a bike to work in the morning, whereas she drove and this psycho decided she'd rather kill him than let him go. Guy got his hip and femur crushed and was seriously lucky not to lose his life.

Kay is arrested and a couple of days later the boyfriend passes information onto the media that she's been taken to a psychiatric hospital after a complete and utter mental breakdown. I told the guy how sorry I was, wished him all the best, and honestly that's the last time we spoke. An insane story, all true. All that drama, all that fear and suffering and worry because of someone I never even flirted with, never befriended outside of the game, barely even knew what she looked like or even cared. All that fear and suffering and worry because of someone I never even flirted with, never befriended outside of the game, barely even knew what she looked like or even cared. I just enjoyed playing games.

It made me realize how crazy and delusional some people in this world are and how someone online can completely destroy your life. Fortunately, I don't think my wife ever told her divorce lawyer about the messages Kay sent her, and the year after the fact, I get to see my daughter more often than some other divorced dads do, which is, thank God, a huge win for me. But despite all my efforts, I can't seem to quite get Kay out of my head. I'm slow to get back into the dating game and it's honestly because I'm terrified that I'll meet another girl like her because I might not survive another girl as

possessive, manipulative, or downright evil as K-9, either emotionally or physically. To be continued... Just afternoon on Thursday, May 14th of 2020, the 72-year-old Long Island man, Dwight Powers, was participating in a Zoom call with around 20 other people. They were all part of the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and, like millions of other people during the pandemic, were attempting an old system around new and frightening conditions. It wasn't like Dwight to miss a meeting. His long-held sobriety was precious to him, and his own slight techn It wasn't like Dwight to miss a meeting. His long-held sobriety was precious to him, and his own slight technophobia wasn't going to stand in the way of that. Dwight sat at his computer in the small office he'd put together at his home on Dixon Avenue

in Amityville, and warmly chatted with those in attendance before they noticed something moving in the background of Dwight's video feed. To their horror, they saw a figure walk into the room, slowly approaching Dwight from behind. Given that he was concentrating on the conversation unfolding on screen, Dwight was completely unaware that anyone was creeping up on him, and the first he knew of the intruder's presence was when they began viciously beating him about the face and neck. Other users in the call gasped as they saw such a cruel display of violence unfold before their very eyes, inflicted by a man who turned out to be completely naked. When the figure finished hitting Dwight and turned to leave the room, other callers asked if he was okay, but Dwight could barely respond.

He was bleeding from a busted lip and the sheer speed and intensity of the ambush had clearly shaken him. But to his viewer's horror, the attack wasn't over. The figure returned to the room holding something in each of his hands, things that glinted in the light of an overhead lamp, and in full view of almost 20 other Zoom callers, began stabbing Dwed in the light of an overhead lamp, and in full view of almost 20 other Zoom callers, began stabbing Dwight in the back and side, over and over and over again. Those watching could do nothing but call 911 as they watched Dwight gargle blood before falling off of his chair, but even this was a fruitless task, since no one actually knew Dwight's home address. When Dwight fell, his attacker went down with him, plunging the large kitchen knives into Dwight's

fallen body in a frenzied and bloody assault, until all people could hear over his computer's microphone were his dying breaths. The callers managed to give a vividly detailed description of Dwight's attacker, thanks to the quality of his computer webcam, but when the police honed in on a man fitting that description, who also happened to have Dwight's blood all over his change of clothes, they discovered something horrifying. The Dwight Powers murderer was none other than 32-year-old Thomas Scully Powers, Dwight's own son. In a statement given to homicide detectives shortly after his arrest, Thomas Scully Powers admitted stabbing his own father around 20 to 25 times. He told them he returned to the kitchen at one point to change knives because

the smaller, cheaper blades kept bending whenever they struck bone, and to fully decapitate his own father in a horrendous, unprovoked attack. Thomas had to use a bread knife to saw through the dense bone and cartilage of his father's spine. Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Seney said, This is a shocking and disturbing case. By the defendant's own admission, he brutally stabbed his own father repeatedly until he was certain he was dead. The investigation into this horrific murder is still ongoing, but rest assured we will obtain justice for the victim. Shockingly, when Thomas Scully Powers was charged with murder and appeared before a judge via video link to enter a plea,

he insisted he was not guilty by reason of insanity. However, a psychiatric exam showed Thomas to be quite lucid, and in light of this, the judge ordered that he be held at the Riverhead Correctional Facility without bail, and that a maximum sentence of 25 years to life should be handed down should Thomas be found guilty. In the run-up to the trial, Thomas' defense attorney insisted that he would be exploring Mr. Powers' mental health and capacity in relation to this incident. It seemed obvious that they would be playing the insanity card as I'm sure neither they nor the general public could comprehend any sane reason why a man would just murder his own

father out of the blue. The prosecution argued that Thomas had murdered his father when he was completely lucid, owing to the fact that he tried to flee the scene when the cops arrived. He knew what he had done was wrong and had attempted to hide the evidence of his crime by mopping up the blood and disposing of a bloody bed sheet in a trash bag. On top of that, when the cops arrived at the assisted living facility that Dwight Powers called home, his son tried to escape arrest by jumping out of a second floor window. Despite being injured in the fall, Thomas ran across a busy highway and into a corner store where he attempted to use Dr. Pepper, of all things, to wash the blood from his clothes.

Obviously, he was quickly spotted by the store's owner, who called in the police officers that arrested Thomas shortly afterward. Suffolk County Police Department said that although they had yet to determine a motive for the stabbing, they could safely rule out any tensions stemming from father and son being quarantined together. Prosecuting attorneys were also confounded by the killing, saying Thomas had mentioned during his police interview that his father had tried to slit his wrist with a knife, but they had a physical inspection that revealed what they characterized as only a slight mark on Thomas' wrist and dismissed the claim of self-defense as a flimsy attempt to mask a markedly darker motive. Two neighbors of Dwight Powers, Steve and Mary Englert, said they had been close friends of his family for the majority of the 40 years they'd spent living side by side.

They said he was very close to his family, but although he undoubtedly had a lot of love for Thomas, Dwight seldom talked about his wayward son. With a euphemism that seemed to hide something much more sinister, Mary Englert told reporters that Thomas had struggles and would move in with his father during tough stretches. Dwight never hesitated to take Thomas back in, had struggles and would move in with his father during tough stretches. Dwight never hesitated to take Thomas back in, with Steve and Mary testifying that Dwight was a very devoted father. When his sons needed him, he was there, Mary told reporters with a glint of melancholy in her eye. As it turned out, Mary actually grew up with Dwight in the small town of Levittown, New York State, and said that he had been absolutely horrified to hear of her beloved neighbor's untimely death. At first, she simply refused to believe it was true, insisting it must have been some terrible mix-up. Although the Englerts had been unable to call over at Dwight's house due to the pandemic,

they made a point of calling him on his cell phone to wish him a happy birthday, which had only been a few weeks prior. How could we have known that was the last time we'd ever talked to him, Mary said. It just didn't seem real that he was gone. Dwight loved his family so much. They were everything to him. I just can't imagine why it all happened. By all accounts, Dwight Powers was a stand-up guy. He had served as a rifleman in the United States Marine Corps and had a tour of Vietnam under his belt. When Dwight left the Marines, he got himself a job as a customs agent, opting for a quiet life in the suburbs where he could keep his family safe and happy. Folks said there wasn't a darn chance he had skeletons in his closet, he was just too much of a goof. He was 50 years old when he joined a rock band that played charity

shows for children's foundations. Then when he was 60, Dwight grew a passion for the environment and began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. When he wasn't making the world a better place, he could often be found watching reruns of The Three Stooges, laughing his butt off at wholesome slapstick humor. There have been plenty of suggestions that Dwight wasn't the family man he made himself out to be, and that a dark and sordid history of patriarchal abuse led to Thomas lashing out in some kind of psychotic frenzy. But every attempt to paint Dwight to some kind of abusive smiling sociopath has either been based on circumstantial evidence or downright lies. But the question remains, will we ever find concrete evidence or testimony of Dwight's secret abuses? Or was a good man just unlucky enough to have a son who was violently and

criminally deranged? Maybe people just want to find a rational excuse as to why a young man would murder his own loving father while completely in the buff. Because there's nothing scarier than the idea that we live in a world where those we shower with love, support, and affection can just snap one day, leaving us choking in a pool of our own blood, with the digital audience just having watched us die. It all started with a Zoom call. At least, I only became aware it was happening because of a Zoom call. For all I know, it could have been happening for much longer, but the day of the second post-lockdown work meeting was the first time I noticed it. We're in the middle of a pretty tedious brainstorming session with a few members of marketing when a co-worker interrupts whoever's talking to address me by name.

It actually made me jump at first. I was totally tuned out, so hearing my name brought me right back around again. I respond, huh? Yep, I was listening, when I noticed the person who addressed me is now closely studying their own laptop screen. I don't mean to alarm you, they said, but I think someone's watching you through the window behind you. I know exactly which window he's talking about so I turn a bit nervous at the idea of discovering he's right only to see that there's no one there. I'm more relieved than anything to be honest. I figured he was playing a joke on me because he clocked that I was nodding off during the meeting and I'd be lying if I said I didn't maybe deserve it a little bit. Very funny, I said, and a few of the other callers had a little titter at the impromptu prank. I'm sorry, but I wasn't joking, the guy said. Did no one else see that? I'm so sure. You're probably just seeing things.

Someone else chimed in and within a few minutes, the whole thing was completely forgotten. A smudge on the screen, a bit of lag on the call, eyes playing tricks. There were a hundred ways to explain it. The truth was literally unthinkable at that stage. A short while later the exact same thing happens. The same guy interrupts, only far more urgently this time saying, look, look, it's right there, I'm not imagining it, you can all see that, yeah? I know what he's talking about, only I don't turn around immediately. I look at my own webcam feed to see what he was talking about, and right when I see it, what's clearly the silhouette of a head in the window behind me, I hear one of the other

callers say like, oh wow I see it too. I spin around just in time to catch the quick blur of whoever was watching me ducking out of view. I'm actually really creeped out at this point because it obviously wasn't just somebody walking past my ground floor bedroom. Someone had actually stopped to stare inside. My window isn't even facing the street. It's at the side of the apartment block like you have to actually go out of your way to find it. Now I'm only 5'3 and I'm 8 stone which for any Americans reading this means I'm tiny and I had to make sure if someone was actually creeping on me they weren't just hiding out and waiting until I was vulnerable.

So phone in one hand, kitchen knife in the other. I tell the zoom call that I'll be right back and then head out to make sure that everything is kosher. It's peak lockdown during all of this so the streets are pretty much deserted, so I'd think I'd have noticed anyone wandering around. But there was no one, not a soul in sight. So I guessed, or rather hoped, that it was just some neighbor kids messing around, maybe looking for a wayward ball or something. About a week goes by and the whole window face incident has been at the back of my mind the whole time. For a lot of young women who live alone, the idea of being targeted where we're most vulnerable is frankly terrifying. So the

prospect of that nightmare coming to life just didn't bear thinking about. I'm not saying I was on edge the whole time or that I lose sleep over it or anything, but let's just say I held my keys a little tighter in my fist whenever I walk down the street my apartment block is on. But anyway, at one point I head out to the grocery store to pick up food and I end up caught in one of those super long COVID lines that you're stuck in for like 40 minutes before you're allowed into the store to buy your stuff. This is on top of the fact that the store near me had implemented this dumb one-way system in the aisles in an attempt to stop the spread. My point is, a trip that would have normally taken like half hour ends up taking more like 90 minutes

and an annoying amount of my day has been completely wasted. So I'm already in a bad mood by the time I get back to my apartment only to find that the front door has been bashed in. Apparently there had been a break in while I was out. If only criminals could work from home. It seemed obvious that it was a burglary at first. All my stuff had been strewn around. Drawers and cabinets were opened and emptied.

The TV was still there along with my playstation but most break-ins just go for jewelry and phones I heard, anything small that they can pawn easily. Obviously I called the cops like there and then who arrived within a half hour or so. They advised me to help them look around the apartment for anything that might be missing, valuable electronics and whatnot, but I told them I already looked and that nothing obvious seemed to have been taken. My bedroom looked like it had been hit by a bomb. Clothes had been strewn all over the place. Whole drawers had been pulled out and flipped, like whoever broke in was looking for something. One of the cops spent some time looking

around in there before he called out to his partner. Hey, we need forensics up in here is what he actually said. I asked him what the deal was, if he'd found something that I should know about. Both cops had been warm, friendly, and helpful up until that point, but when I asked him why forensics was needed, one of them told me not to worry about it and to stay out of my bedroom for the time being. It was no big deal at first, I was just grateful that they showed up so fast, even if they did wear masks and insist on keeping six feet between us at all times. So by the time forensics team showed up, I'm out front of my apartment building

talking to my mom on the phone. Only when I see what they're actually doing in my apartment, it triggers what I can only describe as a mini freakout. Guys in gloves and white coverall suits have been scooping big handfuls of my underwear into bags, sealing them, then taking them out to the truck outside. And then it dawns on me, whoever broke into my apartment had left DNA on my underwear. I probably don't need to tell you how exactly they'd done that, the whole thing grosses me out too much for me to actually type it. But the thing that really got to me was, if I'd actually been home that afternoon, there's no telling what would have happened if some violent perv had actually gotten their dirty hands on me.

But anyway, the story does actually have something of a resolution and thankfully a happy ending, because they had this guy's DNA. Police were able to match it on their database with a guy who'd had multiple run-ins with the law for public exposure, among other things. He was arrested, and he's now looking at three years in prison for aggravated burglary, some kind of charge like that. But the whole thing came full circle for me in an interview with some detective, who'd mentioned that this guy liked casing his victims' places before he struck. Over the past month or so, have you seen anyone hanging around your apartment who doesn't live

there, maybe someone looking through your window? He said it. He literally said it. It was him, that day when I was in the Zoom call. It was him that had been looking through my window. He'd been stalking me for God knows how long, and when it came for him to actually get me, only by the grace of God was I lucky enough to have been out grocery shopping. Otherwise, it doesn't bear thinking about what might have happened. Hi, I'm Natalie and I'm a yoga teacher out here in Portland, Oregon. About this time last year I had my own studio, a burgeoning list of clients and a profit margin I was really proud of. But then the pandemic hit and business pretty much dropped off overnight. I was going to have to radically rework my business model if my business was going to survive

and for about a week, I was stressing out about what I was going to do. Then it hit me. I was hearing a lot about some video calling app called Zoom in the media and how it was helping businesses continue trading despite strict lockdown conditions. I figured if people could have a management meeting via webcam, I'd be able to teach a yoga class online. I was worried that some of my clients would be slow to warm up to the whole download dog idea. Sorry for the yoga joke, but to my delight,

enough people signed up to pay my rent for the month, which was a huge weight off my mind. It took a few sessions for me to really get the hang of it but after a while, I was hosting two sessions a day, four days a week, and business was still growing. Then when I put in an ad on social media, interest exploded. People were trapped inside, bored out of their minds and were craving some kind of self-improvement. It went from being the worst thing to happen to my business to something resembling the best thing. But having those Zoom yoga classes brought a whole host of problems.

Some people lost connection to the call and demanded I Venmo their money back. Other people's setups weren't that great so I couldn't properly advise them on their form. But the biggest thing? My yoga studio is in a commercial block behind a series of locked doors away from prying eyes. Interruptions and security have never been a problem, but random things were able to interrupt my clients, be it their cats or other more terrifying things. So I'm running an afternoon session of about 10-12 clients and everything is going smoothly. Then suddenly, I start hearing something that kind of sounded like feedback coming from one of my client's microphones. It steadily got louder and louder until curiosity got a hold of me and I had to ask them what the sound was. My client started looking a little anxious, apologized, then got up while saying she was

going to shut a window. Me and these other ladies are watching our screens, listening as the feedback noises cut off when the girl shuts the window. I'm thinking this girl is going to be right back, so I get ready to resume the session again but then I hear her faintly say something like, oh my god, no, no, no, no, no. Then crash. All you hear is the sound of a window breaking. Then the girl running across her webcam like a wave from the crashing sound. We're terrified. We have zero clue what's going on, which made it all the scarier. Like I thought it was a home invasion or something. I didn't know

that her apartment was actually a couple floors up, so unless it was like evil Spider-Man or something, but either way. The airwaves are just a mess of worried women anxiously asking this girl if she's okay, what's going on, should someone call the cops, all this panic chatter. Then about a minute goes by and there's even more smashing glass sounds coming from the client's feed. I keep thinking I'm about to see some hooded figure, claw hammer in hand, marching across the webcam towards his prey. But thank god nothing like that ever happened, but even then, what did happen was almost impossible to determine at the time. As I'm watching, I notice that the weird feedback noise is back and much louder this time,

and slowly, it just sort of morphs into a steady barking sound, which is when I realize what it is. It's people chanting something, some four-syllable phrase, only I can't quite make out what it is. Meanwhile, my besieged client is calling the cops, trying to get someone out to her, while we're all making sure to stay in the call to keep an eye on her. It took us quite a while to get all the details on what actually happened but when I heard, I was outraged. The girl in question lived in an apartment block in what some would call a gentrified area of Portland. A large protest happened to be going on past her apartment at the time and it was not one of the peaceful ones. These idiots were throwing rocks at any residents that

looked like they might house young professionals. I think they even wrecked a few bars and restaurants in the neighborhood too. My client just so happened to be unlucky enough to have them march past her apartment just as they started feeling mean. Like, I'm very much in favor of most of all the stuff that went down, I voted in favor of it and I fully support people's right to protest. But I know for a fact that people used all the unrest in Portland this summer to just go out and live out some of their darkest fantasies. Those are the worst kind of people in my mind. Like I just want to ask those guys, what did my client do? Why was her apartment targeted? She's not a cop or some storm trooper. What in God's name were they thinking? But yeah, definitely the scariest

moment of the summer for me, which is really saying something considering there's been a deadly virus going around. My client wasn't hurt, thank God, but she was left with quite a bill to get her windows replaced, all because some inconsiderate jerks decided to hijack a righteous protest to do some horrible, hateful things. On the morning of August 12th, 2020, the young daughter of 32-year-old Maribel Rosada Morales was logging onto her computer for her first day of Zoom classes. Her home state of Florida had been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, and like many of her Warfield Elementary School classmates, the closure of her school meant she was forced to

participate in one of the great educational experiments of our time, one in which millions of children all over the world would be educated remotely using a piece of conference call software called Zoom. This new ad hoc method proved to have its fair share of problems, and scores of teachers reported difficulties in remote education almost immediately. But the teacher that morning must have had no idea what kind of horror she was about to face, a horror she would be unable to hide from young, innocent eyes. Around 8am, the 10-year-old student was taking part in a roll call with around 30 other children when her teacher began to hear something in the background of her audio.

It sounded like voices, hushed but strained and as the minutes passed, the voices coming from the feet of Maribel Morales' daughter grew louder and louder. It got to the point where a full-on argument seemed to be breaking out in the home and by the time profanity began to be used, the teacher realized that some kind of potentially violent domestic altercation was on hand. Then, the teacher, along with 30 other young children watched in horror as the young Morales' girl looked off camera and quickly covered her ears with a terrified look on her face. A series of loud pops could be heard, sounding strange and tinny when picked up by the laptop's cheap microphone. Many of the children asked what they were, but their teacher knew, and she was

quick to mute the girl's mic so they couldn't hear what came next. The last the teacher in class saw of Maribel Morales' daughter was just before her screen suddenly went black as a bullet fired from a 9mm handgun smashed into the computer's motherboard. Police officers responding to the teacher's 911 call arrived at the Morales' residence just minutes later, but they were too late. Lying on the floor, surrounded by screaming, terrified children, Maribel Rosado Morales had been shot to death in front of four of her own kids and two young cousins by a man who had apparently fled the scene on a stolen bicycle.

Just a few hours later, police received a phone call from a city bus driver, saying he and his passengers had been taken hostage by a man armed with a pistol. The man had ordered the driver to take him to a destination off of the bus's route, and was in the process of subduing and intimidating the bus's many passengers, thus giving him an opportunity to call. He didn't seem to have made any demands, but he was armed and extremely agitated. It was a painfully volatile situation, but by some insane stroke of luck, a police SWAT team happened to be on a training exercise in the general vicinity. Once the bus was cornered,

they stormed the vehicle and subdued the hostage taker without a shot being fired. As he was being cuffed, the hostage taker made a shocking confession. He told the heavily armed policeman that his name was Donald Williams and that he had shot and killed his ex-girlfriend just a few hours before. And as it turned out, his ex-girlfriend was none other than 32-year-old Maribel Rosado Morales. Donald was subsequently charged with first-degree murder as well as several other felony charges including being a convicted felon in possession of a gun. The local sheriff's department said that he would also be charged with armed burglary and armed home invasion and that there would obviously be additional penalties due to the presence of children during such a horrific killing.

In the aftermath, the Florida Department of Children and Families was faced with the heartbreaking task of finding new homes for poor children who had been orphaned during the attack, who were all between the ages of 10 to 17. The shooting rocked the local community, especially given that some of their own children had witnessed a life being taken, all thanks to advances in communications technology. Warfield Elementary and the Martin County School District released a statement saying, Our deepest sympathies and condolences go out to the victim's family, including children present in the home who were witnesses to this heartbreaking and senseless tragedy. We have our grief team deployed to assist students and staff who will undoubtedly feel the impact of this horrible incident. We stand ready to assist and offer support in any way we can.

But no amount of grief counseling will really put a dent into the immense trauma suffered by so many children that morning, not to mention their teacher, who for a few grim moments must have thought that she'd witnessed the death of a child while on the job. And once again, such an incident proves that as much as advancements in technology have the capacity to enrich our lives, allowing us to stay in touch with people we're otherwise unable to see, it also has the capacity to darken them, too. Remember when the quarantine first started, and everyone was using Zoom for everything from work meetings to virtual birthday parties? Let me tell you, a lot of people weren't using passwords on their rooms.

And if they were, the number of times that it was a 123 or a password was astounding. Point being, I broke into a whole lot of Zoom calls last summer, mostly with hilarious results. I hacked my way into some regional management meeting and told the exec he was fired. I got into what I figured was a remote learning session for a middle school where I successfully pretended to be a kid for like 15 minutes. I also caught some grandpa waiting for a call from a relative and almost convinced the guy that I was his grandson. Guy had to squint at the screen before telling me to go F myself. Okay, it was super obnoxious of me and I know I'm a jerk for doing it. But does it warm the cockles of your heart to know that I got my comeuppance? That I got what I deserve for

sticking my dumb head where it didn't belong? I bet you are, even if it's just a little. But let's just see if that changes by the end of this story. So right after I had gotten to some afternoon mother's meeting to give them all the sad little life Jane speech from Come Dine With Me, I figured I peaked. There was nowhere to go, no more mountains to climb. So I gave Zoom sniping a rest for a bit until the cravings returned to me later that evening. The fun thing about zoom sniping at night was that you occasionally found something a bit saucier than you would in the daytime.

For example, I once got into a zoom call between a few girls having a virtual sleepover in various states of undress. I'm not saying I stayed longer than a few seconds, I'm not that much of a perv, but you get my point. So I'm typing in random words in the search bar to bring up potential sniping targets. I accidentally hit a punctuation mark and happened across a room with a very distinctive name. Most are just called like Andy's room or Queen's Park Regional Subway Manager's Meeting, boring stuff like that. But this room didn't even have a name. It just had a series of punctuation that made up a kind of shape, like a kind of curve or wave shape. Usually I had a plan of what I was going to do before I got into a call, a goof or a bit that I had in mind. But that time I didn't.

That time I just had this nagging curiosity to see what was going on in it. But you know what they say about curiosity, right? Instant regret. When I loaded into the call and saw what was happening on two of the four panels, I immediately exited the call. It was like a gut reaction, almost like a physical reaction to being burned by something. Like I legit shouted, whoa, and backed up from the keyboard before my hand jumped to the mouse. Then I just sat there, kind of dumbstruck, just processing what I'd seen. I don't want to go into what it was, I don't think I have the words or the emotional capacity to go into detail regarding what I saw that night.

But put it this way, imagine the sweetest, most innocent looking child you've ever seen. Now imagine the worst possible thing you could do to them, the worst thing you could ever possibly conceive of. Whatever it is, you'd rather see it happening to the kid than what I actually saw for real. It absolutely positively fried my brain for about 30 minutes, because that's about how long it took for me to realize I should have called the cops. As much as the concept filled me with dread, I actually set about trying to find the room again. I had to at least try to jot down some details, backgrounds, physical descriptions, anything that I'd be able to hand over to the police to aid them in arresting the scumbags responsible for

what I can only describe as ritualistic abuse. I wasn't even sure which piece of punctuation I'd punched in erroneously, but you can bet I tried every single one in my attempt to find that godforsaken room again. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find it. I wasn't even sure what I could do at that point. I didn't think I could just call the police and be like, I saw some kid getting messed with online, but I have zero details. But apparently that's exactly what you're supposed to do. From what I found out over the next few days, after talking to a few greater Manchester police officers, just telling the police what platform you see something dodgy on can help them pin down the people perpetrating the abuse.

I didn't mean for this to turn into some internet safety infomercial, there was just so much I didn't know about how the police tracked down and removed that kind of indecent online material. We hear about stuff like that, and it all seems too abstract, like it's happening someplace else far, far away. But seeing it online like that, hiding in plain sight, it made me realize how kids are suffering like that every single day, all over the world, and we're not doing nearly enough as a society to stop it. But anyway, the point is, just be careful when you're snooping around online, you might just bite off considerably more than you can chew. That, and if you do see

something, always, always report it. It might seem pointless, but just know your actions bring us all one step closer to ridding the world of dangerous predators. Predators Back when I was in secondary school, the subject I hated the most, most definitely, was French. I absolutely loathed it, so naturally I was bad at it. And by the time the mock GCSE exams came around when I was 16, my French teacher's projected grade for me was pretty dire. So, my head of year, my parents, and my French teacher had a little chat and came up with a novel idea. I was going to live in France for a week. At the time, I honestly thought they were mental. This Paris trip was a thing the school did every year, but it was usually the only top students in the various French classes who got to attend. You know, people who actually wanted to learn French.

But as I found out, they also suggested that the less able students consider attending too, which is how my parents got that fateful phone call. Immersive learning, they called it. The idea being that living with a French family for a week would force us to improve our language skills. I hated the concept, but it's amazing how open-minded you can be when your mom and dad take away your Xbox and your TV, cut off your pocket money, and ban your mates from coming round. So, after a week or so of the great electronics embargo of 2004, I suddenly found myself considerably more persuadable. And so in February of 2004, I got on a coach to join a

handful of other students for the week-long trip to Paris. We were looking at a five-hour coach journey down to Dover so we would catch the ferry over to France. So I loaded up on AA batteries, a CD wallet full of music, god that makes me feel old to write, and sat on my own to settle in for a long, seemingly pointless journey. About two hours into the drive down to the English Channel, I feel someone giving me a tap on the shoulder, pushing their hand through the little gap on the coach seats. I pull one of my earphones out to hear a girl's voice asking, What CDs did you bring? I hadn't really had the opportunity to check out who else was in attendance, and admittedly, neither did I care at first.

But I turn around in my seat to see that behind me is this girl called Rachel. Rachel had only joined our school in the middle of year 10 and was in a completely different social circle so that day on the coach was my first proper interaction with her. Me being a jerk, I basically scoff at the idea of her liking any of the music I was into but still, I pass my CD wallet back to her, hoping I can revel in how cool and edgy I am when she's like, ew, all this music is horrible. I'd pretty much assume that, given she hung around the peripheries of the cool kids, Rachel wouldn't be into the same music as me, but then there we were, swapping music recommendations with her in-between shy attempts at flirtation.

All of a sudden, the prospect of spending a week in France didn't seem so bad in my mind. The next few days were spent sightseeing in Paris, with me and Rachel spending almost all our time together. And I was just smitten, and I was dying to spend some time alone with her, so when she suggested hanging out outside of the school stuff we were doing, I was pretty elated. The only trouble was, we were all staying with different host families so Rachel was staying in a completely different part of Paris than me. But when I find out she's only an hour's walk away in a part of Paris called Clichy, I think jackpot. I can easily make it over to her and back in the

course of the evening without the host family worrying or calling our teachers. I was as nervous as I was excited. Going for a little walk was basically going to be my first ever date. It was the weirdest combination of not wanting to go but not being able to stop myself and I remember looking up the French phrase for I'm going to the shop so I could use it on my host family as an excuse. Then before I know it, I'm out on the streets of Paris, trying to find a particular neighborhood without having the foggiest idea where to begin. It's not long before I'm relying on my seriously terrible French, asking for directions and totally failing to understand the responses.

I was literally going on which way people were pointing whenever I said, Clichy? S'il vous plait? And then just walking in that direction for a few minutes before asking another person. Eventually the only people I could see to ask directions was this group of lads about my age. I walk up to them, ask them where Clichy is in my terrible French and then from what I could make out, they basically said they'd walk me there. Like they're all walking off in one direction, beckoning me to follow them. So I do. We're walking for a while, maybe 20 or 30 minutes and every so often I'm like, Clichy? And they're like, non're like, continuing to point down the road. Then out of nowhere I hear this siren screeching.

We're all suddenly bathed in blue light. My first thought is, cool, French car chase. So I turn around to have a gander only to see these French police cars pull up to the side of the road right next to us. The lads I'm with just start legging it, and I know I'm a moron for having followed them, but when a French policeman is barreling it at you with his baton,

it's somehow just instinctual to run away as fast as you can. We end up getting caught by another car full of police, who grabbed us by the scruff of the neck and started leading us back towards one of the cars. As we're walking, one of the French lads starts struggling a little bit and bumps into me in the process. The police respond by putting him in cuffs straight away but the damage had already been done and you'll see what I mean by that in a minute. The French police get us lined up on the side of one of their cars and start forcibly searching the handcuffed kid while asking the rest of us to empty our pockets. I had nothing to hide, and I would have gotten across that I was English much earlier,

but every time I tried to speak, one of the officers would shout some phrase that I could only assume meant shut up. I figured if I just kept quiet and let the police do their thing, eventually they'd find out that not was I not even a part of that little group of lads, but that I wasn't even French. I had this I don't belong here, if I just go along with it I'll be fine attitude, but unfortunately that was not to be. When it came to be my turn to empty my pockets, the police watch as I take out my phone and my wallet, only as I'm pulling my wallet out, something else falls out with it, something that was most definitely not in my pocket before.

One of the cops picked it up, sniffed it, and then said something in French. His partner immediately put me in cuffs and then led me away to the other car, the one that had originally chased us. I didn't say a word. I might have only been 16, but I knew what was in that bag and I knew I was in a whole world of trouble because of it. The only question was, how did it get in my pocket in the first place? People have subsequently laughed this whole thing off, rolling their eyes and saying, oh yeah sure, a bag of drugs just fell into your pocket. But I swear on my mom's life, that French kid slipped it into my pocket when he bumped into me.

It's the only explanation I really have. Look at it this way, my goal was the romantic Parisian rendezvous with Rachel, and my French wasn't anywhere near proficient enough to actually buy anything illicit. That's on top of the fact that I simply didn't have the money to do so. But either way, I get taken down to some police station and frog-marched up to their booking desk. When I get there, I get this little beacon of hope. All of a sudden they care that I'm English and they arrange for a translator. I think I'm off the hook. Finally I can actually explain what happened. How it was all just some horrible mistake that had occurred because I was chasing a girl.

Oh you little English rascal, I thought they'd say. Away with you and keep your peepee in your trousers. But I was young, naive, and dumb as a rock, and they didn't give a toss where I was from. They wanted to charge me with possession of illegal substances, with intent to supply. My jaw dropped when the translator explained what the connotations of that phrase meant. They were looking to charge me with something big, not some slap on the wrist for unlucky English boy. They wanted to lock me up. As you can imagine, I was absolutely bricking it. Just sitting there in the cell they put me in, thinking I'm never going to be able to go home. What was I thinking? Thinking all these apocalyptic thoughts while I waited hours for the police to get in touch with my host family and by proxy, my teachers. They also got me this French public defender who

was my absolute saving grace. This guy spoke English really well, and when he told me not to worry, that I'd never see a young offender's institution, I was so relieved that I cried when he left my cell. To this day, I'm not sure how he did it. Maybe it was just the idiot French police wanting to scare me, but he somehow managed to whittle down the prison time they were threatening me with to just deportation. I'd not be charged with a single thing, and I'd be able to freely travel back to France once I was 18, but for now, they wanted me out of the country and it caused a huge drama back home. It was student teacher meetings, parental

punishments and counselor sessions for months afterwards and I had plenty of time for it all since I was suspended from school until the exams. I think for the most part people believe me about the drugs especially when I explain that it all happened because I was trying to see Rachel, who I ended up dating for 6 or 7 months afterwards. I think that's maybe what happened with the French police too. I was hardly some teenage Escobar and prosecuting me would no doubt cause all manner of diplomatic shenanigans. All the nonsense that followed the arrest seriously sucked. For example, the school put it on my parents to pay for my flight home, and having to buy a ticket at such

short notice was not cheap, so I had a debt to work off. But every time the grounding or the shouting or the punishment chores got too much, one thought kept my spirits up. That it was better to be home and work like a dog than being trapped in some foreign juvie where I didn't even speak the language. I grew up in the 1980s South Africa, which means I have a whole host of crazy stories. But perhaps the craziest doesn't even involve anyone from my country, rather a girl that came to stay with us for a few weeks one summer. My parents happened to be part of a rotary, which long story short meant that they hosted students from all over the world. They'd stay with us for a few weeks, attend a local university, then head home.

And every time they did, my parents got a nice little cash incentive for part of the program. I was only young at the time, but I remember all the students being really nice. I'll accept one. This girl named Darcy. According to my parents, Darcy seemed like a very bright young lady, but she also caused a lot of trouble for them with her poor behavior. She stayed out late, she was rude and antisocial and by the time she was caught stealing alcohol, my parents had just about enough and arranged for her to stay with a different host family. We later heard from them that she was a total monster while living in their house too. The only good thing anyone had to say about her was that she was very

passionate about being an obstetrician, which is the kind of doctor that specializes in pregnancy, from what I understand. My parents said that one of the rare times she spoke to them was to announce that a doctor was allowing her to attend a live childbirth, and that she seemed very excited about it. This was deemed a noble pursuit and was Darcy's only redeeming factor. And if only people at the time knew how wrong they were about that. Anyway, Darcy ends up flying back to the US and we think we've heard the last of her. Then a couple of years later I have this really distinct memory of walking downstairs into our family living room where my mom and dad were watching the nightly news. They were engrossed

by whatever story it was, completely oblivious to the fact that I'd even walked into the room. The next thing I know, I'm seeing Darcy's face on TV and announcing, Mommy, why is the rude girl on the TV? Before I'm whisked out of the room by my dad, he then tells me that Darcy has been very naughty and that's why she's on the news. And I didn't find out how naughty until many years later. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that the whole incident came back to me one day and I asked my mom and dad about that Darcy girl that stayed with us for a few weeks and why I'd seen her on the news. Dad gives mom this uncomfortable look at first, before she explained that Darcy had killed someone, and it had obviously been such a huge story that it had been broadcast on international news. Mom claimed to not remember

any more details, but when I looked them up, I think it was a case of not wanting to remember, as opposed to the former. Because from what I later read, Darcy ended up kidnapping a girl outside of an airport back in the US. The terrified girl happened to be pregnant too, but when she told Darcy, it didn't faze her, because Darcy had actually been hoping to kidnap a pregnant woman because of what she was planning to do next. Darcy lied, telling her victim that she'd be freed if she did as she was told, but when she least expected it, Darcy strangled her, then cut her stomach open with her car keys. She then ripped the girl's unborn baby from her womb, cut the umbilical cord, and then made off with a still living child in her arms. Tragically, the police couldn't get

to her before the baby died, and she ended up getting something like 30 years for double murder. That's all creepy on its own, I see that, and I'm sorry I had to share those grisly details. But the thing that really gets to me is how that doctor at the university teaching hospital, the one who must have taken a shine to Darcy's passion for the miracle of childbirth, had no idea how Darcy would put what he taught her into play. He's probably retired these days, but I wonder how much it plays on his mind. Like I'm pretty sure he actually got a visit from the American FBI in the days following the double murder, so he heard it first hand that this girl, the same one that he assumed would bring life into

the world, had actually killed a mother and a baby, and for such messed up reasons too. Because Darcy had ended up killing that woman and trying to steal her baby to cover for a web of lies she'd spun about being pregnant. I think she later told police that she'd stuffed her clothes at first to full friends and relatives, but after a while she needed an actual baby or they'd know she was lying. So she took one, in the evilest way imaginable. And I slept in the room next to that girl. A girl who was only about 18 months away from doing something unspeakably vile, which is a thought that makes my skin crawl. Thank god my parents kicked her out when they did, because there really is no telling what a psycho like that might have gone on to do, given the opportunity. Born on the 28th of December 1985,

Meredith Kircher was better known to her school friends as Mess. By all accounts, she was a very popular young woman, invariably described as caring, intelligent, and witty. Meredith was also extremely enthusiastic about Italian language and culture, falling in love with the country and its people after a family vacation when she was 15. When the time came for Meredith to choose a university course, she jumped at the chance to study European politics and Italian at the University of Leeds, mainly because the course would give her a chance to live and study

in the Italian city of Perugia. Despite being a relatively small city of only 150,000 people, Perugia is rather well regarded as a bastion of art and culture. It's also something of a university town, where more than 25% of its population are registered as students, and much like Meredith, many are on some kind of study abroad program. In September of 2007, Meredith moved into a four-bedroom ground floor flat in a house at Via della Pergola. Her roommates were two Italian women in their late twenties, Filomena Raymondelli and Laura Mazzetti, as well as a 20-year-old American student who was also taking part in an exchange named Amanda Knox. Being native English speakers, Amanda and Meredith quickly formed an attachment, and attended a series of concerts and festivals towards the end of 2007.

It was at one of these concerts that the pair met 23-year-old computer science student Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian Harry Potter look-alike who Amanda began dating shortly afterwards. In Italy, the first of November is known as Tutti Santi, All Saints Day, and is a national public holiday. This meant that all of Meredith's Italian roommates were out of town, having traveled home to visit their respective families. And since Amanda had a date with Raffaele that night, Meredith was only saved from a night alone by a dinner invitation from a group of English women who were vacationing in the area. At around 9pm when the four women

were done with dinner, Meredith began a short walk back to her apartment. The next morning, Amanda Knox arrived back at that apartment she shared with Meredith to find the front door wide open. At first she was merely irritated by the lack of security but since the place was quiet as the grave and Meredith didn't seem to be home, there was no one to complain to. It was only when she found blood in the bathroom that she and Meredith shared that Amanda began to worry. When she tried Meredith's bedroom door and found it locked, Amanda happened to notice that someone had used the Italian girl's bathroom, even though they were out of town, and whoever had done so had left like a mess.

It was clear to Amanda that something strange was going on, and it made her so anxious that she called Raffaele and begged him to come over to the apartment. Then when he did so, it was Raffaele that noticed the broken window to the nearer the property, something that Amanda had entirely failed to spot. Shortly afterward, Meredith's cell phone was found simply lying in the property's backyard, and it's at that point that Amanda finally decided to call the police. But to the couple's amazement, the police flat out refused to break down the door to Meredith's bedroom, and a mutual friend had to be called in to break into the room. Smashing the door from its hinges would certainly cost a fair bit to repair, but the peace of mind from knowing Amanda wasn't lying dead in her bedroom outweighed any monetary amount. Only once they had access to

the girl's bedroom, Amanda and Raffaele found that their worst fears had come true. Lying on the tiled floor, covered in a blood-stained duvet, was the body of Meredith Kircher. A pathologist from Perugia's Forensic Sciences Institute released the findings of Kircher's autopsy to the public shortly following its completion. Her injuries consisted of 16 bruises and 7 cuts. Bruises on her nose, nostrils, mouth, and underneath her jaw were compatible with the hand being clamped over her mouth and nose. Forensic scientists interpreted the injuries, including some to Meredith's private region, as indicating an attempt to immobilize her during some kind of indecent assault. After analyzing the crime scene, as well as the circumstances in which Meredith was

murdered, Detective Superintendent Monica Napoleone told colleagues that the murderer was definitely not a burglar, and that apparent signs of a break-in were staged as a deliberate deception. She also argued that given Amanda Knox was the only occupant of the house who had been nearby on the night in question, she was the number one suspect in her friend's murder. In the police interviews that followed, Amanda was repeatedly questioned without the presence of a lawyer and was put under immense pressure until she made statements that

police believed sufficiently incriminated her. Then, on November 6th, 2007, Amanda was arrested and officially charged with the murder of the affable young British girl she had grown incredibly close to over such a short period of time. What followed was a living nightmare. Amanda was completely innocent of the crime she was being charged with, but this didn't stop a man named Fiorenza Sarzanini authoring a best-selling true crime book about her. His work included events and accounts that had been completely fabricated by Sarzanini, things that overly sensationalized the events of the night of the murder and essentially made the whole murder out to be the result of some deranged cult of eroticism. Amanda's lawyers later described the book's sole purpose as being to arouse the morbid fascination of its readers,

and included an outrageous and dangerous amount of misinformation. Yet no matter how false its narrative was, the book saw a great deal of commercial success before court proceedings had even commenced, and the lewd theories invented by the hack author became the accepted version of events. American legal commentary Kendall Coffey was so outraged by the situation that she publicly stated, in this country we would say, with this kind of media exposure, you could not get a fair trial. So with a hideous amount of media spin looming large over the proceedings, the trial began on January 16th, 2009, at which both Amanda and her boyfriend Raffaele pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution painted a picture of events in which a furious Amanda had attacked Meredith over her refusal to join her in some kind of menage a trois. She had ambushed Meredith in her bedroom, repeatedly smashing her head against a wall before she attempted to strangle her. They even suggested that Amanda had taunted Meredith by saying something to the effect of, you acted the goody-goody so much, now we're going to show you. Now you're going to be forced. To the horror of the assembled courtroom, the prosecution then outlined a scenario in which a third male was brought in to indecently assault and incapacitated Meredith Kircher, as part of some kind of obscene ritualistic

assault. Once it was finished, Amanda took a kitchen knife and stabbed Meredith to death, before stealing her mobile phone and some money to make it look like a simple case of burglary gone wrong. It was a compelling story, so compelling that on December 5th, 2009, an Italian jury pronounced Amanda and Raffaele guilty of murder, with the presiding judge then sentencing them both to 26 years in prison. The third person, the one who actually committed the indecent assault, was Rudy Guedi. Rudy had been born in the Ivory Coast but had lived in Perugia since he was five years old. His home life had been turbulent to say the least, with his school teachers and priests being more active in his upbringing than his own father. After his fingerprints were found at the scene

of Meredith's murder, Rudy was tracked down by Italian police, who found that he had actually fled to Germany in the previous few days. Given his obvious guilt, Germany allowed his extradition back to Perugia to stand trial. His connection to Amanda and Raffaele was the crux of the entire case, with the only supporting evidence of Raffaele being at the scene of the crime being purely circumstantial DNA evidence. But neither Amanda nor Raffaele had ever heard of him, despite the prosecution's assertions that they were associates. However, it turned out that Rudy had previously visited a neighbor of Amanda's, returning a few nights later to break in and make a mess of their bedroom.

The bizarre incident was reported by the homeowner when questioned by police, who noted the similar dirty bathroom aspect of Meredith's murder. Despite Rudy's denials, the mountain of evidence against him led to swift conviction for murder and assault in October of 2008, and he was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. But it took far too long for the Italian justice system to recognize the innocence of Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend. It wasn't until September 7th, 2015 that the Italian Court of Appeals published a full report citing glaring errors, investigative amnesia, and guilty omissions. The report stated that the prosecutors who won the original murder conviction failed to prove the whole truth to back up the scenario that Amanda and Raffaele killed Meredith, and as a result, they were fully acquitted of her murder.

It was the end of almost seven nightmarish years of lies, sensationalism, and defamation. Finally, Amanda Knox had cleared her name, but in the aftermath of such a miscarriage of justice coming to light, and Amanda being declared yet another victim in such a grisly, convoluted case, it's too easy to forget the real victim had been laid to rest years ago. The degree that Meredith would have received in 2009 was awarded posthumously by the University of Leeds, with her funeral being held on December 14th, 2007 at Croydon Parish Church. It was attended by more than 300 of her friends and relatives, wishing to pay tribute to a charming, intelligent young woman

who had tragically lost her life long before her time. When she and Amanda had met in Perugia, becoming fast friends and attending events together, neither must have imagined the nightmarish fate that would await each of them. Rudy Guede hasn't just destroyed one life that night, he almost destroyed two. I went to a Catholic high school here in the US and every year they'd take part in a senior exchange program in tandem with schools in Canada and Mexico. I've always had a huge passion for Latin American language and culture and

I hounded my Spanish tutor to get me in the exchange group that was headed south of the border. I'll never forget the day my mom gave me the good news. She texted me as soon as my principal called her and I jumped for joy when I heard that I was headed for a month-long stay in Mexico City. I'd be studying at an all-girls Catholic boarding school, and although the whole living on campus thing was a big selling point for my mom and dad, I hated the idea of being cooped up in some dorm room whenever I wasn't studying. I wanted to see Mexico City, the real Mexico City, not some sterilized corner of it that was awash with the same religious iconography I'd grown up with. The school turned out to be great, the other girls were welcoming and friendly for the most part, but boy were they strict.

Technically you weren't allowed off campus, but girls could sign out on the weekends in pairs so they could head into the city and pick up school supplies, snacks, whatever their allowances would buy them. But you had to be back by a certain time, otherwise the privilege would be rescinded indefinitely. So cut to my third weekend there. I'd already been into Mexico City once already with a friend I'd made named Lupe but I only got to explore for a grand total of 40 minutes. Needless to say I was itching for more adventure but I was about to bite off considerably more than I could chew. So like I said, pretty much everything about the school was amazing including the cafeteria food. My only complaint was this teacher that the other girls called, Señor Jimenez.

The other girls said he could be really mean and stern, but he seemed to take something of a liking to me, and not in a good way. I'd catch him staring at me, and every time I did, it gave me the creeps. So my third weekend in Mexico, I can't find anyone to accompany me into the city. I am heartbroken, as the last Saturday is going to consist of like a little goodbye ceremony before I fly back to Rhode Island and I won't have time to explore properly. So for the first real time in my life, I actually consciously break the rules. I sign myself and Lupe out for the afternoon, if you're reading this, I'm so sorry if I got you in trouble, and start heading towards the campus' main entrance and exit. Then right as I'm about

to escape, I see Senor Jimenez coming the other way with a gloomy expression on his face. I refrain from making eye contact, hoping he'll leave me be and not ask questions. But as it turns out, that was far too much to ask. Where are you going? He asked me in a heavily accented English. I reply in Spanish telling him that me and another student are headed into the city to pick up some gifts for my parents. He just smiles and said, Rubia, gesturing toward my hair. It was literally the first time I had seen the guy smile and suddenly I understand his somewhat unhealthy interest in me.

There is an awkward moment of silence before I say my farewells and head towards the bus route that would take me into the city. The whole time, I'm praying that none of my other teachers will notice me standing there. Granted, I only had a week of the exchange left, but I had no doubt that I'd be sent home early and in disgrace if I was found to be violating the sign-out system. But nope, the bus comes, I get on, and I set out for a few hours exploring Mexico City. It was an absolute dream come true for me. I felt like the female Anthony Bourdain or something, exploring smoky street food markets and everything else the sensory overload of a city had to offer. Then at one point, my head is on a swivel, and I'm just soaking up all the sights and sounds and smells when I see a face that I recognize through a crowd of people.

It's Senor Jimenez and he's power walking down this little street and looking around like he's searching for someone. When we make eye contact, it hits me. He's been watching me and had followed the bus into the city to get me, alone. By that point, getting punished for breaking the sign-out system was the least of my worries, and the ante had been upped to running around downtown Mexico City trying to avoid getting cornered by the pervy teacher. What followed was like some Hitchcockian chase through streets and alleyways with Señor Jimenez gaining on me every minute. I found myself alone in a small back street and I started speedwalking down it in the hopes of finally losing my pursuer. I'm in a total panic at this point so I barely saw the large white truck at the end of the street.

But when I heard hurried footfalls behind me and turned to see Senor Jimenez running at me, like actually running at me. I actually let out this horrified scream, then ran as fast as I could sprinting down the back street at full pelt, watching as one of the white truck's doors opened. Right as I reached the end of the street, a guy in the white truck jumps out, throwing his arms around me and starts trying to pull me into the truck. I can still see Senor Jimenez running at me and in the heat of the moment, I curse myself for allowing him to corral me towards my potential kidnappers. I think Jimenez is about to help me get in the truck before jumping in himself,

then they drive off to God knows where to do God knows what with me. But then, smack, Jimenez must have slammed his fist or elbow into the kidnapper's face because suddenly I'm free to move again and I'm scrambling from his grip while shouting, ayude me, ayude me, help me, help me. People come rushing out of shops and houses and this whole scene of pure chaos erupts as people join Senor Jimenez in chasing off the guys in their white truck. I hate this to be one of those stories where the moral is rules exist for a reason, because that seems like the worst, most bootlicking sentiment ever. But those were Senor Jimenez's only words to me as he walked me back towards his car and drove me back to campus. As it turned out, a lot of wealthy families sent their kids to the Catholic high school I was

visiting, like seriously wealthy families. As a result, the kids were occasionally targeted for kidnapping and ransom. But instead of actually warning anyone, it became something of a dark secret that the school swept under the rug. Better to shut your mouth and take all that sweet exchange money than to talk about it and lose the funding. But just as I predicted, I was sent home early and in disgrace, and my parents were absolutely furious with me. The one strict condition of me flying down to Mexico was that I wouldn't go anywhere alone, and that's exactly what I did. I know it was dumb of me, and sure if I could go back I'd do it different, but you have to understand my thought process. I didn't think

I'd get back to Mexico for years. I couldn't just sit around in a glorified convent all weekend. But now I get it. I get why it's just not safe to go wandering around in foreign countries, especially not in my age. You should always be careful, always be vigilant, because as much as people are mostly nice, it only takes one or two bad guys to pose a serious threat. Yingying Zhang was born in the Chinese city of Nanping on December 21st of 1990. From a young age, Zhang excelled academically and had ambitions of becoming a university professor. Naturally, she remained in higher education after she graduated from Sun Yat-sen University, at the top of her class, going on to earn yet another degree from Peking University three years later. It was then that Zhang was given the opportunity to travel to the United States on an academic exchange

and traveled to the University of Illinois in April of 2017 to conduct research on photosynthesis and crop productivity with the College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. Zhang had previously committed herself to returning to China to marry her long-term boyfriend but quickly fell in love with American culture and by June of 2017, she began to consider a permanent move to the United States. With this on her mind, Zhang wished to secure an apartment in Urbana, Illinois. So on June 9th, 2017, she traveled by bus to an off-campus apartment complex where she was planning to sign a new apartment lease.

Due to a busy afternoon, Zhang found that she was running a little late and sent a text message apology to the leasing agent at approximately 1.30pm, informing them that she would arrive at the rental property 10 minutes after their proposed meeting time. Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District security footage shows her exiting the bus at exactly 1.52pm, where she then attempts to transfer to another bus. Yet because Zhang was on the incorrect side of the street for boarding, the bus did not stop after she attempted to flag it down. Zhang then briskly walks to yet another bus stop just a few blocks away, and at this point, there can be little doubt of the anxiety

she must have been feeling at the prospect of missing her appointment. Moments later, as Zhang waited for her bus, CCTV footage shows that a black Saturn Astra drove past her just before 2pm, before circling back around and coming to a stop just a short distance away. The video then indicates that the driver either calls out or beckons to Zhang because she approaches the driver's side window and appears to engage them in conversation. Then, after about a minute, Zhang climbs into the passenger seat and the car drives off. At 2.40pm, almost an hour after they were due to meet, Jong still hasn't arrived at the rental property, and the letting agent texted her to let her know that they'd have to postpone their meeting. And by 9 that night, with Jong's friends having seen hide nor hair of her, an increasingly concerned associate professor contacted local law enforcement to report her missing. Over the days that followed,

Urbana Police Department worked closely with specialist FBI agents to track Jong's last movements, offering a reward of $10,000 for information leading to her recovery. Deeply moved by the disappearance of one of their own, the University of Illinois' large student body aided in scouting the local area, using social media to raise awareness and to coordinate guerrilla search efforts. They were soon joined by Zhang's father, Ronghao Zhang, a maternal aunt and her boyfriend, who flew over to the U.S. to confer with authorities and to aid in the search. Each said that they would not return to China until Yingying Zhang was found,

and the university announced that they planned to install additional high-definition security cameras throughout the campus, asserting that their students' safety was a top priority. By June 19th, ten days after Zhang's first disappeared, authorities were becoming desperate for information. There had been several false sightings of her in Salem, Illinois, the investigation of which had wasted resources and dashed hopes. The reward amount was then raised to $50,000, the largest offered in the 31-year history of the local Crimestoppers organization. The best lead investigators had were stills from the bus stop security camera footage.

But whoever was driving the vehicle that John got into that afternoon stayed far enough away from the bus stop that their license plate number remained indiscernible. Yet there was still hope, as police discovered that there were only 18 four-door Saturn Astras registered to owners in the local area. One of these vehicles happened to be registered to a man named Brent Allen Christensen. Born June 30th, 1989, Brent was a former PhD student at the University of Illinois, having been a continuously enrolled student for the better part of 10 years. He was a married man, and when questioned regarding an interaction he may have had with Yingying Zhang, claimed that he did not remember what he was doing at the time of Zhang's

disappearance. He told investigators that he may have been sleeping or at home playing video games, but throughout the course of the interview, it became clear that Brent was hiding a dark secret. When pressed by the cops to come clean, he admitted that he was having an extramarital affair, something he used to explain various absences that he couldn't properly account for. The interview process aroused a great deal of suspicion in investigating officers who were certain that Brent had something to do with John's disappearance. It was on the back of such a hunch that they managed to secure a search of his vehicle, hoping to match it up with the one in the CCTV footage. Upon inspection, investigators observed that the car's sunroof was remarkably similar to the one on Christensen's car.

They also noted that the car in the video had a cracked hubcap, and upon re-inspecting Christensen's car, found that it too had a cracked hubcap. Investigators also discovered that the passenger door of his car appeared to have been cleaned to a more diligent extent than the other vehicle's doors, which they said may be indicative of an attempt or effort to conceal or destroy evidence. It was unmistakably clear by this point that it was indeed Brent Christensen's car that John got into, and that there were many, many things he hadn't told them about that day. During a more intense questioning session that took place on June 15th, Brent was pushed into admitting that he had given an Asian female a ride,

but claimed that he had let her out of the vehicle after only a few blocks, after a wrong turn caused her to panic. This prompted FBI agents to take possession of Brent's computers and a cell phone before placing him under continuous surveillance in mid-June. In light of the accusations he was facing, the FBI also managed to convince Brent's mistress into wearing a listening device for them, talking her into it by claiming that at worst, it would only exonerate him if he proved innocent. But to her absolute shock, when confronted with the question regarding Zhang's disappearance, Brent began to brag that he had dragged Zhang back to his apartment against her will, that he was a serial killer, and how Zhang had been his 19th victim.

Horrified by what they heard, the FBI rushed into action, and on June 30th, Brent was arrested and charged with felony kidnapping. The FBI noted that despite Christensen having no prior criminal record and no record of disciplinary problems at the university, he had used his cell phone to access a website called FetLife, visiting forums such as Abduction 101 before the alleged kidnapping. They also discovered that Christensen had attended a vigil held for Zhang on June 29th, where in a bizarre incident, he had described the characteristics of his ideal victim to his wife and had pointed out those in the crowd who matched them. Additionally, Christensen was recorded by his girlfriend saying that Zhang had resisted and fought with him, and he was also recorded threatening someone who then provided incriminating evidence to authorities. Then, at the beginning of his trial, despite insisting on his innocence and pleading not guilty to the initial charges of kidnap and murder,

Brent confessed his guilt. He admitted posing as an undercover cop, using the ploy of a helpful police officer to trick Zhang into his car. He also admitted to attempting to abduct another graduate student by the name of Emily Hogan just a few weeks before. The court heard that after picking up Zhang later that morning and taking her back to his apartment, Brent choked, violated, and stabbed her in his bedroom before dragging her to his bathroom where he decapitated her. Brent then claimed that the day after he killed Zhang, he put Zhang's dismembered body in three separate garbage bags, which he then disposed of in the dumpster outside of his apartment. Over the next two days, Christensen claimed he disposed of Zhang's personal belongings

in various dumpsters in the Champagne-Urbana area. The dumpster in which Christensen placed Zhang's remains was emptied three days later, and the contents taken to a private landfill in Vermilion County, compacted at least twice, spread over an area 50 yards wide and subsequently buried under 30 feet of garbage. It was a shocking admission, and the one that was only prompted by the threat of the death penalty. But even with the information given, it was unlikely that Jong's remains would ever be recovered. On June 24th, 2019, a jury took less than two hours to return a guilty verdict. Brent Christensen was found guilty of one count of kidnapping resulting in death and two counts of making false statements to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

During sentencing deliberations, the jury could not unanimously agree to sentence Christensen to death. As a result, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In early December of 2019, Christensen reported to USP McCreary in Pine Knot, Kentucky, to begin serving his life sentence. But given that he escaped the death penalty by the narrowest of margins, it could be argued that he escaped the punishment he deserved. And it's difficult to argue that a man who took such pride in having tricked a foreign exchange student into their car, who bragged of killing and violating her, doesn't deserve to have his own life taken away in turn. Back when I was in college, I had an option to study for a year at the University in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany.

Since I hadn't had the chance to see much of the world before then, I figured why not. I'd get to visit Europe and the college would basically subsidize the whole thing and opportunities like that tend to come once in a lifetime if you ask me. It seemed like it would be a dream come true. Travel over to Germany, maybe catch a train to Amsterdam or Paris every other weekend. I was super excited about the whole thing. But the first month turned out to be an absolute nightmare, and I cringe when I look back and think how I had zero clue as to what I was walking into. I was 19, naive, and

although I consider myself quite a confident young woman, traveling alone for the first time was certainly daunting. I made all my flights on time, met my host family at the airport and at first everything seemed fine. My German was pretty basic but I talked back and forth with the dad in a mix of German and English so I could make myself understood. It was only when I was home alone with his wife that things got kind of intense. So they lived out in the middle of nowhere basically. Like Frankfurt am Oder is a pretty rural place despite having all the amenities of a large city. Their kid was grown up and had moved out so having the spare room and the need for cash must have gotten them interested in hosting exchange students. The husband seemed to like the idea.

Facilitate learning, build bridges between nations, all with collecting a fistful of euros. His wife most definitely did not like the idea, but just how much was only clear as time went on. The husband worked a lot, and I mean a lot, so I had to spend an uncomfortable amount of time around her. Maybe she thought I was going to be some insidious American homewrecker come to steal her husband away. Maybe she just didn't like me staying in her kids room, saw me as a usurper or something. Point being, she was a total c-word to me. For example, mom and dad said to call them the day I arrived to let them know that I got

there safe. This is right before cell phones were readily available so not just anyone could afford one, let alone on some crazy expensive international tariff from back in the day. This means I have to actually ask the mom if I can use the phone and she responds by giving me this big lecture on how it's really expensive to call internationally and I can only have two or three minutes. This is entirely in German by the way, not even an attempt at English and I only barely understood. Anyway, I told mom I was fine and she said she'd call again in a couple of days. But that phone call never came and after a week of not hearing from my mother, I asked the German lady if I'd missed a call or something. She said no. Then to my shock,

she refused to let me use the phone to call back home. I had to walk five miles back to town to buy a phone card to use a payphone, only to find out that my mom had called every single day since we first talked. She said every time the German lady answered the phone, she'd find out that my mom had called every single day since we first talked. She said every time the German lady answered the phone she'd ask for me, in either English or broken German, and that every time she was greeted with complete silence. And I was furious. I marched back to the place I was staying and locked myself in the bedroom. I was dying to confront the German mom about it, actually give her a piece of my mind, and I guess that kind of confrontation just isn't in my character.

I just packed my bags in preparation for leaving because that's what I was set on doing, and told the father when he stopped by the house that I was intending to switch host families. The German mother seemed weirdly sad at the idea of me leaving, but she was unbearable to live with so I guess she got what she wanted in the end. But the thing that actually haunts me about the whole thing was that when I finally got to switch to a different host family, I found out why she was being so weird and creepy with me and my mom.

Their grown up daughter hadn't left home or whatever, she'd died in some freak accident just a few years before. The new host family filled me in on the whole thing and even showed me a picture of their deceased daughter. She looked almost exactly like me. Like a mirror image in some of the old pictures the new family had. It was like looking at a ghost or something, closest I'll ever come to really seeing one anyway, a real doppelganger. And suddenly, everything kinda made sense. I know this isn't as scary or spooky as like I stayed with a family of incestual cannibals, but yeah, there was something really creepy about that whole dead daughter revelation. How people can still be haunted by things,

just not the same kind of ghosts we might imagine. To be continued... 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 located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends. And remember, someday, love will find you.