The Lets Read Podcast - 174: A VERY SCARY CHRISTMAS | 21 True Scary Stories | EP 162

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Christmas & Uber... 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: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at tread experts.ca slash locations. Everyone's got a pro need tires. I've got a pro car making a weird sound. I've got a pro.

So who's that pro the pros at tread experts from tires to auto repair. Tread experts is always there helping you with Kumo tires. You can trust until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Thank you. Born on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1895, little Giorgio Soddu emigrated to the United States at 13 years old. He arrived at Ellis Island during the summer of 1908, accompanied by one of his older brothers. But as soon as both boys had cleared customs, the older brother turned

around and sailed right back to Sardinia, leaving poor little Giorgio all alone in New York City. It's not clear why this older brother didn't stay with him, or why little Giorgio was sent to America at such a young age. Giorgio didn't like to talk about Sardinia or the reasoning behind his daunting journey across the Atlantic. Giorgio eventually changed his name to George Sauter and found work on the railroads of Pennsylvania. He started off as a waterboy but was eventually promoted to the position of driver in Smithers, West Virginia, saving his pay until he was able to start his own trucking company. George and his handful of employees hauled fill dirt to construction sites and later took to hauling the coal that West Virginia is famous for.

It was while working in Avalacia that George met a girl named Jenny Cipriani, a fellow immigrant from Italy and as it turned out, she had arrived in the United States around the same time George did. They began dating and married shortly afterward, settling in a two-story timber frame house two miles north of nearby Fayetteville. Over a ten-year period, Jenny and George would go on to have a jaw-dropping ten children, the first of which was born in 1923. With his prospering trucking business making a handsome profit, George was more than able to provide for such a large family. But the man was as outspoken as he was hard-working, and was particularly vocal regarding his hatred for Benito Mussolini, the brutally fascist dictator of Italy. This led to many an

argument with other members of the local Italian-American community, and he was said to have almost come to blows with one or two of the pro-Mussolini camp. His passionate opposition was probably motivated by the fact that Joe, his second oldest son, had left home to fight in Europe in 1943. Eighteen months after Joe's departure, Mussolini was overthrown, tortured, and then executed by Italian freedom fighters. George welcomed the news with jubilance and was said to have publicly celebrated the dictator's death among family and friends. Yet it seems that someone, somewhere,

observed the commemorations with a vile contempt, and soon the Sodder family began to experience a series of sinister visitations. In October of 1945, George's older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school. Then one day, there was a knock on the Sodder's front door. George answered the door to find an electrician on the doorstep. He didn't remember

calling an electrician, but the man claimed to have been sent over on behalf of the local electrical company, with this task being to check the home's wiring. Confused but trusting, George welcomed the man to his home, who promptly began the inspection. By the time he worked his way around to the backyard, the electrician was telling George that the wiring in his house was faulty, so much so that it was a potential fire hazard. This confused George even more, as the entire home had been refurbished less than a year prior. But he took the man at his word, thanked him, then saw him out. George then called another electrician and asked him to come and take a look at the wiring. This new electrician confirmed his initial belief that there was

nothing wrong with the wiring in his house and told George that the electrical company doesn't just send guys around to check the wiring of houses. Whoever the man was, he certainly hadn't been with the electrical company. But if he wasn't an electrician, who was he? A week or two after the fake electrician had showed up, the Sodders received another knock at the door. This time the man introduced himself as a traveling life insurance salesman and offered George extremely low rates on a lucrative policy. When George jokingly asked what the catch was, the man assured him there

wasn't one, then said something to the effect of, you never know, a guy who goes around making dirty remarks like you do, their home could just go up in smoke at any time. Then everything they've worked for, the nice house, the beautiful wife, the children, they're all going to be burned to cinders. It was all beginning to make sense. The visit from the fake electrician, the salesman's comments about a fire, it was a result of his opposition to European fascism. George told the man to get off of his property, warning him that any other solicited visits would be repulsed by force. The visits soon ceased after that and in the

run-up to the holidays, things began to return to normal. Christmas of 1945 was much like any other in the Sodder household. It was expensive, it was hectic, but to Jenny and George, watching their children open their presents was pure, unrefined joy. The eldest of their daughters, Marion, had been working in a dime store in downtown Fayetteville and she surprised three of her younger sisters with new toys that she had bought for them as gifts. Around 10pm, the children were so excited that they asked their mother if they could stay up past their usual bedtime and since it was the happiest day of the year, their mother agreed. The only condition was that they put the cows in and feed the chickens

before going to bed. By 30 minutes past midnight, the whole family was asleep in their beds when suddenly their phone began to ring. Jenny saw her woke up and walked downstairs to answer the call, but when she picked up she didn't recognize the voice on the other end. It sounded like a young woman who was calling from a party with loud voices and clinking glasses in the background. The woman addressed Jenny by a name she'd never heard of, then when Jenny told her she might have the wrong number, the woman laughed before hanging up the call.

Confused but not alarmed, Jenny simply replaced the phone's handset and returned to bed. But that wasn't the last time she'd be woken up that night. Because outside, in the cold December darkness, men were gathering. And they had evil on their minds. Just after 1am, Jenny was once again awakened by the sound of something hitting the roof of her house. She later said it sounded like a bang, then a rolling noise, but it wasn't enough to wake up any other family members.

Around 30 minutes later, Jenny was still lying in bed, wide awake, when she began to smell smoke. When she investigated, she found George's office was in flames, and hastily began to wake up the rest of her family so they could all evacuate. In the minutes that followed, both parents and four of their children, Marion, Sylvia, John, and George Jr., all escaped the house suffering from nothing but smoke inhalation. Once they were outside, George attempted to re-enter the house but discovered the stairs were on fire. It was then that he suffered through the horrific realization that his remaining six children were trapped in the rooms upstairs, soon to be engulfed by the raging

inferno. He then rushed to the family phone, attempting to call 911 as his home burned, but the line was dead. He ran back outside, screaming for his daughter Marion to run to a neighbor's house so they could call the fire department. While this was occurring, a driver on the road nearby had also witnessed the blaze and had sprinted into a nearby tavern to call 911, yet they too found the phone line to be dead. An ominous pattern begins to emerge when we discover that Marion, upon arriving at the neighbor's house, heard them say something about the phone not working.

In the end, it's believed the passing motorist was eventually able to reach the fire department from another phone in a tavern a few miles down the road. Clearly someone had disconnected the phone lines not just to the Sauter household, the fire department from another phone in a tavern a few miles down the road. Clearly, someone had disconnected the phone lines not just to the Sauter household, but to the entire neighborhood. Upon learning that no one was able to contact emergency services, George Sauter flew into action. He ran into his backyard, where the family usually kept a long wooden ladder, but you guessed it, someone had taken the time to remove it from the backyard and it was nowhere to be seen. Then, completely barefoot,

George climbed a wall of his house, breaking an attic window in an attempt to climb inside. Yet in the process, George cut his arm so badly that he was in danger of bleeding to death and he was forced to retreat back down to the ground. Over the next 45 minutes, the six surviving solders had no choice but to watch their home being reduced to little more than a pile of cinders. They wailed and screamed as it did, assuming that the remaining children had perished in the fire. Due to the ongoing American contribution to World War II, the local fire department were painfully low on manpower. As a result, they failed to respond until around dawn, hours after the fire had started, and it was later discovered that the fire chief, a man named F.J. Morris, couldn't even drive the fire truck

and had to wait until someone who could drive it was available. By the time they arrived, the firefighters could do little but sift through the ashes that remained in the solder's basement. Yet by 10am, the fire chief had informed the surviving family members that they had been unable to find any bones, meaning that either the fire had been hot enough to incinerate the remains completely, or they hadn't been in the house at all. There are two prevailing theories at work, the first being that the house fire did burn hot enough to incinerate the children. This is somewhat unlikely, since without the presence of plastics or accelerants, it's fairly difficult for a regular house fire to reach incineration

level temperatures. The second side of this theory is that there was evidence of human remains, but the firefighters were simply too incompetent to find them. Yet the other theory is that someone entered the house before the fire was started and kidnapped five of the Sodder children. But who in the world would do such a thing and was their crime connected to the threats that George had received in the months before. After four days when the fire department had ceased their investigation, George had the site bulldozed with the intention of converting it to a memorial garden for the lost children. The grief was unbearable, but George seemed to have made up in his mind that the fire was just a horrible accident.

Yet the following day, the local coroner gave a statement which made George's skin crawl. Instead of blaming the fire on an arson attack, the coroner announced that the cause to be faulty wiring. Faulty wiring in a house that had been checked over twice within the previous year. Shortly after, when George sought out those that had advised the coroner on his official statement, he made a horrifying discovery. One of the men that had attested that the fire was an electrical fault was the same man that had been pretending to be a life insurance salesman in order to threaten George on his doorstep all those months before. There seemed an obvious conspiracy at work, yet despite his pleas, no one would listen to George's theories on his missing children.

The official take was that they died in the fire, and death certificates for the five children were issued December 30th. The local Fayetteville newspaper then openly contradicted itself, stating all the bodies had been found, but then later in the same story reporting that only part of one body was recovered. Almost as if it had been edited at the last minute but not thoroughly enough to eliminate all references to the children being missing. In the years after the fire, the surviving members of the Sodder family attempted to rebuild their lives. But as they did so, and the clouds of grief withdrew, they began to question the authorities' official explanation of the fire's cause. For example, if it had been caused by an

electrical problem, why had the family's Christmas lights remained on throughout the fire's early stages when the power should have gone out? And remember the ladder George rushed to use, the one he usually kept in the backyard? Well, it was eventually found almost a hundred feet away from the house at the bottom of an embankment, almost as if someone had deliberately removed it to hinder any attempt at rescue. Then, in the course of post-fire investigation, a telephone repairman discovered that the solder's phone line had in fact not been burned through in the fire. Rather, it had been cut by someone who had climbed up the 14-foot telephone pole before severing the wire by hand. The police had previously arrested the man who had been caught stealing from the solder property, and they confronted him regarding his potential involvement

in the fire. The man admitted he had been in the area on the night of the blaze and had severed the phone line, believing it to be the home's power line. Yet he staunchly denied having anything to do with the fire, insisting he fled the area shortly after realizing he'd cut the wrong line. The police also managed to get in touch with the woman who'd made the wrong number call shortly before the solder home went up in flames. She told the police it had been nothing more than a mistake and had been intending to call a friend of hers, yet the woman had an Italian second name and despite the area having a large Italian-American community, a connection to the pro-Mussolini threats the family received cannot be ruled out. Then there was the matter of no bones being found.

Jenny Sauter was very vocal in her belief that the children had been kidnapped, especially given that many of their household appliances had survived the fire almost completely intact. Given they were made of materials much less hardy than human bone, how did they survive the fire while the children were completely incinerated? Jenny also cited a similar incident which had occurred around the same period, when a freak house fire killed a family of seven. The skeletal remains of all seven family members were recovered from the smoldering ruins, and as a local crematorium employee later stated,

it's possible for human bones to withstand temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,090 degrees Celsius for periods up to two hours, far longer and hotter than the house fire could have been. In the spring of 1946, Jenny Sauter began turning the site of her burned and bulldozed home into a memorial garden for her departed children. It was a garden she would tend to for the rest of her life, but it didn't mean she'd given up on her missing children. After all, there was mounting evidence that what had occurred was a premeditated attack on her home, one that had been planned and executed by a shadowy cabal of fascist conspirators whose tendrils stretched among a terrifyingly wide network. It soon emerged that

the driver of a bus, which had passed through Fayetteville late on Christmas night, said he had seen some people throwing balls of fire onto the roof of the house. This was corroborated a few months later as, once the snow had melted, young Sylvia Sauter found a small dark green rubber ball-like object in a rush near the ruins of their home. Could this have been the object which was thrown onto the Sauter's roof, perhaps after being wrapped in paper, doused in gasoline, and set aflame? The family's hopes were further renewed when several witnesses claimed to have seen the missing children after the home had collapsed in flames.

One woman who had been watching the fire from the roadside said she had seen some of them peering out of the passenger car while the house was burning. Assuming they had been safely evacuated and were perhaps about to be taken to a hospital, she didn't think anything of it. Another woman who worked at a rest stop between Fayetteville and Charleston said she had served them breakfast the morning after the fire and noted that they had traveled with a strange man who drove a car with Florida license plates. These new revelations prompted the Sodders to fire a private investigator, eventually deciding on a man named C.C.

Tinsley from the nearby town of Galley Bridge. Tinsley confirmed that the very same insurance salesman who had threatened them with a fire over George's anti-Mussolini sentiments had been on the coroner's jury that ruled the fire an accident. It had been no coincidence, no mistake, there was an obvious conspiracy at work. Tinsley also learned that despite the official account being that no remains had been found in the ashes, a scorched human heart had been found, which he later packed into a metal box and had buried in secret. The fire chief himself had apparently confessed this to a local minister, who broke confidentiality to confirm this to George Sodder in person. George then rushed to confront the fire chief, the same man that had claimed not to know how to drive his own fire truck

and was told that in reality, what had been buried was a fresh beef liver. He supposedly placed it there in the hope that the Sodders would eventually find it and would finally be satisfied that the missing children had indeed perished in the flames. This newest twist seems to have driven George to the very limits of his sanity. At one point, after seeing a picture of some young New York ballet dancers in a magazine, one of whom resembled one of his missing daughters, he drove all the way to the school where his repeated demands to see the girls were refused. George was eventually escorted from the premises by forceful but sympathetic police officers.

George then contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that since the children were kidnapped, it was within their remit to investigate. J. Edgar Hoover himself responded to the letters, stating that, Although I would like to be of service, the related matter appears to be of local character and does not come within the investigative jurisdiction of this bureau. If the local authorities requested the bureau's assistance, he would of course divert human resources to assist them. But the Fayetteville police and fire departments had declined to do so, relaying the questionable statement that they were capable of handling the investigation themselves.

Then in August of 1949, several small bone fragments were unearthed from the buried ruins of the Sodder family home and after analysis, were determined to have been human vertebrae. A specialist later confirmed that they were pieces of lumbar vertebrae, yet quickly added that they were from a person between the ages of 16 to 22. This almost completely ruled out the possibility of the fragments belonging to one of the deceased Sauter children, as the oldest missing child was just 14 at the time of the fire. This expert also stated that there were no scorch marks on the bone, adding that it was very strange that these bones were the only ones found These new findings attracted national media attention and the West Virginia legislature held two hearings on the case in 1950 However, authorities later told the Sodders that their case was hopeless

And that seems to have been the point where all investigations, both private and official, ceased entirely. But still, the Sodders didn't give up hope of finding their missing children. They printed flyers, offered a $10,000 reward, and even put a billboard near the site of their incinerated home, begging people with information to come forward. George followed up leads personally, traveling to the areas where tips had come. For example, a woman from Missouri claimed Little Martha was being held in a convent there, while a bar patron in Texas claimed to have overheard two other people making incriminating statements about a West Virginia fire that happened on Christmas Eve some years before.

When George heard later that a relative of Jenny's in Florida had children that looked similar to his, the relative had to prove the children were his own before George was satisfied. The incident clearly had a horrendous effect on George Sauter's psyche, and he remained an angry, heartbroken, and deeply suspicious man for the rest of his life. The fates of the missing Sauter children remain a mystery to this very day, and despite the fact that several people claim to have met grown-up versions of the children, the case is unlikely to be solved any time soon.

And that makes it all the more frightening that there seems to have been a violent group of fascist sympathizers on America's east coast during World War II. A group that was equipped, motivated, and hateful enough to execute a kidnapping so intricate and effective that they could make five innocent children disappear without a trace. Nestled in the small English village of Blacknest in Hampshire lies a quaint, almost stereotypical British pub known as the Jolly Farmer. Surrounded by lush green fields and sleepy country lanes, the pub seems pretty unremarkable.

But those old enough to remember know that the town has a dark and mysterious past, and in the run-up to Christmas of 1989, the mood and blackness was anything but subdued. The night of February 4th of 1989 was much like any other for the staff and customers of the Jolly Farmer. The pub filled with its regular faces, propping up the bar until around 2 o'clock in the morning, when last orders were finally called. After the last of the drunken customers had been corralled out of the pub, the only two people that remained were the manager, Richard Dean, and second chef, Clifford Howes. Both men busied themselves with the last few items on their closed down list, yet none of those activities involved picking up the pub's phone, because if they had, they'd have noticed that the line was

dead, and that one little detail might have just alerted them to the horrifying fate that awaited them. Because just before 2.40am in the wee small hours of December 5th, the Jolly Farmer was rocked by a huge explosion, which ripped through the building and reduced it to rubble, with both Richard Dean and Clifford Howells still inside. The explosion is said to have been heard over two miles away, with many claiming they saw the fireball erupting into the sky. Horrified ambulance and fire crews arrived shortly afterward, only to be greeted by a huge smoking ruin that used to be the Jolly Farmer. All that remained were the pub's sign and a chimney which had somehow remained intact during the building's collapse, with debris being spread for almost a hundred yards around the explosion's epicenter.

Paramedics and firefighters immediately began trawling the rubble for any survivors, and the scene quickly became like something out of a disaster movie. After one particularly large chunk of rubble was moved, rescue personnel were faced with the sight of an arm sticking out of the rubble. It was Richard Dean's, and as his saviors worked to free him from the smoking debris, they noticed that his clothes had melted onto his skin from the heat of the explosion. He would go on to miraculously survive the ordeal, but received catastrophic third-degree burns to almost a third of his body.

Yet compared to Clifford Howes, Richard had been lucky. The second chef had been standing directly over the spot where the explosion had originated and had been crushed under tons of burning debris which had collapsed into the pub's cellar, burying and burning him alive in the process. His remains were not recovered until over 12 hours later when emergency services finally cleared enough of the debris to sufficiently reach the bottom of the pub's cellar. He was just 34 years old when he was killed. By the time emergency crews had reached the cellar and thus recovered Clifford's body, the cause of the explosion became apparent. The smell of gasoline was almost overpowering, suggesting the explosion was no accident,

and when the remains of a homemade fuse were found, what remained of the Jolly Farmer officially became a crime scene. Arson investigators discovered that gasoline had been poured through the wooden doors of the pub's beer cellar, creating a pool of flammable liquid right underneath the pub, which would in turn cause flammable vapors to form, causing the explosion itself. Police also discovered that the pub's phones had stopped working because they had been professionally cut, obviously to prevent any survivors from contacting emergency services. It became apparent that the pub's destruction was the result of a sophisticated and well-executed plan.

But who would be vicious and devious enough to do such a thing? Almost twenty years later in 2008, pub landlord Arthur Tompkins gave an interview in which he said, There was absolutely no reason to target us. The police had theories but they found nothing, because there was nothing to be found. It was just a quaint little pub in the middle of nowhere. Why would anybody target it? It's ridiculous. At the time of the arson attack, there were seven different pubs of the same name in the county of Hampshire alone,

leading some to theorize that the attack was a simple case of mistaken identity, yet in the course of the investigation, none of the other pubs seemed to have a reason for why they might be targeted either. Naturally, the police were completely baffled. Their only lead was a vehicle which appeared to be fleeing the area, but neither the car nor the identity of its driver could ever be uncovered. Despite the floundered investigation, Hampshire police have refused to give up on the case, with Chief Investigating Officer Mike Southwell stating that he's convinced that the murderer is still detectable. Arthur Tompkins is less confident, saying he's resigned to the fact that the identity of the firebomber will forever remain a mystery.

Yet despite the horrifying destruction that was wrought that December night, the jolly farmer rose from the ashes and is still open for business today. Who knows if the attack was the result of mistaken identity, or the result of a deranged person with a vendetta against the pub, its patrons, or those who work there. And though the UK has largely forgotten the Black Nest bombing, those who witnessed its aftermath will never forget the sight of a street strewn with rub go, you can get it from Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard

when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExExpress.ca BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. On Christmas Day of 2014, a 911 dispatch center in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,

received a phone call from a 36-year-old man named Dustin Lee Klopp. Klopp proceeded to tell the dispatcher that he required police assistance at his home, apparently citing a domestic disturbance and, after being assured that officers were on their way, Klopp hung up the phone. A short time later, when police officers arrived at the Klopp family home, they were met with the sights of a derelict house. Domestic disturbance calls usually implied that a property was occupied, but in this case, there didn't appear to be anybody home. This prompted the officers to begin circling the home, searching for signs of anything amiss.

That's how they ended up near a shed in the Klopp family's backyard, a shed that had the smell of death about it. Upon searching the shed, the officers found a bag containing the remains of a freshly slaughtered adult female, one that was soon determined to be Stephanie Kilhefner, the wife of Dustin Lee Klopp. But the question remained, if Stephanie was lying dead in the family tool shed, where was Dustin and their two daughters? The police rushed into action, terrified that there was a risk to the surviving family members. It was imperative that they located Dustin, at least to inform him that his children were missing. But just 30 minutes after the call Dustin placed at the 911 dispatch center,

he walked into a Lancaster County State Police barracks and made a harrowing statement. My name is Dustin Lee Klopp, he told the officers at the front desk, and I murdered my wife. Homicide detectives then took Klopp into an interview room and began to take down his confession. According to Dustin, it was around 10pm on Christmas Eve when an argument with his wife began to steadily escalate. The holidays can be a stressful time of year for people with less than stable lives, and certainly in the Klopp's case, alcohol compounded what had already been a tense atmosphere. Dustin said that Stephanie began to berate him, cataloging his failures while

she subjected him to a thorough verbal flogging. Dustin told her to stop but she refused, continuing to cudgel and humiliate him. And we all know that the trouble with the ones you love is they have the ability to hurt you the most. Stephanie's words cut deep, so deep that Dustin simply lost his mind and saw red. But no amount of emotional hurt can possibly excuse what he did next. Dustin said that, as Stephanie rose from her seat to physically confront him, he followed suit and threw a punch so hard that it knocked his wife unconscious.

It isn't clear what went through Dustin's head in the moments that followed him striking his wife. He only ever talked about what he did and not why he did it. But what we do know is that Dustin obviously decided that Stephanie had to go. He had crossed the line, committed an unforgivable act, and it was one that Stephanie would ruin him for. She'd take the kids, she'd take the house, and she'd take half of every paycheck for as long as he continued to draw breath. And to Dustin, that was simply not an acceptable outcome. He went into the family kitchen, reached for the butcher's block, and took out the sharpest knife he could find. He said he waited for a while over his wife's unconscious body, watched all the possible outcomes of his actions playing out before his eyes, but in the end, he made up his mind. Dustin kneeled

down, brought the blade of the knife up to his wife's throat, and then sliced open her jugular vein. Blood must have pumped from the open wound like a faucet, with Stephanie's powerful heart muscles sending blood shooting up the arteries towards her neck and brain, yet she didn't expire instantly. In fact, Stephanie Kilhefner took an upsettingly long time to die, so much so that her husband opted for an even more violent solution. Dustin walked into the family's backyard and retrieved a large axe he'd been using to chop wood for his smoker. He then walked back into the family home, brought the axe up above his head, then used the sharpened blade to split his wife's head in two. After that, she was no longer breathing, and her fight for life was brought violently to an end. Dustin then spent the rest

of the night dismembering his wife's corpse, all the while his sleeping children lay upstairs, blissfully unaware of the carnage that had unfolded below. By the time morning came, Dustin had only just finished cleaning up his dead wife's blood. He'd also bundled her severed limbs and torso into a bag which he then took out to the tool shed in the backyard, but still, the scene wasn't quite purged of the scent of death.

As a result, Dustin swiftly drove his children over to their grandparents' place, telling them that they were celebrating Christmas at their place that year. The grandparents found their appearance such a lovely surprise that they didn't question Dustin too much before he took off in his truck. Overcome with guilt, Dustin drove around for a little while and contemplated turning himself in He briefly considered taking his own life, thinking himself unable to face the trials that would inevitably follow His children would never have a normal Christmas again, not after their father had murdered their mother in a drunken rage But in the end, Dustin simply drove over to the state police barracks and, with a heavy heart, confessed to the murder of his own wife. The guilt was something he could never seem to overcome and in early 2015, while being held at a Lancaster County prison, Dustin hung himself in a cell.

His attempt was soon interrupted by a prison guard but it was too late. Dustin was declared clinically brain dead just a week later and passed away after guard but it was too late. Dustin was declared clinically brain dead just a week later and passed away after his life support was turned off. Crimes like this are prime examples of why restraint and de-escalation are so important. When Dustin lost his temper with his wife, he not only lost the moral high ground, he kicked off a chain of events that would end with the deaths of both himself and his wife. It's almost reminiscent of the game of chess. Good chess players think two or three steps ahead before moving a piece. They consider all possible outcomes of their actions, never

making a move in haste. Maybe that's why such an ancient game is still so relevant today. In which case, maybe we should think a little more like chess players. If we did, maybe the world would be a better, brighter place. On a freezing New York evening, just three days before Christmas, the Harris family received the last visitor its members would ever see. One after one, Tony and Dolores Harris, their 15-year-old Shelby, and their 11-year-old Mark were tied up, shot, then doused with gasoline and set alight. Their horribly scorched and disfigured corpses were discovered the following morning after a neighbor of theirs complained to the fire department about a smoke alarm going off on their property. Police said that there was no sign that an intruder had forced entry into the house, leading them to believe that they had either snuck in through an open door or window, which was highly unlikely given the cold winter, or that the killer was someone they'd known and trusted. However, as State Police Captain Carl Shavers stated to the media,

it's a tragedy. These were very outgoing people who would open the door to just about anyone. In the immediate aftermath, police struggled to discern a motive to the murders, and they soon enlisted the help of FBI agents in their quest for solid leads. A brown and tan van was discovered to have been taken from the family's garage and it was recovered later in the parking lot of a mall nearby. Police then stated that they said that they wished to speak with a cyclist who was seen riding through the area shortly before nightfall on December 22nd, but no one came forward. As the Christmas wreaths and red ribbons still fluttered from the doorways of the gray two-story house, they were soon joined

by yellow crime scene tape. The Harris' lived in Ellis Hallow, a quiet neighborhood set between forested hills just north of Ithaca in western New York State. The family had moved there in 1986 when Tony Harris was named sales director of Deemco, a Syracuse-based electronic equipment distributor. His wife Dottie was close with just about everyone in the neighborhood and organized bake sales and cookie exchanges. She was active in the PTA and the Ellis Hollow Board and she opened a crafts and gift shop, The Grey Goose, in a barn next to the house. Neighbors said the crime rate was extremely low, with roughly one incident of theft or burglary being recorded every year. Tompkins County

Sheriff Robert Howard mentioned that there hasn't been a murder in Ellis Hollow in a long, long time, and naturally, its residents were suitably horrified by such a brutal familicide. About the worst thing that happens here is a car accident in the winter, said Pat Domain, who lived two houses from the Harris residence. Ellis Hollow was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and neighbors watched each other's children. Yet after the Harris murders, they started to peer cautiously through their windows before answering the door. At the family's collective funeral, loved ones and neighbors described them as active and well-liked members of the community. You can't think of anyone that would have a grudge against

them, said Anne Parziale, a friend of Mrs. Harris. People can't understand how it could happen. This is a very wholesome, family-oriented community. Those things aren't supposed to happen here in this community, added Edgar Clemens, a retired school teacher who had lived on Ellis Hollow Road for 26 years. I don't think anybody around here slept Saturday night. I've opened the door to people whose cars are broken down. I don't think I'll do that anymore. Police quickly uncovered a suspect, an ex-con known as Michael Kinge, and set about tracking him down. Yet when they finally cornered him in his apartment complex, Kinge produced a shotgun, placed it under his chin, and threatened to take his own life. The cops held

their fire, promising to bring in a trained negotiator in the hopes of de-escalating the situation. But before this negotiator arrived, Kinch aimed the shotgun at police officers and fired. Thankfully, the shot sent lead fragments spraying harmlessly above their heads, and law enforcement's return fire was considerably more accurate. But before he fell, Kinch turned the shotgun on himself, racked a shell into the chamber, and fired. The Tompkins County Medical Examiner found that the shot Kinch fired in his attempt at taking his own life had merely grazed the left side of his face, and it was the police's small-caliber handgun ammunition that had put him down. However, given the circumstances of Kinge

firing a shot at them, his death was ruled a justifiable homicide. Obviously, Kinge was never put on trial for the murders, but him taking his life by cop was seen by many as a tantamount to an admission of guilt. This was later confirmed when a sawed-off rifle found in the suspect's apartment was positively identified as the weapon used to kill the Harris family. Kinj's mother was wrongfully convicted of being involved in the murders and it ended up being a major police scandal, but aside from this horrifying miscarriage of justice, the really disturbing thing is that the motive behind the killings was never determined. No one knows why a small-time crook like Michael Kins just suddenly snapped and chose the most wonderful time of the year for one of the most heinous crimes in history. On the eve of their wedding day in January of 2006, the future looked bright for Bruce and Sylvia Pardo.

With a combined income of over $150,000, the couple's fledgling marriage promised to be very comfortable, and they had recently purchased a half-a-million million dollar home in Montrose, California. It was on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac, just up the hill from the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, where Bruce volunteered as an usher at the Children's Mass. Bruce was making $122,000 a year as an electrical engineer at ITT Electronic Systems Radar, down in Van Nuys, and together the couple built a nest egg of almost $90,000 in just two years. In his spare time, Bruce either worked on home improvements or walked Socky, the couple's big brown Akita, over at the neighborhood dog park. Yet despite their opulent and initially congenial married life, there was soon trouble in paradise.

By December 2007, Sylvia was sleeping in the spare bedroom while spending weekends at her parents' place. Two months later, she told Bruce she wanted a divorce. Sylvia filed court papers asking for her attorney's fees and $3,166 in monthly spousal support. The situation has become untenable, she wrote in one document, and continuing the marriage is not an option. Sylvia also claimed her husband had drawn down their $88,500 savings to $17,000 in just two months and was transferring funds to a private account in an attempt to withhold capital from her. This attempt was identified and stopped by Sylvia's attorneys and the results were disastrous for Bruce. As a result of his malpractice, Bruce lost his job at ITT and soon was drowning in debt while struggling to find work.

He begged the court to grant him spousal support until he could find employment, complaining that his former employer had failed to provide him with a severance package and that he was losing $2,000 a month in expenses. Yet instead of granting his request, the court ordered Pardo to pay his ex-wife $1,785 a month in spousal, plus $3,570 for past payments. When the divorce was settled, he was also ordered to pay his ex-wife an additional $10,000 for past payments, but most painfully, he was forced to give her custody of their big brown Akita, Saki. By Christmas of 2008, Bruce was flat broke and desperate. He told a close friend that he was considering leaving California altogether and was searching for work up in Iowa of all places.

He said his plan was to perform one last Christmas Eve midnight mass at his church and that he'd leave for Iowa before the holidays were through. But as it turned out, Bruce decided on a very different course of action instead. On Christmas Eve of 2008, Bruce Pardo had started drinking early. Some say he might have been in two minds regarding what he was about to do, but in reality, Bruce had been planning it for months. He'd been tinkering away at something in the garage of his home, one of the few things he'd managed to retain from what had been some pretty brutal divorce proceedings.

The device had taken weeks to perfect, and he'd be darned if he wasn't going to give it a proper field test. After finishing off a bottle of vodka, Bruce walked into his bedroom and found his outfit for the evening laid out on the bed. It was a bright red Santa Claus costume, complete with black boots, bushy white beard and most importantly, the iconic red hat. He then packed a few things in his car, climbed into the driver's seat and drove off into the night. Just before 11.30pm, Bruce Pardo parked up outside a large middle-class home in Covina, California. He got out of his car, grabbed a special package from the back seat, then made his way to the front door. From the doorstep, Bruce could hear a party of about two dozen guests was going on inside. There was laughter, the clinking of glasses, and classic Christmas songs playing on some crisp-sounding

stereo system. Bruce raised his hand and knocked on the door of a house containing his ex-wife and her immediate family. Inside, an eight-year-old girl heard the knocks, then excitedly rushed to the door to investigate. When she opened it, she must have been nothing short of delighted to none other than Santa Claus himself standing in the threshold. And even better, he actually had a wrapped present under his arm too. Bruce was numb from the liquor. He knew what he was about to do was vile, evil in fact. He just didn't care. He had only one thing on his mind that night, the same thing he'd fixated on for months prior. Revenge. Bruce reached into his Santa suit, pulled out a handgun, and sent a bullet tearing

through the little girl's head. He then stepped over her body, burst into the living room, and began to open fire on the 24 remaining party guests. What followed was the very definition of horrifying and chaotic. Guests dove for cover, scrambling for the exits as the gunmen dressed as Santa Claus continued to systematically slaughter them. Some didn't even have a chance to react, mistaking Bruce's outfit for a harmless prank and watching gormlessly before their loved ones were murdered. Others who tried to flee were clipped by Bruce's bullets and shot execution style as they lay helpless on the floor. One girl leapt from a second floor window, breaking her ankle when she smashed into the concrete below. A total of 16 of the 25 guests managed to make it out that night,

yet despite being out of live targets, Bruce wasn't done wreaking havoc. He opened the gift-wrapped package and took out a homemade, pressurized device that would douse the interior of the house with a flammable cocktail made up of high-octane racing fuel and compressed air. Essentially, he'd built a homemade flamethrower, and he intended to use it in the incineration of all that Sylvia held dear. Thankfully, Bruce's despicable scheme went horribly wrong when the canister's vapor suddenly ignited upon release.

The ensuing fire caused Bruce to suffer third-degree burns to his arms and legs, with the heat being so intense that portions of the Santa costume were melted onto his flesh. Meanwhile, party guests who had managed to escape the massacre began calling 911 to report the shootings and the fire. He's shooting my whole family. My mom's house is on fire, Pardo's ex-sister-in-law told an emergency dispatcher. We need someone immediately. My daughter's been shot in the face. Police and firefighters who first arrived on the scene believed Bruce had perished in the fire when in fact, he had somehow survived horrific burns and smoke inhalation and was en route to his

brother's house roughly 25 miles from Covina. It took almost a hundred firefighters an hour and a half to get the inferno under control. A subsequent inspection of the interior yielded the charred remains of three victims, with the remains of five additional victims being discovered shortly afterward. The hunt for Bruce Pardo was on, with authorities desperate to locate him before he could kill again. But around 3.30am, they received a call from a man who claimed to be Bruce's brother, and he had some shocking news for them. When police officers arrived at Bruce's brother's place, they found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Using plastic wrap and a girdle, police found $17,000 in cash strapped to Bruce's body.

He was also in possession of a plane ticket to Canada that was scheduled to leave the day after the massacre. They also found what was described as a virtual bomb factory inside his home. Inside Bruce's car, police found roughly 300 rounds of ammunition, two computers, a map of Mexico, and a booby trap that was rigged up to a flare. An FBI ordinance disposal team attempted to disarm the device, but the attempt failed catastrophically and the car exploded. Luckily, no one was hurt during the incident, but it just

showed how violent and determined Bruce had become in his efforts to take human life. In total, Bruce managed to kill nine of his ex-wife's family and friends, including the woman herself. The departed included Sylvia's parents, Joseph and Alicia Ortega, her sister Alicia, and her sister's son Michael. The other victims were believed to be two of Sylvia's brothers and both of their respective spouses. Astonishingly, the initial gunshot victim survived her injuries. The 8-year-old girl, as did another age 16 who was shot in the back. Their physical injuries healed quickly, but as for the emotional wounds, that may take much, much longer to mend. In the aftermath, when told of the killings, Bruce's friends struggled to believe what

had taken place. Bruce was the nicest guy you could imagine, said Jan to Tana, the head usher at his church. Always a pleasure to talk to, always a big smile. Others described him as a kind and gentle man, who was considered incapable of violence, but speculated that his divorce, the loss of his job, and mounting debt simply pushed him over the edge. I can't believe I'm seeing my old boyfriend on TV and all the people he destroyed, added Carol Sanchez, who dated Bruce during their high school years.

It's heartbreaking. He was a very easygoing person, a very friendly guy. I would never in my right mind think that he would ever do anything like that. And maybe that's exactly the point regarding people like Bruce. At one time he was known to one and all as that gentle church-going soul who couldn't hurt a fly. But something changed Bruce. In the middle of all that sadness and loss and pain and grief, Bruce just stopped being Bruce. Bruce Pardo died when his soul ran out of stamina and sank slowly into the deep, dark void to drown in his grief forever. Many years ago, among the vast frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle, a young reindeer was born with a rather frightening physical abnormality. Unlike the rest of its species, who are almost uniformly born with opaque brown noses, this reindeer was born with a bioluminescent mutation, meaning his nose emanated a sinister red light.

Obviously, this freakish mutation gave away the herd's position to nocturnal predators, and as a result, the reindeer that eventually came to be known as Rudolph was violently shunned by its peers. He was referred to by slurs such as Red Nose and was subjected to an almost constant campaign of bullying and exclusion by the remainder of his herd. Then, during a period of particularly unseasonable Arctic weather, the lighting equipment of a prominent local logistical company was mysteriously sabotaged. Naturally, any transport company operating in the Arctic Circle would be equipped to deal with an environment in which darkness can last for 23 hours a day. So, who or what put them in a position where they were forced to turn to the unlikeliest of candidates during their hour of need. Nevertheless, it was none other than Rudolph that was approached by the company's management, who begged him to aid in the navigation of their cargo vessels in the lower, northern, and southern hemispheres. Rudolph agreed, and with his help, operations were able to continue despite the immediately

thick fog which clung to the frozen tundra. The incident was nothing short of a public relations triumph for the previously despised reindeer, with even former critics stating that his efforts would, and I quote, go down in history. Yet the celebratory mood which followed seems to have allowed the perpetrator of one of the largest acts of sabotage in arctic history to completely escape justice. Only a handful of suspects were ever considered, and each walked free after a brief period of questioning. Yet somehow, the one person with everything to gain from the sabotage was never brought in for questioning. It's awfully convenient that Rudolph, the one creature whose body had the ability to create its own natural light, would be in the position to bail out a company that some called too big to fail.

And despite calls for him to be formally questioned regarding his whereabouts on Christmas Eve, law enforcement has thus far neglected to act on them. Maybe Rudolph is just an unlikely but well deserving hero, a reindeer who found himself in the right place at the right time. But maybe, for a reindeer who was nothing but shunned, humiliated, and tormented until his early adult life, making himself a hero is just the first phase of a terrible, bloody revenge. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. Just after 4pm on Saturday, February 20th of 2016, a man by the name of Matt Mellon was

preparing to head over to a friend's house in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Since Matt intended to drink alcohol that evening, he made the responsible decision to take a taxi to and from his destination. He got out his cell phone, opened up the highly popular rideshare app Uber, and requested a cab. At 4.21pm, an Uber employee driving a silver Chevrolet Equinox pulled up outside Matt's apartment. Matt climbed in, said hi to the driver, and they began their journey. Matt would later say the driver wasn't particularly warm, but this gave him no cause for concern and they promptly began their journey.

At some point during the ride, Matt said his Uber driver received a call via a Bluetooth earpiece. Although he couldn't hear what was being said, Matt said he assumed the call hadn't been good because as soon as he'd hung up, the Uber driver began driving extremely erratically. Matt said nothing at first, but when the Uber driver entered an oncoming lane of traffic, drove through a median strip, ignored a stop sign, and sideswiped a Ford Taurus, Matt became understandably terrified. He asked the driver to slow down but his pleas were ignored and the terror quickly escalated until Matt was begging the man to stop and let him out.

Again, his requests were ignored and Matt had to wait until the driver was forced to stop until he jumped out of a rear door and called 911. Matt gave local law enforcement as much information as he could regarding the Uber driver and license plate, and was suitably shaken and outraged by his experience. But in truth, Matt had no idea how lucky he was to be alive, as his driver had been Jason Brian Dalton, a man whose violent descent into madness had only just begun. Born on June 22nd of 1970 in Greenfield, Indiana, little was known about Dalton's early years. We know he attended Kalamazoo Valley Community College, graduating in December of 1992 with an

associate degree in law enforcement. But for some reason, Dalton didn't follow through with his dream of enrolling in the school's police academy program. In 1995, Dalton married his wife Carol, who would go on to give birth to the couple's two children. Dalton supported his young family with jobs working for a BMW, first as a mechanic and later as an insurance adjuster. Coworkers described him as a nice guy and a good family man, but one who also had something of a short temper. A former coworker who worked with Dalton at an insurance company remembers an incident in which Dalton began roaring at a customer over the phone, slamming the handset down before pacing around the office,

clearly in the grips of a furious rage. His coworkers said he and other employees found the behavior alarming, but Dalton later apologized, telling them that he was having a bad day, which apparently set their minds at ease. It's not clear how long before his mental break this was, but Dalton's madness would manifest in far worse things than just erratic driving. At 5.42pm, 25-year-old Tiana Carruthers was walking near the Richland Township apartment complex when a silver equinox aggressively pulled up next to her. Dalton was in the driver's seat. The woman said he called out to her, using a name she didn't recognize, but when she turned to inform Dalton that she was in fact someone else, she was met with a torrent

of handgun fire. She was hit four times in the left arm, legs, and back, yet despite her abject terror, she was smart enough to play dead so that the shooter might move on. And it worked. Satisfied he'd killed her, Dalton put his foot down and sped off into traffic, running a red light and smashing into another vehicle as he fled the scene. Carruthers would survive the attack, but her left arm had to be surgically reconstructed as a result of her wounds. It's at this point that something rather bizarre occurs, something which indicates that Dalton may have slipped into some kind of fantasy world of his own creation. After firing

on the woman near Richard Township, Dalton drove to meet his wife and children at his parents' place in Comstock Township. It's there he explained that his Equinox had been damaged by a disgruntled taxi driver who'd then fired gunshots at him after being enraged that his Equinox had been damaged by a disgruntled taxi driver, who then fired gunshots at him after being enraged that his business was being eaten up by Uber. Although Dalton assured his wife that Uber's head office was dealing with the incident, he also gave her a 9mm Taurus hand gun, telling her she may be in grave danger without it. He instructed her not to go to work, not to take their kids to school, and not to leave the house unless it was an emergency. Carol begged him for more answers,

but it's apparent that Dalton told her that keeping her in the dark meant keeping her safe, and he'd shed more light on things once the crisis had blown over. He then switched vehicles, taking his wife's black Chevy HHR and, unbelievably, after almost murdering a woman in what amounted as a drive-by shooting, Dalton carried on accepting ride requests using his employee's version of the Uber app. Those he gave rides to during this time said that there was nothing remotely untoward about Dalton, and he was warm, friendly, and drove as safely as can be. All until just after 10pm when Dalton arrived at a Kia dealership in Kalamazoo.

According to one witness, who was perusing potential purchases with her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tyler Smith, and his 53-year-old father, Richard, they were approached by a strange man who asked them what kind of vehicle they were looking for. The man didn't appear to be any kind of salesman, so it was with a degree of confusion that the men began to answer him, yet as they did so, the strange man pulled out a handgun, shredding each of them with 18 bullets fired from an extended magazine. The witness ran for cover as another in a Burger King parking lot across the street pulled out their phone, filming the shooter as they fled the scene.

The vehicle in question was a black Chevy HHR with Jason Dalton in the driver's seat. Ten minutes later, Dalton pulled up near the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Texas Township, just five miles from the road from the Kia dealership. Just as he pulled up, four people in two different cars were trying to exit the parking lot. Dalton reloaded his handgun, took aim, and fired. One witness observed Dalton as he exited his vehicle in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, before approaching one of the vehicles he'd fired upon. According to them, Dalton asked one wounded passenger a question then, when she answered,

he executed her with a single shot to the head. To this day, it's not clear what this question was, but it's more than likely Dalton would have executed her no matter what she'd said. There was no method to his madness. He desired only to kill. 14-year-old Abigail Kopp was also shot during this incident, with the bullet smashing off an entire section of her skull. She underwent a number of emergency surgeries and would go on to miraculously survive the attack, despite losing her elderly 68-year-old adopted grandmother, Barbara Hawthorne, in the process. Following both murders, the dispatch centers of the Kalamazoo Emergency Services were set alight with calls reporting the shootings, with a grim realization setting in that the city was faced with an extremely dangerous instance of a mobile active shooter. Thanks to new installed security cameras at the Kia dealership,

the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety were able to put out extremely accurate descriptions of both Dalton and the vehicle he was using, and the cops went into overdrive trying to track and arrest him. Yet even more incredibly, Dalton actually continued to take Uber fares even as the subject of an intense police manhunt. At 12.04am, he picked up three passengers before dropping them off at a dormitory on the Western Michigan University campus. These passengers later told police that Dalton wasn't overly friendly but also did nothing to alert suspicion. Just minutes later at 12.12am, Dalton gave four people a ride to their hotel.

During the ride, one of these hotel guests had been thumbing through social media on their phone and happened to come across reports of the recent shootings. They read the description of the shooter in the vehicle he was driving and noted with morbid amusement that they were riding in a similar looking vehicle with a similar looking driver. You're not the shooter, are you? They reportedly asked Dalton. And no, was all he said. Around 20 minutes later at 12.36am, a Kalamazoo County police sergeant observed a black Chevy HHR dropping off some passengers. He followed the vehicle, matching the license plate with that of their

supposed shooter, and requesting backup before he made his move. Four minutes later, he and a fellow officer conducted a traffic stop on Dalton, who appeared to grab for something under his seat as they approached. The officers rushed him, pulling open his car door and dragging him out onto the pavement outside. Only once they had the cuffs on him did they realize Dalton was wearing a bulletproof vest, and a subsequent search of his car revealed that he was in the possession of two 9mm handguns, one Walther P99 and one Glock 19, neither of which he had a license for. Another 15 long guns were recovered from his home, and it became apparent that Dalton had

prepared himself for a long and bloody standoff with pursuing law enforcement. In the immediate aftermath of Dalton's arrest, American President Barack Obama praised the Kalamazoo police and pledged the complete support of federal authorities in the investigation that followed. Governor Rick Snyder took to Twitter expressing his sorrow and condolences to the families of the victims. Uber's chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, also released a statement which read, We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Our hearts and prayers are with the families of the victims of this devastating crime and those recovering from injuries. We have reached out to police to help with

our investigation in any way that we can. Just two days after he was arrested, Dalton was charged with six counts of first-degree murder, then returned to court in May of the same year, where he interrupted the testimony of Tiana Carruthers, making a number of indecipherable outbursts. Carruthers burst into tears. Dalton was dragged out of the courtroom and he later appeared via live video feed from his jail cell. Yet despite his initial belligerence, on January 7th of 2019, Dalton pleaded guilty to all charges and was later sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole to be served at Oaks Correctional Facility. To this day, it's not clear why Jason Dalton chose to kill six people on that fateful February night. He's never given a media interview and he's never attempted to explain his behavior.

However, one thing we do know is that, following the pre-trial proceedings, it became apparent that Dalton's attorneys would seek an insanity defense. He then underwent a 60 day psychiatric evaluation in June of 2016, conducted by the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Saline. This evaluation was set to conclude on August 15th, but just three days prior, psychiatrists announced an unexpected six-week extension to the evaluation. Then, when these additional six weeks were up,

psychiatrists stated their evaluation was still inconclusive and Dalton was declared fit to stand trial. Again, it's not clear why the evaluation was extended for so long. It could be because Dalton's defense attorneys wanted to keep him detained until he could adequately trick his doctors into thinking he was insane. But it's also possible that Dalton and his motives proved completely indecipherable, that his timing and choice of victims were so random that head nor tail could be made of his bloodthirsty killing spree. Then, just when it seemed like he'd remained tight-lipped about the murders, Dalton purported to tell his doctors why he'd killed that night.

Dalton said that the iPhone can take you over, a report stated, adding, he recognized the Uber symbol as being that of the eastern star and described how a symbol of the devil would appear as a horned cow head before he had lost control of his body. Dalton also stated that he never really aimed when shooting and that somehow the devil directed his bullets into those he fired at. It's unclear if his doctors believed him or not, but what is clear is that a man who tried very hard to seem insane was eventually declared mentally fit to face punishment for his crimes. His true motives might always remain a mystery, but we live in a world where there is little time to reflect on just one madman with

a gun. There's always another, and another, and an unceasing cycle of bloodshed, grief, and death. To be continued... up the most important fare of my brief career in cab driving. I'd lost my job as a manager of a coffee shop I'd been working at, so in order to pay rent, I signed up to Uber in order to make ends meet. At first it was a real godsend, and I'll throw out a trigger warning for cliches before I give you the usual spiel of, I was able to set my own hours, be my own boss, and meet cool people for a living. I know, it's old news by now, but it's true, and considering it was something of an occupational low point for me, it wasn't actually all that bad. But then I met Amy. Amy isn't this girl's real name, but by the end of the story I'm sure you'll understand if I tweak the details to protect the innocent, so to speak.

Amy was pretty. Had a four star rating, tipped well, pretty much your dream passenger. But she was so much more than that to me because I've never hit it off so well with a girl in such a short space of time before. It started out with me asking how her day was after picking her up around 6 on a Friday evening. She was cheerful, said she had an okay week but said she was swallowing the frog, so to speak, by heading over to an ex's place to pick up some leftover belongings. If she got it out of the way then, she could just enjoy the rest of her weekend without worrying about it. Yeah, I didn't know what swallow the frog meant either,

but according to her, it was a Mark Twain quote that goes something like this. If the first thing you do in the morning is to eat the frog, then you can continue your day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that will happen to you all day. Basically, get all the terrible things done early so you can just chill for the rest of the day. I like that idea, and it made me like Amy even more. We went from talking about our ex to talking about quotes we liked to literature and sports.

It was a total scatterbrained conversation, but we seemed to match or compliment each other at every turn. By the end of the ride, I had actual butterflies in my stomach, and when I promised to pick her up again soon if she'd ever needed a ride, I had actual butterflies in my stomach, and when I promised to pick her up again soon if she'd ever needed a ride, she was like, why wait? She tore off a piece of paper from her purse, wrote her number on it with some makeup stick, and then handed it to me. I felt like I was on top of the world, I really did. She was smart, funny, and incredibly cute, and for some reason she seemed interested

in me, of all people. I was so excited at the prospect of taking her out somewhere that I had to refrain from texting her almost right away. Gotta play it cool, right? So, that's what I did. I tried to keep my mind on work, let her do her thing, then maybe text her in the morning. But I couldn't even wait until then. When I finished my fairs, I sent her a quick one to be like, just let me know if you're free for coffee over the weekend. Then I had some dinner, played some Xbox, then went to sleep at around 3am.

The next thing I know, I'm waking up to the oh so familiar sound of my phone vibrating against my bedside table. I roll over, open one eye, and see unknown caller on the screen, and the first word that pops in my half-asleep brain is Amy. What she'd be doing calling me from an unknown number when I already had her saved in my contacts I don't know, but still trapped in my sleepy ignorance, I answer the phone, expecting it to be her. I say hello, and I'm instantly hit with confusion when I hear a guy's voice on the other end. He addresses me by name, asks if I drive for Uber, and when I confirm both, he tells me he's from the police, then asks if it'd be okay if he comes to visit me at home. Immediately I'm like,

what's this about? And he tells me it'd be better if we just spoke about it in private. Now, I'm not an idiot. I'm also not particularly anti-cop, but I know way better than to talk to one without a lawyer present. The only question was, if I'd broken some traffic law or something, why was this guy being so cagey about his reasoning for wanting to talk to me? So I pressed him like anybody would and told him I'd really rather know what was going on before I agreed to meet. He sighs, agrees, then starts telling me how one of my Uber passengers had been reported missing and that he was hoping I'd be able to help with the investigation.

I know this is stupid. In fact, in light of what I said about keeping my mouth shut, what I did next was titanically moronic, but I just blurted out, Amy? There was a slight pause and the guy just goes, I think we need to have a chat, don't you? Now, two officers stopped by my place later that day. I just wanted to do everything I could to help. I remember sitting down, offering them some coffee, and then basically launching into a big tirade about how Amy had been talking about how the ride was to visit her ex, that maybe, just maybe, they'd done something to her. But bizarrely, the detectives didn't seem very interested in her ex-boyfriend. The person they seemed interested in was me.

I remember the sinking feeling I felt when they asked if Amy got back into my car after her collecting her stuff. I told them no, that a round trip would have obviously made sense, but that she also might have wanted to talk to him, maybe get some closure, you know, typical breakup stuff. Then they asked if I could prove that she got out of my car, which I could. Best piece of advice I'd ever gotten was to get one of those dual dash cams, the kind that records both the inside of the car and the outside front. The good news was I had that footage on hand, proving she didn't get back in my car. The bad news was, believe it or not, it was out of battery. It was like a practical joke I felt like against myself

and it would have been funny if the punchline wasn't me being put into cuffs. And I don't know if the cops thought I was trying to destroy into cuffs. And I don't know if the cops thought I was trying to destroy the footage or whatever, but they grabbed that dash cam from me, told me I was under arrest, and literally, that was that. I know all I had to do was wait for the camera to charge and everything I told them could be confirmed. But good god man, sitting in that cell, catastrophizing that the camera was broken and that I'd have a murder charge pinned on me. It was without a doubt the most terrifying few hours of my life and just when I felt like I was about to lose my mind with worry, an officer opened up the door and basically just told me,

Sorry about that, you're free to go. I was still trembling as they booked me out of there and asked me if I needed a taxi or an Uber and those idiots didn't even give me a lift home. I was really, really angry with the police until I was asked to appear in court. After that, I understood why they suspected me. Amy's ex-boyfriend hadn't just killed her and disposed of her body, he'd come up with an elaborate plan to frame whatever taxi driver dropped her off. He played the heartbroken boyfriend, faked text messages and even edited security camera footage, believe it or not. This all ended up getting used against him in court but at face value,

you could see why the police had me down as their number one suspect. It was actually the ex-boyfriend that reported her missing in the first place. He called the police right after he'd finished dumping her body in some random land out in the rural area, telling them some sob story about how they'd just gotten back together and she wanted to pop back to her place to pick up a few bits before being driven back. To be honest, it was chillingly well thought out and I think I'd have been grimly impressed if it wasn't for the fact that I was supposed to be the fall guy.

Thankfully, he got life in the end. I didn't go to any more of the court sessions, it was just too upsetting to see Amy's family all torn up like they were, so I heard the rest through the local and national news. I stopped driving Uber after that, not because I was overly traumatized or anything, although I'd be lying if I said the whole thing didn't get into my head for a while after, more because I got a decent job offer for a management position at a corporate coffee shop. I went to a few therapy sessions which honestly really helped because for a while back there I weirdly blamed myself for Amy's death. But as my therapist told me, if it wasn't me it'd have just been some other driver and

we can't just blame ourselves for facilitating what are, ultimately, the sins of others. I've driven Uber for a couple of years now and I was actually planning on calling it quits in early 2020. But then, you know what hit, and people were avoiding public transport like the plague. Pun very much intended. So it didn't really make sense to do anything else for the time being. I still do it today, meaning I've been officially driving for Uber for three years and four months as of this October. In that time, I think I've given rides to literally thousands of different people. The whole spectrum. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

I posted a whole bunch about the cooler fares I've had over in subs like r slash made me smile and r slash off my chest. But I've never really had the chance to answer anything like this before. I don't really like to talk about some of the crazy or frightening passengers I've given rides to. And I hope by the end of this you can understand why. But anyway, here are some of the worst, scariest, or generally most frightening passengers I've ever given rides to. The first of all the frightening fares I took were the two obvious looking gangbangers carrying a very suspicious looking package. The whole way they talked in low whispers in the back seat, letting out these devious little chuckles every so often. I couldn't quite hear what they were saying but at one point I made the mistake of making eye contact with one of them in the back

seat. He had face tattoos and when we locked eyes, he and his compadre fell silent. He then pipes up, asking if I ever get into any trouble. We're about the same age and I can feel him sizing me up with the question, trying to see if I'm going to give him a punk answer or not. I just give him one syllable. No. My intention being to engage him as little as possible. I wouldn't have even taken his ride request, but the display picture he was using was pre-faced

tattoo. You could tell it was the same guy but it was most definitely a bamboozle. Anyway, this guy almost acts like I'd given him the opposite answer because he follows up with, you ever had to shoot somebody? I don't even carry a gun in the car let alone ever had to shoot anyone so again i just gave him a one-word answer no he and his buddy think this is hilarious and there's more low speech in the back seats before the guy says feels good to shoot someone i mean feels powerful immediately i start getting nervous. I didn't think they were going to pull anything, but I definitely wanted to get the ride over as quickly as possible. I had no idea how far the little encounter was going to escalate, and like I said, if I had any inkling, I'd never have picked the guy up in the first place.

We stop at a red light, and I can see one of the guys in the back shifting around, taking something out of the bag they were carrying. But like I said, I just had no suspicion that they were about to do what they did. The next thing I know as the light goes green and we get moving again, I hear the mouthy kid laughing to himself, only it sounds like closer in my ear than it had been before. So just as I'm thinking, he's not leaning towards me, is he? I just feel something cold and metallic pushing into the back left of my head. I knew what it was almost immediately. I didn't need to hear the hammer being cocked to know. Then, I'm not sure if this is exactly what he said, but it's the gist of it.

He says, If I shot you right now, this speed, you think we'd die too? I honestly couldn't tell you how long it took for me to come up with an answer. Could have been seconds, but I swear it felt like a whole couple of minutes. Just sitting there, weirdly calm, thinking, I might die tonight. Yeah, my heart was pounding, but this weird kind of survival instinct took over and I just thought, screw you guys. If I go, we all go. Like I said, I didn't answer at first because my first reaction was to put my foot down. By the time the speedometer read 50, I just said, Yep, at this speed, there's no way you'd survive.

I felt the gun still pressed into the back of my head for a few seconds as they laughed, and that guy in the back seat only took it away when I ran a red light. Both of them thought this was equally hilarious, but I think the mouthy guy dropped his poker face for a second when he was like, chill, chill, it was just a joke homie. I kept our speed above 50 until I pulled up outside their destination, still shaking as I parked up to let them out. Face tattoo guy had stashed the gun somewhere by then but gave me some smug smile as he said, stay out of trouble, or something equally obnoxious as he got out of the back seat. I didn't touch my phone for a minute or two as he and his buddy crossed the street and

walked into a bodega. Then, the second he was out of sight, I called the cops. That's the thing that always gets me about this incident. Like, what did he think I was going to do after he shoved a gun to my head? Drive off and carry on with my night? The cops were on the scene in more than a couple of minutes, and I didn't even recognize them at first. I just saw two more guys with guns jump out of what turned out to be an undercover car, and it wasn't until I spotted the badges around their necks that I realized they were cops. They were smart too, they didn't just burst in to try and grab the guy, they waited until

he walked out, both hands full of whatever snack and slurpee he'd bought. They got him into cuffs without so much as a shot being fired. Some might call me a snitch, I call them idiots, because it's one thing to have those gangbanger dillweeds shooting and killing each other, but threatening civilians is something I won't stand for. I'm not some tough guy, I just hate bullies is all. Always have. The next one that springs to mind seemed like it might have been more sad than anything, as when I picked this lady up, she was in tears, clearly in a great deal of distress. So I tried to stay respectful, offered her a Kleenex, but otherwise kept the chatter to a

minimum. Then about halfway through the ride, she gets a call. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but you just can't help yourself sometimes. You gotta turn the radio down so they can talk, there's literally nothing else going on noise-wise apart from the traffic outside, so as I'm listening to her speak, I gather that she's probably talking to her husband, or at least an ex-husband, and they've just had some kind of argument. I'm not sure what about, it definitely seemed like the husband was doing most of the talking and the vast majority of her contributions were like, no Tom, you can't do that Tom, I won't accept that. She's trying to talk sometimes but he's cutting her off and I'm

starting to tune out when she suddenly blurts out, Tom, if you do that, I'll hurt the kids. I swear to God I thought I misheard her at first. I was honestly like, no, no way did she just say that. But she did, because she said it again, and whatever the argument was, ended. She apparently won it with that round. Shortly after, she said bye to whoever it was and hung up. I didn't say another word to her. I was rigid, imagining what those words might entail. Then I remember my eyes flicking to my Uber app and I suddenly remembered where I was supposed to be taking her. It was a Duane Reade, like the pharmacy chain. I didn't call the cops on her, I imagine her husband or whoever it was on the phone had seen to that,

but I did pull over, told her to get out, and promised to refund her money. She tried to make out like she'd already paid me, but as some of you might know, not the case. I cancelled the fare, told her I wasn't moving the car until she got out and after a brief stand off she ended up walking. I don't know what kind of messed up situation she was in or if I could stop it, but I sure could make it so I wasn't a part of it. We'll be right back. Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations.

From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. 21-year-old Samantha Josephson grew up in Robbinsville, New Jersey, as the daughter of Seymour and Marcy Josephson. While majoring in political science at the University of South Carolina, Samantha studied abroad in Barcelona and planned on attending the Drexel University School of Law after her 2019 graduation. Samantha was a girl who showed boundless potential, who was potentially looking at a partial scholarship to Rutgers, but all her dreams would be snuffed out after making just one fatal mistake. On the evening of March 28th, 2019,

Samantha went out drinking with friends at the Bird Dog Bar in downtown Columbia. At around 2am, they decided to call it a night and, like so many of us have done before, Samantha pulled out her phone and ordered an Uber. Just nine minutes later, surveillance footage from the bird dog shows a black Chevrolet Impala pulling up outside. Samantha steps outside, enters the vehicle, and greets her driver. The man at the wheel was named Nathaniel Rowland. And although he didn't say anything as Samantha climbed into his car, he hadn't actually been expecting a passenger.

You see, the car that Samantha had climbed into wasn't her Uber. It was just a similar looking vehicle she'd drunkenly mistaken for her ride. You'd expect Roland to ultimately tell her to get out of the car, but he didn't. He simply engaged the locks, trapping Samantha inside, then drove off. It's not clear whether or not Samantha realized her mistake before Roland stopped the vehicle, but at some point, Roland parked up his Impala, pulled out a knife, and inflicted a sustained and savage attack upon the terrified Samantha. Using a bizarre looking two-bladed knife, Roland proceeded to stab Samantha a hundred and twenty times. She attempted to shield herself,

but she was trapped, and Roland was armed. As well as several horrific defensive wounds, Roland also stabbed Josephson in her head with so much force that the knife went through her skull to her brain. But the killer blow seems to have come when he stabbed her in the carotid, one of two main arteries that carries blood to the brain. Samantha also sustained wounds to her face, neck, shoulder, torso, back, lung, leg, and feet, bleeding out within just 10 to 15 minutes. Roland then dumped Samantha's body in the New Zion field, where she was discovered by a handful of local turkey hunters. The following morning, Samantha's roommates became deeply concerned when they found she hadn't returned home. Police rushed into action,

easily tracing her last known whereabouts to the Bird Dog Bar and Nathaniel Roland's black Chevy Impala. Officers later happened to cross Rowland while he was out driving and after a traffic stop was attempted, Rowland jumped out of his stationary vehicle and began to flee. Inside his car, police officers found a container of liquid bleach, germicidal wipes, and a bottle of window cleaner, but perhaps the most incriminating piece of evidence was Samantha's phone, which Roland had foolishly chosen to keep. He was arrested, questioned, and tissue samples were taken. Disturbingly, the tissues under Roland's nails tested positive for Samantha's DNA,

meaning whatever he was doing after he'd killed her, it had been rigorous enough for particles of her skin to become embedded under his nails. Roland was soon charged with Samantha's kidnap and murder, and it became apparent that Samantha wasn't his first kidnapping victim. He had apparently carjacked a woman at a stoplight in October of 2018 and was extremely violent in the commission of the crime, beating her and threatening her, before they drove to an ATM to almost empty her bank account. In July of 2021, Roland was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering, with a judge sentencing him to life in prison. The same judge, a veteran of the legal circuit, said the murder was perhaps

the most heartless and severe he'd ever seen, denying Roland's request for leniency. It's also easy to see why. Roland displayed some horrifying predatory behavior. When a stranger accidentally climbs into their car, most correct-thinking people simply laugh it off, perhaps getting a little prickly if they're in a bad mood. But Roland found a stranger climbing into his back seat, and his first thoughts were nothing short of bloodthirsty. Samantha Josephson made an honest and simple mistake, and Nathaniel Roland made her pay with her life. I live here in Los Angeles, and as you probably already know, if you don't have a car here, you're pretty much screwed, and because of this very reason, Uber and Lyft are a hugely popular alternative to buses and trains. I've only ever had one bad Uber driver, but boy was he bad.

And although I'm pretty sure the company fired him in the aftermath, it left a really bad taste in my mouth for some time after. And I took a long break from rideshare apps in the aftermath. So I took a routine Uber from La Brea to Crenshaw and just as I'm about to get out, the driver asked me if I'm going to give him five stars. Normally I'd just have said, yeah, sure. But this guy was late, he wasn't even remotely friendly, and I just overall got bad vibes off the guy,

so instead of giving him a straight yes, I was like, I don't know, maybe, we'll see. Then I go to climb out of the back seat. I just hear click as the doors in the back seat lock up. I can't open the doors and I give the guy a look like, very funny. He just comes back with, give me five stars and I'll unlock the doors. Yeah right, I was going to give him five stars after that. So I straight up just told him no, that 5 star drivers actually let their passengers out at their destination. I figured

he'd unlock the doors after that and not wanting to lower his ratings anymore, but he didn't. He just kept the doors locked and reiterated that no 5 stars, no exit. Then when I say, okay, okay, I'll give you a good rating and get out my phone, but he just snatches it right out of my hand and starts giving himself a review. I'd already decided to report the guy to Uber, but I decided to be polite enough to get my phone back. But no, the guy tossed it onto the floor and started to drive off. I have no idea what would have happened if that cop hadn't been driving by right as I started screaming for help. He pulled the Uber over and I got out as the driver tried explaining that it was all just a miscommunication. He wasn't arrested but Uber assured me that he'd been fired in the

end. I just hope they've improved their vetting process so that never happens to anyone again. I'm one of the assistant general managers of a mall here in Michigan, and last Christmas brought one of the most frightening encounters of my entire career. Every year, the assistant GMs are responsible for organizing the holiday-related events and decorations, and this includes the Santa's workshop. It can be a heck of a lot of work, so we divide up all the tasks between the three of us and last year, I was in charge of hiring a Santa. It sounded kind of fun at first, getting to line up interviews with a series of tubby retirees before scoring their ho-ho-hos out of ten. So, I posted a few advertisements on some job sites, then waited for the replies to roll in.

The response to my ad wasn't exactly overwhelming, but you can't exactly blame people for not wanting to do something like that. Like I realized that as much as I tried to phrase it as politely as possible, the ad still subliminally screamed, hey boomer, are you fat and old? Well come get paid minimum wage to get puked on by screaming children for 10 hours a day. So it made sense that people weren't lining up to don the red suit. By the time I started to get a handful of respondents, I realized it wasn't going to be such an easy task.

The first guy that came in said he was a specialist Santa, but demanded $25 an hour, way over our budget of $9.25. The second guy that came in for an interview was a total creep and kept flirting with me even though I was old enough to be his daughter. Then the third guy that came in smelled like my college roommate. This nauseating mix of Cheetos and vodka that, I swear to God, was enough to wilt the flowers. Around ten interviews in, with the only viable candidate having the personality of a cardboard box, I thought it was doomed. But that's when Ted walked in our conference room and things began to look up.

Ted's resemblance to Jolly Saint Nick was nothing short of uncanny. He had soft, curly white hair, a similarly glossy beard which he later admitted to shampooing daily, and he had this stout look about him without seeming outright obese. He had rosy cheeks, a glint in his eye, and a deep rumbling laugh that had me offering the job before the interview was even over. The only trouble was, Ted came with a catch, because Ted was Canadian. He said he'd come down from Hamilton to stay with family over the holidays and thought he'd earn some cash while he was south of the border. He'd applied for a temporary work visa, but only two days prior to the interview and he was still waiting

to hear back. However, Ted told me he'd be happy to pass along the permit details once he got them, and he didn't mind working for free for a while, as long as we got all squared away at the end of his stay. I was more than prepared to work it like that. He didn't object to the low wage, something I had zero control of by the way, and he seemed to relish the whole Santa look, mainly to make his grandkids happy while he was staying over. Basically, Ted was perfect, the answer to my prayers. I told Ted that aside from a few formalities, he'd pretty much gotten the job and I'd be calling him ASAP to give him his start date and orientation. As you can guess, one of these formalities is a background check, but it's one an outsourced company performs for us. We just pass on the

person's name and social security number and bingo, they tell us if they're an ex-con or whatever. It worked exactly the same way for Canada, only it's called a social insurance number up there or something. The company could just contact the Canadian police and get the results just as fast. A few days later I get a call back saying they had no record of a Ted having committed any crimes but not to continue his application. You see, there was a Ted in Canada with the exact same last name, several in fact, but none of the SIN numbers were a match. That was the first suspicious thing about Ted, and although it wasn't a total deal breaker, the company could check if he had it changed in the last 10 years or so. It was what set me on

the road to finding out the truth. So, while I was waiting to hear back from HR, I was on break one day, sitting in the office, and I decided to do a little digging. I felt like I was maybe overthinking things a little, that maybe all the stress and lack of sleep was making me paranoid or something. At least, that's what I told myself as I sat down at one of our office's computers and opened a web browser. For those of you that don't know, here in the United States, there are whole government-run websites dedicating to let you know if someone is a possible convicted

offender in your area. You can search by name, address, state, heck even if you don't have information on your person of interest you can just search a whole list of offenders state by state so you can be sure if someone's not on there. I couldn't recommend doing this casually as it can be pretty frightening to see just how many there are but I'm honestly glad resources like that exist, otherwise it could put a lot of very vulnerable people in danger. So anyways, I sit down, bring up the website and start searching. First I type in Ted's name and get nothing back. This kind of relaxes my concern a little, but there was still something about Ted that seemed a little too good to be true, I guess, and a part of me just doesn't allow good to exist without condition. I sat there for 40 minutes of my 50 minute long lunch break, looking at the face of

every single creep in the state of Detroit. I'd type in a random address in different parts of Detroit and the surrounding area, just making sure that my sinister little hunch wasn't dead on the money. Then right as I'm about to call it a day and just dismiss my fears as baseless paranoia, there he was. He wasn't listed as Ted. He actually had a chillingly normal name, David Smith, and without all that silky white hair, he was kind of hard to spot. But he had the same eyes, the same rosy cheeks, and the exact same smile in his picture. And who in God's name smiles when they're having their picture taken for an offender's registry? But all that paled in comparison with the feeling I got when it actually hit me,

that this guy had tried to get a job, with kids. He'd evidently been styling himself after Santa Claus for a while, all with the intent of getting a job as the titular character in Santa's little workshop. He had no grandchildren either by the way, so what he told me was a complete lie. Instead of waiting for it to go through our HR department and the relevant outsource company in turn, I decided to go on the offensive. I know that was totally the wrong call and my bosses didn't let me hear the end of it during the aftermath, but I felt personally offended. The creep had lied to my face, and I'm ashamed to say that I fell for his little act, hook, line, and sinker. I called the number he'd given me,

and when he answered, I gave him the same cheerful act he'd given me the first time. I pretended everything was fine, and that I just wanted to clarify a few things regarding this application. I realized in that moment that I actually wanted the whole thing to be a huge mistake. I wanted to ask him if his name was David Smith and have him be like, what are you talking about? Then to immediately get a call from HR like, Canadian guy checks out, give him the job. But no. When I brought myself to ask him like, hey, um, your name wasn't David at some point, was it? There was just silence on the other end of the phone, then a click as David hung up.

I called the cops immediately, telling them that a David Lee Smith had breached his parole conditions by attempting to gain employment around children, which is obviously a huge violation of any offender's release conditions. I didn't hear anything else after that, not from the cops anyway, and I imagine this David Smith was re-arrested and taken back to jail for attempting to pull the collective wool over our eyes. I just think how bad things could have been if I'd have taken him up on his offer to work for free at first. I mean, they really should have had alarm bells ringing from the get-go,

but I was just so desperate to find someone that I just... I didn't think properly. We found someone for the job in the end. They sucked and were super unreliable, but they had no record and gave us no causes for concern with their behavior. But the whole incident marked what is without a doubt the creepiest and most skin-crawling occurrence of my entire management career. When I was seven years old, my parents offered me a very unusual Christmas present. We were moving into a new house across the country, right around the holidays, and I remember my parents sitting me down and basically asking, if you could choose any other name

in the world to call yourself, what would it be? I thought about it for a second, then decided that the coolest first name I'd ever heard was Dexter. No, not because of the fictional serial killer, more because of the old cartoon network show called Dexter's Lab, which centered around the coolest kid scientist in the history of TV. Mom and dad asked me to really think about it, because I was going to have to use my new name forever and ever. But my heart was set on Dexter's so that was that. From then on my parents referred to me only as Dexter and not by my old name which was Anthony. It made for an easy transition and since we were in a new place people didn't know us by anything else and it just so happened that our family had a second name too.

That would have all been much harder back in Providence but I was still kind of curious as to why we'd move and changed our names. It's like a Christmas present to ourselves, my mom said. New beginnings can be a gift. And I suppose she was right. I was much happier in our new home and soon the weirdest Christmas ever was just a speck in the rearview mirror, so to speak. It all started in such a weird way too, something I didn't understand at all until many years later. I remember getting off the school bus and walking the short distance back to my house when, all of a sudden, I heard a voice calling out to me from a parked car.

They were like, Hey! Hey kid! You're Tommy's kid, right? I just nodded. My dad had a lot of friends who all drove fancy cars, so I figured this was another one of his buddies. What? You don't recognize me now? The guy asked me. It's me. Your Uncle Johnny. I was at your communion.

I just stared at him nervously, wanting to get inside to get warm, but knowing it would be rude to just walk away. Okay, okay, you're still young, but look, I need you to do me a little favor. The guy continued. I got a Christmas present for your pops here. Make sure he gets it. The guy then produced what looked like a shoebox. Pretty expensive looking thing too. I remember wanting to open it to see what was inside, but the guy was quick to cut me off. Telling me not to look inside.

That it was a surprise from my father. You don't want to ruin the surprise, do you? The guy asked and I responded by shaking my head. There's a good kid. Now run along and make sure you give it to your father. And remember, no peeking, okay? I was considerably less nervous by that point. I mean, if he had a present for my dad, he had to be a good guy.

So I just did as I was told. Took the box into the house, then waited for my dad to get home from work. When he arrived home, I rushed to give him the shoebox. I remember it feeling like it was sort of a gift from me, too. Like if I was delivering it, I was sharing in some of that joy. But when I walked up to him and offered him the box, saying it was from Uncle Johnny, he just said, who? I repeated that it was from an Uncle Johnny, and dad still had that puzzled look on his face as he took the box from me, took off the lid, and rustled around the papers inside to see what it contained.

Then suddenly, he froze, and I remember watching the color drain from his face like it was yesterday. He slammed the lid back on the box, and when I asked what was in there, dad just told me to go up to my room. Then as I was walking up the stairs, he started calling out for my mom. And that's how this weird Christmas started. The next morning mom and dad were piling suitcases into our car while telling me and my sister that we were going to spend the holidays in the countryside because the snow would be better. The next thing I know we're in a cabin in the middle of nowhere,

and I'm getting the very unusual Christmas present of getting to pick a new name. The thing is, at that age, it all just seemed totally normal. Or rather, I'd know something was happening, I just thought it was something that every family did. After a while, we moved into this new house in another state and this meant that for the longest time I thought Colorado and Rhode Island were like right next door to each other. It didn't even occur to me that we'd move far away from home because I couldn't think of a reason why we'd move so far. I remember asking my parents if we're going to change our names the

next Christmas and they told me no because it'd be hard for all the people in our new town to learn new names, so we'd just be keeping the ones we had. I know it seems crazy, but being so young, I just kind of forgot about the whole thing after a while. Again, I thought it was something every family did at some point, just move towns and pick new names. I thought it was part of the process or something. It didn't make a difference with our parents. Me and my sister just called them the

same thing we did before the move, mom and dad. I had a little trouble getting the hang of my sister's new name, but, and I know this is becoming a running theme here, but kids can get used to anything pretty quickly. Then that was that. For like 11 years, my parents basically covered up what happened to the point where I didn't suspect a thing. I think maybe my sister did but I definitely didn't. She ended up getting the talk before she moved away to college and then she was part of this conspiracy too, in cahoots with our parents to keep me in the dark for another three years. And then, right when I was picking colleges come SAT time, they sat me down for the talk too. Some of you might have guessed what the talk consisted of by now, and no, it wasn't the birds and bees talk if that's what you're thinking.

The talk was basically my parents explaining to me that the reason we'd moved out to Colorado all those years ago was because my dad was in the witness protection program. He'd never actually been in the mafia himself, he was just an associate, but things went wrong for him in a big bad way, and he was dealing with guys who didn't just cut off business ties, they cut off heads and hands so the cops can't identify you, at least not right away. But anyway, according to them, the mob guys he was working with had two problems. Firstly, they were convinced someone in their organization was a police informant, and secondly, they had no idea who that person might be. So, in order to flush out the informant,

they basically set out a bunch of packages to each of them, all containing something that might scare them into making a move. Apparently, my dad wasn't the informant, but he also had no idea that this was part of a larger scheme to flush the mole out. He thought it was a straight up accusation and decided to get us out of Providence before any punishments could be meted out. So, ironically, the mafia had turned a solid earner into an FBI informant, all by just accusing the wrong person. Now, I don't know if that's 100% true or not. When your parents lie to you for almost your entire life, you wouldn't put another couple past them. But it's the version I chose to believe. But what I know for certain is what was in that shoebox I gave to my dad. It was a rat, and someone had hammered a nail through its mouth. We'll be right back. card when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo TreadExperts dealer near you

at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca. For most of my life, my mom and dad insisted on buying a real pine tree to serve as the centerpiece of our Christmas decorations. I can understand why they'd pay the extra money for a real one. They really are stunning when they're decorated. It's even worth having to clean up a million dead pine needles come to new year. But there's another reason why they put up the bother with each year, and it's all down to six-year-old me's attempt to decorate. Around the time that I was born, my parents were almost completely broke. Dad was still finishing off his degree, and mom had only just started her business. So, as a family does, we basically didn't have a pot to pee in. As a result, they had to buy one of these fake plastic Christmas trees for our living room.

I honestly loved the thing, and I remember getting so excited about decorating it with my mom. Then one year, after seeing something on television, or maybe I saw it in a book, I honestly can't remember, I decided that the Christmas tree was missing something. I remember using a chair in the kitchen to reach an out of reach drawer, one I knew mom kept some scissors and twine in. I took those and then used the same chair to search a cupboard where mom kept the little candles we'd used on my birthday cake. Then it was just a case of tying it to one of the little plastic limbs of the Christmas tree before lighting it with a

so-called child-proof lighter that I'd nabbed from near the cooker. Once the little candle was burning, the tree looked perfect in my eyes, and after admiring my handiwork for a moment, I ran off to get my mom so I could show her. If she liked it, she might let me tie some more of the little birthday candles to the tree and it'd be even prettier. I remember running up the stairs in my parents' little two-bedroom apartment shouting, Mommy, Mommy, come and look what I've done. She appeared from a room, I grabbed her hand and I started tugging her in the direction of the stairs, all the while repeating that I had something to show her. I remember feeling so proud of myself. I'd definitely seen a Christmas tree somewhere with little candles on it, probably fake

electric lights now that I think about it. But it'd look marvelous, and I hoped my mom would agree that my efforts had replicated that sense of festiveness that I'd felt too, even at such a young age. We smelled the burning plastic before we even got to the living room. It's weird how even though I didn't really know what I was smelling at the time, I knew it was bad. Maybe it's some deeply woven strand of genetic memory in us that means we're pre-programmed to know that burning smells

mean bad news. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. Either way, the sight that greeted us as we rounded the threshold had my mom letting out a long, high-pitched scream. Almost the entire tree had gone up in flames, and in the time it took for my mom to reach down and grab me up in her arms, the whole thing had become a raging fireball that billowed black smoke. Whatever cheap substance the manufacturers had used for the fake foliage turned out to be highly flammable. Mom's first thought was to just get me out of the flat that we were living in. Then when she ran out into the hallway to put me down, she grabbed the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall before running back inside to deal with the blaze. I was definitely old enough to know what a fire extinguisher was,

all thanks to school fire drills, but I had it in my head that if my mom had grabbed one, everything was going to be fine. They're fire extinguishers, they extinguish fire. Point, squirt, fire gone, I thought. I had no idea how terrifyingly quickly plastic-based fires can spread thanks to all the melting and burning material. They also burn really hot too for some reason, which makes the fire even more likely to spread. So it was with utter confusion and horror that I saw my mom re-emerge from our apartment, phone to her ear as she banged

on her neighbor's doors. I was in floods of tears by that point, knowing full well that it was all my fault. And by the time my mom saw the fire alarm, broke the glass, and the thing started blaring. I just lost it entirely. What unfolded was a night sat outside, watching as a crew of firemen tried to put out what remained of our apartment building. I had completely ruined Christmas for like a bunch of different families, and to this day, I can remember how soul-crushingly terrible that felt. I mean, that's after the prospect of me having possibly literally killed people had passed, and until the firefighters could assure my mom that

everyone in the apartment building, pets included, had been safely evacuated, and I was just in bits. I thought the punishment for my silly little decorating attempt would be somewhere between a lifetime chariot ban and life in prison. I'd ruin Christmas for Christ's sake, and sure there was no greater sin than that. But no punishment came. We just moved into a hotel for a few days, went to a relative's place for Christmas dinner as we planned to, then in the new year year my parents got looking for a new place for us to live. Then here's where the weird silver lining comes in. This was back at a time when the property ladder wasn't a complete and utter mess and my parents actually bought their flat as an investment

to later buy a house hence why they were so skint at first. Now unbeknownst to my mom, my dad had been paying into a little home insurance fund, him being the bigger worrier of the two. Then when it came to collecting on the money, both of them agreed to just tell the investigator that it had been a faulty set of Christmas lights since the flat had been gutted by the fire and there was plenty of melted plastic around the tree itself. The claims adjuster was told by the fire service that it probably was just an electrical fault. Alright, a casual bit of insurance fraud was committed. Why do you think I'd been sparse on geographical details, but the point being, the insurance company paid out big. Allowing my parents to get onto the

property ladder to buy the house that I'd spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in. I only got all the details of this years later for obvious reasons, but you can probably imagine my amusement at how one of the scariest moments of my childhood ended up being nothing short of a blessing in disguise. That doesn't stop how it affected me though and to this day, just the sight of an open fire is enough to cause the memories of that Christmas to come flooding back. The year when utter disaster turned out to be something of a miracle. When I was a kid, I witnessed a neighbor murder his wife on Christmas Eve. I was still at that age where I actually believed in Santa, so when my mom and dad put me to bed,

I stayed up and stared out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of him landing on the rooftops in our neighborhood. It didn't take long before I realized that I could see into my neighbor's bedroom. It was dark, and all I could see was the shape of a sleeping person covered in a duvet lit up by the light of a nearby TV. Not exactly skin and max, I'm sure you'll agree, so I didn't feel too guilty about it, and I kept on looking out for Santa's magic sleigh. Suddenly, there was movement in the bedroom across the way and I looked in time to see my neighbor walking in on his sleeping wife. I try to pry my attention away from the bedroom as he moved towards the bed, but then it's quickly drawn back when I see fast, violent movements in the light of the TV.

In the low light, it just looked like my neighbor was hitting his wife. And I know that's bad enough, but all I could see were these downward moving blows and nothing else. So as distressed as I was, all I told my mom and dad when I ran downstairs was like, I think the neighbor is beating up the neighbor mom. My dad just bolts upstairs, figuring I'd seen something from my bedroom window. He went up to check it out, but by that time, someone had drawn the curtains. My dad asked me if I hadn't just had a bad dream, but I swore to him that I'd been awake and on the lookout for Santa. I then repeated everything I'd seen in exact detail, and by that that time mom was listening too. When I finished, dad and mom gave each other a look. You know, one of those mom and dad concerned looks that's like an entire

conversation within a silent word spoken. Then my dad kneels down and asks me something. Buddy, are you sure that's what you saw? Because we could get in a lot of trouble if that's not true. But again, I'm not totally insistent that I saw what I saw, and I didn't find out what happened immediately after that until quite a while later, but as I was actually drifting off to sleep, Mom and Dad were downstairs having a very tense but quiet conversation. Dad, to his eternal shame, was insisting that I couldn't be sure, that the room had been dark, that I might have even seen them possibly doing something that I shouldn't have and just not understood what I was seeing.

Mom, on the other hand, was steadfast in her better safe than sorry attitude and told my dad that if he didn't call the cops, she'd take me to my aunt's place because she wouldn't be celebrating Christmas next to a wife-beating neighbor. That was that. My dad called the cops. He said he was praying it was some kind of mistake, but given how he could just give an anonymous tip, he figured, why not? My parents then watched from their own bedroom window which had a view of the neighbor's driveway as the cops pulled up outside and knocked on their door. They said it was this nail-biting moment, hoping they'd hear the sound of the neighbor's wife answering the door before being all, oh good evening officers, what seems to be the problem?

That way they could just carry on drinking eggnog and watching Jesus Christ Superstar or whatever they had on down there. But instead of that, they watched the cops knock, then knock again, all before they apparently turned on their flashlights and began circling the home. What woke me up was hearing, sir, come out with your hands up, and all this other cop speak when the police finally blocked off the guy's house for the eventual standoff that would unfold. Our neighbor had a gun and he was threatening to shoot at police officers if they attempted to enter his home. The next thing I remember, my mom was rushing into my room and telling me to get

dressed. The cops had knocked at our house and told us that they were evacuating the area just as a precaution in case a shootout had commenced. Our house had that old stucco style of wall which is apparently pretty safe but even so, the cops weren't taking any chances. Considering that we lived in Texas at the time the guy could have had anything in there. My parents say that when they were driving out of the area the whole street lit up by blue and red flashing lights. They had no idea what kind of scene that they were going to come back to. This wasn't all that long after the whole Waco thing either. well a few years after but fear of some repeat shootout type deal weighed on everyone's mind as news of the standoff got

around town. And it ended pretty anticlimactically, the guy actually took his own life as the police were finally busting into his house. But upstairs they found the dead body of his wife, still lying in her bed, exactly where I'd seen her, stabbed more than 30 times. I hadn't been watching the guy hitting his wife, I'd been watching him stab her, over and over again, and all I'd done for a couple of the seconds there was just watch. Once all the info was out there, mom and dad tried as best they could to shield me from it, because they correctly figured that once I put two and two together and worked out what I'd seen, I'd be extremely messed up by it. And yeah, I really was. Seeing it screwed me up for a long time afterward and I didn't grow up out of the general anxiety disorder until my early 20s

I just figured that if our neighbor could do something so terrible to someone he seemed to love Then anyone could do it People I'd known for years People I was otherwise warm to they could be capable of the obscenest acts of random evil Just because they looked normal, just because they smiled when they saw you in the driveway in the mornings, didn't mean they were a monster, hiding in plain sight. Christmas Eve with my six-year-old son was one of the most memorable nights of my entire life. Sure, we'd had a bunch of Christmases before that, but being a six-year-old marked the first time that he really started to understand the whole Santa thing.

He became completely fascinated with the idea that this fat dude could just, like, shapeshift down the chimney. Not to mention how he could visit every single child on the planet over the course of one night. He started begging me and his mom to take him to Santa's grotto so he could meet the man himself, and when it came to leaving out cookies and milk, he insisted on leaving out an entire package of Pepperidge Farm, believing the more cookies we gave Santa, the better his presence would be. It was absolutely adorable and it totally rekindled any of the festive spirits me and his mom had lost over the years. So on Christmas Eve, we leave out the whole bag of cookies, top up Santa's glass of milk, and then I take him upstairs to bed. He's way excited about the possibility of Santa arriving,

which poses something of a problem for me and his mom. If he was still awake when we started putting presents under the tree, he might come downstairs, see us eating the cookies and arranging all the boxes, then his festive fantasy would be totally ruined in my mind. We agreed that was totally unacceptable so we waited until like 1am when he was completely out for the count, before we dressed the scene like Santa had visited, even including a little note thanking our son for all the cookies, saying he was the most generous little boy he'd ever had the pleasure of delivering to. We were so stoked to see his reaction in the morning, so much so that even we had trouble sleeping that night. But just like our son, the adrenaline subsided eventually and we both drifted off to sleep.

The next thing I remember, my son is standing by my bed, shaking me awake and whispering, Dad, wake up, wake up. I can see the little glow in the dark hands of the clock on my bedside table and they're telling me it's just before 5am. So as much as it was obscenely early in my mind, I knew I had to get up if I wanted to see his face when he opened his presents. All this is going through my head and I'm just about getting ready to slip out from under the warmth of the covers when my son says, Dad, Dad, Santa's downstairs. My first move is to look over to my wife's side of the bed, but instead of being downstairs like I thought she might be, she's lying there asleep next to me. I'm instantly struck by this uh-oh moment, thinking that if my son had just heard

someone downstairs, like actually heard someone, it obviously sure wasn't Santa Claus. I remember telling my son to wait where he was as I crept towards the doorway, listening out for any sounds coming from downstairs. Believe it or not, it wasn't just his imagination. He was right. I could hear someone downstairs. By this time, his mom had woken up, and she's asking what time it is. But all it took was one look from me as I reached for the little lockbox I kept my gun in, and she just knew something was wrong. She was just amazing about the whole thing too, just totally affirmed why I wanted to have children with her in the first place. She just started, come to mama, come get a Christmas cuddle. And all this other stuff just completely distracting our son despite him insisting he wanted to go meet Santa.

I closed the door behind me, crept towards the staircase then felt my heart pounding as I started to descend. As soon as I saw the two people crouch down by our tree, I raised my pistol and just growled, get out of my house. As soon as they heard me, they just bolted back out the window they'd pried open to get the presents under our tree. I thank god they didn't put up any resistance, that they didn't even say anything before they just jumped out the window. I know of many other confrontations like that where the homeowner came out way worse, and I thank God every single day that I didn't end up as one of them.

To me and my partner it was nothing short of a miracle that the only casualty of that morning was our son's hurt feelings. He was furious that I hadn't let him meet Santa Claus, and no matter how much we tried to explain that Santa was busy and that he couldn't stop to talk, our son cried and cried, all up until we showed him the special note that Santa wrote for him. And that really did the trick, especially once I improvised the idea that Santa had written the note because he was so grateful, even though he was super busy. Now, me and my partner are still wondering how we're going to tell him about that once he's older. We know it'll be something we'll be able to smile about. I mean, no one got hurt, thank God, and I know it'll be funny to see his reaction to the truth, but in that moment,

it was just about one of the most terrifying occurrences of my entire life. Back when I was a kid, me and all my brothers and sisters would sleep in the basement on Christmas Eve to give Santa, i.e. our parents, enough space to arrange all of the presents under the Christmas tree. One night, I remember noticing that there was a lot of noise coming from outside on the street, but we couldn't see or anything because there was snow covering the windows. Suddenly, our mom came downstairs and told us not to come upstairs until she told us. Not long after, we heard sirens and saw police lights reflecting in the snow. But this was kind of a rough neighborhood, so it wasn't like a few emergency vehicles were going to make our ears prick up. There was a lot of commotion that we

couldn't see, but we were so excited that it was Christmas Eve that we just didn't pay it any mind. Then, the next thing we know, my dad is walking down the stairs followed by none other than Santa Claus himself. We all just freaked out. I heard you had to line up for hours at the mall if you wanted to meet Santa. Then there he was, making a guest appearance at my house on Christmas Eve, his busiest time, which was definitely a high compliment indeed. We all said hi, ran up and gave him hugs, before Santa told us that his sleigh crashed in the snow outside. He was waiting for the police to show up so they could get him back in the skies again, and while they were working to get him

unstuck, he had decided to come visit a few of us neighborhood kids to see how our Christmases were going. He also had a huge surprise for us. He had a present for each of us and we were allowed to open them early. We opened them up, sang a few Christmas songs and then when we were done, Santa said goodbye and went back to delivering toys. And it wasn't until years later that I found out what really happened that night. Santa hadn't crashed in the street outside. In reality, there had been a huge gang fight outside of our house involving knives and baseball bats. Three people had lost their lives that night, which the EMTs were unable to save a single one of them.

And the chaos that followed, an older guy from our church who happened to live down the road, figured my parents might be struggling to help keep us calm with all the violence outside. So, not knowing that we were blissfully ignorant of it, he put on his Santa suit and came over once the police arrived. Santa was a hero to me as a child, but I now know that it was a kindly neighbor that was the real hero, and stuff like that is what Christmas is all about. Around about five minutes after being stabbed for the first time, I felt a fear that I'd never experienced before or since. It was around the holidays, Christmas to be specific, and I was just walking back to my apartment minding my own business when some guy comes up, yells at me and punches me in

the face. I'm taken aback a little, not exactly in a fighting position, I just looked up confused, where he then punched me again, sending my glasses flying off my face. That's when I realized that it wasn't some random hit and run type thing that was being filmed for Vine or whatever, and as I went to get up again, got punched yet again again making me fall back from the force of it. Nothing hurt, like I wasn't in any pain at all so once I got into a position where I

could defend myself, I told him to stick it where the sun don't shine before I just knocked him out, something like that, and he looked at me completely stunned and left. Moments later, I hear a cry and it turns out to be the girl in the apartment above me. She sees me, rushes over and screams at the guy as he's walking away and she then tries dragging me inside but I refused. They told me I got stabbed and I tried explaining to them that I was just punched and that it was probably just where the guy's fist had impacted against my cheekbone, splitting it open. Right then I put my hand to my chin because it felt all cold. I pulled it back to find it covered in blood, way more than I'd expected from just a busted

cheek. But still, I was convinced I wasn't stabbed. They had to make me look in a mirror where I would then see my entire cheek was ripped open. Yeah, almost the entire right side of my cheek is just completely sliced. Sounds painful, right? Well, you'd be surprised because luckily, he tore my nerves and in combination with the adrenaline I felt nothing at all. But then someone was looking at my glasses and the situation looked like it had the best outcome. The part that covers my temple was barely hanging on because he tried to stab me in the temple first and then when that didn't work out he went for the eye,

which had a huge deep scratch in front of it from where the lens saved my eye. That's definitely the closest I've ever come to serious injury or death, and I ended up moving away from New York City not long after. Boston is crazy, sure, but it's so much calmer than NYC. At least no one's stabbed me in the face here yet. It was just before Christmas of 2005, three weeks shy of my 50th birthday. I went to the gym, rode there and back on my bicycle, and unfortunately found myself struggling a bit in a drizzle and headwind on the way home. Got home, wife leaves for the movies with her sister and my post-workout meal consists of snacking on some leftover chicken. But right as I'm stuffing my face I notice this dull,

unusual pain in my chest. Felt like indigestion and since I suddenly wasn't hungry anymore, I figured that's exactly what it was. Within a few minutes the pain got more intense and spread through my upper chest and I know enough from movies and TV shows that when your left arm goes numb and you get those sharp chest pains, you're in a lot of trouble. First, I called 911. After that, I called my wife. EMTs were at my house in a few moments and they got me on the sofa and began working on me. I began to feel very tired, like I wanted to close my eyes and sleep, but the EMT kept telling me to stay awake. I closed my eyes for what I thought was a moment, I just couldn't help it. The next thing I know I was on the floor and an EMT was kneeling alongside me with defib paddles in his hands.

I had flatlined due to my heart working too fast and I later learned was down to a 90% blockage of my artery. This happened at least three more times at the hospital before I was stable enough to have a cardiologist get me in an OR and insert a stent. Apparently they called that the widowmaker or something. As only like 1 in 10 men of my age group survive it, so the fact that I'm still here is apparently nothing short of a miracle. I spent the next three days lying in a hospital bed and after I was sent home, I spent another two weeks recovering in my own bed, followed by almost three months of cardiac physical therapy. I've recovered well and am a pretty healthy 64-year-old today. I take a number of maintenance meds and I've fought hard to keep my weight down and eat

correctly. But I suppose what I really want to say here is that I don't recall going down before being shocked back. It's like you don't know what's happening. When I came to it was like waking up from a deep nap. But it's the nearest to death I've ever been and although I don't wish to get that close again, there came a sense of peacefulness that I just wasn't expecting. And ironically, that's what creeps me out the most. I used to work EMS and a coworker turned good buddy of mine was working dispatch for a call we got on Christmas. I arrived on the scene later so I never got to interact with the victim in question but my buddy did describe the 911 call

to me afterward. Initially me and my crew were just supposed to be backup for a gunshot wound at some farm about 20-30 minutes outside of town. Gunshots run a whole spectrum of seriousness and some can be nothing but flesh wounds that the victim basically refuses to have treatment. Other times, they can be way, way worse. And this was one of those times. The whole thing turned out to be a father who recently lost both his parents within a month, and didn't want his family to suffer through the sense of loss either. So, completely illogically, the guy decided to kill his family to spare them the same fate. The psycho killed his wife, her mother, and their two kids.

Later found out that the 911 call we got was from a 13-year-old daughter who had been shot in the head but is still alive and conscious enough to make the call. The call was about 30 minutes long and apparently the father was in the same room as her and the rest of the recently murdered family members. She was sitting on her bed with a bullet in her head just saying in the most monotone voice ever, I've been shot, my family is dead, my dad has a gun. Just in so much shock that she couldn't express any emotion. You could hear long pauses of silence as the dispatcher tried to get an idea of the situation and how the daughter and dad were just staring each other down for five minutes at a time with nothing but breathing to be heard and the daughter answering the dispatcher's questions. About 30 minutes go by of my buddy, the dispatcher, going,

are you alright? He's still there? He still has the gun? He just gets monotone responses back. You can hear the sound of sirens in the background and the father leaves the room, followed by a gunshot. The dad took his own life and died right as we were pulling up. She ended up living but had lost every single member of her family that week, and personally I have no idea what happened after that. Remember when people were obsessed with those Christmas jumpers? I mean, I guess a few people still get their woolies out around the festive season but that was a few years back when people were just obsessed with Christmas jumpers. It got to the point where it seemed like absolutely everyone who was out for a drink was wearing one

and the whole of London was basically a giant competition to see who had the best one. One night I'm having a ciggy break at work and I see this guy walking down the street towards me, wearing what had to be the most random Christmas jumper I'd ever seen. To be fair, it was quite dark out and I could only see him under the orange tinted street lights which obviously sent the colors off a little bit for me. But still, as he's approaching, I'm like, what in God's name is this guy wearing? And then he gets closer. He looks up at me and before I can even say anything, he just collapses.

He wasn't wearing a red and white Christmas jumper. It was a grey hoodie and the red splotches were all stab wounds. I did what I could and I called 999, but the guy kept passing in and out of consciousness as I was on the phone and I honestly thought he was going to die by the time he got to the hospital. He was still conscious when the ambulance arrived and that gave me a lot of hope that he'd be okay, but then the following day I recognized him in a news article that said he passed away in hospital. It was horrible. Like I said, he was conscious when they were getting him in the ambulance, and I think he actually tried to thank me before they shut the doors and sped off with their lights on.

I really did think he was going to be fine, and then to find out that he died as the result of some horrid little gang feud was just absolutely horrifying to me. 100% the single worst thing that's ever happened to me and I'm not sorry that I don't live in that part of London anymore. To be continued... narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, 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 of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data,

located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. you