The Lets Read Podcast - 253: FINDING A MASS GRAVE AT THE BOTTOM OF A LAKE | 17 True Scary Stories | EP 241

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Texas, deep sea exploration & waste management encounters HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsRead ♫ Music & Audio Mix: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, IQbar and Astonishing Legends

Mom, Mom, did you see my race? Of course I did, darling. Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year you might do better. But I did win, Mom.

You did? When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149. And one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit Specsavers.ca for pairs of glasses from $149 and one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. Excuse me.

Why are you walking so close behind me? Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay. Well, you know what? Specsavers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149. And, oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses.

Sounds great! Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry, then! To my count. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. I'm a professional diver, and I posted a story of mine a couple of weeks ago or so. I'm not going to write it up again, but to give you the gist of it, I was doing body recovery on a contract for local law enforcement. I found a body, attached a line and started swimming to the surface when something grabbed the body and started dragging it at an incredible speed.

I cut the line just in time to prevent myself from being yanked down with it. I'm sure some of you deep sea loving individuals will remember that story. I've got a couple of other stories of my own that I can go into more depth if you guys want, mostly involving fish that were a bit too big for comfort coming to take a look while I was doing some welding or that time I rebreather malfunctioned and I started having a full blown drug trip while I was 200 meters underwater. Fun stuff. I've got a ton more interesting stories though, mostly from other divers. I can't speak to the truth of them because I wasn't there and some are pretty out there.

Keep in mind, some of these stories are sort of like diver urban legends. They get passed around until nobody can remember where they started. And the story I'm about to tell you though, I heard from a good friend of mine, a dive master who trained me on my first dives. I have no reason to believe that he's lying. This was back sometime in the late 80s, I believe. My friend, Frank, had just gotten out of the Navy and started doing civilian work, mostly welding. He worked with the police for a short time, like I did. Like me, for Frank, diving was both a hobby and a job, so he would spend his weekends exploring known shipwrecks and points of interest known to the local diving community. Sometimes he

would just set anchor in a random spot and dive down to see what he could find. He usually found a whole lot of nothing, but on this particular occasion, he hit the jackpot. Metaphorically speaking, because there was nothing good about what he found. He was doing an extreme depth dive that day, which as I explained in my last post, I'm not going to name the lake that he was diving in just in case it somehow leads back to him, but it was a very large lake that was 900 plus feet deep, so he was pushing the boundaries a bit, especially since he was solo diving without any partners. He got to the bottom and, as per usual, there was just the usual sand, silt, and

some rocks covered with algae. Not even any fish that he could see. He dug around in the sand a bit to see if he could find anything, and he felt something hard and smooth buried a few inches under the surface. Frank grabbed it and tried to take a closer look at it, away from the floating sand. It was some sort of prescription bottle with a label worn or torn off. So he put it off to the side and kept digging. He found something much bigger right away. He pulled it out of the sand and to his shock, he was staring at a human skull. He dug around in the sand some more to find the bones, pretty much feeling his way around because the fine sediments that he was digging up made his visibility almost zero. He found something else hard and pulled it out, but

it wasn't another bone. It was another skull. He kept digging and estimated that he found at least 200, likely more, skeletal remains at the bottom. Mixed with the skeletons were, he estimated, thousands upon thousands of prescription bottles like the one he found earlier. He didn't have enough oxygen or time to stay down for long, so he dug around in a few spots to see how large the dump of bodies and bottles were. He estimated that it could have been almost 50 by 50 feet roughly in size, so it's possible that there could have been many, many more bodies there than his estimate. Probably the spookiest bit is that since he had done work with the police, he knew what a body looks like underwater at various stages of decomposition. The bones had been picked clean by fish, but the bones themselves couldn't have been

there for much longer than five years. Being a good citizen, Frank carried one of the skull pieces up with him to the surface. He talked to some of the people he'd worked with in the police as a diver and they immediately told him that they were not going to investigate that and that he should never speak about that again. Being someone who valued his own safety, Frank did just that and ended up moving to the other side of the country about a year later. He never told me why, but I've got the feeling that he no longer felt safe working or living in that area. Okay, time for one of my own shorter stories. Frank has more interesting stories than me, but I want to share some stuff from my own personal experiences as well, and this actually happened just last year.

I was doing some maintenance and repair work on a dam for an artificial lake. I had chosen the spot to work in particular because it was a treasure trove for exploration as a diver. Since the lake was artificial, there were several small villages, farms, and homes that had been submerged when it was constructed, something that's surprisingly common when it comes to artificial lakes. So I was down at the bottom of the dam, doing a visual inspection of the gate guides and seal plates, trying to find anything that needed maintenance or replacement. It was summer, so the water was pretty murky and visibility was low. Something bumped or nudged me on the back

and I turned around expecting to see my dive partner but instead I was staring right at the face of the biggest, ugliest catfish I've ever seen. Water does weird things to your perception of size but I could swear this thing must have been the size of a small SUV. If it had wanted to, it could have eaten me no problem. I froze in place because I hadn't expected to be in danger from aquatic wildlife when a freshwater dive, but it swam away and circled around for a while as I worked. It's actually fairly common for a fish to watch you while you work, but I've never seen one as big as this before, and I'm just glad that it wasn't hungry. Now the next story is a bit out there, so to speak.

I trust Frank, but being deep underwater can do strange things to the human mind. Narcosis can and does cause hallucinations among other mental disruptions. I've experienced it myself first hand. When it's happening, your brain can't distinguish reality from the hallucination and there's never a point in your mind where you go, oh, I'm hallucinating. It's usually a case of the frog boiling where it comes on you slowly. Anyway, back to the story, this was probably in the late 90s to early 2000s. Frank wasn't really clear on the date when he told me the story. Frank was probably in the late 90s to early 2000s. Frank wasn't really clear on the date when he told me the story. Frank, at this point, had graduated from casual recreational exploration to full-blown treasure hunting. He had a boat with sonar designed to find shipwrecks

and all sorts of neat stuff. To this day, he hasn't found anything of actual value, but I suppose the thrill of the chase is a treasure of its own. It was a long week, and Frank was making a big expedition to a remote part of the coastline where an old ship apparently sunk in the early colonial period. Nobody ever found the wreck. The route was known, but there was a storm and they never arrived. The location was extremely remote. You either got there by boat, almost a two-day trip from near a suitable launch, or you hiked there on foot. Frank figured that the remoteness of the area accounted for the wreck never being found, which is why he was so keen to search

himself. He still talks to me about going back there today, since he now has a portable sonar system that he can mount on a canoe. He didn't have one of those back then, since he now has a portable sonar system that you can mount on a canoe. He didn't have one of those back then, so he just packed a bunch of food and supplies for the weekend along with his diving gear. I doubt you could even carry a canoe with you on that hike, but if anyone could, it would be Frank. He gets to the ocean, sets up camp a ways from the ocean in a sheltered nook, then drags his gear down to the ocean and goes for a dive. The first day, he just snorkels mostly. The second day, after he has the lay of the land, his words not mine, Frank decided to go diving. He only had two cylinders of air with him from the hike, so he had to make his time count if he wanted to find anything. The entire expedition was ill-advised in my opinion, but Frank does what Frank wants, apparently.

He thought he knew exactly where the wreck was because he had figured out where the currents were pulling any debris. So, he set out for that spot, swam in, and dived. Frank gets to the bottom and, to his disappointment, does not find a shipwreck or sunken treasure or anything really of interest. There's a lot of just various debris and rubbish. Even just when he's about to give up, he hears the telltale sound of a boat motor coming from the surface. His immediate instinct is to surface and say hi, but his instincts were screaming something else. So, he decided to wait and see until he ran out of oxygen and had to resurface. He swims up a bit closer to the surface to see if he can find a boat following the sound.

He sees a boat coming above him and cut off the engines, and something big gets tossed into the water and begins to sink like a rock. Frank said that it was immediately obvious to him what it was based on the silhouette, but he didn't fully realize until the man sank past him, eyes bulging with shock, screaming with empty lungs. Frank followed him to the bottom as fast as he could, and when he got there, the guy was still unconscious, but just barely. He pulled off his rebreather and fitted it over the guy's face while trying to free his legs. His legs had been put in buckets full of cement, and Frank alternated breaths on the rebreather for about 15 minutes

while desperately trying to break the guy's feet out of the concrete without any luck. The whole time he thought the guy was trying to talk to him, trying to say something that he couldn't understand. After about 15 minutes, Frank realized that he couldn't get the guy's legs free. If he stayed down any longer, he would run out of air and die himself. He said leaving the guy down there to drown was the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. The poor bastard realized Frank was leaving and frantically grabbed him, trying to rip off his rebreather and keep it for himself. Frank ended up kicking him in the face and swimming off without looking back.

He eventually resurfaced and reported this to the police, and they found the body about a week later. Apparently it was a mob-related killing. It actually happens more often than you think. I don't think Frank ever got over what happened. The way he described it, first the pure relief and joy when Frank gave him the rebreather, and the agonized, panicked fear when he realized Frank was leaving him. Being someone who dives for a living, I've had lots of friends who have drowned on the job for various reasons. It's not something you really dwell on a lot, but this man has always stuck with

me. What the hell was he thinking in his final moments? It's probably due to my line of work, but I've got a bit of a fascination with death, or rather, the final thoughts right before death. That last final spark before everything gets snuffed out forever. To be continued... who has experience in both deep sea wells and nature research studies with reefs. Apparently, the carpet ate one of his rafts on an expedition, according to him. It happened late one night while the rest of the crew was sleeping. He was pulling an all-nighter, studying the sea life around volcanic vents. He was moving the raft from one vent area to the next when he saw what he described as churning sediments on the seafloor. A giant moving cloud of underwater dust essentially moving towards the raft.

He moved in closer and saw what he described as a colossal ectoderm crawling along the seafloor, with long dexterous filaments probing the seafloor ahead of it. He maneuvered the raft in for a closer look and used the arm to prod one of the filaments. In the seafloor ahead of it. He maneuvered the raft in for a closer look and used the arm to prod one of the filaments. In the blink of an eye, he lost contact with the raft. Apparently, it happened so fast he didn't even see it happen. One second the thing was about five meters away from the vehicle, and the next second it had swallowed the thing whole. His excuse for not having footage was that the footage was all recorded and stored on the raft, rather than being recorded on the operating station, which seems pretty fishy to me.

However, he was very confident in himself to the extent that he claims that he is the discoverer of this new species. He gave it a name, which I completely forgot because it was so stupid and boring, but giant sea carpet sounds way cooler anyways. And way, way back in the mid-90s I read a book on cryptids that there was something called the hide. Apparently, it was a flattish thing with eyes along the rim, about the size of a large cowhide, hence the name. From what I recall, there was one observation of such a creature rising up to an underwater trench to absorb a shark that had somehow become paralyzed by it. It was observed at some distance by a diver. Does any of that ring a

bell for anyone? Supposedly it took place somewhere off the Pacific coast of South America. Some people who claim to have seen the thing mentioned other similar things. A lot of the stuff I've heard from other divers seems like it could be attributed to very rare and very large siphonophores that live in the deep sea. Now the following is a response to the previous post. What you're talking about was described to me as a sort of pancake-shaped creature that would hide under the sand with a single small near-transparent tentacle floating upwards. A diver touched it, spasmed, and immediately the creature rose out of the sand to devour him. Don't touch strange things in the ocean. People may as well go on a tangent and talk about some other stories I've heard that might be attributed to siphonophores. There was this one cranky old

retired diver who swore he'd seen a sea monster of unfathomable size on a dive once. I always assumed that he was full of it, but the way he described it sounds a lot like a siphonophore. The story went something like this. He was on a dive doing something that I've forgotten when he saw an absolute giant tentacle stretching up from the nearby drop-off. The thing was so huge that he couldn't see the beginning nor end of it. So now he goes around constantly claiming to have come within a hairbreadth of being devoured by a gargantuan sea leviathan of unfathomable proportion. And yes, that is exactly how we talked. Looking into siphonophores, it makes total sense that something like this

could exist, though it would be less of a sea monster and more of a giant serpentine jelly blob sifting through plankton and floating nutrients. Another siphonophore-related story I've heard is about an absolutely gargantuan jellyfish-type creature that was allegedly about the size of a military submarine. The diver who saw it said the thing was so massive that it had somehow developed its own biosphere, with various species of fish circling around and swimming inside it. He described it as having an appearance like a giant upside down orchid suspended underneath a massive sphere of translucent jelly. The coloration was very dull, but that might have just been due to the extreme depth. This story is a bit out there in terms of believability.

It's not a very widely spread or widely believed story, mostly because of how crazy and supernatural it is. If you work as a diver for long enough, you're bound to run into a few people like this, ultra-superstitious guys who believe in all sorts of curses, bad luck, sea monsters, etc. A common belief you'll find among many of them is this sea deity, god, or demon called Davy Jones, who roams the seafloor searching for divers or sailors who have displeased him for one reason or another. Whether something or someone is lost at sea and never recovered, Davy Jones has got it. What makes this story interesting is the description one guy gave

me of this Davy Jones because it's pretty spooky. The guy claimed to have seen on one of his dives a trail of giant footprints approximately as long in length as he was tall, so about five and a half feet long since the guy was pretty short, and though he'd never seen it himself, he claimed that one of his friends had. This Davy Jones was a bipedal humanoid that stood over 200 feet tall, had stalk-like limbs, walking along the seafloor and kicking up great clouds of silt behind him as he walked. According to this guy, looking into the face of this creature meant instant death for his village. It would be too terrifying for any mere human to behold. To be continued... All divers gather round, for I'm back with more stories from my colleagues around the world.

Please sit around the campfire and enjoy a good old-fashioned tale. They don't make them like they used to. Have you heard of the raptures of the deep? Few people have. At 30 meters below the surface, water pressure alters the properties of gases within the human body. What was once harmless or vital begins to poison your mind. The deeper the depth, the deadlier the poison becomes. Symptoms include impairment, euphoria, laughter, anxiety, hallucinations, hysteria, terror, and death. Yet we still venture into

those depths, risking our lives and minds, delving into a place where the barrier between the mind and reality becomes very thin. Those of us who return can bring with us only memories of a bizarre alien world beneath the waves. These are some of those memories, tales from beyond the depths of madness. My first story of the night is not set in the depths of the ocean but rather on the surface. This story was told to me by a captain of a ship that I was on for research work. A good Aussie chap who always had a good yarn or story to tell about life at sea. At the beginning of his career on the sea, he was the greenhorn on a commercial deep sea fishing trawler. They mostly caught black cod, though a lot of other fish got caught in the net

and were discarded. He said that the deeper you laid your nets, the stranger things you pulled to the surface would be. Beyond a certain depth, the fish became inedible, their flesh transforming into a pale, gelatinous substance not long after reaching the surface. One night in particular, it seems this crew set their nets too deep. As the nets were raised out of the water, dripping wet and filled with pale, wriggling flesh, it became apparent that something was wrong. The fish were screaming, and the noise was unbearable. Some of the crew ran below deck, and the rest put in earplugs. After some debate, they opened up the net on the deck to examine the fish. The captain swore that when they did, he saw fish with human faces,

distorted, corpulent and distended, unmistakably human, and they were screaming. Pale blobs of flesh with drooping faces, fleshy noses and black eyes, wretchedly screamed in anger, pain, or hate. They were quickly thrown overboard and the crew fished in shallower waters from that point onward. The next story is one of my own. Those of you who have been in previous threads might recall me talking about this briefly. I was doing a mixed gas dive to the bottom, which was 60 meters deep in this part of the lake. Mostly I was looking for valuables or other odds and ends that ended up at the bottom of the lake. When I was a kid, I took a tooth on a boat trip.

I think that was when my fascination with the deep began. My mind fixated on the idea of my tooth sinking to the murky bottom and lying there, lost to the depths forever. I enjoyed finding those things and bringing them back to the surface. It's so rare that you can bring something tangible with you from the deep. On this particular day, I brought back with me something that was intangible yet infinitely more valuable than any treasure. I still had over half my cylinder and was enjoying scanning over the lake floor, sifting through the sediment and whatever odds and ends had ended up there. Out of the blue, I had a powerful intuition that I was being watched. I turned around and saw a man

standing there behind me on the ocean floor. He smiled at me broadly and waved his hand. That's when I recognized him in a sort of stunned shock. I was face to face with my dead father on the lake floor, 60 meters below the surface. He pointed to my cylinder and said something, his face wrinkled with concern. Well, he tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth, only bubbles came out, and I couldn't understand what he was trying to say. He pointed again, directly at my oxygen regulator. It slowly dawned on me what was happening. The equipment was malfunctioning, giving me an improper mix of gases that at this depth

can result in raptures of the deep narcosis. At this point I was aware that I was hallucinating. I should have started swimming back up immediately, but I couldn't. I had left so much unsaid to my father. He had died in a boating accident a few years before and I had never really gotten over it. He was just there one moment and gone the next. I never said goodbye. You have certain regrets when someone dies, things left unsaid. I always mull them over in my mind. I wish I'd said this, why didn't I tell him that before he died? And I finally had a chance to tell him those things, to have that goodbye, but I couldn't speak because of the stupid rebreather in my mouth.

I started to rip off my mask and rebreather so I could talk to him, but he grabbed my hand. I yanked against him and tried to pull off my mask, but he wouldn't let me. Frustrated, I screamed into my mask, bubbles floating up around me in a stream to the surface, and then I felt him pull me into a hug, the kind he used to give me when I was a little kid. And in that instant, I just knew that he understood, that I knew that this was him saying goodbye.

When the bubbles cleared, he was gone. I swam back towards the surface, spent a few minutes at my safety stop and then resurfaced. I know it wasn't real, that it couldn't possibly be real. And besides, I don't even believe in ghosts. I know I didn't really see my father or my father's ghost down there. It was probably a manifestation of my subconscious desire or some nonsense. I'm not a psychologist. But even still, it's hard for me not to want to believe that it was real in some small way. That my mind was more open in that state and he reached out. I'm not sure why.

I guess it's just that it felt like he was there. It felt like him. It felt so goddamn much like him. God. I miss him. This is another story from Frank. If you remember him from one of the earlier deep sea threads I posted in, in case you weren't in these threads, Frank was my diving instructor, an absolute legend who has been around for a while and seen lots of strange crap.

He never told me exactly where or when this took place, which is kind of irrelevant. In any case, he was taking a group of new diver trainees out on a dive for their certification. Usually they start you out in shallow water and after a few dives they take you out somewhere deeper. Frank goes out into the ocean to get you used to the sensation of being underwater and being unable to see the bottom, an important thing to get used to if you're a diver. There's lots of places where the shelf becomes a sheer drop-off, potentially hundreds of meters straight down into nothing but abyss. If you're not used to it, just seeing it can induce panic and terror in certain people. The deep does that to certain people. I would recommend not becoming a diver if you have some sort of phobia or fear of deep water. Facing your fears is great and all, but having a panic attack while you're

40 meters underwater is a bad idea. Frank said that people who panicked or were scared of deep open water were pretty common. Hell, I got pretty scared my first time, but he says there's another reaction he's only seen once, though he's heard of it from other diving instructors. The only way he could describe it is the call of the deep. They dropped into the water off the boat, and Frank could immediately tell something was off. This kid hung back from the group, staring down into the water. Frank tried to pull him back, but he shook off his arm and started swimming away straight down. Frank waited a second and then started after him. He caught up about 30 meters

and grabbed his leg. The kid looked back at him, smiled, and then pushed away and continued going straight down. Frank followed him for a bit and tried to stop him again, but the guy just kept going further and further down. Eventually, Frank had to stop and let him go or risk dying himself. And to this day, Frank said it was the most unnerving thing he's ever seen. What could possibly compel a man to just swim straight down into the ocean? What did he think awaited him down there? The kid's body was never found, and the parents actually tried to sue Frank,

but he was exonerated by the testimony of the other trainees who backed up his claims. The police chalked it up to the kid actually wanting to take his own life, but I'm pretty sure there's a long list of better ways to do that. As I said, this isn't an isolated incident. No cause or motivation has ever been determined, and the reason why these people swim to their deaths remains a complete mystery. Mom! Mom! Did you see my race? Of course I did, darling!

Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year you might do better. But I did win, Mom. You did? When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149.

And one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. 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 our tread experts. Toyo's open country family of tires

will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca I was conducting a recovery dive in a local lake for the police, recovering the body of some idiotic kid who hadn't worn his life jacket while drinking on a party boat. The lake was deep enough to require mixed gas to avoid narcosis. I followed all the normal protocols, keeping in contact with my diving partner and monitoring my dive computer. It doesn't take long to reach the bottom, but getting back up always takes much longer.

My partner and I split up to cover more ground due to the extremely low visibility. It must have been about five minutes before I saw it. A human silhouette standing upright at the lake's bottom. I swam closer and found him perfectly preserved without a sign of decay on his body. He was buried and silt up to his shins. It really looked like he could still be alive or had only been dropped into the water a few moments ago. I tied a line to him and started to head back up toward the surface so I could signal the boat to haul up the body. I swam up, letting the line play out behind me until I reached my first safety stop. While I was waiting for my body to decompress

further, I noticed that the spool of the line was still being pulled out even though I had stopped. It was completely taut and unspooling at a blistering speed. It took me about half a second to realize that my reel was about to run out, and I was about to be pulled down by the line. There was a good 900 plus feet on my line, and the speed at which it was being reeled out was so tremendous that as soon as I grabbed it, my hand was split almost completely open to the bone. In retrospect, that was a foolish thing to do, but it was just basic instinct to grab the rope and try to cut it with my knife. I then had a sudden burst of clarity and

cut the straps holding the reel to my suit after a few seconds before the line ran out, causing it to vanish into the murky water. Within about half a second, I felt as if though the force of the whiplash alone would have been strong enough to break my back and kill me if I hadn't cut the straps. I was pretty shaken at this point, more shaken than I had been since I'd found my first dead kid. Nevertheless, I managed to ascend slowly and take my safety stops despite the pain, fear, and of course, all the blood leaking out of my hand. It's a good thing this was a freshwater dive, or I might have been in real trouble on my way up. Anyway, my knee-jerk reaction, and what everyone else told me, was that it was narcosis-fueled hallucinations.

Divers see all sorts of crazy things when narcosis kicks in. I've heard stories of fish and squid with human faces. Some guy swears that he was face to face with Cthulhu. My point is that narcosis is, to an extent, like temporarily being on DMT and it can make you see some absolutely insane things. The only thing I could make sense of was how I got the cut on my hand. It's clearly from a rope. It's not clean enough to be from my knife or any other sharp object. The doctor even noticed that I had friction burns all surrounding the cut. So what the heck caused the cut, if I was hallucinating? And if I wasn't hallucinating, what the heck dragged out a line that fast?

What really keeps me up at night is that the guy was resting on the bottom of the lake and my line was going straight down. So either he was pulled through the bottom of the lake or something with incredible strength and speed grabbed my rope and was reeling me in like a fish. I'm not sure which scenario is worse. So, this is another story from Frank, and it's a fascinating one. During his time as a commercial diver on the west coast, Frank made an intriguing friend. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Frank first encountered his friend while performing a basic maintenance checkup at the local marina. He was inspecting the moorings to ensure they're in good condition when he noticed something unusual. One of the mooring chains appeared to be protruding straight out of a large rock on the ocean floor. Curious, Frank approached it to take a closer look and to his surprise, the chain was somehow embedded in the rock. Perplexed, Frank reached out and realized that the rock felt oddly soft and squishy. And strangely, the rock even seemed to be looking at him. Suddenly, the color of the rock flashed to a pale white and in an instant, the entire rock vanished in a cloud of dark ink. By now, you might have guessed it. Frank's friend is a Pacific giant octopus.

These creatures can weigh around 110 pounds and boast a tentacle-to-tentacle span of over 14 feet in diameter. They possess the remarkable ability to change the color of every cell in their bodies, allowing them to mimic almost any object on the sea floor. They were both sizable and nearly invisible, not to mention highly intelligent. Luckily for Frank, this particular octopus, whom he named Frederick, turned out to be mischievous rather than a dangerous menace like some accounts of giant octopuses suggest. Over the following months, Frank had several encounters with Frederick during various dives. Frederick had a penchant for mimicking peculiar objects,

suddenly flashing white upon discovery and then playfully swimming away in a cloud of ink. After a while, Frank simply started assuming that any odd sight he encountered was Frederick's way of playing a prank on him, and he began to ignore such displays. However, this only led Frederick to engage in more creative pranks, like tickling the back of Frank's head while he was looking or toying with the valves on his diving equipment. After a series of such interactions, where Frederick's antics were ignored one time too many, Frederick briefly tampered with Frank's oxygen regulator before restoring it. From then on, Frank made sure to not disregard his friend, and even occasionally brought down toys or objects from the surface for Frederick to play with. This unusual friendship persisted for most of the year, until around January when Frederick vanished for several weeks. Frank admitted relief, but he couldn't help worry about his friend's whereabouts.

Eventually, Frank rediscovered Frederick at the same marina where they had first crossed paths. Frederick was coiled around the mooring chain, camouflaged as a rock. However, his disguise wasn't as convincing as before. The rock was conspicuously dotted with white spots. Frank greeted Frederick in his customary way of waving hello, and after a moment's pause, Frederick waved back, briefly flashing white before reverting to a rock-like hue. Frank lingered for a while, but Frederick seemed uninterested in games like hide-and- and seek, so Frank returned to his tasks. After about a week of half expecting to spot Frederick on one of his dives, Frank revisited the marina. Frederick was still there, wrapped around the chain.

He no longer pretended to be a rock. His skin was now a bright red with molted white spots. He acknowledged Frank with a wave and a flash of white, then reverted to his red hue. Frank had brought fish this time, yet Frederick declined the meal and remained anchored around the mooring. The following day, Frank returned with a lobster, apparently Frederick's favorite food. Still, Frederick clung to the mooring chain and rejected the lobster. He didn't wave or flash white as usual. The subsequent day, Frederick was nowhere to be

found, and for the next month, Frank returned to the marina weakly hoping to see Frederick again, but the octopus was conspicuously absent. Eventually, Frank relinquished the hope of encountering his friend at that location. Yet to this day, Frank relinquished the hope of encountering his friend at that location. Yet to this day, Frank sometimes inspects peculiar rocks or objects underwater, hoping for one last glimpse of Frederick. At the bottom of the ocean, one can find numerous things, but a friend is rarely among them. This story comes from an intrepid treasure hunter who I'll call Carl. Carl was a week into his two-week treasure hunting voyage slash vacation,

and so far he had little success and today wasn't any better. It was nearing lunchtime and all he'd done was sit around drinking beer and watching a sonar. Finally, he spotted something that piqued his interest. A pole-shaped object jutting out of the ocean floor and propped against a large rock outcrop. More often than not, Carl mentioned objects like this on sonar ended up just being old waterlogged trees that had sunk to the bottom. However, there was always a chance that it was the mast of a long sunken ship shattered by undersea currents with its treasures and artifacts spread across the sea floor.

Hoping for a much needed win, Carl prepared his gear and dove. The descent was uneventful, visibility was good, and he could spot the object from a distance. As he got closer, his excitement grew and he became more convinced that it was a wreck. Finally reaching the spot, he discovered that the beam was in fact jutting out of the rock rather than leaning against it. The rock was weathered and covered by dead coral and barnacles along with the mast. The shape was distinctly similar to the hull of a large ship. An intact hull meant intact treasure, and Carl eagerly began to search for an entry point to investigate the interior. After a few minutes of searching, he couldn't find a single hole or break in the coral-encrusted exterior of the wreck, which was a bit odd given that the ship had sunk.

Carl almost gave up hope until he came across something extremely strange, a perfectly preserved door embedded in the side of the hall. Carl's first instinct was to open it, but out of nowhere, every single one of his instincts started screaming alarm bells at him. He hadn't seen a single fish or sign of life on or near the wreck. The wreck was old, too old for there to be a perfectly preserved modern door complete with an uncorroded brass handle in the side of the hall. He pulled back and took another closer look at the wreck as a heavy sense of dread began to overtake him. He found a patch of the mast where the coral crust had fallen away, revealing the surface. After knocking on it a few times, Carl realized that the mast where the coral crust had fallen away, revealing the true surface.

After knocking on it a few times, Carl realized that the mast wasn't made of wood. It was stone. If the entire wreck was petrified, it was very, very old. Much too old to make any sense, and much, much too old for there to be a completely preserved modern door in the side of the hull. Who the hell puts a door in the side of the hall. Who the hell puts a door in the side of their ship anyways? The sense of dread Carl was fearing became overpowering. Every single one of his senses was screaming at him that he shouldn't be there, that he

didn't belong, that something was very, very wrong. But there was no way that he could just come all the way out here, make the discovery of a lifetime and just leave. So he swallowed his fear and headed back towards the door. He wasn't going to let nerves take away what was possibly one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century. As he swam around the hole to the section containing the door, the fear intensified until, as he described it, it felt like he was having a complete mental breakdown. Still, he pushed through his fear and toward the door. As it came into sight, he noticed something was wrong. The door was ajar and slowly opening from the inside.

Carl sat there for what must have been a full few seconds, watching the door open. His entire body screamed at him to run. And that was when he felt something else. Something watching him from inside the door. Something that Carl could only describe as pure, unthinkable evil. Carl made a mad dash for the surface, hyperventilating and screaming into his mask, not daring to look back as he could feel a presence following behind him, watching with hungry eyes. He shot straight to the surface without any safety stops, flopped onto his boat and headed back towards land at full speed. He managed to call the Coast Guard for help, despite being wracked with pain from decompression sickness. He was picked up off of his ship in a helicopter and flown to the nearest decompression chamber,

and thanks to the quick rescue, Carl survived, albeit with permanent joint damage and some paralysis in his left leg that put an end to his treasure hunting career. He refused to share the location of the wreck with me, and it seems that some things on the bottom of the ocean aren't meant to be found. The story comes from early in my time as a commercial diver on the Hibernia rig. The rig is the biggest in the world and is absolutely massive, basically a small city jutting out of the seafloor. The entire thing is on top of a massive concrete platform settled on the bottom of the ocean, which is also used to store barrels of crude.

Even back when I was doing this, safety regulations were very important. Unlike most of my other jobs where I mostly inspected and repaired the integrity of the structures themselves, I was checking the oil storage itself to ensure that it was safe, secure, and not leaking out of containment. It was good, steady work inspecting the site nearly every day, and it paid well. Usually I worked with a group of two other divers. The day this happened was like pretty much any other. The weather was terrible, the onboard chef's omelette was delicious, and the rig workers were also terrible. Nothing new, so we began to dive.

I reached my target and began inspecting lids, seams, and taking water samples to ensure no minute particle leakage. After a few minutes, I got a weird feeling on the back of my neck that I was being watched. I turned around to see one of my partners, floating a distance away from me, watching me work. I waved at him and gave the okay sign to signify that I was okay and he returned it. I wasn't sure why he was watching me instead of doing his own work, but I didn't really care much. However,

I had a feeling in my gut that something wasn't right. I mulled it over in my mind while I worked. Something about him seemed off, but I had no idea what it was. So I turned around again after a bit and sure enough, he was still there watching me. I waved at him and made the same okay hand sign and again he returned it. Something about the way he did it made me feel disgusted and repulsed. The fingers looked wrong, if that makes any sense. I don't remember enough detail to describe exactly how they moved incorrectly, but I felt a distinct uncanny valley level repulsion upon seeing it. I was looking at something very, very wrong. My gut instinct was screaming at me that this

guy was dangerous, and that's when I realized what had actually been bugging me initially. The guy didn't have any bubbles coming out of his regulator. Oh god, this guy doesn't have a rebreather. My diving partner has a rebreather. This isn't my diving partner. Wait, how can this guy be giving off bubbles without a rebreather? And here's where I need to explain a bit of technical stuff for those not familiar with diving equipment. Regulators are those typical scuba masks you see. You breathe in air from them and exhale into the sea. Rebreathers are much bulkier and they recycle the air you're exhaling, reusing it so that you get more efficiency for longer or deeper dives.

Regulators make bubbles and rebreathers don't. As I said, all our guys on the rig used rebreathers. It was company policy and the best option. This diver was using a regulator and on top of that, he wasn't making any bubbles, which was just screaming all kinds of alarms. I stared at him for a second as he floated there, staring back at me through the gloomy water. My stupid search and rescue slash recovery instincts kicked in and I assumed this diver was having an emergency malfunction with his rebreather and couldn't breathe, possibly already unconscious or dead. So I tried to suppress the blaring warning signs in my gut and swam over to him as quickly as I could.

The warning signs in my gut grew worse the closer I got. There was just something about this guy that was wrong somehow. I can't describe it any other way than that I knew instinctually that he should not exist, that he was wrong. Finally, my gut got the better of me just as I reached out to pull off his broken regulator so he could share my rebreather on our way up. I stopped my hand a few inches away from the mask and felt an intense jolt of fear. Staring down into his mask, there was nothing behind it. It was completely empty. No eyes, no face, no skull, no corpse, just blackness. I reached out with my hand and

touched the top of his head. His wetsuit hood squished inwards as I pushed, deforming the shape of his head. And that's when it moved. The thing turned its mask up towards my face, raising its hand and making the okay sign again. My body was in full flight or fight mode at this moment, and though I'm no coward, spooky phantom divers are pretty far beyond my limits of what I'm willing to engage with. So I swam away, putting a decent distance between us before I dared look back. When I turned to look, I saw the diver floating backwards into the current, leaking black oil or blood or something from his mask and limbs. It wasn't long before he was entirely hidden behind a black cloud, vanishing into the murky sea. I went back up to the surface as quickly as humanly possible, assuming that I had a bad gas mix or a malfunctioning rebreather causing narcosis.

The maintenance crew never found anything wrong with my gear though. That doesn't rule out the possibilities of narcosis induced hallucinations. Being in the Navy, you get to see a lot of the world, and with two deployments currently under my belt, I have seen a lot of crazy things. However, this occurred during my last deployment, and it's a moment I'll never forget. Not just due to the fact that it's left me physically shaken, but there was no explanation to what we saw that night. I had watched from midnight to four in the morning, and my watch station is in a little area right behind the bridge. In this area, I was the supervisor of a small team of four others, making sure that they did their job properly, which was to make sure that we knew what other ships are out there, who they are, and where they came from. The midnight watch is usually pretty boring as

nothing really happens around that time. The bridge team tend to keep to themselves around that time and only came to bug us when they had questions about a ship or any possible ships in the area. I had one person out on the bridge to talk to the lookouts which were people stationed around the ship that made visual reports to the bridge on other ships or any marine life that could be near us. To ensure that I knew what the lookouts were reporting, I had a speaker hooked up to the station that the lookouts used to talk to each other and make reports. Usually during this time, the lookouts liked to talk about nonsense and gossip amongst each other. I will admit, a lot of their conversations were funny.

On this particular night, however, one of the lookouts made a report to the bridge and I knew something was wrong because she sounded extremely nervous and here is the initial report. Bridge? Port Fantail? Go ahead Port Fantail. Bridge, the water behind us is glowing. Say again? I can't explain it any other way, but the water is glowing. What the hell? I said to myself as I went out to the bridge and talked to my guy out there, making sure that he heard what I heard as well. We both reported it to the JOOW, the junior officer of the watch, and he thought it was weird as well, but claimed that it might just be bioluminescent algae, which, although extremely uncommon, it made sense at the time. I told my guy to pass the word back to the lookout in hopes that it would calm her down. As I walked back to my station, I heard the lookout talking through

the speaker, teasing and making fun about her reporting glowing algae. After that, all seemed normal. About 20 minutes later, I heard the lookout come out again, and this time, talking to one of the other lookouts. Starboard Fantail? Port Fantail? Yeah? Did you see the water glowing in the distance?

Yeah, what about it? I think it's following us. You're stupid. No, seriously, look at it. We think it's following us. You're stupid. No, seriously, look at it. We passed about 20 minutes ago, we shouldn't be able to see it anymore. You're either really tired or really paranoid, and you need to calm down." After that, the lookout again reported it to the bridge, and this time, the J-O-O-W told him the password to inform him when the

glowing algae got closer. I went outside myself to check it out and I did indeed see it. Although it could be nothing, I was a bit on edge also. Then out of nowhere, I visually see the glow rapidly getting closer to the ship coming in from behind. I ran back inside and heard the lookouts making the report, but before I could inform the bridge, the water around the ship started to glow. The glowing faded slowly then got brighter every few seconds, and everyone on the bridge was completely dumbfounded. No one moved or speak, just stood in place, watching as the bridge filled in and out with an ominous green glow. And this went on for a couple of minutes but felt like an eternity. I don't know what others were thinking, but I honestly thought that

this was the end. We then watched as whatever was glowing beneath the ship slowly moved away from us, moving ahead of us. Then, in a sudden flash of light, it was completely gone. Everyone on the bridge remained silent for about a minute, and even though everyone was shaken up, we all tried to get past it, and many went on like it never happened. Since there was no official report of the incidents, and since it was never passed down to the other watches, this event technically never happened except to those who witnessed it, which happens

more than you think. The captain was never informed on what had happened. I have not been able to stop thinking about that day and I haven't told anyone about it, not even my wife and family, not because they won't believe me, but because they worry about me constantly when I'm out at sea, so I kept it to myself until now. I just wanted to share what I experienced and to pass the word that there is something in the ocean. What is it? I don't know. And that truly terrifies me. Mom! Mom! Did you see my race? We'll be right back. Not you did. When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149,

and one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer, or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz, make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals.

Download the 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. I got a bunch of wild camping stories from back in the day, but there was only one time that I was ever really terrified. Bears and snakes, they're all hella scary, but they're stuff that you can do to avoid getting bitten or attacked or whatever.

You can hang on to bear mace or wear above the ankle hiking boots and rest easy knowing that you've done something to keep yourself safe. But when you're caught with your pants down in the middle of the night and you got no effing idea what's out there, that kind of fear hits different. So, my best buddy through all of middle school and high school was this kid, Beto. And Beto ended up going to UT Austin to study a business degree so every so often I drove over to Austin to go visit him. But then this one time he gets this idea that he wants to take me on a camping trip to Longhorn Cavern State Park. I say it like that because I can't think of anyone less likely to want

to go on a camping trip, but when he explained how dope it was going to be and how we'd be completely free out there to do whatever without ever having to worry about cops or anything like that, it did start sounding like something I might enjoy. I've never been that much on walking or being outdoors, but smoking out of a tent before grilling up a bunch of costillas and corn, I'll show up for that. But what I didn't know is that there was less chance of me filling my plate, and more chance of me filling my pants, if you know what I mean. Anyway, so we drive over there, walk out into the woods, set up our camp, and get to doing our thing. Before that, we'd always had to worry about getting pulled over or caught smoking or whatever, and it sucked, but then out in the woods, it was completely different. I didn't like all the bugs, like that part really sucked about it,

but just chilling by the fire, listening to tunes, and passing blunts, I gotta admit, it was pretty alright. But then, the forest started to get dark, and I don't know if you've lived your whole life in the city, and then suddenly decided to sit by a campfire in the middle of the woods while the sun goes down, but it gets weird out there at night. All kinds of things start creeping around and making noises, and every one of them had me like, what was that? Does it eat people? Get the gun out, dude, get the gun out. He just thought it was hilarious, and in all fairness to him, I was kind of overreacting for the comedic value. And then he says, that's an owl, dude. I'm not shooting an owl. They're cool.

And we played it off like that until I kind of settled into how noisy it can get at night in the woods. We stayed up for a while, just talking and smoking and drinking, and then once our eyes started getting heavy, we kicked a bunch of dirt over the fire and then got into our tent. My buddy, he's used to sleeping out in the woods like that because he'd been doing a bunch of hiking with friends from college. But me, I just lay there for like a whole entire hour, staring at the ceiling or whatever you call the top of a tent, imagining a bear's head just coming through

the door of the tent and eating me alive, junk first. Like the other stuff, that sounds kind of funny to think about now, and I kind of knew that I was being a big baby about it, but I swear to god, I started hearing another kind of sound, a bigger sound, and it was way closer than the others. It sounded like something rubbing up against a tree or leaning on it real hard to the point that it was actually creaking. Right away I sit up thinking, yo, this is different cause like I said, what the hell is so big that's making a whole tree creak like that? And it's close, so I didn't like that at all. I hear the tree creaking even more.

Louder, too, so I wake my buddy up, saying, What's that noise, my guy? I'm half expecting him to just say, like, Oh, that's a lesser-spotted whirlpool will or whatever crazy animal name he was saying before, but he doesn't. He sits up, same as me, and starts getting this real wigged out look on his face. That sent me into a low level panic because the whole time he'd been super chill about everything, so whatever was getting him reaching for his gun like that had to be bad, and right after, we hear some more creaking on the tree, heavier this time, so he gets his gun ready and points it at the tent door

like he's expecting some big bear to rip through it any second. I'm wondering to myself by that time, like, why didn't I bring a gun too? Because whatever it was, sounded like it'd take way more than just a 9mm to take it down. Then right when I think that I'm about to completely lose my mind, we hear this big creak followed by this insanely loud snap and a screech so loud and blood curdling that I swear that I feel like I was about to rip through the back of the tent with my bare hands and just run off into the darkness. We we just held still, too scared to move, just waiting in the best defense position that we could even though we were probably still horribly unprepared for whatever the hell was outside breaking down trees. After the screech,

everything went completely quiet, like so quiet that I could hear my own heart beating in my chest, and we just waited, too scared to even breathe until we were finally convinced that whatever had been out there was gone. I wanted to pack up our stuff and get out of there right away, but my buddy said that it'd be a worse idea to run. Whatever it was, we needed to stand our ground because if we ran, it'd probably chase us, and something that big doesn't lose what it chases. We even think about sleeping, and the most we advanced out of the tent was to unzip the front flap and shine our light out to make sure that nothing was just hiding out there. My buddy was incredibly brave as he kept his gun trained on that opening, but we waited until dawn to head out and look around. We saw the tree right away, lying less than 50 yards away, totally uprooted,

but completely dead too. And that's when my buddy started to act relieved, like we didn't have a problem. He said dead trees like that fall over sometimes, and although it might have scared the hell out of us, we were never in any true danger. Beto then took a look around the tree and then pointed at what he said were some porcupine spines. I didn't know porcupines even climbed trees, but Beto said that's what explained the evil screaming sound we heard. Poor little dude had been up in the tree sleeping, then woke up to it falling. He was probably more scared than we heard. Poor little dude had been up in the tree sleeping then woke up to it falling. He was probably more scared than we were. And that all makes sense to me and I'm not saying I know any better than him because that dude's smart and he always has been. But what he was never able to explain was what made the tree fall down in the first place. He said it himself.

He didn't notice it when we were making our camp and he knew to keep an eye out for dead trees. Not even for safety either because they make great firewood. He hadn't seen any that looked dead enough to really just topple over. But then there it was, right there in front of us. Roots all freaky and tentacle looking as they stuck out of the ground. I've talked to one or two people about this since and they think it was maybe a black bear trying to get up to the porcupine and maybe the tree falling down scared both of them off. Sure, that makes sense again and I'm not trying to say it was Bigfoot or anything like that, but neither of us actually saw what it was so we can't say for sure what it was or what it wasn't, right? And I'm telling you, it sounded way bigger than just a black bear. They're not even all that big. Are you saying a bear went for that tree over the smell of food that must have been all over our camp? Because that's the question that got my buddy thinking like, huh. And the one that still has me thinking, I'm never going out into the woods again. Just after midnight on December 13th of 1990, the lifeless body of 33-year-old Mary Lou Pratt was discovered lying in a yard in a low-income neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. She had been stripped, beaten, and then executed with a single.44 caliber gunshot

to the head. Within hours of her body's discovery, the case had been handed to Detective John West Fallon, a tobacco-chewing East Texan who dressed like a cowpoke and spoke like one too. Detective West Fallon was familiar with Mary, who by her mid-thirties was one of the most seasoned escorts in all of Oak Cliff. But of all the hookers he expected to find dead on the street, Mary was somewhere near the bottom of his list. Mary was no stranger to violent johns, but it was no accident that she'd survived in such a dangerous line of work for so long. Mary was extremely savvy with her

business and very rarely plied her trade to strangers on the street. Instead, Mary tended to visit a small number of so-called regulars, some of whom she trusted enough to drive her home for the night. But apparently, some of that trust had been gravely misplaced. Following her transportation to the Dallas County Coroner's Office, Detective Westfallen made sure to witness Mary's autopsy. The gaping hole in her skull quite clearly spoke to the cause of death, but those in attendance soon noticed something else regarding the condition of Mary's body. As Detective Westfallen and his partner stood a short distance from the blue plastic cart where Mary's body. As Detective West Follin and his partner stood a short distance from the blue plastic cart where Mary's body lay, Dr. Elizabeth Peacock peeled open the departed girl's eyelids.

She had done so to make a note of Mary's eye color, but all that stared back at her were two empty sockets. Dr. Peacock was morbidly impressed. Mary Pratt's eyeballs had been removed so carefully that her upper and lower eyelids were left completely undisturbed. The doctor told the watching detectives that it would have taken someone of extreme skill to carefully cut away the six major muscles holding each eye in their socket, meaning there was a horrifying chance Mary's killer was a skilled surgeon. Detective Westfallen knew that he was facing an uphill struggle. With no murder weapon, witnesses, or significant forensic evidence, there was little chance of answering the many questions which surrounded Mary's murder, namely, what kind of person would do something so twisted?

A few hours later, Dallas Patrol officers Regina Smith and John Matthews clocked in for their morning shift. The two officers' area of operations included a once-popular shopping district just off Jefferson Boulevard that had drastically deteriorated over the previous 25 years. Financial decline preceded a sharp rise in crime, which meant drugs, homelessness, and most importantly, prostitution. Smith and Matthews' assignment was to establish a presence in the area through community policing. Instead of aggressively prosecuting those involved in petty or non-violent crimes, Dallas PD sent Smith and Matthews to gather intelligence that would lead to the apprehension of the more dangerous or insidious criminals. But to gather intelligence, they first needed to win the trust of some rather

unconventional allies. Many in the Dallas PD referred to the beat as a public relations job, but Smith and Matthews could have been more accurately described as heavily armed social workers. Rather than arrest the many prostitutes that frequented Jefferson Boulevard, the two officers focused primarily on their safety. Anyone caught turning tricks during the daytime would be tossed in a cell, but those who plied their trade at night, in the quarantine zone of the ultra-sleazy star motel, were essentially free to do so as they pleased. As the girls became increasingly appreciative of the police protection, they began to talk, and soon, Smith and Matthews had established a deep rapport with several of the girls, along with a rough picture of local organized crime networks. The morning of December 13th was much like any other, and as the two officers approached the star, they soon noticed one of their regular customers. During Smith and Matthews' first meeting with Veronica Rodriguez, the 26-year-old had defied

their presence by soliciting a john right in front of them before aggressively resisting any attempt at engagement. A few months later, Veronica was greeting the officers with a friendly smile, but she remained a remarkably stoic young woman. So when Smith and Matthews turned on to Jefferson that morning and spotted Veronica waving them down with a panicked look on her face. They knew something was terribly wrong. The moment they pulled up next to her and rolled down their windows, Veronica leaned into the car and yelled, I almost got killed last night. She went on to explain that right in the middle of that night, her John had snapped and attempted to strangle her in a cornfield south of Dallas.

Veronica was known to tell the odd tall tale, but on this occasion, the officers were in no doubt that she was telling the truth. Veronica then told them that she'd been saved by a passing stranger who'd chased her alleged killer off, yet when asked for the name of this knight in shining armor, her memory suddenly grew hazy. A few days later, the plot thickened when Smith and Matthews found Veronica sharing the cab of a truck with a balding middle-aged Caucasian man. Confident that she was trying to work during prohibited hours, the two officers

attempted an arrest. But as they hauled the trucker out of his cab and ordered Veronica to do the same, she suddenly begged them not to arrest him. Please don't arrest him, she reportedly said. That's the man who saved me from being strangled. After putting him in handcuffs, Smith and Matthews learned the man's name was Axton Schindler. Aside from a few unpaid parking tickets, Schindler's record was completely clean, yet the officers then listened as he claimed Veronica's story was complete fiction. He hadn't saved her from any attack. He wasn't even one of her johns. He was just an old friend doing her a favor, at least so he claimed. Regardless, Schindler was hauled down to the department to pay off his fines while

Veronica was arrested for breaking the daylight ban on propositioning. To Smith and Matthews, it seemed like just another day on the job, yet months later, they'd realized a huge clue to Mary Pratt's murder had been hiding in plain sight. A few months later, on the morning of February 10th, 1991, 27-year-old Susan Peterson was found dead on the same street Mary Pratt was found. Susan had also been a prostitute and much like Mary, had been severely beaten before being stripped down to her underwear and shot in the head. Interestingly, although Susan's body had been dumped on the very same street as the first victim,

it was technically outside of the city limits. This meant that, instead of Dallas Police Department, the second murder fell under the jurisdiction of the Dallas County Sheriff's Department and their top homicide detective, Larry Oliver. Larry was unfamiliar with Mary Pratt's case, meaning that he had no idea that he had a potential serial killer on his hands. But just like Detective Westfallen, he had made sure to be present at the autopsy. He too discovered that Susan Peterson's eyes had also been removed and with the same careful precision as the first victim.

The next day, Detective Oliver drove over to the Dallas Police Department to speak with John Westfallen. The two detectives were initially reluctant to toss around the term serial killer, yet the gravity of the situation wasn't lost on either of them. They were dealing with a highly dangerous, highly deranged individual who was almost certainly planning another of his signature murders. In order to try and prevent further deaths, flyers warning of a potential spree killer were posted around Jefferson Boulevard. There was no mention of the surgical removal of the victim's eyes, but a deep sense of communal panic set in all the same. Smith and Matthews found that even the most hard-faced working girls of Jefferson Boulevard were now only too happy to talk to them. But while the move was fantastic for community relations,

it deeply frustrated Detective Westfallen. He understood that preserving human life was paramount, but the warnings would not only reach potential victims, but they'd also reach the killer, who in turn might significantly change their tactics and techniques or attempt to evade justice altogether. By mid-March of 1991, Detective Westfallen had accumulated four notebooks worth of case study pertaining to the Oak Hills prostitute murders. He'd also overseen

several undercover units that had been sent to stake out the area of Jefferson Boulevard. They'd run computer checks on the license plates of vehicles that cruised by, just to see if the owners had priors, but the stakeouts yielded nothing and were soon discontinued. March 10th would see the detectives one step closer to the answers, but it would come at the cost of another victim. 26-year-old Shirley Williams was found dumped on a residential street in the heart of Oak Cliff, just blocks away from an elementary school. An unopened condom had been placed next

to her corpse, and just like the previous two victims, her eyes had been surgically removed. As news of the third murder spread, Jefferson Boulevard became a veritable ghost town. Many of the prostitutes had moved out of town for the foreseeable future, planning only to return once the killer had either been caught or moved on. Those who were desperate enough to ply their trade went out in twos or threes, and often with a pimp or their hired muscle watching from a parked car nearby. Smith and Matthews kept up their patrols and were surprised at how many of the

girls still ventured out to make a buck. One of them, a woman in her mid-thirties by the name of Brenda White, claimed to have survived an attack just a few days prior. She told Smith and Matthews that she'd been picked up by a man with salt and pepper hair, cowboy boots, and blue jeans. Brenda had suggested the pair head to a hotel, but her John said he knew a better place. This was a huge red flag to the veteran prostitute who'd learned never to head to an undisclosed second location, and especially not with a first-time John. She attempted to exit the man's vehicle, but at that moment, and to use her words, a change came over his face. It was like an anger, rage, she said, and then he started screaming,

I hate you, I'm going to kill all you mother effers. Brenda said the man then lunged at her, but she already had her pepper spray in hand. She sent a stream of burning vapor into his eyes, jumping out of the car and ran off into the night. Given that Brenda's description of the man was oddly reminiscent of the previously arrested Axton Schindler, Smith and Matthews decided to run his name through a more thorough background check. This is how they discovered that Schindler's address, 1035 El Dorado, was registered to a deceased man named Fred Albright. Fred Albright owned another piece of property in Dallas, one that just so happened to be in the very same neighborhood that Mary Bell and Susan Peterson were found. The two officers

reached out to the Dallas County Sheriff's Department who, as you remember, had been working the case in tandem with the Dallas Police Department, and when they asked if the same Fred Albright meant anything to them in connection with the murdered prostitutes, there was a pause on the other end. The two officers later said that it must have been a penny drop moment for the deputies over at the Sheriff's Department and, in time, they explained why the connection was so chilling. Not long after Mary Pratt's body was found, the department had received an anonymous tip from a woman claiming to be a friend of the deceased. The woman asserted that, just prior to her murder, Mary had been dating a man named Charles. Whether this was professionally or recreationally,

it's difficult to say, but the anonymous woman claimed Charles had an unhealthy obsession with Mary's eyes, to the point that she found it intensely unsettling. Investigators had initially shelved the report, and were planning on returning to it later, but after the call from Smith and Matthews, it held a terrifying new relevance. You see, Charles was none other than the adopted son of Fred Albright, but the question remained, how were he and Axton Schindler connected? After perusing his extensive criminal history, the detectives pulled up one of Charles' mug shots. It showed him to be a fairly handsome, well-built man with grayish hair, angular features, and deep-set dark eyes, exactly like the man Brenda White had described. Smith and Matthews rushed in to inform Detective Westfallen of the huge break in the case.

With his blessing, the officers then tracked down Brenda White and showed her the picture of Charles Albright. That's him, she said. That's the man who attacked me. Smith and Matthews then tracked down Veronica Rodriguez, the girl whose story had seemed strangely off. She might have made up many tales in the past, but this time, she clearly wasn't lying. The moment she laid eyes on the photograph of Charles Albright, she started to tremble.

Then, just like Brenda White, she pointed at his face and then told the cops, that's him. Just after 2.30 in the morning, under a shower of light drizzle, a SWAT team smashed in the back door to 1035 El Dorado. The exterior might have looked decrepit, but the inside was beyond luxurious. One cabinet was filled with expensive crystal champagne glasses, while another held an extensive collection of highly sought-after Jadro figurines. In the bedroom, Charles Albright was caught completely by surprise, and as the heavily armed SWAT team dragged him out of bed and snapped handcuffs around his wrists,

his young girlfriend began to wail in confusion. Whatever Charles had done, it was clearly a serious matter. The only problem was he seemed like the last man on earth to ever break the law. Look, I've known Charlie for 30 years, said Albright's friend, a retired Baptist minister, and all that time I think I would have seen his dark side slip out at least once. Believe me, if he really was a psychotic killer, he couldn't have kept it a secret all this time, could he? In 1933, when he was just three weeks old, Charles was adopted by Fred Albright and his

young wife, Del. According to Del, Charles' birth mother was an exceptionally bright student, but was just 16 years old when she fell pregnant. Her furious parents demanded that she put the baby up for adoption or face familial exile, and the girl chose the first option. As a boy, Charlie was known to be a happy but eccentric young man of above average intelligence. By seven, he had memorized the names of all the constellations and was such a talented tap dancer that he was booked to open for a nationally renowned tap dance troupe at the famous Texas Theater. Charlie was just so much damned fun, recalled a childhood friend. We were always waiting to see what he'd do next. Surprisingly, Charles had a remarkably stable childhood for someone who grew up to be a serial murderer.

But as he grew older, his adoptive mother began to exercise some rather unusual parenting techniques. Adele Albright became so afraid of dirt and disease that she would change and wash her son's outfits up to three times a day. She would occasionally take him to polio clinics to gaze at those suffering from the disease, locked away in their iron lungs, prisoners to their infections. If you don't keep clean, she'd tell little Charles, this is going to happen to you. You'll spend the rest of your life in one of those things. This strange behavior continued for some time, until the unusual descended into the downright abusive. She would sometimes lock him in a dark room as punishment for the smallest disobedience.

When he wouldn't take a nap, she would tie him to his bed, sometimes for twelve hours at a time. When he wouldn't drink his milk, she would spank him brutally until his back and legs were a patchwork of yellowing bruises. The Albright's neighbors noticed how odd Del seemed to act, especially around her boy, but Charles never complained, on account of his mother's harshly taught lesson of, if you ain't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. If you asked Del, she'd say that she was so overprotective of her adoptive son because of how precious he was to her. For whatever reason, the Albrights couldn't conceive naturally and this no doubt put a great strain on Del's mental health. But as we've already learned,

those feelings manifested themselves in some very unhealthy ways. She recognized Charles' intellect and nurtured it as best she could. But while piano lessons and private tutoring might seem par for the course, teaching a young child taxidermy is unconventional at best and inappropriate at worst. As Charles set to work on the dead birds his mother encouraged him to bring home, his mother would lavish him with praise. She too had taken an interest in the rather morbid hobby and passed her knowledge on to her boy. She showed him how to use a knife to cut open their tiny skulls

and how to use a specialized kind of spoon to cleanly scoop out the brains. But without a doubt, the most difficult part of the process was removing the creature's eyes from their sockets without damaging the socket or surrounding skull. To ensure that he could properly perform the task, Del Albright spent hours forcing her son to practice the process over and over again. He'd use a tiny scalpel to separate the soft tissue, and then use a pair of minuscule forceps to carefully remove the lumps of flesh from the bone cradles, all without cutting too deep or pulling too hard.

When it came to birds, pruning the feathers and wiring the legs were perhaps the most crucial parts of the process. But when it came to the difference between just a good piece and a great piece of taxidermy, it was all in the eyes. Charles would regularly join his mother on trips to her favorite taxidermy store and would spend as long as he could, staring at the rows and rows of intricately crafted glass eyes. But they were far too expensive for the repugnantly frugal Del Albright, who told her son that if he wanted them, he'd have to save up his meager allowance. And so, Charles' taxidermies ended up going without. They'd stare back at him with dark, empty eye sockets. Despite his bizarre and slightly abusive upbringing,

Charles performed wonderfully in high school and went on to enroll at the North Texas State College over in Denton. However, once he got there, his behavior took a dramatic turn for the worse. Charles was arrested for several burglaries that resulted in hundreds of dollars worth of goods being stolen. He claimed innocence when he got caught, but his mother refused to loosen her purse strings and attempted to act as her son's lawyer. He ended up spending his 18th birthday in prison. Once he was released, Arkansas State Teachers College was a chance for a new start, and for a while, it seemed as if though Charles was headed for high achievement. Teachers often complained that Charles didn't study, but then were flabbergasted when his grades came out as mostly A's and B's.

Unsurprisingly, anatomy appeared to be Charles' strongest subject, and some teachers suspected that he would go on to medical school and a career as a surgeon. Charles might have been taking his studies more seriously, but his love of pranks remained. In one instance, one of Charles' friends had just endured a rather rough breakup and, in a bit of frustration, tore up several photos of his ex before throwing them in the trash. Then, unbeknownst to his heartbroken friend, Charles retrieved the photographs from the trash can and began cutting out their eyes with a kind of arts and crafts knife known as an exacto blade. Over the days that followed, Charles' friend began noticing little strips of paper stuck to various points around their home. There was one above his head, one in the back of the bathroom door,

even one over the kitchen counter, and on each one was a pair of deep brown eyes, the eyes of his ex-girlfriend. Charles thought it was hilarious. His friend violently disagreed and after a tense confrontation, the strips of paper disappeared. After eventually dropping out of college, Charles entered the job market but did so entirely on his own terms. He faked a teaching certificate to get a job at a high school in the nearby town of Crandall, but was forced to resign when his deception was uncovered. Since he was a popular member of the staff, the school promised to give Charles his job back if

he attended Arkansas State Teachers College, but he was kicked out soon after his enrollment for stealing school supplies. Then apparently on a whim, Charles enrolled in beauty school, and eventually gained a beautician's license. He then found a job as a stylist at a local hair salon, where again he proved himself a popular member of the team. Not long after, Charles discovered that one of his associates was seeking to commission a portrait of his wife. Charles claimed that he'd paint a world-class picture of her for just $250. The associate was skeptical,

as Charles' claim of being an award-winning artist seemed dubious at best, but shockingly, every word was true. Charles was indeed a talented self-taught painter and had once won a prize at the Texas State Fair for his portrait of a dark-haired woman in a long green dress. He worked on the painting of the man's wife for weeks on end and when he finally was done, it was magnificent. The man had expected something that he could hang on his wall, but when Charles announced that it was ready for collection, the man found the frame was six feet tall and three feet wide. The coloring was rich but realistic and the proportions were so lifelike that it could have fetched ten times the price at a gallery. Without a shadow of a doubt, the most alluring, transfixing aspect of the painting were the subject's eyes. Charles claimed to have dedicated an entire week to ensuring that the eyes were nothing short of perfect, ensuring the proper amount of shadow under the lashes, the right droop around the lids, and the correct amount of shading to the subject's

pale blue iris. Until then, Charles had led something of a mischievous but harmless existence. He might have had sticky fingers and a penchant for forgery, but he'd never hurt anybody. And that all changed in March of 1985. Sometime in 1979, Charles had begun attending St. Bernard's Catholic Church on Old Gate Lane in East Dallas. He was said to have a fine singing voice, occasionally aided the church's priest in his holy duties, and sometimes would bestow generous acts of charity on some of the congregation's less fortunate members. And this is how he first met a young family, down on their luck, who just needed a little help getting by. Charles slipped the man of the house a hundred dollar bill during

a church service. The man fought back tears and a deep friendship was cemented. However, half a decade later, the 14-year-old daughter of the family shared a shocking and long-held secret with her parents. Charlie Albright, one of the most pious and popular members of St. Bernard's Church, had been violating her, and he'd been doing so for years. 51-year-old Charlie denied the accusations, vowing passionately to clear his name, but on March 25th of 1985, he stood before a judge in a somber Dallas courtroom and pled guilty to the charges of knowingly and unintentionally engaging in deviant intercourse with a minor. Charles essentially went into hiding following the conviction and went on an extended trip to Arkansas to wait out the media storm.

It was here that he met Dixie Austin, the woman who he was sharing his bed on the morning of his arrest for murder. Dixie would later claim that she had no idea of her boyfriend's murderous nature, and recalled how he'd spent most of his spare time hunting salamanders out in the woods. Charles told Dixie that one of his dreams in life was to discover a brand new species of salamander so he could name it after himself. At this point, it wouldn't be surprising if Charles really was some kind of accomplished amateur reptile expert, but on this occasion, the story was a cover. Charles wasn't off looking for lizards. He was looking for ladies of the night, and for considerably more sinister purposes than their preferred form of commerce.

One of the first girls Charles encountered was a married mother who plied her trade after her husband had gone to work and her children were at school. She later recalled feeling sympathy for him and how he seemed to want company more than relations. He was a sweet gentleman, she reportedly said. If I ever needed extra money, I would call him and he would drop it off. This relationship continued for many years until finally the woman began refusing to see him on account of his increasingly aggressive temperament. In one instance, Charles handcuffed her to a bed and began whipping her with an extension cord while yelling, Scream if you like it, scream. Charles is thought to have maintained several such relationships with several different women, including his future victims, Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson. Yet,

he didn't develop a thirst for murder until the deaths of his adoptive parents. Following his father's fatal heart attack in 1986, Charles inherited a fortune of almost $100,000, along with all of his parents' homes and property in South Dallas. For sentimental reasons, he kept all the property in his father's name and to bring in a little extra cash, he rented out one of the smaller homes on a street called Cotton Valley to a husky-looking truck driver by the name of Axton Schindler. With little income coming in, Charles decided to move into the old family home in Oak Cliff with Dixie Austin moving in not long after. Theirs was a quiet, romantic life,

until the veneer was suddenly shattered one morning by the emergence of a horrifying truth. When he was first detained on suspicion of murder, Charles refused to say a word to the arresting officers. He was taken back to his cell, then investigators set about searching his many properties. They found exacto blades, a copy of Gray's Anatomy, and at least a dozen true crime books, but there were no obvious murder weapons and more importantly, no eyeballs. Both Axton Schindler and his girlfriend Dixie both acted as crucial alibis for Charles and for a while, it looked as if though a conviction was going to be impossible.

But the Dallas County DA had a trick up their sleeve and for the first time in US history, they were going to seek a murder conviction based solely on hair evidence. Just days after Charles' initial arrest, the Dallas Forensic Lab discovered that tiny hairs found on the bodies of the dead prostitutes were almost identical to hairs taken from Charles' head and pelvic area. While this might be considered circumstantial to some, the lab was also able to determine that minute hairs found in Charles' truck were identical to samples taken from Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson, as well as those taken from the third victim, Shirley Williams. It was an unconventional link, but it was the only one that had put Charles behind bars, so with some hope and a prayer, the prosecution went to work.

Charles' defense attorney claimed that the prosecution's case hinged on flimsy, unreliable evidence, and that the real killer was most likely Axton Schindler, who just so happened to have fled Dallas a week before the trial. Granted, Charles was an eccentric man, but he was no killer, and the attempt to link his impressive extracurricular activities to the actions of a psychopath were a grave insult to his character. Yet the jury saw through the defense, and on December 19th of 1991, he was pronounced guilty, then sentenced to life in prison. Charles vowed to fight the case on appeal and welcomed a series of journalists into his cell to life in prison. Charles vowed to fight the case on appeal and welcomed a series of journalists into his cell to profess his innocence. I never touched an eyeball, he told

one. I truly think, and this may sound far-fetched, that the boys in the forensics lab cut out those eyes. I think the police said, we want some sort of mutilation to gain more attention to the case, and that's how I got roped into this whole thing. It's a miscarriage of justice. Charles continued to fight his case from the John Munford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas, and did so until the year 2020, when he passed away from an undisclosed medical condition. It marked a rather anticlimactic end to such a storied life, as many had hoped Charles would open up about the murders later on in life. There was a lot of speculation regarding other potential victims, and without a full and frank admission on his part, it's more than likely that Charles took many dark secrets to his grave. Yet thanks to a full and forensic analysis of his upbringing and early adulthood, I believe it's possible to place an educated guess on why Charles did such terrible things.

A person's formative years are the most important of their entire lives, and the things they learn at that age are carried with them into later life. Little Charlie should have been out riding a bicycle, or had his nose buried in a storybook. But instead, his deranged and abusive mother watched him carve out the eyes of dead birds before telling him, good boy. Oh, excuse me. Why are you walking so close behind me? Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes.

Okay, well, you know what? Specsavers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149. And, oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great. Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on.

Let's hurry then. To my count. One, two, one, two, 1, 2, 1. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. When you want to bet on sports, play it on a field or ice or course. The Rivers is the place.

Over, under, money lines. Same game, Paul A's gets all fine. You'll put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. On May 2nd of 1949, James Byrd Jr. was born in Jasper County, Texas, the third child of Stella May and James Byrd Sr. Stella May was a Sunday school teacher, while James Sr. was a deacon at the Greater New Bethel Church over in East MLK Boulevard. Both parents attempted to instill their son with a strong moral compass and respectable work ethic, and for a while, Junior kept himself on the straight and narrow.

But it wasn't long before James Jr. fell in with a bad crowd, which led to some very poor decision-making on his part. Between the ages of 20 to 37, James was arrested on several different occasions, on charges varying from theft and forgery to violation of parole. The last charge saw him do a serious stretch in prison, but after that, James vowed to turn his life around. And by 1998, a 49-year-old James was working on and off as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He was also known to walk wherever he wanted, meaning he was most likely banned from driving in some capacity. James could have quite easily evaded the ban by borrowing a friend or a relative's car, but doing so might have risked violating his parole, so instead, he walked.

On Sunday, June 7th of 1998, James walked all the way across Jasper County to spend the evening with some friends and family. There was music, a cookout, and an inflatable mini pool for the kids. Then after a few beers and a healthy digestion period, James summoned up the stamina to walk back home. Shortly after 2am, James said goodbye to those in attendance and then walked onto the dark streets of Dallas, never to be seen again. Sometime between 2.30 and 2.45am, James was walking along a long, dark stretch of road when a pickup truck pulled up next to him. The men claimed to recognize James from his many walks around Jasper County and offered him a ride to wherever he was going.

James then climbed into the bed of their truck and the driver took off down the road. However, instead of taking James to his intended destination, the driver took him east all the way out of Jasper County, to a small clearing in the woods. There it's believed that James was told to get out of the truck, and realizing something was terribly wrong, he did so. But when he tried to get away, the truck's driver, along with two other men, chased James along into the clearing and attacked him. Forensic evidence suggested James put up one hell of a

fight, but he stood no chance in the three-on-one struggle against younger, fitter men. Once they got in the better of him, and James was lying on the ground, his attackers continued the assault, landing blows all over his body before spray painting and urinating on him once he was firmly unconscious. The men then dragged James' unconscious body back to their truck, tied a chain around his ankles, then attached the chain to the rear bumper. James was then dragged three miles along Huff Creek Road, and an autopsy suggested that he had remained alive and conscious for at least half of it before his bones were broken and his body was torn apart.

What remained of him was dumped in front of a historically African-American cemetery on Huff Creek Road. The next morning, the police found traces of James' body in 81 separate locations along the highway, along with one majorly significant clue, a cigarette lighter with the word POSSEM inscribed in it. Given the sheer horror of the crime at hand, there was a massive incentive to solve it as quickly as possible. The carnage that unfolded that night wasn't something that they could block off or hide. It was spread along three miles of highway and, as news of the murder swept through the city like wildfire, people were horrified by what they heard. The Jasper County Sheriff's Department were soon

finding themselves contacted by the FBI who wished to offer their assistance on account of the extreme nature of the case. They returned within hours with a break in the case. Possum was the jailhouse nickname of a 23-year-old man named John William King, who was on an FBI watch list after associating with a known white supremacist group. King also had several white supremacist tattoos and was discovered to be a full-patch member of a jailhouse neo-Nazi organization known as the Confederate Knights of America. King was arrested, and after a brief investigation, it was discovered that the two other men in the truck that night were named Sean Berry

and Lawrence Brewer. At the murder trial, it was established that 23-year-old Sean Berry did not share John King's politics, but was found to be just as culpable in James Byrd's death as his two racist companions. 31-year-old Lawrence Brewer, on the other hand, was a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist, who prior to Byrd's murder had served a prison sentence for drug possession and burglary. According to his court testimony, he joined a white supremacist prison gang along with John King in order to safeguard himself from other inmates. Yet the prosecution painted a picture of a man who joined with enthusiasm as opposed to reluctance. One of their chief witnesses was a psychiatrist, who stated that Brewer did not appear in the least bit repentant for his crimes and, at one point, referred to him as, and I quote, a racist psychopath. The prosecution coupled their expert's testimony with a note intercepted by the guards at the jailhouse where King and Brewer were

being held. Proven to be in King's handwriting, he described knowing that the murder of James Byrd might result in a death sentence, but that he did it anyway. Regardless of the outcome, we have made history, one passage read, before he signed off, death before dishonor. Jail officials also mentioned that both King and Berry had attempted to obtain a copy of a book entitled The Turner Diaries whilst awaiting their trials. Published in 1978, The Turner Diaries were written by the rabidly racist William Luther Pierce, one of the founding members of the since-defunct National Socialist White People's Party. The novel depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to insurrection, nuclear holocaust, and ultimately a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of Americans' ethnic minorities. It's been

described as being explicitly racist and anti-Semitic by the New York Times, and an FBI expert on white nationalist terrorism once called it the Bible of the racist right. While it might be acceptable to obtain a copy of the novel for academic purposes, King and Brewer's desire for it was obviously not innocent and provided yet more evidence that the murder of James Byrd Jr. was not only first-degree murder, but motivated solely by racial hatred. At the trial's conclusion, Sean Barry was spared the death sentence and instead sentenced to life in prison. The jury acknowledged that the crime was never something Barry would have instigated alone, but since he failed to stop it, a share of the blame was his to shoulder.

As of 2023, Barry is living in protective custody at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Ramsey Unit. He spends 23 hours a day in an 8 by 6 foot cell, with one hour for exercise, most likely because white supremacist prison gangs such as the Aryan Nation have put a bounty on his head. He'll be first eligible for parole in June of 2038 when he is 63 years old, but frankly, it'll be a miracle if he survives until then. Lawrence Brewer, in all his unrepentance, was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. He was executed in the Huntsville unit on September 21st of 2011. The day before he was put down, Brewer told Houston's KHOU 11 News,

As far as any regrets? No, I have no regrets. I'd do it all over again to tell you the truth. Shortly afterwards, he sat down for his final meal. Brewer's existence had been just a blip on the radar of the Texas penitentiary system, but the request that he put in for his last meal had significant consequences for hundreds of other death row inmates. Brewer's order included two chicken fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions, a triple patty bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and jalapenos, a bowl of fried okra with ketchup, one pound of barbecued meat with half a load of white bread, three fully loaded fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, one pint of Blue

Bell vanilla ice cream, a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts on top, and three large root beers. When the meal was presented to him, Brewer looked over at the massive spread that had been laid out for him, looked at a correctional officer in the eye, and told him, I'm not hungry. Due to some kind of food safety regulation, the prison officials were not permitted to repurpose the giant feast and were reportedly forced to throw the entire thing in the trash. The news prompted outrage from the people of Texas, and State Senator John Whitmer petitioned prison officials

to end the 87-year-old tradition of giving last meals to condemned inmates. The prison agency's executive director responded by stating that the practice had been terminated effective immediately. On April 22, 2019, John King's appeals to both the Texas Court of Criminals' Appeals and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles were denied, and he was executed at the Texas State Penitentiary on April 24th of 2019. While it's easy to celebrate King's death, it's harder to fathom why James Byrd had to die in the first place. But instead of succumbing to anger and despair, James' family found the strength to turn something ugly into something beautiful.

In the years following his death, family members helped establish the James Bird Foundation for Racial Healing. Eccentric former basketball player Dennis Rodman donated $25,000 to the foundation, while boxing promoter Don King established a $100,000 college fund for Bird's three children. Perhaps the best way to sum up their attitude is to recount their joint statement in the aftermath of his death. How does one respond to such a brutal act, they said. Having a loved one tortured and lynched produced an unimaginable sense of loss and pain. Yet retaliation, hateful speech, or promotion of hate-written propaganda never entered our mind. We thought, what would Jesus have done? How would he have responded? The answer was crystal clear. His message would have been one of peace and hope. The End Way back in the fall of 1981, I applied to join the Texas Department of Public Safety with a view to becoming a highway patrol officer.

I was accepted, and after all recruit school in Austin, I got my first duty station up in Archer County. For the first couple of years, it was everything I ever really dreamed of. I had two jobs, work on my bike and chase bad guys, and nothing else was worth any spit. In 1987, I got promoted to corporal, which came with a little more responsibility and a little extra pay, but I was still doing the same old thing of working on my bike and chasing bad guys, as I said. But then, in 1990, I got promoted to Highway Patrol Sergeant. I thought I wanted the progression. It meant pay and benefits and prestige. But what I wanted was the freedom to carry on doing things my way,

and being stuck behind a desk half the time wasn't my way at all. I guess it was around that time that I met my first Texas Ranger, but by happenstance, it wasn't in a professional capacity. I was sitting in a barbershop up in Wichita Falls, minding my own business, getting my hair cut when in walks this older gentleman who looked like he'd just stepped off the set of a John Ford movie. I recognized his belt right away and how it marked him out as a Ranger, so I struck up a conversation with him and asked him about his work. He went on to describe my own personal paradise. He'd worked his way up to captain by

that time, so he wasn't exactly some head charger anymore, but back in his day, he had almost complete operational freedom. You gotta work your way up to being a ranger. They don't hand that kind of freedom to just anyone. But once you got it, your major would say to you, here's the job, go get it done, and everything else was up to you. I wanted that kind of freedom more than anything and from what I could tell, joining the rangers meant keeping it until I was too old and worn out to do my job anymore. So I applied for them. I was tested in the winter of 91, accepted in early 92 and then moved down to Temple when I was assigned to Company F.

I worked on a couple of cases with a partner for a while, kind of like a probationary period where you learn from a more experienced ranger. But after I was signed off, I was on my own. As long as I kept things legal, I was free to investigate however I saw fit, the only thing that mattered was getting the job done. But as the saying goes, that amount of freedom came with a great deal of responsibility too. Responsibility in the form of some very unsettling cases, and this is the worst of them. Just before Christmas of 92, a 15-year-old girl named Katie Andrew disappeared from her home in Houston. A couple of weeks go by and Houston PD can't find hide nor hair of her, so while she remained listed on the missing persons register as alive, local PD didn't have the highest hopes

of bringing her home. Right about the time they started scaling back the search, I'm assigned to a motel room homicide over in College Station. The victim was a student of Texas A&M, found lying in the bathtub with her forearm sliced from wrist to elbow. Local PD thought that she had taken her own life at first, right up until they saw the ligature marks around the victim's neck. It was a homicide, but staged it looked like they'd taken their own life and at first, I didn't understand why I was being assigned to something that local was more than capable of. And that's when I was shown a piece of security camera footage taken from the motel on the night of the murder. It showed the suspect walking in and out of the room on multiple different occasions,

but just once, he'd escorted what looked like a teenage girl from his car to the room and back again. A 15-year-old girl that looked a hell of a lot like the missing Katie Andrew. The way it was explained to me, this psycho was dragging her along in some godforsaken criminal rampage and it was only a matter of time before he killed her too, and it was my job to stop that from happening. We had a potential suspect almost right away. He was said to be a member of some fringe church over in Kent County, some real strange folk over in Kent back in those days, and Jonathan himself had several run-ins with the law. But what made him my prime suspect was the fact that he'd been

previously arrested for trespassing and harassment of another 15-year-old girl. It was her parents who'd filed the complaint, and the report was strange from start to finish, but what caught my eye is that our suspect, in the midst of just walking onto someone's property uninvited, had asked the girl, is your name Katie? He'd been looking for her long before he'd ever found her, but what made Katie Andrews so special? What was the connection between them? I figured if I'd work that out, the whole case would just unravel in front of me, but just as I was getting to work interviewing people and trying to get some answers,

our suspect dropped a second body. At the motel over in Harker Heights, about only 20 miles or so from where I lay my head at night, a maid walked into a room to clean up and found herself standing in the middle of a nightmare. A 17-year-old high school girl had been crucified on an upturned bed frame, and our killer had carved her up piece by piece. It looked like death by a thousand cuts, like he'd tried to open up every blood vessel in her body one at a time. Now I know what you're thinking. If they bled this girl out, how come the blood wasn't leaking under the motel room door? Well, that's just the thing. There wasn't hardly a spot of blood on the floor of that motel room. I figured the killer put some

kind of plastic sheeting down to try and keep the crime scene clean. But now, I'm not so sure. I helped Harker Heights PD search the crime scene from top to bottom and it was there that we found an earring belonging to Katie Andrew. It was tucked into a pillowcase, meaning that there was very little chance it just fell off and into that pillowcase while she was sleeping. We figured she'd put it there to let us know that she was still alive and had been at the motel but again I'm not so sure about that anymore. We figured that they were headed west so I drove out towards Lubbock to link up with a couple of boys from company C. We hoped that we might be able to cut our suspect off before he committed a third murder so we canvassed every motel we could with

photographs of Katie Andrew and our suspected killer. We figured it was only a matter of time before we got a call from one of our motel owners, but when the call finally came, it was to give us the news that a third body had been found. Only this one bucked the trends in a serious way. Instead of a young woman, the victim was a grown man, and instead of being attacked in a motel room, the victim was murdered in their own home. But again, unlike the other murders, which appeared to have some kind of method to their madness, this third one was just a complete horror show. The victim was lying on his kitchen floor. There were no wounds to his limbs or torso, but his face was barely recognizable. Someone had bitten him. Real deep bites, too, all over his

face. When people use their teeth during a violent struggle, it usually results in a chunk of flesh being torn from whatever they were biting. It's an instinctive thing from man's dark past. A person bites down on their aggressor, or in this case, their victim, and then in the course of the struggle, the bitten flesh is removed. Think of it like a bear trap. Once that piece of flesh is in its grip, it's too late to do anything about it, and struggling only aids the cause of the biter. But in this case, there hadn't been any flesh ripped away from the guy's face, no chunks of skin missing from the guy's cheeks or chin or jowls. It was only bite marks, some intersecting and overlapping, but there had to be a hundred of them. The guy's face was

completely and utterly mutilated. As you can imagine, the change in technique had me very bothered. The idea that our suspect was forcing Katie Andrew to watch all these hideous crimes, possibly as some kind of psychological torture that said, this is what's going to happen to you, I'll admit, I lost some sleep over that. But when the autopsy report came back and we read the county coroner's findings, everything changed. According to the report, the and we read the county coroner's findings, everything changed. According to the report, the bite pattern of the victim's face were slightly too small to have been made by a grown man. Instead, the coroner suggested that the bite pattern belonged to a much younger person,

someone who hadn't finished fully developing yet. I didn't want to believe it. I don't think anyone wanted to believe it. But the evidence was right there before our eyes. Either our suspect had tried to throw us off by switching up his M.O. and using a pair of dentures, or our abduction victim wasn't nearly as much of a victim as we thought she was. By that point, I'd thrown all preconceived notions I'd been carrying out the window. The idea that Katie had been a runaway was dismissed fairly early on in the investigation. She was an average student, a quiet kid, and kind of easily led according to her parents,

and considering the suspect had a history of harassing girls named Katie, I figured it was a straight up abduction, and that little Katie was simply too scared to try and escape. Lord knows, if one of the first things she saw was her abductor strangling another girl to death, it made sense that she'd been terrified into compliance. But if those really were Katie's bite marks all over our third victim's face, then maybe he'd gone and flipped some kind of switch in her. If that was the case and she suddenly stopped wanting to be found, then my job just got a whole lot harder. Assuming he might not want to be seen anymore, we stopped circulating pictures of Katie

and we focused on photographs and photo fits of our suspect and that of the vehicle we suspected him to be driving. With the help of local sheriff and police departments, we flooded the area between Killeen and Odessa with as much information as we could, and told everyone and their dog to keep an eye out for our suspect, or more specifically, his vehicle. And it paid off, and on February 27th of 1993, I got the call that closed the case. I get a message on my beeper from a deputy over

the Sterling County Sheriff's Office asking me to call him back and when I do, he tells me a concerned citizen had called in a tip regarding the Katie Andrews case. The citizen claimed to have seen a truck driving onto a small construction site just off the 87. He thought it was strange, since the place was always deserted on weekends, but when he got a little closer and recognized the truck, he called the sheriff's office as soon as he was able. He also added that the driver looked like he was driving around the back of the half-constructed home, almost like he was trying to hide it from the view of passers-by. That was all the information I needed to hear, and as soon as the sheriff over there had granted me the company of a few of his deputies,

I drove over to Sterling City, and we rolled out together around sundown. It's moments like that that made me want to join law enforcement in the first place. We were all on four wheels, but it felt more like we were riding out there, like some old posse led by Jack Hayes or Bill McDonald. Sure, the whole thing might turn out to be a damp squib, but by God it felt good to be on the move, armed for bear, and all with the same purpose of rescuing an innocent little girl. But it wasn't a dud, and we found our man when we stormed that half-built house. He just wasn't in the condition I thought I'd find him, never in a million years. We wanted to keep the elements of surprise as best we could, so instead of rolling up on that

place with our lights and sirens blaring, we took the exit before the house, parked on this little dirt road, then stalked our way across the brush with only a crescent moon to light our way. We had a deputy with a 12 gauge and beanbag rounds go in first not wanting any collateral damage if our perp proved to be armed but as we listened out for any signs of activity we didn't hear anything at all. So quietly as we could we stacked up at what served as an entrance covered by a plastic sheet

then flicked on our flashlights and stormed the interior the place was just a skeleton on the inside with only one or two pieces of paneling closing off one of the rooms we could see signs of life before we walked through the open doorway discarded wrappers empty soda cans that kind of thing but we couldn't see what was going on in there until we actually were in the room, or what was intended to be a room anyway. The deputy with the beanbag shotgun went in first, and he kind of pulled back from the sight of something before letting out this, Sheriff's Department, show me your hands. His heart was nowhere near in it, and I'm surprised

he could even get the words out to begin with because when I saw it, I'll be honest, it took my breath away. Hanging by the neck from one of the beams above our heads was our suspect. He didn't look like he'd been dead too long. He was in a hell of a state, but he still looked fresh. It always gets me in movies when someone walks in on a hanged person and they look pretty as a picture, because in real life, it's just about the ugliest thing you'd ever want to see. But right at his ankle, holding on and looking like she was crying, was what looked to be a teenage girl. I suddenly understood why our man was so reluctant to shoot,

but he crept forward saying something softly like, it's gonna be okay, we're the cops, you gotta come with us now. She didn't want to leave him at first. She just kept on clinging to our dead perp's ankle, sobbing like he wouldn't believe. We actually started to relax a little. I know that sounds crazy looking back on it, but our suspect was dead and we had her hostage. Only thing to do was to

get her out of there as quickly as possible and end her ordeal once and for all, so that's what we did. We backed up out of the room, assuming our point man was about to lead little Katie out of the half-built room and then, in a sort of flash, it was happening. The point man screamed. Katie rushed forward. He fell back. She fell on top of him, and in a flurry of flashing light beams, we all saw the knife swinging wildly for the deputy's throat. There was nothing else to be done. Katie was an imminent threat to that deputy's life, and as much as I saw fit to lunge forward in the hopes of tearing her off of him, one of the other deputies acted exactly as his training told him, and he pulled the trigger. Sadly, Katie didn't make it to the hospital alive, and the deputy was in critical condition for almost three days afterward due to the amount of blood he'd lost. We did everything we could for both of them, and the deputy who shot ended up not

coming back after his extended leave had run out. It was a nightmare situation, but it was take one life or risk losing more, and in those decisions, there ain't no time for that. I was the one who had to deliver the news to her parents, and let me tell you, that was just about the hardest thing I'd ever had to do. Telling them was one thing, but then telling them how it happened, that was another thing entirely. You'd be amazed at how well Mr. and Mrs. Andrews handled receiving the news, some of the bravest folks I'd ever come across now that I really think about it. I think they'd long accepted that it was just a matter of time before

they got the news that every parent praised they'd never hear. In the interest of giving them as much closure as possible, I told them everything I'd learn in the course of the investigation. I'd been giving them regular updates on whatever progress I had been making but after we got the news about the bite pattern, I stopped being so liberal with what I was telling them directly. The same applied to the press around that time too. We didn't want to feed them too much information on account of news reports spooking our perp. They were both headed west in a very steady pattern, like they were headed to somewhere,

so naturally we didn't want to do anything to change that and mess up our chance of tracking them. I did make sure to tell Katie's parents about the bite marks, mainly as a way of trying to explain why Katie might have become violent with the officer. She might have been completely traumatized, brainwashed, you name it, stranger things have happened with abduction or kidnap victims. But the one thing I didn't tell them was that we found a note in that half-constructed house written by our dead suspect. We first thought that he hung himself because he didn't want to go to prison, figured that he heard what they do to chomos over in Huntsville, but his note said otherwise. I looked at that note many, many times over the

years, so many times that I can almost write it out from memory, and it said, Get the mescalero. Find Palmer. He can help. Otherwise, take your own life. If you don't, it'll keep happening and it won't ever stop. I'm sorry, Katie. I don't know what any of that meant at the time, and to be honest, I still don't. But as for telling Katie's parents about it, they had enough unanswered questions to live with that I didn't want to saddle them with another one. Before I left, I promised them that I'd find out why Katie was taken and where she was being taken to. It was a promise that I couldn't keep. When I finally managed to crawl into bed in the early morning hours of that Sunday, I had a

whole plan laid out in my head. I was going to find where this kid was getting his cash from because an unemployed man, having just shy of a thousand in cash on him at the time of his death, that raised a lot of questions. Then I was going to find out who Palmer was by talking to some boys over in New Mexico because Lord knows if they and our perp had partnered up once, they might have done it God knows how many times before. To me, the case was still very much an open one, and as I closed my eyes that morning, I saw myself working on it for years and years.

But when I woke up a few hours later, fixed myself some coffee, and flicked on the TV news, I knew that Katie Andrews' case was going to be on the back burner for quite some time. On the TV, armed men with ATF on their flak jackets were climbing ladders onto the roof of some house. It looked like it could have been almost any house in central Texas, the kind of place that you might call home and then my jaw drops as this ATF agent trying to pull down some black curtain from a window starts taking incredibly heavy fire from inside the house. Bullets are ripping up the wall next to him. Then a bullet rips up through the roof just behind him,

where someone else inside the home beneath him is trying to shoot him through the roof. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And then suddenly some kind of caption appeared at the bottom of the screen with one word in particular catching my eye. Waco. That Sunday was the beginning of the standoff between local and federal law enforcement and the branch Davidians, led by the now infamous David Koresh. What happened to Katie Andrews should have been a huge story in its own right, but

it was completely overshadowed by what happened the very next morning. Maybe if it had been a one and done type of thing then I'd have got the help that I needed to investigate all those loose ends. But that siege went on for months and the whole time any kind of police work above murders and highway patrol came to a complete standstill. Everyone tried to help out including many of the company F-Rangers I served with. No one is proud of how it ended but I'm even more ashamed of the company F-Rangers I served with. No one is proud of how it ended but I'm even more ashamed of the account that I left unsettled with Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. I never was able to get to the bottom of why their daughter had to die and you can put it down to a

scared deputy with an itchy trigger finger if you want but anyone with half a brain knows it goes a lot deeper than that. What made Katie try and hurt people who'd come to rescue her? And what kind of help did our perp think she needed? I consider myself lucky that I never again encountered a case of that nature. I didn't fail another family. I didn't fail a little girl. And I never went up against nothing I couldn't explain to myself in one fashion or another. I can't handle having dealt with just one case like that, let alone two or three,

because sometimes I catch myself wrestling with some unanswerable questions, and coming up with answers that made me feel like a scared little kid again. Oh! Excuse me. Why are you walking so close behind me? Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay. Well, you know what? Specsavers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149. And oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great. Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry

then. To my count. One, two, one, two, one, two. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. When you want to bet on sports, play it on a field or ice or course. BetRivers is the place. Over, under, money, line. Same game, parlays, it's all fine. We'll put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook.

Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. I worked in waste management for a couple of years back in the mid-90s. I know people who say they could never work a job like that, and not even because of the stigma that comes with it, which is very real by the way. I know you don't look down on garbage men, being the paragon of virtue that you are.

But I think you know as well as I do that there's a lot of people that look down on the job whether they care to acknowledge that or not. That's why the salaries tend to be higher than you'd expect. It's not the early mornings or all the stinky, rotten stuff people think we handle on a weekly basis either. By the time I got into it, all you did was hook dumpsters up to the truck, push a button, and then hey, presto, garbage is gone without barely having looked at it. It's because people think less of you, subconsciously too, but at the time that I applied for the job I was more than accustomed to being looked down on.

I spent the better part of my late teens and early twenties addicted to heroin, and although that whole saga would make for a horror story all on its own, that's not the story that I'm trying to tell you today. In fact, I don't even think this story is all that scary either. My life was never in danger. We didn't find a dead body or almost crush some homeless dude, which actually almost happens quite regularly, and I can't say that I suffered any sleepless nights after what happened here. or almost crushed some homeless dude, which actually almost happens quite regularly, and I can't say that I suffered any sleepless nights after what happened here. But then, having said

that, what I saw that morning made for one of the single most disgusting sights I'd ever seen, and it wasn't just what I was seeing either, it was what I was hearing. I guess that doesn't make any sense out of context, so I'll just get on with it. My route was up in the Hamptons, which might sound ironic to some until you hear this went down at a fish market. It was definitely the worst stop on our route, especially in the summertime, but since we were always within our rights to refuse to deal with a dumpster if we deemed it a biohazard, God bless the unions, the market was always very respectful and kept everything as secure, clean, and tidy as possible.

But no matter how hard they tried to make it easier on us, rotten fish is always going to smell like rotten fish, no matter how many layers of trash bag you wrap around them. Anyways, they were mostly very considerate when it came to disposing of their waste but there are always anomalies exceptions that break the rules and one morning i came face to face with that exception as we were driving up to the dumpsters both me and the driver noticed something was off almost immediately usually speaking each of the dumpsters would be closed and then locked with a hex key, something which came into practice to stop animals or homeless folks from getting in.

But then on this occasion, each of the dumpster lids were opened slightly, which looked like ripped open bags of rice with their contents spilling out into the ground in front. It's not entirely unusual to have someone try and use someone else's dumpster to dispose of their own trash, and since the fish market always kept their dumpsters in good order for us, I figured that's what happened on this occasion as well. They were always decent with us too, so I figured I'd just do them a solid, squish the lid down a little to make it all fit, and then hook the dumpster up to the truck to be emptied. Now, the dumpster is on the left side of our garbage truck, so as much as

I could see the mess that we had waiting for us, I didn't get a great look at it as we rolled up. Neither did my driver apparently, who was either too tired or too careless to look over at it himself, so it wasn't until I got out and gloved up that I realized something was wrong. The smell was way worse than usual. I mean, that was kind of a given, seeing that the dumpster wasn't closed and locked, but it's just way stronger than I expected it to be. I masked up before walking around the truck, and as I got closer to all the spilt rice, I started to hear this noise. It sounded like soft raindrops or like an egg frying in another room in your apartment if you kind of get the sound. Just this sort of faint rustling that I couldn't quite pinpoint thanks to my hood being up.

And then, it hit me. I wasn't looking at grains of rice, made fat from some overnight rain. I was looking at maggots. And as I learned that morning, one maggot on its own doesn't make a sound. But hundreds of the little things all writhing around among the black plastic trash bags, it sounded like something sizzling on a skillet. I didn't exactly run off screaming or anything. It wasn't that kind of scary. I guess it was that moment of realization, connecting the dots between what I was seeing and what I was hearing.

All those hundreds of little squirming maggots that had burst from hell knows what was stinking up that dumpster. I refused to even go near the thing. Then told the driver once I got back into the truck who, in turn, did this double take before going, oh my god, that's one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen. Which for someone working in waste management is saying a lot. Turns out our initial suspicions were true, and that someone had hijacked the fish market's dumpsters with some kind of variety of meat or something. I feel kind of bad for him because it was the fish market that had to deal with it, and it must have made for one type of job, I can tell you that.

Maybe they got some non-union extreme cleaning company in or something, I don't know, but either way, someone was in for a real horror show of a cleanup job. The weird thing is, that probably wasn't the worst thing I had to deal with, not on paper anyway. If I laid it all out and asked y'all to pick one, it might not even be the maggots. But I swear, if you were there with me and heard that sizzling, fried egg wriggling as all those maggots feasted on whatever rotten guts were in there. It'd stick to you like it stuck to me. I grew up in a pretty poor area of northeastern England, and since I didn't do very well in school, my prospects were always going to be quite limited. I fell into painting and decorating for a while, but in the end, I got sick of crap pay and crappier bosses and I decided to go my own way. The trouble was I couldn't really do anything else.

The way I saw it I had to either get really good at something or be willing to do stuff that no one else would and that's how I came up with my business idea. I now run a fairly successful extreme cleaning agency that takes the jobs that other cleaning firms turn down. Our only two rules are that everything remains above board and legal, and we don't clean what we haven't seen. The last part is particularly important because I never used to operate that way. If someone agreed to pay my quote, I'd be over to the property in question at the drop of a hat, all my gear in my van ready to go.

But eventually I learned the hard way about biting off more than I could chew. One morning, I get a call bright and early, but right away I can tell this one is a little bit different. Most of my calls came from locals, or people only a little bit different. Most of my calls came from locals or people only a little bit further afield. You could tell by their accents, which are quite distinct for this area, and the woman on the other end of the phone that morning sounded quite posh. She was giving an all that I'm terribly awfully sorry to bother you and then asked if I was free to do an emergency job that might last all day, depending on the manpower I had available. This was only the second year of me being self-employed, so I was still working alone,

having sunk all my money into the specialist cleaning and safety equipment I needed. I actually did have a job lined up that afternoon, so I apologized and told the woman that we'd have to make it another day. The posh woman then started asking me, are you sure you can't reschedule your other appointment? I'm on an awful bind and it'd be simply splendid if you could find the time to help me. I told her sorry again but I just couldn't cancel on people at the last minute. There was a pause on the other end and I swear on my nan's grave that she says, whatever they're paying, I'll double it. Like I was a bloody hitman hired to bump her off. Double for the afternoon than the same rate for the morning too, she'd said. I need it polished off today, you see. I asked if she was serious and she said yes.

Then I asked if she minded paying up front and she agreed to that and all that. I felt like I just hit the jackpot. Yeah, I know it's a bit sly to take advantage of desperate people, but if they're willing to pay, I'm willing to work. I got in touch with my afternoon job and was able to rearrange for later on in the week which freed me up for the high paying last minute one that had just come in. I then got myself over to the property, met the woman I thought was the owner, and she gave me the key. It's only then, right as she handed me a cash stuffed envelope, that I asked what I should be expecting, you know, just to get an idea of how

bad it was. She says it wasn't all that bad on the inside, but that she needed someone discreet, so on the off chance that there were any items of a sensitive nature. That's the word she used, sensitive. And although I have no idea what she might be about, I definitely didn't like the way she said it. I told her if by sensitive items she meant anything illegal, I'd be out there in a flash on the phone to the police. She then reassures me that, no, there'd be nothing strictly illegal in there, but that if I found anything, quote, of private or personal nature, again, her choice of words, not mine, I was to put it aside, out of public view so it could be collected at a later date. I was mega suspicious, obviously. I'd had some weird jobs, and they

were all weird jobs in their own way, I suppose, but this seemed extra, extra weird. And it was. After the lady put an envelope full of cash in my hand, half now, half when the job's done, and I'd counted it up and locked it away in the van. She gave me a key ring with a load of different keys on it then left me to the job. I remember looking up at this big three-story house, crossing myself then unlocking the front door and walking inside to absolutely nothing. Some properties were so bad that I had to clear out the entrance hallway just to get my kid inside while some are deceptively clean until you walk into the first room when boom, you walk into a bird's nest with a massive pile of dung right underneath it.

But I very soon found out that the place wasn't remotely filthy, more just untidy. But then I remembered all the stuff the woman had said about personal, private, or sensitive items. But then how terrible could it be? A few boxes of nudie magazines? A gimp suit? Something embarrassing like that? Whatever it was, it didn't fuss me in the slightest because if I ever got near it, touched it, or stumbled across it during my clean, I'd be wearing my tried and trusted gloves, mask, and overalls combination. I think my only real issue was how long the job might take to complete. Three floors,

two bathrooms, four bedrooms. To get every room spick and span might take 12 hours, maybe a bit more. I could call in some help from a mate that I roped in from time to time, or I could work harder than I ever had in my life and walk away with it just shy of two and a half grand. First thing I noticed when I walked into the house is that by the looks of things, it hadn't been redecorated since like the 1970s. The hallway carpet had this horrible kind of circular pattern on it in red, brown, and orange colors and it ran all the way up three flights of steep stairs. The wallpaper had a similar pattern on it, only with much lighter shades of yellow and orange. It honestly felt like I'd stepped back in time or something,

and as I walked into the living room, I saw all the appliances were coming up 30 years old too. There was a big old cabinet TV in one corner, a record player in the other, and like I said before, it didn't look too filthy or abandoned, just untidy, like someone really old and infirm had been living there before they got moved into an old folks home or something. It didn't look like the cleaning would be too intense, but there certainly was a lot of it given that there were loads of rooms on three floors. So with that in mind, I got cracking immediately, starting with the living room. All I had to do there was wipe down the surfaces and shampoo the carpet. It's a powder shampoo so it doesn't take forever and there's no risk of a damp smell afterwards.

Before that, I had to clear out all kinds of clutter and some of that clutter were these old magazines. They were strewn all over the coffee table and I was halfway into throwing them into a bin bag when I realized the dates on them. They were all from the early 80s, every single one, and that was around the time it dawned on me that I was in a kind of living museum almost. Absolutely everything, including the old style landline telephone to all the old kitchen fittings, all looked like they'd been deliberately preserved to suit a certain period of time, like they'd made an effort not to include anything too modern. It was quite impressive in a weird way

and I thought that they must have been some kind of enthusiast from that era or something like that. Nothing else made really any sense, because someone had clearly been living in the place. Last thing I did before I started on the second floor was clean the kitchen, which, again, wasn't too heavy of a job, but it was just odd that everything looked so dated. On the way out, I thought I'd check the fridge and freezer to make sure that they were empty, and they were, except for one half-empty jar of Piccolilli at the back of the top shelf. I reached in, took it out, then, before lashing it into a bin bag, I checked the best-before date on the side of the jar. I can't remember the exact

date, but it was sometime in the early 80s, just like the magazines I'd thrown away. I didn't know what Piccolilli was at the time, so the fact that it hadn't mutated after 20 years, even having been sat in a fridge, it actually made me panic a little bit, until I realized two things. Number one, you could print out an old label to stick on a jar and number two, the list of ingredients meant that it could well have been from the 80s and just had nothing happened to it. The two biggest ingredients were mustard and vinegar so that might explain why it hadn't gotten moldy after so many years. But even so, it was still really weird that someone had chosen to live in what was basically a working museum.

As you can probably imagine, the bedrooms and bathroom upstairs were all in that same 60s, 70s style kind of thing, so I won't describe them in too much detail. Only two of them seem to have been used any time recently, one as a guest room and the other as an actual functioning bathroom. Loads of the clothes in the cupboards of that main bedroom looked really dated, but I pictured a lot of old man clothes. I don't quite know what old man clothes are now that I think about it, maybe flat caps or woolly jumpers or something. I don't know, but definitely not these flared jeans and bright orange low-cut t-shirts. It was about then that the museum idea really started to make sense in a weird way.

As I carried on cleaning, I remember thinking, it's probably some rich guy who bought up his childhood home and he's made it like some type of time capsule kind of thing. It's quite a nice idea if you think about it, not that you'd catch me spending that kind of money on something like that, but still, different strokes for different folks as they say. Anyway, I'm just minding my own business when I suddenly hear a door closing downstairs. It had to be the living room door, as that's the only one I'd left open, and although I hadn't heard the front door opening and closing, I assumed it was the lady who paid me come to see how I was getting on. I called out down the stairs something like, hello, I'm up here, and then waited at the top

of the steps, expecting the woman to appear out of the living room. I remember waiting for an uncomfortably long time, just standing there, getting more and more nervous as the silence got creepier and creepier. In the end, I walked down the stairs, into the living room and then into the kitchen at the back, following what I thought was the intruder's route. The kitchen had a door into the back garden, one that should have been closed but was now wide open. I walked into the back garden, expecting to find someone like a gardener or a plumber or something, but there was no one there. The back garden was totally empty, and that's when it hit me. The intruder hadn't come in the front door. They'd come in the back door and slam the living room door as they'd walked into the hallway, the opposite direction I'd

assumed. I retraced my steps, went back into the house's main hallway, then into the hallway, the opposite direction I'd assumed. I retraced my steps, went back into the house's main hallway, then into the one place the intruder could have gone, which was the front room I'd already cleaned by that point. And you guessed it, it was empty. That's the point where I actually started feeling uncomfortable. I mean, so uncomfortable that I didn't want to be in that house alone. If someone for some reason was now in the house with me and evidently didn't want to be seen or heard, that's just about the most obvious red flag for danger I can possibly think of. Maybe they broke in thinking the place was empty, and maybe they ran out the back when they realized it wasn't. But if they were still in the house,

hiding away somewhere, they might not think anything of clocking me over the head was something on the way out, or at least that's what my fear was anyway. I did another sweep of the house, armed with a cricket bat that I'd pulled out of a bedroom cupboard. I actually thought about calling in that help from a mate of mine too, but just as I was about to hit the dial, I thought of the money. We always did a 60-40 split, which meant handing him a hell of a lot of cash for a job that was two-thirds of the way through. I couldn't exactly lie to him about the pay. I'm not that much of a scumbag, and it did make sense to have him around in case anything dodgy did happen, but then that little voice in the back of my head popped up like, stop being a fanny and just finish the job.

So, that's what I did, or tried to do anyway. At that time, it was early afternoon, so after eating my packed lunch in the back garden with nothing really weird happening at all, I got cracking with the rest of the job. I finished cleaning the second floor bathroom then got started on the two third floor rooms which had just been used to store junk. This was obviously much heavier work than the other rooms but it was still relatively an easy job of taking it all out the front and throwing it into a skip. It was a lot of old furniture, wooden tables and chairs, nothing remotely creepy if you don't count all the cobwebs. There was just one thing I was really dreading, and that was the small loft space with a pull-down stair ladder. I thought about just

ignoring it and hoping that I could get away with not cleaning it, but then all it had to take was one walk around and there was a good chance payment would be withheld until I'd clean it. But then all it had to take was one walk around and there was a good chance payment would be withheld until I'd clean it. Not wanting to take that chance, I got a torch out of my van, mustered up the guts to pull down the ladder stairs, then pushed open the little hatch at the top. My torch went in before my head did because I wasn't about to stick my head up into a dark space like that. So as I stuck my head up, I was shining the torch around and then I saw something that had me almost falling back down the ladder in fright. In one of the two tallest corners of the loft, there was a figure. At first all I saw were these two dark eyes shining back at me as the torch beam hit them. I scrambled back

down a few steps, still seeing those big black eyes in my head as my heart started pounding in my chest. I think if I hadn't worked out what I was looking at in the next few seconds, I honestly think I'd have filled my pants, but as my brain worked overtime out of pure terror, it suddenly hit me that I'd seen those big dark eyes before. Slowly but surely, heart still going a mile a minute, I stuck my head back up into the loft to see a gas mask staring back at me. It had been mounted on the top of some kind of mannequin and there was a military uniform underneath it that looked like it could have been World War I or II, that sort of era anyway. Sitting next to it was an old-fashioned luggage trunk with a big, hefty-looking padlock on it, and it occurred to me that these might have been the personal, private items that the woman might have been talking about.

Aside from a bit of dusting, there wasn't much for me to do, but every second I was up there I felt like I was somewhere I shouldn't have been, and I couldn't bear to turn back on the mask and uniform because of how creepy it looked. I was very glad to be done up there, and after a quick once over to make sure everything was looking good, I gave the woman a call so she could come over and have a look and give me the rest of my pay. She turned up about 15 to 20 minutes later, and while I was still sat in my van looking up at the house, wondering what it was that felt so bloody off about it. She walked up with another envelope, and I started reeling off all the things that I'd been up to, mainly all the deep cleaning stuff like shampooing the carpet,

getting all the grime off the windowsills, and doing the same with all the appliances in the kitchen. I kept on like that for a minute hoping it'd justify the huge amount of cash that she was about to hand over for the second time that day and then something hit me. She wasn't bothered in the least bit about all the work I'd put in. She was more interested in knowing if I'd got on okay, as she put it. The only thing I thought to mention was the mysterious intruder I'd had just before my lunch break, how I was a bit worried it was some burglar or a smackhead looking for a place to shoot up. Now that, she did seem interested in, and asked me to tell her exactly what happened. She then told me what I'd long suspected, that she'd given the keys to a few different tradesmen who were all working on the place,

so it could have been any number of them who'd stopped by to check something out or pick something up. It didn't make sense that they wouldn't announce themselves, though, but that's the explanation she gave me me so that's the only one I considered at the time. It's only now, with 20 years of hindsight and experience that I realized how it wasn't just that incident with the intruder that was weird. Something wasn't right about that whole house. I remember how before she drove off with the keys in her possession again, I asked the woman why the place was like a museum or something, why there didn't seem to be anything in there that was made after the early 80s. She said something about a man with dementia living there, and how he felt much more comfortable in that kind of setting. I asked if she knew the guy personally, and she said no, she just worked for a company that was dealing with the sale of the property. Again, it seems like a reasonable

explanation on paper, but something about the way she said it made my bullcrap detector go off. I don't think that she was flat out lying to me, but I get the feeling that she wasn't telling me the whole truth and that there was a lot more story behind that house than I'd first guessed. I don't think that was a normal place that I went into that day. I know that's going to make me sound like some kind of flat earther or most haunted obsessed loser, but I mean it. I don't think that I was sent in to clean the place, not really. I think I was more like a guinea pig. Spend a few hours in there, rummage around, see what happens. I didn't get frightened or hurt or anything like that, but something did happen in there.

Something I'd never been able to explain, even all these years later. I don't even think it was just that one weird incident with the intruder. I think something was wrong with the whole house. Or rather, not that there was anything wrong with it. It just wasn't like any place I'd ever been before, and in a way, I just can't find the words to explain it. I sometimes think about asking around the old painting and decorating boys that I used to work with to see if any of them know anyone who'd worked in that house. Maybe it was just me getting a bit stir-crazy working all day on my own, but then again, maybe there's something about that house that's very different from any other. Long time listener, first time caller.

The story isn't mine, but it's my friend's, but he can barely write a text message, let alone an email, so I'm writing this for him. He used to be a garbage man for a while, back when we first graduated high school, and he has this really messed up story that he likes to tell from time to time that legitimately creeps people out. So, one morning, he's on his regular route and he was one of the guys that jumps off to grab the garbage cans before emptying them into the truck. It's said as soon as he and this other dude got off the truck, they'd started seeing all these missing cat posters attached to streetlights and telephone poles. They said the cat's name was Boots, I guess as in Puss in Boots, and had a cell phone number and picture attached too. Sounds kind of out of pocket, I know, but my boy and his co-workers

started making jokes about how little Boots probably got his ass run over while out looking for lady cats. They're still just laughing it up when my boy comes across a real stinky trash can, which they always used to check on account of, I don't know, not wanting to get crap on them or something. Homie takes the lid off the trash can just to make sure that there's no surprises waiting for him and there's little boots, bashed and broken dead as can be. My friend goes to check the missing poster and finds that the house the cat is missing from is on the same street they're on. Not just that, but the trash can boots was found in belonged to the neighbor of the house he was missing from. He's thinking the neighbor really did run boots over with his car, maybe by backing out of their driveway without looking or whatever.

But whatever happened, the right thing to do was to go up and tell the homeowners what happened to their cat. He says he felt kind of bad after making jokes about it and they were about to stop at that same house anyways to collect their trash so that's what we did. He says it was a weekday morning, kinda early and he could see lights on and people moving around so he figured he was good to buzz the front door. He hears some moving around inside then the sound of someone running to the door and then when it opened there's a kid just standing there like, yeah? My boy asks the kid, hey, is your mommy or daddy home? And the kid replies, mommy's in the shower. And my buddy then is kind of lost and doesn't know what to say. So he asked the kid, does your family own a kitty cat? But then the

kid just shakes his head. He says he was a little confused for a second, like maybe he'd read the wrong house number on accident or something, but then he looks up to see the house number is right there on the door in front of him, so he definitely doesn't have the wrong house. My friend then says, are you sure you don't got a lost kitty or something? And again, this kid just looks back at him, completely expressionless, and shakes his head. Right then, the kid's mom appears, dressed, but their hair is up in a towel. She then shoos the kid away from the door, and then asks what my buddy wants. My homie then tells the lady about her dead cat, and she obviously is pretty upset, so he asks if she wants him to bag the thing up and bring it

over so they can give Boots a little funeral or something. The lady decides that they're going to tell the kid that Boots went to live on a farm upstate, as they always do, and that they'd get a new cat so the kid would just move on and forget about it. Pretty solid plan for parents, I guess, and the lady thanked my buddy for letting them know, and then she kept on talking about how upset Lucas was going to be, which I guess was the name of her kid. Boots was his best buddy, his most favorite furry friend in the whole wide world. He wouldn't be able to handle such terrible news, not at the age that he was. He wasn't ready.

All very understandable, right? My buddy says how bad he feels for them, wishes them a nice day and the lady thanks him again before closing the door. So he gets back on his route, finishes up, and then he said the whole time that they were back in the depot, sorting all the garbage and whatnot, the kid's reaction was just burning a hole in his head. According to the mom, that kid loved that little cat,

and the prospect of him finding out that it was dead terrified her. But then the kid straight up acted like he didn't even own a cat. I get that the kid could have just been super shy or whatever and just said theory creeps us out too much to even really think about it too long. According to my friend, the kid wasn't what you typically imagine when you think of a shy kid. You know the kind of thing I mean, not making eye contact, hiding behind the door and refusing to even say anything. The kid was the total opposite. He didn't seem scared at all. He stared back at my friend all deadpan and he didn't even flinch when he mentioned little old Boots the Puss. That's what my boy kept thinking back on at the sorting depot, how incredibly creepy that kid had acted considering the circumstances.

All that thinking led to a real dark kind of conclusion, and honestly, if it all went down exactly the way he said it did, I think I kind of believe it. It might be a hotter than hot take, but screw it, I'll say it. I think the kid hurt Boots. I think he didn't like his dear old kitty cat nearly as much as Mommy thought. I think she mistook the kid's interest in the cat as affection when, really, it was something else. It wouldn't be the first time a kid deliberately hurt an animal like that, right? I mean, isn't that one of the warning signs when a kid's destined to grow up to be a serial killer? But then to me, the really scary idea is that if the kid really did kill his cat,

he was smart enough to put it in the neighbor's trash can and not his own, like he was trying to cover his tracks or something. To me, that's like the first signs of the kid's evil genius coming through right there. So young, but already picking up the tricks of the trade, you know? And the story doesn't even end there. My buddy worked the route for months afterwards, always passing the same house at the same time on the same day of the week. Sometimes, not all the time, he'd seen that little demon kid staring at him from a window with the same sort of dead stare that he had when he lied about having a cat.

Bro, it gives me the creeps just typing it out, I swear. My buddy said passing that house topped his list of things that he hated about that route. If that were me, it'd top the list of things I hated about my whole life. Creepy adults are one thing, but creepy kids? They're the real nightmare fuel, if you ask me. When you want to bet on sports, play it on a field or ice or course. BetRivers is the place. Over, under, money, line. Same game, parlays, it's all fine. You'll put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook.

Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. In early November of 1975, a garbage man working his regular route around Redondo Beach, California, made a hair-raising discovery. After coming across one particularly heavy trash can, he decided to separate the contents in order to more safely deposit them in his truck's disposal

unit. One trash bag seemed much heavier than the others, and as the garbage man carried it to the back of his truck, he noticed blood leaking out of the small tear in the thick black plastic. He dropped the bag there and then, terrified that he incriminated himself in some way and rushed to call the police. Within the hour, the cops had blocked off the street where the bag lay and after carefully opening up the black plastic, they discovered something horrifying. The bag contained the carefully dismembered remains of a young man named Larry Gene Walters. And the incident sparked a long and arduous criminal investigation, the goal of which to catch a killer the media had dubbed the Trash Bag Killer.

Born on September 24th of 1939, Patrick Wayne Kearney was the eldest son of two hard-working middle-class parents. He was raised in eastern Los Angeles by a mother and father who did everything to ensure the happiness of their children. But as he advanced through the state education system, Patrick became the subject of relentless bullying. His skinny frame and sickly constitution made him an easy target for his crueler high school classmates, who often taunted him for his somewhat effeminate mannerisms. As a result, Patrick remained deeply closeted regarding his homosexuality, while growing understandably angry and resentful towards his bullies. Yet while many young men in his position would simply endure the treatment, until free to escape and live comfortably,

Patrick allowed his torment to warp and twist his own sense of morality, until the people that surrounded him could be placed into one of two categories, predator or prey. At around 13 years of age, Patrick began developing some extremely violent revenge fantasies involving his bullies. He imagined kidnapping them, nailing them to a wooden board, and then skinning them alive with a small but razor-sharp knife. He wanted to see them suffer. He wanted to see them hurt. But his small stature, on top of how outnumbered he was, meant that he was unable to seek retribution. And so, Patrick turned his violent frustrations elsewhere. It was around this

time that Patrick's father taught him how to hunt wild pigs. The circumstances of these hunting trips aren't exactly clear, and some have even suggested that they were actually trips to a local slaughterhouse. But thanks to researchers from Virginia's Radford University, we know that shoot was the operative word Patrick used. So it's much more likely that his loving, well-to-do father believed a few hunting trips would both cement their bond and relieve the stresses of his classmate's cruelty. Patrick's father taught him that to kill with just one shot, he needed to shoot a wild pig just behind its ear. Again, it's not clear how proficient a killer Patrick was, but he took the lesson to heart and began practicing in his spare time. In all likelihood, Patrick went out into the woods with a small caliber rifle or BB gun

and began to hunt small animals for sport. Some reports say he tortured survivors and grew to be fixated on the sight of blood, while others stated that Patrick, and I quote, found pleasure in rolling around in the blood and the guts. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Patrick and his family moved to Arizona, and then Texas, before eventually returning to California. Patrick then spent a few months at El Camino Community College in the city of Torrance, but dropped out to enlist in the Air Force at the age of 19.

Following his basic training, Patrick returned to Texas in 1960 as part of his first duty station, and it was here that he met a fellow airman by the name of David Hill. The two men were kindred spirits, as Hill was also a closeted homosexual, and over the course of their service together, they became romantically involved. Patrick and David then sought honorable discharges from the Air Force, and once they were granted, they started a life together in Long Beach, California during the summer of 1961. The men seemed happy for a while, but the following year, David announced that he was departing on a solo hitchhiking trip up and down the West Coast. He assured Patrick that he'd return by the start of summer, but it was an outright lie. In reality, David Hill had reconciled his relationship with his estranged wife, Linda,

and when Patrick learned of this, he was heartbroken. In order to fill the void of his failed relationship, Patrick engaged in serial promiscuity and cruised for potential partners around the gay nightclubs of San Diego and Tijuana. He was met with a fair amount of success, but was also met with a fair amount of rejection, too. And while Patrick rejoiced in the former, he was completely emotionally unequipped to deal with the latter. Getting turned down enraged Patrick and one night, a sudden series of them resulted in him throwing in the towel and driving back to Long Beach earlier than planned. On the drive back, he remembered the squirrels and peccaries he killed during his teenage years, of the power he'd wielded over them in death. As Patrick drove, lost in thought, he suddenly spotted a hitchhiker at the side of the road. It was late at night on a lonely stretch of highway.

The decent thing to do would be to pull over and give them a ride. But as the grateful hitchhiker climbed onto the back of his motorcycle, Patrick had a sudden and terrible idea. He drove the 19-year-old hitchhiker to a secluded area and told him to get off his bike. The teenager was confused but when he saw that Patrick had a gun he did as he was told. Patrick then told the boy to turn around possibly under the pretense of robbing him but when the order was complied with, Patrick aimed just behind the boy's ear and then shot him in the back of the head. Patrick has never revealed the boy's name, possibly because he neglected to ask. The squirrels and peccaries didn't need names and neither did the hitchhiker. Patrick also has revealed the location of his first murder and

the victim doesn't appear to have been reported missing. Yet Patrick was able to provide an insight into that too. He claimed he was driving in the same area a few weeks later when he noticed a second person walking at the side of the road. This boy was a little younger than his first victim and to Patrick, he appeared to be searching for something. Patrick claims that he asked the boy what he was looking for, only to be told that just a few days prior, his 19-year-old cousin had gone missing in the very same area. Patrick invited the boy onto the back of his bike, claiming that they'd be able to search a much wider area that way. Instead, Patrick drove the boy out into a secluded area and then repeated the

process of marching him into the desert and shooting him in the back of the head. Once his victim was lifeless and still, Patrick began to indulge in a horrifying kind of nostalgia. The lifeless bloodied corpse before him reminded Patrick of the small furry creatures of his youth and how in death he was able to exercise total control over them. It's believed that Patrick mutilated and desecrated his second victim to a diabolical extent, disemboweling and skinning him as Carrie and Eaters began to circle in the skies above. It was these first two murders, but especially the aftermath of the second, that cemented Patrick's desire to revisit those horrid games of his youth.

Patrick partook in one more of those grisly games, all at the expense of an 18-year-old boy he referred to only as Mike. By that point, he was entirely committed to wreaking a terrible vengeance against a world that had so frequently humiliated him. But then, something curious happened. Sometime in the first half of 1962, when Mike was still just 22 years old, David Hill showed up on his doorstep. His former lover had attempted to rebuild his relationship with his wife, but found he'd been living a lie. He was in love with Patrick, and to pretend otherwise would be a disservice to both of them.

What followed was a brief period of happiness and stability for Patrick and his prodigal partner. They'd moved into a small apartment together, and Patrick managed to secure a rather lucrative job as an engineer for an aeronautical company. In early 1963, Patrick experienced some kind of strife, potentially as a result of his relationship with David. As a result, he marched into his manager's office and suddenly quit his job. The circumstances of his resignation are shrouded in mystery, but Patrick was inexplicably rehired just a few months later as a senior research assistant. This amounted to a two-tier promotion for Patrick and is evidence that he was extremely productive and effective following David's return. The following year, David and a then 24-year-old Patrick would move to California's Culver City,

and with the latter's additional income, they were able to rent a much larger property together. Again, it seems the couple experienced relative peace for a short time, with David officially filing for a divorce from his estranged wife. All throughout this romantic reunion, from 1962 to 1967, Patrick's bloodlust remained dormant. This is most likely due to the sense of happiness that came with his romance with David. For the first time in his life, things seemed to be going Patrick's way. But that newfound prosperity came with an overwhelming sense of insecurity. During the summer of 1967, Patrick invited David on a trip to Tijuana and planned to show him his former haunts from his days as a single man. It was here that they ran

into an old mutual friend, a man in his late twenties known as George. It seems that David and George had a definite chemistry between them, which inspired a vicious jealousy and an increasingly insecure Patrick. Just a few months after the surprise reunion, Patrick invited George out drinking with him alone. George may well have considered it a proposition. In reality, it was more of an execution. Patrick drove to George's home in San Diego, then talked him into having dinner with him back in Culver City. But then the moment they walked through the front door, Patrick produced a pistol, then shot George in the back of the head. His dead body was then dragged into the home's bathroom, where Patrick violated,

mutilated, and skinned and dismembered him over the course of the next several hours. Patrick also extracted the bullet from his victim's head to ensure the murder would not be traced back to him, then buried the dismembered body behind his garage. They say the act of murder gets easier with each passing victim, but George's murder marked the first time Patrick had killed out of necessity to defend what was his. There was no way in hell he'd risk losing David to someone he considered more mature and attractive, and he'd do anything, no matter how monstrous, to keep him. Not long after David was told that George had moved away, he and Patrick moved into a large two-bedroom home in Redondo Beach.

It should have marked an exceptionally happy occasion for the couple, who owned their own home for the very first time, yet David was becoming increasingly concerned with his boyfriend's behavior. Despite being completely unaware of his murderous proclivities, David had noticed a distinct change in Patrick's behavior. He had become more and more coercive and controlling as the years went by, and as time passed in their Redondo beach home, the relationship steadily deteriorated. Eighteen months later, in June of 1971, Patrick woke up to an empty home. David's clothes were gone. His car was gone. All that remained of him was a handwritten note on the kitchen table. It's not clear what exactly was written, but

it could quite easily be summed up with, it's over and I'm never coming back. The abandonment was devastating to Patrick's mental health and the revenge fantasies of his youth returned with a vengeance. Over the next three years or so, Patrick geared up for the killing spree of a lifetime, refining and perfecting his methods until he could kill frequently and discreetly. By the summer of 1974, Patrick was thought to be murdering unsuspecting victims at least once a month. He would cruise gay bars or keep his eyes peeled for hitchhikers, often choosing victims who bore varying degrees of resemblance to those that had bullied him during his youth. Then, once he had won their trust, he would execute them almost as soon as they climbed into his truck.

He would usually shoot his victims just behind the ear with a small.22 pistol, holding the gun in his right hand while steering his truck with his left. This mobile method of murder ensured minimal exposure to potential witnesses, with a customized seatbelt mechanism making sure the bodies of his victims stayed upright in the passenger seat. Patrick also ensured that the bullets in his.22 caliber pistol were of a relatively low gunpowder yield, meaning there were rarely any exit wounds following the gunshot. The rounds simply scrambled their brain matter, killing or disabling them and thus allowing Patrick total control over them for what came next. Patrick would then drive the corpse of his victim to a secluded area of Southern California before intimately violating and desecrating the remains He would sometimes violently assault his victims following this period of copulation

screaming the same homophobic epithets that had once been directed at himself Having completed his acts of sadism Patrick would dismember his victims with a hacksaw before depositing their butchered bodies into a series of trash bags. These bags would then be dumped into various locations such as landfills, along freeways, or in random dumpsters Patrick came across while on his travels. During his earlier murders, Patrick seemed content to leave the bodies of his victims to turkey vultures or coyotes. It certainly made for an effective, natural way of disposing of

bodies, but it also meant that Patrick had to relinquish what he saw as his property to a bunch of hungry animals. Entering the remains in trash bags, as well as choosing the location that they'd be dumped, allowed Patrick to extend his level of control over his victims. It had also posed a problem. Disposing of human remains was grisly work, and the stench of death meant remains were often discovered just hours after they'd been dumped. So to avoid any unwanted attention from law enforcement, Patrick began draining his victims' bodily fluids prior to their disposal.

This dramatically slowed the onset of any foul odors, a process Patrick would double down on by bathing the bodies of his victims in bleach and dishwasher detergent in order to cleanse away any forensic evidence he may have left. Although Patrick mostly targeted men in their early or mid-twenties, his obsession with his own childhood bullying caused him to direct his anger at the occasional adolescent or child victim. Patrick's youngest known victim was five-year-old Ronnie Smith, who vanished from Lenox, California on August 24th of 1974. His body was discovered just less than a month later in the state's Riverside County. The same fate befell eight-year-old Merle Chance of Venice Beach, who disappeared on April 6th of 1977 while riding his bicycle near Patrick's place of work. Patrick chose to finish his shift early that day, then had it out into the parking lot to gain the boy's attention. Once Little Merle was in his truck, Patrick discreetly smothered the boy before driving him back home for the night.

The next morning, after placing the boy's chopped up body into trash bags, Patrick dumped Little Merle's remains in the Angeles National Forest off Angeles Crest Highway, approximately 11 miles north of Altadena. On June 16th of 1976, Patrick came across 13-year-old Michael Craig McGee, who was hitchhiking between the cities of Lenox and Torrance. Michael has a long history of petty criminality and would often leave his home on long trips around Southern California. This made him an ideal target to Patrick's despicable proclivities, who won the boy's trust before inviting him on a camping trip that very weekend. Michael agreed and was driven back to Patrick's home to prepare for the trip. Patrick later claimed that he had every intention of making good on his invitation, at least until Michael presented himself as what Patrick referred to as a threat.

According to him, as soon as they arrived at Patrick's Redondo Beach residence, Michael began boasting of his extensive criminal history and began wandering around the house as scanning for potential points of entry. It seems Patrick hadn't been the only one looking for a victim that day, as young Michael may well have perceived him as a potential target for robbery. In light of that, Patrick waited for an opportune moment, and then shot the 13-year-old in the back of the head. Michael's body was never found, and although Patrick later admitted to murdering him, he was also quoted as saying, I disposed of the body, completely disposed of it, you aren't going to find him.

Eventually, Patrick's targeting of adolescent males led to his demise, particularly the slaying of 17-year-old John Otis LeMay, who was killed on March 13th of 1977. That same day, at around 5.30pm, John informed a neighbor that he was headed over to Redondo Beach to meet a man named Dave, who he'd befriended during a visit to a local gym. The Dave in question here is undoubtedly David Hill, Patrick's former lover, and the fact that he directed the young man to Patrick's home is deeply suspicious. David was later cleared of all charges against him after it was alleged that he played an integral role in the murders committed by his former boyfriend, but the fact he directed 17-year-old John to Patrick's home is very suspicious indeed. There's a chance David had no idea that his lover was such an

inhuman monster. But at the same time, it's unclear why communication between him and Patrick had been re-established following their second and supposedly final breakup. Regardless, John LeMay arrived at Patrick's house to find the homeowner wasn't expecting anyone. And when asked if David was around, Patrick told him no, but invited him inside to watch TV while they awaited his return. Then, at some point, Patrick reached for his.22, then shot John in that same familiar spot, just behind his ear. By the time John LeMay was killed, local law enforcement had already placed Patrick on their list of suspects. A local butcher, Jerry Stevens, who claimed Patrick visited his shop regularly, told police that he was a loner with an eerie sense of quiet about him. He also noted that

Patrick inquired about the best way to butcher an animal and would ask which knives the butcher used to ease the cutting of joints and bones. Yet Stevens was perhaps one of the only people aside from David Hill who got even the slightest inkling of what a monster Patrick Kearney was. Patrick's employers at Hughes Aircraft saw their model employee as something of a neurotic and accepted that a person with as high an IQ as him, believed to be in the 180 range, often came with their own personal eccentricities. Throughout the course of their investigation, law enforcement were informed that John LeMay and David Hill had been spotted in each other's company, and given David's connection to Patrick,

both were announced as wanted for questioning. Patrick initially fled to Texas, but during the summer of 1977, David convinced him to return to California and turn himself in. Patrick then gave a full and frank account of his 15-year career in killing, but insisted that David Hill had been party to none of them. Despite what many have suggested, forensic and circumstantial evidence point this to being true, and David was later released without charge. In total, Patrick confessed to a jaw-dropping 35 murders, pleading guilty to all of them in order to avoid the death sentence. He was subsequently ordered to serve life without parole at California's Mule Creek State Prison. It's a cruel reality that many, many children endure periods of bullying in their lives.

The vast majority of them get over it and go on to lead happy and fruitful existences. But some, Patrick Kearney included, allow their torment to shape and define them. Patrick may have believed that he was striking back at a world that had wronged him, wreaking a terrible revenge against those that had bullied him, but the truth is, in becoming a vicious, bloodthirsty, predatory deviant, Patrick handed his bullies the kind of victory they could only dream of. They treated him like a freak, like a monster, but instead of showing them his capacity for dignity, integrity, and ultimately forgiveness, Patrick gave in to the

lesser angels of his nature and ensured his name will forever be associated with some of the most heinous acts of evil in all of criminal history. To be continued... 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. We'll be a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600

to speak to an advisor free of charge.