370: THE MOST HORRIFYING THING I'VE SEEN IN THE WOODS | 8 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 355
00:00 My name's John, and I'm recently retired from the Washington State Patrol. I did the full 25, made it to lieutenant, and got my pension, and all in all, I'd say that I have very few regrets. But just like every other former cop out there, I got one or two cases that have followed me into retirement, some for the better and some, for worse. Now, in early 2019, the State Patrol's missing and unidentified persons unit commenced a call. cold case initiative. The goal was to assign a small group of experienced detectives to the piles of unsolved missing person cases sitting in the unit's archives.
01:08 And since by then I had 12 years under my belt, it didn't surprise me when I got the call. We met one Monday morning when one of the MUPU guys showed us to the filing cabinet containing their cold cases. Looking inside felt like playing Russian roulette with all six chambers full because no matter which one we picked, it was going to be a mess. And that's why we were the chosen ones, I guess, because we could handle messy and not burn out and end up chasing wild geese. But the very first one I picked ended up being one of the dirtiest and downright darkest cases I'd ever worked. And to protect those involved, I've omitted the names of all those involved, so my apologies if my prose is clunky
01:51 in certain parts. But back in 2014, a retired oil rig supervisor and and former army engineer went missing from his home in Pullman. Now, his car was found a few weeks later over the state line in Idaho at a motel near McCrosky State Park. There were no signs of struggle near his car or in his hotel room, and the motel's security cameras showed him leaving the site on foot, looking calm and collected. The investigating detective noted that voluntary disappearance was a distinct possibility, since during the months prior to his disappearance, the missing man's marriage had deteriorated drastically. Yet there was no activity on any of his bank accounts, so if he had disappeared someplace,
02:37 it was on somebody else's dime. Now, the first thing on my agenda was to go talk to the missing man's wife. She was a warm and friendly woman, but carrying the pain of her husband's disappearance for five long years had clearly taken its toll on her. She was living with a friend, a man who, who was evidently playing the role of a surrogate husband. But since both believed her husband was still alive, neither seemed prepared to make their affair public.
03:04 If in fact there was an affair, and what they shared wasn't a platonic companionship. The missing man's wife confirmed that, for around six months prior to his disappearance, their relationship had been strained. He'd been distant, preoccupied, and perpetually irritable, but for the life of her, she couldn't get him to tell her why. He'd been retired from the oil industry for a couple of years by that point, so it couldn't have been work getting to him.
03:31 The only clue to his poor mental state was the fact that he spent long hours in the evening talking to an old army friend of his. Those nightly conversations continued right up until the day before he disappeared. And then when his wife woke up alone that morning, she found nothing but a note on the table which said, I'm sorry, there's something I need to do. It was believed that McCrosky Motel, the one that his car was found at, had served as the meeting place between him and this old army friend he spent so much time talking to. And so according to the wife, if anyone knew where he'd be, it'd be him. The only trouble was he'd refused to talk to anyone about his dealings with her husband, not even the local sheriff's department. She gave me the army buddy's contact details and advised me to reach out to him, albeit very much.
04:21 very gently and very politely. But then on the walk back to my car, the lady's friend caught up with me and had a thing or two of his own to share with me. Namely, his belief that the lady's missing husband was off working for the CIA. This friend seemed absolutely convinced that both our missing person and his old army buddy had both been working for the CIA on and off since they left the army. He said that he wasn't heading off around the country supervising oil rigs. He was going to CIA black sites to study extraterrestrial materials and technology.
05:02 And when I asked what proof he had, the friend admitted that he didn't have much. But then again, he was right in that you can't just go calling the CIA and asking if such and such a person is an agent. Because all you get in return is that movie cliche of we can neither confirm nor deny. He was basing his theory around his suspicion that the old army friend lived the life of a CIA agent, in that he traveled overseas a lot, had no obvious source of income, and spent a lot of time flying down to Reagan Airport, which services the CIA headquarters at Langley. I asked him how he knew all of this and was told that he'd done all of his own research.
05:42 He was also quick to add that it was research the old army buddy hadn't taken kindly to. But in the friend's mind, that only confirmed the man's guilt. He then shared his belief that our missing person's final meeting with his old army buddy had actually been a kind of recruitment session, and that after swearing himself to secrecy or a missing person was off working on some secret project at some secret base somewhere. The wife's friend told me a bunch of other stuff about UAPs and Tic Tacs, as he called them, and both of which I found out were these new way of jargon, meaning UFO.
06:20 And as you can imagine, I didn't find myself taking many notes by the time he got around to all that stuff, but he was right about my next port of call being this old army buddy. He was also right when he told me that finding our missing person would involve waiting into some very murky and very dangerous waters, just not in the ways he might have believed. Now, having received the old army buddy's contact details, I gave him a call as soon as I was able. But the UFO guy was right about how blunt he could be, and that's putting it kindly. Because no sooner had I explained that I was calling about his missing friend, he made his feelings abundantly clear. He told me to never, ever call me again, and if he saw me sneaking around his property, like that damn tinfoil hat son of a bitch, those are his words, by the way.
07:10 He'd have me thrown in jail, just like he did with that goddamn E.T. obsessed A-Hull, his words again. And it was only then that I discovered that the UFO guy hadn't just conducted his own investigation as such, what had rather directed a prolonged campaign of harassment toward the old Army Buddy, one that had resulted in an arrest being made. Now, the old Army Buddy might have told me to get lost, but I didn't make detective by giving up that easy. I knew a former military man like him would respond much better to seeing a badge in person, rather than hearing just a name over the phone. But before then, I knew he'd need some time to cool off, because approach too quick and that angry old bastard might have done more than just file a complaint.
07:57 Instead, I decided to look into the missing man's background a little more to see if that had provided any clues. And boy, did it ever. Like I said, you can't just go asking the CIA who's an agent and who's not. But the army, on the other hand, they'll tell you just about anything you damn well ask so long as the person's been. discharged. His wife had told me our missing person had been a radio technician, and for a time, that was certainly true. But by the date of his discharge, he was serving in a very different role. Without getting too technical with the military speaker, our missing person was part of an engineer battalion, but for some reason, served in an intelligence capacity following a period
08:42 of specialized training. This is what's called an out-of-branch role, and while they're not unheard, they're usually temporary positions that fill gaps in the organization, but our missing person spent three years in that intelligence role, while taking at least a few months out of each year to be trained by intelligence guys. Now, this was all interesting enough, but what really got my attention was how the army couldn't seem to tell me why our missing person was discharged. All they provided me with was the date of it, October 5th of 2001. Now to me, out of all the strange things I'd uncovered regarding a missing person, this was the strangest. And for the benefits of any young whippersnappers listening to this in the years to come, here's why it was so strange. So, less than a
09:29 month before that discharge date, America experienced some attacks that happened in September of that year, the largest single loss of life on American soil committed by a foreign actor. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives, the New York skyline was irreparably altered, and folks from sea to shining sea wanted to get themselves some goddamn payback. Over 30,000 extra troops signed up over the next six months alone, and retention rate shot way up too, with more than ever choosing to re-enlist rather than miss out on going after Bin Laden and his boys. But then, if that was the case, how come our missing person not only turned down some pretty lucrative signing bonuses, but had his discharge fast-tracked. If he'd stayed enlisted for just 18 more
10:18 months, he'd be entitled to his army pension, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say it constituted a pretty shocking display of cowardice. But our missing person was certainly no coward. He'd served honorably in several war zones prior to the sudden discharge, and had even earned himself a bronze star for what he and his men did in Panama, which had me wondering. he really leave the engineers right after September of 2001 and opt to give up all that pension money? Or, much like undercover cops do, was he transferred someplace secret to be what you might call a deniable asset. The way to safely rule that out was to draw up a list of likely employers in the oil industry and then tick them off one by one until I've found the one our missing person worked for.
11:08 But when this went on for three whole days without result, I must have tried at least a hundred. And then, things finally made sense. Our missing person hadn't been working at an oil firm at all, and he'd lied to his wife and friends about where he was going. So what in the hell was he doing instead? I placed a few calls to his wife to arrange another talk. When she didn't answer any of them, I figured that she was just busy and told myself to be patient. But then the very next day, I got a call. call from an unknown cell phone number. Now, I figured she'd switched numbers and I'd been calling
11:44 the old one, so I picked up and said something like, hi there, thanks for calling me back. But it wasn't our missing person's wife. It was his old army buddy, the one who told me never to call him again. And as it turned out, there had been a major miscommunication that had resulted in years of misunderstanding. You see, the old army friend didn't understand the severity of the situation. He figured there had been a divorce, maybe some infidelity, and then after running off someplace, his old friend just didn't want to talk anymore. Now, he didn't know his safety was in question, and if he had, he wouldn't have brushed off the first cop he spoke to five years previous. He knew his friend was troubled, he just didn't know how troubled, and then when he finally found
12:29 out his old friend was actually missing, the first thing he did was give me a call. Now, I can't say too much about this old army buddy because he ended up telling me things that had get him in a whole heap of trouble if his old bosses found out. But in the interest of uncovering the truth, he was more than willing to speak freely, just not over the phone. We met in person, somewhere private, and he told me that while the UFO guy had been crazier than a bag of hammers, he was right about one thing, and one thing alone. And that's how the old army buddy and our missing person had actually once served in the central intelligence agency. I'd already established that a missing person had served in an intelligence capacity during his
13:13 final few years in the army, albeit in a very unusual one. And according to his buddy, this made him a prime candidate for an agency recruitment in the aftermath of September 2001. Just like I'd suspected, our missing person hadn't quit the army at a time it needed him most. He'd just moved to a place where records aren't made public. and while I assumed he was given a job similar to the one he'd been doing in the engineers, I was very wrong. He hadn't been some kind of intelligence analyst.
13:44 His job was very euphemistically titled, Interrogator. Unfortunately for the whippersnappers, it's time for another quick history lesson. Now, that time in September 2001 was a very dark time for America, obviously. Not just because of all the lives lost or how we realized our enemies could use our own. own liberties and successes against us, but also because of what we resorted to. Folks were so dead set on revenge and so scared that our enemies had something else up their sleeves that we ripped up the rulebook in a way that had the founding fathers rolling in their graves. The Patriot Act was passed, meaning the government had the right to spy on its
14:26 own citizens in a way that it never, ever had before. But that's not what our missing person was involved with. He was involved in developing and executing so-called advanced interrogation techniques, a very fancy newfangled term that conveniently replaced a very old one. Torture. Our missing person, along with his old buddy, was inducted into a large team of CIA interrogators whose job was to fly over to Afghanistan and later to Iraq to extract information from people. Afghanistan had been slim pickings, and most of al-Qaeda guys either escaped into Pakistan or were picked up by U.S. Special Forces and flown to Guantanamo Bay to be interrogated there. But Iraq, and in particular this one city called Fallujah, it was a whole other story.
15:18 After the invasion, coalition forces were busy dealing with the situation in Baghdad, and for good reason with it being the center of power. But just 30 miles away, there's this city called Fuluzza. And since the coalition was stretched so thin, they had to hire civilian contractors to police the place. International insurgents began using the city as a staging ground. Fallujah was flooded with weapons and equipment. And then in March 2004, four of those civilian contractors were ambushed, mutilated, and then hung from a bridge by insurgents as a way of saying, come get us. The solution was obvious, send in the Marines.
15:58 But when they got there, they didn't find a handful of insurgents taking advantage of a city in chaos. They found a fortress. The insurgents fought hard. They fought smart, and they were dug in deep. And this wasn't some grassroots, Fist in the Air Resistance Movement either. Because while former Iraqi army officers were most definitely running the show, the rank and file consisted of terrorists from all over the world. There were guys from Egypt, Syria, Chechnya,
16:28 even European countries like France and Germany, and the Marines knew that because they pulled their passports off their bodies after the fighting was done. These guys had to land in Syria and go through passport control just like everyone else, and only some of them had straight up written jihad in Iraq as the reason for entering Syria. Once these guys realized the Marines were going to take the city, a lot of them simply dropped their weapons and tried to blend in with the civilians, rather than go all out in a blaze of war. glory. And then with the Marines surrounding the place to make sure they couldn't escape, military intelligence went snatching people up left and right before carting them off to the interrogators to see what they knew. And that's where our missing person enters the picture. Hina's old buddy were with the Fallujah Interrogation Unit all throughout 2005, and according to the buddy, it was the single biggest regret of both of their careers. Since all the attention was on Baghdad,
17:27 the Fallujah unit ran almost completely unsupervised and things turned real messy, real fast. Now, firstly, everyone was still very much in payback mode. So knowing that there were so many bad guys in town made them nothing short of bloodthirsty. I was told interrogations are supposed to be cold, withdrawn affairs, where an almost scientific approach is taken to physical and mental suffering. But the old buddies said the Fallujah team were openly talking about how good it felt to be dishinged finishing out some punishment. It wasn't even about getting answers anymore. Everyone knew some dumb-ass Libyan jihadist didn't know Jack about September. He was just there because he heard he
18:08 could shoot at Americans and maybe even secure his spot in paradise in the process. But the team didn't give a good God damn. If he was there to kill Americans, then he was going to suffer. It got to the point where anyone who wasn't Iraqi-born was getting dragged off the street and interrogated, and not all of them made it through. The team had all kinds of people dragged in there, and some of them were tortured to death. The old army buddies said walking through their headquarters, which was heavily guarded, and set up a few miles away in the desert, was like a living nightmare. All you could hear day and night were the screams.
18:46 The place had to be constantly clean, too, because the smell of all that blood attracted flies. So it either smelled so heavily of bleach and other crap that it had to make your hands. headache or it reeked of blood, and you were constantly swatting flies away from your face. Anyone who died during interrogation ended up getting buried outside in the desert, and in the rare case the person was truly innocent, they were dumped by the side of the road for the rats and strayed dogs to find. Everyone knew how terrible it was, too. They hated the screams. They hated the stink of blood. They hated the flies. When I was told, there was also this sense of, we all got a job to do and it ain't a nice one but it's an important one so suck it up buttercup because
19:29 we could be the marines getting our nuts blown off on the front lines it was the perfect storm of evil i guess and i was told that it wasn't until a long time after that they had this shared what the hell did we do back there kind of moment and then over time as all the wmd stuff turned out to be all bull crap and everyone found out how rich certain folks got on the back of all that death They realized that all that pain and suffering they'd inflicted had been for nothing. The old buddies said that this went on for years with our missing man going from true believer to openly questioning what the hell the U.S. military was even doing in Iraq. Being on the CIA payroll kept him quiet, I guess, but after he retired,
20:14 I was told our missing person got way, way worse. He took to drinking, and according to his friend, he drank a lot, too. He said he needed to be able to sleep, and it went way beyond that as well. He realized just how many innocent people they'd hurt and killed, and how that was becoming harder and harder to live with. What's worse? He didn't have anyone but some agency shrink to talk about it, too. His old buddy couldn't be there, not all the time,
20:42 as he hadn't retired yet, and our missing person couldn't exactly go talking about classified stuff to a civilian doctor either. He was already teetering on the edge, and then something terrible happened. The buddies said that just before New Year's Eve of 2013, our missing person called him in the middle of the night and asked him to go to the website of some Arabic language news channel. There, he found a live video feed coming from a very familiar-looking Iraqi city,
21:12 and as he watched in horror, our missing person talked him through what he was seeing. Fallujah, the city that inflicted a thousand horrors upon, and some sick misguided attempt to save it, was under siege from a group of militants, one that appeared to be very well armed and very well trained. They were in the process to surrounding the place, just like the Marines had done nine years before, and then about a week later,
21:39 they drove out the Iraqi army and declared their first major victory. Neither man knew who the group were at the time, but cut to about seven to eight months later, and the whole entire world would know their name. And while that name sounded different depending on what language you spoke, in America, we called them ISIS. The old army buddy didn't know exactly when his friend had disappeared. He just got a call from him in February, not long before his car was found at the motel. But it wasn't hard to figure out the exact date our missing person had gone missing.
22:13 I called his wife to ask if she could remember the exact date. Without skipping a beat, she said January 4th. It was a Saturday. The exact same day the news broke that Fallujah had fallen to ISIS terrorists. We think that was the straw which broke the proverbial camel's back, because after that, our missing person ended up drinking himself right down into a hole. His old buddy said that when he showed up to the bar that they met at, he looked like he had one foot in the grave already.
22:45 And then all they spoke about were regrets and the lies, and how it was all for nothing, absolutely nothing. The meeting didn't end well either. The old buddy suggested that he get help, but his missing friends said nothing could help him anymore, not booze, not even the church. He said he knew he was going to hell, that he'd inflicted so much pain that he could never even the scales. Now our missing person also mentioned how they might be the last time that they'd see each other, but I guess the old army buddy didn't see that for what it was,
23:18 and he left thinking that his old friend couldn't stand to see him anymore. Not when he was that much of a reminder of something he'd do anything to forget. Everything made a little more sense after the call with the old army buddy, and although it stayed off the record, I had a conversation with the missing man's wife confirming his former position at the CIA. And after that, it was a case of figuring out which direction he might have gone on foot following his departure from the motel. And while that proved a difficult process,
23:47 I hope that it had at least give me something to work with. Well, it did, and when I found out what it was, it was nothing short of devastating. It was in a bar that I ended up talking to a man who knew the area well. He'd grown up around McCrosky State Park and spent a lot of time there as a kid, so it was him who told me that the motel our missing person stayed at right before he disappeared was just a half-hour's walk away from a place they called Dead Man's Bridge. He told me the section of river at Ranover were rapids, and that if a person fell in, they'd be bashed against the rocks before they hit a section of what's called an undertow.
24:30 Now, this is when submerged obstacles like large rocks cause fast-moving water to go over the top, which creates a strong downward current that can drag swimmers beneath the surface. So basically, fall in the river near Dead Man's Bridge, and it will knock you out and drown you. He said it had become popular with a certain kind of person, people who were just too tired to go on and who saw something almost dignified in letting the river take them. Instead of being washed up downstream, all lifeless and looking like a drowned rat, the river fed into the Columbia, which spits anything that falls into it right out into the Pacific Ocean. And then once you're out there, you're good and gone, and no one's ever going to find you without a submarine and a whole lot of luck. It all suddenly made sense to me, and when it did, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Not just because I felt for our missing person, having been driven so crazy with guilt that he'd most likely opted to check out early,
25:31 but because it was me who was going to have to tell his wife. A woman who'd been so utterly convinced by her friend that her missing husband was still alive, and that was one of the hardest things I'd ever have to do. Now, without a body, we couldn't officially declare the missing person's case closed, not without a warm or cold body as concrete proof. But after a while, I guess as she slowly came to accept it, the missing man's wife filed a petition to have him declared dead in abstincia, which for those who don't know is when someone's been missing for so long
26:06 that the only reasonable explanation is that they're deceased, or in the case of our now grieving wife, when you're 99% sure someone's deceased, you just can't 100% prove it. And only then, once it's been made official, could we take the file out of the cold case cabinet and put it where it belongs. Back in the early 2000s, I was looking for jobs and saw that there was an upcoming vacancy at the Sunflower Ranger Station way down in the Tonto National Forest. I was already a Forest Ranger at the time, stationed at the Gifford Pinshurt.
27:04 up in Washington. But after spending almost six years there, I figured myself a little bit of a change of scenery. And after all that time up in the Pacific Northwest, the scenery didn't come much more different than Arizona. I had myself a solid federal resume, too, with lots of experience in recreation, wildfire management, and wildlife work. And the only thing going against me was that I'd never worked that far south before. But lucky for me, someone down there, saw it fit to give me a chance, and so I packed my truck and then drove down report for duty. Tonto itself is an incredible place. It's situated in central Arizona, so in the south there's miles upon miles of gray-brown desert dotted with small prickly pears and taller saguaroes.
27:56 Classic Sonora stretches. And then in the north, the land rises up into the much greener highlands, thanks to all the mesquite trees and juniper bushes. Then there's the Mazotso Wilds, where there are plenty of pines and oak trees, and where Sycamore Creek and the Salt River drainage carved deep-cut canyons through the rock. And that's where the Sunflower Ranger Station is, tucked on a flat along Sycamore Creek about 10 miles west of Pumpkin Center and a good way south of Payson. Now at around 3,500 feet you're in that transition zone, with steep ridges that'll make you earn every mile on patrol,
28:35 but it's a solid base for covering the district. Close enough to the desert floor, but with the high country right out your back door. It's a very Depression-era setup, but it was still pretty solid when I was there. You had your main residence and office building right next to the barn garage shop that's got stalls, storage, and bays for the rigs,
28:56 and then scattered around where a few newer sheds, a latrine and a corral outback. And as for parking, there's a working area out front, as well as alongside the barn where the district trucks and engines pull in. Now, it's nothing paved or fancy like you'd see at the big stations, just gravel and dirt enough to turn around a trailer. And apart from when the fireguise are there in the summer, it's mostly pretty quiet up there and not some fancy visitor center.
29:25 And so you can imagine my surprise one day when I walked out of the office and saw a hiker passing me on her way to the parking lot. Now, she looked to be at about her in her mid to late 20s, and after so long in the job, you get a feel for who's an experienced hiker and who's pretty much brand new to it. And from the tired, sick of it look on her face and all her fancy, brand-new hiking gear, I could tell that she was relatively new to the hobby. I gave her a smile she passed me, and then with a straight face she told me something like, like, you guys should really do something about the bugs around here.
30:02 I thought it was funny. The timing, the delivery, the absurdity of the idea that we could do something about hundreds of millions of flying and crawling insects, each of whom contributed in their own small way to the health of the local ecosystem. It was just funny to me. But I also made the mistake of thinking this lady was meaning to be funny, because after I laughed and said something like, if only, right? She didn't just fail to return my smile.
30:30 She stopped dead on the path, turned around, and demanded, What the hell is so funny? It was one of those real uh-oh kind of moments. You know the kind. When you completely misjudged a situation in person and now some a-hole with a temper tantrum decides that they're going to make their problems, your problems. But since I was in uniform, I could hardly tell her to go kick rocks, and so instead, I tried to try to.
30:57 to calmly and politely explain myself. I apologized, saying that I totally mistook her comment as something humorous and that I wouldn't have laughed at all had I known that she was 100% very serious. Now, I remember she asked if I responded to every question in such a rude and condescending way, or if I only spoke to women like that. And then after I responded by assuring her that that wasn't the case, she once again demanded that we do, something about the bugs. I took a breath and then started very calmly explaining why we couldn't just kill all the bugs in the forest. Because A, it's impossible to get them all and B, doing so would upset what's actually a very
31:42 delicate ecosystem. Now, say we did manage to wipe out just one of the many species there. You might not notice much at first. The critters that feed on the bugs start coming up short at supper time. Their numbers can drop or they can go looking somewhere else for food, which in turn upsets other ecosystems. And then you've got the plants to think about. Some insects pollinate flowers or chew on leaves and keep certain plants from taking over. Remove it and one plant species might spread like wildfire while another starts disappearing.
32:16 The forest is in some collection of separate parts. It's more like a net. And if you tug hard enough on one strand, the whole thing shifts. but I didn't even get to explain all of that before the lady cut me off. She started telling me how when she went on vacation to Mexico, the hotel staff sprayed down the grounds with insecticide that looked like a thick white fog. Now, I wasn't completely familiar with the technique at the time, but I knew that it was a thing,
32:45 so I tried looping around to my last point to explain why we couldn't do that, at which point she then says, can't or won't? I tried telling her that I didn't know much about the whole fogging technique, but I guess the way that I said it was a little too dismissive for her, because she started accusing me of lying, and not just lying either. She used the term gaslighting. She raised her voice and said something along the lines of, You just told me you knew what I was talking about, now you suddenly don't? Then started yelling, don't gaslight me, mister. Don't you dare try to gaslight me?
33:25 I didn't even know what the term meant back then, and in the context, I assumed it was just slang for being disrespectful. It was only later that I learned she was accusing me of trying to maliciously trick her. But regardless, as I tried to explain myself, she suddenly turned around and stormed off after giving me an exasperated huff. I kept on apologizing as I followed her towards the parking lot, but she only stopped once, and that was to get my name and badge number. Then once I told her, she turned and went towards the parking lot, as I all but begged her to give me a chance to explain. It's not unusual for people to have bad experiences with the outdoors, especially if they don't bring the actual footwear they need or in this lady's case enough bug spray. And I kind of pride myself on talking sense into people. I also didn't want her running off and writing up some big complaint to my boss when just a small amount of dialogue can fix all.
34:25 kinds of misunderstandings. But then right as we hit the parking lot and she made a bee line for her car, she turned her head and screamed, and I do mean screamed. Stop following me! Her scream was so shrill and sudden that it literally stopped me in my tracks. I couldn't even bring myself to say anything either. I just stood there watching her walk away thinking, what the heck just happened? But no sooner had that thought entered my head, a co-worker of mine named Troy came rolling into the other end of the parking lot in his truck. Now, we saw the whole thing, so as I'm walking over to him, he gets out, walks around the other side, then gives me a nod of the head as if to ask, the hell happened there. I walk over to him, so close that I could talk low enough so the lady wouldn't hear me,
35:17 and then started telling him in words that were less than kind about the confrontation that I just had. Now, I told him what she said about the bugs, how it wasn't a joke and how she freaked out after I tried to explain why I laughed. But while I'm doing this, I can hear the lady starting up her car and heading our way. I heard her wheels on the gravel, getting louder as she got closer than, as I was getting to the part about her yelling, don't follow me. Troy's gaze suddenly dropped away from me and yelled, Look out! I heard the lady's engine rev as I turned and saw it coming right to. towards me. Troy had warned me just in time to get out of the way. But even after throwing myself
36:03 back so hard I tumbled to the ground, the lady's car only barely missed me in Troy before slamming into his truck with a loud crash. I scrambled away from it and got to my feet as the lady backed up, hearing Troy yelling out, what the hell from the other side of his now damaged truck. Now I thought that she might attempt another ramming maneuver, so I rushed to put the front end of Troy's truck between us. But instead of coming at me, she sped off towards the parking lot's exit with her bumper half hanging off, and then off she went down the dirt track, which led to the highway. Now, seeing as he had the better view and wasn't trying to avoid getting squished, I assumed Troy got the lady's license plate number. And so when he said he didn't, and that she
36:49 took off too fast for him to read it with his eyesight as he was an older guy, I yelled something I won't repeat and then ran towards my truck and took off down the track after her. Now, she must have been going like a goddamn rally driver trying to make the distance that she had, but I managed to catch up with her just before she hit the highway, and I had her plate number memorized by the time she disappeared out of sight. It was a dang good job, too, because taking a truck like mine on a high-speed chase is a big, big no-no on account of how dangerous it is. I drove back to the station, called it in the local sheriff's department, and then the lady was arrested that very same evening at home.
37:31 Deputies charged her with assault on a federal officer, but while she was in custody, they initiated a 51-50 and placed her under psychiatric supervision for 72 hours. I guess she was so out of her mind that she hit the threshold to be detained, and while most folks are released after that three-day period, doctor saw it fit to keep her under long-term care. Realizing that there was something seriously wrong with her and she wasn't just some a-hole, it made me feel almost the complete opposite about her. At first, I was nothing but angry and spiteful and justifiably so. The lady tried to literally do me some serious harm. But after I found out that what happened was just the start of her hitting rock bottom
38:17 with regards to her psychological state, I couldn't feel anything but sorry for her. Now, sure, she should have been locked up for everyone's safety, her own included, but when I remember it these days, I go back to that initial exchange in my head and think about how I was saying one thing while she was hearing something completely different. No wonder she seemed frightened. I would be too if I was insane. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support. and for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With better help, insurance options may now be available
39:17 nationwide with an average co-pay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning, too. I think one of the biggest expectations we put on ourselves is this idea that we should always have everything figured out, whether it's our careers, relationships, or just everyday life, there's this constant pressure to keep up with everyone else. And sometimes it feels like no matter how much you're doing, you should always be doing more. But when you really think about it, we often hold ourselves to standards we'd never expect from the people we care about. If a friend was going through a difficult time, you probably wouldn't expect them to have all the answers or handle everything on their own.
40:00 So why do we put that kind of pressure on ourselves? I think it's important to remember that everyone moves at their own pace and there's absolutely nothing wrong with reaching out for a little support along the way. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 100 T-25 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average co-pay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the U.S. You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com slash read to explore your payment options. That's betterhELP.com slash read. Back in March of 1998, I was a 32-year-old prosecutor here in my native Belgium.
40:56 I've been in the job for three years, so I was still relatively new, and after spending years focused on less significant crimes like financial fraud, I was finally handed my first murder trial. I relished it, knowing that first impressions mattered, and if I may say so myself, I think I did myself proud. My stubbornness, along with a certain refusal to look away from unpleasant facts, impressed my superiors immensely, so much so that a few weeks later on a drizzly Tuesday morning, I received what I can only describe as a life-changing telephone call.
41:33 A colleague from the International Criminal Tribunal had seen my file, and was particularly impressed by a conviction I'd achieved a few years prior, pertaining to a case involving systematic abuse in Belgian prisons. I'd also written a piece on command responsibility during the Yugoslav wars, with a particular focus on the failure to prevent the genocide of Croats and Bosniaks, and this too had gotten the attention of the ICT. I was offered a job, one that was very well paid and came with a generous expense account, but there was also a catch.
42:07 I was told they needed someone who understood bureaucracy and blood, the name of my written piece, as well as someone who wouldn't flinch when, confronted with evidence of extreme violence. And if I accepted, I'd end up living and working in a place whose name had been synonymous with some of the worst crimes in human history. Rwanda. Now, my first instinct was to say no. I was dealing with a heavy caseload at the time, one of which involved bringing charges against a prolific distributor of CSEM. And I didn't want to walk away from the case, and I didn't want to walk away from my colleagues either. But after, I'd have to go. giving my hastily conceived answer to the ICT's recruitment officer, I was told that I had a few
42:50 weeks to think about it. And then over time, my refusal started to feel less and less like a polite decline and more like cowardice. You see, many years before my own country of Belgium had colonized Rwanda and rolled through a system of ethnic identity which divided people into one of two categories, Hutu or Tutsi. The colonial government vastly favored the Tutsi minority, and who were much more keen to cooperate than the Hutu majority. But this only created a huge amount of resentment between the two groups of people. And when the Belgians granted Rwanda its independence, this system of governance didn't change. The Tutsis clung to power.
43:32 And then by the early 90s, Rwanda wasn't so much a functional state as it was a powder keg, just waiting to explode. There was already a civil war brewing by the time the country's Hutu presidents was a assassinated by its own presidential guard, who were also Hutu. Then the extremist behind the plot used his death as a Casas Belai to begin a slaughter of biblical proportions. Militias, known as Inter Rahamway, set up roadblocks, having already drawn up lists of Tutsi officials and other community figures they wish to round up and kill. Radio stations then broadcast names and addresses calling them cockroaches and urging their extermination. Rwanda wasn't a particular.
44:14 segregated place either, particularly the larger cities like its capital Kigali. So while out in the countryside, bands of armed soldiers engaged rebel fighters en masse in the cities, neighbors slaughtered neighbors in the streets outside their homes. In one of the more horrifying accounts of genocide, a Hutu parish priest murdered his own Tootsie parishioners by bayonetting them to death. Others were killed with everyday items, such as gardening tools like hose or shepherds. shovels. Carnal violation was used as a weapon of war, and any moderate Hutus who tried to give shelter
44:52 to Tutsi friends received the same treatment as those they tried to protect. And just over three months of violence, anywhere between 800,000 to 1 million people were killed. Bodies clogged rivers, while mass graves were dug in schoolyards and football fields, and all the while, the international community did next to nothing. The violence only stopped after a militant group named Rwandan Popular Front arrived from the north, stormed the capital city and restored order. What remained was truly terrible. What was once a fractured nation had become like a charnel house,
45:30 and I was all too aware of the violence and the suffering there. And then since Western governments had done nothing for the people and still hadn't after four long years, I thought the least that I could do was help count the dead. I flew into Kigali during the wet season of 1999 and found myself part of a small team, including a forensic anthropologist from the United States, a Dutch investigator, a Canadian Special Forces officer acting as security, and two Rwandan translators. We were briefed by a senior member of the ICT at a UN encampment. Intelligence reports suggested that there was a rural property in a region south of the capital named Bougasera,
46:11 in which a Tutsi family had been murdered by a Hutu mob. The files spoke of a series of murders, and I expected perhaps seven or eight bodies, but nothing could have prepared me for what we found. Absolutely nothing. It rained so much that by the time we arrived at the property, the road had turned into a red paste that clung to the wheels into our boots.
46:36 It looked like many of the other homesteads we'd passed on the way. mud brick walls, a tin roof with banana groves sloping down to a small stream below. It was very pretty in its own way, but as soon as we got within about 30 to 40 meters, we started to smell the decay of death inside. Inside the main house, the floors were gray concrete, and it had been stained black in many places where blood had pulled and dried over time. The largest room on the ground floor, the kitchen and dining space, had been converted into a slaughter chamber.
47:11 Hooks still hung from the ceiling beams, their sharp points still displaying flecks of gore, and a long table had been placed against one of the walls in which deep channels had been carved into the wood to drain fluids. Empty shell casings littered the room, with our security detail pointing out that, while most of them were from Russian A-Ks, a few were from Belgian FALs.
47:35 Weapons made by my country, weapons that we'd left there which were now being used to commit the most horrendous acts of pointless violence, and it made me sick to my stomach. Outside, we found a makeshift crematorium consisting of an oil drum furnace rigged with iron grates. When I looked inside, I noticed how its interior crusted with charred bone fragments and teeth, and while nearby, a shallow pit had been dug and filled in. We didn't have to scrape away much of the dirt to start finding remains either, and some were small enough to belong to children no older than eight or nine. And to find such a sizable amount of human remains was one thing, and to know some were children was a horror I can barely describe.
48:22 But it was the personal effects that broke something in me. In one of the home's back rooms, stacked in a haphazard piles all over the floor, were the clothes of those who had been murdered. There must have been thousands of clothes piled on top of each other, men's shirts, women's shawls, and hundreds of shoes all missing their pairs. I remember seeing a single red high heel that must have belonged to someone who dressed well for what she thought was a meeting or an arrest. I also remember seeing what I'm quite certain was a part of a school uniform, along with a tiny pair of plastic sandals depicting cartoon characters. Well, push me over the edge was picking up a child's sweater, a pale blue one with a knitted duck on the front. It was stiff with dry blood. I kneeled and set it down carefully, as though disturbing it would wake the dead, and then by the time that I was at my full height again, I was crying.
49:20 By the end of that day I wanted to leave that place, leave Rwanda, and never return. But we ended up going to and from that house for three whole weeks before I was. I was able to fly home again. Our forensic anthropologist cataloged bones under a tarp in the courtyard, and by the end of those three weeks, she estimated that at least 280 individuals had been murdered there, and that's not including those whose remains may have already been incinerated. Our Dutch investigator, a nice man named Peter, interviewed survivors from nearby villages. They said the trucks came at night and how they couldn't sleep because of the screams.
50:00 One old woman described seeing a Hutu community leader directing operations. Another mentioned soldiers from the former Rwandan armed forces. Peter wrote down many names, but there were no documents, no paper trail, and since the killer had been careful to ensure no cameras were around, so while there were plenty of pictures of the bodies, we couldn't find a single piece of footage depicting killings of any kind. And we seized what little we could. things like a handful of identity cards were pulled from the pockets of that discarded clothing
50:33 or a rusted pistol registered to a man still living openly in Kigali. Now, that was the only significant piece of evidence we found in terms of connecting a murderer to their victims, and only then it may have accounted for only a handful of deaths and a genocide committed mostly by everyday household items. I remember spending long evenings writing reports by lamplight, drinking warm beer by the dozen to keep the rage from clouding my judgment. And not just rage at the killers either, but rage at my own country of Belgium. It was Belgium who issued the ethnic identity cards in the first place, cards which might as well have been death warrants if they had Tootsie written on them.
51:16 And just like when we found those bullets, I've never been more ashamed of my country. On the whole, the investigation was an uphill struggle for the first week, and it didn't get any easier as the weeks went by. You might have had an expense account, but there was a strict limit on what we could spend on any given day. Then, because ours was only a small part of a much wider investigation, we received only minimal support for the tribunal's HQ in neighboring Tanzania. And what's worse, we put people's lives at risk.
51:51 Now, in many cases, the witnesses we convinced to testify receive visits from men on motorcycle, after dark. And then the next time we visited them, they changed their stories and either couldn't remember or didn't see. We had a lot of anecdotal evidence, but barely anything tangible, so it soon became a case of knowing who had been part of that bloodthirsty mob, but not being able to pin anything on them. For example, one afternoon, our van drove past a man repairing a fence at a homestead only three or four kilometers away from the kill house. One of the translators saw that. One of the translators saw him as he drove past and started pointing and talking to the other in a way that we couldn't understand. We quickly switched to English and explain how the man we'd passed had been spotted
52:35 unloading bodies from a truck back during the genocide. But what disturbed me the most was how the man politely waved as we passed. It was like he didn't have a care in the world, like all the violence had been swept under the carpet by people who could just switch off that part of themselves and go back to normal. We exhumed what we could from the pit of the pit of, in the backyard, then photographed, measured, and sealed everything away in evidence bags. We spent one last day in Kigali debriefing with members of the tribunal in the UN, but the conclusions were stark. We had boxes of bones and clothing samples, and my report was thick with notes, but when all was said and done, convicting just one of the homestead executioners would
53:20 mark the achievement of a lifetime, but all of them, that was as close to intent. possible as it was possible to be. The case was provisionally docketed, but never brought to trial. The landscape of the investigation was an ever-shifting one which constantly had new priorities, new mass graves, and new political realities to deal with. We later heard that the only identifiable subject had died of malaria in a refugee camp, disguised as a victim of the genocide and not a perpetrator. But the others are still free to walk among the same communities. they once terrorized. They are businessmen, minor officials, and respected elders. They attend church on Sundays with people they'd shed blood with. Their children go to school with the children of some of their
54:09 victims. Sometimes, late at night in my apartment in Brussels, I opened the sealed plastic container I kept against all protocol. Inside is one small red sandal, sized for a child of perhaps six years old. I don't know why I kept it. Evidence of failure maybe, or perhaps a reminder that justice is not a natural force, but a fragile human invention that is easily starved of resources and will. And that's why all those shoes we've found will stay empty and those of the killers wander far and free. The world, as I've found, moves on far, far too easily. I don't work for the UN anymore, but it sometimes comes up in conversation with the youngest
54:54 lawyers I work with. They sometimes ask how I coped, and I tell them the truth. I didn't cope with anything. Everything I saw, everything I heard, I still carry it with me. I remember the smell of that house and the small blue sweater with the knitted duck and the rows of silent shoes. I'm told the compound near Nyamada still stands, but locals avoided after dark. The country itself has forgotten, but the people still remember. And so do I. Back in the 70s, my old man used to be a homicide detective here in Houston. He works in brutal cases over the years, and he's told me many a story that's replayed in my head when the lights are off and I'm just curled in bed in silence.
56:01 But out of all of them, this is the one that stayed with me for the longest, and it's all to do with what he always called the Orchard Apartment Murders. So back in the late 70s, Houston was booming with oil money, and all that oil money had people pouring into the... the city trying to get a piece of it. But whenever there's a big influx of people from elsewhere, some of which are going to be very down on their luck, you get yourself a little spike in crime to go along with it. Dad said the number of homicides spiked, not by much, but it was noticeable, and then one night, it started. I double check just to make sure, but the night on the first
56:40 murder was July 27th of 1979, and no prizes for guessing this happened at the Orchard apartment. in southwest Houston. Most of the units are pretty small, so they tend to house a lot of single work-a-day folks, and the same was true even back then for a lady named Alice Rankin. Now, Google's telling me she was a 33-year-old secretary and single mom. And then one morning, since her car was in the shop,
57:07 a co-worker of hers stops by to give her a ride to the office. Now, he's buzzing her apartment, but she's not answering, right? So he gets inside somehow, and then walks all the way, up to her place only to find the door slightly ajar. The guy then steps inside to take a look around and see if Alice is okay. And then when he walks into the bedroom, it must have been like walking onto the set of a horror movie. There's Alice, lying on her bed with no clothes on.
57:36 Her feet are tied, and there's a pillow covering her from the neck up. But when the co-worker pulls the pillow away, there's no Alice to check on at all. just a stump where her head used to be. Someone had her killed, violated her, then took her head with them as a trophy. My dad said that there was a blood trail that went all the way from Alice's apartment to the building's rear entrance,
58:05 meaning whoever cut her head off just straight up walked out of the building with it, probably holding it by the hair. Alice's head was never found and neither was her killer. But Dad said that right as they were still working out to figure out the first murder, the second hit less than two weeks later. Alice Rankin's apartment wasn't a crime scene anymore when the cops had no reason to closely guard the building.
58:30 Because why would they? Dad said everyone figured that it was a crime of passion, maybe a former lover that had taken their breakup a little too hard and thought, if I can't have her, no one can. No one figured the killer would return to the exact same. building to do the exact same thing. But that's exactly what they did. Two weeks later and two floors up, a lady named Mary Calcutta rented an apartment after moving here from Pittsburgh. Her friends back home had heard all about what had happened to Alice Rankin, so they've been telling her to lock her doors,
59:04 look over her shoulder, don't talk to strangers, all that kind of stuff. And she told them that she'd be extra careful. And I'm sure she was too, but sadly, that didn't say if her, her. Much like Alice, she was found naked in her bedroom, but instead of being tied up and decapitated, Dad said it looked like Mary had put up one heck of a fight. It wasn't so much a case of looking for signs of a struggle as looking for a place there hadn't been won, and it was probably thanks to how hard she fought that her killer didn't have time to completely cut her head off. He slid her throat and stabbed her a bunch of times, but the fight was so loud that he was probably scared that someone had called the cops. So instead of calmly walking out with Mary's head swinging
59:49 in his grip, this monster probably ran for his life. Now my old man said he was convinced the same guy did Alice and Mary. It was the same apartment complex, two women living alone in the same brutal style of killing in each case. Every other woman at Orchard Apartments thought that they were next too and Dad said that they were all buying guns, walking in groups at night, or straight up packing up and moving elsewhere. The panic was real, especially because the very same day Mary's body was found, another body showed up on the other side of town. Dad said it was an exterminator that walked into this lady's townhouse on early lane
01:00:29 after he showed up for an appointment that she made with him. And that's when he found this girl, Doris Threadgill, with her neck cut most of the way through. This time there were no signs of any struggle, and I know it's also. only a small mercy, but Doris was thankfully found with her clothes on. Dad said the scene made it look like he'd gained entry to the house under false pretenses, almost like Doris thought her killer was the exterminator and didn't realize he wasn't until it was too late. It was just different enough for some to suggest it was the work of a different psycho altogether, but Dad was never convinced. He said the work on her neck
01:01:09 was just too similar, that the M.O. matched in all the right places for him, and they got chills thinking Houston now had its very own spree killer, maybe even a serial killer, to use what, at the time, was a fancy new term. Dad said things seemed like they couldn't get any worse, and it wasn't just his own caseload. Everyone else's was piling up, too. And then suddenly, things did somehow manage to get worse when the dead bodies of a teenage couple showed up miles apart from each other.
01:01:40 The girl's body was found in a park someplace. Now, Google was saying it was at Watonga, but I'd swear that my dad said it was freed. But the boy's body was found in a used car lot, but only his body, not his head. That was missing. Dad said that there was nothing in the way of strong forensic evidence to link it to the apartment murders, so officially speaking, they were seen as unconnected. But again, my dad has no doubt. He thinks the same killer spotted the girl alone and maybe even,
01:02:13 attacked her out in the open that night, but when he was interrupted by her boyfriend, it was him who suddenly became the target for getting his head cut off. Dad and his squad ran down every lead, fingerprints, witnesses, knives, everything. But since there was no DNA technology back then, they had to do everything the hard way and without computers. Dad said that he heard they submitted evidence later for testing, but no hits came back. And since at the time, not even a single likely suspect was named, there was no arrests either. No arrests, no trial, no justice, nothing. Dad retired without closing it, and whenever he used to tell me the story, he'd always end up shaking his head, grumbling about how the family's never got any peace or justice. He said the way
01:03:03 orchard apartments got hit twice in quick succession, and how the killer liked taking heads, it suggested a kind of evil that was almost like unholy, you know. Whoever killed those poor people and either cut their damn heads off or tried to, they were crazy as an outhouse rat, no doubt about it. But at the time, they were smart enough to make sure that they never got caught. And even real smart people aren't smart enough to not get caught slipping. You also got to remember neither of the two missing heads were ever recovered, meaning that maybe somewhere, out there.
01:03:40 There is an old man with two frozen heads in a unit, and he takes them out every so often, ageless, and looking the same as they did almost half a century ago, which really is like something out of a horror movie. Dad always said that that was the one case he'd do anything to be able to go back and solve, and I can understand why. Being able to bring justice to those poor families would have been quite something, but I imagine putting that sick.
01:04:07 son of a bitch and cuffs after working so incredibly hard to track them down, that would have been a heck of a thing too. I've given almost 20 years in my life to the Forest Service. That's taking me all over the country and I've enjoyed almost every single day of my service in a job that I considered myself lucky to have. But of all the places I've served, from California and Colorado to Washington and Montana, there's one place that sticks with me more than all the others, and that's the Deep Creek Ranger Station up in Idaho's Bitterroot National Forest. It's now called Magruder Ranger Station, but to me it'll always be Deep Creek. But what makes it different, at least one of the reasons anyway, is how secluded it is.
01:05:17 It's about 35 miles west of Darby, Montana, if you're familiar, and when you drive out there, out in the absolute middle of nowhere, it's like driving a lot of it. It's like driving a lot of into a whole different country. All the trees are close in, the air starts getting that sharp, clean smell to it, and signs of civilization start getting fewer and further between. And then you keep on going for a couple of miles down some dirt tracks with barely any signage until it's just trees, trees, and trees from miles around, and that's where the station is. The ranger's house, a two-story log place, was home base.
01:05:55 You roll up after a long day on horseback or foot patrol, kick the mud off your boots, and know that aside from the one other rangers stationed with you, you were about as alone as it's possible to get out there. Now, it's been built in the 20s or 30s by FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, and while it was rustic as they come, it had this real built-to-last sort of feel that made you feel safe. But living there almost meant embracing the quiet and being all, almost completely self-reliant.
01:06:28 There was no corner store, no quick run to the doctor, and all our power and water came from generators and wild springs. Summers were nice, but winters were brutal, and sometimes we got snowed in so bad that we had to dig our way out. But that lifestyle has a charm to it, and after a while, you start feeling more at home out there than you do back in civilized society. And so I was out of Deep Creek for three stretches
01:06:55 in the early 90s, two summers and one winter, and during my second summer, I was stationed with a fellow ranger named Gifford, or Giff for short. Now, me and Gifford made a great team, same age, same kind of background and experience, and the same taste in music. And that was one of the things that kept the cabin fever from setting in too hard, being able to listen to all of our favorite guitar bands on what, at the time, anyway, was a state-of-the-art cassette player. I guess music was one of those things that we just couldn't do without, but another thing I couldn't do without were cigarettes. You see, I've been a smoker since my teens, and while I've kicked the habit now, I was still very much a butthead back during that second summer at Deep Creek. I bought three whole cartons with me, one for each month that I'd be stationed there, and still, I was careful with how much I smoked, because it meant driving a heck of a long way, and on back roads it was way too easy to get.
01:07:52 get lost on. Now, I'd smoke one before breakfast, one after lunch, and then one right before sunset before me and Giff each hit the hay, and it became something of a little bit of a ritual for me. I'd sit at the camp table outside the cabin, light up a smoke, and then enjoy all that peace and quiet with no one or nothing to interrupt me. But then one night, something did interrupt me, a man, and one who looked like he was wearing all white. I was sitting there, just like I did every evening, only the sun hadn't quite set yet, so I was able to catch sight of him as he moved between the trees. Deep Creek might have been secluded, but it was still in a public national forest,
01:08:36 so it wasn't entirely unusual to see someone out there. But as I said, what really caught my attention was their clothing. And all the time I've been a forest ranger, I've never seen anybody wearing white clothes out in the woods but them. beige, maybe, but never a bright white. So as he walked between the trees, it might have been low-like conditions, he stood out like a sore thumb. Now, he didn't stop at first, just moved from tree to tree wearing what looked to be a white t-shirt and white shorts. If he had anything on his feet, they weren't white, and it also occurred to me that they didn't have a pack with them either. Now, it was strange enough of a sight that I just stood and walked parallel to them for a minute.
01:09:21 minute or two just watching them until he started watching me too. Now, I could tell it was a guy from the way he walked, but then he suddenly stopped walking and turned to face me. I stood there looking at him and he stood there looking at me and all the while I'm just thinking, just who the hell is that dressed like they're in a gospel choir? Now, when I finished my smoke and stubbed it out, the guy in white was still looking at me. and so not being one to antagonize some stranger, I just turned and started walking back to the cabin. But not before looking over my shoulder and checking if he was still there. But that time, the man in white was nowhere to be seen.
01:10:07 I told Giff about the guy before heading to bed, and he said that the guy sounded like some crazy kind of hippie, one who probably thought that I was a hallucination caused by whatever was in his brownies. I thought that sounded about right. And then by the next morning, I'd just about forgotten the man in White and didn't think about that creepy dude again until Giff brought him up after patrol the next afternoon. Now, he spotted him apparently out in his truck, standing up on a ridge, and then when he got to the bottom of this winding road that took him down the mountain, this dude in White was standing near the bottom right at the side of the road that he drove past.
01:10:47 Now, this wasn't like an impossible feat or anything. He could have gotten down if he rode a tree down from the ridge and then ran down the hill as fast as he could. But that's just it. If he did run, he had to have run as fast as a freaking jackrabbit down that slope. And so hippie or no hippie, both me and Gil found ourselves thinking, hell, that boy can move. And while it was strange, he hadn't done anything really threatening yet. But it was coming all right.
01:11:15 We just didn't know it yet, and when it got there, it was bad. Me and Giff didn't see this guy in white again, not during the daytime anyway. And so we really did figure that he was just some hippie type who'd spent a few days out there wandering the woods and hugging trees. But then one night, we're sitting in the cabin after a long day of fire watching and trail maintenance when I decided to head out for my nightly smoke. I sat down, grab one of the pack and lit it up, but I don't think that I was more than a few drags in before I heard that scream, cutting through the darkness ahead of me. It wasn't close, but it wasn't far either, so after making very sure that the cigarette was out,
01:11:59 I ran into the cabin to grab my rifle and then went running off through the trees in the direction that I heard the scream from. Giff was close behind me with a flashlight, and I remember it bobbing up and down ahead of me, as each of us yelled out hello and who's out there and all of that. It wasn't long before he heard a response. someone yelling out for help close by. And after that it was easy to close in on him and I honestly
01:12:25 expected to see that man in white and Giff's flashlight beam, having had a run in with a pack of wolves or some mountain lion or something. But it wasn't him. It was some hiker wearing all the clothes that you might expect one to. He was lying on his back, screaming for us to help him, and I remember how pale he looked in the light. But it wasn't until we got close enough to see it that he started screaming. My leg! My leg! And for as long as I live, I'll never forget the feelings of shock and horror that I felt when I saw his leg was missing just below the knee. Although his pack was lying nearby, his severed leg was nowhere to be seen, but the amount of blood pumping out of the stump meant that that simply wasn't a priority. The only thing that mattered in the moment was saving this guy's
01:13:17 life. And so with Giff covering me with the rifle and flashlight, I tied my belt around the guy's leg as a sort of makeshift tourniquet. And then once I was sure that I'd stemmed the bleeding, I got him on his feet. Now, we kept asking him what happened, but all he said at first was, I don't know, before going back to begging us to help him. We promised we'd do everything we could, but that we had to get him moving, because assuming it was a predator of some kind that took his leg, we were all still in danger. I asked him that too, if it was wolves or a cougar, maybe even a bear. But all he said was, I don't know, and then begged us to bring his leg with us. Again, that just was not a priority. We had to get him back to the station and then call for help on the radio as quickly as
01:14:05 possible. But the most important thing of all was not getting caught by whatever took this dude's leg. Now, I was the one who helped him move, so I couldn't look back to see if anything was following us. Giff could, and that was kind of his whole job, but every time I asked him if he saw anything, he just said no. We managed to get the wounded man back to the station. Then his gift started working on him with the first aid kit. I jumped on the radio to call in a medical evac. Now, I knew that was the only real option available to us, so they had no real choice but to call in the chopper. and then call it in they did, and they showed up in those bright orange suits that they used to wear,
01:14:46 running up the clearing with a stretcher in medical supplies. The paramedics treated him, and then they carried him back to the hospital after complimenting my tourniquet skills. But before they showed up, we had maybe 20 to 30 minutes with our amputee hiker, and while he didn't say all that much, what he did say had us scared as hell as the helicopter took off and flew away. Now, we didn't have much in the way of medical supplies at the station, but only in comparison to a hospital or some such. We still had enough to banish the stump, apply an actual tourniquet, and even get some morphine in him to get him stabilized and a little more comfortable. Or at least as comfortable as a man can be after something just took his leg off.
01:15:30 And then once we had him stabilized and able to talk a little more, we once again started asking him what happened out there. and again he kept saying that he didn't know, but only in response of what it was that took his leg. He said he was just walking through the woods after a long day's hike, looking for a good place to set up camp when he kind of lost track of time and had the sun go down on him. Now he keeps walking, thinking that one perfect pitching spot was just right over the hill. When out of nowhere, he hears a rush of air next to him. He said it was loud, like something came at him. him really fast and then a sudden force had him sprawled out on the ground like a freight train just appeared and smashed into him. The next thing he knew, he had this intense pain in his lower
01:16:18 leg, and then when he looked at it, he saw it was missing below the knee. And that's when I heard his first scream and went rushing through the woods to try and find him. But in that time, while he was lying there screaming, he didn't see or hear anyone or anything moving around him. It was like whatever took his leg off just disappeared into the darkness again and at lightning speed. It was the speed issue that later had us thinking about the guy in white. I can't imagine how or why he might have done something like that. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence that we saw this strange guy out in the woods and then the next hike here passing through got his freaking leg taken off
01:17:00 and was such a clean and obviously man-made cut too. We didn't ask him about any. man and white, and I regretted not doing so for a while. But Giff convinced me that it wouldn't have mattered if I did. If the guy saw someone dressed like that, he would have said something. And if not to us, then to the cops who talked to him after the criminal investigation started. But he didn't say anything about him. It was only me and Giff who had encountered him, or maybe it's the case that only me and Giff saw him, and he hit the hiker so hard that he managed to disappear without being spotted again. And if, that is, you can believe a man wearing white clothes can just disappear like that,
01:17:43 and under the light of an almost full moon, too. Like I said, Giff and I stayed awfully spooked for a while after we saved that hiker, and we didn't sleep until dawn, as we pretty much couldn't, and so we patrolled the perimeter of the station instead with our guns and flashlights at the ready. We didn't stray into those woods at all, and we'd have been fools to do some something like that under the circumstances, but if someone was coming for us, we wanted to be ready for them when they got there, not lying in our beds, just dead to the world. And we never saw the guy in white again. Some sheriff's deputies came out to look for the guy's leg and ask us a few questions, but they didn't find anything and we didn't hear back from anyone
01:18:26 else about what happened to that poor hiker, not from fellow law enforcement anyway, it was just really internet stuff. Nothing ever dramatic or terrifying ever having to have. again while I was stationed out there at Deep Creek, but that's what makes me think about it all the more and how strange and horrifying it all was, because if it happened once, it could sure as hell happen again to someone else. And if it does, I wonder if someone else will spot a strange figure, walking through the woods just days before it happens. You can call me Ranger Mike, and I've been with Parks Canada for coming up on eight years now. I grew up in Alberta and spent many a summer volunteering with trail crews in the mountains.
01:19:31 And then after doing a park and rec program in college, along with working a few seasons at smaller provincial sites, then I got myself posted to Jasper National Park back in 2018. And working here has been pretty special. We do everything from guided tours to search and rescue, and we get to do it in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Now, it's hard work, long hours, but you never get tired of the viewing. and getting to call an entire provincial park, The Office, is something that never gets old either.
01:20:04 Every summer, and like a lot of places, the park runs a network of fire lookouts. We have a bunch of towers on the ridges and mountain tops, then as soon as fire season ramps up, we used to staff them with trained observers who live up there for a whole season. Now, a lot of the towers are completely automated these days and rely on a bunch of fancy sensors and whatnot. And if you're wondering, why spend millions of dollars on all of these top-of-the-line electronics that are also expensive to maintain when you can pay someone a few thousand bucks for the season? The story I got here might well shed some light on that. Their job is a pretty simple one.
01:20:44 Scan the horizon all day with binoculars and spotting scopes looking for smoke or flames. And then when they spot something suspicious, they radio it in right away with the exact location using maps and bearings. Now that early warning gives crew time to get on the fire before it grows, and since lightning and dry weather can make its serious business here in the Rockies, the lookouts play an important role in protecting the park and all the animals that call it home. And probably the most famous of all the lookouts, though she came before my time, was a lady by the name of Stephanie Stewart. 70-year-old Steph was a legend around the park and had spent more than half of her 18 year career at the isolated Athabasca lookout, which is up on the high ridge in the far northwest of
01:21:33 Jasper. Only a single desolate road leads up from the valley floor, and if you follow it, it'll take you to the 40-foot high lookout and accompanying log cabin that stand near the peak. That might sound a little too much for a woman in her late 60s and eventually 70s, but to Steph, age was never an issue. Just a few years before her final lookout, she completed a solo bike ride across Canada and even flew over to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. She might have been a sweet old lady, but from what I heard, she was tough and she was reliable. And to me, that makes what happened to her all the more strange and all the more frightening. Whenever she was on duty, Steph's supervisor at the Natural Resources group would call her each morning to make sure that she was okay. They'd talk shop,
01:22:26 keep each other updated on the situation and resupply needs, and then the super would hang up and go about checking on the other lookout stationed around the park. But in the morning of August 26th, way back in 2006, the first few calls from Steph's supervisor went unanswered. And when someone did answer the phone, they stayed quiet and then hung up. The supervisor tried again to get stuff on the phone, but that final call got that, we are unable to connect your call right now message,
01:22:57 like the phone had suddenly been disconnected. And as he can imagine, Steph's supervisor was very concerned by such a worrying turn of events. And so they drove out to the Athabasca lookout right away. Now he found her truck parked outside. And then when he checked the cabin, he found a pot of water boiling on the stove, all signs that Stephanie was close by. But when he looked around, calling out her name as he went, slowly realized that she wasn't there.
01:23:27 And that's when he saw the blood. I've heard different things from different people regarding where the blood was. Some say it was on the stairs leading up to the lookout. Others say it was all over the porch. Some say both, and there was blood all over the place up there. But either way, it was enough for the super to call the Mounties, and after her super made the call, Steph was officially reported missing that same morning. I actually spoke to a search and rescue guy named Mark a while back, and it was him who turned me on to Steph's story in the first place.
01:24:03 He was the guy who managed the initial search, and with the help of Steph's supervisor, he worked out that, along with a gold watch, a whole bunch of bedding had been taken from her cabin. Now, he said he took it personal, because where he lived, he could actually see the Alabasca lookout tower from his back porch way up there on the mountain. He'd spent many a sunny afternoon looking up at that thing, sipping a beer and wondering who was up there. And so to think something bad had happened to them, like I said, he took it personally. And of all the rescue attempts he wished could have gone differently, he said that one topped his list. Once the Mounties were involved,
01:24:44 they were able to quickly rule out any kind of animal attack based on forensics alone. The gold watch being missing was a dead giveaway that a person was to blame. for what happened to her. And seeing as Steph made a call to her family that previous night, during which she'd sounded right as rain, it was safe to say whoever took her crept up on her during the night. But what I find particularly creepy is that that detail about the boiling water. All that blood was spilled hours before Steph Super got there, and seeing as it was confirmed to be hers, it's unlikely she put that water onto that boil herself. This means the man who took her did it, and that he did God knows what to her and then put some water on a boil like he wanted to make himself some morning coffee.
01:25:33 But when he heard Steph's super rolling up the track in his truck, he ran before he could be spotted. But that also means that he did something with Steph's body first before he put that water to the boil. Either that, or he was strong enough to pick up her body and run real fast with it, And with Steph being five foot two and pretty skinny, that's actually a very frightening, plausible possibility. Like I said, no one ever found Steph's body, so it wasn't clear if she had been killed there at the look at or taken someplace for something even worse. There was a massive search effort, too. That Mark guy said it was the biggest that Jasper had ever seen. But apart from the blood around the cabin and lookout, not a single other trace of Steph was found around the forest.
01:26:20 Mark said it was freaky, like Steph and her attacker had just straight up vanished, and there was a lot of people online who say all kinds of dumb things about Sasquatches and aliens and werewolves and all sorts of stuff. But there's other people, Mark and myself included, who think there's much more down-to-earth types of explanations. And his name is Travis Vader. Aside from sharing a name with a literal supervillain, Vader is a convicted murderer, serving time for killing an elderly couple in British Columbia back in 2010. Vader killed them, but more importantly, he robbed them too.
01:27:00 He also disposed of their bodies in a place that they'd never be found, refused to say where he put them, and no matter how hard the authorities try, they can't seem to find them. But not only that, Vader's alibi for Steph's murder, places him within 30 minutes' drive of that lookout, which most definitely places him, quote-unquote, in the area, and should have had him investigated as the case's number one suspect. But then here's the thing. RCP did nothing of the sort. Even after his conviction, when it
01:27:32 became obvious that he was most likely the killer, they didn't question him, let alone declare him a person of interest. And to me, it almost feels like they know something they're not telling us. Instead of charging Bader, the cops had Parks Canada almost changed their policies regarding access and training. First off, they blocked off public access to the road leading up to the look at, and trespassers can now be prosecuted for straying on the government land. And secondly, and in addition to a bunch of training, every lookout and cabin has been considerably upgraded. Each is now surrounded by lockable gates and fencing and all the surrounding brush has been removed to improve visibility, and makes it easier to spot anyone approaching. Windows and door locks have been improved too.
01:28:19 panic buttons have been installed at each location, and potential lookouts have to undergo mandatory self-defense training. And while everyone appreciated the massive safety upgrade, particularly Steph's daughter, who only wanted to make sure that it couldn't happen again, every so often I get to wondering what prompted that very expensive reaction. Now, was it really out of respect for such a dedicated and beloved member of the Parks team, or was it because of something else? To automate all those watchtowers and turn others into little forts,
01:28:53 it's almost like the authorities know they're up against someone or something they can't protect people from. And although I've always appreciated Jasper for how beautiful it is, I know there are corners of it that aren't so beautiful. And no matter where we are out there or what we're doing, no one can never truly be safe in a place as wild as this. I've been a U.S. Forest Ranger for 18 years now, and in that time, I feel as if I've not just seen the best and worst of nature, but the best and worst of humanity, too. I've seen things so beautiful I wish I'd taken photographs of them, but I've also seen things that make me wish I could reach into my own mind and pluck out whatever piece of my brain is holding the memories of them. And unfortunately for you, this story is about the second kind, and one that does not have a happy ending.
01:30:11 So what feels like a lifetime ago, I was stationed at the Wapidi Ranger Station in the Shoshone National Forest. It's actually kind of a special place, as not only is it the longest continually active ranger station in the state of Wyoming, but it's the oldest Forest Service ranger station in the entire United States. About 30 miles west of Cody, the original 1903 is now one of a cluster of more modern U.S.FS buildings, all surrounded by a rail fence. And back in the summer of 2010, it was my home during a three-month stay out there in the woods. We'd see a lot of hikers going past, either heading out or coming back from someplace, and sometimes they'd ask us questions about the surrounding trails or just the forest in general.
01:30:58 And then one day, I stepped outside to see a young, young man and a woman walking through the open gate. After giving them a wave and asking if I could help them, the young man asked how to get to the one particular beauty spot about two miles from the station, and the second he said its name, I realized what was happening. See, this beauty spot was a very popular spot for marriage proposals, and we had at least three or four guys a season taking their girls up there for a beautiful backdrop when they pop the question. It was cute, I guess. They'd stop by the station to get directions, and you'd always see the excitement and nervousness in the young man's face while his girl remained blissfully ignorant.
01:31:38 And it was no different on that day when I walked outside, and had that young man ask where the beauty spot was. In the moments after, we shared a very knowing look. I knew what he was planning, and he could tell that I knew. And so after giving him a nod and a very wry smile, I addressed him with as much courtesy and respect as I could. could muster, not just because it might boost his chances, but because I admired the balls of it. You see, my wife and I had the total opposite of a romantic proposal. We found out that she was pregnant, and she said, well, we better get married, I guess. And then that was that. Two weeks later, we had a courthouse marriage. And so I really admired these kids for putting it all on the line
01:32:23 like that. One couple even stopped by to thank us for giving them directions, but sadly, not on that day, because after giving them directions and having the excited young man thank me and walk off with his girlfriend, they didn't come back. A couple of days later, I was sitting in the office building when I heard a knock on the door. And then, when I went to see who it was, I found a missing person's detective from the state police standing there. He had a picture to show me and I recognized the girl in it right away because it was the same one who had been standing next to that young man and just blissful ignorance as he asked me directions to that beauty spot. The detective said that he managed to track down her last known location to this forest,
01:33:06 and then after asking if I'd seen her, I told him sure, and then walked him out to the beauty spot. Now, on the way, I told him all about how it was a popular spot for proposals and how it wouldn't surprise me if the couple were either camped out there or had eloped on some post-engagement honeymoon in a state of loved-up giddiness, I guess. Now, I remember laughing when I said that, and the detective kind of smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. No, they stayed cold, and what we saw next made me realize why they'd stayed that way. When we made it to the beauty spot, it looked like it always had. A small hill crested above
01:33:46 a gentle slope, which led down to a stream, with a meadow full of wildflowers beyond it. It was just as pretty as I remembered it, and the detective agreed that it was a fine spot for a proposal, but then we both looked down, and we saw them. Lying on the soft soil beneath us, one behind the other, were the two missing kids. The girl's head had been partially blown away by what must have been a point-blank shot. And while there was no obvious wounds to the male, it later came out that he'd bled out from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his own stomach. Now, the picture that emerged was a horrifying one, easily one of the most haunting, heart-wrenching
01:34:26 things that I've ever had the misfortune of coming across as a forest ranger. Boy proposes to a girl, having been sure as anything, that she'd say yes. When she said no, he lost his mind for a moment and shot her. Maybe he didn't even say no. Maybe she said a whole lot of things before he pulled the trigger. But whatever it was, it probably wasn't yes. And so our young man, with his bright future ahead of him, chose to throw it all away over a moment of wounded pride. Now we think he came to his senses after he watched his girl's dead body tumbling down the slope,
01:35:02 and then knowing that he couldn't deal with the consequences of his own actions and wanting nothing more than to lie with his beloved during the final moments of his life. Our would-be groom chose to end this on his own terms, the slow and painful way. Having seen him lying there like that, I don't think I'll ever stop being haunted by the look on his face. He died in agony both physical and emotional, and it read all over his cold, lifeless face as we look down at him. And then the image of a man cradling a much smaller woman whose skull you can see into because it had been torn open by a bullet.
01:35:39 That sure as hell was something that I wish I could forget, too. Now, I don't feel sorry for him. I think he got what he deserved in a strange sense, and it's the girl that I feel sorry for, the one who wasn't given any choice in the matter. She went out with him that day not knowing what was coming. what was really coming, I mean, and I found myself hoping to God that it was quick and that she didn't have to suffer too much or be scared for too long.
01:36:06 Now, I don't work at Wapidi anymore, and I'm not stationed at Shoshone either, but a while back I called the station there and asked if anyone had been up to that beauty spot recently. The ranger I spoke to was familiar with what happened and told me that the last time he was up there, he'd found a bouquet of wildflowers someone had picked from the meadow and laid at the crest of the hill. I know the girl must have had family, probably friends too, and it was probably one of them who went to spend some time where she died and leave something to memorialize her with. But it was still nice to think that it wasn't just me that thought about her, and how incredibly unfair it all is that her life was just snatched away from her like that.
01:37:09 Even though it's been 15 years now, I remember that day like it was yesterday. My name's Tom, by the way, and I've been a U.S.FS ranger up in the Pacific. Pacific Northwest for the past 25 years. And while I've most definitely seen a lot of strange crap in my time, I never saw anything quite like this fella that I'm about to tell you about. So it was a quiet Tuesday afternoon in the late summer of 2011, and I was at the station feet up and sipping some coffee while going over some trail reports. It was hot outside too, so I had all the windows open a jar just to let in that sweet, cool air while hopefully keeping the bugs out.
01:37:50 But then I heard it. The sound of the men yelling in the distance, and right away I knew that this was different. It wasn't like a celebratory woo or someone hollering for help. These were like primal animal sounds, like he was mad, but crazy mad, if that makes sense. Now, we're no different from regular law enforcement when it comes to enforcing the law and powers of arrest. So if someone out there is breaching the peace and posing a danger to either themselves or others, were obligated to do something about it. So even though the sound alone was enough to give
01:38:23 me chills, I grabbed my radio, sidearm, and a first aid kit, and then was out the door and moving steadily towards the sound of the shouts. Now, I didn't call it in right away because there was still a chance that there was just some drunk camper or a group of frat boys or something like that. But if it was anything bigger than I could handle, I had my portable right there. And thank God I brought it too because I sure as heck ended up needing it. I moved through the underbrush that came up to about my knees as quiet as I could. The shouts kept coming, getting louder as I got closer. But as I closed in on him, I started hearing these wet thumping noises that right away struck my nerves on edge. I crept up over this little rise, staying low behind some bushes, and then suddenly, there he was,
01:39:11 maybe 15 to 20 yards ahead of me in a small clearing. Now the guy had his back to me, but he was completely buck naked, with pale skin all scratched up from the brush. And while kneeling at the base of a tree, he was bashing his head against the trunk over and over again. I guess I must have been frozen for a second because I remember just sort of watching him go at it as I felt myself getting sicker and sicker.
01:39:39 But that's also how I heard him whispering something under his breath, and the only part that I heard Foley was, got to get it out. We later found out the guy had choked down something like 15 grams of dried psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, as they're called on the street, which constitutes what might be referred to as a catastrophic overdose, considering most people only chew up a gram or two. The guy was tripping so hard that he thought the fungus had gotten to his brain, and the only way to fix it was to crack his skull open and, you know, do brain surgery on himself, right there against a tree in the middle of nowhere.
01:40:17 Something that I wasn't about to let happen, though. I kept my pistol low at first, not wanting to antagonize him directly, and then announced myself as I broke into the clearing while imploring him to stop what he was doing. The guy just whipped around all crazy. Blood was smeared across his face, and for a second or two, he just stared at me with his chest heaving and the blood dripping off of his chin. And then, after letting out what was honestly a terrifying roar, he charges at me. Now he came at me full tilt, leaned forward and ready to tackle me, but this poor son of the
01:40:53 bitch was so dizzy from bashing his own head to pieces that he only made it about ten feet before his legs just buckled. He went down hard, face-planning into the dirt, and I was on him quick, dropping a knee into his back and struggling with him until his arms were pinned. Now when the fight went out of him, he started mumbling stuff again, but he was too tired out and messed up for me to make any sense of it. I used these flex cuffs on him, which were pretty much zip ties once I was sure that I was able to, and then gave his facial wounds a look after rolling him over. And it was bad, really bad, and I knew that he needed urgent hospital treatment if he'd managed to do any damage to its brain.
01:41:34 Now I called it in on the radio before wrapping his head in some gauze, and then after that, it was just a case of keeping him calm until backup showed up. And while we waited, I covered him with this space blanket from my pack as he seemed to sort of drift in and out of consciousness. And that's the one time he managed to say anything I understood, and even then, it was just a variation on the first thing when he asked me to help him get it out. I just nodded along and told him help was on the way. I didn't even know he was on mushrooms at that point either, so I just felt terrible for him. and when the ambulance crew showed up, they took one look at him before loading him up and taking him away. And the last I heard is that he spent a week or two in the hospital and then he was released without any further psych treatment.
01:42:20 I went back to the station that evening, wrote up that report and just sat there shaking my head. Forest service work, anal, smoky bear hats, and campfire talks. He deal with some really messed up stuff sometimes. And years later, I still think about him sometimes when I'm out on patrol. I guess some folks come out here chasing something, be it peace or adventure or escape. And I suppose not all of them find what they're looking for if we're going to get all philosophical about it. But that guy found it all right. And then he took it so close to the edge that he fell right off completely.
01:42:57 And just as a side note, if you ever head into the forest, stick to the trails, tell somebody where you're going, and for God's sake, leave the hallucinogens at home. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST.
01:43:49 Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.
There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click any sentence in the transcript to leave one.