To Die For - 10) Kill or Be Killed

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

"The smell was the smell of death. When you smell man sweat…together with blood… together with the land. I can still remember it in my nightmares."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beckley is guilty. They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail.

The person who did it is still out there. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father. But he was leading a double life. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All eight episodes of To Die For are available now to binge absolutely free. But for ad-free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. Warning. The following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes.

Listener discretion is advised. So you went to your place, you packed up, did you talk to your parents at all? No. So you didn't even tell your dad you were going to Chechnya? No. So you didn't even tell your dad you were going to Chechnya? No. Really? I just, I don't know, I just didn't speak with them. We didn't talk for like quite a long time, for the whole year. Did you tell anyone else or anyone in your family? No. Not even your sister? I couldn't speak with my sister. I mean, I was not couldn't speak with my sister i mean i was not allowed to speak

with my sister you might have like died and shushed in your family just would have found out i mean they would find out at some point i mean they would find out through like a letter or someone showing up their door but you never even would have told them you were going to the war? Well, they said that I wish you to be not alive. I was thinking, I mean, it doesn't matter if I will go, even if I will be dead. They don't really care anyway. I felt like maybe this is it. This is the end which will give me the relief. I had to do it, gotta go on my own. You didn't get stuck behind. I was holding my gun. I got you, I tell you all. I had to kill you.

Was it so much fun? Episode 10, Chapter 22, Sent to Die. So in the morning, I arrived at the train station station and we all lined up. I had my backpack with me. It was one of the worst days of Aliyah's life, and possibly one of the last. As punishment for rejecting her new commander's advances, she had been sent away to die on the front lines of a war 500 miles away. So first we sit down into the train, and everybody in the car were just young boys.

Their eyes were full of fears. I looked at them, and everybody just had only one thought. Will I survive? Will I come back? The train was bound for the border between Russia and Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region just north of the country of Georgia. It was annexed by Russia in the 19th century, and ever since then has been trying with varying degrees of success to be un-annexed and independent again. When we arrived at the main station, we were given this uniform.

It was like a thick jacket. The color was dark green. Everything was much bigger than my size. And they gave us guns, but like sniper guns, VCC and SVD. I didn't have any idea even how to like use these guns. Some nine years earlier, Chechnya had declared its independence. And now, Ilya and her fellow soldiers were there fighting in a war for Putin, who was determined to retake control of the territory for Russia. This was the Second Chechen War.

And then I had this guy and he was standing next to me and he was like from Kyrgyzstan, I think. He probably saw like that I was all depressed because I was standing there as a zombie. He was telling me some funny stories and very stupid. And I looked at him and was like, can you like stop? And he said, is it like your first time? I'm like, yes, of course it's my first time. He's like, relax, it's like my second time.

So no worries, nothing happened. See, I'm still alive, I'm still here. The newly arrived soldiers, including Aliyah and the man she was talking to, Rashid, were then ordered onto trucks and sent to the front lines. He was talking and then he started to smoke and everybody was smoking and I just,

I thought like maybe it will help me out. So I tried to smoke and then I was coughing and I said, fuck it. I'm not doing this. Like I couldn't. And then he said,

good, good. It's better not to smoke if you're a sniper. And I was like, why? And then another guy was sitting next to me. He said, if you smoke in the night, your enemy may see you. And if they can just track or like calculate

where your hat is, they can kill you in your hat. So it's better not to get used to to the smoke and i said like oh yeah good to know thanks we were driving for a couple hours it became dark and cold and we arrived to the place where far away we could see it was not like even town, but like small kind of village with a few houses. Aliyah and her new squad members were then brought to a makeshift military base on top of a hill. They said, okay, so this is your station.

Obviously no shower, no TV or anything like that, no computer, no telephone, no internet, of course, no nothing. And the smell was the smell of death. When you smell man's sweat together with blood together with the land I can remember in my nightmares I mean there were only guys that was kind of like a little bit concern me But you know what? Nobody even thought about sex because the most important instinct is to survive. The first night I didn't sleep at all and I didn't hear anything. It wasn't any, you know, bombs and gunshots. And then in the morning, around like 5 a.m., I felt so cold. It was freezing. And I couldn't even hear any birds singing

or anything like that. It was deadly quiet. And I looked at the guys. They were sleeping like babies. Over the course of her first day on the front lines, Aliyah's friend from the train station, Rashid, became a mentor of sorts to her. He showed her the safest corner of the barracks to sleep in

and taught her other best practices for staying alive that he learned on his previous deployment in Chechnya. I was trying to wash my face. He said, don't do it. And I was like, dude, are you crazy? Like, this is hygienical things. I need to wash my face. And he said, no, if you're a sniper, because if your face is clean, then the color of the clean skin reflects the light, and then the other sniper can see you and can shoot you really, really well. Rashid taught Aliyah more about concealment and shooting a rifle, and they were signed as buddies and given night lookout duty. We started to talk a lot, and I kind of, like, get used to his stupid jokes. And while we were, like, sitting there, I remember he was asking me questions like,

so, where did you study? What was your department? Who was your commander? And slowly, slowly, I just opened up to him. I said, like, you know what? I can tell him. Why not? So I told him the whole story from the beginning. When Aliyah got to the part of the story about turning down the advances of her commander, Lieutenant General, Rashid had some strong words about him. He's like, oh, like that prick? I heard a lot strong words about him. He's like, oh, like that prick.

I heard a lot of stories about him. He sent many soldiers to the front line knowing that they would be killed. He still did it. He didn't care about their families, about their lives, so he just basically sacrificed their lives for nothing. He said he's a very bad commander. And I said, well, that's why I'm here. I guess it's just bad luck.

After a few days, Aliyah began to realize the full, grim nature of her assignment. Shooting at people who she didn't know and couldn't see, who were also shooting at her. And wondering at the same time, was she even on the right side here? We were attacking civilians. We were fighting normal families. They were protecting their country. We were attacking them. And then I heard a lot of stories

about Chechen men, how cruel they are, how do they torture people, how they would cut you apart just for their pleasure, just to have fun. They would cut off the head of the Russian soldiers and they would send it to either Russian commanders just to kind of like piss them off and scare them.

All these like stories made me nauseous. Aliyah didn't know whether these stories were true or just dehumanizing propaganda, but it kept her close to the base and on high alert in case of attack. We didn't have enough food and one day a small troop of my colleagues soldiers decided to go to the village to get some food. I mean, not to get some food, they would basically almost like rob this village, right? So, I mean, the Russian soldiers with guns, hungry. So, of course, the village population would just give wherever they wanted,

just to leave them alone and not to kill their families and their kids. But this time, the raid didn't go as planned. There was an old guy, old enough to fight, but he still had a gun in the house, and he tried to kill my colleagues, but they shot him first. So it was terrible, you know.

It was terrible because they're like old people in that village who were just killed for nothing. It's unclear whether one man in the village was killed or several people, but this act of senseless brutality shattered the quiet on the base. When they brought the food, it was the feeling that this food had, like, blood. You know, like, it's just, you couldn't just even eat it. It's almost like poisoned by the blood of innocent people. The next day, snipers began shooting at the base. Evidently, the villagers had informed the Chechen militia about what had happened, and now they were taking revenge. A revenge

that, in some respects, Aliyah could understand. It really pissed that mercenaries off. That's why they came and they started to basically kill us. If he wouldn't do it, or if they wouldn't go to the village, you wouldn't have this problem. Despite Aliyah's empathy for what the Chechens were going through,

she was also a Russian soldier, the target of these mercenaries, and she had her orders. Our commander wanted to terminate them by killing them. So that night, Aliyah and Rashid went to their lookout location,

knowing that this time they might not come back. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Bethely is guilty. This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head.

Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.

Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet. And that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life. He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do. He then began entering the houses.

He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here. Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Chapter 23, Aaliyah's Prayer. Russia has waged a brutal war against Chechen separatists since the 1990s. The violence began when a former Soviet... We have fought against the Russian occupation for centuries. We even had our own Holocaust.

Stalin deported the entire population. The Minister for Defence provided a report on Chechnya. Let me quote from the text. In Russia's interest, this region must be rendered devoid of life. The Chechens were pretty formidable. They were a strange mix of volunteer local militias, ex-military, and foreign fighters. This is Dr. Mark Gagliotti,

who is one of 29 British journalists that the Putin regime banned from Russia in 2022. He's also the author of several books on Russia, including Putin's Wars. The Chechens themselves think of themselves as wolves, but they regard the wolf as being essentially something to live up to. But on the one hand, absolutely ferocious in defense of the pack, but one that ultimately depends on and protects the pack. Because this region and the Caucasus Mountains and the Chechens who live there are very little understood,

I've called Dr. Geliadi to help explain the war that Aliyah was fighting in. Of all the various parts of the Soviet Union, the one that was probably the most unruly, the most reluctant to be under Moscow's control was Chechnya. It had been finally annexed by the Russian Empire back in the mid-19th century. And essentially, whenever the central government looked weak, the Chechens rebelled. Dr. Geliadis explains that when the Soviet Union dissolved, Chechnya took the opportunity to declare independence. And though the Russian army tried to stop them, they didn't succeed. This was the first Chechen war. And in effect, the Chechens fought the Russians to a draw that time.

Then Putin came to power and decided to finish Russian business in Chechnya. But first, he needed a reason to go back to war. A few weeks later, there were several terrorist bombs in Russia. Over 300 were killed. It wasn't clear who'd done it, but most Russians were ready to blame the Chechens. But some now say that these events were orchestrated by the spies inside Putin's power base, the FSB, successor to the KGB. I might tell you without any doubt that the Second War was initiated by FSB as a provocation. They provoked Chechen.

This became the Second Chechen War, the one that Aliyah was now caught up in. Here's Dr. Geliady again, who also hosts the podcast In Moscow's Shadows. So essentially, yes, this is very much Putin's war. And also, this was his opportunity to essentially demonstrate to Russians across the country that things were going to be different now. It gave him a chance to pose with tough guy, macho rhetoric, but also make the point that Russia was back.

Even by the low standards of war, the Second Chechen War was a brutal and horror-filled conflict on all sides, which included torture, assassination, mass murder of civilians, and suicide attacks. All civil wars have a tendency to be deeply unpleasant, but in this case, brutality was mobilized as another weapon of war. I mean, there were at least 40,000 civilians who died.

We have cases of cities like Grozny being leveled, even when their civilian population's within. But we also have a huge range of everything from outright atrocities to just simply heedless brutality. Looting, for example, was widespread. This is audio of a Chechen fighter returning a laptop that was looted by Russian forces. How he got it back, we probably don't want to know. In the end, Putin ultimately won his war.

But at what cost? What happened is, essentially, Chechnya was brought under control. But it was brought under control, firstly, by massive levels of brutality. Secondly, by promising the new Chechen elite huge amounts of money and considerable autonomy. With this context now, let's return to Aliyah and her fellow soldier Rashid as they walk to their lookout point on the Russian-Chechen border, where the looting of Russian troops has led to a retaliatory attack by the Chechen militia. So we went to our location with Rashid at the small hill. And while we were laying there, I was just looking at the watch all the time.

1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. By 5 a.m., I noticed that I was shaking. I was cold as well, but you know, like this feeling when you're scared so much. It's like your heart is shaking, and it gives this shake to all your body. So 6 a.m., we've heard some gunshots from our side. It wasn't that long, for a few minutes, and Rashid, he touched me with my shoulder, he said, okay, now, like now. And he pressed the trigger and he shot them the enemy he said to me it's simple now it's your turn and I saw through the scope I saw face with a beard and with a hat and i stopped breathing at that moment but i waited i felt like

the blood and the heart beating through my ears like i could feel that my heart is beating so loud or she told me like do it now. I pressed the trigger and it was a silence. I pressed the trigger. I didn't cry. I didn't feel anything that time, that moment. I just didn't feel anything. I felt the metallic, you know, metallic... I don't know how to say it. I just felt the strands of the gun.

And I didn't look again. I just closed my strength of the gun and I didn't look. Again, I just closed my eyes like that. And then Roshi told me, good job. Was it a good job? I don't know. I laid there for maybe an hour in a silence. Richard also didn't talk.

And then in the morning later we returned to our base. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I drank a little bit of water, but I couldn't even eat anything. When you experience something like that, it's just so much stress. It was almost like nauseous to even think about the food. I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was already dark. And only Rashid came to me. He said to me, how do you feel?

Like, you okay? Like, yeah. And he said, well, let's go. Let's go back. We need to, you know, to go back to our position. So I said, like, yeah, let's go. As Aliyah and Rashid walked together, he spoke to her about his own challenges in coming to terms with a horrible act of killing,

trying to help her feel better about the events of the day before and likely the day ahead. We were walking and he talked to me. His eyes were always warm, you know, like he was really kind and he loved nature. He always was like looking at the sun and telling like it's so beautiful and leaves and trees and he was a perfect sniper and killer. He told me about a wolf. He was a young boy. His father took him for the hunting and he said,

I saw a big wolf. And he said his eyes were so beautiful. And he said he looked at me. And father said like like don't hesitate press the trigger and he said i i couldn't do it because the wolves were so beautiful like just beautiful animals it is like strong eyes and he said he felt really bad after. He made me to feel a little bit better. I told him, listen, it's still human being and it's still someone's son.

Perhaps father, brother, husband. And he said to me, never think this way. He said, when I hunt animals, they also have families, but you are the hunter. Never think that these people are somehow associated to anyone else. Because if you will start to do this, when you hesitate to press the trigger, that's exactly the moment when you will be killed. He said, just don't think, like you aim it, you press the button. We came to the position, that night it was quiet.

I could hear how the wind was going through the air. As they set up their guns and lay waiting in this eerie quiet, Aliyah's dread soon came back, despite Rashid's talk. That smell and that coldness and that disgusting feeling of the metallic cold weapon in your hands constantly where your finger is just stuck closer to the trigger and you're always in pressure waiting. To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's

doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Bethely is guilty. This case, the more

I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there. I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you stab somebody that many times, you have blood splatter.

Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all. Which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet, and that's what I wish people would understand. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life.

He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do. He then began entering the houses. He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here.

Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Even after several more nights of stillness, broken by gunfire, Aaliyah never became comfortable with the horrible task required to survive. The constant terror, sleeplessness, and discomfort made a way at her. Like, I came to the point where I just was thinking that I don't care what will happen. I just want to get out. Like, you don't care anymore. Even, you know, like, at some point you're so scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared, you're scared.

And then at some point you're just, like, so tired to be scared that you're like, fuck it. If I will be killed, I don't care anymore. Like I'm so tired, you know, like it's like you're just so exhausted. You just feel like even if it will happen to me, it's okay. I saw enough. It's fine. I just want to go to somewhere else, maybe in another world. But instead, it just got worse. One night in particular, just before a big mission,

Aliyah was plagued by nightmares and found herself praying in her half-sleep. Please, God, please just get me out of here. Please, I don't want to be here. Do something so I can leave this place and I want to go home. She slept fitfully, and then suddenly she awoke to noise and chaos all around her. When I woke up, I felt like something was going on

and people like running and it's some kind of like tension, but I didn't know exactly what happening. What was happening is that her base was being pounded by grenades and mortars. The half of the base, it was just bombarded like that. And the whole land and sun and everything, just with all this soil, it just flew on the top of my head. Like just with a, how do you call it? With a bomb-like pressure. how do you call it, like with the with the

bomb-like pressure and because I was laying in the corner, like Rashid gave me that. He gave me that. He gave me that corner because it was the most safest place,

he said. And he gave me that corner because it was the safest place, he said. And he gave me that safe place. They all were under that. Not all of them, but like 80% of my friends. They were killed. Parts of bodies were everywhere. I couldn't stand because my left shin, something fell on it,

like the wooden huge stick, which was next to my place where I slept. It's like it falls on me, but it falls exactly on my leg, and it broke my bone. And I didn't know exactly what happened but I couldn't stand up and I uh when I I took this like land out and all this stuff I I saw the bone the white bone which was like out of my machine through the through through the trousers which I was wearing all the time. And I couldn't do anything. I started to scream like, like, help, help, but I couldn't hear anyone. The lieutenant was alive, but Rashid's face laying just next to me.

And he didn't have half of his body. It was just his head and arms and just his shoulders. And he was joking the last time. He said, hey, why don't you marry me? You know, we will be such a good couple. I'll take you to Siberia to introduce to my mom.

She'd love you so much. I was laughing. I said, you're still an idiot. I wish I would never say it to them. I wish I would say yes. I felt guilty. He cared about me, you know, not like others. He really did. He never tried to like even touch me in a way where he would like hit on me or something, not like any other man he was really noble these thoughts flashed through alia's mind as she lay under the rubble unable to move everything was like in a dream my commander lieutenant was like screaming and calling like is anyone is anyone anyone can hear me and i i was going like here like, come here. He came with another guys.

He looked at me like, you know, like, what's going, like, what happened? Like, where's the pain? Like, you're injured, what? And I showed him on the leg, like, yes, yes, I broke my leg. They held me from my arms to get me out. We went out from the base a little bit further, like under the hill. And we sat over there. From about like 40 soldiers, there were only 10 people left. Only 10.

All these boys, these boys were like 23 22 even 25 they're just little kids they've they've didn't seen anything in this life and they were killed just in front of me they were just killed and that's it that's it and when you see like these young kids like dying for nothing. How do you feel? Like, is it fair even? Like, where is the justice? Why? Like, what's the reason of doing that? You know, like even like, it doesn't make any sense. A support team eventually showed up in a military truck, along with two medics who examined Aliyah.

They said to Lieutenant, I mean, she's like a pointless soldier right now. She can't do anything. She can't walk properly. So when they started to untie the bandages, I started to scream. And they gave me, I think it was morphine or something like that, I don't know. Because I remember that feeling, I was laying just in front of the car and I looked at the sky. And the sky, I remember exactly clouds and it was blue, so blue that you felt like it was like a heaven. And I just closed my eyes and I passed over. And in the car, I remember I woke up and I started to scream. And then my commander said,

Like, relax, rest, rest. It's gone. Just rest. And I closed my eyes again. The Leah's Story continues in Episode 11. If you're experiencing a post-traumatic stress, mental health, or suicidal crisis, you can call or text 988 for immediate support. Veterans can press 1 to be connected with the Veterans Crisis Line. To Die For is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted and written by me, Neil Strauss, with additional writing assistance by Tristan Bankston. Executive

producers are myself, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay. For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams. Lead producer and editor is Tristan Bankston. Additional editing by Miles Clark and Christian Brown. Supervising producer, Tracy Kaplan. Consultants include Nushin Velizadeh, Chelsea Gooden, and Jamie Albright. Artwork by Byron McCoy. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Mixed and mastered by Dayton Cole. Our theme song is Killer Shangri-La by Psychotic Beats featuring Patti Amore.

Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, Oren Siegel, Becky Jensen, The Nord Group, Meredith Stedman, and Alex Vespested. To have a murderer as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down here. In Marion, Illinois, an 11-year-old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live-in girlfriend maintaining innocence, but charged with her murder. I am confident that Julie Beasley is guilty.

They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there. Listen to Murder on Songbird Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father. But he was leading a double life.

He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.