True Crime Campfire - Is It Fiction? The Crimes of Krystian Bala

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

In Dostoevsky’s book Crime and Punishment, the character Raskolnikov says, “All people seem to be divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary'. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because they are ordinary. Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like…just because they happen to be extraordinary.” Spoken like a true psychopath, my dude. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that Raskolnikov murders an old woman in that book—not just for the money, but to prove to himself how “extraordinary” he is. That the rules most of us abide by aren’t for him. Today’s case is about a modern-day Raskolnikov—a self-proclaimed intellectual whose grandiose narcissism hid a deep well of rage and insecurity, and led him to not only commit a brutal murder, but to tell us all about it on his blog. Download the game "June's Journey" on Apple iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/junes-journey-hidden-objects/id1200391796"June's Journey" on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.wooga.junes_journey_hidden_object_mystery_game&hl=en&gl=US&pli=1Sources:The New Yorker, David Grann: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/true-crimeTaipei Times: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2007/09/23/2003380130The Guardian, Elizabeth Day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/16/crimebooks.featuresSky TV's "Killers: Behind the Myth," episode "Bala: The Novel Killer"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In Dostoevsky's book, Crime and Punishment, the character Raskolnikov says, All People Seemed to be divided into ordinary and extraordinary and extraordinary. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because they're ordinary, whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like, just because they happen to be extraordinary. Spoken like a true psychopath, my dude, it probably won't surprise you to hear that Raskolnikov murders an old woman in that book, and not just for the money, but to prove to himself how extraordinary he is, that the rules most of us abide by aren't for him.

Today's case is about a modern day, Raskolnikov, a self-proclaimed intellectual whose grandiose narcissism hid a deep well of rage and insecurity and led him to not only commit a brutal murder, but to tell us all about it on his blog. This is Is It Fiction? The Crimes of Christian Bala. So, campers, for this one, were all the way over in Poland, December 2000. Despite the chilly day, some friends were outfishing on the Oder River when one of them looked up from his tackle box and saw something floating in the water.

Something that looked strange, out of place. He shielded his eyes and squinted at it, trying to figure out what he was looking at. It could be a big log, he thought, but then he saw the hair. It was a body, a man, and clear. the victim of some horrible violence. He had a noose tied around his neck, and his arms and legs had been connected to it in an evil system that would tighten the noose around his throat the more he tried to struggle against the bindings. All he had on was a pair of boxers and a shirt, no pants. It was clear he'd been tortured. His body was covered in deep bruises and knife cuts,

and an autopsy would soon confirm that he'd been starved for several days before death. Worst of all, the medical examiner found water in the victim's lungs, meaning he was still alive when his killer dumped him in the river. It would have been a cold, dark, excruciating death, an uncommonly brutal murder. It didn't take detectives long to figure out the identity of the body in the river. He was Dariusziewski, 35 years old, tall and handsome, with long, wavy black hair and striking blue eyes. His wife had reported him missing about a month before the body was found, and the circumstances were strange, to say the least. Darius lived and worked in Vroklav, about an hour's drive from where his body turned up. He owned an advertising company, and the last time anybody had seen him, he was rushing out the door of his office to meet a potential client with an urgent request.

That was on November 13th, and after that he'd just dropped off the face of the planet. And now here was this absolute horror at the river. Not only was Darius dead, he'd been horribly, cruelly murdered. This sweet guy who wrote music and played guitar in a rock band in his off-hours loved Led Zeppelin, and as his wife put it, wouldn't harm anybody. Darius's wife was so devastated that she couldn't bear to look at the body to try and ID it. By now it was in pretty bad shape, so much so that Darius' mom had to identify

him by his long hair and the birthmark on his chest. Heartbroken, Darius's family marked the spot where his body was recovered with a cross and hoped for quick justice for this man who had been loved by so many. Initially, investigators wondered if this was some kind of gang-style hit, the torture, the bindings. There was definitely a lot of rage there, so it had the aura of revenge or retaliation. But Darius did not seem like the type of guy to be caught up in something like that. He and his wife were in the process of getting approved to adopt a child. He'd never been in trouble with the law before.

He owned his own business. They couldn't dig up any gambling or drug problems, any loan sharks he'd pissed off, anything fishy with his ad agency. He didn't seem to owe anybody any major money. They couldn't find any reason, in other words, why someone might want Darius tortured and dead. So the investigation, which had seemed to start out on a high with the easy idea of the victim, began to stall.

A search of the river in the surrounding forest didn't turn up anything significant. Even broadcasting the case on the hit true crime show 997, the Polish equivalent of our America's Most Wanted, didn't turn up any leads. Pouring through Yenishevsky's business and bank records didn't shed any light either. They spoke to Darius's wife about some trouble they'd had earlier on in their eight-year marriage, but it seemed to the detectives that they'd worked through that and were stronger for it. They were looking forward to becoming parents together. There just wasn't anything that pointed to a murderer or a motive. And within six months, the case grew as cold as the river where it had begun.

But it wouldn't stay that way. In 2003, the case made its way to the desk of a cold case detective named Roblewski. Detective Roblevsky, y'all, is one of us, fascinated with criminal psychology to the point where he was taking sight classes in his spare time. He took one look at the Darya Shannyshevsky file and he was down the rabbit. hole determined to find out the who, and more importantly, the why. Fun fact about Detective Rebleski, by the way, his first name is Yasek, which is basically Jack in Polish, and his last name means Sparrow. So his colleagues call him Jack Sparrow, like from Pirates of the Caribbean. We're on a run. We're like so self-referential these

days. It's so true. He knew that in cold cases, the answer was often there in the original file, something overlooked the first time around. A witness statement, a seemingly unimportant clue, so he started from the beginning, reviewing every detail from the initial investigation. The details of Darius's disappearance were creepy. His mom had worked as a receptionist at the ad agency, and she told the investigators that on the morning of the day her son went missing, she'd taken a phone call from a polite-sounding man who asked to speak to Darius. He said it was urgent. He isn't in yet, she said, but I might be able to help you. The caller had asked if she could make him several large signs, one as big as a billboard,

which would have been a nice high-value contract. Daryush's mom was happy to talk to the guy about what he wanted, but as she started to run down the list of services they provided, he cut her off. No, I want to wait and talk to Mr. Yanejewski, he said, and hung up. He didn't give his name. Darius' mom remembered hearing what sounded like traffic noise in the background, as if he were calling from a payphone. Later that day, she asked her son

if that guy had called back about the big signs. He had, Daryush said, and I'm going out to meet him today. The last time anyone had seen him, Daryush was heading out the door at around four in the afternoon with his cell phone in his hand, on the way out to meet his potential client. In hindsight, one of Daryush's employees remembered that she looked out the window and noticed two men following closely behind him as he walked away from the building. This caught the detective's eye.

He kind of suspected that more than one person was involved in the murder. Just because Darius was a tall, well-built guy, he seemed like he'd be hard to subdue. A little while later, as they were leaving work for the day, several people noticed that he'd left his car in the parking lot. That was weird. He went out to meet clients all the time, but he always took his car. When the detectives checked the ad agency's phone records, they found the call from this mysterious client. they'd come from a pay phone not far from the building. Interestingly, the phone records showed that after hanging up with Darius's mom,

the caller had called Dariush's cell phone. Of course, as tantalizing as these details were, they weren't necessarily related to the murder. If they were, though, then they pointed to a killer who had planned every move with precision, familiarized himself with Darius's routine, knew about the business, knew his cell phone number, and managed to talk him out of his safety zone, and into some unknown location, a car, an apartment? The detective couldn't be sure yet.

He was intrigued by the fact that Darius' cell phone had never been recovered, despite the fact that multiple people had seen him with it that day he went missing. If he could find that phone, Detective Robleski knew it might be a crucial piece of evidence. He wasn't optimistic about finding it, though. I mean, any killer with a couple brain cells to rub together would have destroyed it, right? Smash it into smithereens or tossed it in the river. Right? You'd think. But he was happy to find out that Darius's wife still had the receipt for the cell phone, and it had the phone's IMEI number on it. Now, this is basically like the serial number, and it can tell you a lot about the phone's origins. This meant that if

anybody had used the phone after Darius went missing, Vroblevsky could track it. And to his amazement, when he ran the number, he found out that this phone was actually still in use, like three years after Darij's murder. When he looked into it further, he discovered that the phone had been sold a few times over the years, passing from person to person. So, patiently, Vroblewski set about tracing the chain of owners back to the original, the person who had the phone right after Darius did. This guy turned out to be innocent of any crime. He was a businessman who'd bought the phone online from an eBay-type auction site called Allegro. Paid about 50 bucks for it. The date of the sale made Detective Roblewski's antennae twitch, three days after Darius went missing.

Three days. Exactly the length of time the medical examiner thought Darius had been starved and tortured before his death. Fortunately, for everybody, the buyer still had the record of the sale on his own account history. He'd bought the phone from a seller with the username Chris B.7. And this, it turned out, was a fella named Christian Bala. By all accounts, and Bala grew up in a normal, loving, upper-middle-class family. His parents doaded on him, taking him fishing and buying him pets and encouraging him in his academic interests. He was smart and popular, too, a smooth talker who never had trouble attracting girls. Some of his school friends noticed that he tended to tell big stories about himself, though, many of which seemed too

good to be true. Basically, my dude lied his ass off, a pattern that would continue throughout his life, so much so that U.K. crime writer Mark Billingham thinks he started to believe his own bullshit. Yeah, you see that a lot with true narcissists. Definitely. And Christian could be arrogant and confrontational if you crossed him. But a lot of people fell for his schick. Women especially, so much that his friends nicknamed him Amora, which is basically Polish for like Romeo or Casanova. After high school, Christian went to university, the first person in his family to go ever. His parents were so proud of him. He majored in philosophy because, of course, he did. He was a big fan of Nietzsche and his good old Superman, and he was into the postmodernist,

Jacques Derridae and all those folks. If I had a nickel for every insufferable asshole who loved him some Nietzsche in philosophy, I'd have a lot of nickels. But why wouldn't Christian love Nietzsche? After all, in his own mind, he was a Superman. I'd just like to point out that the Nietzschean Ubermensch isn't about being better than everyone else. It's about being the best you that you can be, not letting life's difficulty stand in your way. It's like kind of sad boy, like self-help is what it is. Of course, douche canoes with superiority complexes always thinks it's about stepping on people on your way to the top. Yeah, smartest guy in the room, right?

At university, Chris created his own image. and it was mostly successful. His professors were impressed with his intelligence. Women were drawn to his apparent confidence. Mark Billingham said later, he built these enormous myths about his own character. By, you know, lying, bigging himself up. And he did it very consciously,

justifying it with bits and pieces of his favorite philosopher's work. Truth is an illusion, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, that means I can make up some bullish about a trip to Paris I never actually took, or a hot woman I had a torrid affair with. Tell all my friends about it and laugh behind their backs. According to journalist David Grant, whose New Yorker article about the case

was one of our main sources for this episode, Christian had a name for this. He called it mytho-creativity. He once wrote to a friend that if he ever wrote his memoirs, he'd make sure to cram them full of myths, a.k.a. lies. Yeah. Christian, buddy,

we all went through the mytho-creativity phase and middle school hun. Most of us grew out of it. Yeah, Chris, you're basically that girl on TikTok who claims she's a 300-year-old vampire-wearwolf fairy hybrid for views. What a champ. Isn't that fun for everybody around you, not being able to trust a word out of your mouth? Reminds me a lot of Ben Field for a few weeks ago, doesn't it? You? I bet they'd get along like a house on fire. We should set up a fun little prison play date. I think they'd spend the whole time knocking each other's block towers over and crying. Or they just eat each other.

Yeah, yeah. Or just kiss. You know, one or the other. There you go. Yeah. Everywhere you turn in this case, you find people calling Chris an intellectual. He called himself one, evidently, which is hilarious. It's like going to his dinner party and saying,

Hi, I'm Katie. I'm brilliant. Yeah, he must have just really liked saying it. I'm an intellectual. What does that even mean? intellectual. Is that a job? I've never seen it advertised anywhere. You can't major in it. I feel like if you're calling yourself an intellectual, what you're pretty much communicating to the world is, I am an insufferable dweeb who brags about not owning a TV to hide the fact that I'm achingly insecure about my own inadequacies.

I will judge the coffee you serve me if I come to your house. I've been thinking about this. Is it possible he meant ineffectual? Oh. Yeah, maybe. Or insuffer. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think both definitely fit him better. Fortunately, for most of the women in Poland, Christian didn't really have any serious relationships until one weekend he ran into a childhood friend on a fishing trip. Her name was Stasha. Christian swept her off her feet, and they got married in 1995. A son followed soon after. Christian had promised Tasha he'd take great care of her, but nah. See, Christian just wanted somebody to stand in for the role of wife, TM, while he chased his dream of becoming a great philosopher.

Somebody to stay home and take care of him and his kids. He didn't love Stasha. She was his property. He cheated on her like all the time, but he was insanely jealous, too, always accusing her of cheating. In Christian's mind, Stasha's place was in the kitchen making biscuits and babies, and his place was out at the club, getting an intellectual with the ladies. Oh, God. And he looks like so exactly like you think he does, too. Like, remember, we're talking mid to late 90s here, plus philosophy major. So he's got like the long dark hair, little wire rimmed glasses, the perpetual cigarette, the black clothes, just, ugh, God, I'm triggered to my core. Like when I saw pictures, I was just like, no, my horrible exes are flashing before my eyes. Make it stop. I know this man and he's bad. Stasha had dropped out of high school to work as a secretary. She wasn't into philosophy. So my guess is she was someone he felt superior to, someone he thought he could easily dominate. Being an intellectual didn't open up the financial doors Chris thought it would.

I know. I'm just as shocked as you are. He tried making it for a while as an academic, but he wasn't getting anywhere. Which, yeah, man, it takes like a freaking eternity. What did you expect? But Chris was impatient, I guess, so he dropped his studies. By now he was working on a PhD and decided to try his hand at business. He started a specialty cleaning company. And it seemed like he just assumed he was going to kick ass and take names right out of the gate, despite his lack of any, I don't know, experience or training in business. But who would have thunk it? He sucked at this venture too. Because running a business involves more than just telling people at dinner parties that you read, all six volumes of my struggle in a weekend and found it so pedestrian. His cleaning business lasted less than a year, quite a bit less, in fact, lasted a few months

would be more accurate way of saying it. He went bankrupt, and things weren't going great on the home front either. When his business started to crumble, Christian's treatment of his wife got worse and worse. Their babysitter witnessed a lot of it. Christian was drunk a lot. Angry, loud, always accusing Stasia of having affairs, spying on her, checking her phone, project much? Mm-hmm. He didn't seem to be in control of his own behavior. And Stasha, bless her, finally got sick of his shit. She filed for divorce.

Good for her. It was ugly. Christian might have treated Stasha like shit when they were married, but now that she dumped him, he was obsessed with her. He was convinced she was having an affair. So he hired a private investigator to follow her around. one night stasha was out at a bar with one of her friends when christian came storming in he got right in stash's face and screamed at her that he knew she was sleeping around that he was going to kill her and her men it took five people to drag him out of the bar one of his friends later told the press that christian had gotten drunk one night and quote started to behave vulgarly and wanted to take his clothes off and show his manliness yikes Clearly, my dude was falling apart. Do you know which Nietzsche texts talked about getting halfway to Pickled and trying to flash your friends your pickle?

I must have missed that one because I'm so unintellectual. So Stasha was scared, obviously, but she was also determined to get on with her life. And one night in the summer of 1999, in the midst of her ugly divorce, Stasha was at a bar called Cruelieu. crazy horse when she met a handsome, good-natured musicians slash ad-exec named Darius Yanishevsky. They were both standing at the bar waiting for their orders. Stasha was waiting on some fries, and she asked Darius if they'd put any out yet, and they got to talking. And it quickly turned into one of those things where you spark with somebody immediately and end up talking all night. Before they parted ways, they exchanged phone

numbers, and not long after that, Darius asked her out on a date. That went so well that they ended up getting a hotel room together at the end of the evening. But before anything happened sexually, Darius confessed to Stasha that he was married. Stasha later said that as attracted as she was to Darius, she just couldn't bring herself to sleep with a married man. Christian had put her through hell with his cheating, and she said she just couldn't do that to another woman. So she left. And that, as far as we know, was that. But through his creepy private detective, Christian found out about the date, he was convinced that Stasha and Darius were having an affair. A few weeks later, he showed up at her apartment, drunk off his ass, and confronted her.

How dare she betray him? See, in his mind, Stasha was still his. Never mind that she'd left him months ago and filed for divorce. I know who he is, Bala told her. He'd even been to Darius's work, he said. He described the office building. He knew the name and room number of the hotel where they'd gone for their date. freaking creepy. And, of course, it wasn't too long after that, November 13, 2000, that Darius disappeared.

When she heard about the disappearance, Stasha was concerned enough to ask Christian if he'd done something to the guy. But Christian acted like it was a ridiculous question, and Stasha accepted it. As volatile as he could be, she didn't want to believe her son's father could kill someone, especially since all she'd done was go on one date with the guy. this despite the fact that she and several other witnesses had seen Christian freak out about a bartender hitting on her at a club after Darius went missing yelling I'll kill him I've already dealt with such a guy As their divorce As their divorce wrapped up and the murder of Dari Ushana Shev

Slowly went cold, Christian Bala left Poland. And for the next five years, he traveled around, living in various places and taking various jobs. He went to the States. He taught English and scuba diving in Asia. And he decided to try out a new route to fame and fortune. He was going to be a writer. By the way, I was delighted to find out he speaks English, because I'm really hoping he'll hear us making fun of him. It is all we want, really. We just want the dildos we make fun of to hear. and maybe cry a little. You know, cry to his mama, who still thinks he's innocent, apparently.

Poor mama. By the way, skipping ahead a little, because this case went cold for so long, the media put out this narrative that it was a perfect crime, which must have just tickled our boy pink, the little shit. But as you'll come to see,

as the story goes along, this was anything but the truth. Perfect crime, my ass. In truth, despite his supposed genius IQ, this killer rivals Dexter want to be Mark Twitchell, aka Twatchel, for biggest dipshit we've ever covered. If there was a boneheaded move to make in this case, he made it with a flourish, okay? But stranger homicides are the hardest kind to solve, and almost nobody knew of the tenuous

connection between Darius and Christian Bala. In fact, even when Bala emerged as a suspect because of the cell phone, it took Stasha a while to admit that she'd had that little almost fling with Darius and that Christian knew about it. Okay, back to the cold case investigation. Detective Robleski has discovered Christian Bala was the one who sold Daryush's cell phone online a few days after we met missing. So he decided to see what he could find out about this dude. When he searched the name Christian Bala online, the first thing that popped up was a blog. And it was a doozy.

See, in his quest to become a novelist, Christian had started a blog. On it, he posted excerpts from his first Vanity published Magnum O. opus, which he called a muck, as in running a muck. More like, um, yuck, am I right? As Detective Rovleski read, he could not believe what he was seeing. The book was about a psychopathic killer, and its descriptions of a murder seemed eerily familiar. Not only was the protagonist named Chris, but a lot of the other plot points lined up with Christian Bala's real life and with the murder of Darius Yanoshevsky.

Chris's wife in the book bore striking resemblance to Stasha. Chris commits a murder where he binds the victim and stabs her to death, then sells the murder weapon on an internet auction site. As Ravleski interviewed Bala's friends, he found more similarities between him and the fictional Chris. Of course, every author draws from their own life experiences. That's not unusual, and it shouldn't be considered evidence in a crime. But, I mean, come on.

Yeah. When the author is a murder suspect and the fictional murder sounds a hell of a lot like the real one, it's going to raise a few eyebrows. A muck, by the way, is as god-awful as you'd expect. A forensic psychologist described it to the TV show killers as half-hardcore porn, half-sadistic violence. Journalist Elizabeth Day described it as a pulp fiction orgy of bestialogy, pornographic Oedipal complexes, and indiscriminate sexual violence. And from what I've read, that's pretty accurate. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's edge lord crap.

Despite Christian's insistence that the whole thing is just a metaphor about the cruelty and hypocrisy of society. Yeah. At the start of a mock, the narrator slash killer Chris says, I have infected you. You will not be able to get free of me. Shut the fuck up, nerd. I won't be able to get free of how much I fucking hate this guy, so maybe he's right. Maybe he's on to something.

He has infected us. So the detectives were intrigued. They wondered if the book might be the key to solving the case. Maybe it would clue them in on Christian's motive for killing Darius. They delved into the gross thing like a bunch of lit students cramming for a final exam, digesting every word of a muck. Stuff like this. I pulled the knife and a rope out from under the bed,

as you do with a picture story for children to lull them with some nonsense about kingdoms far, far away. I began to unwind the plot of the rope and to make it more interesting, and I was tying a noose. It took me two million years, during which I could think about 60,000 scenarios of the crime. The cigarette burned my lips. Then I threw the noose around her neck. Mary came to her senses, but she was sure that it was one of those little games that we sometimes performed to spice up the fuck. I tightened the noose with all my strength, holding the kicking Mary down with one hand, with the other I stabbed the knife above her left breast. The ribs screeched, but the long steel blade entered her.

Blood spurted. It ran down her nipples and stomach. It blushed her pubic hair, her thighs. Oh, God, that's so gross. Everything was already splashed with blood, without the slightest rustle, without a moan, without words. In total silence, a sentence of convulsions as during orgasm. I go out to the streets of Paris and white gloves.

I smile at people, and I'm as calm as never before. Far, far away, beyond the seven forests, beyond the seven mountains, I abandon the rope cut off from Mary's neck. I sell the Japanese knife on an internet auction. I pretend that I was a virtual character from a video game. Katie? Uh-huh. I hate this guy.

I hate this guy. He writes like he expects the audience to never get it and he expects to be praised for it. Like, dude, knowing your audience is like grade school shit. So at this point in the investigation, Ravleski felt sure he had the right guy and the motive, jealousy. But the evidence was practically nil. All they had was the cell phone Bala had sold online. They needed something else. So they turned back to the phone.

records from Darius's business. Those two calls he'd gotten on the day of his disappearance from the mystery client wanting big, expensive signs. The calls had been made from a pay phone down the street a little ways from Darius' office building. Now, this was the kind of phone that you had to use a phone card for. And fortunately for the detectives, these cards were registered, and all the calls made on them were logged with that same registration number. Vroblewski got hold of an expert in telecommunications and had them hunted. down the registration number of the calling card used to make those two phone calls and identify other numbers that the same card had called around the time of the murder. And lo and behold,

what do you think they found? That card, the same one that had made the two mystery calls to Darius on November 13, 2000, had also made a bunch of other calls to various family members and friends of one Christian Bala. A caboom. Now that is a nice piece of evidence. Bro used his own phone cart, y'all. Our boy genius! Unfortunately, though, Christian was out of the country at the time the cold-case investigation started ramping up, and Vroblevsky didn't really have the means to go get him and haul him back to Poland, so he continued investigating.

He put an alert on Bala's passport, and he waited. While he was waiting, he looked into something else. The website for that true crime show, 997, which had covered Darius' murder years, earlier, and he found something interesting. There had been a few unusual hits on the website from various countries around the world over the past few years, looking at the info about the murder, and when Vrobleski checked Christian's travel history, he realized that the hits had come from the same countries our boy had been in, at the same time he'd been in him. He was keeping an eye on the case. In 2005, Christian, having made such intelligent decisions so far, as we know,

decided to come back to Poland. And, of course, the alert on his passport immediately let the detectives know he was back within habeas-gravis range. Now, I don't have time to get into this in as much detail as I'd like, but Christian later claimed that the arrest went down in this terrifying,

movie-like, like mafia-style kidnapping scenario where these ununiformed men just grabbed him off the street in the middle of the night and threatened to take him out to the woods and kill him and bury him and a shallow grave and all this absolute, just phonus, balones that makes no sense whatsoever. And when Detective Roblewski found out about this,

he was just like, nah, we just arrested him like we do everybody else, you know. It was very ordinary and professional. I know who I believe, and it ain't Mr. Mytho creative. You're telling me that the guy who told everyone he would lie to make himself more interesting, lied? Wow. I cannot believe it. I know.

He so shot himself in the foot with that shit, too. Like, how do you expect a jury to believe you when you come and right out and telling friends? Like, oh, yeah, I lie all the time. Like, such an idiot. So they hauled Christian in and sat him down in an interview room. The detective interviewing him had consulted ahead of time with a group of very well-trained criminal psychologists. So he went in with a plan for how to handle Bala. And it worked like a charm.

At first, Christian denied everything. He'd never even met Darius, didn't even know who the guy was, but when the detective said, So I assume he must have had help with this murder, or maybe you were the helper? Christian snapped. He's like, I didn't need any help. Ah, ego. Always the narcissist Achilles heel. This is how Law and Order made us all think interrogations went.

Cession is really such a fucking cliche. And after that, he pretty much copped to the murder. The detective was thrilled, but the feeling didn't last long. Right after he confessed, Christian started to play crazy in the interrogation room, playing around with the phone on the table, just acting weird, saying he felt sick and needed a doctor, and after the doctor came and cleared him, Christian retracted his confession. Dang.

Forensic psychologists evaluated him soon after this, and determined, shock of shocks, that he was most likely a psychopath. get out of town, right? Who to thunk it? I mean, I joke, but it definitely fits for me. If nothing else, look at the way Christian bound Darius. I think that tells us a lot about the psychology behind this murder, because I can't imagine a more helpless situation to be in. Like, if you move a muscle, you're just going to help suffocate yourself faster. So the only way you can stay alive is to stay absolutely still, absolutely submissive at the total mercy of your capture. And, Clearly, that's what Christian wanted to dominate Darius.

Show him who's in charge. After Bala retracted his confession, the prosecutors were left with less confidence in their case. They had the cell phone sale, they had the phone card info, and they had a convincing motive, but they wanted more, so they kept digging. They found a friend of Stasas who told them that Christian had cornered her one night at a restaurant and grilled her about Darius. Who is he? Where does he work? And she wasn't the only friend who spoke up.

One of Christian's own friends admitted to the detectives that Bala had confessed to him at a New Year's Eve party. So much for, I never knew the guy. They also went through some of Christian stuff, stuff he'd left at his mom and dad's house, and they hit pay dirt. We know this guy is dumb already, right? Kept the victim's cell phone and sold it, used his own phone card to call the guy the day he abducted him, wrote a novel about a similar murder and published it on his blog, yelled at a bar that he'd already dealt with one of Stash's boyfriends? Surely. Surely it couldn't get any worse, right? He couldn't get any dumber. Right? Right, guys? Y'all. In this box that Christian left at his parents' house,

they found a notebook with detailed notes about Darius and his routine, a pen from Darius's company, and one of his business cards. Can we say trophies? This man, this man backed up his plans. Not only did he write a fucking blog about it, he also wrote it in a notebook. You guys, stop writing down your fucking crimes.

Jesus Christ. I feel like this is important because Bala never shuts up about what a bunch of smoothbrain pop tarts the investigators are. In one interview from prison, sitting there in his little jumpsuit, He called the lead detective a complete idiot, illiterate idiot, for suggesting his book might be a blueprint of the murder.

Brainless jellyfish, he called the people who put him in prison. What bless his heart. Unsurprisingly, after Bala's arrest, the media went bat shit over the story. Killer confesses on lurid blog. Author writes book about real murder, which is just ridiculous. I mean, come on, Christian's not an author. Yeah, almost nobody had read a cuck, sorry, a muck before Christian's arrest, but now it was selling out everywhere. Gross.

Some of his friends and exes and former professors were startled by how filthy it was, a major contrast to the polite guy they'd known. It was jarring. One ex-girlfriend told the press, our sex life was normal. It was nothing like this. But that's what we've learned about psychopaths, isn't it? There's a mask, and then there's the monster behind it. Let's not get it twisted, by the way. This book is not a bestseller because it's any good.

It's a bestseller because its author is an actual murderer. And very quickly, the prosecutors began to realize something important about a schmuck. Sorry, God. A muck. The book, although an intriguing little glimpse into the interior life of the suspect, was a distraction. It wasn't evidence. And they decided they weren't going to present it. such. Even Detective Robleski came to agree with this, as immersed as he'd been in the book. He realized

that it had no place in the trial. They weren't going to focus on fiction. They were going to focus on fact. When Bala realized this, he was furious. See, he planned to base his whole defense on the idea that he was being prosecuted for his writerly imagination. Yeah, and this is very clear in an interview he did after his trial with the New Yorker's David Grant. I am being sentenced to prison for 25 years for writing a book. A book, he said. It is ridiculous. It's bullshit. Excuse my language, but that's what it is. Look, I wrote a novel, a crazy novel. Is the book vulgar? Yes. Is it obscene? Yes. Is it bawdy? Yes. Is it offensive? Yes, I intended it to be. This was a work of provocation. I wrote, for instance, that it would be easier for Christ to come out of a

woman's womb than for me, I mean for the narrator, to fuck her. You see, this is supposed to offend. What's happening to me is like what happened to Salman Rushdie. Yes, Christian, you're a martyr for your cause. Note, by the way, that little Freudian slip there. Then for me, I mean, the narrator. Yeah. And this is hilarious to me. It really bothered him that people were supposedly misunderstanding his precious book. And the reason that's hilarious to me is that Christian was a postmodernist. As David Grant put it, quote, Bala had long subscribed to the postmodernist notion of the death of the author, that an author has no more access to the meaning of his literary work than anyone else. But when he found out that the detectives and prosecutors were looking at the book like a

blueprint of Darius's actual murder, he was super pissed. He told David Grant that the murder in a muck was, quote, simply a symbol of the destruction of philosophy. He said, I'm the fucking author. I know what I meant. Now, if this ain't the most delicious irony, like, I have to admit, okay, I kind of hated the postmodernist when I studied them back in undergrad, so I'm enjoying this part immensely. Oh, that's not what you meant? You object to an audience drawing its own conclusions about your work, hypocrite.

Sorry, Christian, you fail lit 101. That's a Jacques Derry Don't. And if you got that joke, you are a massive nerd and truly one of my people. And if you didn't, don't feel bad because literally like seven people probably did. And the other one is me. Like one of those is me. All right. So Christian took the stand in his own defense because of freaking course he did.

And I can't imagine he did himself any favors with the jury. I've seen him in interviews and he gives insufferable a new name. Like, it's just painful to watch. It's cringe on a whole other level. And the jury, of course, found him guilty of the murder of Darryushanasevsky, and the judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison, which I imagine just chapped his little ass something fierce. He still claims he's innocent.

He's written another book or two since a muck. I know we'll all be super jazz to hear that. If you want to peruse a mok, by the way, you can find an English-language PDF of it online, so you don't end up, you know, giving this stuff. dipshit money. And as is so often the case with these fine fellows we cover, Christian's mama is convinced he's still the sweet, innocent, lammy lambkin she gave birth to all those years ago and wouldn't her to fly. Literally. In fact, she told the Taipei Times all about the pet turtles

and parrots he had as a kid and said, Christian loved the plants and the wildlife. His father used to take him angling and whenever he caught a fish, he wouldn't want to kill it. He would say, you can have it if you want, but I want to set it free. I'm just spitball in here, but maybe the fish hadn't slept with his wife. Just a theory. In her eyes, this has all been a terrible misunderstanding. But I couldn't help but notice that she admitted she hasn't read her son's book. Maybe she should.

It might open her eyes a little bit. It should open all our eyes that just because somebody talks a good game doesn't mean they can't have the worst of intentions. Just because somebody got all A's in school doesn't mean they can't be a dumbass. And just because a guy seems confident doesn't mean he is. Because here's the thing, Chris Chan, it sucks to see your ex with somebody new. Okay, we've all been there. But the bitter pill you don't have the huevos to swallow is,

it's not going to bother anybody with self-esteem. Not enough to kill over it. So at the end of the day, what you did is the self-own of the century. You might as well have just taken out that big. Billboard and had it say, I am a sad little biscuit. Enjoy that jumpsuit, buddy. Before we wrap up, I wanted to thank everyone for their patience with our unexpected hiatus last week. Unfortunately, um, I had to say goodbye to my sweet dog, Finn. He was the best boy, even when he was barking during recording. Thanks, Camper's. I appreciate you.

So that was a wild one, right, Camper? you know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. Special happy birthday shout out today to our listener Brighton. Have a great one. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Michelle, Nicole, Lauren, Ivan, Lori, Whitney, awesome, Megan, and Vodkatonic.

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