True Crime Campfire - Not Today: Amazing Stories of Survival

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

We deal with a lot of real-life horror stories, and because it’s real life, they’re often chaotic and cruel. Justice might ultimately be served, but more often than not, the victims are already cold in the ground. If someone is dead-set on killing you, there’s a very good chance they’ll succeed. In the most satisfying fictional horror stories, of course, there’s a survivor, someone who faces the monster or killer and lives to tell the tale, someone who finds deep wells of courage and resilience inside themself and defeats the horrors the world throws at them. And these stories are not only limited to fiction.Sources:Investigation Discovery's Surviving Evil, S3E7, “The Bathtub Killer”A&E's Cold Case Files, S4E24, “Déjà Vu/Secret in the Well”People: https://people.com/bathtub-killer-dateline-nbc-murders-texas-8659842Court papers: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591471c6add7b04934373412https://multco.us/news/susan-walters-who-fended-hitman-provides-guidance-multnomah-county-crime-victims-portalWillamette Week: https://www.wweek.com/news/2016/08/17/a-hit-man-came-to-kill-susan-kuhnhausen-she-survived-he-didnt/Investigation Discovery's Nothing Personal: Murder for Hire, "This Man Brainwashed His Friend into Killing His Pregnant Wife"Oregon Live: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2014/06/portlander_who_hired_hitman_to.htmlThe Gift of Fear by Gavin de BeckerFollow 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://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @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. We deal with a lot of real-life horror stories, and because it's real life, they're often chaotic and cruel. Justice might ultimately be served, but more often than that, not, the victims are already cold in the ground. If someone is dead set on killing you, there's a very good chance they'll succeed. In the most satisfying fictional horror stories, of course, there's

a survivor, someone who faces the monster or killer and lives to tell the tale, someone who finds deep wells of courage and resilience inside, and defeats the horrors the world throws at them. And these stories are not only limited to fiction. This is not today. Amazing. stories of survival. So, campers, we're starting this one out in Arlington, Texas, September 17, 1996. A little after 5 o'clock in the afternoon, police responded to a homicide call at the pear tree apartment complex. It was a nice, well-maintained complex, but behind the door of apartment 816, there was a nice.

nightmare. Christine Vu, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher, lay dead, faced down in her bathtub, which was half full of water. She was naked and bound with duct tape, and she had been sexually assaulted and manually strangled. Her living boyfriend, Tang Chiku, was distraught. He had discovered Christine's body and called police, but they were, at least for now, suspicious of his story. Tang had come home from work and tried to open the apartment door, but it was dead. dead bolted from the inside, and no one answered his knock. He figured maybe Christine was in the bathroom, so he went to his car for a cigarette before trying the door again. Still no joy. Getting worried, he went down to the apartment complex gym where there was a pay phone and tried

calling her, but she didn't answer. So he went back and tried the door again, and this time it opened. The deadbolt was no longer locked. Thing hurried in, and it was just a few seconds before he found Christine dead in the bathroom. He called police before the reality of the situation really sank in. Whoever had killed Christine had still been in the apartment when Thang first tried the door, and it only slipped away when he'd gone down to the gym. It's easy to understand why the police were dubious about his story.

Intimate partner killings are a lot more common than stranger murders, and this magically unlocking door sounded like BS. But they found a fingerprint on the... the deadbolt that didn't match Thang or anyone who worked in the apartment complex, and DNA retrieved during Christine's autopsy didn't match him either. He wasn't the killer. But investigators had no idea who was, despite a massive investigative and canvassing effort. Three months later, on Christmas Eve, Wendy Prescott's family were getting worried. Wendy, a 22-year-old teacher's aide, hadn't shown up for a big family dinner at her aunt's house and wasn't answering her phone.

That wasn't like her at all, and when she hadn't shown up by 11 p.m., her aunt and uncle drove over to check on her at her apartment. Again, at the pear tree apartment complex. When they let themselves in, they found Wendy in exactly the same situation Christine Vu had been found a few months before. Naked, bound with duct tape, face down in her bathtub. The similarities were eerie for the investigators who worked the scene. Christine and Wendy's apartments had exactly the same layout and decor. The two bathrooms were identical. Imagine being anyone living at the pear tree apartments,

but especially a young woman living alone. It was deeply disturbing when Christine was murdered. Now that a second young woman had been killed in exactly the same way, there was panic. People moved out in droves. This didn't help police who were trying to canvas everybody there and get DNA samples from the male residents. A lot of people just got out as soon as they could

and left no forwarding information. There was really no doubt that both crimes had been committed by the same person and DNA recovered from Wendy's body confirmed it. Investigators also lifted another print, but as this one was from a thumb rather than a finger, they couldn't match it to the one from the other scene.

These were carefully executed crimes. Detectives were confident these murders were not the killer. first crimes, but they didn't get any hits when they ran the prince through the national aphist system. And without any connection there, they were left with the laborious task of going through residents of the pear tree complex. This produced a couple of leads that initially seemed promising but didn't turn into anything useful. An AC repairman had taken off work on the days of both murderers, but he had perfect alibis for both. The guy who lived across the hall from Christine Vue

had subsequently switched apartments to live right across from Wendy Prescott. This was bizarre, but in the end it just turned out to be bad luck. The poor dude had been so freaked out about living across from a murder scene, he'd asked to move, and the apartment complex had put him across from Wendy. Oh, my God. What's the opposite of buying a lottery ticket? That's what I recommend for this guy. Jesus.

The case stalled. The police had no idea about the identity of the serial murderer. the press had dubbed the bathtub killer. Two years later, in the early hours of February 23, 1999, 22-year-old Chima Simone was asleep in her room in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority house at the University of Texas at Arlington. Suddenly, an overwhelming sense of dread snapped her out of sleep. There was a man in her bedroom, his face behind a pantyho's mask, a gun in his hand.

Do what I say and I won't kill you, he said. He sexually assaulted her violently. Then, with the gun pressed against her head, forced her to perform oral sex on him. Chima was suddenly overcome with anger. It coursed through her, stronger than fear. And she bit his dick, hard. The intruder screamed, then beat her badly enough to swell one side of her face and split her lip. But then, he hobbled away.

Despite what she'd just been through, Chima was able to give the police a good description of her attacker. He was black, clean cut, and probably in his mid-20s. The attack was quickly connected to the 1996 murders by a weird coincidence. Wendy Prescott's best friend was also a student at UTA, and she lived at the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority House. In fact, until recently, she'd been Chima's roommate. Oh my God, wow.

This friend told police she knew who had attacked Chima. It should have been me, she said. It must have been her ex-boyfriend who had been stalking her. She said he must have killed the other two women, too. As it turned out, though, that wasn't the case. Her ex might have been a crepe, but he had a solid alibi for the night Chima was assaulted, and his DNA didn't match the samples taken from the victims.

But this coincidence got the Arlington PD and the campus police sharing notes more quickly than they usually would, and it didn't take long for DNA to confirm, from what everybody suspected, that Chima's attacker was the same man who had killed Christine Vue and Wendy Prescott. Chima was lucky to be alive. If she hadn't wounded him, maybe he wouldn't have beaten her so badly, but he might have hung around to kill her. Thanks to Chima, the physical description police were working with included a distinctive feature, a recent significant injury to his penis, the kind of wound that was definitely going to leave a gnarly

scar. Adrian Fields, a 22-year-old postal worker, had been terrified as soon as she'd heard about the bathtub killer back in 1996. The killings took place just a short drive from her apartment. She had this weirdly intense feeling, he's going to get me, I'm going to be next. Adrian had had an abusive childhood, and she was scared a lot, but the bathtub killer shook her up in a way that just would not let her go. She couldn't stop thinking about him or shake the condition. conviction that he was going to come after her. She was barely sleeping. She was afraid of the dark and had to have the TV and bathroom light on. When she did sleep, it was on the couch in the living room so she could keep an eye on both the front door and the patio door. She got up again and again

during the night to make sure the doors were locked. Often her older sister Finita would have to come over and spend the night with her. Adrian felt like she was going crazy. Two weeks after Wendy Prescott had been murdered, Adrianie. couldn't take it anymore. With her sister's help, she packed up and moved out of town to nearby Grand Prairie. She felt secure in her new apartment for a while. But before long, she started to have another worry that someone was following her, stalking her. Her fears about the bathtub killer started to come trickling, then flooding back. And just to step back for a second here, from the fact that we're including her in this story, you might have already guessed that

Adrian was not just being paranoid here. Abusive childhoods can sometimes lead people to develop a hyper awareness of the moods and intentions of others. She didn't know it, but Adrian had actually met the bathtub killer, and something in that interaction had informed her, even if only on an unconscious level, that she was face to face with a monster who had the darkest of intentions towards her. But imagine you're the friend or sister of someone like Adrian, who's convinced she's going to be the next victim of a serial killer. You might sympathize and be understanding of her fears, but, I mean, do you take them seriously? When weeks and months pass, the most likely reaction is that you think this person that you care

about is just paranoid to a degree that it's upsetting her life. It can get kind of frustrating. Older sister Finita told her, get a grip. But she couldn't. She was living in fear, sensing that someone was watching her. hunting her. Y'all know we talk a lot about intuition. We did a whole episode on it a while back,

the gift of fear, and the truth is Adrian's intuition was screaming at her. She knew, of course, that her fears were disrupting her life. She tried to break free of them, writing herself a letter filled with determined hopes for the future. I'm going to sleep in the dark. I will not be afraid anymore. She called up her family that night and told them about her new resolution to live free from fear.

Vanita asked if she wanted her and her boys to come over and stay with her, but Adrian said, no. She was starting her new life tonight, and she was going to get a good night's sleep in the dark. It was October 26, 1999. Adrian woke in the dead of night to the sound of the lock on her patio door being popped out. Soon after, she heard heavy, regular breathing in the darkness. She screwed her eyes shut and desperately tried to tell herself she was dreaming. eventually, though, she couldn't take it anymore and spun around, opening her eyes to stare at the bedroom door. The man who had been standing there in the darkness immediately started running right at her.

He clamped his hand roughly over her mouth and pressed the cold muzzle of a gun into Adrian's back. Do you feel that? he said. If you keep screaming, I'm going to hurt you. He was calm, cold as ice. He assaulted her for the the next two hours. When he caught Adrian looking outside, he said, why are you looking at the window? My friend's coming to meet me, Adrian said. No one's coming over here, he said. No one ever comes over here. How did he know that? He had been watching her, following her, for a long time. When he asked her her name, Adrian said Sarah. He said, how about we call you Adrian? He knew all about her. Adrian had been terrified of exactly the situation for years, scaring herself by imagining

how things might go. Because of that, she thought a lot about what she'd do, how she might get out of this alive. And again, I think that quick, instinctual reading of a person helped her out, because her answer was, I'm going to talk to him. Why are you doing this? She said. The devil keeps making me do it, the creep said. She kept talking to him, like you talk to a person, instinctively knowing that it would make her real to him, not just a puppet in his fantasies. It's a lot harder to hurt someone if you see them as a fellow human being. While he was raping her, the man had ordered Adrian to have sex like there's no tomorrow.

Afterwards, she said, is there a tomorrow? Of course there is, he said. But is there for me, Adrienne said? There was a long, long pause as the bathtub killer weighed the question, enjoying her terror. Yes, he said eventually, and left. Adrian called 911 a right away and then fell apart. It didn't take long for investigators to tie this attack in with the others. Eight months later, the killer's penis was still badly scarred by Chima Simone's teeth,

and she'd seen the scar. DNA evidence soon confirmed the connection. So investigators now had more than a physical description of the man they were hunting. Thanks to Adrian Fields, they had a much deeper understanding of his psyche. The net was closing. They would have caught him soon enough, but technology accelerated the process. In 1999, the FBI was in the process of introducing its advanced fingerprint system, I-A-FIS. In the summer of 2000, the Arlington investigators ran the prints from the original murders again,

and this time they got a hit. 27-year-old Dale Devon-Chinette had been arrested and fingerprinted in 1999 for burglarizing a car stereo store in a Dallas suburb. Next to nothing was uncovered about his early life. He was a manual laborer and forklift operator from Louisiana who moonlighted as a bouncer at a local club. That was where he chose his victims. If a young woman caught his eye, he'd asked to see her ID before he led her into the club. So right away, he got her name and her address. Then he'd stalk her, sometimes for months and even years, in Adrienne's case, before brutally assaulting her.

After his arrest, he was linked to at least three more rapes. His crimes were executed so calmly and confidently, there were almost certainly others farther back in his history that we still know nothing about. We'll probably never know how many. Dale Chenette was charged with Wendy Prescott's murder. If a DA feels like they've got a strong

standalone case, they'll sometimes keep additional crimes in their back pocket just in case anything strange happens during the trial. And with the fingerprint and DNA evidence, my dude did not have a chance in hell. He was found guilty, and in January of 2003, he was sentenced to

death by lethal injection. Despite numerous appeals, where he represented himself, Chinette's sentence was carried out on February 10, 2009. It just happened to be Adrian Fields' birthday. Obviously, this is a horror story, and the horror of it has always stuck with me, but what sticks even more is the incredible courage of these women who survived every woman's nightmare. Chima fought back with her anger and her teeth.

Adrian fought back with her ability to talk to her attacker and human, her self to him. Both of these women are heroes, in my opinion, and without them, this waste of carbon might never have been caught. Now, for this next case, we're in Portland, Oregon. Susan Kuhnhausen was 51 years old and an ER nurse at Providence Portland Medical Center. On September 6, 2006, she'd just finished her shift, so as you can imagine, she was pretty wrecked. Still, she wasn't quite ready to go home. She wanted a little chill-out time.

She went to the perfect-look hair salon on East Burnside Street, about halfway between the hospital and her house. An hour later, hair done and spirits lifted she headed home to a cute one-story Cape Cod on southeast Alder Street. Susan went in the back door as she usually did. The alarm started beeping and she turned it off. Right away she noticed a note by the microwave. It was from her husband of 18 years, Mike. It said, Sue haven't been sleeping, had to get away, went to the beach. He said he'd be back Friday or Saturday and signed the note, love me. I should say here, by the way, I don't really understand this part of the story, because as you'll see in a minute, Susan was living by herself at this time, separated from Mike, so I don't know if he just still had access to the house and came over sometimes, or what,

probably. Anyway, Susan went through the house and out the front door to get her mail. It was a warm evening, and she stood in the yard for a couple minutes going through the envelopes. When she went back in, she kicked off her shoes and noticed it was really dark in the bedroom. She wondered if she'd forgotten to open the curtains that morning. She went in, and she'd only gone a few steps before a man leapt out from behind the bedroom door and charged toward her. In other circumstances, he might have looked harmless, a chubby, pink-faced dude with silver hair and a beard. He'd have made a great Santa Claus at one of your cheaper malls. Now he looked furious, crazed.

He had yellow rubber gloves on his hands, and he was gripping a red and black cloths. claw hammer. This wasn't a situation that needed a Sherlock Holmesian leap of logic to figure out. This guy was here to kill her. Susan had had a kind of chaotic childhood. Her dad was a cook in the Air Force, and he and her mom split up when Susan was in the second grade. Between two parents, one of whom had to go wherever the military sent him, Susan and her brother grew up in Colorado, Arizona, California, and Nevada, always a new town, a new school, new friends to make. and that can often lead kids to either extreme introversion or extroversion, and with Susan, it was the latter. She was outgoing, with a big, contagious laugh you could hear from across the room.

She loved going to comedy clubs. Susan became first a licensed practical nurse, and then a registered nurse. She moved to Oregon in the early 1980s, ultimately settling in Portland. The one area of Susan's life where things weren't sparking was La Paceaum. In 1988, a friend and Susan's mom talked her into taking out a personal ad in Willamette Week. It said, someone different. Single white female, 33, overweight but not over life, seek single male who wants more out of a relationship than just slender. She got a bunch of replies.

One read, hi different, my name's Mike. I'm a 39-year-old divorced white male. I enjoy most things in nature from wandering in the ape caves at Mount St. Helens to walking on the beach at sunset. They spoke on the phone for the first time on January 30th, and Susan marked the date in her day planner with a smiley face. For their first date, they went to the botanical garden and fed the ducks and the squirrels. They got along great, always going out together for hiking and fun stuff like that. Within a year, they drove down to Reno to get married. Mike had grown up in Portland. He told Susan he'd fought in Vietnam, although she came to doubt that later. It's not

clear whether he ever actually went overseas, but Mike's military records had him marked down as a switchboard operator. And that's perfectly fine. He still served, but he was making it sound like he was out the jungle with an M-16, like Rambo. Soon after their marriage, Mike got a job as a janitorial supervisor for Oregon Entertainment, the parent company of a local chain called Fantasy Adult Video. And let's not think too deeply about what a janitor for that company

was cleaning up. Oh, gross. Why? The bloom fell off the rose pretty quick once they got married. While they were dating, Mike had managed to summon up the pretense of joy, but he was fundamentally a miserable person. He liked to tell Susan, life's a shit sandwich, and every day you take another bite until you die.

Oh, that's nice imagery. He sounds fun. A real Debbie Downer. You know, they weren't going out hiking anymore. Weren't really going out at all. Mike just liked to sit on the couch, chain smoke, and drink endless cans of Diet Coke. It's every woman's dream. You know, I really like to see that dating really hasn't changed.

Like, nope. Men have, for online dating, men have, like, five photos of, one thing they did like five years ago and they use that on their dating profile and usually it's like fucking fishing you know and then they say I love hiking and then you're like okay when's the last time you did hiking and they're like oh you know 1993 yeah you're like with my parents when I was five and you're like oh okay cool so it's like man so they that's why that's why it's important to like get out of that like honeymoon phase really see them see them for what they really are because man you got to you got to see because you would not believe it's like if you've never

been on a dating app which I think many of our fans are married and have been for a long time Like, it's fishing photo, fishing photo, fishing photo, hiking photo from pre-pandemic. I've heard that. Like, I've seen memes about it, so it must be true. There must be a lot of those fish holding up a fish profile pics. And it's like, listen, some ladies love fishing. Sure. A lot of women don't.

You're trying to attract women here, gentlemen. But, you know, do you? Whatever, that's, I'm off my soapbox. That's fine. Whenever Susan went out on her own, he'd grill her about where she was going and what she was going to do. He'd go through her bank statements. She made more money than he did and get all persnickety about little things that Susan bought herself. If this marriage was a horse, you'd shoot it.

It was a little lame. But Susan stuck it out, all the way till September of 2005, when she decided on something that would be utterly alien to Mike. She wanted to be happy. I know. She kicked him out, and Mike went to live with his dad. So Susan was living alone when the stranger rushed at her with a raised hammer in the darkness of her bedroom. What would you do in that situation? Most of us would panic, which is absolutely the norm.

response, but Susan had been an ER nurse for nearly 30 years, which meant, among other things, that she'd seen some shit. Oh, yeah. Not everyone who comes into an ER is calm and in control. Susan and the other nurses had had regular self-defense classes, and reacting coolly at a crisis was almost an everyday experience for them. Still in her blue scrubs, as her attacker started swinging the hammer down, Susan stepped in close so the blow would have less force.

Still, the hammer smashed into her left temple. Who are you? What do you want? Susan yelled. He just kept swinging the hammer. Susan was five inches shorter than him, but had a weight advantage. She slammed into him, trying to push him over, but he pushed her up against the bedroom wall and said, you're strong. Hell yeah, she is. With a moment to think, Susan fully realized she was in a fight for her life.

adrenaline and anger flooded through her and she shoved her attack her back who sent you she yelled he tried to hit her again with the hammer but she wrestled it from him and smashed it claw in down four times into his head he didn't fall though and he managed to grab the hammer back so susan grabbed his throat with both hands who sent you here she screamed into his face squeezing hard his face went from red to purple and started turning blue susan realized she was killing him and she got scared she got up and tried to run for the front door her attacker had no qualms about killing he jumped up raced after her and caught her in the hallway spinning her around and punching her twice susan fell down he stood over her with the hammer in his hand and susan bit him hard on the leg she was thinking five steps ahead if she was going to die she wanted to leave teeth marks on this creep so he could be identified not that she was planning to die. She managed to knock her attacker down, and they wrestled on the floor. She kept biting him on his arm, his side, his thigh, and quite firmly, on his junk through his pants. Even as they

struggled, Susan tried to stick her hands in his pockets, looking for some kind of ID she could toss somewhere so the police could find it later. Finally, as they struggled, Susan managed to hook her leg around her attacker and lever herself on top of him. She got her left arm around his neck and pulled it in tight. She yelled, Tell me who sent you here, and I'll call you a fucking ambulance. The man just growled at her. Susan had already let up on this guy once and been attacked by him again. She wasn't going to make that same mistake again. She kept her arm tight around his throat till he stopped moving. Then she grabbed the hammer and raced to her neighbor's house and got them to call 911.

You might have already guessed from the way she kept asking who had sent him, but Susan Susan had immediately jumped to the conclusion that her attacker was a hitman, hired to kill her, and she wasn't keeping quiet about who she thought was behind it. On the 911 call, her neighbor tells the dispatcher, she expressed a concern it may have been her ex-partner who sent the person. It didn't take long for police to identify Susan's attacker. Ed Haffey was 59 years old, a Vietnam vet from a privileged family, and a terrible human being. By 1991, his once-promising life had spiraled into a mess of violence, meth production, and burglary.

He was already in jail on drug and gun charges in March of 91 when he was charged with arranging the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Georgia Lee Dutton, earlier in the year. In 1994, he pled guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and served nine years before being released in 2003. What the hell? Nine years! He literally tried to kill somebody nine years. That's freaking pathetic. Anyway. He moved to Portland to try and start over, and he needed a job. With Ed's record, not many people were going to jump at the chance to hire him, but in July 2004, good old Mike Kuhnhausen hired him to clean the floors at Fantasy Adult Video. This was a year before Susan kicked Mike out, and two years before the attempt on her life, but I'm very confident that Mike was already thinking about killing his wife, and that's why he was. he hired at Haffey.

His murder wrap was a bonus for Mike. He'd have his very own hitman to keep in his back pocket just in case he needed one. A few weeks before the attempt on Susan's life, Mike lost his job. We don't know why exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if his bosses took a closer look at his recent hiring decisions and found out that, thanks to Mike, they now had a convicted murderer on their books. Also, fantasy adult video was transitioning to just. just being fantasy, ditching the porn tapes and concentrating on sex toys and lingerie,

with an emphasis on clothes for strippers to wear on stage. They were aiming for a female customer base, and sad, creepy Mike wasn't really the vibe they were going for. Anyway, Mike was out of work and apparently wasn't living with his dad anymore. The financial squeeze was on. Susan had changed the beneficiary on her life insurance policy from Mike to her brother, and had made sure that Mike knew it. But they were still married.

And for now, they still shared ownership of the house on Alder Street. They'd paid off the mortgage and it was worth around $300,000. If Susan were dead, Mike would own it outright. She was so smart, by the way, to change her life insurance and to tell him she did it. That's the part a lot of people seem to forget. It's useless if they don't know. Because if they think that they're going to get money, you know what I mean? Like, she clearly knew she might be in danger to do that in the first place.

She's a savvy lady. Absolutely. Detectives looked through Susan's house after the attack, but they missed something in the basement. It was understandable, I guess. The basement was a cluttered mess, and Home Invaders don't usually leave things lying around. But the next day, a friend went with Susan to help her pick up some of her belongings and noticed a backpack down there. Inside this thing was a bottle of Hershey syrup, $200 in cash, some diabetes pills, nice juxtaposition with the Hershey syrup there, a daybook and an envelope.

The daybook entry for September 4th, two days before the attack, said, call Mike. Scrawled on the envelope was Mike's cell phone number. Records from the security company showed that someone had deactivated the alarm, then reactivated it shortly after, while Susan was at work. She hadn't changed the code after she kicked Mike out. It was the date of their anniversary, 1210. Mike had let Ed Haffey in, then wrote the note Susan had found by the microwave and left, reactivating the alarm.

Haffey had hidden down in the basement, and close to the time Susan was expected back, he'd amped himself up for the crime, an autopsy showed that he'd had a near-lethal amount of cocaine in his system by the time Susan killed him. So I'm thinking like maybe the confusing note was to set the scene. for detectives later when they were wondering why the security system was turned off and back on again? Yeah, I thought of that. But it's so dumb because what if it doesn't work?

What if, you know, he just attacks her and she manages to chase him off or something? You know what I mean? Like, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But Mike is dumb, so I'm not surprised that he would do that. I mean, it's clear that he didn't think much of Susan. Like, he didn't think anything of her. Right. He did not know what was going to happen here at all.

Yeah. On the day of the attack, Mike had driven to the coastal resort town of Lincoln City and got a room at a hotel. He didn't stay the night, though. Susan's struggle with her attacker obviously made the news, and for Mike, the most pertinent fact was that she was still alive. And Ed Haffey's body was right there. It wouldn't take long for investigators to tie him to Mike, and he knew it. Mike drove back to Portland that same night, and the next day bought a 357 magnum revolver from the silver. lining's pawn shop. On September 8th, two days after the attack, Mike left a typically self-pitying note

at his dad's house. All I ever wanted was to be loved and every time I had it up. Aw, puppykins. Did our best laid plans go all titty's up? Bliss his heart. Coming right on the heels of him buying a gun, this obviously had authorities very worried about what Mike might do to himself, but Five days later, a sheriff's deputy stopped him in the parking garage of the Sunnyside Medical Center. Mike claimed he was checking himself in. I had nothing to live for anymore, he told the deputy. An involuntary psychhold soon followed, and shortly after that, an arrest for conspiracy to commit murder. He denied everything, but Mike Kuhnhausen's goose was pretty much cooked.

He was an idiot. Ed Haffey had tried to involve an old cellmate in an insurance scam. and taken the buddy to meet Mike. He backed out as soon as it was clear they were talking about murder and was happy to identify Mike to the police. Ed didn't have a car and a friend had once driven him

to an Applebee's parking lot so Ed could talk to Mike. Another witness happy to talk to the police. And finally, in August of 2007, Mike pleaded guilty. Susan, meanwhile, said of herself, I'm doing a life sentence for picking a bad husband. She was anxious after the attack,

always looking over her shoulder. She always sat where she could see the door. She made a habit of switching up her driving routes and would circle around if she thought someone was following her. She moved to a new house on a cul-de-sac and put gravel all around it so she could hear if anybody came close. She got a gun and practiced shooting.

She knew Mike was due to be released in 2014. He still claimed to be innocent, said he'd only pled guilty to avoid a longer sentence. He should have gotten a longer sentence. It's hard not to think he'd. got off easier than he should have just because Susan managed to kill his hitman before he killed her. He shouldn't have been rewarded just because he picked a shitty henchman. But Mike would insist to the dwindling number of people who cared enough to listen that he was the real victim here.

Susan was terrified as Mike's release date came closer and closer. He'd made a mistake and hired the wrong guy. He wouldn't make that same mistake again. But in June, 92 days before release, Mike Kuhnhausen died in prison of prostate cancer. Susan's story was big news. People called her a hero. She didn't feel like a hero, though. Didn't really understand why people thought that. Her boss at the hospital told her,

they're not calling you a hero because you killed a man. They're calling you a hero because they want to believe, given the same circumstances, that they too might survive. That is so perceptive. I think that's absolutely true. stories like Susan's give us not only hope but courage too I think just to know that there are people out there who fought back in one I'm sure their victories come at a pretty steep price post-traumatic stress fear trouble trusting people but a lot of survivors use their experiences to help other people Susan for example she changed her name by the way from Kuhnhausen to Walters gives motivational talks teaches self-defense tactics and works with police departments to provide better services for victims of crime. And she's also worked with her local PD to develop a system to warn victims when their attackers are about to be released from jail. So if you ask me, hell yeah, she's a hero.

All the women in this episode are. And I love how every one of these survivor stories is different. You know, some of them survived by just kind of instinctual brute force reaction and just, you know, anger-fueled courage, and some by an instinctual understanding of their attacker and his motives. There's more than one way to fight back, y'all. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you make it out of there alive, if you possibly can. Now, leave you with this. Susan's still out there advocating for the survivors of crime and for victims' families. And if you ever hear this, Susan, we think you are a certified badass, and we hope you're thriving.

We hope you all are thriving. So that was a wild one, right, campers? 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 and today we want to wish a very happy 30th birthday to our listener adabaya we hope you have an amazing day ideally with lots of cake and ice cream and as always we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons thank you so much to ali sarah megan and jelena i'm not sure which we appreciate y'all to the moon and back and if you're not yet a patron you're missing out Patrons of our show get every episode, ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash truecrime campfire.