This story takes place in the second largest city in Iowa in
1973. I was a 5 foot 820 year old
weighing 120 lbs. I lived alone in a large old
two-story house with four apartments, 2 upstairs and two
downstairs. My one bedroom apartment was
downstairs. My friends Steve and Gary, along
with their infant daughter, lived upstairs.
I had gone to high school with Steve and had worked in
housekeeping with his wife, G in the past.
At that time, I was employed as a waitress at a steak and brew
restaurant, working both the lunch and dinner shifts. 1 Sunny
spring morning As I was walking to the bus stop to go to work, a
massive man materialized from thin air as if summoned by
demons from the depths of the abyss below.
Before I could recover from the shock of his sudden appearance,
he viciously grabbed me by the forearms and yanked me off the
sidewalk. Quickly recovering from my
initial shock, I immediately screamed at him, let go of me as
he pulled me closer to his massive chest.
My nostrils were assaulted by the worst malador I had ever
experienced. The overpowering stench of
putrefaction, urine, filth, body odor, and some unidentified
chemical reminiscent of a substance you might encounter in
a school science lab gagged me. I've never before or since
encountered such an utterly disgusting, gag inducing odor.
I almost couldn't breathe. This coming from me who has an
iron constitution, says a lot. I'm the person you call to clean
out a fridge full of rotting food that's been sitting in the
110° heat for three months with the power off because I can
handle it. As if his weak appearance wasn't
terrifying enough, this man weighed at least 400 lbs and was
a good six foot eight. I twisted and turned, but he
just gripped my arms ever tighter.
Finally I writhed around, so I was facing him and there was my
moment of opportunity. If I could get him to loosen his
grip on me for a mere millisecond, I might be able to
make a break for it. There was no traffic, no people
passing by. I was on my own, he said.
You're coming with me and you're going to do what I say.
Screw you, I said, and I kicked him square in the crotch as hard
as I could. He groaned as his grip
momentarily loosened on my arms. I wrenched myself away and ran
as fast as I could for five blocks to the bus stop.
I didn't even look behind me once to see if he was there or
following me. I didn't want to see him.
I had hoped, correctly, that I could easily outrun him due to
his extreme size, and I certainly didn't want to slow
down to look behind me in case he was there.
I was shaking as I boarded the bus to work.
When I got to work, the boss and other waitresses asked me what
had happened. They saw the giant handprints on
my arms that clearly defined his huge fingers on my flesh.
My skin was already turning awful shades of green, blue and
black. I told them about my encounter
on the way to the bus stop. Horrified, they insisted I call
the police, but I just wanted to put it behind me and get on with
my day. I figured I most likely would
never see this random stranger again, or at least that's what I
told myself That night after work, I took the bus back and
walked the five blocks home from the bus stop.
As usual, the large house where my apartment was had a big front
door with glass panels on either side of the door frame and also
in the door itself. There was always a light on in
the entryway, but the entry door was never locked.
My apartment was on the left inside the vestibule, with my
neighbor's door directly across from mine on the opposite side
of the stairs leading to the two apartments on the 2nd floor.
I took my keys and let myself in, then closed and locked the
door immediately. That was my habit.
I had to cross the living room to turn the lights on, then went
to close the drapes on the big Bay window in the living room.
As I did this, the same man who had assaulted me earlier jumped
up from the shrubbery by the window and glared at me with
pure anger and violence in his expression.
My jaw dropped as I jumped away from the window in horror and
shock. In a flash, he was in the
entryway, pounding on my door, shaking it in its very frame.
He screamed at me. Let me in.
If you don't, I'm going to break it down and have my way with
you, and then I'm going to kill you.
I was certain the door was going to come off its hinges any
moment. It was just a cheap wooden
interior door after all. There was no doubt this monster
was capable of breaking it down. I screamed back at him to go
away because I was not going to open my door.
He kept pounding and yelling that he was coming in anyway,
throwing more disgusting threats my way, adding that there was no
stopping it now. Then he went back outdoors to
the front of the house by my Bay window and began to bang at it,
still screaming. This went on for another half
hour, him coming inside, beating on the door, then back outside
to my Bay window screaming all the while.
What unimaginable things he had planned to do to me.
I could feel and hear his escalating anger.
I had no reason not to believe him, because I was completely
aware he was capable of doing those things he threatened,
especially killing me. I could hear his rage amping up,
and I knew it wouldn't be much longer before he broke down my
door and came inside to complete his evil plans for me.
Now, I'm sure you're probably thinking, why didn't I just call
the police already? That's a good question.
You see, I just didn't have a phone.
I had no way to call 911 or anyone for help.
I was trapped in my apartment like a wild animal caught in a
Hunter's trap. I felt how livestock must feel
upon exiting the chute in the slaughterhouse, knowing death
was only moments away. I knew my time was running out.
I had to think of something, anything I could do to save
myself. I didn't own any actual weapons,
so that was out of the question. Besides, the massive difference
in size was not exactly conducive to close contact
self-defense. What do I do?
I wondered. The adrenaline was pumping
through my body, every nerve raw as jagged glass and on edge,
ready for action. I took some deep calming breaths
to try and clear my mind and get some control over this pure
terror. The longer I waited, the worse
it could be. Suddenly I had the beginnings of
an idea. Maybe, just maybe, I could open
my bedroom window which was towards the other side of the
house. But what if he was back there
waiting for me in the pitch darkness?
What if he heard me opening the window, taking out the screen?
What if he heard me jumping to the ground into the bushes?
The thought of being caught by him outside was just as
terrifying as remaining put, which wasn't really an option if
I wanted to survive this. But wait, maybe if I made it
outside undetected I might be able to run around to the back
of the house. There was a rear stairway there,
probably for the household help back in the day.
It was always unlit and pitch black, but the narrow and steep
stairway had but a single exit point to my friend Steve and GS
rear door. No one really ever used those
stairs. There was no light source in the
cramped stairwell, so consequently it was cloaked in
an opaque pitch blackness. I felt fairly confident they
would be home as they rarely ever left their apartment.
One of them surely had to be there and they would have a
phone. So now I had a plan.
I bolted into the bedroom and began to open the old wood
framed window, trying to be as quiet as possible while the wood
complained around the pane of glass in its center.
Great. The window was raised and it was
time to take out the old wood framed screen from the window
sash without making a sound. It came free from its confines
with a pretty audible scrape. Oh God, it was the hardest thing
I had to do. Launching myself out the window
into the blackness, cloaking the house into the untidy shrubbery
beneath my heart pounded in my ears.
It seemed so loud that anyone nearby could clearly hear it,
thump, thump, thumping away, trying to control the rushing
blood and heat in my body. I held my breath, hoping the
madman was not in these bushes and had not registered the soft
thud and rustling of the bushes I'd made as I landed.
I felt exposed outside, but swallowed my terror down.
I then made a mad dash around to the back, running and stumbling
up those steep stairs in the dark.
I knocked on my friend's door, praying they would hear me and
answer my cries. And oh, please be fast, I
thought, before he discovers me. After what had to be the longest
weight of my life, I heard Steve asking who was out there in a
curious tone. Obviously because no one ever
used that stairway. I whispered through the door.
It's me. Sandra let me in.
There's someone outside threatening to hurt me.
Steve opened the door immediately, a confused and
surprised expression on his kind face.
I jumped inside practically, almost knocking him flat in the
doorway. I then locked the deadbolt
latch, catching my breath a little.
I shakily told my friend what was going on.
Wasting no time, he dialed 911 and explained the situation,
providing the address. We waited silently in the
apartment for the police to arrive and I remained wide eyed
in total fear. To my surprise, a short time
later, the police were knocking on my friend's door.
They informed me the man was captured hiding in the bushes
under my front window. They were familiar with this man
too. He'd apparently escaped from
some institute nearby and they'd been looking for him.
That was part of his life without parole sentence he'd had
because he was apparently a convicted assaulter.
I will say of a particular kind. I was so shocked as I stared at
the officer. I had no idea this man could
have been stalking me for some time before I'd ever seen him.
That was his typical modus operandi.
Selecting a victim, I asked the officer why they didn't inform
the public about his escape, to which I never received a direct
response. When I was a young child, I was
not one of those children who were afraid of monsters.
They just didn't seem scary to me.
Well, that has changed now, and if you were to ask me if I
believe in monsters these days, my response would be very much
yes. I was born in Edgewick, an area
in the English city of Coventry, and I grew up in the 1970s.
Like most kids lucky enough to have their grandparents still
around, they were two of my favorite people in the whole
wide world. My granddad was a fantastic
bloke who taught me to fish and shoot pellet guns, but my Nana
was an absolute St. She always had a tray of
gingerbread men ready whenever we went around for tea, and she
made the best roast potatoes I've ever had.
Even all these years later, almost everywhere she went,
people would stop her to say hello, or would simply say
something nice as they walked past her in the street.
As a young lad, I didn't really know any better.
I just thought Nana was as popular with everyone else as
she was with me, But they didn't love her because she made good
roasties or baked a cracking apple pie.
They loved her for a very different reason, as I learned
later in life. My Nana was a popular and rather
famous figure in Coventry because she had served as an Air
raid Warden during the Second World War.
I imagine not many of your American listeners will know
what one of those is, so if you'll excuse a slight
diversion, let me explain. During the war, every fit
fighting age man was sent off to the army or what have you,
meaning women had to take their places in jobs they wouldn't be
traditionally expected to do. You had lady police officers,
firewomen and ladies digging through the rubble of bomb sites
and helping to rebuild essential infrastructure.
In the case of my Nana, you had Lady Air Raid wardens too.
When German airplanes started dropping bombs on us, the Air
Raid wardens would go around to make sure everyone was in their
shelters. They also went around to make
sure no lights were showing as they did these full citywide
blackouts back then to confuse German bombers.
So if there were a crack in your curtains and your warden could
see light coming from inside, they would bang on the window so
hard that the glass would almost break.
And that was your warning for the night.
Anyway, that's what Nana did. Walked around all night making
sure everyone stayed blacked out and all that.
One night Nana was doing her rounds when she heard a scream
coming from a good few streets away.
As you can imagine, the blackouts meant that the nights
back then were deathly quiet, so Nana could hear the scream from
quite a distance away. As she was running to
investigate, she bumped into another Air Raid warden, a bloke
this time. As they reach the area they
suspected the scream had come from, they started looking
around to locate the source of it.
Minutes later they found her, a young woman stabbed almost to
death in an alleyway. The young woman was rushed to
the hospital and survived her wounds, but everyone agreed that
she had been very fortunate to do so.
She claimed her attacker had been a very nondescript working
class gentleman wearing an overcoat and cap.
They also discovered that the woman was a prostitute, or
rather she wouldn't admit to being one, but there was very
little other reason why a woman would be all dressed up and out
on her own like that, especially when there was a bloody war
going on. She was never about to admit it
though, not Even so much as to avoid arrest either because of
the deep shame associated with it.
But that being said, she wasn't the only one who attempted to
defy the blackout regulations to ply her trade, and they ended up
paying a very similar price a few nights later.
And Nana wasn't there to hear it happening this time, but another
young lady was attacked in roughly that same area, just too
far for Nana to hear it on her rounds.
Again, the woman was suspected to be a prostitute, but sadly
she wasn't as fortunate as the first young lady.
Her attackers seem to have learned a lot from that first
attempt, and on his second he very literally went for the
jugular. When all was said and done, the
Air Raid Wardens were scared that they had a sort of Coventry
version of Jack the Ripper on their hands, and the timing of
it was just bloody awful as well.
The Germans were raining bombs from the sky, and as grim as it
was, that brought a real sense of togetherness to the people
suffering from it. So to think this bloke was how
to put it battling against his own team in the middle of a war.
It put the absolute fear of God into people.
People said he was a German agent, some commando sent over
to terrorize the people. He wasn't that at all, as it
turned out, but it gives you an idea of how frightened people
were. Anyway, this carries on for a
few more weeks until in the end there were no more prostitutes
walking the streets at all after sundown.
But then the psycho still wanted to satisfy his thirst for blood,
so after having no luck on one of his hunts, he tries to break
into the home of a woman he believed to be alone.
Thankfully the woman wasn't alone, as her husband was in the
bath upstairs and he chased the attacker away without a stitch
of clothing on him, which probably added to the shock
factor and scared the attacker off.
The fact that no one was hurt was no doubt a good thing, but
it was a very thin silver lining to a very dark sort of cloud.
Because if this Blackout Ripper, as the people had taken to
calling him, was willing to break into houses to find a
victim, then it wasn't just prostitutes that were in danger.
No one was safe. As you can imagine, people
weren't happy. They thought the police should
have caught the bloke after the first attack, but they'd let him
commit two or three more attacks before he finally went for
someone minding their own business in their own home.
They were outraged, saying it never should have gotten that
far in the first place. And they raised such a fuss that
the local Superintendent promised to beef up local
patrols and hire more air raid wardens to watch the streets.
But then, that was no good, was it?
The police couldn't very well neglect other areas of the city
for a prolonged period of time, and the Blackout Ripper avoided
officers and wardens like the plague.
What's even worse, they couldn't let lady officers or patrol
women out on their own, so they had to double up for safety,
meaning even though they brought in help from other areas of
Coventry, it still wasn't enough to cover all the necessary
ground. Then that night, when the
patrols were supposed to be boosted and everything was
supposed to be fine again, the Blackout Ripper struck again.
Some of the prostitutes who had gotten word of the boosted
patrols had decided to take their chances out in the street
again, and for one of them, that proved a deadly mistake.
That night's murder was the most savage yet, and it seemed only a
matter of time before the Ripper decided to go kicking down doors
again. Something had to be done.
Or rather, someone had to come up with a plan.
And that's when my dear old Nana suggested something incredibly
brave, that she would pose as a prostitute to bait the man into
trying to attack her, at which point she could blow very hard
on a whistle to summon officers who would be waiting nearby.
And you read that right, by the way.
They didn't give her a gun or a club or anything else she could
use to actually defend herself. The police gave her a tiny tin
whistle and then basically told her off you pop, go and catch us
a murderer. I think it might have been a bit
more of a sophisticated operation than that, but I
remember feeling an acute sense of outrage when I found out that
they wouldn't give her any kind of weapon.
Granted, not even the police were armed with guns at the
time, and British police still patrol, mostly unarmed, not
counting your Taser, baton and CS spray.
But back then they had even less to work with if they wanted to
subdue a criminal. But then the officers standing
by to catch the Blackout Ripper would be armed with batons.
Nana had nothing but her wits, that bloody whistle and a will
to catch the monster that had been praying on the good people
of Edgewick. And so one night, Nana makes her
way down to the local police station to go over the plan one
last time before heading off into the night.
Then down at the station. She dolls herself up in all her
finest glad rags, slaps on a load of war paint makeup that
is. And then once all the officers
are in their various hiding places, off she goes towards the
Cap Martin Rd. which was where she'd first pose as bait.
She said she was walking up and down for hours, heels clacking
on the pavement, but she didn't see so much as a soul, and after
a while, Nana started to think that they wouldn't have any
luck. Finally, she turned down the
back street between Cheval Ave. and Grammouth Road and took a
little wander down that, not realizing it was a dead end.
She then turns back, only to see someone blocking her exit.
The figure is about 50 feet down from her, but she knows it's not
one of the policemen. Because he's clearly not wearing
that very distinct Bobby's helmet that they were all
wearing, Nana said. She called out to the man, and
she could tell that it was a man by the way he was dressed, but
that he didn't reply to her. Instead, he started walking down
the back street towards her at a brisk pace, still without saying
a word. She sees him reach into his
jacket and take something from a pocket, something which he
fiddled with for a second before she saw the glint of a blade in
the moonlight. Nana's hand went straight for
her pocket, straight for that little whistle she'd been given.
She knew that there were policemen just a street or two
away, so blowing the whistle would have them there in
seconds. But as she pulled it from her
pocket, the tiny tin whistle got caught on a brass button, and it
slipped from her grasp. She thought she'd had it.
There was no finding that whistle before the bloke reached
her, but she also sort of instinctually kneeled down to
grab it back up off the floor. She said she was frozen in
terror for a moment, convinced that she was about to die, when
suddenly this wave of defiance rose up in her and she whipped
off one of her shoes and brandished it like a weapon.
Nana said this Ripper laughed and asked her what are you
planning on doing with that? But in reply, she told him.
And she didn't just say this either.
She barked it so loud that people streets away heard her.
My name is Warden Eileen Topsberry, and you're bloody
well under arrest. That got another laugh from the
bloke, that one a little bit more nervous than the 1st, and
then Nana started screaming something equally loud.
Things like I'll have your bloody eye out with this heel if
you come near me, and maybe that was a bit more fight than he was
used to. But just for a moment the Ripper
hesitated and the next thing Nana knows, she can see two
bobbies coming. Bombing around the corner at
full pelt, shouting. Oi, you stop where you are.
In that moment, Nana went from being trapped in the back street
with the Blackout Ripper to having successfully trapped him
in with two approaching officers.
The stroke of bad luck turned into a stroke of good luck in a
matter of a few moments. And it's a bloody good job too.
My mom hadn't been born yet, so if Nana was murdered, there's no
mom, no me, and none of my kids either.
Since he knew he was boxed in, the Ripper tried to scale a wall
to get away, but it was too late for him.
The two bobbies grabbed him by the leg, brought him down, and
then beat the living crap out of him before they dragged him off
to the police station. After that, Nana was a hero.
We still got the newspaper clipping from that time too, and
she was intensely proud of them right up until the day she
passed away. She was a bit loopy towards the
end too, and started losing her memory and all of that.
But she never ever forgot the night that she saved Edgewick
from the Blackout Ripper. I'm a female and when I was 16 I
lived in the Valley area of Los Angeles.
This was many years ago. At that time, the best part of
my week was Saturday nights when I would meet my friends at our
beloved Under 21 nightclub to dance the night away.
Eventually I got the great idea that since I was there every
week anyway, I might as well work there.
All I had to do was ask the manager and I landed the
prestigious job of Snack Bar Cashier.
It took me just a couple of hours to realize my mistake.
If I worked there, I couldn't dance, laugh and have fun, but
I'd made a commitment. So for the next several weeks at
least, I was working there, not dancing on the vast majority of
those Saturday nights. Usually I'd have to get a ride
to the club and back. It wasn't too difficult since I
didn't have my own car until a couple of years later when I was
in college. But on occasion a family friend
would lend me his little blue Toyota and on the Saturday night
of this story, he did. I felt so independent and free
to be able to take myself to and from the club.
On that night I drove to the club and had a relatively good
time serving sodas and dancing with my group of friends during
my break to music by Prince Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind
and Fire. At the end of the night, I got
into my borrowed car and headed toward home.
For those who don't know, the San Fernando Valley is made-up
of many suburban towns. None are really small, some are
very nice, and as you'd expect, some are less nice with higher
crime. I lived with my family in a
medium area in the northern part of the valley.
It was neither very nice nor very bad, with middle class
homes on mostly respectable, if not professionally manicured
lawns. Being in the greater Los Angeles
County area, there were many differing routes I could take
home, whether freeways, highways, or city streets.
It was after midnight and most routes I could take at the
moment would be bustling On a Saturday night.
I'd had my fill of loud music, laughter, and chattering voices
as I headed home, so I opted for a quieter route.
I took some major busy streets, then veered into some quiet
neighborhoods that I could cut through to get home.
I figured if I drove through some quiet house lined streets
with no traffic nor stop lights, I'd get home a little faster and
I was tired. GPS built into your car wasn't a
thing at the time, and if it was, it was nowhere near common.
Cell phones weren't a thing either, so I had to rely on maps
or just knowing the chosen route.
I'd heard bad things about an area called Pima, but I'd only
been through it during the day. Maybe once still I knew how to
get through to shave a few minutes off my time.
Being someone used to walking or taking buses, I felt blissfully
perfectly safe in a well running car with gas in the tank.
I believed I was safer in this moment than at almost any other
time as I entered a very dark residential area in Pacoima.
I only had to go north a couple of blocks to get to the next
town, then to my own. As I slowly drove down a dark,
quiet Ave. of modest, slightly rundown homes, there were very
few St. lights illuminating the unknown.
On my right were some small still houses, so sealed up and
quiet I could almost imagine no one had ever lived there.
On my left was a completely unlit neighborhood park.
I thought of families playing there in the sunshine, but now
in the pitch blackness it looked very uninviting.
I felt almost as though I were an observer in a theme park
ride, looking at the attraction from the safety of the carriage
seat belt and all. I smiled to myself at the little
thrill of seeing something spooky while I was perfectly
safe. That's when I noticed some
people walking down the deserted St. toward me.
While this was the first sign of life I'd seen in quite some
time, at first I didn't give it much thought.
My left turn out of Pacoima was coming up just past the park
anyway, but as they got closer I very quickly realized it wasn't
just a few people. This was a group of
approximately 8 to 12 young men, probably in their early 20s, and
they were not casually walking down the sidewalk.
No, they were aggressively running down the middle of the
street and right towards me, the only moving car around.
I suddenly had to slow to almost a stop as not to hit anyone.
And this is when they all got a real good look at me.
Their looks turned instantly more excited and animated as
they realized I was a young girl all alone.
Some of them exchanged smiling glances.
Others were whooping, whistling and calling out things to me
like hey little lady, come out and play or babe, I can treat
you real good, smoothly, effortlessly, as if they'd
rehearsed ahead of time. Several of them stopped me
completely by standing right in front of my car, putting their
hands on the hood all the while others walked around to my
driver's side and passenger side doors.
They unapologetically pulled at the handles trying to open the
doors. I didn't always lock the doors
when I drove, and cars didn't have auto door locks back then,
but I was thanking God that I'd had the foresight to do so on
that night. Of course, it all happened very
fast, but in my shock and terror it felt like slow motion,
adjusting my mind from carefree to possibly being abducted or
worse by this large group of men.
For what felt like several minutes, I just sat there, no
longer feeling safe. I realized it would just take
one easily broken window and I would be at their mercy.
And they did not appear very merciful.
They seemed more like a gang of hungry tomcats drooling over a
tiny mouse. They had me trapped.
I couldn't drive forward nor reverse out of there because at
the time the car was completely surrounded by these men and when
I saw a couple of the guys picking up rocks or other
objects to probably try to break the windows, I knew I had to
think clearly and act fast. I did the only thing I could
think of. I made the knee jerk decision
that I was going to drive through them and they would just
have to get out of the way or pay for it, showing no
hesitation. Once my decision was made, I
began to drive forward, having blocked my car completely.
I could see the surprise on some of their faces as they realized
they quickly had to move out of the way or risk being run over.
All the men standing in front of the car managed to jump out of
the way and I speed up, taking the left turn out of Pacoima.
I didn't even check the rear view as I heard some of them
running after me, yelling angrily about 15 minutes later.
I did make it home safely, but my heart didn't stop beating out
of my chest for the remainder of the night.
Of course, I thought about it for a long time afterward.
I felt proud of the way I'd handled the situation.
But of course I'd learned a hard lesson and I kicked myself for
my stupidity. I kept running through
possibilities of what could have happened.
What if they didn't get out of the way and I actually had to
hit someone with a car? How would I have lived with
myself? What if one of the men had
pointed a gun at me or gotten a window broken?
What if one of them had a car nearby and chased me home?
I'm very happy that it turned out the way it did, because it
could have been much, much worse.
I hope we'll all keep in mind that we're not invincible inside
a car. No matter how safe and cozy our
heated leather seats are, Dark, quiet shortcuts are not a good
idea, especially late at night. And always drive with your doors
locked, Pima gang that tried to grab and do who knows what to a
teenage girl driving alone late one Saturday night.
It's been a long time since then, and I'm very glad we
didn't become better acquainted. If you put a gun to my head and
demanded the craziest true story, I knew, or else you'd
shoot. I'd tell you this one.
I used to be an undercover cop here in DC pretending to be a
street junkie. I was good at it too, having
completed 3 full stints before they killed off my character, so
to speak. My success stemmed from the same
traits that make an Oscar winning actor.
It's all about how you carry yourself, your mannerisms, or
what I always called a person's physicality.
For example, to portray my junkie character, I draw in my
stomach tight as if I were having stomach cramps.
Then I drop my shoulders low, walk fast, and occasionally
pretend to wipe sweat off my brow or cheeks to add that real
sense of authenticity. It was all in the stomach
cramps, though. If people saw you holding
yourself like that, or if I looked like I was going to ask
them for change, I became the Invisible Man.
It was like my superpower. I saw everything and everyone,
but no one saw me except other street junkies.
By the time I won those guys over, everything else just fell
into place. In as few words as possible.
My role was intelligence gathering.
I'd stay on the job for a few months at a time, really living
that lifestyle aside from all the dope and disease.
Then I take a vacation, telling the junkies I was going to visit
my parents out in the country, and then I'd be back on the line
again in a week or two. Refreshed.
Renewed. One of the first major things we
accomplished as a task force was closing a violent gang assault
case connected to the narcotics trade.
I won't go into details, but the whole thing was essentially A
punishment for a missing package, and it's sent shock
waves around the whole city. Seeing as the victim was
basically a civilian, it meant a lot to everyone to send these
jerks to federal prison, but little did we know that it would
be what they called a Pyrrhic victory.
Not long after we put these people in cuffs, the number of
bodies being found around DC increased by 500% over the
course of about a month. As you can imagine, the Chief of
Police wanted to know why. Officially speaking, all the
deaths were chalked up to overdoses and some suspected a
bad batch of heroin was to blame.
But some of the OD deaths were veteran St. junkies.
Although junkies tend to be desperate, their vocation relies
on them being street smart, not street stupid.
If they knew that there was a bad batch going around, they try
to isolate and avoid it. But some of the deaths were
people who should have easily known better.
My point is, I knew something was wrong almost right away.
Not just that there was some bad dope going around.
I had to figure out what I started doing my usual rounds,
not asking too many questions, just putting out feelers like I
always did. That's how I found out it wasn't
coming from one particular corner or dealer who might have
cut his product so hard he didn't mind a few dead addicts.
It was coming from everywhere. People were avoiding one dealer,
thinking it was coming from them, and then they dropped dead
after spiking the bag they got from their safe guy.
Rumors were flying around. People were getting scared and
sick from running out of dealers to turn to.
We had four pharmacy robberies in one day.
That's what I mean when I tell people that in a city like DC,
any city really, everything is connected.
And when that rot sets in, it's like mold.
You need bleach to get it out. At times the BPD looked more
like a dry, wet wipe than a bottle of Clorox.
Anyway, the part where I feel like I fell down was unlike a
lot of the other junkies who were avoiding the regular
hookups in an effort to stay safe, I was hunting bags like it
was the last batch of dope ever made.
I wanted to find whoever was selling that bad dope and get
them off the street. Locking up junkies is one thing,
but letting them die off in their dozens every week was no
part of my job description. Don't get me wrong, St. addicts
do each other pretty dirty and you'll meet some real bad ones
too. But I'd say around 40% are just
good people who made terrible decisions.
Some of them I might have even called friends in some other
lifetime. So as I was saying, I was
running around Deanwood trying to find the source of this bad
dope. But then instead of being
everywhere, it seemed to be nowhere all at once.
Everyone seemed to be able to get their hands on the bad dope
when they weren't looking for it, but me going out of my way
to try and get my hands on it, I couldn't seem to find any at
all. Every bag of dope I bought went
straight into evidence After the spike in drug deaths, every
other bag was being tested for toxins and what not.
Not a single one ever came up as hot, meaning fatally poisonous.
So as you can imagine, I was starting to get pretty
frustrated. Everyone seemed to be able to
get their hands on that bad dope, except for me, at least
until one day when I finally got my wish.
So early one morning, I get myself on the street and start
doing my thing, putting out feelers and asking the junkies
who's holding. Eventually I get hooked up with
the one guy I've been buying from and we meet in our usual
spot to make the exchange. But then instead of being there
on foot or on bike, the delivery guy is in his car.
And instead of just giving me the dope and taking the cash, he
says something like get in, we got to go someplace to get it.
I'm thinking, OK, this is out of the ordinary, but whatever.
And I get in his car and off we go to get the product.
We ended up in some trap house, which was to be expected, but
what I didn't expect was to be given the bag of dope by someone
you might call a Lieutenant. That is, someone who would never
regularly involve themselves in direct sales.
He didn't just hand me the stuff, either.
He asked me to sit down in the upstairs bedroom.
That doubled as their kind of office.
Then I was subjected to what I can only describe as a minor
interrogation. I didn't get the impression that
they were looking for an undercover.
It was all minor questions. What's your name?
Where are you from? How long you've been in DC?
That kind of stuff. They wanted to know who I'd been
buying from, who I thought had the best product if I'd never
been picked up by the cops. I answered everything as
honestly as I could, even the question about being arrested.
Me and the boys had faked one or two arrests while I'd been
working just to give me a little authenticity.
So I brought up those times, figuring that they could
corroborate them if they asked the right people.
They asked a few more questions, just seemingly basic stuff, and
then after that they gave me the bag and told me to get lost.
I asked him straight up if the stuff was safe and they said
yeah, that it was like a new package and the old one was off
the streets. I didn't take their word for it
and like everything else, I bought the bag, went straight to
evidence and then on to testing. Testing also takes time, a long
time given the backlog of crap the lab has to test.
So we didn't get the results until days, sometimes weeks
after we sent off samples. Usually that kind of time scale
worked for us, but on this occasion it almost got me
killed. The next morning was the same
start as usual, bright eyed and bushy tailed by 7:00 AM.
Out in the streets by 7:30 everything went as normal.
And then come early afternoon, I went to my usual spot outside a
liquor store to beg for smokes from people coming out.
It was part of a daily effort to establish presence in the area,
and part of my routine was harassing the store owner for a
free bottle or a free pack of smokes or anything.
He never gave me anything, which was fine, because I wouldn't be
able to take it without catching hell from the higher ups.
But it did big things for my character in terms of
establishing that presence and authenticity.
Every time I walked into that guy's store, it'd be a case of
you again. What the hell do you want now?
And that's if he didn't open straight up with get the hell
out of my store, you crackhead. But that day, the day after the
visit with the Lieutenant, I walked into a store to have him
address me by my street name, and the thing that really
grabbed me was how he didn't know my street name.
And if he knew my street name, that meant someone had been
talking to him about me. But if that was the case, why
was I being talked about? So the store owner calls me by
my street name, and right away my guard is up when he tells me
that someone is looking for me. I'm posturing like I always did,
asking who's looking for me in an aggressive way and adding
things like. You tell whoever is looking for
me that I'm right here. I ain't hiding, I'm right here.
But then instead of telling me who was looking for me, the
store owner told me that someone had called into the store, as in
on a cell phone, and asked for me by my street name.
They asked the store owner if he had seen me and that when or if
he did, he was to tell me to call him back, whoever he was.
A lot of y'all might think that that's a little too vague to
know who was calling, but you got to understand something.
None of my street contacts ever used a phone, and neither did I.
Or if I did, it was always a payphone.
No true St. Junkie could get their hands on
a cell phone and not try and sell it for drug money, so me
having one would have been a dead giveaway that I was
undercover. No one who knew me on the street
would ever ask me to call them back.
And if they did, there was no way that they wouldn't have left
a number or a street address or something for me to head up.
That meant that whoever wanted to talk to me was from the
department, in which case it was probably important if it
couldn't wait for the next debrief.
I found the nearest payphone, fished through my spare change
to find enough for the call, and then placed it directly to our
office. I kept in character, used my
street name, then the person who picked up passed the phone to
the person who tried to contact me, and that's the proverbial
crap Hit the fan moment as soon as he picks up the phone.
He's like, Jody, you need to get your ass off the street and you
need to do it fast. I asked him what the hell he's
talking about and he says these five little words I don't think
I'll ever forget. You should be dead already, he
told me, and then repeated that I needed to bring my ass in
before I got myself killed. It was like a movie or
something. I'm asking him to tell me more,
and he says something like there's no time.
I'll explain later Anyway, so we coordinate a pickup point
somewhere discreet that didn't involve me hiding in a goddamn
dumpster. Like he'd only half jokingly
suggested. He shows up, I get in his car,
and I'm goddamn furious, because doing that completely burned my
cover. I didn't see anyone see me get
in, but that doesn't matter. In undercover work, you always
assume someone's watching you. You either go total immersion or
you might as well assume that your covers been burned.
And for me, there's no in between.
So as I said the moment I stepped in my Co workers car,
years of work went to crap in the time it took me to buckle
up. I told him that he better have a
damn good explanation for pulling me out like that, but
boy did he ever. We didn't know it at the time,
but Narcotics had a mic in the apartment I'd been questioned
the day before, and that's how we learned that the baggy I had
been sold contained what we like to call a hotshot.
Basically drugs that have been tampered with so that instead of
getting you high, they kill you. Following the gang assault
arrest, the dealer somehow got wind that one of the street
junkies was an undercover cop. In other words, they knew I was
there, they just didn't know who I was.
So someone had the bright idea to load up a bunch of hot shots
and sell them to whatever St. Junkie they suspected of being
the undercover. They must have murdered at least
50 junkies by poisoning before they finally found out it was
me. And the way they did it was kind
of genius. They were so effective in
murdering their suspected undercovers because no junkie on
the planet doesn't shoot up or snort the dope they just bought.
So if I bought the bag and I was still alive, that was because I
hadn't taken the dope I bought from them.
And the only reason I wouldn't do that is that I was an
undercover cop. The surveillance team heard the
dealers put a green light on me with their own ears.
They used my cover name and everything.
They heard how I must have been an undercover because I clearly
hadn't taken the hotshot they'd given me at the time I was
picked up. There must have been like 100
little hoppers running around with pistols in their
waistbands, just hoping to run into me so they could ice me and
enjoy the reputation boost associated with that.
And what I'm trying to say is, I should not be alive right now.
To outsiders, it seems like the system worked.
Surveillance heard my cover name, got in touch with the
boss, and then that started the frantic effort to get a hold of
me before I ended up with several bullet holes in my face.
But the probability of that all happening exactly as it should
is like winning the lottery of life.
Surveillance didn't know my cover name, so if the dealers
hadn't talked the whole thing out and explained exactly why
they knew that I was undercover, the call wouldn't get made if I
didn't stop by the store for some reason at that exact time,
the call doesn't get heard and I'm dead within an hour.
I could have got shot on my way to the pickup shot as I was
getting into the car. I've gone over it in my head
like 1000 times and in every scenario I don't make it out
alive. But then somehow, by the grace
of God Almighty, I made it out of there.
And I'm not a religious person and I kind of admire people that
do have faith. But after some of the crap I've
seen, I can't bring myself to share it no matter how hard I
try. And that's why I don't talk
about guardian angels or any of that stuff.
And I talk about the lottery. I don't need to believe in
angels to appreciate how awesome literally awesome it is.
That circumstance and coincidence aligned and saved my
life. I know my angels.
I met them. They're my Co workers and I owe
them everything I have to tell you about the freakiest thing
that ever happened to me. I'm really into nature
photography and I even make some cash from it on the side.
Last summer I decided to head out to Zion National Park to get
some shots of the local birds. I figured I'd make a weekend of
it, so I drove my truck out there with my camper attachment
on the bed. I arrived in the late afternoon,
found a nice secluded spot to set up camp, and spent a few
hours hiking around and snapping photos until the sun started to
go down. After a quick dinner, I decided
to call it a night. I climbed into my tent in the
back of the truck, placing my keys and other items beside me,
and dozed off. Sometime in the middle of the
night, nature called, if you know what I mean.
I groggily crawled out of the tent and headed a little way
away from the campsite to take care of my business.
I was still half asleep and it was pitch black out there in the
woods. All of a sudden I heard a stick
snap beside me. I whipped my head around toward
the sound and I swear to God I saw the most bone chilling thing
I've ever laid eyes on. There, perfectly framed between
2 trees, was the silhouette of something.
It looked vaguely human shaped, but was way too tall, about 7 or
8 feet, and it was far too thin to be a normal person.
What looked like its arms were freakishly long, longer than I
am tall, and I couldn't make out any hair, clothes, or anything,
just the black shape of this thing.
For a second I thought I must be seeing things.
Maybe it was a weird tree, catching the moonlight in a
strange way. But then as I began to take my
gaze off of it, trying to make sense in my head of what I just
saw, the silhouette began to move.
For the brief moment my eyes had turned away.
It slowly and steadily began taking long strides in my
direction, as if trying to sneak up on me.
I was horrified. My brain kept trying to
rationalize it. A tree, a shadow, my tired eyes
playing tricks. But I knew then this thing was
moving. My eyes shot back towards it,
and at the same time its movement stopped.
I wasn't hallucinating anything, because it was closer than it
was before. Then I heard the sound, this
awful, raspy, wheezing sound, like something struggling to
breathe and also trying to hide the sound.
It was coming from the direction of that silhouette.
At this point, I was freaking out inside, but trying my best
not to show it. For some reason, I did not want
this thing to know that I knew it was there.
So I turned back around, facing forward, pretending I hadn't
seen anything. But I kept watching from the
corner of my eye. About 10 seconds later, it began
to move again, taking those same quiet, creeping, deliberate
steps towards me. I couldn't take it anymore.
I spun around and the silhouette froze once more, my voice
cracking in terror. I yelled out.
I see you. The thing didn't react.
It was like someone had pressed the pause button and left it
there, but the wheezing breaths continued louder than before,
maybe because it was closer. I was covered in goosebumps,
every hair on my body standing on end.
I stared at that black silhouette, trying to force my
eyes to see more details, to pick up some clue as to what
this thing could possibly be. But there was just the unnerving
shape and those awful rasping sounds.
I don't even really remember deciding to run.
Suddenly my legs were just pumping, tearing through the
underbrush back to my campsite in a wild, clumsy, desperate
Sprint. I practically dove into the cab
of my truck, frantically searching for my keys before
remembering I'd laid them down in the tent attachment.
There was no way in heck I was going back out there.
I knew I couldn't reach them through the rear window because
the Dang thing had been jammed shut since I bought the truck.
So I just locked the doors, turned on the engine to blast
the radio, flipped on every light I had and hunkered down to
wait for dawn. I sat there rigid, clutching my
pocket knife jumping at every night time sound I heard
outside, until finally the first rays of sun started to brighten
the sky. As soon as it was light enough
to see, I bolted from the cab, snatched my keys and got the
heck out of there. I didn't bother lowering my tent
attachment, which had to be raised when you used it.
I was so rattled after these events, I didn't go camping or
on any photography trips in the wild for a full year.
I kept thinking about that silhouette lurking in the dark.
I've never been so deeply scared in my life.
I still don't know what to make of it.
I've heard about skinwalkers, wendigos, and other creepy
legends out there in the wilderness of the Southwest, but
I never put much stock in that stuff until that night.
Now I don't know what to believe.
All I know is I came face to face with something out there in
those woods, something in Zion National Park, something that
didn't move like any human or animal I've ever seen.
Whatever that pale gaunt and deeply unnatural thing was, I'm
glad I got away from it. Be careful out there.
You never know what you might see in the dark.