The Morbid Fascinations Podcast

Trigger Warning: Physical and Sexual Violence; Suicide

I never meant to do it. Well, I did mean to do it, but somehow when I did, it only felt like fiction. That was how the podcast always felt too; like fiction. It was just another story to tell.

It all started as a lark with my best friend Josie. We grew up reading about crimes in the newspapers we snuck out of the recycling after our dads finished with them. We read Nancy Drew novels like it was our job. We played detective games and spent all of our free time solving whatever mysteries we decided needed solving. They were never riveting- we could easily spend an afternoon creeping around the house with notebooks and magnifying glasses, looking for clues in The Case of the Stolen Strawberry Poptart, or The Case of Josie’s Missing Beanie Babies (that one ended up being a mass kidnapping committed by her eleven-year-old sister, and it was the biggest case we ever cracked). So when we were in our junior year of college and stumbled upon a true crime podcast for the first time, we were completely hooked. And by hooked, I mean that we listened to every single true crime podcast we could get our hands on. Admittedly there wasn’t much at the time; the genre really didn’t explode until more than a year after we made the initial discovery. We were, after all, pretty on the ball with anything that came wrapped up in the shape of a good mystery.

By the time Josie and I graduated, both of us with degrees in communications (right, I know, we really didn’t think our futures through or make a plan), neither of us could find anything better than a minimum wage entry level job. That was, of course, until Josie had the inspired idea to start our own podcast. We spent the summer after graduation researching, writing episodes, and figuring out a more legit way to record than the obvious solution of the record button on our smartphones. We came up with a theme song, a name- Morbid Fascinations: True Crime Cases-, and I even managed to rustle up some advertisers in time for the debut of Episode One.

We never expected to make any money. We hoped we might make a little something, of course, but we figured we’d pour in all of our time and effort that first summer, just to kill time until an actual job came around. And then it took off. We went from ten listeners the first week to three hundred the second. By the end of our first month, we were closing in on twenty thousand and still growing. People actually wanted to hear our voices, our best-friends-since-birth banter, our takes on the hottest recent crimes and coldest unsolved cases from decades earlier. We stopped looking for actual jobs long before the end of the summer, when we realized this little hobby had more potential than any official job we could ever land.

Josie and I rode the high of our podcasting success for more than two years before things got out of hand. Sure, there were blips along the way, bumps in the road; I’m not trying to say it was easy. I poured hours and hours of research into each case. I poured my heart and soul into the podcast. And I loved it. I loved how each time we told the stories of cases, they became ours. Like a fiction we got to live inside of for the week. Like Josie and I became a part of each case. But the further in we got, the more I came to realize that it still wasn’t enough. It drove me insane, the not knowing. I could do all the online research I possibly could, and I still couldn’t solve a single case. Just reporting about the cases wasn’t enough anymore.

So I took a stab at investigative journaling. Not actually, because I never had any training and I was still just a podcaster with no real credentials, but I went for it anyway. While researching an old cold case, I kept circling back to one key witness who I knew had to know more than he was letting on. There were few to no leads in the case; it was all dead ends and had been cold for a decade and a half. I only had about ten minutes worth of script written for the episode despite dozens of hours of research, so I dove deep into the history of the only witness who had ever nudged the detectives into motion. When I discovered that he didn’t live far from me, I decided to drive out and ask him the questions that I couldn’t live without the answers to.

The case was a missing person’s case turned to murder investigation after the seventeen-year-old girl’s body turned up in a dry creek bed ten days later. The only substantial lead in the case was an ATM transaction from the afternoon she had disappeared, and this witness claimed to have seen someone using her ATM card. He recounted the memory to me some fifteen years after the fact, over a mug of steaming tea in his dining room.

“I was right behind the guy, close enough to read the name Naomi on the card. He was holding it up, squinting, so the card was right in front of my nose. That name, Naomi, stood out to me since it was a big burly lookin’ dude using the card, but I figured it was her dad or somethin’. Anyway, that was when I realized I was standing way too close and I didn’t want the guy to think I was snoopin’ on any ATM PIN numbers or anything,” -that bristled me, since I knew the N in PIN stands for number so calling it a PIN number is redundant, but I let him carry on- “so, I took a step back. And that was all I saw. I gave a description of the guy to a couple sketch artists later- I mean, I reported it after I saw the name Naomi in the news, related to that poor missing girl. And they called me in to follow up. They got a bunch of tips after they released the sketches, but nothing ever came of it.”

“I’d always wondered how you knew your sighting was important. What made you decide to report it,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts and come up with a halfway decent question to follow up with. “And was there any security footage to back up your sighting? I was never able to find any recording of the two of you at the ATM-”

“No, the security cameras recorded over the old footage every three days, and I didn’t make the connection and report what I saw 'til four days after. It was just another day for me, like I said. I never realized I was seein’ anything important, it was just the little detail of the name on the card that stuck in my mind, because it was a little strange, is all.”

That was the moment the pieces all clicked into place for me. “It really is too bad that the footage was gone. And you had no idea how important those first three days were.” I tried to keep my voice even as I asked, “What camera system was it recorded on again?”

“It was a…” but the witness paused before answering, and gave me a critical look. “Why does that matter?”

“You worked for a security company back in the day, right?” I had done my research. Left no stone unturned. “So you would have known if the security cameras at that bank were run by a system your company operated. So you would have known, right, that the footage would be recorded over in three days. Seems pretty convenient, no? Make up a fake man, come up with an excuse for you to have seen the bank card with Naomi’s name, then you can make your tip and insert yourself in the investigation, just far enough out from the incident that it can’t be proven that the man never existed?” The witness didn’t respond, didn’t react, except in his eyes. His pupils dilated almost imperceptibly, just for a fraction of a second. “Or rather,” I laughed, confident that I was finally getting to the bottom of things, “he did exist, but not the way you said. Because the man with the ATM card was you, not a man in front of you. How the investigators never put that together-” The witness was still refusing to react, but the corner of his mouth twitched up, almost like he was suppressing a grin. I shivered. Something in the way he looked at me made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I took a deep breath, sighed, and started again. “They do know, they just have no proof. That’s why they stopped investigating. They have all the answers they need; they just don’t have enough to take it to trial, do they?”

“That’s all conjecture,” the witness said, and he flashed me an infuriatingly smug smile. “I told the reporters what I saw, and they made a sketch. It was all they could do. The body was too degraded by the time they found it to pull off any attacker’s DNA. There were ligatures left on the body, but nothing they could trace back to any attacker.”

Something in me screamed to run now while I still could. Not to push him any further. But I couldn’t leave before I was positive in what he had done. “And that’s how they decided the crime was probably sexually motivated. A crime of opportunity. Or maybe someone had been stalking her. And the ATM withdrawal afterward was just done to distract the investigators into thinking it was just about some mugging, instead of all the depraved things you actually did to her.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wondered if I had gone too far. But it was too late to take them back.

To my relief, the witness only shrugged. “Well, this was all fifteen years ago. We’ll never really know what happened, will we?”

“Why did you talk to me today? Why invite me in?”

“I still think about that case, sometimes. Still wonder what happened. I wish I had stopped that man at the ATM machine-” damn guy, doesn’t even understand the acronyms he’s using- “Maybe if I had, things would have gone differently. Maybe I could have saved her life.” The words were right, but he was still smirking in the most unsettling way.

“Or did you just want some attention back on you, some of the old rush?” I paused, then, deciding to push my luck just a hair further, asked, “Have you committed any other murders since?”

His barking laugh of a response sent a chill down my spine. “You’re absolutely nuts, you know that? Complete lunatic. Get the fuck out of my house, girl.”

In retrospect, I’m surprised he didn’t snap right then and kill me, like he had killed Naomi all those years ago. But maybe he thought I would have told someone where I was going and who I was meeting. He’d’ve been right- Josie would have guessed exactly where I had gone, after a glance at my notes. She never would have let me go if I’d told her what I was planning, but I just had to look him in the eyes when I told him I knew what he had done. I knew the depravity that hid behind his eyes.

After I left that day, I listened to the recorded conversation a dozen times, trying to find anything I had missed. Any tiny inflection in his words I hadn’t picked up the first time. It was compelling stuff. I had all the circumstantial evidence laid out, and even though there was no solid proof of his misdeeds, I could see Naomi’s last minutes of life playing out in my mind like an old-timey movie reel. I could see the witness hiding just out of sight, grabbing Naomi off the sidewalk as she walked down her street to the bus stop, could see him slapping a dirty hand across her mouth to shut her up, then dragging her down an embankment to the creek bed where he would tie her up, rape her, and then finally, still in the throws of passion, choke her to death. She didn’t stand a chance. What had he done from there? Dragged her body into a van, driven her to the dry, secluded creek bed fifty miles away where her remains were eventually found? I shuddered at the thought, half horrified, half mesmerized by the brutality of it all. What had it felt like, when he killed her? Had he watched the light leave her eyes, felt an overwhelming sense of power as he held her down?

I couldn’t stand the thought that he was still out there, still free. He had taken Naomi’s life, but his was still fully intact. He was free to do what he pleased, even though the cops and I knew the awful truth of it all.

It took me a few days to decide on the most tactful way to do it, but after my thousands of hours of research, I was well-prepared. I knew the common pitfalls, the ways people most often were caught. I waited until long after dark and I had scheduled a sleepover with Josie that night. She wouldn’t notice me leaving, and if she did, well, I trusted her to be my alibi anyway.

Actually following through with the plan was easier than expected. The neighborhood was quiet- no witnesses- and he had left the bathroom window cracked open. Once I had donned a pair of latex gloves, it was almost too easy to pop out the screen and climb inside. He was sleeping heavily and the snoring made me feel at ease as I creaked across the wooden floorboards to his bedside. I pulled the syringe out of my pocket and had injected all of its contents before he woke with a gasp. His eyes focused blearily on me for a long moment, and I could tell he was struggling to place who I was. Finally, our eyes met and he understood.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” His words were already slurring.

I ignored his question. I walked back into the bathroom, popped the screen back into place, then turned and walked out the front door, leaving no evidence behind but the unlocked deadbolt. No one would suspect a thing.

Naomi’s episode, released the next morning, was a success. Josie was impressed with my expert sleuthing, though what she knew about my research process barely skimmed the surface. It felt good, laying it all out there. I left things rather cryptic of course, never explaining how I knew what I knew, but it was exhilarating telling Naomi’s story with more details than anyone else knew. Our listeners couldn’t get enough. Especially when, three days after the episode was released, news broke that the decomposing body of the key witness from the case had been discovered by his concerned neighbors. It was quickly ruled a suicide. An overdose, clearly a result of his implications in the murder of that poor young girl, fifteen years ago. It was practically a confession. “A guilty conscience never rests easy,” as one news reporter put it. Josie and I released a short episode discussing what would lead a man to end his life, when he finally can’t live with his guilt any longer. I lamented the loss of any life, but how grateful Naomi’s family must be to finally have peace. It was easy to reframe the events of earlier that week to this new story, the one I released to the public. I was just a podcaster; that was all.

The resurgence of the old crime in the news brought new fans and curious listeners, and our numbers soared to new records. Josie and I basked in the glory of our podcast topping the charts. We had everything we wanted; all of our hard work was really paying off now, and in a big way.

I figured it could only last so long, and I was right. As they say in the true crime world, the truth will out, in the end. It was a neighbor’s Ring doorbell that caught me. He was searching back through old footage, apparently looking for evidence that his neighbor had been unwell before the suicide, when he saw my black hooded figure cross the screen, then reappear, still shrouded in darkness, twenty-five minutes later. Just like that, the case was reopened, and it didn’t take them long to focus on me. The questioning began. The lead investigator hinted that it was my most recent episode that led them to me. Something about the detailed conjectures I made, the hints I dropped that I was close to the investigation, was what put me in in his line of sight. I knew it was a risk when we were recording, but I couldn’t bear to leave any details out.

It was actually a relief, being so close to the investigation. I had always wondered, while sitting behind the mic, what it was really like being in the middle of the action. Just reading about cases, chatting while recording with Josie, wasn’t the same as actually being part of a case. I kept aching for a notepad, or for the record button on my phone. I found myself rephrasing statements and questions from the investigators in my head, trying to fit it into a podcast script. This stuff would be pure gold in an episode.