the early 1980s was one hell of a time to be a crime reporter in southeast Florida I moved down from South Carolina in the spring of 1980 and in doing so almost doubled my salary from $177,000 to $31,000 a year which for an entry-level reporter was crazy big money back then I wasn't even working for any of the major Miami papers either I was working for a smaller much more localized publication you might know the Pine Crest Pioneer it's a very morbid fact of Journalism that if it bleeds it leads and the paper circulation had
been up ever since the drug violence in Miami started spilling out into the suburbs it could be really gruesome stuff too we're talking gang reprise random killings even bombings hence why my new salary was so good but the thing you start to notice after a while of covering this kind of gruesome thing is the corrosive effect it has on wider Society it's like something gets into the water supply or infects the collective Consciousness and for a time it seemed almost every other person in Pine Crest was up to no good and I think that for
me personally the clearest example of this involved what I like to call the biggest story I never wrote on Saturday October 31st of 1981 there was a party at one of the big houses over on maresa drive a wealthy boat salesman had allowed his 17-year-old daughter to throw a Halloween costume party in their backyard she invited all her friends they had the night of their lives and around midnight the boat salesman pulled the plug and then politely called time on the party everyone filed out into the streets outside and then slowly but surely all the
girls friends began to safely make their way home all except one the next morning the parents of a girl named Christine Parks reported her missing to the Miami date police department and initially the prognosis was not good all the houses on maresa drive as well as the streets that surrounded it are all built onto a kind of artificial Canal which allows the homeowners to dock their boats right next to their backyards the police quickly theorized that since some of the girls had snuck alcohol into the party Kristen had walked off on her own fallen into
the water and drowned some had their doubts because no one had heard any yelling or splashing but still the cops dragged the canal for any human remains if only to be able to rule it out as a possibility but no human remains were ever found 3 days into the search and with law enforcement becoming increasingly desperate a trucker was driving past the lake at the top of the South Dixie Highway way when he saw a half naked girl staggering out of a patch of trees near the side of the road he stopped his truck jumped
out then after using his jacket to give the girl some dignity he asked what she was doing out there all alone with half her clothes on the trucker later said that the girl seemed drunk and that she didn't remember where she was or how she'd got there the only thing she remembered was her name Kristen Parks as you can imagine Kristen's family were elated to see that she had returned alive but she was not returned unharmed following a thorough medical examination it was determined that Kristen had been drugged abducted then repeatedly and brutally violated over
the course of the next 48 hours then instead of killing her her abductors drugged her one final time then drove her out to the South Dixie Highway in the middle of the night and dumped her in a wooded area Kristen had been relatively calm and stable while under the Drug's residual effects but once she sobered up it was a different story entirely the trauma of what she'd experienced over those past few days was simply too much for her young mind to handle and from what I understand she suffered a total nervous breakdown she withdrew from
school stopped seeing friends and despite undergoing a rather radical course of medication and therapy Kristen remained mentally and emotionally crippled by the horrors she glimpsed through the ha Miss of her memory but what made things a thousand times worse was the fact that the search for her attackers very quickly ground to a halt the investigation's lack of progress was greeted with fear and concern by Pine Crest citizens and some were extremely vocal in their demands for justice but none more so than the boat salesman whose home the party took place in this is the point
where I have to change some names to protect both you and I from some pretty nasty lawsuits I imagine and from what I understand our boat salesman is still a very litigious man and I'd hate to see you be punished for doing me the service of reading this out loud so instead of referring to him by his real name I'll just call him by another Mr Stone and stone had personally offered up to $10,000 reward to anyone who helped bring Kristen's attackers to Justice and had even offered to hire a private investigator to expedite the
process with regards to the second Point Kristen's family declined his charity but Mr Stone remained highly and publicly vocal in his demands for justice and he even put up a billboard outside his showroom for a while begging the public for further information when we met at a charity auction in the spring of 1982 it was him that actually suggested that I start investigating the whole thing and he offered his full cooperation in the hopes that my reporting contributed to catching Christen Park's abductors I couldn't work the case fulltime I still had other assignments to complete
but my editor gave me full permission to work on it whenever and wherever I could provided he got the first option to publish it the police had never arrested or charged anyone with Kristen's abduction but they'd still questioned a handful of suspects in relation to the incident the first was a young man Kristen had supposedly been dating who had reacted badly when she broke up with him he too had been at the party but thanks to various aliis he was ruled out as a suspect the second person question was a security guard hired by Mr
Stone to ensure the partygoers stayed away from The Canal at the rear of the house the security guard said that at one point during the evening Kristen had approached him to begin a conversation the guard claimed Kristen showed signs of intoxication so fearing that someone had smuggled alcohol into the party which they had he went to inform Mr stone stone instructed the security guard to head back outside find the source of the alcohol and then confiscate it but when the guard returned outside Kristen Parks was nowhere to be seen assuming she'd simply run off to
hide among the throng of dancing teenagers the guard simply carried on doing his job trying to figure out where the booze was coming from he didn't see Kristen again that evening and it wasn't until the next morning that he learned that she was missing the third person that the cops questioned and who for a while was considered their Prime Suspect was an excon who lived on a construction site out on MTA Island MTA is one of South Florida's most affluent neighborhoods and with most of the homes there offering more than 10,000 square ft with high-end
amenities such as Gourmet kitchens wine vaults and spacious outdoor areas which raised the question what was an unemployed excon doing living out there well the excon a man named Frank Jeffers had taken to squatting among the bones of a half-built home and due to some pretty tight legal loopholes the authorities were unable to effectively remove him somehow Jeffers had managed to get his hands on a small boat which he used to sail over to the wealthier neighborhoods on the edges of Pine Crest before absconding after committing Petty acts of theft and vandalism Jeffers had been
arrested around half a dozen times mainly for things like trespassing or harassment but that's not what he earned a conviction for you see about 20 years earlier Jeffers was arrested after abducting his neighbor's 14-year-old daughter he bundled her into his car while she was on her way home from school and if it wasn't for several witnesses reporting the license plate of the car there's no telling what Jeffers would have done to that girl the cops pulled him over as he tried driving the girl down into the Everglades then and he spent 16 years in prison
on charges of aggravated kidnapping after he tried and failed to fight the case well now Jeffers was out and apparently he was up to his old tricks again it was Mr Stone who turned the cops attention on to Jeffers in the first place his family had been unfortunate enough to have several runin with the man including one incident in which he'd scared the heck out of stones then 16-year-old daughter while she was sunbathing Jeffers had been making a nuance of himself ever since his release from prison and by the spring of 82 he constituted the
cop's most likely suspect in Christen Park's abduction he was questioned on several separate occasions and his aliis for his whereabouts on the night of the abduction were apparently shaky at best but lack of solid evidence connecting him to the crime shielded him from arrest or charges it seemed only a matter of time before police would be able to gather sufficient evidence against him however following a break-in at a Pine Crest boating goods store police attempted to place Jeffers under arrest but when they rolled up on his half completed squat he opened fire on them with
a 45 caliber handgun and as you can imagine the cops were less than thrilled that Jeffers had suddenly decided to go out with a bang but still they obliged him and following a hail of bullets and Buckshot the number one suspect in Kristen's abduction and assault was no more I spoke with Mr Stone following Jeff's death and while he expressed regret that the case's number one suspect would never see True Justice he said there were far worse ways for something like that to turn out and to be honest I was inclined to agree with him
after covering serious crimes all around Florida and South Carolina for a full 5 years I knew damn well that when it comes to child Predators the risk of reoffending never truly goes away his death at the hands of police might not have been true justice but it was a kind of Justice all the same and to the people of Pine Crest it was like a great weight have been lifted off their shoulders it seemed like Jeffers had gone and written the end of my article for me going out in a blaze of in glory to
coin a word I thought all I needed to do was tie up a few loose ends in terms of some of the info I'd gathered then I'd write an article so complete and in-depth that when I turned it into my editor I might as well staple a Ray's request to the front cover but then those loose ends turned out to be like a loose thread and a knitted sweater and the more I tugged at him the more the whole goddamn story as I knew it started to unravel before my very eyes Jeffers had two aliis
for the night of Kristen's abduction to get around he either had to drive his boat or walk which is how he ended up drunk out of his mind walking past past his neighbor's house on the night of the abduction by his own admission Frank Jeffers had been and I quote singing Drunk and had been wailing so loud as he walked past his neighbor's place that his neighbor had come to his window to shoot him a very disapproving look and Jeffers claimed that they locked eyes long enough for him to flip his neighbor the bird and
then after yelling at him to go fornicate with himself so to speak the neighbor closed his curtains and presumably went back to sleep but then when the cops went to question this neighbor regarding the exchange he claimed it never happened no one had any reason to doubt the man he might have disliked Jeffers but sure not enough to perjure himself in a court of law right yet it was this particular point of interest that first made me realize that all was not as it seemed I heard from one officer who shall remain nameless obviously that
the neighbor had altered his story once he realized Jeff's Freedom was the line at first he said he heard Jeffers returning home but later he changed his story to say he assumed it was Jeffers returning home but that he never actually laid eyes on him he hadn't gotten out of bed and he certainly hadn't shut his curtains after Jeffers had flipped him the bird everyone kind of knew the guy was lying I believe cops when they say that they get a sense for lying cuz I developed the exact same thing over the years but if
the guy truly was out of his mind and he hated Jeffers that much that he was willing to perger himself then there wasn't much that they could do to stop him especially when he made such a convenient scapegoat the second of Jeff's two aliis came from a bar that he went to late that night a little place down near Cape Florida beach named buddies and the cops had approached the bar Soul proprietor who promptly handed over copies of the night's security camera footage yet when it came to entering the footage into evidence they decided it
wasn't clear enough of an image of Jeffers and refused to enter it but then instead of returning the bar owner's property to him they neglected to do so I found that out when I went to talk to him and since it had just been a blank VHS tape the guy wasn't exactly ready to lawyer up over it but he was still pissed about it and used it as a jumping off point to complain about the cops to me for around 10 minutes straight and I just let him talk and then I tried to steer the
conversation back in the direction of the security camera footage and it turns out he had the original tape on sight and was more than willing to show it to me now bear in mind this was back in 1982 so even the most Cutting Edge security camera footage was still very fuzzy compared to the kind of crystal clear images you kids can shoot today but Frank Jeffers wasn't exactly inconspicuous he liked bright colors only ever wore a wife beater swimming shorts and a pair of sandals and had a streak of bleach blonde hair kind of like
a messy mohawk I guess his fashion sense was part of the reason that he was so easy to ID when it came to all of his Petty crimes and when the owner of buddies showed me his security camera footage from that night there was Frank clear as day he couldn't see his face and I suppose in theory it could have been someone who just so happened to look and dress like him I'd never personally met the guy but from how he'd been described I was confident you could have shown that footage to just about anyone
who knew him and they'd say that's Frank Jeffers and there's no question that it was him in fact just about the only question I had at all was how the hell didn't the footage pass for a positive ID and to get an answer I ended up getting in touch with one of the cops who took part in the investigation prior to Jeff's death he told me that on the advice of some hot shot attorney they had got in touch with they've been told the footage was unusable in the eyes of the law if it didn't
display any prominent facial features scars or tattoos then it couldn't be used by Jeff's future defense attorneys and therefore did not constitute an alibi worth taking seriously I remember telling him how if that were me on a jury I'd have no problem considering it some solid evidence if the man himself was stood there right in front of me with that same streak of blonde hair matching the one on the videotape but the cop I spoke to just shook his head and told me it was out of his hands and on the advice of that hot
shot attorney the higher-ups had declared the tape wasn't a sufficient Alibi and that Jeffers was to remain the case's primary suspect and to me this seemed like a huge mistake so I was very curious to know who this wise attorney character was the Cop made a phone call then told me the attorney had been recommended by none other than Mr Stone I knew the cops weren't interested in reviewing the tape but Mr Stone sure would be especially if it was his attorney that had made such an error of judgment I didn't hesitate to contact him
but when I did he acted in a similarly obuse manner as the police department he thanked me for my concern but advised me to trust in the Council of his attorney Jeffers had been the most likely suspect and now he was dead case closed I asked if he'd seen the security camera footage from the bar out near Cape Florida beach and he hadn't but then when I told him that I was strong considering the possibility that Christen Park's attacker hadn't been Jeffers and that the real one was still out there somewhere Mr Stone suddenly snapped
at me I remember him asking just who the hell do you think you are buddy then in a round about way he accused me of trying to piggyback on a tragedy that further my career I told him that was the last thing I was trying to do and how the only thing that mattered to me was Finding Kristen's attacker before he hurt anyone else Mr Stone then replied that if that truly was the case then I'd respect the opinions and judgments of those more qualified than I anything less would no doubt only increase the pain
and suffering of those affected the last thing I asked him before he hung up on me was if he'd at least come and view the security camera footage for himself and after that the phone line went dead what stone said about only increasing pain and suffering rattled around my mind for the next couple of days and I really struggled with the possibility that deep down my motivations really were entirely selfish I figured that in his mind having the Parks family believe Jeffers was Kristen's attacker gave them a degree of closure and me convincing them otherwise
was simply unacceptable to Mr Stone who no doubt wanted the whole morbid chapter of his life to be over and done with but to me bringing the real attacker to Justice was the greatest gift in anyone could possibly bestow upon them the Parks family didn't need a sense of justice they needed real Justice and with each passing day it looked more and more like it was up to me to provide it I never reached out to Kristen before I didn't think that I really needed to but in coming up against such a solid brick wall
I figured that I had no other choice but to explore every possible Avenue of Investigation Kristen had obviously been interviewed extensively in the aftermath of her ordeal but I needed to make certain that the cops hadn't missed anything and so I called her parents and asked if I could talk to her as I've already mentioned Kristen had a great deal of difficulty recovering from her ordeal so her parents weren't too keen on her talking to a reporter especially not one from such a minor publication but after a long and heartfelt talk with Kristen's Father Patrick
he invited me over to his home to talk with his daughter at first Kristen told me very little that I didn't know already and anything that was new was irrelevant enough for me to understand why it had been left out of the reports the only thing that she'd mentioned that I felt was worth noting down was that one of her attackers smelled like cinnamon in this little detail had not been in any of the police reports but when I asked Kristen why she'd failed to mention this before she told me that she had on numerous
occasions in fact and had no idea why hadn't been in any of the reports and that's not the only thing that somehow hadn't made its way into the police reports I asked if she was 100% certain that it was her attacker who smelled like cinnamon and not just some kind of ambient scent in the place that she was kept like an air freshener or something Kristen told me that she'd never been so sure of anything in her life she'd been mostly blindfolded but was certain that while it was two men who abducted her only one
of them ever violated her and every time he did Kristen smelled sweet cinnamon on the man's breath before leaving I thanked Kristen for her time and thanked her father for arranging the meeting the detail about the cinnamon on her attacker's breath was entirely new information to me and I wondered just what else I was yet to discover it turns out the next big detail was just around the corner almost everyone in Pine Crest was familiar with Mr Stone and his daughter but I'd been investigating the abduction for almost 8 months before I realized that she
wasn't an only child Stone who had hosted the party had two children a 17-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son and while his daughter was a popular and high achieving High School junior his son had not been blessed with intelligence or social skills Stone Son who I guess I'll just call Junior had been diagnosed with learning difficulties at a young age and was transferred to a dedicated special Leed school but then that is just about all anyone knew about Young Junior he was rarely seen outside the family home and when he was he was always in
the company of either his mother or some kind of caretaker kids who met him said he was weird and that he mostly stayed up in his bedroom watching horror movies and reading comic books I asked a few of the kids who were at the party if Junior had come downstairs at all or had tried to mingle with the partygoers most said no that they didn't even know that the stones had a son but two kids said they had seen an older boy at one point not wearing a costume and talking to one of Stone's security
people I then got in touch with the cop from Miami date Police Department the one who told me about Stone's attorney ruling out Jeffers Alibi he said Junior hadn't been questioned at all regarding the events of that evening and that as far as the police department knew he'd been up in his bedroom the whole time you see what I was saying about how things just started to unravel I had kids saying Junior had been at the party if only for a brief period but then the police department told me Point Blank that he hadn't come
downstairs all night I asked him how they could be so sure of that and you know what the cop told me because Mr Stone told us the next time I called Stone marked the last time we ever spoke we weren't on great terms after our last phone call the one where he'd advised me to in so many words stop asking questions so when I called him that last time he wasn't exactly pleased to hear from me he picked up the phone I announced myself and then when I asked to talk to Junior he hung up
the phone no questions no comments just click and the line went dead and that was the early summer of ' 82 and I didn't give up on the case not by any stretch but that call marked the point at which my progress started rapidly slowing down without Stone support and with the police department quickly losing patience with me it seemed like I had little choice but to put the entire project on the back burner I had other fish to fry not necessarily bigger ones but I was a reporter not a cop investigations didn't pay the
bills writing articles did so I wrote articles on other stuff and let Christen Park's abduction case slowly Fade Into the background now cut to late October of 1982 a full year after the Park's abduction and with a being Halloween time I was thinking about it a lot Halloween that year was a Sunday My One True day off from work and I spent the evening shaking homemade rum runners and pondering over the case officially speaking it was closed but I knew Kristen's attacker was still out there and befitting the season it haunted me like a Restless
spirit I remember heading to bed that night in realizing that it was the very first time a story had gotten away from me I imagined myself coming up to 60 years old still obsessed with this one lingering unsolved case I'm actually laughing as I typed this because my personal prophecy ended up coming true all except for one little detail I don't consider it unsolved anymore and what I didn't realize back then on Halloween night of 1982 was that it wouldn't even be 24 hours before I solved the mystery and not only figure out who abducted
Kristen Parks but why on Monday November 1st I was at the Pine Crest Cash and Carry picking up a few groceries after work I've been thinking about the parks case here and there but with it being a work day I had much more of my mind on the stuff that I've been working on that day I remember grabbing a little Hamburger Helper cuz I wasn't much of a cook back then along with a few other items before heading over to the registers now I got in line then when I looked up I saw the lady
in front of me was one of Mr Stone's housekeepers who I'd met once or twice while visiting him at home we exchanged greetings then as we were chatting my eyes wandered to the groceries that she had lined up on the little conveyor belt along with an assortment of cleaning items there was a whole bunch of Halloween candy and I correctly assumed that the bags had been heavily discounted due to the end of spooky season but the thing that really got my attention was how there had been at least five or six bags of the same
candy and that particular candy was atomic Fireballs I remember saying to Anessa Stone's housekeeper that someone must have really liked those candies I remembered them from when I was a kid but I never did like that name Fireballs having my mouth burned just wasn't what I was looking for in a candy so I never paid any interest in them on account of their name alone and that's half the reason that I made the comment in the first place just wondering which little psycho like the idea of sucking on an atomic fireball instead of maybe a
Jolly Rancher or lemon head Anessa looked at me kind of chuckled a little then told me that they were all for Mr Stone's son Junior that he loved those candies more than anything and that they probably helped some dentist by himself a boat to go with his vacation house down in Key West and by that point Anessa was packing her purchases into her paper bags and just as she picked up the last bag of fireballs she takes a look at the bag and then at me and says something like uh cinnamon there was a very
very brief moment maybe only a millisecond where I thought to myself huh I never knew they were cinnamon flavored and then everything dropped like the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs cinnamon the exact same scent Christen Parks had smelled on her attacker whenever he violated her cinnamon the favored candy of stone son who lived his life watching splatter films in a windowless room on the third floor and was seen talking to the security guard who just so happened to be the last person to see her talk to Kristen parks at that party Frank Jeffers didn't
have a van he also didn't have a place to hold a teenage girl prisoner for a few days either not somewhere secure like a storage unit which is exactly where Kristen believed that she was being held but Mr Stone who suddenly didn't seem so excited on Seeking Justice for Kristen when the investigation suddenly involved his family he had the means to purchase or rent just about anything and maybe just maybe had the money and the will to buy his socially inept son a little private time with a young friend of his sisters that had caught
his eye back then as I put it all together it almost seemed too crazy to even contemplate Stone was a pillar of this community someone who was either respected admired or loved to even entertain the idea that he was a coldblooded psychopath who facilitated the abduction and violation of an underage girl it seemed like sheer Madness but then the more I thought about it the more it started to make all the sense in the world the Gathering hadn't been a Halloween party at all it had been a teenage Meat Market from which Junior could select
his victim the next chance I got I told my editor that I wanted to talk to him and through a series of oddly specific hypotheticals I told him what I was thinking and how I'd arrived at that position as you can imagine he stared at me slack jawed for half the time I talked especially towards the end when I got to all the stuff about junior or more specifically how he should have been the number one suspect but was never even questioned my editor thought about it for maybe 15 to 20 seconds then told me
that as long as I could write it in a way that didn't get us sued into Oblivion then he'd get it checked over by the papers legal department then out onto the presses if all we were doing was asking the right questions we'd be protected by the First Amendment and there was nothing Stone could do about it but as we came to find out that wasn't entirely true a few days later I was about a third of my way through the article when my editor called me into his office showed me A draft copy of
the next morning's paper right in the middle two pages of the paper Mr Stone had bought a full page ad for his boat showroom and another page to exclusively advertise his new SEO range of jet skis Stone had signed a 24mon long advertising deal with his employers one worth almost $100,000 he knew that with that amount of money at stake there was no way in hell that the paper's owner would run a negative story about him them and as a result my editor told me that we'd have to kill the Junior story it might sound
weird but I wasn't surprised seeing that Giant ad almost knocked me off my goddamn feet but I remember thinking of course he bought an ad of course he did he had all the power in the world and I was just a goddamn scribe for a crappy Small Town Newspaper if I push things any further I'd probably end up with a pair of cement shoes or something so instead of potentially risking my life as well as my job I opted for survival and killed that story I remember an old black and white movie that I saw
once when I was a kid I can't remember what it was about but some beautiful broad was crying to some bogey wannabe and how unfair and unjust the world is in response the bogey wannabe said something like that's the way the world Works kid always has always will when I first heard that I didn't believe it was true but I feel like the whole process of growing up and becoming an adult is finding out that it is and that a truer statement has never been [Music] spoken hi let's read I'm a longtime listener who happens
to be very active in the comment section of your videos I never had a reason to write to you before but that all changed last October after a group of neighborhood kids decided to harass me Gaslight me and otherwise make my life a living hell I also want to take the opportunity to issue trigger warnings for poor mental health pathogen anxiety gangstalking and interactions with cops sometimes I really wish you'd do better and make an effort to protect your Audience by issuing the appropriate trigger warnings but I guess no one's perfect first off sorry but
not sorry here I hate Halloween because if there was ever a day of the year that exemplifies all that's wrong with modern-day America it's October 31st to me it represents the absolute peak of our vapid disposable culture a time of year when corporate Fat Cats make millions off of morons buying masks they're only going to wear for a few hours now don't get me wrong I love candy just as much as the next guy but turning the whole thing into a giant capitalist circle jerk disgusts me more and more each year I hate Halloween but
that doesn't mean that I don't tolerate it but then by tolerate I mean I don't sit out on my step with a bucket full of rocks ready to hurl them at any kids who step on my driveway I don't leave a bowl of candy out for the little brats who by the way almost always come from Rich families who don't need to be extorting food from these less fortunate than them but I do leave a sign out front saying no trick or treat no exceptions so they know not to knock on my door the sign
worked in 2021 and it also worked as intended in 2022 which by the way they shouldn't have been out but last year a group of kids decided to completely ignore it and came walking up my driveway to knock on my door when I heard someone knocking I assumed it couldn't possibly be trick-or-treaters so when I opened the door and saw a bunch of kids wearing cheap fullbody Marvel hero costumes I was not pleased first off they looked way too old to be trick-or-treating the kid in the Iron Man costume looked like he was 12 13
at the most and when they all said trick-or treat in unison it sounded so entitled that it made me want to barf I looked down at the kid who was attempting to look like Tony Stark and told him that his costume wasn't even lore accurate he looked at me kind of funny and asked what I was talking about so I told him that the circle on the Iron Man's Chest is called The Ark reactor it's supposed to be yellow the fact that it's blue in those dumb Coro Fest movies is a stylistic choice they made
it a vibranium core to sell more Black Panther tickets when traditionally the reactor has been depicted as yellow or gold to signify different technological iterations and by the time I was finished all four kids were looking at me like I was speaking another language so I just stepped back inside and told them to buzz off and then slam the door in their faces I deal with a lot of generalized anxiety and pathogen control is a huge trigger for me so just that minor interaction had me feeling extremely uneasy as I went and sat back down
in my computer chair but no sooner had I sat down then I had heard someone knocking at my door for a second time I knew who it was there was no way it could have been anyone but those kids again so I stopped back towards my front door opened it up and then lo and behold it was the Trashy Marvel kids in their cringey costumes when I asked what they wanted this time the kid in the Iron Man costume told me you know we got a trick you now right and that alone infuriated me but
as he and his little friend started to laugh at how angry they'd made me I just exploded I yelled that if they came anywhere near my house again I'd be contacting their parents and then for the second time it would felt like as many minutes I slammed the door in their faces I was almost shaking with anger by the time that I got back to my computer because the level of entitlement in those brats was just off the scale they had completely ignored my no trick or treating son sign in fact I feel like there's
a good chance that the sign was the only reason they knocked on my door in the first place they were lucky I'm not the kind of person to call or talk to the cops for any reason otherwise I'd have been dialing 911 and giving their description to the dispatcher but being the decent and private person that I am I don't ever call or talk to the police and I tried calming myself down a little with breathing exercises and then tried playing a little OverWatch in hopes that that might Mellow Me Out but then we're talking
no more than 5 or 10 minutes later I hear someone knocking on my door for a third time I recall being totally unable to stop myself from letting out a sort of Screech of frustration as I marched towards the front door and when I swung it open with a face that probably looked like thunder I saw a very alarm looking lady and a group of kids and when I yelled at them asking if they were blind and couldn't see my sign they told me there was no sign I kind of scooted Ed past the grown-up
lady so I could see my porch fully then when I saw that there was no sign I felt like I was about to pass out those evil Marvel kids had stolen it I think and I screamed at the kids and the lady to get the hell off of my property and then walk back into my house and close the door I had to take a seat on my stairs for fear of hitting my head if I passed out and then decided if I didn't take something I was probably going to have a really bad night
in terms of my anxiety they always make me feel a little drowsy but they're super fast acting and they always hit the spot when I need it and I took one put up a fresh sign saying no trick- or- treaters but this time in my windows so no one could steal it and then went on with my evening in peace but that piece probably only lasted an hour I just started my second playthrough of one of my more favorite games when through the wall of sound my headphones provided I heard thunk thunk thunk and like
one hollow bang and then two more in quick succession the first scared the living hell out of me but the second and third sound sounded almost familiar and I had an immediate idea of what had just happened and lo and behold on the outside of the window pane where I placed my no trick-or-treat or sign three broken eggs were dripping down the glass and I was so angry that I was almost completely dissociating I remember seeing the eggs then the next thing I remember I was in the fetal position in my bathtub pretty much with
the knuckles on my right hand all swollen and bloody I took a second pill and then took a shower and then put some Sav On my knuckle before I decided to just take a nap if I hadn't CM down by the time my alarm went off then I just call a quits on the whole day and then take enough melatonin and doxy to knock myself out for the whole night and that was around 700 and when I woke up at around 9:00 I felt much calmer so I figured I'd just go play some more OverWatch
to take my mind off of things before that I needed to eat so I got dressed walked out downstairs and went into my kitchen to get myself some snacks none of the lights were on in my house and I prefer low light or darkness when I first wake up to prevent sensory overload so I figured that it must have looked like I'd gone out or had headed to bed for the night because no sooner had I lined up some bread slices ready for the PB&J than I heard the distinct sound of someone softly stepping on
the loose Paving slab around the side of my house the guys I hired didn't level the found foundations of the driveway properly so around the side near the gate leading to my backyard there was this one loose slab of stone that rocked and knocked whenever you stood on it even if you stood on it very lightly there would still be this sort of soft dunk sound and that's the exact sound I heard coming through my open kitchen window my first reaction was to sneak back upstairs to my bedroom where I planned on hiding until whoever
it was had finished whatever they were doing I didn't mind losing some stuff to some unhoused folks in a home robbery but I was terrified that whoever it was might want to assault me or do something terrible which would only add to the mountain of trauma I'm already burdened with but then and excuse the potential for over description here but as I got to the bottom of my stairs something caught my eye through the unfrosted portion of my front door's glass panel it's mostly frosted but there are small strips around the outside that are fully
transparent I glanc towards the door as I reached the bottom of the stairs but I didn't see a white crime van parked at the end of my driveway or more unhoused folks making their way towards my door and instead I saw a group of kids dressed in regular clothes who looked an awful lot like the Marvel kids who had knocked on my door just a few hours earlier around the same Heights it wasn't some home Invader creeping around the back of my house it was one of the tricker treaters no doubt come to do some
additional tricking in my backyard I slipped on my sneakers and headed towards the back door in my kitchen which led out into the backyard I waited a few seconds hand on the door knob and then flung it open as fast as I could rushing out into the backyard to be greeted by none other than the Iron Man kid and I don't think I have the words to describe the kind of satisfaction I felt when I saw the look of pure Terror in his Beady rat's eyes it was glorious and I felt like an avenging Angel
as I slam my body into him as he tried to escape Escape he had only one way to run but since I caught him by surprise I was able to cut him off in a very effective manner I never been much of a fighter and I never played any sports in high school at all so I didn't know the first thing about tackling or taking anybody down but let me tell you throwing all 243 lbs of myself at this kid as hard as I could manage that sure as hell did the trick he smashed into
the wood fencing at the side of my house so hard he basically slid down and afterwards before trying to find his feet again I say tried because you can bet your ass that I didn't let him and when he tried to scream I found myself instinctually going for his throat and mouth to stifle his cries and he was so much shorter than me and so much weaker that it almost seemed way too easy to just snatch him up like that and then one by one I wrapped both my hands around his throat and squeezed the
way it cut off all of his breath and completely silenced him was nothing short of Exquisite I might add but as I squeezed and squeezed lifting him off the ground and feeling his little legs kicking Out Underneath Him I realized that if I squeezed any harder I'd be in danger of crushing his neck and outright killing him I didn't want to kill him I just wanted to scare the kid and since I happen to know the difference between choking his breath and choking his artery don't ask how I know this I decided to mess with
him a little bit I loosened up my overall grip on his neck but focused my grip on either side of his laryn which had the effect of slowing down the blood supply to his brain and that's all I had to do was count to five and the kid went from flailing around like a fish out of water to limp as a wet noodle I shouldn't have laughed but my god did his dumb little face look hilarious as he started to snore his eyelids were half open and his eyes were rolling into their sockets as I
laid him down and started dragging them further into my backyard the kid woke up again by the time we reached the grass but he was so woozy and Light headed that not only did he have no clue what was happening but he didn't seem to know where he was either he said a name Brian or Ryan or something thinking maybe it was his friend and not me who was dragging him across the grass I think but when I stopped dragging him and he turned to look I got to enjoy a second look of pure pant
wetting fear in his beady little eyes he managed to stammer out something that please don't before I started to approach him then as he rolled over and tried to get up and run off with his back to me I took an arm around his throat and began to choke him again I have to reiterate at this point I'm not a bad guy so at no point did I actually planned on killing this kid but having said that it was still a lot of fun making him think that I was going to do so and as
I squeezed in just the right spot on his neck I told him those were the final few moments of his life then just as he really started to Buck and roll around he went limp again and then I I laid him back down in the grass I kind of wish that I had the presence of mind to get it all on camera because I think I'd have watched it back a h hundred times by now just laughing at how Darkly humorous this all really was I'd have sent the kid and his family a copy of
the recording too just so they can see the moment that I laid him down in the turf and began stroking his hair I wasn't trying to be creepy about it and I didn't do it cuz it excited me not in the way that you're probably thinking I did it because that time it really did look like he was just sleeping and he made that weird snoring sound even louder than the first time a few seconds later when he woke up for a second time he was just as confused and groggy as the first then right
as he looked at me almost to ask who are you I told him you're dead kid Welcome to Hell and at that moment he peed his pants the kid straight up heat his pants right there in front of me as tears started to well up in his eyes and he starts to hyperventilate I had to smack him full force across the face to stop him from going into shock I think and this kid must have been 12 or 13 at the minimum and that's a Man In some cultures and there he was balling his eyes
out like a little baby just cuz he got choked out a couple of times for Retribution and I think his memory started to come back to him in that moment because he started blubbering I'm sorry I'm so sorry in between his little sobs I had the presence of mine not to say anything at all for a moment I just drank in the image before me thinking I did this I took control and I hadn't felt real Pride like that in so long and I could have done so much more to that kid but I decided
enough was enough and it was time to let him leave just not without a little warning first I told him by sneaking onto my property he was lucky that I hadn't killed him I also told him I had a right to peace and privacy and so whatever conflict we had ended there and then because I wasn't about to call a bunch of brain dead cops for the sake of some dumb kid but in return I expected the same from him he was going to keep his mother effing mouth shut and if he didn't if I
got so much as a whiff that he told another living soul of what had happened that night I was going to saw through his mom's neck with a hack softer violating her in front of him and then when I was done with her I was going to do the exact same thing to his dad only in reverse I told him I did care if I went to jail or what not that my life was a living hell and I'd be better off getting all that free medical care than having to pay for it myself and
I asked him if he understood and he nodded his head and then off he went scampering into the night with piss running down his legs and I could smell it well long story short the kid did tell someone and I've had the cops harassing me all year and all because that little jerk couldn't keep his mouth shut and take his punishment like a man instead of sniveling like a little boy about to vandalize my backyard I told the cops my truth which was how some dumb kid had tried breaking into my house and that all
I'd done was teach him how that wasn't a good idea I did acknowledge that I grabbed him dragged him around a little bit and shoved him off my property but I did leave out some of the parts which I'm sure you can all agree is that he completely deserved and I think that's only fair though because the kid said nothing about throwing eggs in my window or stealing my sign he left out that little part and you have to ask yourself which is worse criminal damage and theft of property or a little rough and tumble
with a kid that I did an effing favor for in teaching him a lesson he had no right to be on my property he had no right to steal my stuff he effed around and he found out and if I do end up getting arrested over this maybe I should follow through with my little promise to baby Tony Stark maybe I'll find out where he lives where Mommy and Daddy lay their heads and show him how some people are not to be messed with and I'll be damned happy to submit a followup from [Music] jail
just prior to 10 p.m. on Saturday October 30th of 1993 three men walked through the doors of a single story red brick Bar Named the Rising Sun The Rising Sun is situated in the northern Irish village of Grey steel a Catholic majority town of just over a thousand people which lies in the Northwestern coast of County londondary that evening the bar was hosting a Halloween party for the town's residents with a great number of them Dawning creepy costumes before descending on the Rising Sun to drink and dance till the we small hours of the morning
when the three men walked into the bar they were were wearing matching dark blue boiler suits with only their mouths and eyes visible underneath cold black balaclavas their sudden presence was barely noted by the bar's occupants who believed their outfits were little more than costumes but the men had not arrived to enjoy the party they had not brought Joy or rry instead they brought only death just 7 days earlier two delivery men drove a blue Ford escort into Belfast from nearby ardoin they parked just around the corner from frizzle's fish soup on the shank Hill
Road then after retrieving a heavy gym bag from their trunk they began carrying it towards the fishmongers seeing as it was shortly after 1: p.m. on a Saturday when the two delivery men arrived the fishmongers were extremely busy so busy in fact one of the delivery man Thomas Begley had to Wade through the crowd of customers alone having hoisted the the gym bag into both arms his plan was to place the delivery on the refrigerated counter in front of him but the 5B bag did not contain even an ounce of seafood because Thomas Begley and
His companion sha Kelly were not couriers of perishable Goods they were members of the Irish Republic Army's Belfast Brigade and instead of fish the bag Begley was carrying contained a highly volatile homemade bomb Begley's PL man had been to place the bomb onto the counter announced that it contained an explosive device and then ordered the fishmonger's proprietor and customers to make a swift exit the civilians on the ground floor of the shop were not his intended target and in reality the bomb was intended for those on the Shop's second floor you see that afternoon the
second floor of frizzle's fish shop was the location of a meeting between leaders of the Ira's Arch Rivals the olster defense Association formed in September of 1971 and intended as a kind of parent organization to various armed militant groups Who Remain loyal to the British crown the uda's twin goals were to defend Northern Ireland's Protestant population and to combat what was referred to as the militant republicanism of its Ira enemies according to intelligence provided to Begley and Kelly some of the most high ranked UDA officials in the country will be packed into an up stairs
room on that dreary Saturday afternoon meaning just one well-placed bomb could potentially wipe out their entire leadership but despite the Ira's meticulous planning they got two things horribly wrong the first was that the uda's meeting had ended hours earlier and the second floor of the fishmongers was completely unoccupied the uda's leadership made a habit of disseminating false information even among its lower ranking operatives to ensure their movements and whereabouts were difficult to track as far as most people knew their meeting was due to commence at around 1:00 p.m. but in reality it started at around
10:00 a.m. meaning that by 1:00 that afternoon not a single member of the uda's inner Council was present when the two Ira operatives arrived with their bomb but this was only the lesser of the Ira's two mistakes that day the primary one was enlisting the help of a Catholic bomb maker with extremely subpar bomb making skills as Sha Kelly waited near the fishmonger's door his role being to Shepherd customers off the premises Thomas Begley hoisted the gym bag onto a refrigerated counter in front of him once he'd set it down Begley planned to announce that
he had a bomb and that all innocent civilians should vacate the area but Begley didn't even get a chance to speak the moment he set the explosives hold all down onto the fishmonger's counter the bomb inside of it suffered a cat catastrophic malfunction and detonated prematurely Begley was killed instantly in fact he was practically vaporized by the 5 lbs of explosives the device employed but sadly he was not the only one to lose his life 63-year-old John Frizzle the fishmonger's owner was also killed instantly when Begley's bomb exploded along with his 29-year-old daughter Sharon and
13-year-old Leanne morray the IRA did indeed assassinate a member of the olster defense Association that day in the form of 27-year-old Michael Morrison who just so happened to have stopped by to pick up some fish yet their bomb also killed his partner Evelyn be along with their 7-year-old daughter Michelle 63-year-old George Williams also died in the blast along with his wife Jillian well 38-year-old Wilma mcke was crushed to death when the force of the blast caused the old building to collapse into a pile of rubble in total almost 60 people were injured by shattered masonry
and flying glass then over the next several hours broken bodies and bloody survivors alike were dragged from the debris by a mixture of emergency services and frantic Volunteers in the aftermath of what became known as the shankill road bombing there was an outpouring of ferocious indignation from Belfast Protestant Community one prominent member of the UDA Billy the Twister mcquiston told a British journalist that and I quote anybody on the shankill road that day from a Boy Scout to a granny would have gone out and retaliated if you'd given them a gun even though the Ira's
plan of attack had sought to minimize civilian casualties its disastrous execution meant most people saw the bombing as a Despicable and indiscriminate attack on Protestant civilians rather than a targeted assassination of the uda's command and control element shank kill's Protestant Community believed the bomb had worked exactly as intended but UDA Chieftain Mad Dog Johnny adir knew different Adair knew that he and his fellow Inner Circle had been the bombing's true Target but as the commander of sectarian militants Community tensions were his bread and butter and he wasn't about to let a good crisis go to
waste that night as he departed his home in a personal vehicle Mad Dog Adair was stopped by Northern Irish police officers and when asked where he was going Adair simply replied I'm a away to plan a mass murder detaining him meant signing the death warrants of many of their fellow officers so the police officers allowed adir to go about his business knowing all too well that killing was his business and business was good at Air's behest the uda's leadership ordered immediate reprisals just hours after the bombing the UDA claimed responsibility for the fatal shooting of
a Catholic delivery driver after he was lured to a bogus call on the outskirts of Belfast then on October 26th the UDA murdered two additional Catholic civilians in a machine gun attack on a Belfast Council building that saw five others seriously wounded both attacks satisfied the UDA leadership's desire for vengeance but the attack's true purpose was to serve as a distraction make British Security Services believe that their target was Belfast Catholics and the redistribution of security forces would leave more provincial targets much more vulnerable targets like the Rising Sun bar lounge and restaurant over in
grey steel County londondary when it was discovered that the Rising Sun was throwing a Halloween party on Saturday October 30th the UDA leadership ordered the commander of their londondary Brigade Billy McFarland to plan and execute an attack McFarland called three of his top henchmen Steven Irwin Jeffrey Dey and torren Knight then arranged to meet them at a safe house near the target they met on October 27th after making the safe house their base of operations began planning out their attack on the Rising Sun they even performed a reconnaissance mission and stopped by the bar for
drinks one night to scout out entrances exits and optimal firing positions it's chilling to think about just a few nights before the attack the bar Patron shared drinks with the same men that just a few nights later would return to murder them finally on the evening of October 30th 1993 Irwin Deanie and Knight traveled by car to the Rising Sun with a fourth man driving ahead of them as a scout when the Scout observed that the Halloween party was in full swing he gave the nod to the UDA kill team who parked their stolen opal
Cadet outside the bar and then walked inside wearing boiler suits balaclavas when three men walked inside armed with an assault rifle a 12 gauge shotgun and a semi-automatic pistol some partygoers believed it was nothing more than a practical joke one or two of them laughed at the sight of the men dressed in their matching boiler suits poorly fitting masks and old replica Firearms but while they might have been old their weapons were most certainly Not Mere replicas and as more and more of the bars patrons realized was happening they fell silent when Steven Irwin armed
with a Czech AK variant known as the vz58 saw the terror in his victim's eyes he smiled then after raising his rifle he screamed trick-or treat before he began shooting Jeff Deanie armed with a 9mm handgun fired a single Bullet at a woman trying to flee before his weapon jammed and he spent the remainder of the attack trying to clear the stoppage but with was not calm or coolhand enough to do so torren Knight armed with the shotgun guarded the entrance while the shooting was taking place and was the only one not to fire his
weapon in Anger Steven Irwin on the other hand fired a total of 60 steel jacketed bullets of the partygoers from his fully automatic assault rifle it took just over 2 seconds to spray the interior of the Rising Sun with exactly 30 rounds of 762 ammunition with each round traveling at over 700 m/ second they chewed through the wooden frames of tables and chairs punched fist-sized holes through human bodies and sent glass splinters exploding across the room at speeds that caused them to become embedded in the unfortunate Patron's flesh when Irwin's rifle magazine ran dry and
his rifle ceased to fire a grim silence returned to the interior of the Rising Sun broken only by the groans of the Gravely wounded Irwin's torrent of Hellfire had been devastating but the bar's terrified occupants believed the shooting was over they began slowly emerging from their hiding places only to see Irwin replacing his empty Magazine with a full one one woman began begging Irwin not to begin shooting again he simply ignored her continued to reload his weapon then sent the first of his new bullets through her skull people scrambled for cover as Irwin once again
began spraying the room's occupants at random and again it took mere seconds for him to send an astonishing amount of lead ripping and tearing through fixtures and figures alike when Irwin's second magazine ran out survivors heard him laughing as he surveyed the death and destruction he'd wrought Irwin was still cackling as he walked outside climbing into their stolen car and escaped with his fellow gunman the first emergency services to arrive on the scene later described it as is a living hell dead and dying patrons were scattered across the Dance Floor while entire sections of the
floor had become glittering puddles of blood and broken glass eight people had been killed outright while 19 were treated in the hospital for serious injuries six of the Dead were Catholics while ironically two of them were Protestants the deceased were identified as Karen Thompson aged 19 and Steven Mullen age 20 also among the the dead were Moira duddy 59 and Joseph McDermot 60 the others included James Moore age 81 John Mo age 50 John Burns age 54 and Victor Montgomery age 76 the following day the olster defense Association claimed responsibility for the massacre referred to
it as a raid and stated that the murders were quote the continuation of our threats against the Nationalist ele electorate that would pay a heavy price for last Saturday's Slaughter of nine Protestants a UDA member from West Belfast claimed their gunman quote had information that senior Ira men Drank In The Rising Sun Unfortunately they were not there on Halloween but our boys acted on the briefing they had been given the uda's public relations Wing acted with the same Dow professionalism synonymous with the troubles but behind the scenes there was sickening relation the gunmen were welcomed
home as Heroes with Steven Irwin being particularly boastful of his want and act of savagery he gloated that he' executed a Catholic woman who begged him not to end her life proud that he exhibited the same lack of Mercy as those who destroyed frizzle's fishmongers thanks to the British Security Service having heavily infiltrated both Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups identifying the gunman was remarkably simple since they were boasting of their involvement the names of the gunmen made their way from Pub to Club until they reached the ears of British informants over the weeks that followed
Steven Irwin Jeffrey deie and torren Knight were hunted down and arrested then taken into custody by Northern Ireland's Police Service during his first appearance on the stand torren Knight was filmed laughing taunting and shouting abuse at the victim's relatives before being led from the courthouse by BFFs Jeffrey Dei remained silent but Steven Irwin responsible for the vast majority of injuries and deaths called his crimes and I quote payback before adding that he'd had no remorse and finally in February of 1995 all three men were sentenced to life imprisonment for their involvement in what became known
as the grey steel Massacre torren Knight then received an additional life sentence for his involvement in the Catal killings in which three innocent Catholics were shot and killed by UDA gunman all three men should have spent the rest of their lives in prison but because of Clauses in the peace deal known as The Good Friday agreement Irwin Deanie and Knight were released in the year 2000 less than five full years enter their supposedly lifelong prison terms The Good Friday agreement saw the release of many such dangerous prisoners on both sides of the political and religious
divides Michael Stone Infamous for his grenade and gun attack at the funeral of a slain Ira man saw Freedom long before his sentence was up as did Patrick McGee who attempted to assassinate the British prime minister in the 1984 Brighton Hotel bombing but another prisoner to win his freedom thanks to the agreement was Shawn Kelly the sole survivor of the IRA bomb team who prematurely detonated their device in the fish mongers on the shankill road on in the name of progress Alan Gillis a poet and Native Son of Belfast wrote a poem of the same
title progress and it reads as follows they say that for years Belfast was backwards and it's great now to see some progress so I guess we can look forward to taking boxes from the earth I guess that ambulances will leave the dying back amidst the rubble to be explosively healed given time 100 ,000 particles of glass will create impossible patterns in the air before coalescing into the clarity of a window through which a reassembled head will look out and admire the shy young man taking his bomb from the building and driving home hey friends thanks
for listening click that notification Bell to be alerted of all future narrations I release new videos every Monday and Thursday at 9:00 p.m. eastern time and there are super fun live streams on Sundays and Wednesday nights if you got a story be sure to submit them over at my email let's read submissions gmail.com and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video and if you want to support me even more grab Early Access to all future narrations and bonus content over on patreon or click that big join button to hear about the extra
perks for members of the channel and check out the let's three podcast where we can hear all all of these stories and big compilations located anywhere you listen to podcasts all links in the description below thanks so much friends