The Fragile Line Friendship and Fear in Teenage Life

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Back when I was just fifteen years old, my parents
moved us out of the city and to a small
town about thirty miles away from where I grew up.
I had to start tenth grade at a whole new
school with no friends, and was probably the loneliest and
most stressful period of my entire life. I was actually
kind of mad at my parents for uprooting my whole
existence like that, and a new bedroom and bigger back

(00:37):
yard meant nothing to me when I'd lost all my
friends and all my familiar hangouts. I guess that makes
me sound like a total ingrate, But where we lived
wasn't exactly a great place for teenagers lots of drugs,
et cetera. And so these days I get it. But
back then I was not happy. I was a complete

(00:57):
nervous wreck. During the first week of tenth grade, I
had this idea in my head that I'd remain a
friendless loser until graduation, at which point I'd be so
socially stunted that I'd be alone for life. Highly irrational,
I know, and on the surface it seemed that it
was proven wrong within a relatively short space of time,

(01:18):
because around the start of my third week, a group
of kids invited me to sit with them during lunch.
I was a ball of anxiety, but they were nice
and told me that I was welcome to sit with
them during lunch in the future. That meant a whole
lot to me, as I always felt ultra scrutinized every
time I was walking among the tables trying to find
a place to sit. I sat with them for the

(01:40):
rest of that third week, keeping quiet and trying to
just blend in. They'd ask me a question every so often,
where I was from, what kind of stuff I was into,
and each time I'd try and give the least offensive
answer possible, again just trying my best to fit in.
But then come Friday, they asked me if I wanted
to hang out that night after school. I had to

(02:02):
really stifle my enthusiasm because it meant the world to
me that they thought that I was cool enough to
hang Then, when I asked where they usually chilled, they
told me the bridge. The bridge turned out to be
an old, disused railroad bridge that ran over a river
about a mile out of town. Every weekend, my new
group of friends would head out there with whatever tobacco

(02:23):
or alcohol they could get a hold of, because there
they were free to do whatever they wanted. Remember I
told you about growing up in a kind of bad neighborhood. Well,
I was already into all kinds of foolishness before we
moved out of town. It wasn't anything too bad, but
I'd already tried cigarettes and stuff, so it wasn't like
I was thinking, oh, no, these are bad kids, better

(02:47):
stick to after school Bible study club or whatever. I
was down to hang with them, and I was psyched
that they'd even asked me in the first place. So
at the end of school, my new friends come to
make sure that I'm headed down to the bridge that night.
I'm like, sure, I'll be there, and tried to hide
the spring in my step as I'm walking off. I
was legitimately euphoric. I'd found a new group of friends,

(03:10):
and they seemed like my exact kind of people too,
which is why I was so mad when some kid
came to sit down next to me on the bus
and told me not to go hang out with them.
I'm probably going to sound like a total jerk here,
and I'm embarrassed to even say this, but I thought
the kid who approached me was a total loser. His
clothes were dirty, he kind of smelled a little, and

(03:31):
had this wild red hair that he obviously didn't wash.
And when he told me not to hang out with
those guys, I figured that he was trying to I
don't know, sabotage me or something. I know that makes
me sound like a jerk and a bit of a cynic,
but I was so insecure in my status as the
new kid that I couldn't conceive of anyone going out
of their way to be nice to me. I kind

(03:54):
of just told him to get lost, then turned to
face the window and ignored him. But hested, he said
something like, I know it sounds crazy, but I think
those guys are going to try to hurt you. I
overheard them talking about shoving someone and if the fall
would kill them. I think they were talking about you again.

(04:18):
I just told the kid to get lost in so
many words, only much more forcibly this time, and he
did eventually leave me alone. But after I got off
the bus and walked back to my house, what he
said kept looping in my mind. My new friends had
invited me to the bridge, and they themselves had said

(04:39):
how it was a railroad bridge over a river. Had
they invited me there because they actually wanted to be
my friends, or was it a trick and they were
planning on shoving me off the bridge as a prank.
I think if the kid had said they're going to
beat you up or something kind of vague like that,
I wouldn't have given it to second thought. So he

(05:00):
specifically said shoving and falling. I remember thinking how the
kid that warned me might have known all about their
hangout enough to give me a very specific kind of
fake warning, if that makes sense. After all, I knew
next to nothing about all the social dynamics in town,
which in practical terms meant that I had no idea

(05:21):
who to believe or who to trust. I spent like
an hour thinking it over. Then when the time came
to go meet my new buddies over at the bridge,
I was a total coward and decided not to go.
I say coward because that's what it felt like at
the time. I was too scared to go meet them,
just in case the whole thing was some ruse to
prank me. But I was also scared that I was

(05:44):
about to blow my one shot at fitting in with
a friend group at school. I wrestled with the two
concepts back and forth for another two hours. Then, when
I realized it was probably too late to go hang out,
I just sort of sunk into a mild depression. The surface,
the reaction was as bad as I feared. My new

(06:04):
friends said I couldn't sit with them any more. Then
I'd been rude as hell to refuse their invitation. They
said they'd waited around almost all night waiting for me
to show and that I hadn't shown them the courtesy
of showing up for five minutes. And at the time
I was horrified. I'd reassured myself that maybe they wouldn't

(06:24):
react so poorly. Then there they were, kicking me out
of that friend group before I even had a chance
to really prove myself. I was devastated and went and
sat on my own, And to add insult to injury,
the stinky redhead kid came and sat with me, almost
like he felt sorry for me. Now I know what

(06:46):
you're thinking, stinky redhead kid is a cool guy in
these days, I would totally agree with you, But at
the time, stupid fifteen year old me had nothing but
contempt for him. If the moral of this story is
that kids can be cruel, and then, sadly, I guess
that example extends to me too, because once again I
told the kid to buzz off, leave me alone and

(07:08):
not even think about sitting with me. Ever. Again, I
condemned myself to be lonely again for about a week until,
by a total happenstance, another new kid joins tenth grade.
I figured this was my shot to make a friend.
He was a dude and looked like they might be
into similar stuff as me, so hopes were high. Next

(07:30):
chance I got, I sat with him during lunch period
and got talking to him a little. But then the
next lunch period guess who called him over to their table.
You guessed it the old friend group that I was
very briefly a member of. I thought they did it
on purpose, and I guess on one level, they kind
of did it. Seemed like they kicked me out of

(07:50):
one friend group and now they were denying me the
chance to form another. Like a nightmare scenario where the
guys I thought were going to be my friends kind
of turned out to be my bullies. They had me
sinking further into that very teenage flavored depression. Seeing this
new kid doing all the stuff that I should have
been doing with the people I should have been doing

(08:11):
it with, And every Friday night for weeks on end,
I'd be lying in my bedroom totally depressed and wondering
what those guys were doing out at the bridge. They
obviously hadn't been planning to pull a prank on me,
because the new kid had been hanging with them for weeks,
probably down at the bridge too, And if they had
pranked him, especially by shoving him off the bridge, he

(08:32):
sure was handling that well. Again, this had me totally depressed,
and above all, I am out of my mind furious
with that stinky redhead kid. I thought he totally tricked
me into not hanging out with my future friend group,
and probably so he could just have me all to himself, which,
to be fair, is exactly what I'd try to do
with the new new kid who joined tenth grade after

(08:54):
I did. I remember one Friday night just stewing in
my hatred for that stink kid, fantasizing about giving him
the old right there fred in the cafeteria. But then
the next day, when I was throwing a ball around
with my dad, he said that if they kicked me
out without a second thought. Those kids weren't friends in

(09:14):
the first place, and that in the end, I'd be
happy that I didn't go down to the bridge that
Friday night, because I wouldn't be stuck hanging out with
a bunch of losers who are so fickle. At the time,
it was sort of reassuring, but neither of us had
any idea just how right he really was. The next morning,

(09:35):
so Sunday, I'd been awake for maybe two or three
hours before I realized that there was a kind of
strangeness in the air. I hadn't been in town long,
but weekends there were like weekends anywhere lots of people
got the day off. Kids aren't at schools, so I
was used to seeing people walking down the street, either
by themselves or with their dogs. There was also this

(09:59):
group of three kids who used to routinely ride their
bikes up and down the street. I saw them after
school sometimes and always saw them on weekends. But that
whole Sunday morning, for at least two to three hours,
I didn't see a single person walking down the street,
and nothing but a single car, which was my mom
returning home from the grocery store before it closed early.

(10:21):
I remember how when I got home, I went downstairs
to see if she brought back any snacks or anything,
and I could immediately tell something was wrong. She called
my dad down into the kitchen, and when he got there,
Mom told me to go up to my room. I
asked why, and she snapped at me, telling me to
do as I was told. Dad shut the kitchen door

(10:43):
behind me, and I walked all the way to the stairs,
but stopped on the first few steps so I could
listen in on what they were saying. I couldn't make
out every word they said, but I got enough to
know that a dead body had been found in the
woods outside of town, and that the rumor going round
was that it was a kid from my high school.
I was shocked, horrified even but I also had no

(11:06):
way of knowing which kid had been found dead. Like
I said, I had literally zero friends to call about it.
And this is before social media, so it's not like
I could just search up some hash tag or scroll
through a bunch of feed to read what people were
saying about it. I had to wait until school the
next morning to get any real info, and then just

(11:27):
after eight a m. We got an announcement from the
principal saying that we were all to file into the
gymnasium for a special assembly. So that's what he did.
Me and all the other kids walked off to the
school's gym, except it wasn't all the kids, and I
think I might have been one of the first people
to get an inkling of what had happened that Saturday night.

(11:50):
As all the kids were filing into the gym, piling
onto the bleachers or taking seats on the floor in
front of it, I noticed that one particular group was
nowhere to be seen. I've been in the habit of
keeping an eye out on my old friend group, mainly
out of bitterness. To be perfectly honest, I wanted to
know where they were as much as possible so I
could just avoid them. So as everyone's walking through the

(12:13):
gym doors, I'm looking out for the group, but more
and more kids are filling up the gym, and there's
no sign of my old friend group anywhere. Eventually, and
once they're sure no one else is due to show up,
one of the teachers closes the gymnasium doors, but still
my old friend group are a no show, and then

(12:34):
it hits me. Either one of them ended up being
the body they pulled out of the woods, or they'd
done something truly terrible. Once the doors were closed, the
principal started telling us about how something terrible had happened
over the weekend, and the terrible thing was that a
tenth grader had been found dead in the woods just

(12:56):
outside of town. Obviously, quite a few of us had
her rumors by that point, but having it confirmed by
an official was still very shocking, and I remember the
gasps and oh my gods. After the announcement was made,
we were told that if any of us had any information,
we were to approach the school resource officer. It didn't

(13:17):
matter if classes were in session. If he had any info,
you had reported immediately. We weren't told who exactly had
died either. We were quick to figure out who was
missing from the gym since a group of five kids
were absent from school that day, but we didn't know
which of them had been the one to lose their life.
It took a while for the truth to come out,

(13:39):
but I always had a good feeling that something very
specific had happened, and when the truth did finally come out.
It turned out I was exactly right. The dead body
found in the woods had belonged to the new kid,
the one who joined tenth grade shortly after I did.
He'd been found in a shallow stretch of river just

(14:01):
below the old railroad bridge, the same place my former
friend group used to hang out on a Friday night.
According to forensics, it appeared as if the kid had
jumped off the bridge thinking the river was much deeper
than it was, but in reality it was only shin
deep in the section he landed. He broke both of

(14:21):
his legs, injured one of his arms in the fall,
than after failing to drag himself out of the water
with his one good arm, he drowned after becoming exhausted.
There was a brief period when every one in town
thought that it was some kind of accident. You know,
the kids were drinking, maybe doing drugs. Then all of
a sudden, one of them believed that he could fly

(14:42):
and tried jumping off the bridge. A lot of the
more hysterical folks in town were blaming the kid's death
on drugs, like that old L. S. D story where
the college kid tries jumping off his dorm's roof because
he was high on acid and thought that he was Superman.
The same thing happened in our town, but only for
maybe a few days at most, because once we all

(15:04):
found out what actually happened, the reaction was very different.
At first, all we knew was that the kid had
fallen off the bridge somehow. The drug theory was prominent,
and a lot of people figured that some kind of
accident had occurred, but a handful of other folks suggested
that the new kid had been pushed. I feel like

(15:24):
that was one of the more extreme or less popular theories,
because people were asking themselves, why would they just murder
the new kid like that. My potential new friends might
have been a bunch of burnouts, but they weren't evil,
were they? And to this day I still don't quite
know if it was an act of pure evil. But
the cops sure decided that the law had been broken,

(15:47):
and when the news broke that the kids had been
arrested had sent shockwaves through the local community. And when
they were initially being questioned by the cops, it only
took a little pressure for one of them to start
singing like a canary. The whole thing was supposed to
have been nothing but a prank pushed the new kid
off the bridge the worse They thought what happened was

(16:07):
that he'd get wet before having to walk home in
wet clothes while they laughed from up above. But that's
not what happened, and they didn't realize what was actually
happening until it was far too late. Apparently, the kids
on the bridge ran down, dragged him out of the water,
and tried to save his life, but it was no good.
They couldn't revive him, and when they realized he was dead,

(16:29):
they just ran off and left him there. The following night,
someone was walking their dog down by the river and
it was them that found the body. One kid ended
up going to juvie for a second degree murder, and
I think one other kid went down for assisting him,
but the other three kids got away with it completely.
I guess the cops could only charge the pusher and

(16:52):
the one who lied to help cover it up, but
the other three kids got to go back to school
like nothing had happened at all. They were complete pariahs
for the remainder of high school. They never got that
stink off themselves. But there was also someone I owed
an apology to and that was stinky redhead kid. Carl

(17:13):
and I were friends for almost twenty years afterwards, right
up until the day we lost him in a freak
car accident, and I think about him every single day,
not just because he was a close friend that I
lost so suddenly, but because if it wasn't for him,
I might not be around to enjoy a single day
without him. So here's to you, Karl, and here's to

(17:36):
all true friends, because Lord knows they're hard to come by.
My wife and I met when we were still at
n YU, and after we had our first child, we

(17:56):
held out for nine years in Tribeca before we moved upstate.
I still miss living in Tribeca for a whole bunch
of reasons, but it was not a place you wanted
to raise a child, So after checking out a bunch
of properties around Rochester and Buffalo, we ended up moving
to a small, quiet town in western New York. Two

(18:17):
years unto living in our new home, my son was
almost twelve and my wife and I had just welcomed
our daughter into the world. My son had made his
first real friend during the first year of middle school,
and as the weather got better, and better. As the
summer approached, he and his new buddy would play outside
more and more. His new friend lived just down the

(18:37):
street from us, and boy was he a character. He
had a very act of imagination and would invent all
kinds of scenarios and games for them to play. For example,
one time he called her house and had me pass
along a message to my kid. That message being aliens
had invaded his back yard and he needed my son
to come over and help fight them off. My kid

(19:00):
knew that he wasn't serious, of course, but he still
played along as he begged my permission to head over
to his buddy's house so they could save the world.
I kind of played along too, told him to destroy
the mothership by seven p m. At the latest, then
off he went to massacre extra terrestrials. So this carries
on all summer with my son getting calls about pirate ships, vampires,

(19:24):
or mutant squirrels. And then one day he gets a
call from his buddy down the street and they arranged
to meet up later that day. I asked my son
what the scenario was this time, and he told me
something like, there's a man down by the pond who's
going to give us gold coins if we go on
a quest with him, and I was like, okay, well

(19:44):
have fun and carried on with whatever I was doing,
and then dad brain kicked in. My son had battled
interdimensional invaders, he'd slain three headed dragons, and he'd blasted
off to Mars with his buddy in the passenger seat
of their rocket, but never in all the time they'd
been playing together, had they ever dealt with a man,

(20:07):
let alone one that was offering a reward for something
suspiciously vague like a quest. I walked up to my
son's room and asked him if the man his friend
referred to was actually real, and he gave me a
look like I was crazy and told me no, of
course he's not real, And at first I took his
word for it, while as time ticked by, the old

(20:30):
dad brain persisted. So I walked back up to my
son's room and asked if he was sure that the
man was just made up. He thought about it and
told me I guess so, but I could clearly see
that he wasn't one hundred percent sure, So instead of
just letting him head down to the pond, I decided
to call his buddy's parents to see if they knew

(20:51):
anything about this man. I gave them a call, and
I was originally hoping to talk to my son's friend,
but his parents told me that he'd already left the
house on his bike about twenty minutes prior. They then
told me that he was headed down to the pond,
but we're confused as to why he hadn't gone to
fetch my son before he did. I could tell that

(21:11):
they were starting to worry, because if their kid told
them that he was headed over to our place and
then he went someplace else, that was an obvious cause
for concern. But then, as much as I share their concern,
I didn't want to go freaking them out by me
mentioning a man who still could have been just some
figment of their son's imagination. I just didn't want to

(21:34):
make a whole situation out of something that could have
been nothing. But still, I told them that i'd head
down to the pond with my son right away and
just to make sure everything was fine. They thanked me.
We hung up, and I told my kid to put
his shoes on because we were headed down to that
pond together. And so off we went, and the pond

(21:55):
was only five or ten minutes walk from our house,
so it didn't take long to get there. But when
we did, I couldn't see my kid's buddy anywhere. I
figured maybe he rode his bike off some place else
and would be arriving soon. Because my son and I
arrived a little earlier than they'd arranged to meet. My
kid was still kind of confused as to why I'd

(22:16):
escorted him in the first place, but I told him
I just wanted to check the place out a little
bit and would wait until his buddy arrived to make
sure he wasn't lost or something. And that's what I
told him, And what I was really doing was scoping
the place out to make sure that there wasn't some
kind of diddler hiding in the bushes waiting for the boys.

(22:37):
I walked around a little just talking with my kid
and trying not to make him feel over supervised, even
though that's exactly what I felt like I was doing.
I've got my head on a swivel, keeping my eye
out for any kind of person lurking near by, but
I don't see any one, so I start to feel
a little less paranoid. But then we waited, and we waited,

(23:00):
but there was no sign in my kid's buddy, and
when I asked if he was normally late, my son
said no, and that it was normally early if he
didn't stop at our house first. And upon hearing that,
the feeling of paranoia started returning. So I asked my
kid to take a little walk with me, and that
way maybe we could spot his buddy riding towards us
on a bike. My kid is getting really confused at

(23:23):
how I was acting, but he doesn't ask questions. He
just follows me as I go walking off around the pond.
The idea was to get a better look at the
area that I had already and make sure that there
was no one lurking further away who might swoop in
the second I leave. The pond was in this piece
of semi wild park land, a jungle gym here, some

(23:46):
benches there, but mostly lots of wild flowers and bushes
and stuff, and I was looking around and over the bushes.
My son didn't know what to look for, so his
eyes were wandering all over the place, and that's when
he's spot something familiar that looked like it had been
shoved under a bush. It was his buddy's bike, but

(24:07):
his buddy was nowhere to be seen. I didn't see
what he was looking at, not at first anyway, But
then he crouched down and dragged the bike out from
the bush, with yet another look of confusion on his face.
He still had no idea why his buddy might have
shoved his bike into a bush like that, or rather,
he couldn't quite conceive of why someone else might want

(24:31):
to do that. I started calling out his friend's name,
and at this point he starts asking Dad what's going on.
I was honest with him. I told him I was
worried about his friend and asked him to join me
in calling out his name in hopes that he'd just
hidden his bike then gone off wandering someplace else. So

(24:51):
we're walking along calling out this kid's name, when all
of a sudden, it was my turn to spot something.
It was a shoe, barely visible among some reeds at
the side of the pond, and it looked like it
had been placed there just recently. My first thought was
to tell my son to run to his buddy's house

(25:11):
and tell their parents to call the police, but I
couldn't bring myself to say it. I just couldn't. It
was like an admission that something was horribly wrong that
and I didn't want to leave him alone for even
a minute out there, considering the frame of mind that
I was in, but then having him run with me
all the way to his friend's house that clewed him

(25:32):
in anyway, and by the time we got there he
was almost in tears. We had his buddy's mom walk
him back to his house, then me and his dad
called the cops before heading back down to the pond
to look for his kid. And it was a true nightmare,
literally every parent's worst nightmare come to life, and I
got a front row seat to watch a man lose

(25:54):
his mind. The cop showed up and took over the search,
then eventually opened up an investment into the kid's disappearance,
but to this day, he's never been found. The disappearance
broke the kid's parents to the point that they just moved,
and it haunted my son so bad that we ended
up moving someplace else too. It's a terrible thing to

(26:17):
say out loud, but he was never the same for
a while after that, like he was afraid of his
own shadow. But if that were me and I had
my childhood best friends snatched away like that, I would
be the exact same way. In the summer of twenty seventeen,

(26:45):
I moved from my small hometown of Barnsley in South
Yorkshire to the much larger city of Manchester. I found
a flat in a place called Moss Side, which people
said could be quite a rough area, but where I
lived was no bother. All people were nice, the neighbors
were friendly. Everyone just kept to themselves, really, but the

(27:06):
reputation of the place still kept me on my toes
for the first few weeks of living there. That was
careful where I went after dark. I always made sure
my doors and windows were locked every time I went out,
and I even did stuff like hide my laptop under
my bed and its sleeve just in case my flat
did get broken into. It took just three weeks for

(27:28):
me to have my first run in with trouble, but
when it came, it came from a direction I'd never
have expected, and nothing has ever topped it since in
terms of sheer terror. So the place I'd lived into
the time was a two story building, one flat on
the top and one flat on the bottom, with a
little walk up on either side and shared a back

(27:48):
garden out the back. Both the flat's wheelibins were kept
out the back, so every time the bin in my
kitchen was full, i'd carry it into the back yard
and pop it into one of the bins. I'd done
this about ten to fifteen times in the three weeks
that I'd been there, and it had already become a
regular and uneventful routine. Then one night, at about nine o'clock,

(28:10):
I was taking the bin out after I had done
all the washing up. I popped the bag in the bin,
just like I'd done a dozen times before, when I
heard a voice behind me say don't move. The voice
was coming from the other side of the fence at
the end of the yard, and it was so calm
that at first I thought it was just someone taking
the mick. I turned around and was half way through

(28:33):
saying who the bloody hell are you talking to? When
I saw him. There was a man probably around my
dad's age, so fifty something, leaning over the top of
the fence at the end of the yard, and he
was pointing a gun at me. Not like a handgun either,
it was a full on rifle, like a modern looking
one too. The second I saw him, I threw my

(28:56):
hands up in the air and felt like sudden trembles
coming over me from the adrenaline dump. I remember saying,
please don't shoot me, to which the bloke responded, what,
don't move. Then a split second later I noticed that
he was wearing a baseball cap with the word police
written on it, which was actually really reassuring for a moment,

(29:19):
at least until it hit me that just about anyone
could get a hold of a cap like that at
your average fancy dress shop. I blurted out, are you
the police? And all the bloke said in response was
lift your shirt up. He wasn't barking orders like you'd
expect the police to do. He just set it dead calmly,

(29:39):
with his gun still pointed at me. I think if
he'd have asked me to do anything else, like get
on the floor or put my hands behind my head,
I'd have done just that, no questions asked, because that's
something I've seen the police do before. But when he
asked me to lift my shirt up, I was so
confused that I couldn't help but ask why. The bloke

(30:00):
instantly went, do as I tell you, But again he
didn't raise his voice or anything. He said it calmly
and quietly. I didn't need telling twice. After all, he
was the one with a gun and I was bricking
it so badly that I just did as he told
me and lifted up my shirt. Without any clue as
to why he was asking me. I lifted my shirt

(30:23):
up and then put it down again, only for the
bloke to be like, hang on a minute, lift your
shirt up again and turn around in a circle. I
was beyond asking why by then, so I just did
as he told me and then lowered my shirt again.
After asking what this was all about. He didn't answer
my question that time either. He just asked me what

(30:44):
my name was, so I told him and said Tom.
He then goes listen to me very carefully, Tom, I
want you to walk towards me nice and slowly, arms raised. Okay,
I'm still cacking my but I was getting more and
more sure that he wasn't about to shoot me too,

(31:04):
so I did what he said. When I got close
to the back fence, the bloke goes to me, stop,
so I do, but then he says, nice and slowly
take the latch off that back gate there for me,
there's a good lad Again. I did as he said
and pulled back the latch from the gate. The second

(31:25):
I pulled it back, the bloke tells me step back
from the door, Tom, Then about five or six armed policemen,
all wearing helmets and body arm in and all that stuff,
came rushing through, but still staying as quiet as they could.
One of them was carrying one of those big door
smashing things. Then when they got to the steps leading upstairs,

(31:46):
he went first, and then his mates crept up after him.
It was like something out of a film, it really was.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. We don't really
see big guns like that in the UK, and we
don't really see small ones either, So to see that
proper commando looking blokes burst into my back garden, I
was just gobsmacked. We all just stood there, them waiting

(32:09):
on the stairs which led to the flat above mine,
me with my hands in the air, until the bloke
I've been talking to you said right, Tom, come out
the back gate there for me quick as you can.
I think I knew that because the guy had asked
me to leave the back garden. It was all about
to kick off. And just as I rushed out the
gate and into the street, it did. I saw a

(32:32):
group of police in front of me, and one of
them start saying run to me, please quick as you can.
And then behind me I heard the sound of the
police smashing the door and then screaming armed police. I
could hear all this screaming from behind me, and people
were coming out into the street to see what was
going on. As one of the police in front of
me said he need to come with us, I asked

(32:54):
them if I was being arrested, and they said no,
which was a relief. But then this one police woman
says that I'm being detained for questioning under the Terrorism
Act of two thousand and six. I don't know why
they've got to tell you the date of something like that,
but I swear to God right that phrase, the Terrorism
Act of two thousand and six has just burned into

(33:15):
my memory now. I was like, what do you want
about I'm not a terrorist, But the policewoman told me
not to worry. That's just what we've got to say.
They were going to ask me a few questions and
if I hadn't done anything wrong, then I didn't have
anything to worry about. I think once I heard that
it was that level of serious, I realized any pushback

(33:36):
was just pointless. If I'd have refused to go with them,
like I might have done, if it was just a
drug rate or something, then they'd have just arrested me
on the spot. So off I went to the police
station to answer all their questions. Because I wasn't being
interviewed under caution and wasn't formally considered a terrorism suspect,
the interview happened without a lawyer present for me. They

(33:59):
didn't take me to a proper interview room either. They
took me into like a family room with all the
couches and stuff that's supposed to make you feel a
lot more comfortable. It didn't really help, Like I was
still buzzing with adrenaline. Then, as they asked me all
their questions, I answered them as best I could. But
then some of the questions were very weird. They asked

(34:21):
me what my neighbors upstairs were like, and if they
ever spoke to me, if they were friendly, stuff like that. Obviously,
I'd only been there three weeks, so I didn't have
much to tell them. I hadn't seen much of my neighbors,
and when I had they'd seem normal enough. But then
they started asking me things like if I ever smelled
any strong chemicals coming from their flat, or if they

(34:44):
used the front or back doors to get into their flat.
Now I'm no expert on these kinds of things, so
I had no idea why they were asking me stuff
like that, but I still answered their questions as best
I could, and when they were finished, I was free
to go. They weren't searching my flat or anything, just
the one above, so I could go straight home and
carry on with my evening. But that, as you can

(35:07):
probably guess, was much easier said than done. The raid
was all over the news, so for the next few
hours I sat watching the TV and scrolling through my phone,
and that's when it actually got very real for me.
The previous few hours had been a bit of a blur,
but seeing it all unfolding on camera phones and seeing
the BBC reporter standing right at the end of my street,

(35:30):
it brought it home for me big time. I had
actually been caught up in a bloody terrorism raid, and
from what I learned later on, I was in a
lot more danger than I'd first thought. Once I realized
the bloke was actually a policeman, the one who was
pointing his gun at me. I mean, I actually felt
a bit relieved. Like I said, I know he was

(35:52):
pointing a gun at me, but I'm pretty sure that
he wouldn't just bloody shoot me. It just gave me
a good scare, is all. But what I found out
that the whole thing was considered a quote unquote delicate operation,
and that's because they were scared that whoever was inside
the flat upstairs was going to just blow the place
up if they got advance warning. And that's why the

(36:13):
policeman didn't just start screaming at me when he saw me,
and why they very subtly evacuated the neighbors on both
sides of us. They were about to do the same
thing with me when I took the bin out, and
that's where it all started for me, getting a gun
pointed at me instead of a friendly knock on the door.
I found out later on that it was all connected

(36:35):
to the Manchester Arena attack, which had happened just a
few weeks before. One of the people suspected of helping
the bomber was apparently living in the flat above me.
Couldn't tell you if anyone was arrested or if anything
happened to them after, but bloody how it was scary
thinking I'd potentially been living so close to someone who'd

(36:55):
been involved in something so horrible. Sometime in two thousand four,
the residents of bell Close and Ipswich woke up to
find a moving band parked on their street. The for

(37:15):
sale sign outside a vacant home had recently been taken down,
and overseeing the unloading of boxes and furniture were a
young and very happy looking couple. They had moved to
Ipswich from the much smaller coastal town of Felixtow, and
to their neighbors they embodied happiness, harmony, and hope for
the future. Yet, unbeknownst to all but one, the couple's

(37:39):
arrival foreshadowed a great and terrible darkness. On the evening
of December second, two thousand six, just over two years
after our young couple moved into bell Close, a member
of the local constabulary was patrolling the banks of a
nearby river when he made a horrifying discovery. The naked

(37:59):
body of a young woman was floating in the waters
of Belsted Brook. And within the hour the scene was
awash with uniform police officers, playing clothes detectives and white
gowned forensics teams. The woman turned out to be twenty
five year old at Gemma Rose Adams, last seen around
three weeks earlier near Ipswich's West End Road. Police discovered

(38:23):
Gemma had been addicted to heroin as a teenager and
had been working as a prostitute at the time of
her murder. Just six days later, on December eighth, the
body of nineteen year old Tanya Nicoll was discovered floating
in a nearby body of water. Nicholl had successfully graduated
from secondary school, but by age seventeen, was living in

(38:44):
emergency accommodation while prostituting herself to support a burgeoning drug addiction.
Police interviewed those who knew her and discovered that she
was a close friend of the first victim, Gemma Adams.
Detectives had yet to properly begin their investigation in Titania's
death when a third body was found in an area

(39:04):
of Woodland near Nacton. Twenty four year old Honily Alderton
had been three months pregnant when she was asphyxiated before
her body was arranged in a cruciform position. She was
last seen on the eighteen forty three train to Ipswich,
but after disembarking at the station, she disappeared. Police discovered

(39:27):
Honily had attended Coppleston High School, where her academic performance
had been exemplary. Yet following her father's death from lung
cancer in nineteen ninety eight, Honilly had become increasingly reliant
on heroin to cope with the grief. In the aftermath
of three dead bodies being discovered in quick succession, the
Suffolk Constabulary held a press conference before a gathering of

(39:51):
local journalists, and following the results of a preliminary investigation,
the Chief Constable warned all the women of Suffolk to
remain from frequenting poorly lit areas of Ipswich after dark.
The day after the press conference, the bodies of two
more young women were found near Levington. According to police,

(40:12):
twenty four year old Paula Clennel and twenty year old
Annette Nichols had been murdered via compression of the throat.
Paula Clennel was last seen on the night of December tenth,
and just days prior, had taken part in a man
on the Street style interview with a local news station
on the subject of the recent murders. A self confessed prostitute,

(40:34):
Clennel told the reporter that she was a bit wary
of getting into cars, but I need the money. Police
discovered that she'd moved to Ipswich around ten years earlier,
and had her three children removed from her care due
to crippling addiction to heroine. Annette Nichols, the oldest of
the five victims, had been drug addicted for around six years.

(40:56):
A mother of one, she had been employed as a
beautician prior to her but had since given up custody
of her child so she could pursue organized prostitution. She
was also the only other victim to be posed in
a cruciform position, as in the image of Christ on
the Cross. Given the backgrounds of the victims, the locations

(41:17):
they were dumped in the ways in which Nichols and
Alderton had been posed, the Suffolk Constabulary concluded that the
murders were linked. They launched a large scale investigation code
named Operation Sumac, with the Chief Constable declaring that public
assistance would be key to its success. The killer believed

(41:39):
to be a heavy set mail in his thirties or forties,
almost certainly lived among them. He was someone's husband, someone's father,
or someone's son. The police would do all they could
to bring the man to justice, but they were not
best placed to spot the signs. They warned the citizens
of Ipswich to be wary of anyone who'd recently had

(41:59):
their care thoroughly cleaned, or anyone who disappeared at night
for long unexplained stretches of time. The prospect left a
dark cloud hanging over Ipswich and its citizens wondering which
of them would be next. On December fourteenth, police held
another press conference where they announced that the investigation was
making steady progress. They discovered that each woman had been

(42:23):
murdered in a primary location before being transported to a
body of water or an area of woodland close to
a school or church. They also announced that they believed
their suspect was a violent, possibly religious man who made
frequent company with ladies of the night. They subsequently warned
the public to be on the lookout for any male

(42:45):
who had suddenly and inexplicably come in possession of women's clothing,
as it was believed that the killer was in the
habit of taking trophies from his hapless victims. The following day,
police announced that the number of officers working the case full
time had risen to six hundred and that support staff
from over twenty five different British police forces was lending

(43:07):
material or human resources to the investigation. Just five days later,
on December nineteenth, two thousand and six, the Suffolk Constabulary
conducted an early morning raid on a quiet suburban street
just south of the River Orwell. The name of the
street was Bell Close and the man arrested was a

(43:28):
forty eight year old man named Steve Wright, the very
same that had moved into the vacant house with his
partner over two years prior. The move had been an
optimistic one, with Steve and wife relishing the chance to
start a new life together following the former's failed first marriage.
Yet somehow it ended with the brutal murders of five

(43:50):
young women, leaving both loved ones and law enforcement asking why.
Steve Wright was born in Norfolk back in April of
nineteen five, fifty eight and was the second child of
an R A F policeman in a veterinary nurse. Due
to his father's career. The family moved around a lot
during Steve's childhood, and he spent his youth in Malta,

(44:13):
Singapore and Suffolk. Before Steve was even ten years old,
his parents underwent a brazenly bitter divorce. His father later
said that Steve's mother abandoned them, leaving the young man
searching for a mother figure he would never find. Steve's mother,
on the other hand, claimed his father was a violent
drunk and that she left out of fear for her life.

(44:37):
She also claimed that fear for Steve's the only reason
that she hadn't taken him with her, as his father
had vowed to hunt them down and murder them if
she attempted to take his son away. As a result
of his turbulent upbringing, Steve grew into a painfully shy
young man who struggled with both relationships and employment. He

(44:57):
left school at sixteen with no qualify cation PATS, and,
following a brief stint as a hotel waiter, joined the
British Merchant Navy. He worked as a chef on ferries
sailing out of Felixstowe, but after less than a year
of service, was granted a request for separation. Steve then
hopped from job to job, plying his hand as a

(45:18):
dock worker, a barman, a landlord, and a forklift driver.
But it wasn't long before he gravitated back to sailing
and he applied for a job as a steward on
the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth the Second. Steve spent six
years aboard what he affectionately referred to as the q
E two, and traveled all over the world in the process.

(45:40):
At every port they stopped, Steve was given a few
days shorely, but unlike his shipmates who spent their time
shopping or sightseeing, Steve was in the habit of visiting
local brothels. It became something of an addiction for him,
and his coworkers knew him to disappear for days at
a time before returning to ship, seeming quiet and distant.

(46:03):
At the end of his six years on the q
E two, Steve moved to Norwich and became the landlord
of a pub known as the Ferry Boat Inn. The
inn was located in an extremely rough area of Norwich
and was frequented by many of the city's ladies of
the night. Steve was believed to have been a frequent
customer of theirs, and this may or may not have

(46:25):
contributed to his eventual dismissal a mere five months after
he was first hired. Steve then moved to London, where
he was visited by his mother during the holidays of
nineteen ninety two. Patricia Wright later told journalists that despite
a warm initial reception, her son had quote changed completely.

(46:45):
On Christmas Day, Steve drank continuously from morning until night. Then,
when his mother suggested he slowed down a little, he
flew into a rage and threw her out of his home.
It was f this and f that she told report.
He said such terrible things. He obviously didn't want anything
to do with me. It was around this time that

(47:06):
Steve began to visit London massage parlors, but this was
an expensive habit unsuited to the minimum wage jobs he
tended to stick to. As a result, Steve began gambling
to finance his nightly companionship, but it wasn't long before
spiraling debts began to take their toll. Seeing no way
out of his present situation, Steve attempted to gas himself

(47:30):
in his car, and he was later found lying in
an alley in Haverhill before being taken to hospital. Steve's stepbrother, Keith,
learned his brother had accumulated thirty thousand pounds in debt,
all in just a few short months, and added that
the incident proved a watershed moment in Steve's life. Before

(47:50):
that he used to be quite outgoing. Keith said, he
go out for a beer, have a laugh and a joke,
but after he went a bit quiet it was hard
to get much of out of him. Following his recovery,
Steve went on a ten week trip to Thailand, spending
what little money he had left on pills and prostitutes.
He even sold his car and furniture to fund the trip,

(48:12):
and upon his return Steve was forced to move in
with his elderly father to avoid sleeping on the streets.
Having hit rock bottom, Steve appears to have undergone a
period of intense self improvement. Whilst lodging with his father,
he found a series of steady jobs which afforded him
membership of a local golf club, and was a regular

(48:33):
dapper dresser at the Affixed Hotels bar. Steve was doing
so well that he managed to begin a relationship with
a woman named Pamela, the same woman he would eventually
move to Ipswich's Bell Close with in two thousand and four.
The meeting marked a period of relative stability in Steve's life,
and prior to their relocation to Ipswich, he stopped visiting

(48:55):
brothels altogether. He had just six months after he moved
in to Bell Close, old habits returned with a vengeance.
Steve started off by visiting massage parlors, but by October
of two thousand and six discovered he could purchase company
for as little as twenty pounds from the street junkies
who roamed near his home. One woman claimed Steve had

(49:18):
visited her three days following the discovery of the final
two victims. He was a regular. I felt safe with him,
she said, But that night he turned nasty. He pinned
me down, which is something he never used to do.
He scared me because that wasn't like him. But when
I heard he'd been changed, I thought, oh God, I've

(49:39):
been in his house. He could have done anything with me.
I never thought it would be him. Steve's trial began
on January sixteenth of two thousand and eight, with his
defense hinging on the idea that although he was a
regular visitor of Ipswich's so called red light district, he
was not the woman's killer. Acution raised the prospect of

(50:01):
Steve having an accomplice, claiming there was quote no evidence
that her body had been dragged by one person. Just
over a month later, on February twenty first, and after
eight hours of deliberation, the jury returned unanimous verdicts against
Wright on all five counts of murder, prompting the prosecution
to argue that Wright should receive a whole life tariff

(50:24):
and thus never be released from prison. The judge granted
their request, and the next day Steve Wright was ordered
to spend the rest of his natural life detained at
Her Majesty's pleasure. Greg Bradshaw, Paula Clennel's brother in law,
told the press these crimes deserved the ultimate punishment and

(50:44):
that can only mean one thing, the death penalty. Where
a daughter and the other victims were given no human
rights by this monster. He will be guarded by the
Establishment at great costs to the taxpayers of this country
and emotionally to the bereaved families. However, the father of
Gemma Adams was not so quick to call for violence

(51:05):
when he said, I am very relieved and please for
all the families that this is now over. Finally we
can all start to get on with our lives in peace. Hey, friends,
thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted

(51:26):
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If you've got a story, be sure to submit them
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(51:48):
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(52:09):
Thanks so much, friends, and remember I just clogged all
of your toilets.