Unveiling Dark Legacies A Family's Hidden Truths

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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 (00:13):
Growing up, I thought my Uncle Ray was the coolest
guy in the world. He was my dad's younger brother
by four years, and while Dad was a straight laced
detective with the Santa Monica Police Department, Uncle Ray ran
a surf shack down the beach. He wasn't a loser,
not by any stretch. That surf shack was a brick
and mortar business with half a dozen employees and a

(00:36):
six figure turnover. But Dad still looked at Ray like
he was his wayward kid brother, even if he did
love him to death. He at a beach house down
there on the shore, and we'd drive over there a
few times every summer to hang out with Rain and
his girlfriend Nina. But then one summer we were all
packed up and ready to head down to the beach
when my dad suddenly told us Uncle Ray was busy

(00:59):
and we had to wait for another time to go
see him. We could still head down to the beach,
just not to raise and while I remember being disappointed
in the moment, I think I'd forgotten about it as
soon as my toes hit the sand. I was only
seven back then, so still very innocent, and the sudden
change of plan didn't strike me at all as suspicious.

(01:20):
But what I did notice was how different Mom and
Dad seemed to be acting, and how much they talked
in hushed tones while me and my brother played in
the sand. I didn't question it. I was too busy
building sand castles and all that. But then the next day,
Mom and Dad sat me and my little brother down
on the couch and told us that Uncle Ray had
been in a car accident and had gone to heaven.

(01:43):
I won't tug on your heartstrings too bad going into
all the details, but the loss of Uncle Ray had
me sad for a long time. But like all things
of that nature, the grief subsided over time and life
went on. I grew up, graduated, got it job, then
was living up in OXNRD with a girl that I've
been dating for a few years. When we drove back

(02:05):
down to Santa Monica to visit my parents, we hit
the road, had dinner with my parents, and then we
were on her way back up to Oxford when my
girlfriend got very quiet and MOPy. I asked if she
was okay, and she said, yeah, she just got a
little weirded out sometimes whenever she was near that part
of the p H and I asked why, And this

(02:25):
is what she told me. Twenty years before, her mom's
old high school friend went to stay in a log
cabin with her boyfriend of many years. She told my
girlfriend's mom all about it, where it was, how long
she was going for, and when she was expected to return.
So when that date comes and goes and there was
no sign of her friend, my girlfriend's mom starts to

(02:46):
get worried. And she wasn't the only one either. The
girl's parents called the cops, told them where their daughter
had been and who with, and then asked them to
go looking for her. A few days later, they got
the bad news news a car belonging to their daughter's
boyfriend had been found having been deliberately driven off the road.

(03:07):
He was inside dead from a broken neck, while she
was in the trunk, cut up and wrapped in plastic.
The cops never figured out how or why the girl
had been killed, or why her boyfriend had driven his
car off the road, but his prints were all over
the plastic wraps, so the conclusion seemed obvious. My girlfriend

(03:28):
said her mom took the news really hard. She met
the guy a bunch of times, and he seemed like
a really sweet dude. She used to get emotional sometimes
while driving down that spot in the highway too. I
guess being where it happened was just a little too
much for her. I'm listening to the story, something like damn,
that's terrible, and then my girlfriend said the girl's name,

(03:49):
sort of something like poor Nina, hell of a way
to go, and I think that it must have driven
for maybe a minute or two before I respond, wait
a second, did you just say Nina. When my girlfriend confirmed,
two thoughts flashed through my head. The first was the
memory of Uncle Ray having a girl friend named Nina,

(04:12):
and the second was remembering how he died in a
car accident, but no one had ever said anything about
it being on purpose. I asked my girlfriend if she
remembered the name of the boyfriend, the one that had
driven off the road, and I remember how when I did,
this sort of panicked feeling started rising up in my chest.

(04:33):
The only thing that kept it in check was this
little voice in my head saying stuff like it's just
a coincidence. This has pattern recognition gone wrong. There are
plenty of Nina's around, and you're freaking out over nothing.
But as soon as my girlfriend spoke next that reassuring voice,
got up and walked out like a rock star at
a bad interview, and she says, I think it was

(04:56):
like Ron or Rick or something. And then I asked
was it Ray? And she spun around in her seat saying, yeah, yeah,
it was Ray. Did you hear about this already? I
didn't say anything in reply, I guess because I realized
I had to concentrate on the road instead of the

(05:17):
chaos unfolding in my head. And then the next chance
I got, I pulled over to the side of the road,
asked my girlfriend to wait in the car, and then
got out and called my mom and dad on my
cell phone. It was almost nine by then, so Mom
was in bed and Dad was up watching TV, so
it was him that answered the phone. He could tell

(05:37):
something was wrong just from the way that I was talking.
So right as I'm asking if Mom is asleep or
just dozing, Dad interrupted saying, jes tell me what's going on.
I remember pausing to gather my thoughts and then just
asked him, Dad, how did Uncle Ray die? And he
told me, you know how, it was a car accident.

(06:01):
But then I asked him if it was really just
an accident, or if something else had happened. It was
his turn to pause, like he was sort of gathering
his thoughts, and then all he said was come by
the house tomorrow. I'll explain everything. And I felt weirdly
numb getting back into the car, and although my girlfriend

(06:22):
basically demanded to know what was going on, I couldn't
find the words to tell her until we were back
home and safely off the road. I had this irrational
fear that unless I kept myself together on the road
I'd end up dying in a car accident too, like
some inescapable loop from some over complicated horror movie. But
obviously that didn't happen. We got home safe, I grabbed

(06:45):
a beer out of the fridge. Then me and my
girlfriend had a teary heart to heart where I explained everything,
including the part where my dad had all but confirmed
my tears with that i'll explain everything line. She kept
saying sorry, like it was her fault for telling me,
but it wasn't her fault, it was raise. I could

(07:05):
barely sleep that night, and when I did manage to
drift off, I had this ultra vivid nightmare where my
dad took me into the garage and showed me raised body.
I woke up before he opened the coffin, but it
was enough to have me splashing my face in the
bathroom sink while I waited for the shakes to subside.
A few hours later, I was back on the highway

(07:25):
driving down to Santa Monica to talk to Mom and Dad.
I expected things to get ugly emotionally speaking, and boy
did they ever. Mom was already crying when I got there,
and the first thing she did was give me a
big hug and tell me she was sorry that they
never told me the truth. Obviously, I already had an
idea of what that truth was, but hearing all the

(07:46):
details was still one of the most chilling and disturbing
experiences of my whole life. Dad said all the same
stuff my girlfriend had that Ray and Nina had gone
to some log cabin for the week end. He was
supposed to beat turn on Monday morning, but then Monday
afternoon he called Dad from the road. Dad said he
sounded mad, that he was ranting and raving about something,

(08:09):
but nothing he said made any sense. He mentioned that
something happened in the cabin, but Dad couldn't get the
details out of him, and then all of a sudden,
rages hung up. Dad said he figured that he called
from the road because he could hear traffic in the
background of the call. Then later on he tried calling
Ray at home, but he didn't pick up the phone.

(08:31):
He called him the next morning too, but still got
no answer, which was the same day that we were
supposed to head over to RaSE to spend a day
at the beach. But then, literally a half hour before
we were set to leave for Rays, Dad spots a
car out front. He walks outside and its two detectives
from the local police department, guys that he knew personally,

(08:53):
and that's when they told him that Ray had been found.
That it wasn't good news. Dad didn't work homicide, and
even if he did, there's no way he'd have been
on that case. But he still got all the info
from his fellow detectives, and was all those extra details
that changed the whole thing from something they might talk
to me about someday to something they'd never willingly bring

(09:14):
up with me at all. The first thing that really
got Dad's attention was when the homicide detectives traced Ray's
movements to the cabin he and Nina had been staying in,
which was up near Redwood Deck, part of a collection
of five whose rental costs made their owners a lot
of money. The cabins were in a nice, sleepy patch
of redwoods up near the falls, but they were never quiet,

(09:37):
and apart from a couple of weeks during the June gloom,
the cabins were fully booked almost all year round, but
then during the weekend Ray and Nina were staying there.
A weekend in September, all four of the other cabins
were empty. The detectives found out when they tried to
find witnesses staying in other cabins, people who could testify
to raise behavior a state of mind around the time

(09:59):
of nina murder. They'd also heard about how popular the
cabins were, so imagine their surprise when they found no
bookings at any of the other cabins. They hadn't been
closed for the weekend, they hadn't been reserved. There was
just no bookings, none except Nina and Uncle Ray. This
led to homicide detectives questioning the owners of the cabins extensively,

(10:21):
but there was no indication they were involved. The next
things that didn't add up for the homicide detectives was
how on the day Ray and Nina were due to
drive back to Santa Barbara, where they were living at
the time, and just up the highway from Santa Monica,
they'd stopped at a gas station just hours before Ray
called my dad, ranting and raving. Only the clerk remembered

(10:43):
them acting perfectly normal. Ray pumped some gas, Nina bought
a soda, and then they left together like nothing whatsoever
was wrong. But then somehow, in some place over the
next twenty miles or so, Ray pulls over, chops Nina
into little bits, and then wraps her in plastic before
throwing her in the trunk of his car. The detectives

(11:05):
couldn't work out if Ray murdered Nina before or after
that creepy phone call he made to his dad, but
they know that not long after the call was made,
he went and drove himself off the road after unfastening
a seatbelt, or at least that's what appeared to have
happened according to the scene. I remember my dad telling
me all this with Mom sitting next to him holding

(11:27):
his hand. He was always a really strong, stern kind
of guy, but telling me that story was the only
time I ever saw him well up with tears. It
wasn't just the sadness of it all either. It was
the frustration of not knowing why, of having all those
unanswered questions about the cabins, raised state of mind, and
what he'd said during that phone call, because the phone

(11:49):
call he made during the day of the murder was
something that scared the crap out of my dad. Obviously,
once they learned about the call, the detectives wanted to
know what Ray had said to my dad, but all
he had to tell them was nothing. They asked him
to clarify, and my Dad told him pretty much what
he told me. It was just words. Dad said that

(12:11):
not a single thing that he'd said made any sense,
that it was all just random words. He said. He
concentrated as best he could, trying to work out what
he was saying, but then he got this weird, sinking
feeling when he realized Ray had just gone nuts. He
kept telling Ray to calm down, that he'd call him
at home in a couple of hours to see if

(12:32):
he was okay, but he never picked up, and that
was the start of everything. I remember how by the
time Dad had finished, I just felt kind of numb.
I rolled a few tears when my mom and dad cried,
but that was just because of seeing how upset they were.
I felt numb because I'd been thinking about it throughout
the whole sleepless night prior, so maybe fifteen hours straight.

(12:56):
I'd questioned it, accepted it, and then questioned it so
more before accepting it all over again. So when the
time came to hearing all the gruesome, gritty details, I
was just sort of resigned to it all. I guess
mom and dad kept apologizing too, for keeping the truth
from me for so long, as well as in a
more general sense that things had to happen that way

(13:17):
in the first place. I reassured them in every sense possible,
saying I understood why they did what they did, because
how the hell could you ever expect a younger person
to process something like that. But that didn't seem to
do much for them. I guess it was all that
emotional spilling out after years and years of pretending everything
was okay and not being able to talk about it openly.

(13:39):
We were all emotionally wrecked. By the time it came
for me to drive back then. When I got home,
I told my girlfriend how it had been my uncle
who'd most likely murdered her mom's high school friend, and
as you can imagine, that made for quite the talk,
and we talked about it a lot. I guess that's
the thing that helped me more than anything. Free therapy

(14:00):
I got from being with someone who genuinely gave a
damn about me, so much so that she never told
her mom what she knew, at least not when we
were together. Then over time we just sort of moved
past it. We broke up a few years later totally unrelated,
but I think about her a lot still and how
she helped me get past one of the single worst

(14:22):
events of my entire adult and child life. I grew
up in Greater Manchester in a single parent family. It
had always been me and my mom, so I never

(14:42):
knew any different, and as much as I sometimes get
a bit sad that other girls had dads at home,
I loved my mum more than anything, and I was
grateful for her. As I got older, Mom would tell
me things about my dad, what he was like, what
he enjoyed, and eventually how he died. I was still
very young, when she told me young enough for her

(15:02):
to have to really explain what she meant, saying Daddy
and his friends were in a sailboat on the sea
and a big wave came and knocked them off the boat.
Then Daddy and his friends went underwater, and that's when
the angels came down and took them to heaven. Because
it's nicer in heaven than it is on the bottom
of the sea. And it might sound a bit grim,

(15:23):
but years later, when I was watching SpongeBob, I used
to think, the sea doesn't look all that bad. Actually,
Heaven must be brilliant. But kids just saying think the
funniest things, don't they. No, heavy sarcasm is implied there,
and so yeah, that's how I grew up. Basically, Mum
told me early enough for me to just get used

(15:44):
to it, I suppose, so it didn't ever fill me
with the angster become the source of too much sadness
for me. But then came the day when Mum told
me the truth, and I'll be honest, that did change everything.
As I've already touched on, Mum to sometimes tell me
about Dad, but only good things, only ever, the good

(16:04):
things he loved football, he loved a good Indian takeaway,
and he'd worked for a building firm ever since he'd
left school at sixteen. He sounded like a nice guy.
He always looked after mum and he definitely never did
anything like hit her or cheat on her. But when
she was pregnant with me, he went on a lad's
holiday to Spain to enjoy the last of his freedom

(16:26):
before I was born, and took a faithful boating trip.
He went a little too far out to sea, the
weather took a turn, and that was that. Only that
wasn't that because Mum only ever told me half the story.
I was twenty three when she asked me the question
that kicked it all off, and I think I knew

(16:46):
from the moment she asked me that something bad was coming.
I was over at hers for a cup of tea
and a ketch up when she asked me, out of
the blue, if there were things that I never told
you about, your dad would want to know them. I
asked her what kind of things she was talking about,
and immediately suspecting that it was less than wholesome stuff,

(17:08):
purely from the tone of her voice, And she told
me that Dad sometimes did stuff that she didn't approve of.
She'd have been wondering if I'd only wanted to know
the good parts about my dad or the whole truth,
like who he really was as a man. She wouldn't
think any less of me if I said no. But
the offer was on the table, and of course I

(17:29):
said yes. Of course I wanted to know the full picture.
People are complicated and sometimes good people make bad decisions.
I'm also not one to say something very moody and
pretentious like some truths are better off buried, because I
don't believe that at all, and I'm glad she told
me the truth for the most part anyway. But I

(17:49):
could never have been ready for what she was about
to say, and so I wasn't exactly a plan pregnancy.
You see, Mom and Dad had loved each other and
knew they wanted kids. They were also very happy in
their relationship, so it was basically inevitable. But when Mum
gave Dad the news that she'd missed her period, it
hit him quite hard. He didn't take it hard, and

(18:12):
from what Mum tells me, he was as happy as
he was excited, but he definitely had this moment of
ah crap. I need to get my life together. Mum
said he wasn't the best at work, a good lad,
but no one you'd consider for a promotion, so it
looked like it was going to be quite a while
before he got any serious money coming in. He got

(18:32):
his head down and worked really hard, but Mum said
that you could tell he was getting frustrated because he
knew it'd be a hard road. But then he comes
home from the football one day with a spring in
his step, and when Mum asks him what schemes he's
got going, he gives her the old never you mind.
Mum said he acted like that for weeks too, acting

(18:52):
like he was the cock of the walk, smartest man
in England, and then one day that man disappeared. Not literally,
of course, that came later, but the cheerful, smiley, happy
go lucky version of Dad just disappeared. Mum said he
was acting like something terrible had happened. I mean that

(19:12):
level of sort of grief almost. She'd catch him staring
off into space, eyes all wide and scared, like something
terrible as following him around. She'd ask him what was
the matter, but he'd just sort of lie and tell
her everything was fine. Even though it was blatantly not.
He stayed like that for about a week, didn't improve
at all, and then out of the blue, he tells

(19:35):
Mum that he and his mate are going to Spain
for that lad's holiday I mentioned, you know, to enjoy
the last of his freedom. Mum's a bit surprised, but
she thought that she understood his thought process. He was
just mega's dressed about having me on the way, and
he needed some time to relax, so she just let
him do his thing, and he flew out to Spain
with his friend, and he was only supposed to be

(19:58):
gone a week, but then a week when by he
didn't come home and Mom started to get worried. She
got in touch with the police, and after telling them
where Dad had gone, they reached out to the Spanish police,
who went out looking for him, and the Spanish police
then found that Dad wasn't at any of the places
he'd told Mum he was going, but while there was

(20:18):
evidence of him entering the country using his passport, there
was no evidence that he'd left. That at least narrowed
things down a bit for them, so they started checking
things like hospitals and jails in the area. Just in
case something had happened, but they didn't find Dad anywhere.
Mum said that she had to wait another week or
so before she got the news, and when it came

(20:39):
she was devastated. A boat had washed up on a
beach somewhere in southern Spain, and inside it were half
a dozen empty sports bags and the bodies of two
dead englishmen, my Dad and his friend, Mom said. Two
police liaison officers came to talk to her about it,
the kind the coum to give you bad news. They

(21:02):
told her how Dad and his friend had been shot
at close range while out on a rented motor boat,
which had then washed up on the beach after drifting
at sea for some days. Neither the English or Spanish
police knew exactly why Dad and his mate had been murdered,
but they reckoned it probably had something to do with
a cocaine residue they found in some of those empty
sports bags. Mum was stunned because not only was it

(21:27):
unlike Dad to have anything to do with drugs, but
the cocaine must have been the thing he'd been so
excited about, the thing that he thought was going to
make him a load of money. It was a lot
to handle. As you can imagine, Mum didn't think things
could get any worse, but they did. It took a
couple of weeks, but they got much much worse. About

(21:48):
a week after those two liaison officers popped round to
talk to Mum, they called her back with some very
unwelcome news. Greater Manchester police had obtained a warrant to
search our house topped a box them because they suspected
Dad was involved in a murder that had happened before
he himself was killed. And Mum said the stress was
so bad that she thought she might miscarry. She didn't,

(22:11):
thank god, but it was that bad. All these policemen
walking around the house searching every nook and cranny for
god knows what. It was awful for her, and it
took ages before the police could tell her exactly what
was going on. But when they did, it was even
worse than she ever could have imagined. So round about

(22:31):
the time Mum found that she was pregnant with me,
Dad went into overdrive trying to bring more money in.
Mum said that he looked into all sorts of stuff,
all legal, of course, but then he met a guy
in a kebab house named Muzzy. Muzzy was short for Mustapha,
and although Mustafa had moved from Turkey to Manchester many
years before, he was an active figure in the local

(22:53):
Turkish community and kept lots of contact with its relatives
back home. Dad used to stop by his kebab shops
sometimes after going to watch the football and being the nice,
friendly guy that he was, especially after a few pints,
Dad and Muzzy used to talk a lot. He must
have mentioned my mum being pregnant too, and how he
needed money, because it was Muzzy who told him that

(23:16):
if he could get him ten grand in cash, he
could turn it into a quarter of a million quid
in just over a month. We knew all this because
Dad texted his mate about it, the one who was
killed with him, and the Spanish police got access to
all the messages because they recovered his phone from the body. Anyway,
Dad texted his mate asking if he's got five grand

(23:37):
lying around to go halves with him on Muzzy's little
investment plan. My dad's mate was obviously megaskeptical about the
whole thing. Like my dad, he needed time to get
that amount of cash together and he wanted to meet
Muzzy to discuss it before they handed it over, but
after they did meet to talk it out, it was
full steam ahead. Apparently Muzzy had made in the Turkish mafia,

(24:01):
who smuggled all kinds of illegal stuff into the UK.
At the time, the British border authorities were stopping loads
of their shipments coming through bigger ports, but that made
it easier to smuggle smaller shipments of things like cannabis
resin through smaller UK ports. Through his mafia connections, the
ten gran in cash would buy a pretty sizable but

(24:22):
not easily detectable amount of product that would then reach
like twenty times the amount of cash once it was
sold to street dealers in the UK. All Muzzy wanted
was a fifty grand handler's fee from the sales for
getting everything up and running, and then my dad and
his mate would have a hundred thousand pounds each, a
pretty life changing amount of money at that time. And

(24:44):
so Dad and his mate get the money to Muzzy,
he gets it to his mates in the Turkish mafia,
and then everyone has to wait while the wheels are
in motion. One week goes by, then two and all
the while Dad and his mate are getting more and
more excited. One day, Muzzy calls, but the news isn't good.
The shipment, their shipment was gone. He didn't get into

(25:09):
too much detail. Their ship had come in, the cargo
had been unloaded, and then out of nowhere, a load
of police swarmed the shipping container and the product had
been seized. There was nothing that could be done. The
money was gone, but neither my dad nor his mate
believed a single word of it. Muzzy been going on
for months about how it was a sure thing, how

(25:30):
his mates in the Turkish mafia had been smuggling millions
of pounds worth of cannabis resin without so much as
a sniff from the police or border control. Then the
one time it's their money on the block, their shipment
just gets jumped on. According to the text messages between
Dad and his friend, Dad had asked Muzzy for proof
the shipment had been seized. They couldn't exactly phone up

(25:53):
and ask about the shipment container, but what they could
do to make sure Muzzy was telling the truth was
call of the police and ask if a particular person
had been arrested and held because they've got to share
that information with families of people or even reporters. Dad
asked Muzzy who brought the container in and if they'd
been arrested, but Muzzy claimed not to know any names

(26:15):
aside from his mates in the mafia, and he's not
giving those up for anything. He said, if they confront
another ten grand, they can try again, But aside from that,
they were out of luck. Personally. I think it was
the last bit that really drove out around the bend.
He was absolutely convinced that Muzzy had robbed him, so
all the offer of a second roll of dice was

(26:37):
sort of like, I think you're that stupid that I
reckon I can milk another ten grand out of you,
and he and his friend were furious, so they hatched
a plan to get their ten k back from Muzzy. Unfortunately,
it wasn't a very sophisticated plan, as all it involved
was tying him up in a shed and essentially torturing

(26:57):
him until he confessed what he'd done. They told him
that they were up for trying another shipment, only doubleous
time to recoup their losses. Muzzy says okay, then agrees
to meet them somewhere to pick up the cash, and
that's where Dad snatches him. He and his mate then
tortured Mufasso with cigarette lighters, burning his bound hands and feet,

(27:20):
but Muzzy wouldn't confess. They kept going, beating him up
and burning him, and he gave them his bank details
so they could take whatever money was in his account,
but he still wouldn't confess to scamming them. The police
don't know exactly what happened next, but Dad didn't end
up taking any money, and Muzzy's body was found a

(27:41):
few weeks later, so we think Muzzy died somehow while
being tortured, and Dad was forced to dispose of his body.
That's why they didn't touch his account, because emptying it
would point the finger of suspicion at them if Muzzy's
body was ever actually found. After that, Dad and his
friend made a drastic decision. They were going to fly

(28:03):
over to southern Spain to a place where you could
buy cocaine being smuggled in from Columbia, then get the
train from there to Madrid to Barcelona and then to
Paris so they could get the ferry from Dover to
Calais and avoid the much stricter airline security. I don't
know how solid a plan that was, but it obviously

(28:23):
didn't go down for my dad like that, because after
meeting someone out at sea on this little rented motor boat,
he and his friend either got double crossed right there
or had their cocaine stolen when they were on their
way back to land. The empty bags with the cocaine
residue makes me think that it was the second one
that they got intercepted somehow because of the people they

(28:44):
bought from, one of them dead. Why toss empty bags
into their boat, It doesn't add up. I think they
were found by someone else, someone who either preys on
the small boats that do dodgy deals in the Straits
of Gibraltar, or someone they'd really really pissed off, I e.
The Turks. You see, Muzzy was innocent. The police were

(29:08):
able to confirm that a shipment of cannabis had been
seized at Falmouth Harbor, so Muzzy wasn't lying and my
dad had tortured him for nothing. I just pictured these
Turkish gangsters already annoyed that their shipment got seized, and
then one of their associates, gets kidnapped and tortured. You
wouldn't give a toss if his death was accidental. You'd

(29:29):
want the people responsible dead. No one knows exactly how
they tracked my dad and his mate down, but when
there's two English guys wandering around southern Spain asking around
to buy cocaine, I suppose it doesn't take long for
word to reach the wrong ears. I wrestled with the
truth for quite a while afterwards, because obviously, hearing all

(29:50):
that changed the way that I thought about my dad.
I don't hate him. I still love him, even though
I've never met him, but I do think he was stupid.
I know he did what he did out of love
for me and my mum, and there's a small part
of me that loves and respects him for that, but
a much bigger part of me wishes he'd stuck to
something much safer and much more legal, because if he had,

(30:12):
I'd still have a dad. In the small city of
Amstetten in Lower Austria, there stands a gray three story
building consisting of a regular family home and an attached
apartment building. It's a rather odd structure to perceive a

(30:36):
combination of old and new that sit in subtle contrasts
with one another. But for its owner, the structure constituted
his life's work. The owner, a retired electrical engineer, had
the apartment building constructed in nineteen seventy eight and even
included a rooftop garden for the third floor apartment. Tenants

(30:57):
reported him being reserved and polite. Yet he was also
so exceptionally strict, and of the many rules the building's
owner enforced, the strictest of all was that which forbade
tenants from entering the building's basement. You see, the owner
of the building was a man named Joseph Fritzel, and
he had a dark, dark secret. Joseph Fritzel was born

(31:21):
in Amstetten on April ninth of nineteen thirty five. His father,
Joseph Senior, abandoned his young family when Joseph was just
four years old. Then five years later, his older brother
was killed in action fighting for the Germans during World
War Two. This left Maria, his mother, to raise little
Joseph alone, who later claimed that she was both physically

(31:42):
and emotionally abusive. At eighteen, Joseph began attending the HTL
Technical College graduating in nineteen fifty six with a degree
in electrical engineering, and it was also around this time
that he married a seventeen year old girl named rose Marie.
Over the years that followed, Joseph and rose Marie would

(32:03):
go on to have three sons and four daughters, including Elizabeth,
who was born April sixth of nineteen sixty six. But
just one year after the baby girl's birth, her father
began to exhibit some shocking changes in his behavior. In
nineteen sixty seven, Fritzel began stalking a twenty four year
old nurse in the nearby city of Lynz. He kept

(32:25):
his distance for a while, hiding in plain sight among
crowded city streets, but then one day, having discovered the
woman's husband was away from home, he broke into our house,
held a knife to her throat, and then violated her.
Fritzl was also said to be a suspect in the
assault of another twenty year old woman, as well as

(32:46):
a case of indecent exposure reported around the same time.
He was arrested then put on trial for his crimes,
but shockingly, an Austrian judge sentenced him to a mere
eighteen months in prison of which Fritzel only served twelve.
Following his release from prison, Fritzel was employed by an
Amstetten construction firm and then later worked as a traveling salesman. Unsurprisingly,

(33:11):
his shockingly short prison sentence had done nothing to reform him,
and in nineteen seventy seven he did something unthinkable and
began physically abusing his eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth, and
this abuse continued for six long years. Then, after completing
her compulsory education at the age of sixteen, Elizabeth began

(33:32):
a vocational course which focused on the food and beverage industry.
This required Fritzel to grant his daughter more and more freedom,
freedom she thoroughly took advantage of, as just a few
months after beginning the course, she fled to the Austrian
capital of Vienna in the company of a friend. Sadly,

(33:53):
since Elizabeth was still sixteen and not legally an adult
in the eyes of the law, she was returned to
her family after being trie down by federal police. Some
believed that as a way of averting another escape attempt,
Elizabeth's return prompted her authoritarian father to become more lenient,
But if that was indeed his new approach, it was

(34:15):
nothing but a ploy. By the summer of nineteen eighty four,
a now eighteen year old Elizabeth had completed her vocational
course and had been offered employment nearby Linz. Fritzel knew
that he was going to lose her. That there was
no way in hell his daughter turned victim would volunteer
to stay, and so he got to work. For months,

(34:37):
Fritzel began working on a not so secret project in
the basement of his home. He undertook such projects so
often that it appears not even Elizabeth had any suspicion
of his plans. Then, on August twenty eighth of nineteen
eighty four, Fritzel asked her for assistance in carrying a
door down into the basement. Elizabeth obliged her father than

(34:59):
after picking up one end of the door, she helped
him carry it into a small, windowless room that looked
almost like a makeshift prison cell. She began to panic
and asked if she could exit the basement. Her father
responded by clamping an ether soaked towel over her face
before sealing her prison cell close with the very same

(35:19):
door she helped to carry. Once she realized her teenage
daughter was missing. Rose Marie Fritzel filed a missing person's
report with the local police department. Detectives opened an investigation
into Elizabeth's disappearance, but just over a month later, Fritzel
approached law enforcement with a handwritten letter purported to be

(35:40):
from Elizabeth. The letter had been postmarked in the town
just less than a hundred miles away, and explained that
she was tired of living with her family. Confirmed to
have been written in the girl's handwriting, the letter also
explained that any attempt to find her would result in
her fleeing the country. Fritzel told police that he believed
his daughter joined some kind of New age cult. In reality,

(36:03):
she had been forced to write the letter whilst being
held in her father's basement. Over the next two decades,
Fritzel entered the basement on an almost daily basis, supplying
his daughter with food and other essentials before violating her repeatedly.
Since Fritzel made no attempt to use contraceptive devices, Elizabeth

(36:23):
gave birth to a total of seven children throughout the
twenty four years of her captivity. One passed away not
long after childbirth, but three of them, Lisa Monica and
Alexander were allowed to live with Fritzel and his wife
following the approval of local child protective services. This was
only possible due to Fritzel's previous conviction being expunged, as

(36:46):
at the time even despicable crimes like violation of others
were stricken from the record. After twenty five years, Fritzel
explained to the authorities, who were already under the impression
that Elizabeth had join a cult, that she simply did
not wish to raise her own children. To confirm they
were fit parents, the authorities sent out social workers on

(37:08):
several different occasions, but not a single one saw or
heard anything suspicious, and after a few months the visits ceased.
In nineteen ninety four, and following the birth of his
fourth child by incest, Fritzel decided to enlarge the underground
cell housing his now twenty eight year old daughter and
their first three children. He put Elizabeth and the children

(37:31):
to work, making them dig out soil with their bare
hands until more than two hundred square feet had been
added to their lodgings. It's also believed their work was
incentivized by the additions of amenities such as a CD player,
then later a television with an integrated video cassette player.
Fritzel then installed a refrigerator and hot plate in the

(37:51):
basement so that Elizabeth could cook and feed their children
at her leisure. He also charged her with the children's education,
and punished her failures by shutting off their power or
refusing to bring them food. On one such occasion, Elizabeth
threatened an escape attempt. Fritzel responded by saying that if
any such attempt took place, he would flood the basement

(38:12):
with carbon monoxide and suffocate them. He later claimed to
have electrified the door to their cell and that any
attempts to free themselves would result in sudden and fatal
electric shocks. This was later determined to be untrue. Fritzel
had rigged up no such fatal mechanisms, yet the prospect
terrified Elizabeth, and along with their captive children, Kirsten, Stephen,

(38:37):
and Felix. Such threats ensured their continual compliance. As you
can imagine, Fritzel spent a considerable amount of time in
the company of his captive's second family, but he did
so without drawing suspicion through what one social worker described
as a plausible explanation. Fritzel told his wife and tenants

(38:57):
that the basement constituted his office, and since he drew
up plans for devices intended for use by multimillion dollar
manufacturing companies, his work had to be kept secret from
potential corporate spies. In order to maintain the ruse, Fritzel
went so far as to create what was obstensibly an
active workshop in his basement and concealed the entrance to

(39:19):
Elizabeth's living quarters behind a total of eight electronically locked doors.
These doors could only be opened using a remote control
Fritzel carried on his person, giving Fritzel much needed peace
of mind, but that didn't mean there weren't a couple
of close calls. One night, one of Fritzel's tenants claimed
to have heard a noise coming from the basement. Fritzel

(39:40):
promised to investigate, then returned saying that he'd fixed some
faulty pipes and that the tenant wouldn't be hearing any
more noises. For twenty four years, Fritzel kept his second
family a deep, dark secret, and the level of security
he employed gave him no reason to suspect his scheme
would come to light until one one day, something happened

(40:01):
that changed everything. On the morning of April nineteenth, two
thousand eight, Fritzel entered the basement to find that Kirston,
his eldest daughter from Elizabeth, had become severely ill. Elizabeth
begged her father to allow Kirston to be taken to
the hospital. Fearful that she might die, he agreed. Elizabeth

(40:23):
then helped him carry Kirsten upstairs, whereupon she saw the
outside world for the first time in her young life.
The girl was then taken to the hospital by ambulance
after her mother was forced back into their cell. At Amstetten,
Kirston was discovered to be suffering from a life threatening
kidney infection. Yet, while Fritzel tried his best to explain

(40:44):
the events leading up to her illness, doctors began noticing
glaring inconsistencies in a story. For example, Fritzel didn't seem
to know how many children he had. He also presented
doctors with a note written by Kirsten's mother, Elizabeth, after
claiming to have severed all contact with her. The police
were alerted, and on April twenty first of two thousand

(41:06):
and eight, they broadcast a public appeal for information regarding
Elizabeth and her whereabouts. Fritzel once again asserted that Elizabeth
had run off to join a cult, and when so
far as to name the cult and gave police a
description of their practices. Yet, when officers contacted and acclaimed
expert on the occult, Manfred Wolfart, he claimed that he

(41:28):
had no knowledge of any such organization, fictional or otherwise.
Yet when officers contacted and an acclaimed expert on the occult,
Manfred Wohlfart, he claimed no knowledge of any such organization,
fictional or otherwise. Yet, on the contrary, and after examining
letters supposedly written by Elizabeth, he had noticed some rather

(41:50):
familiar indicators regarding her writing. Firstly, and despite being a
woman in her late twenties, Elizabeth seemed to possess the
vocabularity of someone three times her age. Secondly, there seemed
to be a pattern of unusually large spaces between every
third or fourth word, suggesting the girl had taken her

(42:10):
pen off the page to listen out for someone's dictation.
In other words, someone had either forced Elizabeth to write
the letter or had a great deal of say in
what was written. As police decided to reopen the now
decades old investigation into Elizabeth Fritzell's disappearance. Fritzel returned to
the basement and tried to calm his terrified daughter. Elizabeth

(42:35):
seemed convinced that little Kirsten would pass away and demanded
to be at her child's bedside in order to comfort her.
It's here that Fritzel made his first but ultimately fatal
error in his despicably evil scheme, in that he believed
that he could come between a mother and her child.
Many believed grave threats were exchanged that a usual placid

(42:57):
Elizabeth became vicious in the face of her father to Niles.
It's unclear exactly what was said during the exchange, but
what we do know is that on April twenty sixth
of two thousand eight, he released Elizabeth and their two sons,
Stefan and Felix, and then brought them upstairs to join
the rest of the family. Elizabeth headed straight for the hospital, and,

(43:19):
possibly in the hopes of containing the situation, Fritzel followed.
But once he was there, and following a tip off
from suspicious doctors, police detained both Fritzel and his daughter
then took them away for questioning at the police station,
Elizabeth issued officers with a shocking prerequisite to her co operation.

(43:40):
She would only answer their questions if they could guarantee that,
under no circumstances whatsoever would she ever have to lay
eyes on her father ever again. Then and only then
did she begin to tell the story of her twenty
four years in captivity. Perhaps one of the worst details
officers heard that day was Elizabeth's explanation of how her

(44:01):
father would violate her in the presence of their children.
He would show them adult entertainment using the video cassette player,
then would force Elizabeth to re enact what they saw
on screen while the children watched nearby. Fritzel was swiftly
arrested before his family members were taken into care. Then,
the following night, investigators gained access to the underground prison

(44:24):
cell using the secret keyless entry code, gazing in horror
at the construction's crude sophistication. On April twenty ninth, two
days after Fritzel was taken into custody, DNA evidence confirmed
him as the biological father of Elizabeth's children. Her mother
claimed no knowledge whatsoever of her kidnap or detention. Police

(44:48):
believed Fritzel had been planning to fake his daughter's rescue
from the fictitious cult he'd blamed her disappearance on, but
Persuaine too the agreement that she would never have to
see her father again. Elizabeth gave a videotaped testimony on
July eleventh, categorically disproving any such claim. Prior to his trial,
Fritzel claimed every intimate interaction with his daughter was entirely consensual,

(45:13):
but he still knew what he was doing was wrong.
An extract from a communication with his lawyer read, I
always knew during the whole twenty four years that what
I was doing was not right, and then I must
have been crazy to do such a thing. Yet it
became a normal occurrence to lead a second life in
the basement of my house. Regarding his treatment of the

(45:33):
family he had with his wife, Fritzel stated, I am
not the beast the media make me out to be. Then,
with the regards to his treatment of Elizabeth and her
children in the cellar, Lee explained that he brought her flowers,
as well as books and toys for the children in
what he referred to as the bunker. Fritzel also mentioned
watching movies with his second family, but conveniently failed to

(45:56):
specify their content. When asked why he chosen to imprison Elizabeth,
Fritzel was frank in his explanation that she did not
adhere to any rules when she became a teenager. That's
why I had to do something, he said. I had
to create a place where I could keep Elizabeth, by
force if necessary, away from the outside world. Fritzl also

(46:18):
implied that the emphasis on discipline following the Germans annexation
of Austria, which occurred when he was just a toddler,
heavily influenced his authoritarian views regarding obedience to the family patriarch.
When asked about his mother, Fritzel spoke at length, saying
she was the best woman in the world and as
strict as it was necessary to be with a boy

(46:40):
of his nature. He did, however, claim his mother used
to beat him until he was quote lying in a
pool of blood on the floor. It left me feeling
totally humiliated and weak. He explained. My mother was a
servant and she used to work hard all her life.
I never had a kiss from her, and I never cuddled,
although I wanted it. I wanted her to be good

(47:01):
to me, but she called me a demon, a criminal,
and a no good. I had a horrible fear of her. Naturally,
investigators believed that Fritzel's relationship with his mother explained his maladaptation,
and what he told them thus far was merely the
tip of the iceberg. In nineteen fifty nine, Fritzel and

(47:21):
Rosemarie had been married for almost two years when Fritzl's
mother asked to move in with them. She was getting
older and needed her son's help and caring for herself,
so initially, Fritzel played the part of the dutiful son.
He moved her into his attic kept her comfy for
a while, but over time his treatment of her began
to change. He began talking back to her and ignoring

(47:42):
her requests, becoming more and more insolent as time went by,
until one day, as mother realized he was enacting a
slow but terrible revenge. Fritzel fed his mother less and
less food and allowed her less and less sunlight, until
eventually she was too weak to move. He bricked up
her window and formed their neighbors she'd passed away, then

(48:05):
gleefully told her own mother that the world outside thought
she was dead. She was his first prisoner, the first
woman he'd exercised complete and under control over, and when
she passed away in nineteen eighty, its beliefs she remained
a prisoner in the attic for up to twelve years straight.
In a report by forensic psychiatrist doctor Adohaide Kassner, who

(48:28):
conducted extensive interviews with Fritzel, he described how his subject
believed his pathological behavior was innate, as in he was
born bad. Fritzel claimed to have always harbored evil thoughts,
but that the plan to imprison Elizabeth came to him
while he was serving his prison sentence back in nineteen
sixty seven. He believed it would be a way of

(48:50):
containing his quote evil side, saying I was born to
hurt women, and I held myself back for a relatively
long time. I could have behaved a lot worse than
just locking up my own daughter. Doctor Casner swiftly diagnosed
Fritzel as having a severe combined personality disorder and recommended

(49:10):
he receive psychiatric care for the remainder of his natural life. Finally,
on March nineteenth of two thousand nine, after a harrowing
four day trial, Fritzel pleaded guilty to the charges of
the murder by negligence of his infant son and grandson, Michael,
as well as decades of enslavement, incest, violation, coercion, and

(49:32):
false imprisonment. He was sentenced to life in prison, but
has recently been moved from a high security psychiatric unit
to a regular prison, whereby he can live out the
rest of his life in relative comfort. According to a
statement from an Austrian court, the now eighty nine year
old Fritzel no longer poses the same level of danger

(49:53):
that required him to be kept in a secure psychiatric unit.
They added that due to progressiveday, dementia and physical frailty,
he is quote no longer likely to commit a criminal
offense with serious consequences. But can a man such as
Joseph Fritzel truly be anything other than a clear and
present danger to those around him? Or will those like

(50:16):
him always pose an imminent and irredeemable threat to the
most vulnerable in society? Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Click
that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations.
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(50:39):
every Sunday and Wednesday night. If you've got a story,
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(51:01):
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