True Stories #179 - Murder on Super 8

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you'reabout to hear is a true story.
The year was nineteen eighty nine.There was a farmer, his name was
Robert Reid, and he was outsideworking his land. This was just outside

(00:23):
of Burr Oak, Michigan, andhe looked up into the sky and he
saw something strange. There was acircular group of floating objects over his farmland.
It turned out to be a clusterof weather balloons, and attached to
those balloons was a Super eight filmcamera. Well, Robert wasn't sure what

(00:48):
to make of all of this,but he was concerned because local farmers had
been getting into trouble with the policebecause marijuana had been growing around the edges
of some of their crops, andthe police took a very dim view of
that. Where these law enforcements surveillanceballoons looking for weed. Well, whatever

(01:10):
was happening, Robert decided the rightthing to do was to go ahead and
turn everything over to the local police. And they took the super eight camera
and they had the film developed,and what they saw was sobering. The
footage showed two men dressed in blackand they were standing over a body.

(01:32):
The two standing men had a creston their jackets, the lifeless man's face
covered with a mysterious substance, theskin obviously blemished with something. The camera
swirled back and forth, up anddown, until finally it began to ascend,
revealing a third man who was runningaway from the scene as fast as

(01:53):
he could run. The camera continuedto drift upward into the sky, revealing
warehouses and parking garages. This wasobviously somewhere in Chicago. The wide overhead
vantage even revealed the lights of theelevated Chicago trains, and detectives finally pinned

(02:14):
down the location as an alley somewherein the Fulton River district, and so
they contacted local police. They said, hey, have you received any homicide
reports in that area? But norecords or reports were found. Michigan police

(02:34):
were looking at this strange, disturbingsnuff film and they surmised it was some
kind of a gang murder, maybea cult killing, and with resources played
out, they handed all the footageover to the FBI, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, where federal pathologists revealedanother disturbing detail that dead body was long

(03:00):
dead, it was already rotting thismurder case went on and on and on.
One month turned into three, turnedinto six months, then a year,
two years, and the dead manhad still not been identified, the
killers had not been identified, thecase becoming a cold case. And so,

(03:25):
with all other options, exhausted anddesperate for leads, the FBI distributed
flyers, and those flyers had stillsfrom this super eight film, and they
passed these out throughout the city ofChicago, specifically focusing in the region that
they had pinpointed. And some ofthose flyer distribution locations included schools, and

(03:50):
inside one of those schools there wasan art student and he saw the image
and he had a flash of recognition. He what this was, and he
called a number on the flyer.He contacted the police and said, I've
seen this place, I've seen thesemen. I know what happened while that

(04:14):
super eight film footage that had accidentallygotten away from its handlers, that floated
far into the sky and ultimately landedin that Michigan farmer's field. It was
not a snuff film. It wasnot documented murder. It was a music

(04:36):
video. Oh the footage looked suspicious. It was grainy and desaturated and blurry,
some might say even sloppy, certainlyhard to focus on, but you
could see that man, black jacket, black pants, white shirt, splayed
out upon the concrete as that overheadcamera came up and down and up and

(05:01):
down and spun around. The mancertainly looked dead, but he wasn't dead.
He wasn't a victim. He wasa lead singer. And his face
was not rotten. It wasn't coveredin decay. He was covered with cornstarch

(05:21):
and chocolate syrup. This whole thingwas a filmed artistic exercise by a rock
band in the decade of the musicvideo. This was the era of MTV,
and every band with a new songhad to have a new music video.

(05:42):
This was theater that just happened tolook like murder, which resulted in
a lot of men and women inbadges, also wearing red faces. While
the film crew had once been chasinga rogue weather balloon, law In four
had been chasing its own tale.The band had gotten another camera and they

(06:05):
shot that scene again with new equipment. And when that scene was done,
when this music video was done andreleased on MTV in nineteen eighty nine,
this artist went back to his artperforming for audiences worldwide, returning to the

(06:25):
studio to record more albums. Theman who today is a household name and
a rock legend. The man investigatedfor two years by the Michigan Police and
the FBI as a murder victim,was Trent Resner of nine Inch Nails.

(06:50):
The song and the music video downin it and you can see it on
YouTube. That is a true storiesTrue Stories podcast dot com