Geesh thay was an intense read. Mental that Dan walked free after it all!
I experienced something haunting once which I can share with you guys. Me and my girlfriends meet a bunch of lads at a festival. They were fun and rowdy and some were single which the other singles in my gal gang were keen on. We kept in touch and were invited to a halloween party a few weeks later. It was a Saturday. The night before the rugby world cup final so a big call to have a party then when everyone would be up at 4am to watch the cup. My boyfriend didnt want to come for that very reason, and he also raised concerns about us not really knowing these people that well. But we felt safe, we had good judgement so me and the gals all went. Dressed up, I was a crazy cat lady (my favourite halloween costume to date), the other girls were a hippy, medusa, the black swan ballerina. The party was in a house of a guy dressed as superman and everyone came dressed up, it was a great effort! There was a pirate, cookie monster, a big cuddly teddy and so on. It was a balmy october night and things were looking fun. There was just this one niggle though. Supermans flatmate who also lived in the house was not at all dressed up. He was tense, he was erratic and he had meticulously laid plastic all over every carpeted part of the house. He made strange jokes and he switched between friendly and strange constantly. I got bad vibes from him. Noone else really noticed. They found him funny. Was he just being funny? i thought to myself, but i couldn't shake my concern. I kept a close eye on him. Whenever someone picked up a drink he would quickky wipe the cup ring off the kitchen bench before they put their drink down again. It became obsessive. He also started making creepy comments to my friend the black swan ballerina and was irate whenever he found a discarded beer bottle not in the tiny plastic bag he had assigned as the empties bin. When his flatmate finally took him outside and told him to stop being so wierd i heard him snap back and threaten him, i heard the word stab. Things were getting tense. I went inside and told my friend how uneasy i was feeling. I felt i wanted to leave. The party was humming, all the guest were having a blast in the kitchen but i felt danger. I took my friend outside to say somethings about to happen. As i began to tell her i looked in the window to see the strange flatmate storm purposefully into the kitchen , with horror movie precision he pulled the biggest knife from the knife block and charged towards his superman flatmate. Immediately the pirate and cookie monster grapped him from behind muscling the knife from his hand before he coud cut superman and pinning him down. It all happened in slow motion for me. It was so scary and so bizarre, as the costumed party goers were piecing together what was happening everyone ran outside screaming and i immediately called the cops. We all waited for the cops to come a fair distance away. The armmed defenders squad came as the strange flatmate sat on the lit up stairwell with a hammer in his hand. There was a fair bit of adrenalin surging after that. The guy wad taken away and most of the party cracked on with their adrelin high. I however felt sick. I wanted to go home having felt like i knew something bad was going to happen. My boyfriend picked me and black swan up and gave us a bit of an "i told you so" for going to a party with people we didnt know that well. The next day the All Blacks won the world cup final in the early hours. I cried all through halftime. I hadnt slept cause i couldn''t stop replaying the scene in my head, over and over seeing him pull the knife from the block and then rewatching cookie monster wrestle the blade out of the crazed mans hand. Saving Superman. Its the bizarrest thing and it was so so scary. I was contacted and made the reports in the week following to the police. The cop told me that unfortunately on his release the guy had skipped town, assumed to have flown back to the uk. Superman, his flatmate, was really scared after it all, once the adrenalin had gone and the reality that someone was so annoyed by him thay he actually planned his murder hit home. It was a halloween party to remember for all the wrong reasons and a good lesson in picking flatmates veeeery carefully.
I think he had mental health issues, tbh. Having lots of people intent on having a good time invading his space had tipped him over the edge. It was a nightmare for you, but I suspect it was also a nightmare for him.
I always knew Cookie Monster was a real one. But also: fuuuuuck. Did you ever find out why he snapped? Was it that he just didn't want to have a party?
About eight years ago one of my best friends died. We’re still not sure if it was an accident or a murder.
We just know that it was in the middle of the Arnold Classic, one of Columbus, Ohio’s most chaotic weekends. He was out drinking with some friends of ours. It was a busy street, busy sidewalk. So many people there knew him. He left at some point, got into a car, sent a garbled text message and disappeared. No one saw who’s car he got into. Cameras didn’t catch it.
Joey was missing for about a month before his body turned up in a lake. There were searches and investigations. Podcast episodes, and Reddit threads. Conspiracy theories, and chapters in books written.
And then at some point the police just stopped looking. Stopped asking for information. At this point, I don’t think we’ll ever know. He didn’t drown, we’re sure of that. We’re not sure of anything else, other than the suspicious nature of it all.
There’s something so weird, and indescribable about grief that goes unpunished. Like little rips in your life that go un-mended. I always want to talk about Joey. To make sure that people know. To shake something up enough that maybe justice will come, or someone will fill that hole, or tell us why it happened, or explain anything at all. But it’s also hard because when your grief escapes into the world, it takes on a life of its own and you don’t have any control over that either.
You want people to know. You want other people to scream for justice too. But it also seems selfish somehow, like pulling attention for yourself from the loss of someone’s life. I have a hard time grappling with it sometimes. I have a hard time grappling with it now, even. He was one of my best friends but I’m still not sure if it’s my story to tell.
But I think the stories are worth telling. There’s community in it. Closure, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know. Maybe that weird hole will never close. But I’m comforted to know that things like this roll around in other people’s heads as well.
Emily, thanks for getting your thoughts out here in such a beautiful, touching way. It resonates. And feel proud to have this story sitting here. You do your friend proud. I think closure is such a fiction; we rarely get it. And in instances like this, it's just so far away. And so we talk about, it we try to make sense of it, and we honour our buddies in the process. Thank you.
🫂You do your friend honour by not forgetting 👍🏾I see crime stories of years passing & a confession or similarity to another death links a known perpetrator so one day you might get the answer 🧐
I'm not the murdering type but...I recently had the displeasure of having a gang move into the house opposite ours. Even with all my understanding of societal injustice and institutional racism, I found myself out on the edge of sanity. It wasn't just me either, my partner was taking part. We became curtain twitchers - we watched cars. We wrote down number plates (mostly so we could assist if anything *really* bad happened.
These guys weren't the sharpest tools in the shed - I watched a full-blown drug deal go down at two in the morning on the street outside my bedroom window having been awoken by the thump-thump-thump of the bass in the car of the buyer.
They roared up and down our quiet street at all hours with engines and mufflers that had been modfied, and parked erractically up and down the berms or on their neighbour's front lawn. They dumped number plates in our hedges, threw their rubbish all over the road, let their dog roam (and harrass children and cats), had screaming rows with their partners, or anyone...and wore a lot of the same colour. The police visited regularly.
The neighbourhood whispered with each other and the news reached me that they hadn't paid rent since they'd moved in. Fingers were crossed. Eventually they moved out, though the skip parked in the driveway, bursting full of furniture and rubbish, intimated that they hadn't bothered taking much with them.
Despite all this (and the urges I managed to suppress) I felt empathy for them. They seemed to be trapped in a toxic masculine whirlwind. I don't know whether they got 'points' for being an obvious gang pad or if they were just clueless, but if I hadn't had to endure the unpleasant effects of their hustle, I wouldn't have given a shit that they lived across the road. I wished things different for them and hoped they would, one day, find their way out of the mess they'd ended up in.
We do tend, often, to look at the result of generations of folk who had lost their lands and their mana, and judge them. Yes, they exist and it's not a pretty sight for anyone, possibly even themselves. All humans were once innocent little babies, ready for joy. What happens along the way creates the result.
Wow, what a story. I am sorry Gary had to go through that experience.
"they sat on the couch that whole week, Gary blissfully unaware of who he was really sitting next to"
This line in particular reminds me of a story of my Dad's that he liked to tell people...and relates to how it's really impossible sometimes to predict or know what a person can do or be capable of doing.
As a kid, my Dad's parents both worked so he often stayed at the house of a woman who was his boyscout leader. Her name was Iva Kroeger. He would stay there after school until his parents got off work. Fast forward a few years: Turns out, after seeing her face plastered on the front of the newspaper and seeing most wanted posters around San Francisco, his 'babysitter' became one of the most wanted fugitives in SF. She had killed a couple people (insurance scam) and buried them in her garage. I believe in the timeline, this was a couple years after she babysat him, so there weren't bodies buried while he was there. He told me, as a kid he thought she was maybe a little odd...but perhaps that was also in retrospect. At the time he would have no reason to believe she would murder anyone and bury them in her garage.
My Dad was a high school teacher and loved telling his students this story about his 'murderer babysitter'. My Dad passed away 4 years ago, so I figured I would continue to tell his story for him.... :)
Oh heck, what a terrifying story! But I had to laugh about Gary's thoughts on the 'locked' door, I'm 100% sure I'd have thought the same in his position, lol.
oh man. poor Gary. poor neighbour's family getting no justice whatsoever. Dan could have, and should have, just moved to live somewhere else. this story brought back two very west auckland memories: my boyfriend at the time waking me up in quiet glee to softly tell me he'd been to a party and beat the living shit out of a guy. the next day there was a news story: someone had beaten a stranger to death at a local party. I had some form of cognitive dissonance around it; it couldn't be the man I was kissed so gently by who loved his 2 year old daughter so much (and did meth, had an illegal gun, and soon outlined to me his plan to try to kill me in a way so that nobody would ever suspect him). yeah we broke up. I made a police report but they seemed to think I was an angry vengeful ex and nothing ever came from it. second was realising my flatmate Rick had turned our house into a tinny house and people were crawling in the windows at night to buy weed and speed in our lounge. my friend-flatmate and I barely went outside to the wider bush-lined properly but discovered a significant plantation one day after we realised Rick and his friends had been sneaking into our rooms in the night to get our car keys and taking our cars out on dealing missions. when we asked him to leave, we were a bit nervous, but not nervous enough - he went full evil rage, smashing crockery and glasses and throwing a boning knife at my friend's head like a circus knife-thrower - she ducked and it went doi-oi-oing in the wall behind her. we locked ourselves in the bathroom and called police. he left and we never saw him again - turned out there was already a warrant out for his arrest. (let me point out here that my flatmate-friend picked the flatmates after I had moved in already!) the next day Rick's mates came to get his things, one of them keeping me in a room with a sawn-off shotgun pointed at me while they burned all our stuff in a bonfire. years later, another flatmate was killed by a stranger in a one-punch attack - turned out the guy was friends with Rick. the world is small, but not as small as west auckland.
But I mean, you have at least two options before murder: ask them to shut it, and move. This is like when spouses kill off their spouses instead of, you know, just divorcing them.
I kinda believe that folks that take to murder so easily are really just waiting for a victim. I hope Gary knows that it wasn't remotely his fault that he didn't see through it. Shit, look at Bundy!
Also: fuck Dan. I hope his toes fall off and he's forced to crawl everywhere he goes like the worm he is.
I'm inclined to trust the justice system. Because if you don't, and you insist Dan is guilty even though he was found not guilty, where does that lead? It's a slippery slope to a pretty unpleasant place for everyone - innocent people included
Person accused of heinous sexual crime => Found not guilty => People don't trust justice system => Permanently labelled and/or mistrusted by society
Is that the world you want to live in? The justice system is obviously not perfect and we can fight to improve it, but flat out doubting the findings of a court of law based on *waves hands*, and assuming you have a stronger grasp of the facts than the literal experts we pay to do this stuff is no good IMO.
The bravo thing to have done was just move. It was a shitty flat, one a lot of us likely would have lived in at some point. I moved flats at least 12 times in as many years in my younger days.
Arming oneself for a confrontation has an air of premeditation. He was lucky to get off. One can only hope he has learned from his irrational stupidity.
I've removed and refunded that reader - as I stated, not comfortable with 'bravo' to a death.
And when they went on with lines like "I understand that your schtick these days leans heavily into the American political left", that's just not the kind of discussion that leads anywhere particularly good and makes me feel like we are on Twitter (which we are not).
Oh geez, I feel for your friend Gary.... that is assisting that will sit in his psyche for a lifetime... and Dan surely does sound as though he has assume mental health issues which, thanks to the blardy Justice system, did not get addressed. 😑 I had a few interesting experiences with my 2 Kiwi brother flat mates in Brisbane when I was 20. Both good and freaky. Including turning up after query on a Friday and finding Dennis and Colleen McCulloch (author of the Thorn Birds) totally shitfaced drunk and in various states of hysterics over something funny. I had just read the book and was so fan girl intimidated that I went to my bedroom and stayed there, but desperately wanting to go and join in. A big regret that I didn't! The other thing that happened was when Gavin brought home a hitchhiker dude on his big BSA 1000 bike that he had seen walking along the Beenleigh highway out near where he was working. Tall blonde blue eyed striking looking guy who said he was German and traveling round Oz. We offered him the couch for the night after which Gavin was going to take him up North a bit and drop him on the Highway to go to Noosa in the morning. In the morning i woke up early as usual for work and staggered bleary eyed into the bathroom for a shower, only to surprise our guest who had had a shower and was standing starkers about to get dressed. I got a shock, said sorry, so sorry, and backed out, but NOT before noticing that the guy had NO BELLYBUTTON!! AT ALL! NOT EVEN A SCAR! All the way to work on the train I pondered this and was completely unable to come to with a rational explanation for this. When I got home that day, the boys reckoned when they got up, Max (the dudes name) was gone. No trace of him. Not even a glass or coffee cup that he might have used or, which miffed Gavin, a thank you note of any kind. When I told them my story of the morning surprise they were not too sure whether to believe me or not! Can't blame them. The two guys have long since passed away and I never saw them again after I left Oz 18 mths later. And I never in the decades since met anyone who knew Max, or had had a similar experience. Ever. It still bothers me and probably always will. But I know what I saw.
When we lived in a student neighborhood of Boston in our 20s, we had a roommate disappear and had the cops come looking for her - but she hadn’t killed anyone afaik, only kidnapped her ex-husband’s dogs. And then fled to Brazil with them…
I once worked with a guy who turned out to be a dog knapper. He fled the US back to NZ with said dog. He was an ex-policeman and when he tried to friend me on FB, I swiftly declined.
After my own run-in with an insane neighbour last year, I understand the obsession (not the knife, mind you). Mine played the same three songs - 'Firework,' 'Thunder' and 'Made You Look' - on repeat, every day, for six months. When I asked him to stop, he poured weedkiller over the lawn. It absolutely did my head in, and we ended up having to move away. I don't like to think about what would have happened had I stayed, but I had to understand why he ended up here, next to me, stuck in this sick musical cycle. I tracked down his ex-friends, researched his job history, talked to family members and other neighbours. It was just kinda depressing: he was a sad, divorced, angry alcoholic with no friends whose only method of getting attention was to antagonise people relentlessly. Hmm, didn't you make a movie about someone like that once, Dave?
Bob is his real name and I'm sure if he's still alive he wouldn't give a fuck about me telling this story because I'm sure it made more of an impression on me than it did on him. I met him some years ago in Perth, WA, and he was the sweetest, most gentle guy, despite having already done time in Queensland for armed robbery. The short version of that story was that Bob had been in a bar which had a picture of Ned Kelly hanging on the wall and this somehow inspired him to pretend to have a gun under his jacket and demand all the takings from the register. It didn't end well.
Bob is aboriginal and he just did not ever mix well with alcohol. A few drinks and he became a completely different person.
One day he turned up and invited our whole extensive group of Kiwi expats out.
"How?" we all all said.
"I have money."
It turned out that the money was a large plastic rubbish bin full of 20c pieces. Bob had got drunk and broken into a pizza parlour. This news was greeted by simultaneous side-eye from numerous people, none of whom were keen to be seen as accomplices after the fact.
As the story details emerged, our attempts to distance ourselves from the crime became more resolute. In these pre-cellphone traceable landline call days, Bob had spontaneously phoned his mother, in Queensland, from the pizza parlour. Using their phone. Then he used the same phone to call a taxi to take him home, complete with self-cooked pizza and aforementioned stolen large plastic rubbish bin full of 20c pieces, some of which were used to pay the fare.
What baffles me most about this story is that Bob never actually got caught. The most haphazard and superficial enquiries would have nabbed their offender for the police, but nope - he got clean away.
Gosh. The detail about the tea journal. That goes to show how multifaceted people can be. I recently listened to a podcast where a woman told her story about having a kind of obsessive-compulsiveness around people picking at their skin, chewing gum, breathing loudly, etc. It drove her totally crazy and she just couldn't relax and have a normal life until she finally found some help for her rare and unusual disorder. Maybe Dan has something similar. Or maybe it's severe anger issues. The worst is that he got away with it, seemingly because of his race (not surprised, very sad about that). Gary, if you're reading this, thank you for allowing this story to be shared. I'm sorry you've had to witness all this, and I hope you're doing OK now despite the inconclusiveness of what happened.
That story was short but was so surreal! Murder, GTA, Dexter, white privilege and racism, wow! Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry that happened to Gary and the victims. That story is a 10. The closest I have is my brother calling the police on his friend and his wife for domestic violence and that’s a 3. Unbelievable the life you live.
I'm fascinated by what leads to some people leading vastly different lives to others. David's stories don't seem too far out there to me - I've experienced so many strange and bizarre things in life and I always wonder how everyone else is coping with it all. Then I hear about the lives of my coworkers or people like yourself and I realise that the secret is that they are not dealing with the same kind of stuff I am.
I wonder why some people have multiple personal stories of scam artists, slum landlords, manipulators, predatory potential suitors they rejected, completely unhinged workplaces, nearly being the victims of crimes, etc and other people have more normal life experiences
Hey - I know it's tempting to "find the story" in the press and share it - but please refrain from posting it in the comments here.
There will be a time and a place for that, but I want this to sit as an anonymous, slightly out of context thing. I'm thinking of Gary here.
Thanks heaps!
Geesh thay was an intense read. Mental that Dan walked free after it all!
I experienced something haunting once which I can share with you guys. Me and my girlfriends meet a bunch of lads at a festival. They were fun and rowdy and some were single which the other singles in my gal gang were keen on. We kept in touch and were invited to a halloween party a few weeks later. It was a Saturday. The night before the rugby world cup final so a big call to have a party then when everyone would be up at 4am to watch the cup. My boyfriend didnt want to come for that very reason, and he also raised concerns about us not really knowing these people that well. But we felt safe, we had good judgement so me and the gals all went. Dressed up, I was a crazy cat lady (my favourite halloween costume to date), the other girls were a hippy, medusa, the black swan ballerina. The party was in a house of a guy dressed as superman and everyone came dressed up, it was a great effort! There was a pirate, cookie monster, a big cuddly teddy and so on. It was a balmy october night and things were looking fun. There was just this one niggle though. Supermans flatmate who also lived in the house was not at all dressed up. He was tense, he was erratic and he had meticulously laid plastic all over every carpeted part of the house. He made strange jokes and he switched between friendly and strange constantly. I got bad vibes from him. Noone else really noticed. They found him funny. Was he just being funny? i thought to myself, but i couldn't shake my concern. I kept a close eye on him. Whenever someone picked up a drink he would quickky wipe the cup ring off the kitchen bench before they put their drink down again. It became obsessive. He also started making creepy comments to my friend the black swan ballerina and was irate whenever he found a discarded beer bottle not in the tiny plastic bag he had assigned as the empties bin. When his flatmate finally took him outside and told him to stop being so wierd i heard him snap back and threaten him, i heard the word stab. Things were getting tense. I went inside and told my friend how uneasy i was feeling. I felt i wanted to leave. The party was humming, all the guest were having a blast in the kitchen but i felt danger. I took my friend outside to say somethings about to happen. As i began to tell her i looked in the window to see the strange flatmate storm purposefully into the kitchen , with horror movie precision he pulled the biggest knife from the knife block and charged towards his superman flatmate. Immediately the pirate and cookie monster grapped him from behind muscling the knife from his hand before he coud cut superman and pinning him down. It all happened in slow motion for me. It was so scary and so bizarre, as the costumed party goers were piecing together what was happening everyone ran outside screaming and i immediately called the cops. We all waited for the cops to come a fair distance away. The armmed defenders squad came as the strange flatmate sat on the lit up stairwell with a hammer in his hand. There was a fair bit of adrenalin surging after that. The guy wad taken away and most of the party cracked on with their adrelin high. I however felt sick. I wanted to go home having felt like i knew something bad was going to happen. My boyfriend picked me and black swan up and gave us a bit of an "i told you so" for going to a party with people we didnt know that well. The next day the All Blacks won the world cup final in the early hours. I cried all through halftime. I hadnt slept cause i couldn''t stop replaying the scene in my head, over and over seeing him pull the knife from the block and then rewatching cookie monster wrestle the blade out of the crazed mans hand. Saving Superman. Its the bizarrest thing and it was so so scary. I was contacted and made the reports in the week following to the police. The cop told me that unfortunately on his release the guy had skipped town, assumed to have flown back to the uk. Superman, his flatmate, was really scared after it all, once the adrenalin had gone and the reality that someone was so annoyed by him thay he actually planned his murder hit home. It was a halloween party to remember for all the wrong reasons and a good lesson in picking flatmates veeeery carefully.
Really scary, and with a truly colourful cast of characters in your retelling. Thanks for sharing!
I think he had mental health issues, tbh. Having lots of people intent on having a good time invading his space had tipped him over the edge. It was a nightmare for you, but I suspect it was also a nightmare for him.
Yes for sure, hopefully he's in a better headspace now wherever he may be.
I always knew Cookie Monster was a real one. But also: fuuuuuck. Did you ever find out why he snapped? Was it that he just didn't want to have a party?
Wow. That was quite a tale and well told!
About eight years ago one of my best friends died. We’re still not sure if it was an accident or a murder.
We just know that it was in the middle of the Arnold Classic, one of Columbus, Ohio’s most chaotic weekends. He was out drinking with some friends of ours. It was a busy street, busy sidewalk. So many people there knew him. He left at some point, got into a car, sent a garbled text message and disappeared. No one saw who’s car he got into. Cameras didn’t catch it.
Joey was missing for about a month before his body turned up in a lake. There were searches and investigations. Podcast episodes, and Reddit threads. Conspiracy theories, and chapters in books written.
And then at some point the police just stopped looking. Stopped asking for information. At this point, I don’t think we’ll ever know. He didn’t drown, we’re sure of that. We’re not sure of anything else, other than the suspicious nature of it all.
There’s something so weird, and indescribable about grief that goes unpunished. Like little rips in your life that go un-mended. I always want to talk about Joey. To make sure that people know. To shake something up enough that maybe justice will come, or someone will fill that hole, or tell us why it happened, or explain anything at all. But it’s also hard because when your grief escapes into the world, it takes on a life of its own and you don’t have any control over that either.
You want people to know. You want other people to scream for justice too. But it also seems selfish somehow, like pulling attention for yourself from the loss of someone’s life. I have a hard time grappling with it sometimes. I have a hard time grappling with it now, even. He was one of my best friends but I’m still not sure if it’s my story to tell.
But I think the stories are worth telling. There’s community in it. Closure, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know. Maybe that weird hole will never close. But I’m comforted to know that things like this roll around in other people’s heads as well.
Emily, thanks for getting your thoughts out here in such a beautiful, touching way. It resonates. And feel proud to have this story sitting here. You do your friend proud. I think closure is such a fiction; we rarely get it. And in instances like this, it's just so far away. And so we talk about, it we try to make sense of it, and we honour our buddies in the process. Thank you.
🫂You do your friend honour by not forgetting 👍🏾I see crime stories of years passing & a confession or similarity to another death links a known perpetrator so one day you might get the answer 🧐
I'm not the murdering type but...I recently had the displeasure of having a gang move into the house opposite ours. Even with all my understanding of societal injustice and institutional racism, I found myself out on the edge of sanity. It wasn't just me either, my partner was taking part. We became curtain twitchers - we watched cars. We wrote down number plates (mostly so we could assist if anything *really* bad happened.
These guys weren't the sharpest tools in the shed - I watched a full-blown drug deal go down at two in the morning on the street outside my bedroom window having been awoken by the thump-thump-thump of the bass in the car of the buyer.
They roared up and down our quiet street at all hours with engines and mufflers that had been modfied, and parked erractically up and down the berms or on their neighbour's front lawn. They dumped number plates in our hedges, threw their rubbish all over the road, let their dog roam (and harrass children and cats), had screaming rows with their partners, or anyone...and wore a lot of the same colour. The police visited regularly.
The neighbourhood whispered with each other and the news reached me that they hadn't paid rent since they'd moved in. Fingers were crossed. Eventually they moved out, though the skip parked in the driveway, bursting full of furniture and rubbish, intimated that they hadn't bothered taking much with them.
Despite all this (and the urges I managed to suppress) I felt empathy for them. They seemed to be trapped in a toxic masculine whirlwind. I don't know whether they got 'points' for being an obvious gang pad or if they were just clueless, but if I hadn't had to endure the unpleasant effects of their hustle, I wouldn't have given a shit that they lived across the road. I wished things different for them and hoped they would, one day, find their way out of the mess they'd ended up in.
We do tend, often, to look at the result of generations of folk who had lost their lands and their mana, and judge them. Yes, they exist and it's not a pretty sight for anyone, possibly even themselves. All humans were once innocent little babies, ready for joy. What happens along the way creates the result.
100 per cent.
very well said, thank you
Wow, what a story. I am sorry Gary had to go through that experience.
"they sat on the couch that whole week, Gary blissfully unaware of who he was really sitting next to"
This line in particular reminds me of a story of my Dad's that he liked to tell people...and relates to how it's really impossible sometimes to predict or know what a person can do or be capable of doing.
As a kid, my Dad's parents both worked so he often stayed at the house of a woman who was his boyscout leader. Her name was Iva Kroeger. He would stay there after school until his parents got off work. Fast forward a few years: Turns out, after seeing her face plastered on the front of the newspaper and seeing most wanted posters around San Francisco, his 'babysitter' became one of the most wanted fugitives in SF. She had killed a couple people (insurance scam) and buried them in her garage. I believe in the timeline, this was a couple years after she babysat him, so there weren't bodies buried while he was there. He told me, as a kid he thought she was maybe a little odd...but perhaps that was also in retrospect. At the time he would have no reason to believe she would murder anyone and bury them in her garage.
Iva Kroeger! Good lord.
(reference: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/photos-grandma-kroeger-murdered-santa-rosa-couple-became-one-of-nation/)
I am glad you're OK.
My Dad was a high school teacher and loved telling his students this story about his 'murderer babysitter'. My Dad passed away 4 years ago, so I figured I would continue to tell his story for him.... :)
That sounds so similar to the plot in a John Grisham novel I read once!!
Oh heck, what a terrifying story! But I had to laugh about Gary's thoughts on the 'locked' door, I'm 100% sure I'd have thought the same in his position, lol.
Waiting to pee is such a kiwi thing to do.
Me at least twice a day, internally yelling at myself "WHY DIDN'T I JUST GO BACK AT THAT OTHER PLACE"
Better than the "I'd better go before I leave in case...." Anxiety incontinence ensues.
👏Was just going to say this 😵💫
Or have a nurses bladder. Answer that bell or pee. That is the question
oh man. poor Gary. poor neighbour's family getting no justice whatsoever. Dan could have, and should have, just moved to live somewhere else. this story brought back two very west auckland memories: my boyfriend at the time waking me up in quiet glee to softly tell me he'd been to a party and beat the living shit out of a guy. the next day there was a news story: someone had beaten a stranger to death at a local party. I had some form of cognitive dissonance around it; it couldn't be the man I was kissed so gently by who loved his 2 year old daughter so much (and did meth, had an illegal gun, and soon outlined to me his plan to try to kill me in a way so that nobody would ever suspect him). yeah we broke up. I made a police report but they seemed to think I was an angry vengeful ex and nothing ever came from it. second was realising my flatmate Rick had turned our house into a tinny house and people were crawling in the windows at night to buy weed and speed in our lounge. my friend-flatmate and I barely went outside to the wider bush-lined properly but discovered a significant plantation one day after we realised Rick and his friends had been sneaking into our rooms in the night to get our car keys and taking our cars out on dealing missions. when we asked him to leave, we were a bit nervous, but not nervous enough - he went full evil rage, smashing crockery and glasses and throwing a boning knife at my friend's head like a circus knife-thrower - she ducked and it went doi-oi-oing in the wall behind her. we locked ourselves in the bathroom and called police. he left and we never saw him again - turned out there was already a warrant out for his arrest. (let me point out here that my flatmate-friend picked the flatmates after I had moved in already!) the next day Rick's mates came to get his things, one of them keeping me in a room with a sawn-off shotgun pointed at me while they burned all our stuff in a bonfire. years later, another flatmate was killed by a stranger in a one-punch attack - turned out the guy was friends with Rick. the world is small, but not as small as west auckland.
I've just put more detail in a substack that I made for this sole purpose lol.
https://open.substack.com/pub/amandajkennedy/p/dave-and-linda-a-west-auckland-nightmare?r=2npg0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This is hectic
Crikey! I lived out west but it was never like that! I must have been in a very secluded little layby.
God, how horrendous. That would be such a mindfuck. Terrible that Dan walked free after that. I hope Gary is doing well.
I've had neighbours like that, and the rage that comes with the incessant noise and the sleep deprivation - but, wow.
I don't know how to feel about Dan. It's scary (and bewildering,) that he wasn't convicted - even on a lesser charge.
Gary is a total sweetie.
But I mean, you have at least two options before murder: ask them to shut it, and move. This is like when spouses kill off their spouses instead of, you know, just divorcing them.
I kinda believe that folks that take to murder so easily are really just waiting for a victim. I hope Gary knows that it wasn't remotely his fault that he didn't see through it. Shit, look at Bundy!
Also: fuck Dan. I hope his toes fall off and he's forced to crawl everywhere he goes like the worm he is.
I'm inclined to trust the justice system. Because if you don't, and you insist Dan is guilty even though he was found not guilty, where does that lead? It's a slippery slope to a pretty unpleasant place for everyone - innocent people included
Person accused of heinous sexual crime => Found not guilty => People don't trust justice system => Permanently labelled and/or mistrusted by society
Is that the world you want to live in? The justice system is obviously not perfect and we can fight to improve it, but flat out doubting the findings of a court of law based on *waves hands*, and assuming you have a stronger grasp of the facts than the literal experts we pay to do this stuff is no good IMO.
I would just say there are quite a few assumptions made in this statement - and am also uneasy about a "bravo" to a death. Just wanted to note that.
The bravo thing to have done was just move. It was a shitty flat, one a lot of us likely would have lived in at some point. I moved flats at least 12 times in as many years in my younger days.
Arming oneself for a confrontation has an air of premeditation. He was lucky to get off. One can only hope he has learned from his irrational stupidity.
Yeah Im privileged, I was lucky. And funny enough, there was a time too, I collected military knives. But, I never went armed into a confrontation.
I've removed and refunded that reader - as I stated, not comfortable with 'bravo' to a death.
And when they went on with lines like "I understand that your schtick these days leans heavily into the American political left", that's just not the kind of discussion that leads anywhere particularly good and makes me feel like we are on Twitter (which we are not).
Thanks, all.
Oh geez, I feel for your friend Gary.... that is assisting that will sit in his psyche for a lifetime... and Dan surely does sound as though he has assume mental health issues which, thanks to the blardy Justice system, did not get addressed. 😑 I had a few interesting experiences with my 2 Kiwi brother flat mates in Brisbane when I was 20. Both good and freaky. Including turning up after query on a Friday and finding Dennis and Colleen McCulloch (author of the Thorn Birds) totally shitfaced drunk and in various states of hysterics over something funny. I had just read the book and was so fan girl intimidated that I went to my bedroom and stayed there, but desperately wanting to go and join in. A big regret that I didn't! The other thing that happened was when Gavin brought home a hitchhiker dude on his big BSA 1000 bike that he had seen walking along the Beenleigh highway out near where he was working. Tall blonde blue eyed striking looking guy who said he was German and traveling round Oz. We offered him the couch for the night after which Gavin was going to take him up North a bit and drop him on the Highway to go to Noosa in the morning. In the morning i woke up early as usual for work and staggered bleary eyed into the bathroom for a shower, only to surprise our guest who had had a shower and was standing starkers about to get dressed. I got a shock, said sorry, so sorry, and backed out, but NOT before noticing that the guy had NO BELLYBUTTON!! AT ALL! NOT EVEN A SCAR! All the way to work on the train I pondered this and was completely unable to come to with a rational explanation for this. When I got home that day, the boys reckoned when they got up, Max (the dudes name) was gone. No trace of him. Not even a glass or coffee cup that he might have used or, which miffed Gavin, a thank you note of any kind. When I told them my story of the morning surprise they were not too sure whether to believe me or not! Can't blame them. The two guys have long since passed away and I never saw them again after I left Oz 18 mths later. And I never in the decades since met anyone who knew Max, or had had a similar experience. Ever. It still bothers me and probably always will. But I know what I saw.
Handsome alien hitchhiker - cool
When we lived in a student neighborhood of Boston in our 20s, we had a roommate disappear and had the cops come looking for her - but she hadn’t killed anyone afaik, only kidnapped her ex-husband’s dogs. And then fled to Brazil with them…
I once worked with a guy who turned out to be a dog knapper. He fled the US back to NZ with said dog. He was an ex-policeman and when he tried to friend me on FB, I swiftly declined.
After my own run-in with an insane neighbour last year, I understand the obsession (not the knife, mind you). Mine played the same three songs - 'Firework,' 'Thunder' and 'Made You Look' - on repeat, every day, for six months. When I asked him to stop, he poured weedkiller over the lawn. It absolutely did my head in, and we ended up having to move away. I don't like to think about what would have happened had I stayed, but I had to understand why he ended up here, next to me, stuck in this sick musical cycle. I tracked down his ex-friends, researched his job history, talked to family members and other neighbours. It was just kinda depressing: he was a sad, divorced, angry alcoholic with no friends whose only method of getting attention was to antagonise people relentlessly. Hmm, didn't you make a movie about someone like that once, Dave?
Another hectic one
I've gotta tell you about Bob.
Bob is his real name and I'm sure if he's still alive he wouldn't give a fuck about me telling this story because I'm sure it made more of an impression on me than it did on him. I met him some years ago in Perth, WA, and he was the sweetest, most gentle guy, despite having already done time in Queensland for armed robbery. The short version of that story was that Bob had been in a bar which had a picture of Ned Kelly hanging on the wall and this somehow inspired him to pretend to have a gun under his jacket and demand all the takings from the register. It didn't end well.
Bob is aboriginal and he just did not ever mix well with alcohol. A few drinks and he became a completely different person.
One day he turned up and invited our whole extensive group of Kiwi expats out.
"How?" we all all said.
"I have money."
It turned out that the money was a large plastic rubbish bin full of 20c pieces. Bob had got drunk and broken into a pizza parlour. This news was greeted by simultaneous side-eye from numerous people, none of whom were keen to be seen as accomplices after the fact.
As the story details emerged, our attempts to distance ourselves from the crime became more resolute. In these pre-cellphone traceable landline call days, Bob had spontaneously phoned his mother, in Queensland, from the pizza parlour. Using their phone. Then he used the same phone to call a taxi to take him home, complete with self-cooked pizza and aforementioned stolen large plastic rubbish bin full of 20c pieces, some of which were used to pay the fare.
What baffles me most about this story is that Bob never actually got caught. The most haphazard and superficial enquiries would have nabbed their offender for the police, but nope - he got clean away.
So yes, the law. What a creaky beast it is!
Gosh. The detail about the tea journal. That goes to show how multifaceted people can be. I recently listened to a podcast where a woman told her story about having a kind of obsessive-compulsiveness around people picking at their skin, chewing gum, breathing loudly, etc. It drove her totally crazy and she just couldn't relax and have a normal life until she finally found some help for her rare and unusual disorder. Maybe Dan has something similar. Or maybe it's severe anger issues. The worst is that he got away with it, seemingly because of his race (not surprised, very sad about that). Gary, if you're reading this, thank you for allowing this story to be shared. I'm sorry you've had to witness all this, and I hope you're doing OK now despite the inconclusiveness of what happened.
That story was short but was so surreal! Murder, GTA, Dexter, white privilege and racism, wow! Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry that happened to Gary and the victims. That story is a 10. The closest I have is my brother calling the police on his friend and his wife for domestic violence and that’s a 3. Unbelievable the life you live.
Very glad your brother made that call.
I'm fascinated by what leads to some people leading vastly different lives to others. David's stories don't seem too far out there to me - I've experienced so many strange and bizarre things in life and I always wonder how everyone else is coping with it all. Then I hear about the lives of my coworkers or people like yourself and I realise that the secret is that they are not dealing with the same kind of stuff I am.
I wonder why some people have multiple personal stories of scam artists, slum landlords, manipulators, predatory potential suitors they rejected, completely unhinged workplaces, nearly being the victims of crimes, etc and other people have more normal life experiences