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He Was Trusted. He Bought a Crossbow. They Never Came Home · True Nightmare Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On a Sunday morning in September nineteen ninety one, a
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: man drove ninety five miles to his brother in law's
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: house in Connecticut and opened the trunk of a car
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: that didn't belong to him. The trunk was soaked in blood,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: not a few drops, not a smear, the kind of
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: volume that makes a physician stop mid sentence and say
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: quietly that no living person could have lost that much
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: and still be breathing. The man standing next to the
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: trunk had a story ready. He said the mafia had
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: the family. He said he needed seventy five thousand dollars
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: to get them back. What he did not mention was
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: the three human teeth sitting in that same trunk underneath
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: the blood. That detail changes everything. The man's name was
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Christopher Jamiel Hightower, and in Barrington, Rhode Island. He was
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: exactly the kind of person no one questions, Sunday school teacher,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: youth soccer coach, a sort of neighbor who waves from
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the driveway and knows every kid on the block by name.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: His investor firm, High Tower Investments, Inc. Operated out of
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: a modest office and catered to people who trusted him
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: enough to hand over their savings. He was forty two
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: years old in the fall of nineteen ninety one, and
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: he had been quietly building two lives for years, one
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: visible and respectable, one a sustained act of financial fraud
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: that was finally beginning to collapse around him. The Brendell
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: family lived in that same town of Barrington. Ernest Brendel
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: fifty three was a local attorney, methodical, detail oriented, the
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: kind of man who reads the fine print. His wife, Alice,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: worked at Brown University. Their daughter, Emily, was eight years
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: old and in the third grade. They had trusted High
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Tower with fifteen thousand dollars. When Ernest discovered that nearly
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: twelve thousand of it had been misappropriated, he did not
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: confront High Tower quietly over coffee. He filed a formal
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: complaint with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That complaint had teeth.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: It threatened High Tower's license, his reputation, and the entire
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: fiction he had spent years constructing. By September of nineteen
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: ninety one, High Tower's other life was also unraveling. His wife, Susan,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: had filed for divorce. The phone in his office had
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: been disconnected. He owed eighteen hundred dollars in back rent.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: The complaint Ernest had filed was moving forward. Every wall
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: was closing at once. On Thursday, the nineteenth of September,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: high Tower drove to seaconk, Massachusetts, and purchased a bare
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: destroyer crossbow and six volts. He paid cash. Barrington sits
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: on a narrow peninsula where Narragansett Bay cuts inland, a
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: town of wide colonial lawns and quiet streets where most
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: people leave their garage doors open during the day. It
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: is the kind of place where a familiar face is
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: by definition, a safe face. That assumption is woven into
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: the texture of daily life there. It lives in the
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: way parents hand their children off to coaches, the way
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: neighbors share keys, the way a community invests its savings
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: with a man it sees every Sunday in a church peace.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Christopher high Tower understood that assumption perfectly. He had been
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: building his credibility in Barrington for years, layer by layer.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: The Sunday school class, the soccer field, the investment meetings
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: over coffee. Each row reenforced the next. Each trusted context
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: made the next one easier to access. When this narrator
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: first mapped the sequence of what High Tower did across
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: those forty eight hours in September. The thing that would
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: not let go was not the violence. It was how
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: many times some one trusted him, and how precisely he
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: had engineered that trust to be available exactly when he
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: needed it. On the morning of Friday, the twentieth of September,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: High Tower entered the Brendel garage and waited. Ernest came home.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: High Tower shot him three times with the bare destroyer crossbow.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: The third bolt severed his spinal cord, collapsed his esophagus,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: and stopped his heart. He then struck Earnest with a crowbar,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: cleaned the garage with hydrochloric acid, and buried Ernest's body
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: in a wooded area at the edge of town. He
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: was not finished. That same afternoon, High Tower drove to
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Primrose Elementary School in Alice's stolen Toyota and presented himself
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: as Ernest Brendle there to collect Emily. The school secretary
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: looked at the man standing in front of her and
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: said no. She did not know why. She said no,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: There was nothing she could point to. Something felt wrong.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: She turned him away. High Tower drove to the Barrington
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: y m c A. He produced Ernest's membership card, the
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: card of a man already dead and buried, and told
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: staff he was there to pick up Emily from her
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: after school program. This time the answer was yes. Before
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Emily left the building, she picked up a phone and
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: called her father's number at home. Ernest did not answer.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: The answering machine recorded her voice. She said that something
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: did not feel right and that she was leaving with
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: mister high Tower. Ernest would never hear that message. That night,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: High Tower drubbed Emily with liquid benedryll and secured her
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: in the basement. When Alice arrived home, she walked into
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: a house that had already been waiting for her. High
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Tower held both of them through the night. At some
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: point he forced Alice to sit at Ernest's computer and
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: compose a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission withdrawing
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: the complaint that had started all of this. Alice typed
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: the letter, but before she saved it, she named the
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: file using high Towers initials. She left a thread thin
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: as a wire, and just as deliberate. Christine received the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: call from her brother's neighbor on Saturday, September twenty first,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Ernest hadn't shown up to a commitment. He never missed.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: His car was gone, the house was locked. Nobody was answering.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: She drove from Guildford, Connecticut, to Barrington that same afternoon
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: and found the house empty, lights off, no sign of
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: where the family had gone. She called the police. The
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Barrington department took the report, but there was nothing obviously wrong.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: People leave for week ends, Families go away without telling everyone.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: That explanation lasted less than twenty four hours. The following morning, Sunday,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: September twenty second, a car pulled into Christine's driveway in Guildford.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: It was her brother's Toyota. The man stepping out of
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: it was Christopher high Tower. He told her a story
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: about the mob Rhode Island organized crime. He said, men
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: who had taken Ernest and Alice and Emily, men who
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: had forced high Tower to participate. He said he needed
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: seventy five thousand dollars. He said there was still time
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: to save them. Then he opened the trunk. Christine's husband
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: was a physician. He looked at what was inside that trunk,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: the quantity of blood, the pattern of it, pot and
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: he understood something that no ransom negotiation could change. No
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: living person produces that volume. Whatever story High Tower was telling,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: at least one member of the Brendel family was already dead.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Christine excused herself, walked to a neighbor's house and called
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: the FBI. High Tower was taken into custody that night.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: He had no injuries, He showed no signs of coercion.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: The mafia story, the one he had driven ninety five
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: miles to deliver in person to his victim's sister, collapsed
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: immediately on contact with physical evidence, but the Brendell family
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: still hadn't been found. For the next six weeks, investigators
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: worked outward from what they had. The cross bow purchase
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: traced back to a sporting goods store in seaconk, Massachusetts,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: September nineteenth, one day before Ernest was killed. Store records
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: confirmed High Tower had bought a bare Destroyer model and
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: six arrows. The crossbow and the trunk matched. Forensic analysis
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: of the Tayota confirmed blood consistent with multiple individuals. Lime
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: residue matched commercially available bags identical to the empty one
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: recovered from the vehicle. Then the computer file surfaced. Alice
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: had composed the letter under duress, with high towers standing
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: over her, and she had hidden his name inside the
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: file itself, in the metadata in the document name. It
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: was a message she had no way to guarantee any
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: one would find she sent it anyway. The phone call
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: happened before any of this was known. On the afternoon
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: of September twentieth. Emily Brendle was at the YMCA. Her
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: father was already dead. She was eight years old, and
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: she was standing at a phone and something about the
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: man who had come to collect her, A man her
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: family knew, a man who had coached soccer and taught
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Sunday school, had made her stop. She called her father's number.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: She left a message on the answering machine. Investigators later
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: recovered the recording. She said that something did not feel right.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Her father never heard it. The machine recorded her voice
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: in an empty house, the words playing into silence. She
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: walked out with high tower after that. That message is
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: the emotional center of this case, not because of what
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: it revealed to investigators, but because of what it represents.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: An eight year old child standing at a telephone sensing
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: something that every adult mechanism around her had failed to
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: detect The school had refused to release her when High
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Tower first arrived, citing proper procedure, but the YMCA ultimately
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: accepted a dead man's membership card as sufficient identification. Every
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: institutional safeguard failed, and Emily's own instinct, the one she
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: acted on, the one she recorded, came too late to matter.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: High Tower drugged her with benadro. He tied her in
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: the basement of her own home. He waited for her
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: mother to come home. Alice arrived that Friday night and
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: was taken before she could reach anyone. There are no
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: records of a struggle that left physical evidence outside the house.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: She was controlled, moved to a room with a computer,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: and forced to compose the letter that would protect the
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: man who had already killed her husband. She saved the file.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: She named it with his initials. The following morning, Saturday,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the twenty first, Alice Brendle was strangled. That night, High
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Tower moved all three members of the Brendel family to
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: a wooded area at the edge of Barrington, adjacent to
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: a local school, a place where children played. He dug
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: two shallow graves. He placed Ernest in the first. He
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: placed Alice in the second, and then he placed Emily,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: still sedated, still alive, underneath her mother's body. He covered
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: both graves with lime. Detective Gary Palumbo, who later led
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: the excavation, described the graves as deliberately shallow, close together,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: and deliberately concealed with a substance meant to mislead any
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: search that used scent detection. The lime would mask decomposition odor.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Any dog working the area would lose the trail. The location,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: itself a public space a school perimeter, was chosen in
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: part because it was obvious no one searches were children run.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Christopher high Tower did not fit the profile of someone
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: capable of this. That is not a defense, It is
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: the thing that made this case so difficult for the
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: community of Barrington to absorb. He had been present at
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: the edges of ordinary life, at church, at practice fields,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: at school fundraisers. He had shaken hands with the fathers
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: of the children he coached. He had stood at an
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: altar and taught lessons about faith. The architecture of his
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: life in Barrington was designed consciously or not, to create
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: exactly that impression of normalcy, and investigators found that the
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: design went back much further than anyone had known his
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: academic credentials, the ones that had opened doors at Wright
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: State University in Ohio were fabricated. He had forged transcripts
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: from the University of Rhode Island in Ohio. He had
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: operated another investment group that lost more than one hundred
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars of other people's money. No prosecution followed. He moved,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: and he rebuilt, and in Barrington he built again the
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: investment firm, the Sunday School classroom, the soccer field. Ernest
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Brendel's complaint to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was not
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: the beginning of hight Hour's exposure. It was simply the
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: first complaint that came with a deadline. At the time
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: of the murders, his marriage was ending, His wife, Susan,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: had filed for divorce. His office phone had been disconnected
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: for non payment. He owed eighteen hundred dollars in back rent.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: The investment firm was collapsing from the inside. The fraud
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: complaint meant that the machinery he had assis ssembled in
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Barrington would be examined, and examination would end everything. The
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: prosecution's theory presented by Michael Stone at trial beginning March eighth,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. Was not that high Tower had snapped.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: It was that he had calculated. He bought the crossbow
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: on a Thursday, he entered the garage on a Friday.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: He moved through the following seventy two hours with a
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: sequence of tasks, the school, the YMCA, the computer, the graves,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: the drive to Connecticut, each step designed to extend a
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: window before anyone realized the family was gone. The defense
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: offered a different explanation. Their psychiatrist testified that high Tower
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: had been operating in a delusional state, that the mafia
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: connections he described were real to him, that his belief
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: in organized crime intervention was genuine, that he had not
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: been in control of his reasoning. The tribunal rejected this
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: argument in full. What remained after the rejection was something
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: harder to categorize than either prosecution or defense had fully articulated.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: High Tower had consum druped an elaborate alternate reality mob
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: enforcers kidnapping, a ransom demand delivered in person with theatrical
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: detail tackle. And he had delivered this performance to a
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: physician who understood blood volume, and to investigators who had
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: his teeth in an evidence bag. The gap between the
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: story and the physical world was not the gap of
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: a man unaware of reality. It was the gap of
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: a man who had spent decades constructing versions of himself
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: that did not survive contact with evidence, and who had
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: never until Barrington encountered evidence that could not be ignored.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Emily's voicemail was played at trial. The recording lasted less
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: than thirty seconds. The trial of Christopher high Tower began
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: on March eighth, nineteen ninety three, in the Rhode Island
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Supreme Court. There were no eye witnesses, there was no confession.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: What the prosecution had instead was a chain of physical
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: facts so precise it left almost no room for a
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: different story. State Prosecutor Michael Stone called nearly one hundred
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: witnesses to the say stand. The crossbow purchased in Seaconk,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the lime covered graves, the three teeth recovered from the
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: trunk of Alice's toyota, the forged academic transcripts from the
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: University of Rhode Island, which high Tower had used to
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: fabricate a professional identity from the beginning. Stone introduced those
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: transcripts in open court and asked High Tower directly. High
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Tower admitted he had falsified them. The man had been
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: building a fictional version of himself long before the Brendels
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: ever trusted him with fifteen thousand dollars. The defense called
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: a psychiatrist who argued High Tower had been delusional, that
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: the mafia story he told Christine was not a lie
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: constructed to extract money, but a belief he genuinely held.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: The tribunal rejected it, not because delusion is impossible, but
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: because every action in the sequence. The crossbow purchased two
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: days in advance, the hydrochloric acid, the lime, the forged letter,
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: typed on Ernest's own computer, Alis's car, driven ninety five
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: miles to Guildford. All of it required planning, execu acution,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: and adaptation. Delusion does not buy a crossbow on Thursday
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: and wait in a garage on Friday. High Tower took
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: the stand himself. He told the jury that the mob
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: had killed the Brendel family while he was forced to
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: dig the graves at gunpoint. He described an elaborate criminal network,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: threats coercion. The jury deliberated on June eighth, nineteen ninety three.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: They returned three convictions for murder and one for kidnapping,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: life imprisonment, no possibility of parole, three sentences running consecutively.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: There is one detail from the trial that no summary
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: of this case fully accounts for. Emily's voicemail was played
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: in open court, the recording of an eight year old
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: girl calling her father from the YMCA, leaving a message
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: she would never hear, saying that something did not feel right.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: The courtroom heard her voice. Ernest had already been in
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the ground for more than twelve hours when she made
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: that call. That is the detail that stayed with me
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: longer than any other piece of evidence in this sad case.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Not the crossbow, not the teeth, not the forged letter,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: that voicemail, a child who trusted her instincts exactly right,
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: at exactly the wrong moment, calling a number that would
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: never answer. The Barrington community had coached youth soccer with
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: this man, sat beside him in Sunday school, added their
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: financial futures to High Tower Investments INK, and watched him
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: coach their children on weekends. After the verdict, former state
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: prosecutor Patrick Youngs described it as one of the most
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: methodically planned crimes he had encountered in Rhode Island. Not
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: a crime of rage, not a crime of panic, a
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: crime of arithmetic calculated across four days to eliminate a
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: legal threat and preserve a lie. What the High Tower
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: case leaves behind is not a mystery. The verdict was clear,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: the evidence was overwhelming. What it leaves behind is something
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: harder to name. A woman walking her dog through a
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: wooded area near a school on November seventh, nineteen ninety one,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: noticed her dawg pulling toward a patch of disturbed earth.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: She did not know what she had found. She called
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the police because it seemed wrong. That instinct, small, ordinary
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: animal was the thing that finally brought the breundles home.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Detective Gary Palumbo and a sergeant began digging with careful hands.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: The first depression revealed a knee. They stopped called the
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: forensic team. The second depression, a few feet away, revealed
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: another knee. Two graves, side by side, covered in lime,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: at the edge of a forest, next to a school
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: where children played every morning. Emily was underneath her mother.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Palumbo had described the grave construction in the prior investigation phase,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: but the geometry of it only becomes fully real here.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: A man who coached children's soccer and taught Sunday school,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: had placed a sleeping eight year old girl in the
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: ground beneath her mother's body and walked away. The lime
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: had been meant to defeat search dogs. It almost worked.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: What defeated the lime was a woman on an ordinary
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: walk and a dog that would not move on. Chris
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: her high Tower remains incarcerated. He has never changed his account.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: As of the last public record of his status. He
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: continues to maintain that the Brendel family was killed by
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: organized crime and that he was a coerced witness. No
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: evidence supporting that claim as ever emerged. No criminal network
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: was ever identified, no other suspect was ever named. Alice's
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: coded file name, the document she saved under high Tower's
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: initials while he stood over her, was the last deliberate
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: act of a woman who knew she was running out
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: of time. She could not leave a note, she could
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: not make a call, so she left a signature in
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the only place she could, inside a file name on
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: a computer, and trusted that someone would eventually look closely
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: enough to find it. Someone did. Emily called her father
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: at four fifty three in the afternoon on September twentieth,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one. She said she was about to leave
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: with the man who had come to get her. She
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: said something about it did not feel right. She asked
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: him to call her back. He never called back. He
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: never could. That message still exists somewhere in the record
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: of this case, a child's voice on magnetic tape asking
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: a dead man to please call her back, and the
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: silence on the other end of the line that was
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the only answer she ever received. This show is made
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: by Oba Media.