Morbid Reality

One afternoon, 21-year-old Jake Patterson was sitting in his car behind a school bus when 13-year-old Jayme Closs, who was boarding the bus, caught his eye. Immediately, he was drawn to her. He had to have her. Once this seed planted in his mind, there was no going back for him; he knew that was the girl he was going to take.

On October 5, 2018, he drove to the home of the Closs family in Barron, Wisconsin, with the plan to abduct the 13-year-old, but feared there would be witnesses, so he left. He showed up again a couple days later, but again, backed out last second. Then, one week later, on October 15, he stopped by the Closs home again at around midnight and parked on their driveway. Garbed in a black coat and ski mask, he approached the home with a shotgun and began pounding on the door, yelling for them to ‘’open the fucking door’’. James Closs, the father of 13-year-old Jayme, shone a flashlight through a small decorative glass window by the door but refused to let him in. He had mistaken the man for a police officer and requested he reveal his badge. Without further ado, Jake fired his gun once through the window, killing him, before barging inside and checking every room to ensure there would be no witnesses for what more he was about to do. When he noticed that the bathroom door was suspiciously locked, he shot it down and tore down the bath curtain, only to find Jayme Closs, his targeted victim, crying loudly while being embraced by her mother, Denise, in the bathtub. Denise had already dialed 911 but did not speak; soon, the line would be disconnected.

First, the perpetrator ordered Denise to duct tape her daughter’s mouth shut; she complied, but struggled, so he completed the task himself. He then tied Jayme’s wrists and ankles and duct tape before fatally shooting her mother in the head. He subsequently dragged her outside to where his car was parked, placed her in the trunk, and drove away, bypassing the several police cars that were speeding toward the Closs home 20 seconds too late. He whisked Jayme away to his remote cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin, where she would be held hostage for 88 days. 

During her captivity, Jake would oftentimes force Jayme to hide under his bed and barricaded it with laundry baskets, weights, and tote bags whenever he would leave the house or had family over. There, she would sometimes stay for up to 12 hours with no access to food or water. He had warned her that he would know if she attempted to escape, and once threatened to kill her if she dared move. On one occasion, having noticed she disobeyed his orders tried to get out from that space, he struck her on the back hard. To keep her under control, he would often yell at her and hit the walls.

The end of the brave girl’s captivity would occur three months later on one cold afternoon on January 10, 2019, after her captor left home for a while. She managed to push her way through all of the objects barricading her under the bed and ran outside, flagging down down the nearest person she could find for help: a woman walking her dog. Immediately, the woman had recognized her and took her to the closest house to call 911. Once the police arrived, they waited for Jake’s arrival and arrested him. He confessed immediately.

Ellie Gould was an intelligent 17-year-old girl with a bubbly temperament living in Calne, Wiltshire, located in southwestern England. She had a love for riding horses and dreamed of joining the mounted police one way. At the time, she was dating another boy her age by the name of Thomas Griffiths, a swimmer and rugby player. The couple went way back, having been in each other’s lives since Year 7 and both attended high school together where they were straight-A students. 

On May 2, 2019, Ellie had confided in friends that she had broken off their three-month relationship and that Thomas wasn’t taking it very well. But, truly, the teenage girl hadn’t the slightest clue just how badly her former lover was handling the rejection until the following morning. On May 3, Thomas walked out of school, entered his car, and made the drive to Ellie’s residence on Springfield Drive. Upon entering her house, he pleaded for her to take him back, but Ellie’s mind was already made up. Consumed with rage, he then unleashed a vicious attack that will come to haunt her parents forever. 

Initially, he attempted to strangle her. Then he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the neck a total of 13 times. After she was dead, he attempted to clean the bloody murder scene using cloths. He wiped the blade of the knife on an apron before sticking it back in her neck, strategically wrapping her hand around the knife’s handle so as to make it appear as though it was a suicide. When he went home, he changed into new, clean clothes and disposed of the blood-stained cloths as well as other incriminating items in the woods behind his house. 

To explain the series of scratch marks on his neck inflicted by Ellie’s dire attempt to fight for her life, he told a friend that it was a result of self-harm due to his distress over the breakup. He then went back to school and began shooting texts to the now-deceased girl’s phone asking where she was. Ellie’s body wasn’t discovered until 3pm, when her father returned home, walked into the kitchen, and found her laying in a pool of her own blood–a sight that no parent should ever have to see.

‘’The image of Ellie lying there on the floor has haunted me ever since that afternoon,’‘ said Matthew Gould. ‘’It fills my thoughts when trying to sleep and hijacks my mind when trying to go about my day.’‘

19-year-old Heather Mack was described as having a ‘’privileged upbringing’’, having been raised in her big Chicago home by her parents, Sheila Mack and James L. Mack. Her father, James, was a notable jazz musician and composer. After her father’s sudden death in 2006 during a family trip in Greece, the police would come to be very familiar with the mother and daughter’s strained relationship. Police were constantly summoned to resolve domestic incidents, usually involving Heather stealing money from her mother or even physically assaulting her. In her senior year of high school, Heather began dating an older boy named Tommy Schaefer. Sheila did not approve of this relationship and even forced her daughter to get an abortion twice.

Jennifer Pan was born to Vietnamese refugee parents, Bich Ha and Huei Hann Pan, in Markham, Ontario. As immigrant parents, they set very high expectations for Jennifer. They enrolled her in piano lessons and figure skating from an early age. When that wasn’t occupying her time, she was studying. Her parents were very strict, never letting her date or attend social events. The intense pressure Jennifer was put under drove her to self-harm. The aspiring Olympic figure skating champion ended up tearing a ligament when she was 14 and had to give up her dream. 

Throughout high school, Jennifer received average grades, which she knew would not satisfy her parents’ expectations. She began forging her report cards to pass off as being a straight-A student to her parents. She ended up failing high school, but forged her high school diploma and faked a letter of acceptance into university for pharmacology. Jennifer went the whole nine yards to maintain her charade, such as purchasing second-hand textbooks and doing research in her fake-major. In reality, she worked part-time as a piano instructor and waitress and lived with her weed dealer boyfriend, Daniel Chi-Kwong Wong.

Her parents became suspicious and eventually discovered the truth. They gave her an ultimatum: either she will move back home and complete her education, and would also be forbidden from contacting her boyfriend, or they would kick her out and cut off their financial support. Jennifer chose the former option and moved back home with her parents. She became severely depressed from not being able to see Wong. 

Jennifer and Wong plotted to hire some hitmen to kill her parents so that she could inherit $500,000 and they could be together at last. On November 8th, 2010, the men entered the home fully armed. After ransacking the home for cash, they then shot both Bich and Hann to death. During the police interview, Jennifer claimed she did not know the assailants and she had been tied up the whole time, managing to free her hands to call 911. After changing her story multiple times, the investigator told her that her father survived his injuries and informed the officer that during the break-in, Jennifer was roaming freely and even conversing with the intruders.

In the afternoon of March 22nd, 2018, a 19-year-old woman knocked frantically on the door of dairy farmer Don Sipple who lived in Spring Brook, Wisconsin. The young woman was completely disheveled from head to toe and covered in bruises, cuts, and blood. The word BOY was also freshly carved into her arm. The barefoot woman claimed she had just been attacked and walked all the way to his house on foot. Concerned, he called the police immediately. She claimed to have no memory of what had happened to her and could not even recall her own name. She was take to the hospital for her treatments, to which she revealed her name to the police–Monica Jay. She mentioned another name: Jason Mengel. At this point, investigators began feeling skeptical of her supposed amnesia. Soon, this mystery woman before them was identified as Ezra McCandless (pictured above). But who was she, and how did she end up in Spring Brook with all her injuries?

Like many teenagers, Ezra was confused about her identity and experimented with different names and pronouns all throughout high school. For a while, she identified as a transman before switching back to female. Her name at birth was Monica Jay, but when she became an adult, she changed it to a more gender neutral name: Ezra McCandless. She moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where she met 33-year-old Jason Mengel (bottom left) in the summer of 2017. The two quickly became serious and within a month she moved in with him. Around this time she also met 23-year-old Alex Woodworth (bottom right), a philosophy major, at Racy’s Cafe Lounge. In the fall of 2017, Ezra fell pregnant and underwent an abortion. Her relationship with Jason allegedly turned sour after this event. She began having a sexual affair with Alex around this time. Ezra would later claim that he would often make her dress and act as a boy during sex.

In February 2018, Ezra filed a police report against one of Jason’s friends for sexual assault, claiming he had taken advantage of her while she was intoxicated. The case was dropped when Alex told investigators that Ezra confided to him that the sex was consensual but she was just worried about Jason finding out. Jason would soon find out about her affairs by going through her phone and promptly broke things off with Ezra. Ezra also broke up with Alex and tried hard to rekindle her relationship with Jason.

On March 22, 2018, an agitated Ezra popped into Racy’s Cafe Lounge to talk to Jason, then left to go to Alex’s house. Jason, feeling like Ezra was acting off, drove to Alex’s house to see what was going on. A concerned neighbor called the police when they spotted Jason pacing outside. Police spoke with Ezra, Jason, and Alex, before determining there were no problems and leaving, including Jason. Ezra then invited Alex for a car ride to talk about things.

They stopped on a dirt road, and Ezra suddenly pulled out a knife and began stabbing Alex in the head, torso, groin, and neck. In total, he sustained 18 stab wounds and succumbed to his injuries. She then used the knife to carve the word “BOY” into her arm and began walking away from the crime scene, finding herself at Don Sipple’s house. After police discovered Alex’s body hanging out of Ezra’s car, Ezra claimed that Alex attempted to rape her and she killed him entirely in self-defense. She claimed he carved the word “boy” into her arm after an argument ensued about her gender identity. The evidence found at the scene was not consistent with Ezra’s story of self-defense, but it was consistent with cold-blooded murder.

Herb Baumeister was a serial killer who operated in Indiana and possibly in Ohio, although his true motives will forever remain a mystery. Herb was said to have had a perfectly normal upbringing, but on the onset of adolescence began exhibiting antisocial behaviors such as playing with dead animals and urinating on his teacher’s desk. He was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia, although never received any treatment for it. In the 70s he got married and had three children of his own. Also in that decade he was committed to a psychiatric facility by his father. In the late 80s he founded a successful thrift store chain in Indianapolis called ‘’Sav-A-Lot’’. In the early 90s, police began investigating the mysterious disappearances of gay men who were all eerily close in age, height, and weight. Every lead resulted in a dead end, that is until a man contacted investigators to report that a man who goes by ‘’Brian Smart’’ and frequents gay bars had killed his friend and attempted to kill him as well. Police were able to track down the identity of ‘’Brian Smart’’ who turned out to be Herb Baumeister. When they informed him that he was a suspect in the men’s disappearances and asked to search his property, he refused to let them. In 1996, Herb’s wife filed for divorce and gave police permission to search their 18-acre farm while Herb was on vacation. It was then that police unearthed the bodies of eleven men. Herb is also suspected to be responsible for the murders of nine other men whose bodies were found along the corridor of Interstate 70 between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. 

‘‘A clown can get away with murder.’’

John Wayne Gacy was definitely a prime example of a clown that shouldn’t be trusted. By day, he dressed up as ‘‘Pogo the Clown’‘ and attended children’s parties, putting smiles on their faces. By night, he was abducting young boys, raping them, and burying their bodies in his crawl space. As predicted, the Killer Clown’s childhood was highly tumultuous. He was brought into this world on March 17, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, the second of three children. While he was close to his mother and two sisters, John had a stormy relationship with his father, also named John Gacy, a raging alcoholic who was abusive toward his family. His father was known to mercilessly beat him over any misdemeanor, and sometimes beat him for no reason at all. The man regularly belittled his son, calling him a ‘’sissy’’, ‘’stupid’’, and saying he would ‘’probably grow up queer’’. Despite the abuse, John admired his father and strove to earn his approval. Another unfortunate incident happened to John. As a child, he was molested by a trusted family friend more than once, but he hid it from his father, afraid he would only be blamed for it and be severely punished. To add to his woes, John suffered from a heart condition as a kid, making overweight and unable to play sports. This caused him to become the brunt of bullying by neighborhood kids and classmates. Since the 4th grade, John was hospitalized frequently for his blackouts, and since doctors were unable to determine the cause, his father accused him of faking it. However, in later years, doctors finally discovered he had a brain clot. In his teenage years, John began experiencing homosexual urges and struggled with his sexual identity. He eventually dropped out of high school as he found it difficult to catch up with everything he missed while hospitalized. 

On the night of February 27, 1978, 26-year-old Joe Shepherd was in the car with 15-year-old Roxanne Woodson (left) in Tellico Plains, Tennessee. Joe tried to make sexual advances on the teenager, but when she rebuffed him, he launched on attack on her. Roxanne managed to escape the car and darted into the nearby woods while Joe chased after her. She wasn’t seen again. The night after Roxanne was reported missing, police paid Joe a visit at his house to question him about her disappearance. After he tried to reach for his shotgun, police managed to wrestle it away from him and brought him to the police station. Joe admitted that he did try to seduce Roxanne and he chased her in the woods, but claimed he lost track of her. Joe was charged with assaulting a police officer but was released on bond. Hundreds of people continued to search for the missing girl but all hope of finding her was dwindling and the search was eventually called off. Over a month later, Joe’s mother moved some debris from her backyard and noticed two human hands protruding from the ground. Authorities unearthed the rest of the body which they determined was Roxanne’s. She had her pants wrapped around her head. Joe was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, and he also confessed to another murder: that of 14-year-old Cathy Clower (right), who disappeared two years before. When he led police to her remains, Cathy, like his other victim, also had her pants wrapped around her head. 

On March 26th, 2018, an SUV containing a family of eight veered off a cliff in Mendocino County, California, plunging 100 feet into the Pacific ocean and killing everybody inside. The victims of this horrific accident were identified as Jennifer Hart, the driver, along with her wife, Sarah, and their six adopted children: Ciera (aged 12), Abigail (aged 14), Jeremiah (aged 14), Devonte (aged 15), Hannah (aged 16), and Markis (19). To all those who knew the Hart family, whether directly or indirectly, this was a tragic accident. Jennifer and Sarah, who were very public with their children on social media, often sharing their views on politics and social injustice, were the poster women for a modern-day progressive family. After years of being in the closet, the two finally came out in 2004 and got married in 2009. Just before they got married, they adopted six African American children from Texas. In 2014, a photo went viral of Devonte tearfully embracing a police officer during a BLM protest being held in Portland, Oregon, following the police shooting of Michael Brown. The photo was nationally dubbed “the hug felt ‘round the world”.

After 29-year-old Keith Dardeen failed to show up for his shift on November 18th, 1987, and repeated attempts to contact him via phone went unanswered, his supervisor took it upon himself to phone Keith’s parents. Keith’s father, Don Dardeen, phoned the police to do a wellness check at his his son’s mobile home in the small town of Ina, Illinois, where he lived with his pregnant wife, Elaine (aged 30), and their toddler, Peter. Don himself had a spare key and agreed to meet with the deputies there and grant them access into the home. Once they did enter the home, however, they walked into one of the most gruesome scenes that no father should ever have to witness. Tucked into bed was Elaine and her son, Peter. Both had been bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Elaine herself was gagged and bound. She had been battered so severely that she went into labor, giving birth to a baby girl that was also killed. There was no sign of Keith anywhere, nor his vehicle. It was reasonably presumed that he was responsible for these murders. A manhunt ensued, which ended the next day when Keith was found–but not alive. Discovered in a wheatfield not far from his home, he, too, had met a similar fate as his wife and two children, being shot three times and having his penis severed. Police eventually located his blood-splattered vehicle, which was parked right in front of the Benton Police Station. It was also concluded from the autopsy that the murders of Keith and his wife and children occurred within the same hour.