Case 1 | Case 2 | Case 3 | Case 4 | Case 5 | Case 6 | Case 7

Hey everyone. Very sorry for the extended absence. I’m sorry to inform you all that my grandfather passed on December 30th, 2019. On Christmas night, after a fantastic, lively day with his entire family, his health took a drastic downturn. He passed while we were all over at he and my grandma’s house, preparing for New Years Eve. I know he was happy to go with all of us around, it’s what he always said he wanted.

Let me also say that the time my grandpa and I spent over the past few months, sharing his stories here on r/NoSleep, interacting with everyone, I can’t overstate how happy this all made him. You helped make some very difficult months just that much easier for a sick man, and my grandpa appreciated each and every one of you.

So, we did speak with a detective in Colorado about a couple’s unusual experiences in a cabin in the blizzardous mountains of Pikes Peak, but I thought it might be more appropriate to share the final case my grandpa himself regaled to me. After the last weeks of pre and post-funeral goings on, I’ve finally transcribed the case he told me about on the 24th of December.

—–

I had a good career, you know? These weird cases were few and far between, and when i wasn’t chasing my tail looking for clues that wouldn’t lead anywhere even if I found them, I feel like I really made a difference. Scary as hell, sometimes…yeah…but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Your…your grandmother…there’s…ah, I don’t know. I don’t wanna scare you. I’ve been putting this one off since I started telling you about these damn cases. 

[My grandpa was very apprehensive about sharing this particular case, moreso than any of the others. When he said he didn’t want to scare me, I suggested that with everything he’d already told me, the chances of that were slim. Even still, he was particularly worried that the contents of the case would affect me. Nevertheless, I assured my grandpa I would be fine, and he begrudgingly continued.]

Alright…well, god…this one hits home. So by the time I made detective, I’d been with your grandmother for a while, a long time. In 19…81? Maybe’80, one of the two, my partner and I caught one. Now, this wasn’t immediately apparent as being an Impossible One. There were little hints of odd things, but…

[I could tell my grandpa was questioning whether or not to continue telling me about this case.]

So, the case was a double homicide at a real nice apartment building downtown, you know, a high rise, overlooking the lake, all that. Now, the apartment belonged to a man and his wife, I remember the man’s name was Scott, Scott something. Scott was one of the two victims. He’d been…ah…I don’t wanna be gratuitous, your folks on the website don’t need to hear all the nasty business. 

But…okay, picture someone laying down on their back, arms at their sides. Starting at the tip of his right shoulder and going diagonally downwards to the bottom of his left elbow, he’d been cut. I don’t mean someone had slashed him with a knife. I mean…god…he’d been cut clean through, like someone took a giant axe and hit him at that angle.

He’d been cut there, and then from his right hip to just above his left knee, and then again from his right knee to his left ankle. The cuts were so clean that we didn’t realize at first he’d been vivisected. He was wearing a suit and tie, and the cuts were so clean that he just looked like a normal dead body in a pool of blood. You can imagine our surprise when the coroner’s went to move the body and he fell into a whole bunch of pieces…shit.

So…uh…yeah, there was another body. Scott was married, but the body wasn’t his wife’s. It was this…ah…this, this old lady, must’ve been in her 90’s. Nothing was done to her, she was determined to have died from natural causes. We initially thought maybe the wife had been abducted, and, you know, of course we had to look at her for the death of her husband, but…

This old lady, she’d been reported missing from a nursing home the day before, a nursing home in…shit where was it…Sunset…Sunrise. Sunrise, Florida. We spoke to the staff over the phone, and there was one nurse there, she’d just walked this woman back to her room and given her her medications. She was supposed to mark down on a form when she’d last taken her meds, but she’d left her pen in the common area just outside the room. She stepped out for about five seconds, as she put it, and when she stepped back in, lady was gone. Vanished into thin air.

That was at about 4:00PM. Meanwhile, about 4:15PM, maybe 5 minutes away from the nursing home, a woman was detained after behaving erratically, taken to a mental health facility. That woman was Scott’s wife. She’d been at work that day, and towards the end of the day she disappeared, everyone thought she’d left the office early for the day. She didn’t buy a plane ticket, a bus ticket, a hot air balloon ride, her car was still in the parking garage at her office building.

They’d just…switched places, kind of. Not an exact switch though. We don’t know how the old lady ended up in Scott and his wife’s apartment. Oh…and Scott’s wife, Amanda! That was her name…Amanda. She’d been picked up screaming at the top of her lungs, but after that, she went catatonic. Completely, stone cold catatonic. God…damnit…

Ah…so the whole thing is strange, unexplainable, all that. You know by now how these things go. But…shit, ah…this one though. We, uh…we start going through the apartment, trying to figure out who these people are; I mean, we know who they are, but…you know, trying to figure out what might have led to this point. 

My partner happens upon some photo albums, and…ah…[my grandpa started tearing up at this point, and had to take a few moments to collect himself]…he finds some photo albums, and there’s pictures of, uh…of us. Of me and your grandma. Pictures from our wedding, from games we’d gone to, the first picture we took when we bought our first house together…even pictures from when we were kids, long before we knew each other.

I’m trying to reason it out. I think maybe Scott or his wife is someone your grandma knows, or someone in the family knows. But it’s only pictures of us, no one else in the family. And your grandma didn’t have any clue who they were. It was all logged into evidence, we kept working the case. Never figured out who killed Scott and…and we never figured out how he was cut so cleanly. Doesn’t even seem possible.

Anyways…about a year after that, your grandmother and I are sitting at the dinner table…your mother too…and the phone rings. Your grandma gets up and answers it, and…and uh…fuck…you know, she says ‘hello’, and the color just drains from her face, like she saw a ghost. Then she bursts out in tears, just…hysterical sobbing, and you know your grandma, she’s a strong woman, the strongest.

I get up and take the phone from her, and it’s just a dial tone. I kept asking her, “who was it? Who was it?”, and she just cried and cried and cried. I asked what whoever it was said, and she just shook her head. She’s never told me what was said on that phone call, even to this day. She wouldn’t tell me who it was, either, for a while. 

About a month after the call, it was the middle of the night, and…you know that feeling you get, like you’re being watched? I remember I felt that, except I was asleep. I opened my eyes and your grandmother was standing on my side of the bed, just staring down at me. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, but I damn near pissed myself. “…the hell you doing, Pat?” I ask her, and she just looks at me and says “It was Amanda on the phone.”

After she said that, she took these weird, choppy steps back to her side of the bed, like she was only moving one part of her body at a time to get where she was going. Her toes, then her foot, then her leg, and so on and so forth. It was goddamn…[my grandpa tears up again]…it was goddamn horrifying.

I didn’t go back to sleep that night. The next morning, when your grandma woke up, she had no memory of it happening. When I asked her if the person who had called her a month earlier had been named Amanda, she got real worked up and said she didn’t want to talk about it, and then she…she got sick…physically sick. Ran to the bathroom, threw up. 

Then that night…I woke up again in the middle of the night and your grandma was outta bed. The light in the hall was on, and the stairs to the attic were down. I went up there, and your grandma was…she was sleeping on the floor of the attic, and it looked like she’d gone through a bunch of boxes. There was a whole bunch of stuff we’d stored up there all thrown around, and she…she was sleeping next to some photo albums. Most of them were our old ones, but there was one, and…it was pictures of Scott and Amanda, from their wedding day, from when they were kids.

There was no reason we should’ve had it, and the album was in with a bunch of stuff we hadn’t touched in years. I woke your grandma up, and she didn’t remember going up there.

By that point I was obviously onto different cases, and this one was just filed in with the other Impossible Ones. But…and I didn’t notice this until years later…every year on May 12th, your grandmother gets sick. Real sick. It’s gotten worse as the years have gone by. Remember last year, when she was in the hospital for a few days, dehydrated? It was that.

May 12th is Amanda’s birthday. 

I’ve gone over everything more times than I can remember. Hundreds of times, trying to find a connection. There isn’t one. The closest thing to a connection between us and them that I could find was that my dad’s brother, Alfred, he owned an apartment building on the eastside where one of…shit it was one of them…I think it was one of Scott’s great aunt’s had rented, something really far back and really meaningless.

I’ve told you about a lot of these, and I know I’ve said that one or another was “the one”, the one I could never get out of my head, the one that still, after all these years, really…really gets to me. But this one…this is the one. This is the one that I still look into every year. I call over to the precinct and see if they’ve come across anything new…of course they never have.

Your mother…she…she’s connected to it too, some way. I’ll let you ask her about it though, or your grandma. But I’ll bet she’s not going to want to talk about it. You can…

[My grandpa went into a coughing fit and said he was done for the night, and that he didn’t want to talk about the case anymore.]

—–

On December 30th, while we were all at my grandparent’s house, my grandfather was quite sick, but he’d mustered up all the energy he could so as not to drag the evening down. He was always thoughtful like that. We would’ve been happy to spend time with him in his room, if that’s what was needed, but he refused. He wanted to be up and helping and talking and enjoying the night with all of us.

At around 9pm, the phone rang. He was sitting in a chair in the kitchen, and he reached over to the desk behind him and grabbed the cordless phone. He said ‘hello’, and as soon as he did, I saw the color drain from his face. His lip started quivering and his eyes welled up with tears.

I quickly grabbed the phone from him and put it to my ear, but there was nothing but the three tones the generally accompany the “We’re sorry, but your call cannot be completed as dialed” message, repeating over and over. I looked to my grandpa and asked if he was okay. He simply looked at me and said “It was Amanda on the phone”.

And with that, my grandfather took a look around the room, sat back in his chair, and passed on to the hereafter.

When all of the funeral and will business was completed, I used the information my grandpa had given me in this case to reach out to a relative of Amanda, her sister Anne. I explained that I knew reaching out to the mental health facility she was at would be useless, as they couldn’t and wouldn’t divulge any information nor allow me to speak with her.

Anne informed me that her sister had died just over four years earlier.

And despite there being several people in the house, all of whom acknowledged hearing the phone ring, the phone records showed that my grandparent’s home didn’t receive a call anywhere near 9pm on December 30th, 2019.

I think of all the Impossible Cases my grandpa ever worked, this is the one that truly haunted him the most. In his honor, I’m going to continue his “tradition” of reaching out to his old precinct every year to see if any new developments have arisen.

For now, I know that wherever my grandpa is, he’s regaling anyone else who will listen with the stories of an honorable life well lived.