MAY 2023 - Blues Vol 39 No. 5

ecause bullets were not

ecause bullets were not going to stop this spirit. — T.J. Riggs SOUND THE ALARM The jail had a notorious ghost, Sara Ware, who would play with the lights and set off alarms. Most of the alarms are panic alarms in locked offices where switches actually had to be pushed and slid into a slot to activate. It got to the point where the officers were afraid to go into the courthouse for an alarm. — Aimee Reynolds HIND LEGS One year our department started receiving complaints of headstones being knocked over in the city cemetery, around Halloween. The chief advised us on the midnight shift to spend our extra time around the cemetery to catch the person(s) causing damage. Me being sneaky, I found a good hidden observation point about a block away. There were two major welllit streets providing fair lighting in the cemetery. For several nights I would from time to time stop and check the cemetery with my binoculars and only patrol the cemetery at the start and end of my shift (as usual). One time checking the cemetery I spotted something that looked like a cat walking on its hind legs. I watched it walk approximately 10 feet between headstones and lost sight of it. I rushed over to the area in my patrol car turning on my spotlight, alley lights and takedown lights. Couldn’t find a thing but a track through the dew on the grass that dead-ended at a headstone. To this day I can remember how it moved and its outline in my binoculars. Creepy. I’m an avid hunter and I’ve done plenty of hunting at night. I am very familiar with all the animals in my neck of the woods and I have never seen anything like it. — Arthur Rigsby HOME Several years back, my partner and I were looking for a kidnapping suspect in some abandoned houses. Around 0330 we go to check a house in a very rural and remote part of the county. The house is extremely large and creepy-looking. We make entry and find the inside of this house is like something out of Tim Burton’s nightmare. There are walls going halfway up and stopping. There were doorways barely big enough to stick your head through and opening up into massive empty rooms. Every time we thought we’d made it to the top floor, we’d find another staircase leading up. Finally, we make it to the attic and find all kinds of crazy stuff drawn on the walls. Needless to say, we finished clearing the house and got out of there. — Kevin Thompson ENTRY TOOLS I responded to a suicide as the co-lead detective. A male had hung himself in the tree in the backyard. We checked the residence and it was locked with a deadbolt thrown on both entry/ egress doors. I called for entry tools and a supervisor for a breach because the decedent’s girlfriend was not accounted for and they lived together (possible murder/suicide). Several patrol officers and I were standing at the back door of the house (south side) which had been checked multiple times waiting on entry tools. I look at the door and there’s a gap in the frame and see there’s no deadbolt thrown anymore. I check the door and it’s now open. We clear the residence and no one is inside. I even had them clear the attic space. Inside the door that “magically” opened were multiple notes to family members from the decedent. We all walk outside and are waiting on NOK to arrive and try to walk back in. The door is secured again with a deadbolt. It should be noted no one had keys and there were key locks on both sides of the door. The lead and I were now discussing how we were gonna have to call for entry tools and again the door was open. No one going near it. I again had the residence cleared and no one inside. The lead detective and I did not go back into that house that day. — Rob McGinley A CALL FOR HELP Calls for service coming from a vacant household twice a night for about a week. The voice on the phone sounded like an elderly at-risk lady with Alzheimer’s barely audibly saying “Please help. Please help.” Totally unresponsive to our calls. Confirmed with my shift sergeant that the house’s last resident was a daughter taking care of her mother who was dying from stage two lung cancer. Definitely sent a shiver down my back. — Dalton Hostetler PAPERWORK One cold winter night around 0300 I was parked in a dark parking lot doing paperwork behind a Kmart. Suddenly someone or something banged on my driver’s side window 2-3 times, obviously scaring the hell out of me, but it happens. Except there was nobody there. Business wall 8-15’ to my right, 10’ solid fence to my left, and 100’ open space front and back. Nothing but my own tire tracks in the blanket of fresh snow and no marks on my window or ground indicating a snowball or such. I even got down in the snow and looked under my car. Still a bit anxious whenever I drive back there. — Troy Peterson POLICE1 READERS RESPOND • I was working receiving and release when we had an inmate released to a state mental hospital. When he was given his release clothing he looked toward me with a thousand-yard stare and said, “Why don’t you just do it?” I asked what he meant; with zero inflection and staring right through me, he said, “I know why you’re here. Kill me already and get it over with.” There was no one else in the holding tank, however, I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one had entered. No one had. When I placed him in handcuffs he suddenly focused on me as though just noticing I was there. He said to me, “He’s going to kill me, don’t let them take me!” He survived the transport but it was definitely creepy. • I was a new cop and my FTO and I were on a residential street in the middle of the night. We found a car positioned perpendicular to the road, and the driver seemed to be trying to get turned around but just kept moving back and forth. We contacted the driver who was a female in her early 20s. She was lucid and coherent. She asked me how to get to a nearby neighborhood called Joaquin Muerietta, but she was being somewhat evasive in her answers to my questions. Eventually, she reluctantly told me her family was being held hostage and the only way she could get them released would be to complete missions for the CIA. I figured she was on drugs or just crazy. My FTO was a DRE and he determined she wasn’t on drugs. OK, so she’s just crazy. Then she told me she had a device in the car, which was like a handle with an arrow on the top of it. She said if she held the device, the arrow would glow when it was pointed in the direction she was supposed to go to “continue her mission.” I asked if I could examine the device and she said sure. I decided to humor her and held the device out while slowly turning in a circle. To my shock, the arrow suddenly brightened when it was pointed toward the Joaquin Murietta neighborhood…and only when it was pointed in that direction. She had an expression on her face like, “See? I told you so.” I had never seen a device like that before or since. My FTO was freaked out, and he told me “She’s not committing any crimes so let’s get out of here.” So we left. To this day, I have no idea what was actually happening there. • I was a patrol deputy in a small Texas Panhandle town in the 1990s. One winter night after a good, solid snowfall I was down the alley behind the business district checking for open doors, when I saw a woman at the far end of the alley – about a block away – standing in the middle of the alley, looking my direction. White female, long dark hair, wearing a long black evening dress, but no coat gloves or anything like that. It was after midnight, achingly cold, so I called, “Miss, are you OK?” She looked at me, then turned and stepped into what I knew was a recessed area behind one of the stores, so I got back into the cruiser and drove down there, expecting to find the dock door open, and the kids of the owners hanging out. The dock doors weren’t open. None of the doors were open, and the only thing in that little recessed area was a black cat sitting on the gas meter. As I grabbed the flashlight and started looking around, figuring I was about to find an intoxicated girl passed out in a snowdrift, the cat hopped off the meter, rubbed against my leg and wandered off down the alley. Then I realized that not only was there not anyone passed out in the snow, my footprints were the only ones in the fresh snow. And when I say my tracks were the only ones in the snow – the cat didn’t leave prints either. And I wasn’t new to the tracking game – I’d tracked children across dry caliche before that. I got back into the cruiser and high-tailed it back to the office, told the dispatcher about it, and she said, “Oh, her. She’s been showing up for about 20 years or so. No one has a clue who she is. You see the cat, too?” I hadn’t said anything about the cat. Freaked me the hell out. 96 The BLUES The BLUES 97