Stranger Than Fiction

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Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and today's podcast features three stories that demonstrate that.

The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.

The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Memories, and it's about a man who went missing during a storm, or did he?

The second story you'll hear is called The Bully, and it's about a town that hatched a plan to deal with their least favorite resident.

And the third and final story you'll hear is called One in a Trillion, and it's about the luckiest or unluckiest man alive.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So, if that's of interest to you, please ask the Amazon Music Follow button for a bite of their sandwich, and after they say yes, proceed to jam the biggest bite possible into your mouth.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Memories.

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1988.

A small New Jersey town is shaken by horror.

A devoted mother brutally murdered.

Satanic symbols scattered throughout her home, and her teenage son vanished without a trace.

Was it demonic possession, or something even worse, something more sinister?

Based on the Hit Wondery podcast series The Devil Within, comes Let the Devil In, a four-part documentary that unravels this haunting true crime.

Through never-before-heard interviews and shocking revelations, we will explore a case that divided a community and exposed the dark underbelly of America's satanic panic.

Executive produced and hosted by horror maestro Eli Roth, this chilling investigation will make you question everything you believe about fear, faith, and the monsters we create.

Let the Devil In.

Now streaming, new episodes on Sundays, available exclusively on MGM Plus.

In 1957, 31-year-old Larry Bader was living with his wife, Mary Lou, and their three kids in Akron, Ohio.

Larry was a good father and good husband, but he was a terrible businessman.

Over the past several years, he had launched several new business ventures and they had all failed, throwing the family into fairly significant debt.

And so even though Larry desperately wanted to be an entrepreneur and eventually start a quality business, they didn't have the money to do that.

And so he had to just take some job in order to pay the bills.

And so the job he got was a cookware salesman for a local company, and it did pay the bills, but it did not make Larry happy.

And so on the weekends when Larry was not working and if it was okay with his wife, he would basically just disappear and go fishing on Lake Erie, which is about an hour north of where they lived.

And that was his way of kind of disconnecting from reality and kind of disconnecting from his somewhat crappy life.

And so on Friday, March 15th, Larry approached his wife and said, hey, you know, I'd like to head up to Lake Erie and go fishing for the weekend.

And she would tell him, you know, I got the kids.

It's fine.

You can go do that.

But I heard the weather was going to be really bad.

Are you sure that's such a good idea?

And Larry would tell her, you know what, don't worry about it.

These storms, they always hype them up.

They're never a big deal.

I'll be fine.

And so he kissed his wife, he kissed his kids, he grabbed his stuff, he hopped in his truck, then he left and headed up to Lake Erie.

That night, Lake Erie was hit with a massive thunderstorm, way bigger than the one that the news was predicting.

And then the following morning, the Coast Guard discovered Larry's boat floating around on Lake Erie.

There was minor damage to it, and it was missing an oar, and it was missing Larry.

Larry was nowhere to be found.

And so a search was launched for Larry, but he was never found and he was eventually declared dead.

And so even though the family did not have Larry's body, they would hold a funeral for him and his wife was able to actually cash his life insurance policy, which was enough to pay for her and the kids.

Eight years later, in 1965, Larry Bader's niece, a 21-year-old woman named Suzanne Peka, was in Chicago at a sporting goods show show with a friend of hers.

And as they're walking through the different exhibits, looking at different sporting goods equipment, they noticed over on the side of the building, there was a fairly large group of people gathered around this one particular exhibit.

And so she and her friend she was with walked over to this group and they kind of pushed their way through.

And in the middle of this group was this man with an eye patch and a big mustache doing an archery demonstration.

Basically, he was shooting arrows into a target about 30 feet away.

And so Suzanne and her friend just kind of watched this guy for a couple of minutes.

And very quickly, they could see why he was attracting this big crowd because he was just an incredible archer.

He was hitting the bullseye over and over and over again.

But as they continued to watch this guy, Suzanne's friend started to notice something unique about him.

And he eventually turned to Suzanne and said, hey, doesn't this guy look exactly like your uncle who went missing on Lake Erie?

And Suzanne was kind of surprised to hear him talking about her missing uncle, but she turned and looked at this guy.

And all of a sudden, she saw it too.

He was a spitting image of Larry Bader, her uncle.

Although this guy had an eye patch and a mustache, but even with that, he looked exactly like Larry.

And as Suzanne is watching him, she's thinking, you know, Larry was known for being this incredible archer.

And here this guy is who looks just like him.

And he's an incredible archer.

And so after this demonstration was over, Suzanne and the friend ran over to this guy with the eye patch on.

And Suzanne says to him, hey, I know this sounds totally crazy, but you look exactly like my uncle, Larry Bader, who went missing on Lake Erie eight years ago.

And so the guy, he hears her and he kind of smiles and says, you know, I'm sorry, I don't know Larry Bader.

My name is John Johnson.

People call me Fritz.

I'm sorry.

I don't know who your uncle is.

I can't help you.

But Suzanne, as she stood there staring at this guy, she was becoming more and more convinced this was Larry Bader, despite the fact this guy is saying he is not Larry Bader.

And so she says to him, no, you are Larry Bader.

I'm positive.

You're my uncle.

Now, at this, Fritz would be polite but firm, and he would reiterate that, look, I'm not your uncle.

I don't know who Larry Bader is.

I don't go to Lake Erie.

I just don't understand why you think I'm him.

I live in Omaha, Nebraska with my wife and my kids, and I'm on TV.

I do sports journalism in Omaha, and I advise archery companies, and that's why I'm here.

So I don't know why you think I'm your uncle, but I'm not.

I'm sorry.

And with that, Fritz turned around and he walked away.

And after this discussion, Suzanne and her friend were not remotely deterred from what Fritz was saying.

They were completely convinced this was Larry Bader.

And so they ran to a phone and Suzanne called her two other uncles, so Larry Bader's brothers, and she explained how she met this guy that is the spitting image of their brother.

And they immediately hopped on a flight that night and flew to Chicago.

And the following morning, the two uncles, along with Suzanne and her friend, they went back to the Sporting Goods show.

They went over to the archery exhibit.

And sure enough, there was Fritz doing his archery demonstration.

And as soon as there was a break, Suzanne, her friend, and now the two uncles, so Larry Bader's brothers, they walk over and the two uncles, as soon as they see this guy, despite the eye patch, despite the mustache, they too would say, this is our brother.

And so they approached him and they said, look, I know you're saying you are not our brother i don't know what's going on here but you look exactly like our brother and we have his military paperwork right here with fingerprints will you please just humor us and go to the police station with us and get fingerprinted that way you can prove you really are not our brother please we've been looking for our brother for a long time this would be a huge favor to us And so Fritz was annoyed.

He didn't want to do it, but he's like, okay, fine.

I'll go to the police station with you.

I'll get my fingerprints taken and we can put this this behind us.

And so that day they left the Sporting Goods show.

They went to a police station and Fritz had his fingerprints taken.

And afterwards, the police would tell him, you are Larry Bader.

When Fritz heard this, he could not believe it.

I mean, he literally did not believe he was Larry Bader.

It wasn't like this revelation prompted new memories and suddenly he recalled it all.

It was really the opposite.

Fritz immediately is trying to rack his brain to figure out, like, is my whole life a lie?

But there was nothing.

All he had was a contiguous stretch of memories from when he was a very young child, as Fritz Johnson, all the way to the present.

But we now know that the bulk of his memories are all not real.

He was never a child as Fritz Johnson.

He was Larry Bader and then became Fritz Johnson only eight years earlier.

The timeline of what happened to Larry Bader is rough at best, but as far as we understand it, Fritz Johnson showed up in Omaha, Nebraska a couple of days or a couple of months after Larry Bader went missing on Lake Erie.

And when Fritz showed up in Omaha, he just walked into a restaurant and asked for a job there.

And he had provided documentation that showed he was in fact Fritz Johnson.

And nobody thought anything of it.

He was completely normal.

There was nothing unusual about his behavior.

And over time, Fritz just kind of threw himself into the Omaha community.

I mean, he got married.

He had a child.

He adopted another child.

He left his job as a bartender at a restaurant and eventually got this amazing job as a sports TV broadcaster for their local channel.

I mean, he was like a minor celebrity in Omaha.

Everybody recognized, oh, there's Fritz Johnson.

He's on TV.

Hey, Fritz, how you doing?

I mean, he had a full-blown life.

But as soon as the news broke that he was not Fritz Johnson, he was Larry Bader, right away, the TV station he worked for fired him.

His second wife left him because in reality, he actually was still legally married to his first wife.

And so his marriage to his second wife was never actually real to begin with.

And so she leaves him.

And then also, because Larry Bader was no longer dead, the insurance company that had paid out all that money to his first wife as part of his life insurance policy, they demanded that he repay them.

And throughout all this drama of Fritz finding out he's Larry Bader, Fritz continued to say he was not Larry Bader, that this was all a big mistake.

He just could not understand how this could have happened.

None of it made sense.

And so eventually a team of experts, doctors, psychologists, you name it, they came out to Omaha and they ran Fritz, aka Larry Bader, through a battery of tests over almost two weeks.

And at the end of all their testing, they concluded that one, Fritz definitely is Larry Bader.

So there's no debate there.

He is Larry Bader.

And two, two, he is almost certainly suffering from an extreme case of amnesia, which is memory loss.

But the doctors and experts had no idea how he developed this case of amnesia.

And of course, Fritz, he too had no idea how he developed this case of amnesia.

And it's unlikely we'll ever get any more clarity on exactly what happened to Larry Bader slash Fritz, because unfortunately, just one year after it was discovered Fritz was Larry Bader, Fritz would would die.

He had cancer in one of his eyes, and that was actually why he wore that eye patch and the cancer had come back and it took his life.

Today, his case is considered to be one of the most believable and baffling cases of amnesia on record.

The show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Our next story is called The Bully.

In 1949, 15-year-old problem child Ken Rex McElroy dropped out of school and moved to a tiny farming town called Skidmore, Missouri.

There, he began his life of crime, which consisted primarily of theft.

At night, he would drive his truck onto Skidmore residents' property and he would steal their livestock, alcohol, grain, food, antiques, anything he could get his hands on and that he could sell, he would take.

And if the owners ever caught him in the act, he would just raise his rifle at them and tell them to go back inside and never report it to the police or he would kill them.

And because Rex was this big, 270-pound monster of a man who was known for having a bad temper and for being really aggressive, people generally just did what he asked and his crimes went totally unreported.

In the rare instances that victims would report Rex's crimes to police, Rex would begin intimidating them and their family by staking out their houses at all hours of the night, or he would just walk directly up to these victims and he would say, I will kill you if you testify against me.

And if none of those tactics worked, Rex used some of his illegal money to hire one of the very best defense lawyers in the entire state.

a lawyer who had famously represented the mob, and he would step in and get Rex off of virtually any charge, including the time Rex actually did shoot one of the owners who caught him in the act.

Over the years, Rex would use these fear and intimidation tactics not just to make money, but also to prey on young women and girls.

In the 1970s, when Rex was in his 40s, he began stalking a local Skidmore girl who was 12 years old named Trina.

After assaulting her dozens of times, Rex learned her family was going to be pressing charges against him.

So Rex burned down Trina's family's house and killed the family dog and then threatened to kill the entire family unless they signed paperwork that would legally marry their daughter Trina to Rex.

This would protect him legally in case they pressed any charges against him.

After the family finally relented and signed off on the marriage, Trina was forced to come live with Rex at his house and within two years she became pregnant.

After the birth of her child, she took her baby and tried to run away from Rex, and she ran back to her family's new house and she was hiding there but Rex tracked her down, he took her and their baby back and then Rex proceeded to burn her family's house down again and again killed their new family dog.

By the end of the 1970s, Rex wasn't only just the most hated person in Skidmore, he was the most destructive person.

He had hurt so many people in town, but it seemed like no one could do anything about it.

It was like he was untouchable.

Then, a single piece of candy changed everything.

In 1980, one of Rex's children was at a local grocery store in Skidmore when they were caught stealing a piece of candy.

When the shopkeeper asked the child to put the candy back, they refused and caused this huge fight.

And before long, Rex has found out about this huge fight.

And Rex, instead of being upset with his child for stealing, he becomes enraged that the shopkeeper had the audacity to accuse his child of a crime.

And so Rex began stalking the owner of the store, a 70-year-old man named Bo, along with the rest of Bo's family.

At all hours of the night, Rex would just show up in front of their house with a gun slung across his lap, and he would fire shots into the air.

And then during the day, he would walk right up to Bo and he would tell him, I'm going to kill you.

And so Bo and his family knew it was only a matter of time before Rex did become violent.

And they were right.

In July of that year, Rex showed up at Bo's grocery store with a shotgun in hand, and Bo, who was in the back of the shop loading groceries through the back door, he turns around and he sees Rex walking up to him.

They have this heated confrontation where at some point Rex just raises a shotgun and he fires a shot into Bo's neck.

Bo was gravely wounded, but he would survive, and Rex would actually get arrested and would be charged with attempted murder.

And it seemed like for once, maybe, Rex was actually going to get what was coming to him.

But he didn't.

The attempted murder charge was lowered to just assault, and he was given two years in prison, but he would only serve one day in jail before being released on bond.

And as soon as he was out on bond, he went right to his house and he got his rifle that had a bayonet attached at the end of it, and he went right to the tavern in the middle of Skidmore and he began telling anybody who would listen that he planned to finish the job, i.e.

he was going to kill Bo.

And he described in very graphic detail how he planned to do it, which involved this rifle and this bayonet.

Patrons that were at the tavern that saw Rex and heard these claims, they were scared for Bo, and so they left the tavern and they told city leaders about these threats.

And so city leaders at this point, they've had enough of Rex and they decide they're going to host this secret meeting that will not include Rex the following morning.

So the next morning comes around and all these angry residents, they come to this meeting and they begin discussing, you know, how are we going to handle Rex?

We can't use police.

We can't use politicians.

Nothing can be done.

So what are we going to do?

How are we going to put an end to his reign of terror?

And after a while, they came up with a plan.

And after the meeting was done, everybody left the town hall, they got their guns, and they made their way over to the tavern where Rex was seen earlier that morning.

About 40 of these armed men surrounded the outside of this tavern.

And once they were all in place, another smaller group of men that were all armed walked inside the tavern and they saw Rex sitting at the bar with Trina sitting right next to him.

And so these men, they walk up right behind Rex, uncomfortably close, right behind him, and they just stand there with their guns looking at him.

And at some point, Rex turns around and sees them, and he's about to lash out and start fighting them, but he realizes he's totally outnumbered.

And these men that are standing all around him, they look like they mean business.

And so he stands up, he grabs Trina, and he brushes past them, trying to act tough, and he walks out of the tavern.

When he gets outside, he's taken aback at this additional group of armed men, which is much larger, who are all standing there just looking in at him.

And so Rex at this point becomes visibly frightened, but he grabs Trina and he calmly walks out to his truck, which is parked a little ways out in front of the tavern.

He gets in the driver's side, she hops in the passenger side, and Rex Rex lights a cigarette up, he turns on his truck, and he's about to try to drive away when a gunshot rings out, and Rex immediately slumps forward onto his wheel.

One of the Skidmore residents runs up to the truck, they open up the passenger side, and they grabbed Trina, who was unhurt, pulled her out, and rushed her to safety.

Once she was clear, the other residents with their guns just moved in on the truck, and for 20 seconds, they opened fire on Rex.

And after the shooting was over, nobody called an ambulance.

Everyone just stood there and watched as the town bully died.

In all, there were 46 witnesses that were there when Rex was murdered, but they all said they had either not seen the shooting or they didn't know who the shooter was.

And despite a lengthy federal investigation, none of the witnesses ever changed their stories.

And so, as a result, no one was ever charged with Rex's murder.

Years later, a Skidmore resident, when asked what happened here, they just said that man needed a killing.

The next and final story is called One in a Trillion.

Michael Packard might be the luckiest or unluckiest person alive.

In 2001, when Michael was 38 years old, He was on a flight over Costa Rica when the small plane he was on crashed.

The pilot, co-pilot, and a passenger were all killed on impact, but Michael and the four other passengers, they survived the crash, but they were all left badly injured and stranded in a very remote section of the jungle.

The survivors attempted to use the downed plane's radio equipment to send out a distress signal to try to get someone to come out and help them, but they had no way of knowing if anybody was receiving their signal.

And so all they could do was just send it out and then wait and hope somebody found them before they all died.

And sure enough, 48 hours after crashing, rescuers were able to hack their way deep into the jungle where Michael and the other survivors were, and they were all saved.

While Michael was recovering in the hospital, a doctor told him that based on his injuries, he would not have survived another night out in that jungle.

The chances of even being in a plane crash are astronomically low.

The odds are about 1 in 5 million, with some places giving odds as low as 1 in 20 million.

To put that in perspective, Michael was far more likely to have been struck by lightning, which is about a 1 in 1 million chance, than he was to have been in that plane crash.

But that plane crash would not be the last time that Michael defied the odds and did something totally unbelievable.

Over the next couple of decades, Michael, who was a commercial diver by trade, would survive not one, but two significant encounters with great white sharks off the coast of California.

Some of Michael's friends would not be so lucky.

Michael would get lost at sea, like really lost, like treading out in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight for hours lost.

But miraculously, a boat would find him and save him again.

And Michael would discover the body of a longtime missing person hidden underneath the water about 60 feet down off the coast of Massachusetts.

But of all the improbable exploits of Michael's life, None is more unbelievable than what happened to him in 2021, which experts are saying he had about a one in one trillion chance of experiencing.

On the morning of June 11th, 2021, Michael, who was 57 years old at the time, hopped in a boat with his longtime diving partner, Josiah.

Once they were all situated and they had all their equipment inside of the boat, they took off and headed for the open waters right off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where they planned to do some lobster diving.

A popular way to retrieve lobsters is to literally just dive down and by hand, pick them up and bring them back to the surface.

And so that day, that's what Michael and Josiah planned to do.

Once they reached this spot right off the coast, Michael put on all of his scuba diving equipment and hopped in the water.

Josiah did not put on any diving equipment because he was not going to be getting in the water for this dive.

Instead, he would remain on the boat and help Michael get in and out of the water.

He'd pull lobsters up onto the boat, and he was also there in case of an emergency, he could call for help.

And so just after 6 a.m., once Michael was in the water and signaled he was good to go, he dove down below, and after a little while, he came back back up, but with a relatively small haul of lobsters.

And so the two men figured that, well, I guess today is just not a great day for catching lobsters.

But regardless, for the next couple of hours, Michael continued to go down and catch as many lobsters as he possibly could.

By 8 a.m., Michael had captured approximately 100 pounds of lobsters that were now in the boat.

And so Michael and Josiah were actually starting to feel pretty good about this particular trip.

And so Michael decided he would go back down one more time and try to get just a few more lobsters before they called it a day.

And so Josiah remembers watching Michael who was in the water as he put his mouthpiece back in.

He signaled up to Josiah that he was good to go.

And Josiah watched as he disappeared below the surface.

The water was very calm and Josiah is just kind of scanning out across the water.

And then all of a sudden, this eruption of white water came rushing up to the surface right where Michael had gone down below.

And so right away, Josiah leaned out over the edge of the boat to see if he could look down and see his friend.

But he didn't see Michael anywhere.

Instead, he saw something something massive moving around underneath them.

After Michael had broken the surface on this final dive down to get more lobsters, his plan was to sink down to the bottom of the ocean at about 60 feet and then go hunting for lobsters.

But when he had descended to about 45 feet, he felt something smash into him from behind that felt like a truck hitting him, and then everything around him went totally pitch black.

The impact of whatever it was that hit him had caused his mouthpiece to get blown out of his mouth, so he doesn't have air and he starts fumbling around to find his mouthpiece, but he can't find it.

And as he's fumbling around, his hands are making contact with what feels like walls all around him.

He was inside of an enclosed space.

But when he had touched these walls, they were not normal walls.

They were soft, but they were hard at the same time, and they seemed to be moving like they were pulsating or quivering.

The space he was in was fairly large, and it was not completely flooded with water.

It was like Michael had slipped into this air pocket.

But this air pocket was not stationary.

It was moving and pretty fast because the water that was inside of it was violently sloshing all around.

Michael could hear it slapping up against the walls.

As Michael continued to panic and fumble around for his mouthpiece, he started to notice intense pressure on his legs, but he had no idea what was causing it, and because it's pitch black, he couldn't see what it was.

Finally, Michael found the line that was connected to his mouthpiece.

He jammed it in his mouth and he took a long inhale.

And now that he could breathe again, he had this horrifying thought, have I been swallowed by a shark?

He instinctively began feeling around for the shark's teeth, but there were no teeth inside of this space.

Instead, it was just these walls that continued to shift and move all around him.

And that's when it dawned on him.

He had been swallowed, but not by a shark.

He had been swallowed by a whale.

For nearly 45 seconds, Michael was trapped inside the closed mouth of a humpback whale.

Despite their enormous size, they can be up to 60 feet long and weigh up to 70,000 pounds, they only eat small fish.

So when this particular whale realized Michael was not a tiny fish, it began violently swinging its head side to side to try to dislodge Michael, and that caused that eruption of white water to go to the surface that Josiah saw.

And after a few good shakes, Michael was spat out of this whale's mouth.

Michael remembers suddenly being in the open water with enough light coming down that he could see around him.

The water was very turbulent and churning, and he recalled as he made his way to the surface looking straight down and seeing the tail fin of this enormous whale swimming away from him.

Michael made his way to the surface and he flagged down Josiah, who boated over to him.

He pulled him back into the boat, and Michael, who was totally traumatized by what happened, could only say to Josiah that he was inside of it.

and that it tried to eat him.

After Josiah brought Michael back to shore and called the authorities, Michael was rushed to a hospital where he was evaluated and unbelievably, he suffered really no injuries.

He had some significant bruising to his legs where the whale had actually clamped down on him.

That was the pressure he felt on his legs.

The mouth of the whale was closing on his legs.

But besides that, there really wasn't any other injuries.

And so later that day, he was discharged.

It's believed the whale was a juvenile that had been seen in the area that was about 30 to 35 feet long and that it just accidentally scooped Michael up.

The whale was certainly not trying to hurt Michael.

Whales, especially humpback whales, are not in the business of hurting people.

But in this exchange with Michael, Michael could have very easily died.

He could have drowned or suffocated inside the mouth of this whale, or he could have just died from blunt force trauma.

But luckily, he didn't.

Despite how terrifying this incident sounds, Michael was incredibly casual in all of his interviews about this.

He just kind of acted like, meh, these things kind of happen, you know, whales come out of nowhere, they just scoop you up, you know, it happens.

And he would tell the incredulous reporters who just could not believe this guy was real that as soon as he was better, he was getting back in the water and going lobster diving.

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