The Mutant (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

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On a day in 2001, a veteran homicide detective put on his gloves and stepped into a cluttered

bedroom.

He'd been working on a murder case for months, but he still had no clear evidence pointing

to any of his suspects.

However, a tip from an informant had led him to this bedroom, and he hoped he'd find something useful there. The detective searched the room, and at first, nothing stood out to him.
That is, until he saw a piece of notebook paper sitting on a nightstand. On this paper was somebody's list of goals they wanted to accomplish in their life.
The detective scanned the list. Most of the goals on the list were pretty standard, except for one, which was totally psychotic.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you 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 hide a tiny speaker

in the ceiling of the follow button's bedroom and then play It's a Small World After All on repeat

every time the follow button tries to fall asleep. Okay, let's get into today's story.
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The earth blurs beneath her spindled legs as she rushes over hills and fields, the moon and stars the only witnesses to their vanishing. To her lab they'll go, wrapped in red, waiting to be found, waiting to be woven whole.
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Rated M for Mature.

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Forged by the sea. Just after midnight on August 31st, 2001, 36-year-old Dana Laskowski sat on her couch sipping a drink at her home in Puyallup, Washington, which is about 35 miles outside of Seattle.
Dana had been enjoying a night at home by herself, but as she sat there on the couch, the silence in the house started to feel a bit unsettling. It just was not something she'd gotten used to yet.
Dana was the mother of nine-year-old triplets, so the house was typically filled with a lot of noise. But tonight, the kids were three hours away staying with their dad.
Dana and her husband Stan had separated the previous year. And after the separation, Dana had moved several hours away to Puyallup, where some of her family lived.
Dana and Stan had tried hard to effectively co-parent the triplets. She loved the idea.
She loved that the kids still had a good relationship with their father. But not having them around all the time had been a huge transition for Dana.
Dana grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned on the TV, just to have some background noise. She sipped her drink and then kind of laughed at herself.
Spending a night on her own really should not be that big of a deal. It should be fun.
It should be enjoyable. And plus, even though her triplets would be gone for a few more days still, Dana worked as a nanny for a couple in town, and she'd be able to spend time with their kids,

who she loved too. And so Dana told herself to just relax and enjoy a stress-free night.

Then she leaned back on the couch and tried to watch TV.

But as she was doing that, she suddenly heard this noise coming from the back of the house.

She put her drink down, turned off the TV, and then walked out of the room towards the back door. She expected to see her 17-year-old niece and Amanda's best friend, Emily Launborg, standing in the hall, because Dana always kept her back door unlocked for these two teenage girls.
Amanda and Emily both had strained relationships with their families, so Dana had become a kind of surrogate mother to both of them. She let them use her house to do

laundry, take showers, or to just have a place they could come where they would feel taken care of.

But when Dana reached the back of the house, she didn't see the girls standing in the hall.

She walked to the back door and glanced outside onto the back porch, but she didn't see anybody

there either. She figured she must be hearing things.
Being home alone could do that after all. So she left the back door unlocked in case the girls did show up later, and then turned back around and headed back to the couch.
Even though it was late, Dana suddenly thought about giving her niece a call, just to check in on her. The last time she'd seen Amanda and her friend Emily,

they had been spending almost all their time with this group of teenage guys who called themselves the Park Rats, because they always hung around at the same public park. Dana tried to keep an open mind and not judge, but she couldn't help but worry about two young women spending time with a group of guys who did not seem to have any ambition in life.
And she knew for a fact that some of the park rats had pretty serious drug problems. On top of that, Amanda and Emily were both

relatively small girls, and Dana knew they really couldn't protect themselves if any of the guys

ever tried to get physical with them. Dana sat down on the couch, still debating if she should

call Amanda. However, before she could make up her mind, she heard

something at the back door again. Then she heard footsteps coming down the hall.

At 10.30 a.m. the following morning, a patrol officer from the Puyallup Police Department pulled up in front of Dana's house.
He'd gotten a message from dispatch about an urgent 911 call that had come in that morning. A woman had called and said her children's nanny, Dana Laskowski, had not arrived at the house when she was supposed to.
The woman and her husband had both called Dana but couldn't get a hold of her. And this really worried them, because Dana would never not show up without calling and making sure the kids would be okay.
So the woman had asked the police to please do a wellness check on Dana. The officer stepped out of his cruiser and glanced around the neighborhood.
This was a pretty busy area of town, with lots of fast food restaurants and shops nearby, so the street could see plenty of traffic at night. The officer walked up to Dana's front door and knocked while calling out her name and also introducing himself.
But after a few moments, he didn't get a response, and he also didn't hear any movement inside the house. And so eventually, the officer walked around to the side of the house and pressed his face against a window.
However, the curtains inside the house made it difficult to see anything inside. So he walked around to the back of the house, and there he noticed the back door was cracked open.
He slowly walked up the steps of the old wooden porch, approached the door, and then called out for Dana again through the crack. But there was still no response.
The officer tensed up. He had no idea if this was an innocent mistake by Dana leaving this door open, or if maybe somebody had broken into her house.
And if it was the latter, the intruder could still be inside. And so the officer unholstered his gun, pushed the door open, and stepped into the house.
As he did this, he walked past an open door and glanced inside. It was a bedroom, and it looked like it had been ransacked.
Dresser drawers were open and clothes had been thrown all over the floor, but he didn't see anybody in the room. And so the officer kept heading down the hallway, getting more and more tense as he moved.
He eventually reached the front room and stepped inside, and there he found more pieces of clothing on the floor, but he still didn't see anybody. The officer reached for his radio, about to call in a potential burglary, when he looked over at the couch.
And immediately, what he saw there told him he was dealing with something far worse than just a break-in. A little later that morning, veteran homicide detective Scott Bramhall of the Puyallup Police Department arrived at Dana's house.
He saw a patrol officer standing out front waiting for him. Bramhall could tell this officer was shaken up by what he'd found inside.
Detective Bramhall talked to the officer and got as much information as he could, then he put on his gloves and stepped inside. Bramhall walked into the front room of the house and immediately saw what had upset the patrol officer.
The dead body of a woman lay on the couch with a blanket partially covering her legs, almost like she'd been keeping her feet warm. The patrol officer had found a photo ID during his search, and he had positively identified the woman as Dana Laskowski, the woman he had come to do the wellness check on.
Detective Bramhall approached Dana's body and crouched down beside it. Right away, he saw specks of blood on her cheeks and mouth, as well as blood on the carpet by the couch.
He also saw deep, dark bruises and ligature marks on Dana's throat. Bramhall looked around the room and saw a scarf on the floor not far from the couch, and his first thought was Dana had most likely been strangled to death, and that scarf could very well be the murder weapon.
But the position Dana was lying in was by far the most shocking thing about this crime scene. Dana's head rested on one of her arms, but her other arm was bent at a strange angle behind her back, and her waist was twisted in an awkward position like her body was contorted.
The result of all this was that even in death, Dana appeared like she was actively in some kind of physical struggle. Just then, the detective heard voices and footsteps behind him.
He stood up and turned to see more police officers and a small group of forensic technicians walking into the room. Bramhall waved one of the forensic techs over, and the two of them began examining Dana's body together.
The tech agreed that Dana had most likely been strangled to death, and the severity of the wounds on her throat indicated that whoever had killed her was pretty strong. Also, Detective Bramhall knew that in a lot of cases of strangulation, the victim fights back really aggressively, thrashing and fighting as much as they can, giving further credibility to the idea that Dana's killer really did have to be big and strong to be able to overpower her.
After a few moments, Bramhall left the forensic tech and searched the rest of the house with a few other officers. He told a member of his team to get started on a background check for Dana, while other officers went out to speak with Dana's neighbors to see if any of them had seen or heard something strange that morning or the night before.
As the detective made his way through Dana's house, it was clear the place had been ransacked. However, he noticed that some pretty obviously expensive items like a computer and other electronics had been left untouched.
This could mean a couple of different things. Either someone had robbed Dana's house looking for something specific like jewelry, or this entire scene had been staged to look like a robbery.
Another thing that stood out to Bramhall was that even though Dana's body and the blood indicated a struggle, there was no sign of forced entry. The back door had been open and unlocked when the patrol officer had first arrived on the scene, and the front door had been locked and showed no signs of a break-in.
So Bramhall wondered if Dana had let her killer inside,

or if they had unlocked the back door with their own key.

As Bramhall was searching the house, one of his team members came up to him.

This officer told him that he'd only just started looking into Dana's background, but already he'd found something important.

She and her husband Stan were recently separated, and Stan was not answering his phone. That night, after Detective Bramhall had spent hours at Dana's house, he got back to the police station, and he was already feeling antsy.
Dana's husband, Stan, like any murder victim's spouse, would basically automatically be a major suspect under almost any circumstance. However, in the few hours since Bramhall had begun working this case, Stan had started to look like the perfect suspect.
Stan had not responded to the multiple calls the Puyallup police had made throughout the day, and when Detective Bramhall had reached out to police in the town where Stan lived, they actually went by his house, and there had been no sign of Stan or the triplets. Now, Detective Bramhall did not want to jump to conclusions here, however, he couldn't ignore what might be going on here.
A man killing his estranged wife so he could have sole custody of their kids was actually a fairly common thing. Still, Bramhall couldn't do anything until they actually tracked Stan down.
So, the detective stayed in touch with the police in Stan's town, and he also contacted the Washington State Police to tell them to be on the lookout for Stan. In the meantime, Bramhall started to gather information on Dana's friends, family, and her employers.
Now, he was already planning on interviewing everybody close to Dana, but if Stan didn't turn up soon, he hoped maybe one of them would be able to help police track him down. But the following morning, before Bramhall had met with anybody else, he got a phone call in his office.
And as soon as he answered, he heard the voice of a man who sounded upset and a bit frightened. It was Dana's husband, Stan.
Stan explained that he had just taken his kids camping and had been at a spot out in the woods that didn't get cell service. So when he'd left the campsite earlier that morning, he saw he had tons of voice messages from the police.
And when he had called the cops back, he learned that his estranged wife had been murdered. And then after that, the police had connected him to Detective Bramhall.
There was no question in Bramhall's mind that Stan was a major suspect. However, if Stan was innocent, Bram Hall could not imagine a worse way to have gotten such horrific news.
Bram Hall told Stan they needed to talk right now in person, and so Bram Hall said he would just drive over to Stan's house right now. Stan said okay, and so Detective Bram Hall hung up and then told members of his team to begin looking into Dana's friends and family.
Then Bramhall got in touch with the local police where Stan lived to say he was going there to interview him, and then he headed out. The five-hour drive led Bramhall through the woods and hills of the Pacific Northwest, and as he drove, it hit Bramhall just how slow-going this trip really was.
He wondered if Stan had gotten angry about having to make this drive just to see his kids. Maybe he'd gone to Dana's house and confronted her about it.
If they'd gotten into a fight, Stan could have flown into a rage and killed her. Now, this was just a theory, but when Bramhall finally got to Stan's house along with a local officer and they met Stan at the front door, Bramhall's theory didn't seem too far-fetched.
Because Stan was a big guy, he could have easily overpowered Dana. But more importantly, Bramhall noticed right away that Stan had scrape marks on both of his legs, a sign that perhaps he had a recent physical altercation with someone.
Stan led Bramhall and the other officer into his house, and they all sat down together in the kitchen.

Bramhall didn't waste any time.

He asked Stan flat out if he and Dana had been arguing about their separation,

and if that tension had led to any physical altercations.

Stan immediately shook his head and said no.

He didn't deny that he and Dana argued, and that being separated and trying to co-parent triplets could be stressful, but he said he and Dana had worked hard to help each other and to support each other and to make their kids' lives as normal as possible. Bramhall immediately changed the subject and asked Stan how he'd gotten those scrapes on his legs.
Stan looked a little surprised by the question, but he said he'd gotten them while playing baseball. Bramhall jotted it down in his notebook, having no sense of whether or not he was actually getting the truth.
Finally, Bramhall asked Stan if he'd be willing to submit a DNA sample. And at that, Stan's whole demeanor changed.
He'd been cooperative the entire time, but now he said there was no way he was going to provide DNA. He still didn't really know what was going on here, and he hadn't even talked to a lawyer.
Bramhall knew he couldn't force Stan to give them a DNA sample. Not yet, at least.
He also knew a lot of people, even innocent people, didn't like the idea of providing their DNA. So Bramhall stood up, said he'd check into Stan's camping trip alibi, and that he'd be in touch.
Hours later, Bramhall made it back to the station, and he felt like nothing had really changed regarding Stan. Stan was still a major suspect, and since he hadn't provided a DNA sample, the police would just have to keep digging into his alibi and his background to see if they could find anything that directly connected him to the murder.
However, within minutes of getting back to the police station, one of Bramhall's team members came into his office and told him he had a major new lead. Detective Bramhall was worn out from all that driving he'd just done, but he felt an instant rush when he heard this.

He asked the officer what he'd found.

The officer said he'd spoken to the couple who employed Dana as their nanny,

and they said Dana had a stalker, a guy named William.

And Dana had even said to her employers that if she ever turned up dead,

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On the evening of September 2nd, two days after Dana's body had been found, Detective Bramhall sat inside of an interview room across the table from Dana's alleged stalker, William. It would turn out William had installed cabling at Dana's house a few months earlier, and since then he'd been leaving notes and poems on Dana's front door, and he'd been seen lurking around her house a bunch of times by several of Dana's neighbors.
Police also found a string of harassing messages from William on Dana's phone. And so all of that had been enough for Bramhall to secure a search warrant, and the search of William's house had led to a disturbing discovery.
Inside the interview room, Detective Bramhall pulled out a notebook and put it on the table. Then he asked William if he recognized it.
William lowered his head and then nodded. He said it was his personal journal.
Bramhall flipped open the notebook and showed William what appeared to be a letter to an unnamed woman. And this letter was filled with all these violent things William wanted to do to her.
Bram Hall flipped to another page, which was another letter to this same unnamed woman, filled with even more anger and more threats of violence. And so Detective Bram Hall said it looked to him like William had been obsessed with Dana, leaving her notes and poetry and spying on her at her house.
And when Dana didn't reciprocate, he got angry and started fantasizing about hurting her and began writing about it in his journal. But as William heard this, he just shook his head and said, no, it's not like that at all.
William said those letters were an exercise his therapist had told him to do, and they weren't even about Dana. He said he had written that stuff about a woman who'd broken his heart, but it was just to get out the anger and hurt that he felt.
He would never actually do any of the stuff he had written. Bramhall sat there in silence for a minute, just looking at the man across the table.
Like Dana's husband, William was easily big enough to have overpowered Dana. And even if William was telling the truth about the notebook, he clearly had some kind of unhealthy obsession with Dana.
So Bramhole leaned in and told William there was a really easy way for him to clear his name and help the police figure out what happened to Dana. William could provide the police with his phone and a DNA sample.
And William didn't hesitate. He said he would do whatever the police needed, anything that would show he did not hurt Dana.
In the days following the interview with William, Detective Bramhall and his team met with more of Dana's friends and family. Bramhall had two solid suspects, Stan, the estranged husband, and William, the stalker.
But he still didn't have any clear evidence pointing to either of them. And most of the people he spoke to didn't provide much more information.
But Bramhall eventually met with Dana's 17-year-old niece Amanda at her house, and she told him something that had the potential to turn his whole investigation on its head. Amanda told Bramhall that Dana was like a second mother to her and her best friend Emily.
Dana let them come over whenever they wanted, and the house was like this great escape for them. Amanda said Dana even left her back door unlocked, just so they could come in whenever they wanted to.
This was a huge piece of news for Bramhall. It now made sense how somebody could have gotten into Dana's house without actually having to break in.
They just walked in the unlocked back door. But then Amanda said something else that seemed even bigger.
She explained that she and Emily had become friends with a bunch of teenagers who called themselves the Park Rats. And Bramhall knew exactly who they were, and he knew some of them were bad news.
More than a few Park Rats had ended up in jail for drugs and violent crimes. And so as soon as Bramhall heard this, he asked Amanda if any of the Park Rats knew that her aunt kept her back door unlocked, and Amanda nodded and said yes.
She said she had actually brought a couple of the park rats to Dana's house to meet her, just because Amanda thought Dana was so good at taking care of people who didn't really have anybody else, and most of the park rats had very difficult home lives. Detective Bramhall left Amanda's house and laid out his next steps.
So far, his case had seemed like a pretty straightforward case. Estranged husbands and stalkers were common suspects.
But now, he and his team were going to have to track down and interrogate a local gang of teenagers. Finding the park rats didn't prove to be too difficult for Detective Bramhall.
A few trips to the public park where they hung out, and meeting with a couple members of the group who were now in jail, was really all it took. But getting the park rats to actually give him useful information turned out to be a lot harder.
Most of them said they knew about Dana's murder, but all of them denied having anything to do with it. And since Bramhall didn't have any evidence connecting these teenagers to the scene, he couldn't just arrest them and try to force them to talk.
And so before long, a month had just flown by and Bramhall still didn't have anything. And in that time, no new evidence surfaced that pointed to either Dana's husband Stan or the stalker William.
And so Bramhall began to worry that maybe Dana's death had been the result of a random burglary gone wrong, and that the police were not even close to tracking down her killer. On October 4th, 2001, so 34 days after Dana's murder, her friends and family finally gathered for her funeral.
Because of the ongoing investigation, police had waited longer than usual to release the body back to the family. But now, a funeral home in town was packed with people who had come to express how much they loved and missed Dana, and how much she had been there for them.
Detective Bramhall and some members of his team attended the funeral, watching to see if anyone might do something that jumped out at them. But nothing out of the ordinary happened.
It was just a group of people grieving the loss of a loved one. After the service was over, Bramhall secured the funeral memorial book, which had been signed by the people who had attended.
Bramhall hoped that he could find someone in this book that could maybe offer his investigation a new lead. So Bramhall and his team brought the book back to the station and they went through it, and as they did, they saw some people, in addition to signing it, also left written notes.
And one of these written notes totally floored Bramhall.

After reading the note several times, Bramhall felt confident he had just found a massive clue. Bramhall and his team quickly met with the person who had written this note, and what that person said led police right back to the park rats.
Over the next several weeks,

armed with new information, right back to the park rats.

Over the next several weeks,

armed with new information from this memorial book,

Detective Bramhall tracked down several of the park rats he'd already met with,

and they were willing to cooperate.

All of them still maintained

they had nothing to do with Dana's murder,

but they said there was somebody

the police needed to talk to.

It was someone they all knew, and who they called The Mutant. Framhall thought The Mutant definitely sounded like a nickname a group of teenagers would come up with, like something out of a comic book.
But the park rats said The Mutant was more like a name for a professional wrestler, because The Mutant was really strong and loved to wrestle. And like all professional wrestlers, the mutant had a signature move, choking their opponent, twisting them at the waist, and bending their arm all the way behind their back.
When Detective Bramhall heard about this signature wrestling move, immediately images of the bizarre position he'd found Dana's body in ran through his mind.

And so the detective and his team spent the next several days compiling background information,

and then they brought the mutant in for an interview.

And by the end of that interview, Detective Bramhall knew who had killed Dana Laskowski. Based on information from The Mutant, evidence found at the crime scene,

and interviews conducted throughout the investigation, here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Dana not long after midnight on on August 31st, 2001.

That night, the killer and their partner moved quietly through the darkness towards the back door of Dana's house. Once they got there, they opened it up, walked inside, and began walking

down the hallway towards the front room. When they got there, they opened it up, walked inside, and began walking down the hallway towards the front room.

When they got there, they saw Dana standing by the couch.

But before she could say anything, the killer demanded that Dana give them some money.

Dana stayed calm and said she was sorry but didn't have any money.

But the killer immediately snapped back and said Dana needed to hand over some cash right now.

Dana repeated that she didn't have any money. And then she asked the killer and their partner to please just leave, but the killer wasn't having it.
They walked over to Dana, they grabbed her, and shouted that they wanted her money now. Dana tried to push the killer off, but the killer was too strong.
Dana screamed, and this only set off the killer even more. They hit Dana in the face and then slammed her to the floor.
Dana tried to get up off the floor, but the killer just leapt on top of her and rolled her over onto her stomach. Then the killer saw one of Dana's scarves laying on the arm of the couch, and they grabbed it.
Then, before Dana could do anything, they wrapped that scarf around Dana's neck and began choking her. Dana kicked and flailed, but the killer fought off her attack, while the killer's partner just stood there, watching.
The killer kept choking Dana with the scarf in one hand, and then with their other hand, they grabbed Dana's arm and they yanked it violently backwards, twisting her around at the waist. Dana tried to scream louder, but now she was gasping for air, and slowly Dana's eyes went wide and she stopped breathing, and she died right there on the floor.
The killer let go of the scarf and Dana's arm, and they stood up. They stared down at Dana's body and then over at their partner, who was still just standing there in a daze.
Then the killer picked Dana up. The scarf fell to the floor as the killer laid Dana on the couch,

still in her twisted position with her arm pinned behind her back.

The killer then grabbed a folded-up blanket from the edge of the couch

and covered Dana's feet and part of her legs with it, almost like they were tucking her in.

But after the killer stepped away from the couch and kind of surveyed the scene,

it was like they began to panic. They yelled at their partner that they needed to make this look like a robbery.
The two of them quickly ran to Dana's bedroom and threw open all the drawers and littered the floor with clothing. They also carried some more clothes into the front room and dumped those on the floor as well.
And then they ran out of the room, down the hall, and out the back door. The same back door that Dana had always left unlocked just for them,

so they could always come to her house to escape their troubles at home.

The people responsible for Dana's murder were Dana's own niece, Amanda, and Amanda's best

friend, Emily Lauenborg, who all of the park rats knew as the mutant. The two young women had gone to Dana's house to try to get Dana to give them some money, and when she refused, it was Emily, the mutant, who attacked and killed her.
Emily had not been high on the suspect list because on the surface,

she did not fit the profile of the killer. Police had assumed that the killer was a man who was bigger and stronger than Dana.
And Emily was a small young woman who was only about five foot two. But it would turn out, despite her small size, Emily was extremely strong and loved to wrestle.
Hence how she got the nickname, The Mutant. The note that Detective Bramhall saw in Dana's funeral memorial book that really stood out to him was written by Dana's niece, Amanda.
And it read, I'm sorry I wasn't a better niece for you. 34 days clean and sober.
It's all for you. The funeral was held exactly 34 days after Dana's murder, suggesting Dana's murder prompted Amanda to go sober on that same day.
Now, that in and of itself is not totally unreasonable, that a death in the family would prompt a big life change. However, to Bramhall, as he was reading through the notes, that note just felt weirdly specific to reference her sobriety and the exact number of days inside of this memorial book when all the other notes were just far less specific.
And so to him, something felt off about it. And so the detective followed up with Amanda and asked her about the note, and she would admit to him that she had been struggling with drug addiction.
And so Bramhall wanted to know if her sudden sobriety was connected to Dana's murder, like the note implied. And Amanda would say yes, and over the course of this discussion, she would also just tell Bramhall that there was this drug dealer in the Park Rats who might have killed her aunt.
However, when Bramhall met with that drug dealer and several other members of the Park Rats, they all pointed the finger at Emily, the mutant. Police searched Emily's house and found a piece of paper in her room.
On it, she had written a list of goals she had, and one of those goals was to, quote, kill someone and get away with it. Emily eventually confessed to the murder, and Amanda admitted to being in the house during the murder.

Dana's niece Amanda aided the police in prosecution, and so she was not charged with any crime.

As for Emily, she would take a plea deal and would only serve about five and a half years in prison. A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes

use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic

purposes. Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, Wartime Stories, Run Fool, and Redacted.

Just search for Ballin Studios wherever you get your podcasts to find all of these shows.

To watch hundreds more stories just like the ones you heard today,

head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin.

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