Episode 75

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I'm Dennis Cooper, host of Culpable, and I want to tell you about this case I've been following in a small Ohio town.

When 17-year-old Danny Violet stormed out of his house one afternoon in 1998, His family thought it was just another episode of Teenage Angst and he'd return home safely.

The longer it went, the more worried I was because he never disappeared like that.

But their worst fears materialized when his lifeless, asphyxiated body was later found in a nearby cornfield.

He asphyxiates in a cornfield?

You can't hang yourself from a cornstalk.

The rumor mill in this small town has brought many theories, but the question remains, what happened to Danny?

Did they get scared and have to dump the body?

Was this just all good fun that went bad?

Because if you are doing acid, God knows the different possibilities

from Tenderfoot TV an all-new season of culpable is available now

hate waiting a week for the next episode of radio rental subscribe to tenderfoot plus to get early access to episodes ad-free listening and bonus scary stories visit tenderfootplus.com for details

The following podcast includes scary stories with content that that could be triggering to some listeners.

Listener discretion is advised.

Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with Radio Rental.

At Radio Rental, our videos come to life in your living room, defy all logic and reasoning, and make you question your own reality.

This is not your ordinary video rental store.

At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night.

You've gone

Radio Rental.

Welcome to Radio Rental.

If you're new here, what took you so long?

Radio Rental is a little video shop of horrors.

And not just because of all the dust and my ghastly alphabetizing system.

Actually, let's not focus on the negatives.

Let's watch a new scary tape, shall we?

And remember, these are all 100%

real.

Creepy laugh.

When I was around

eight or nine years old,

I started having this dream.

I would wake up,

my door was open,

and there was a man standing in my doorway.

This went on for years.

My mom and I were driving home from school one day, and I had had one of these dreams earlier that week.

I could not shake it.

I just said, I've been having these really weird dreams about a man in my room.

She asked me to walk her through the dreams.

And I walked her through this very vivid dream.

She asked me if I knew what a repressed memory was.

As 10 years old, I had no idea what a repressed memory was.

She said, I'm going to tell you what happened to us when you were little.

She started to tell the story,

and she said,

That was something real that happened to you.

Everything came back.

This was in the summer,

the dead heat of the summer in the Midwest.

It was mid-1990s.

I was about four or five years old.

I split time between my mom and my dad's house.

This was a particular evening where I was with my mom.

My mom and I lived in an apartment complex.

We were on the ground floor.

Our unit had two bedrooms.

We had one long hallway that ran from the living room down down to the bedrooms, and the bedrooms were on opposite sides of the hallway.

Sitting in my mom's bed, you could look across the hallway and see into my bedroom.

We also had a cat named Sally.

Sally would never leave our side, always would sleep with me.

She just would never leave the room you were in.

We were pretty new to the community, did not know too many people around.

My mom was having her bras and underwear stolen from the communal laundry room.

I think she just talked it up to someone being really creepy.

This particular evening was on a Thursday, which was notable because on Thursdays, I got to sleep in bed with my mom.

My parents were really trying to encourage me to sleep more independently.

But I was really excited because I got to sleep with my mom on this particular night.

We went to bed at the same time

because it was in the middle of the summer.

There were two open windows that were just above the headboard behind the bed that we were in.

We fell asleep.

I remember waking up at some point.

I lifted my head up very slightly.

Sally was jumping off the bed.

I saw her run into my room.

I could not see into my room.

It was pitch black, but I could see the hallway

and I saw our cat disappear into my room.

I felt it was an important thing to wake up and tell my mom.

I turned to her and I nudged her.

She stirred very slightly,

but didn't wake up.

I looked back into the hallway,

and when I looked back,

I saw the dark shape of a man standing in my mom's doorway.

I yelled.

I kicked my mom.

I shoved her.

And she also looked up and saw that there was someone in her doorway.

It was dark behind him.

We could just truly see the shape of his figure standing in the doorway.

My mom was just screaming.

She picked me up and she threw me

out of the window.

I remember expecting to hit the window

and then I didn't.

The screen popped and I fell into some bushes.

She very quickly jumped out after me.

I remember my hand hurting so bad because she was just yanking me running.

I don't even know if my feet were touching the ground.

I remember us running down the grass to one of the walkways

to just be in a lit area.

It was just very dark.

The pathways were the only things that were lit.

And so we ran down to one of the walkways that was maybe 200 feet from the window.

Never seen my mom that scared before.

She was sort of running in circles, looking, trying to scream for help,

trying to just get someone's attention.

I was scared that my mom was scared.

I think I understood there shouldn't be a man in the doorway, but I didn't understand what we had likely just escaped.

At some point, there was someone, I think, who had just parked their car.

Maybe they had gotten off work late or something.

They heard us screaming and they came over.

It was an older man.

My mom didn't want to go back into someone's house.

No one seemed safe, I think, in that type of situation.

So we stayed in the parking lot while that man went into his unit and called the police.

And I don't think we waited very long.

What I really remember was sitting on the wooden steps.

The police were asking us questions and they were coming in and out.

The police don't really know how he got in.

Our front door, the deadbolt was unlocked and the chain was down.

My mom, again as a single woman with a child, swore up and down that she locked that door.

She checked it multiple times.

She locked it when we walked in.

She made sure it was locked before we went to bed.

It was locked.

The chain was up.

The deadbolt was there.

What the police had surmised is that the man had exited through that door.

We didn't have a patio.

We had no other exterior exits.

Really, there was not a lot they could do at that point.

There was no crime outside of breaking and entering committed, and so nothing ever came of it.

My mom and I went and stayed with my grandparents that night, and we actually never spent the night in that apartment again.

We just didn't feel safe.

Eventually, we decided to move.

We went back about a week later, started packing up all of our things.

At one point, my mom was cleaning out the kitchen, and there was a utility closet next to the kitchen.

She opened it, and she found on top of the water cooler a notebook

that contained drawings and like some scribbles

and names of some tenants in our complex,

including my mom's.

We called the police back

and they came and they took the notebook and there were some wrappers in there and other things that led them to believe that the man had likely been in the utility closet that evening while we were there.

If we had come and gone at some point, the man had likely come in and was hiding in the utility closet and had waited until we went to sleep to come out.

When he came out, he walked down the hallway,

first went into my room to see if I was there.

And that was when I had woken up.

There were a lot of things that could have made this go very differently.

He came out of the closet and went into my room first.

Was the intentionality towards me, not my mom?

What if it wasn't a Thursday?

My room was an interior room that didn't have windows.

There was no exit.

She pushed me through the window and as she was jumping through, she looked behind her and he was not coming towards her.

And it's really scary to think about if that window had been closed.

Once he saw that we were gone, he could have probably tried to grab for my mom,

but he didn't.

He picked a Thursday and I happened to be in my mom's bed and she happened to have two open windows that were a foot above her headboard and we were on the ground floor.

A lot of things had to happen for us to be okay.

It's very scary if I start to let myself think about that too much.

Now that was freaky.

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I was 17 getting ready to enter my junior year of high school.

The last few days of summer, those few days where you're not really looking forward to going back to school as a high school kid, just wanting the summer to continue.

Me and two of my friends, we were actually on our way to go get school supplies for the upcoming year.

We were all riding riding in my friend's truck going to the local Walmart.

Lived in a pretty big city, about half a million people or so.

We were sitting at a stoplight, fairly busy intersection, just waiting for the light to turn green and we're chatting.

My friend, who was sitting next to me, kind of sitting sideways in the truck so he can kind of see like behind us.

He says, Hey, there's this guy who's just kind of staring at us over there.

And I remember I said, what?

Where?

Right as I turn my head, my friend says, he's getting out.

He's coming over here.

I turn my head and sure enough, here comes this man out of a car that was behind us a few cars and in the next lane over to the left.

This guy is running through traffic.

And as soon as he came between the cars and he was in between the lanes, that's when I noticed he had about a three foot long, one inch black metal pipe in his hands.

He runs around the back of the truck.

My friend jumps out of the truck.

And before I can even jump out with him, the guy had already run in between the cars and traffic and was right there at the door.

The look on this guy's face was just pure evil.

I was scared, but I was also angry at the same time.

My adrenaline was pumping really hard.

I remember I was shaking.

In a split second, I felt like I was already sweating.

We have to get out of this situation.

I'm scooting.

I'm trying to get out of the truck.

My friend just goes, hey, man, what's the deal?

Because like, we didn't know him.

We had never seen him before.

We had never interacted with this man before.

I mean, this was a grown man and we were like 16, 17 year old kids.

The guy just starts screaming at him.

What was our problem?

What the hell are you staring at?

My friend just kind of puts his hands up.

Hey, man, I don't know what's going on.

We're not staring at anybody.

We looked over and you were staring at us.

And before I even get out,

this guy swung as hard as he could.

I hear This pipe come around, just clock my friend in the side of the head.

He swung it so hard hard that I could hear the air.

It immediately knocks him to the ground, lays him open.

He's got blood gushing out of his head.

He wasn't knocked out, but it knocked him clear off of his feet.

I jump out of the truck.

I'm already yelling at the guy, trying to get him to not look at my friend anymore and look at me because I didn't want him to continue to hit my friend with his pipe.

I just said, hey, motherfucker, you're about to get it.

Our only option is to fight this guy.

I can't let this guy hit my friend again.

I have to fight him.

There was no other choice.

It was fight or flight, and there was nowhere to run.

We're sitting in traffic.

We can't go anywhere in the car.

We have to get out and try and disarm this guy any way that we can.

By the time I got my feet out of the truck and was standing up, he had already taken off running.

ran back to his car, jumped in and drove away.

He didn't take off fast.

He just got in, put his car in drive and slowly drove off like nothing ever happened.

The light had turned green.

Cars are starting to go.

You know, people are now honking and upset that there's this incident, now traffic.

I'm trying to look at his license plate.

My friend that was driving got the license plate by looking in his side mirror.

So we had a description and the guy just took off.

There was an extreme sense of confusion.

We didn't understand why we had been attacked.

We didn't know this man, and this was like a grown-up.

This was like an adult doing this.

And we hadn't done anything.

Had we thrown something at his car, or flipped him off, or yelled something as we drove by, but we didn't even know this guy even existed.

We were all just kind of sitting there looking at each other like, I can't believe this just happened.

We didn't leave.

We called the police and an ambulance showed up.

We gave the police all the information.

The police were almost accusatory.

They kept asking us, did you say anything?

Did you look at him?

Did you do this?

Did you do that?

And we just kept telling them no.

We were sitting in traffic.

My friend noticed this guy staring at us and that was it.

The guy got out and it was on.

I had never seen him.

I never looked at him.

There was no gestures.

We don't even know who this guy was.

I mean, just a guy in traffic.

Then the cop said, was there a possibility that maybe you cut him off in traffic?

And we said, No, he was in the other lane.

We weren't even, and he was like three or four cars behind us.

We had just gotten off the highway and were sitting at this intersection.

And it's not even like we were right next to him.

You know, he was behind us a few cars.

The ambulance comes, takes my friend away.

He ends up getting 10 stitches in his head.

The side of his head was swollen up pretty big.

Police take down all of our information and we just kind of go on from there.

School started a few days later.

My friend that was driving was the one that called the police.

It was him that came to us and said, hey, this detective wants to speak with us at my house about what happened in traffic the other day.

And of course, we were both like, yes, we're doing this.

Absolutely.

This guy is not going to get away with this because we hadn't done anything wrong.

The detective comes over, sits us down, gets our story again, you know, has us all go through it.

The detective had a lineup of six pictures of different people.

And individually, they separated us and individually they showed it to us.

Me and my friend that got hit immediately picked the man out.

We were like, oh, that's him.

That's the guy right there.

And the detective thanked us, said that this was a very serious case, that they were really looking for him.

But that's kind of all he alluded to at the time.

He said that we would either be hearing from him or the district attorney's office later on.

Months went by.

We had all kind of moved on and forgotten about it.

You know, we went on with our junior year of high school.

About a year later, we all get calls from the district attorney's office.

They send us subpoenas to be witnesses and everything.

And we're like, oh, wow, this is really going to happen.

This is going to be a trial.

We go to court.

We all rode together just the same way we did to go get school supplies up to the courthouse, talked about it on the way there.

I remember how scared I was at the time.

And it turns out we were all just as scared.

Three teenage boys don't get scared too often when you're all together.

You feel like you're safe with your friends.

And we were all definitely scared.

We're sitting there in the pews that they have there.

The detective comes up to us, thanked us for showing up for court, glad that we were there.

He said that this case was going to get resolved, probably not in the manner that we were hoping it was going to get resolved, and was telling us that this case was probably going to go to a plea.

The defense attorney was waiting to see if we showed up.

And as soon as we did show up, that's when they wanted to go ahead and accept the plea offer that was offered to him.

But he said, don't worry, this guy has bigger charges coming.

We're just kind of like, bigger, bigger charges.

What do you mean, a worse crime?

And that's when the detective told us that this man, when he hit my friend, was a wanted murder suspect for the murder of his own mother.

They were actually looking for him at the time of this incident.

My blood just ran cold.

This guy could have killed us and he wouldn't have thought twice about it.

He had already killed someone.

What's it to him to kill?

people that he doesn't know if he's willing to murder his own mother.

That's terrifying.

It wasn't like he murdered his mom and had been missing for 10 years.

I mean, it was absolutely terrifying, especially when they brought him into the courtroom, because now we're sitting there looking at this guy face to face.

I don't think I had ever been any more scared in my entire life.

He was sentenced to, I believe, 10 years in jail as part of his plea.

And then he went on to be convicted.

We just thought this was some crazy person in traffic.

We had no idea the level of crazy that we were kind of dealing with.

And that really shook us.

I remember all of us being very disturbed that nobody told us that, you know, this guy was a murder suspect because he could have easily just as well gotten our license plate.

Afterwards, we went back to my friend's house.

We were sitting around talking about it.

We all honestly felt like we had dodged a bad situation that could have been far, far, far worse.

To find that out and realize just how close to pure evil we came was absolutely terrifying.

Ooh, you're on the edge of your seat, aren't you?

Don't fall off, especially if you're driving.

That could be extremely dangerous.

Now, let's take a quick break for some ads.

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of Crime Junkie, the go-to crime podcast for the biggest cases and the stories you won't hear anywhere else.

So, whether on your commute, studying, or while you work, let us keep you company.

With new episodes every Monday, it is truly a Crime Junkie's dream.

So, join me, my best friend Britt, and our entire Crime Junkie community right now by catching up on hundreds of episodes and by listening to a new case every Monday on Crime Junkie, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

And we're back back from all of those delightful ads.

Please buy from our sponsors, they're very nice people.

And as always, it has been a pleasure having you.

On behalf of all of us at Radio Rental, good night and good luck out there.

I don't want to be hearing you on one of these tapes one day, unless you're into that kind of thing.

I mean, whatever floats your ghost.

Do you get that, Malachi?

I get it, Terry.

Damn it, not again.

Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV.

Lead producer is Eric Quintana.

Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.

Hosted by Rain Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation.

Written and produced by Meredith Steadman.

Additional writing by Mark Lachlan.

Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Associate producer is Jaja Muhammad.

Editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Steven Perez, and Meredith Steadman.

Sound design by Cooper Skinner, with additional sound design by Steven Perez and April Ruha.

Mix and Master by Cooper Skinner, with additional mixing by Steven Perez and Devin Johnson.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale.

Video editing by Dylan Harrington.

Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

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My name is Manny Mattney, creator of the number one global hit Murdoch Murders podcast, the show that started it all.

Now known as True Sunlight, my partner in True Crime, journalist Liz Farrell, and I are taking on new cases while still pursuing justice for those we met along the way.

Lunashark Media's True Sunlight podcast values accuracy over access journalism.

True Sunlight shines with empathy, not exploitation.

True Sunlight is the intersection of true crime, journalism, and systemic corruption.

True Sunlight continues to shed light on Stephen Smith's case and the Murdoch co-conspirators, but we also take deep dives into other cases around the country.

From Grant and Gracie Solomon to Sarah Lynn Colucci, Micah Miller, and beyond.

True Sunlight empowers listeners to understand their legal and judicial systems with our unique brand of pesky journalism.

Listen to True Sunlight wherever you get your podcast or visit truesunlight.com to learn more.