Episode 89

You're listening to a Tenderfoot TV podcast.

You ever fake like you know someone just to get out of an awkward situation?

One time I was at a gas station and this guy was giving serious stranger danger energy.

I spotted a woman walking out of the store, made eye contact, and just blurted out, oh my gosh, hey, like we were long lost friends.

Bless her, she played along.

We chatted just long enough for him to leave.

I owe her my life, or at least a coffee.

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Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and bonus scary stories.

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The following podcast includes scary stories with content 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.

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Welcome Stargazers and seeker of knowledge.

Welcome to Radio Rental, the show where we let live, breathing, actual people come in and share their stories of finding themselves in jacked up situations.

Some have played footse with the spirit world, while others have had a speed date with pure unadulterated evil.

Either way, you're going to be creeped out and to be honest with you, that's the way we like you.

But first,

I think I ought to do a few astrological forecasts.

I kind of get requests for that kind of thing.

And

here we go.

First one I'm failing is going to be

Taurus.

Your hard-headed attitude is getting on everybody's last nerve.

And you will soon be asked to quarantine for a couple of weeks.

Not for a medical reason, just to give everybody a break from your overbearing self.

Enough.

Aries.

Aries, it's your time.

Take a leap of faith during the full moon this month, but make damn sure you got a good insurance policy first.

Skagatarius, I got nothing for you.

I ain't gonna blow smoke up you, but I ain't feeling nothing.

I ain't got no messages.

I ain't gonna lie.

I ain't feeling anything.

All right, well, that's it for the astrological forecast.

And now let's get in to this creepy little show we got for you.

You ready?

Don't matter because here it goes.

I was living in Baltimore, going to school with three roommates.

We shared a two-bedroom apartment while we were all attending college there.

It was a Saturday night.

I was doing laundry at another friend's apartment really close by.

I came up the steps into the building.

I dropped my laundry and purse by the door and just headed straight for the shower.

I came out to the main room and I remember laying on the couch for a little while and looking out the sliding glass door that leads to the patio.

I switched sides and looked at the front door and the deadbolt was unlocked.

Which was unusual.

So I jumped up and locked it.

I figured I must not have locked it on my way in.

And I just went to bed.

My roommates were all out of town, so it was just myself in the apartment that night.

Sunday morning, it was really slow.

I was slowly getting ready for work.

I noticed that my lips were chapped and I needed to grab my chapstick from my purse.

So I went over to the kitchen table where I had put it the night before and my purse wasn't there.

I started looking around the apartment and I can't find it, so I check my car and it's not there either, and I'm starting to wonder, okay, where is this?

I call my friend whose house I did laundry at the night before and it's not at her house, and I said, yeah, I must have just left in the car.

And then I notice the laundry bin's gone.

That's not by the door either.

And that's when I noticed that the door was unlocked.

Wait a minute.

I remember locking it last night, specifically right before I went to bed.

I called the police pretty quickly because my purse was gone, my laundry was gone, the door was unlocked, and things just weren't adding up.

I called the police and I wasn't even really sure what to say to them, but I just said my door was unlocked, my purse is gone, and my laundry is gone, and

that's really all I know at this point.

They called it a burglary, and all I could notice was that my purse and my laundry were missing.

And I had this memory of locking the door, but clearly the door was unlocked, so I had not locked it, I guess, or maybe I was telling myself I had locked it to make myself feel better.

But the police did a really thorough job checking all the windows and the doors, and they were like, nothing else really seems amiss in here.

The idea was that maybe somebody just opened the door, grabbed what was right there, and left, kind of a crime of opportunity.

And that's what I thought for the longest time, that anybody coming off the street, the building, just had this open door to the stairwell.

So there wasn't any security between my front door and the door to get into the building.

We had had our door mat stolen a few times before, so I was like, maybe that's not super unusual.

If I just left the door unlocked, okay.

It was strange, but I just actually quickly got ready for work once the police had left.

I had an extra car key, thankfully, but I didn't have like ID or anything because my purse had been gone, so I just went straight to work.

My coworkers were kind of shocked because I'm a little shell-shocked myself saying, yeah, I guess my apartment was burglarized last night and I don't have anything, but I'm here because this is the next thing to do, so I'm doing it.

The next few days, my roommates weren't quite back in town yet.

They were still out the rest of the weekend.

I was just getting my ID together, going to school and getting a new student ID, figuring out how to get a new license and all this stuff.

And then I had to explain it to my roommates when they got back, what happened.

When my roommates got back, it got even more strange.

There were two bedrooms.

I shared my bedroom with another girl, and then there were two girls in the other bedroom.

And slowly, the two girls in the other bedroom started reporting things missing.

from their bedroom, like jewelry.

One of my roommates said she had photos missing off of her wall my other roommate had her backpack missing and a bunch of textbooks and i was like this doesn't make any sense because those things are in our rooms

and i was starting to get really annoyed because i felt like they had renter's insurance and they were making these claims because of the burglary and i was like are you guys exaggerating or unsure because like no one was in the apartment it wasn't actually burglarized it was just a quick smash and grab thing

i was just replaying and rewinding constantly constantly.

Like I got up off the couch and I locked the door before I went to bed and there's no way someone came in because I locked the door, but someone did come in.

So it was this confusing and kind of guilty because I felt like it was my mistake because I'd left the door unlocked.

Someone hadn't, you know, pried the door open.

So it was a lot of complicated emotions.

I was really upset.

I had all of these coping mechanisms for trying to remember if I locked the door when I left.

I would call friends and neighbors in like a panic, being like, could you check the apartment door just to make sure that I locked it?

I had a ring that I would like twist three times to remind myself that I had locked the door, but I never was sure.

That apartment had been like a huge source of independence and friendship, and now I felt like it was a space that I didn't feel safe in.

I spent long hours on campus just to kind of avoid going home, and I just didn't feel safe there anymore.

So a couple months after all of this, we had been working with a detective that had called a few times and asked me questions.

I wasn't sure why, but he was very kind and made it clear that they were trying to get our stuff back and trying to find who had done this.

One day, I got a call from him, and he said,

We found who did this.

And he said that he had known that it was connected to our case

because he found my ID.

They called us to the police station.

They had found a lot of our items, myself and my roommates.

I thought, you know, maybe they found them in a dumpster or something, or people were telling me to look in our dumpster to see if I could find my ID or purse items that people typically toss if they're not valuable.

We went to the police station.

It was a huge room.

And it looked like a yard sale.

There was just tables packed with really neatly organized items, like jewelry was in little plastic bags with the little clasps out so that you couldn't tangle the necklace.

Textbooks, clothing, pictures,

really anything that you could think of.

And so we're walking through all these tables and everything sorted.

There were Sharpie names written on different bags.

I remember telling the officers like, wow, you guys really organized this very nicely.

It was just very bizarre.

And he said, we didn't do that.

They found it like this.

I found my purse, most of the contents that were in my purse.

I found all the clothes that were in my laundry baskets, most of them.

I didn't have like the perfect inventory, but I had written down almost everything I could remember for the detective that I was missing.

Along with the laundry, they had a large table in the back that had just a massive amount of underwear.

I don't remember there being underwear in my laundry basket.

I hadn't written that down, but my friend said, oh, why don't we, you know, we should just look at all the tables and the officers were encouraging us to look through every single item to make sure that we had gotten everything that was ours.

I kind of took a cursory look, went, took another lap, and then went back again because I had seen some underwear that looked familiar.

I thought, okay, well, you know, this is Victoria's Secret underwear that anybody could buy.

It doesn't have to be mine.

But I found three that looked familiar, and one of them had a repair line of green stitching that I had done when I had ripped out the tag to repair it.

So I

couldn't really deny that that wasn't mine.

The thing about it was this was underwear that I had never worn before.

Back in the early and mid-2000s, if you bought a bra of Victoria's Secret, sometimes you would get some free,

you know, special underwear, just really dressy underwear that you're not going to wear every day.

And I had folded it and tucked it into the back of my drawer.

And so I knew it wasn't in my laundry basket.

It was just a slow avalanche of realizing that

somehow

this had come out of my room

and all the way to the police station where I was reclaiming it.

So that meant that someone had been in my room at some point.

We all had collections of pictures of ourselves and ourselves with friends that were missing and they were all there on the table as well as the camera from my purse.

This person had printed out photos from a recent camping trip I had taken.

Someone had come into my apartment somehow and reached over me while I was sleeping and peeled photos off the wall and done the same to, even though my roommate wasn't home, done the same thing to her room.

Not really knowing what to do, I just, you know, packed it up and the officers took photos of everything that we took.

The detective kind of outlined for us in the weeks to come what happened as they were putting the

case together.

Basically, according to their interviews with the man that had broken into our apartment, I had left the door unlocked.

He had been kind of casing our particular apartment for one reason or another, as well as the many other women that joined us at the police station, many college student apartments, specifically women that lived together.

He had been watching us for a really long time.

Our windows didn't have screens on them anymore, which is something that the officers noted when they came to my apartment after I called them.

And he had taken those off, just testing locks, testing the patio door.

For who knows how long, different apartments, he said weeks, sometimes days.

And so one night he just noticed that I came in.

It must have been somewhere in the parking lot watching.

and just came and just tried the door.

And who knows how many nights he did that for.

And that night I had quickly come inside, gone into the shower and I left the door unlocked behind me.

And in that time he had gone to my roommate's bedroom and he just had nothing to do but sit there and quietly go through all of their stuff in a way that they would never notice someone was in there, which is why the officers didn't notice it and they didn't notice it until they saw some things were missing.

One of those roommates had her high school ID at the police station, so he had been deep in like old, just

out of the way places in their room, probably waiting for me to go to bed.

And then when I did go to bed, I must have been sleeping while he was slowly going through myself and my

roommates

items.

My dresser was right at the end of my bed.

He must have reached over me to get those photos off the wall.

Just very methodical and thorough.

And then when he left out the front door, he obviously had to leave the door unlocked behind him.

So that's why the door was unlocked in the morning.

When they found his apartment, he had a second bedroom that had all of our items sorted by person.

He had IDs and names written, and then the photos, all of our personal items kind of separate on these tables surrounding the room, paired to each person.

So his interest was in like our personal items, things that detailed aspects of our lives.

It was

just this

obsessive interest and maybe a compulsion for him.

I'm not quite sure.

Still.

They were actively seeking people during the course of the investigation that may have been assaulted by him in the past or during these.

As far as I know, none of the women that were victims in this stint of crimes that he did were assaulted.

But most of them were not home at the time of the incident.

I remember leaving the police station and just feeling fits of just nausea, like wanting to throw up because it just felt so gross and strange.

I was really guilty because

I had

allowed this to happen in some small way.

The paranoia was still there of like, who did this?

Why would they do this?

And just the stalking element.

It made me feel less alone that there were other women that were victims, but none of the other people had been home.

My sense of safety felt violated.

I was grateful to have my stuff back, but I remember I threw most of it away because I just couldn't

couldn't stand to keep it.

It felt strange.

Especially the clothing, but even a lot of items that I would have otherwise kept, it felt just wrong.

And I felt bad for my roommates because I had kind of denied, like, there's no way that someone came in here.

That is such a foolish and crazy thing to think.

But that's exactly what had happened.

Even the officers said this was like something out of like a crime show.

They seemed very shocked by it.

This person had a pre-existing record.

One of the detectives with the police had had remembered specifically the stealing of underwear and the targeting of multiple apartments.

And this person had been incarcerated for quite a while and had only come out onto parole for a few months.

And then these started happening.

Somebody remembered from the late 80s, early 90s, what was a very similar case.

I had this strange desire to know everything, but the more I found out, the more deeply unsettled I was and really humbled for wishing that I had woken up while this was happening so I could have defended our apartment or done something about it, knowing that if it was me versus him, the story would have probably been very different.

I was fortunately able to get some free therapy while I was at college that really helped with just trusting myself, learning to remember, like, I have locked the door.

I don't need to have all of these strange ways of checking in on myself that I've locked it behind me.

And that even with all of those measures, someone very determined can break through them.

I like to think I left a lot of the fear and mistrust there in that apartment when I left.

Hey, is it just me or is that story off the wall right there?

That's that's weirdo beardo right there.

A little too much for for even old me Ricky Lee and I'm gonna be honest with you there ain't a whole lot of things out there that are too much for old Ricky Lee All right, we're gonna take a quick break for some ads, but don't go away.

We'll be right back

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It says here on the instructions, hold on, I can't read without moving my lips.

Says on the instructions that the store will be closed for a while, so don't be coming by, but it's going to be back after

what we call in the business a brief hiatus.

That means I ain't going to be here.

I wonder who's going to be manning the store when it reopens, because

be honest with you, I got got an idea who'd be pretty dang good at it.

Uh,

what the nut?

Hello?

Terry?

Malachi!

Oh, Malachi, it's so good to see you.

I've missed your matted fur and your pumpkin spice stench.

Oh,

yes, boy, I'm back.

Oh, I'm back, but maybe not for long.

I have news.

I think I know where Zelon is.

On my journey, I met with some, well, shall we call them, powerful intergalactic travelers.

And they told me that the Zelon is out there.

And I know what I need to do.

I need to go into the void to be with her.

To find her, to potentially bring her back.

I know, I know, I know, I know you hate the intergalactic void.

We'll...

We'll discuss it later, but I have to see her.

Don't you understand?

I have to.

We must make preparations, Malachi.

And someone will need to take over Radio Rental.

Yeah, somebody like, hey, me, Ricky, Ricky, Leigh.

Oh.

Hey, okay.

Uh, hi.

I'm, I'm so sorry, I forgot you were here.

This.

Okay, this is a bit awkward.

I...

I'm sorry, but I didn't exactly mean that you would necessarily be the one taking over.

Oh, really?

Not that you've been doing such a bad job.

I'm sure you've been doing great, and thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for dropping everything in your life and coming over last minute.

Yeah, well, yeah, sure.

Happy to help.

Anyway, dear customers, there's so much to do, a lot to figure out.

I'm not abandoning you yet.

This is not goodbye.

We're closing our doors for now, but I will see you next time at Radio Rental.

As well I.

Well, we don't know that yet.

We don't really know that yet.

But most likely, though, you'll see me, old Ricky Lee.

Likely is strong.

Possibly is a better word.

I don't know what to say.

I'm touched.

I'm moved.

I knew I'd be good.

I didn't know I'd be this damn good.

Okay, we can talk about that in private.

Okay,

do a little sidebar on that.

Maybe get some french fries.

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

Showrunner is Meredith Stedman.

Lead producer is Eric Quintana.

Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.

Our main host is Rain Wilson.

Guest host is Jeff Foxworthy.

Written by Meredith Stedman.

Additional writing by Mark Lachlan.

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

Editing by Eric Quintana, Steven Perez, Meredith Stedman, Tristan Bankston, and Sean Nerny.

Sound design mix and master by Steven Perez and Cooper Skinner.

Additional editing by April Ruha and Dayton Cole.

Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy.

Our social media manager is Caroline Orogema.

Video editing by Dylan Harrington.

Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

Radio Rental Merchandise by Byron McCoy.

To shop Radio Rental Merch, visit shop.tenderfoot.tv.

Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, as well as the Nord Group and the team at Odyssey.

If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website radio rentalusa.com.

Follow us on Instagram at Radio Rental.

On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Hey, this is embarrassing, but they're making me read it.

My favorite murder is the podcast that defined a genre.

This is tough.

In 2016, we decided to combine true crime and comedy, and we thought, this will be great.

There will be no problems.

All the brave podcasters before us.

Yep.

I don't want people to go like, they're amazing.

I want things.

And they go, they're brave.

Yes.

That's so brave that you went on to video with that face.

What a brave choice.

You're really changing lives and minds.

New episodes every Thursday on Exactly Right.

Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Goodbye.