Family terrorized by STALKER | True story of "The Watcher"

what's going on guys mister ballin here former Navy SEAL turned internet storyteller with a focus on the strange dark and mysterious and speaking of mysterious today I have a mystery for you and it's one of the more recent mysteries it happened in 2014 and spanned a couple of years following that it is a story that plays out like a psychological thriller and in fact Netflix recently purchased the rights to make a movie or show about this case from the family that were the victims of this case the too long didn't read version of this story is you have this all-american family that purchases their dream own they're getting ready to move in and they start receiving these awful wrathful threatening letters from some anonymous person or group the letters get progressively worse and indicate that whoever is watching them is watching them very closely at all hours and is able to see things that are not easy to spot just from walking by this is someone who is really intensely focused on the family I think that the best way to watch this video and learn about this case to really appreciate what this family went through is to put yourself in the position of being the broadest family that's the family that purchases the house imagine you're in their position would you have stayed or would you have left and I'd love to hear about it in the comment section so let's dive in in June of 2014 Derek and Maria brought us purchased their dream home it is a 1.3 million dollar six bedroom house in Westfield New Jersey which is a very affluent northern New Jersey town so the house they purchased was on Boulevard that's the street name and Boulevard within westfield is little wood at the time was like the street if you lived on Boulevard you had made it I would say that times have changed because now Boulevard is remembered is the place where this case happened so I would say it's probably not the best place to live anymore but at the time it was like Derrick and Maria were living their dreams and they knew it three days after the sale of the house they had moved in yet Derrick had gone to the house to do some painting of the walls and some simple house renovations I think he was just so excited about this house he just wanted to go over and just kind of be in the space so his wife and his kids are back at their old house that they had sold but hadn't moved out of yet and so he's at the new house and he's doing these simple renovations and he's like you know what I'm gonna check the mail because even though they'd only own the house for three days he was like you know what that see what it feels like to go collect the mail because this is gonna be my new home and so he goes out and he opens the mailbox and inside is this little tiny card shaped envelope addressed to the new owners dearest new neighbor at 6:57 Boulevard allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood 6:57 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its one hundred and tenth birthday I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming my grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s it is now my time do you know the history of the house do you know what lies within the walls of 6:57 Boulevard why are you here all find out the letter goes on to identify what kind of car they were driving it was a Honda minivan it went on to say how many contractors were in and around the house over the past couple of days that were doing some renovations in the house it even said that you know I believe I've counted that you have three children someday I will learn their names and I will call to them and I will take them from you you know it's like this it's like a reconnaissance of his family had already begun as soon as they moved in and so Derek is reading through this letter and he's realizing that whoever is sending this this is not a friendly neighbor at this point this is someone who is out to harm them in some way so he takes the letter he runs back into the house shuts all the windows locks all the doors you know leaves the house and goes right back to his wife and his kids that are at their old home and they promptly called the police police show up to read the letter and they're like what is this do you have enemies you know who wrote you this because even the language inside the letter was like it was not quite Old English but close it was like this bizarre writing and it was just very stalkerish and awful and the police just don't really know what to make of it and you know Derek and Maria are obviously very upset they haven't even even moved into the house yet but this is a this is a big cause for concern so the letter did not have a return address but at the end of the letter it just said Who am I it could be someone that's walking by your house every day I could be someone driving by your house every day I could be one of your neighbors I could be anybody that you see at any given day and you'll never know and then it just says signed The Watcher after the police leave that night and promise to launch their own investigation Derek and Maria I mean they're totally on edge and so they they write an email even though it's super late to the woods family they're the family that sold the house to Derek and Maria and they say hey we just got the strange threatening letter have you received anything like this because The Watcher claims to have been watching you for the entire time you were there and the woods family writes back and they say you know three days I think it was three days before we actually left the house we did receive a letter it wasn't threatening it was just thanking us for our time and the house and treating it with respect and you know that it would be taken care of going forward and you know that this person would look after the house for us and it was signed The Watcher but to be honest we didn't think much of it we come pulled it up and threw it away so the broadus a--'s decide that they are not going to rush to actually move into the new house they had thought about doing it but they stop they decide with with this letter but maybe it's best to hold off a little bit and so Derek and Maria would do day trips with the kids they'd go do a day trip do some renovations make sure that the contractors that were there we're doing a good job getting the house in order and they would come back to the house that they were still living in about two weeks after the that letter was was found Maria is there with the kids and she gets to the the new house and she sees there's a letter from The Watcher the same envelope same writing on the outside and so she immediately calls the police even before she reads it she opens it up and it says welcome again to your new home at 6:57 boulevard the workers have been busy I am watching you on the carpals of your personal belongings the dumpsters a nice touch have they found what's in the walls yet time will The Watcher goes on to identify each of their kids by a nickname and by birth order which implies that whoever this was was close enough to Maria or to Derek when they were speaking directly to their kids using their nicknames that they overheard because it's one thing to know the children's full names because it's possible that you could have looked it up online or something but to know their nicknames that is that implies a level of proximity that even though they knew the watcher was probably in the neighborhood almost definitely this meant they were practically on top of one another and it gets creepier the watcher also in this letter asked you know one of the about one of the children and says is she going to be an artist I saw her using her easel yesterday well the easel that this girl had been using is in a back room of the house that it's mostly obscured by trees and shrubbery there's really only one vantage point where you could see this child it would mean you're right on the property like pretty much in plain view of anybody there and with Maria and Derek and basically everyone on high alert looking for this person it seems odd that they could be able to see this girl working at her easel in this kind of hidden back room and not be spotted and then of course they kind of seal the deal making this letter just totally terrifying they go on to say do your kids go on the basement I'd be afraid if I were them as far away from the rest of the house and if you were upstairs you would never the screen who has the bedrooms facing the street I'll know as soon as you move in then I can plan better so at this point Derek and Maria are in full crisis mode because it's one thing to be watched you know which is bad it's another when the person watching you is now overtly threatening your family your kids it's a bad situation so Derek and Maria at this point they don't know if they're even ever going to move into this new house it felt unsafe and so for a few weeks they're kind of teetering on whether it's worth moving in or not and so that they aren't there they're not going to the new house at all and a third letter arrives basically saying where are you the house misses you obviously from The Watcher at one point between the first letter and third letter Derek was speaking with John Schmidt who lived two doors down from their new property on Boulevard and John was saying that Derek ought to look into the Lankford's it was a family that lived right next to their new house kind of a little bit of a strange family it was a 90 something year old mother and her adult children who lived with her who were all in their 60s and one of the children Michael he was just known in the area being a little bit odd but he would just kind of creep out other people it wasn't uncommon to have him like walk across people's property you know like little things like that but looking in windows just giving the vibe that he was a little bit strange and people didn't like being around him so Derek brings it up to the police that hey you should look into Michael Lang for he looks right near us neighbors are saying he's a little bit off the police for like actually he was the first person we talked to we brought him in we questioned him he denied it we have no evidence tying him to it and we just don't think it's him and then later on in the investigation they would actually do a DNA sample from one of the letters and they would they would find out that it was a woman's DNA and so that effectively ruled out Mike Langford but the Lankford's had a daughter and so they decided maybe it could be her and so they actually got a water bottle from from her that they found and they tested that and it wasn't a match so the Lankford's were ruled out Derick is growing increasingly more paranoid and angry you know he went from being you know scared what was potentially gonna happen to feeling like how dare you threaten my family my kids and he started telling the police like if you don't find who's doing this I'm gonna figure out who it is and then you're not going to be dealing with you know a a stalking case you're gonna be dealing with a different kind of case you catch my drift and so the police were like don't do anything crazy we're working as hard as we can it's just there's not much to go on here Derick wasn't okay with that he set up this elaborate camera system in and around his house he's the new house he started staying at the new house turning off all the lights and crouching behind windows and staring at the mailbox in hopes of being able to confront anybody who went near it ended up hiring two former FBI agents to launch his own private investigation he hired a handwriting expert to analyze the the letters themselves to see if they could pick up details about who this was that potentially profiled them and this person all they could conclude was it was someone who was really really mad but all those things really didn't lead to any results you know it was just Derek had become obsessed and he was willing to basically do anything to find out who the heck is writing these letters so at this point the Broadus had already sold their old house they were still living in it because I hadn't moved into the the new house the house being watched but at some point the new owners of the house they sold we're ready to move in and so the Broadus has had to move in with Maria's family but we're still paying the mortgage on 6:57 Boulevard at this point the community started kind of spreading rumors about the Broadus family people believe that the reason they weren't moving into this beautiful new home was you know they were getting a divorce oh they had some legal problems you know the the letters and what was going on with these letters that was not widely known there was speculation about it but no one really knew for sure so Derek and Maria kind of gradually became pariahs and they ultimately decided that they're just going to sell this house this new house they purchased because they need the money they tied up a lot of money in it and they feel like you know what we'll sell the house and we'll move on but by the time they listed it enough rumors were circulating about the weirdness around that house and why no one was moving into it in the weirdness with Derek and Maria that nobody wanted to buy and so they initially list this this property above what they paid because they'd put $100,000 into the house and renovations they just kept doing renovations and that was their way of justifying not not moving in they were like well keep fixing it up it'll be better once we move in but you know so they put 100k in and no one bit they lower the price no one bit they continued to lower the price to where it was like fall a full-blown deficit still no one made an offer so it's not bacon at this point Maria and Derek turned their frustration towards the previous owners because as I mentioned earlier they had received a letter from The Watcher granted it was you know at the very end of their stay in this house but it was before they gave over the keys to the broadest family and Derek and Maria felt like the fact that they got an anonymous letter that was literally signed the washer that name alone was kind of ominous enough that they felt like the woods family should have disclosed that to the broadest family before they moved in and so they filed a legal complaint against the woodsfamily basically saying that you held information that potentially would have kept us from moving in and not having this problem well Derek and Maria were assured by their legal team that at most you know small legal newswire might pick up this this lawsuit and that would be it but the story it got picked up by a number of outlets the fact that they were filing a complaint against the previous owners over basically a stalker and all of a sudden they were all over the news the broadest family had over 300 media requests there were TV stations and news stations camped out on the front lawn everybody wanted to know what's going on with this bizarre you know watcher it became this huge thing and so for Derek and Maria and their family they had to vacate Westfield because it was basically not only unsafe because they were being watched by this Phantom Menace but now that they couldn't escape the media pressure and all the speculation from their nosy neighbors it was just a total train wreck finally the broadest family got some good news literally years after this first letter is sent and they tied up all their money in this new house a family agrees to rent the house no this is going to be at a loss for the broadest family there the rent money will not even cover the the mortgage but to them who've just been sitting on this worthless property they've just been you know eating away at their finances this was a huge win the broadest family they put into the contract with this new family that hey you know you you know what's going on here with The Watcher if you get another letter you're able to renege on this contract and so they the new family moves in and two weeks into being there what do you think happens another letter shows up you wonder who the watcher is turn around idiots maybe even spoke to me one of the so-called neighbors who has no idea who the watcher could be or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone my soldiers that the boulevard followed my orders to a tea they carried out their mission and they saved the soul of 6:57 Boulevard with my orders all hail the watcher the renter was also mentioned in this letter and was definitely spooked but they decide that they're still willing to stick around because they knew going in this could happen they just asked that the broadest family install even more cameras and so they did that they installed more cameras and they decide to stay Derek and Maria are obviously disheartened but at the same time now they have more evidence against the watch arts that take this new letter they bring it to the police and unfortunately much like the other few letters they'd received there was nothing much to go on except that you have this person claiming to watch them but no hard evidence to tie it to anybody so once again they got nowhere after renting this house out for a while to this family at a deficit the broadest family in 2019 finally decide to just sell the house at a four hundred thousand dollar deficit it was just a huge nightmare and at this point they were willing to pay four hundred thousand dollars to get rid of it before they sold it they received one more letter and this is what it said you are despised by the house and The Watcher despite the investigation by police and the unofficial investigation by Derek's private investigators we are not anywhere closer to figuring out who the watcher is or what's hidden in the walls it's all still a huge mystery many people have speculated that the Broadus family that Derek specifically was one was probably the person who wrote the letters because in fact he would later admit that he wrote a number of anonymous letters to people in the community that had been bad-mouthing he and his family but he said it was purely out of frustration I wanted to scare them and make them you know feel what it was like to have The Watcher watching them but he said you know like this whole situation is really devastated financially and emotionally and you know kind of ruined their ability to stay in the town that they loved so much so it's just the angle that he stood to benefit from then it's not a very good theory in my opinion in addition you know recently Netflix bought the rights to their story but if Derek and his family had said what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up this elaborate mystery around ourselves for years in order to you know secure movie rights you'd be putting your kids through something so traumatic and so the idea of like having your kids have to live with the fear of being attacked and getting bullied at school because you know everybody talks in these communities that seems far-fetched - it remains to be seen who the watcher is but to this day it remains a mystery so if you haven't already please click like and subscribe I am going to be trying to do two or more stories a week I'm really making a push to make YouTube my primary so I hope you'll tag along if you want to talk to me separately you can DM me on Instagram that's John Ball in four one six also go follow me in a tick-tock my handle is mr. ballin and that's gonna do it guys I hope this was interesting and I'll talk to you soon

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 2,121,896

Keywords:

Id: YMXVG2Y7vaw

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020